We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Nick Rogers a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Nick, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

When I was initially coming up with the idea for Dirty Haggard Audio, I was working at an audio analyzer manufacturer with both electronics and music production schooling in my history. I had been playing around with some circuit schematics that I had found online and just learned how to design printed circuit boards on my computer. I’ve always wanted to work within music to some degree and it was seeming unlikely that I would find a role as either a professional musician or recording engineer, so I eventually thought “what if I combine the knowledge from both studio work and electronics into a new guitar pedal business?”

When determining what I was going to offer that wasn’t already being done by countless other businesses, I actually come up with my ‘niche’ quite easily. Given that I had been doing zero budget audio recordings for a while with very cheap gear, I was always dealing with extra noise in the audio paths. I figured that if I made all of my circuits with the lowest possible amount of noise (the dreaded noise floor), I could carve out a spot for myself amongst all the other businesses out there, since I really don’t see many of them prioritizing that aspect of design. I ran the idea by a couple entrepreneurial friends and ‘in the know’ music people with very positive feedback, and so I ran with the idea.

I came up with a few designs that (at least in my opinion) sounded every bit as good as the competition, but which had far less noise, and handed the prototype units out to a few local musicians. The response was good, so I was off on a new adventure.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I grew up in a small northern Wisconsin town with almost nothing to do, nowhere to go, etc. I was always looking for something exciting/new to do. Two of the things that this boredom lead me to were playing music and building/destroying things. Firstly, I started playing bass/guitar. I learned some general playing techniques and sounds, started experimenting with cheap guitar pedals, rewired a bunch of speakers, etc. Basically, I was fascinated with the different tonalities you could get from different bits of gear along with how you could connect those pieces of gear up with each other.

I was also very interested in how anything with electricity going through it was put together and how it could come apart. I ended up wrecking a lot of things, which my parents were not very pleased about, but I also learned a lot. I was able to take some classes in high school where we built circuits with various functions: Flashing lights, AM/FM radios, noise makers, etc. which started me down a whole new direction where I really wanted do things by hand and from scratch.

Once out of high school, I immediately went to the closest audio recording school thinking that I was destined to be involved in a continuing cycle of new and interested projects. I very much like the things around me to change periodically, so the idea of a typical 9-5 job where nothing really changes year over year has always been excessively unappealing to me.

At the time, I didn’t quite realize that the recording industry as it was was dying, so this ultimately left me stuck in warehousing and customer service jobs. I rode that out for a number of years until I was in my late 20’s and finally decided to go back to school for something that had a much more likely outcome for employment which I found more interesting.

January of 2012 I began college career #2 for electronics. I had gotten through most of the program when simultaneously the digital/computer based classes started and a teacher who I had ‘clicked with’ over a shared love of a specific Swedish heavy metal band got me a job as a bench technician working on audio analyzers. I have zero patience for computers when they’re malfunctioning and less than zero patience for writing code, so I took the job and dropped out of the school program.

As stated in the previous section, I started putting audio circuits together and eventually started designing my own. I’m into abrasive/unusual sounds, so I was very keen on fuzz pedals, which very aggressively distort electric guitar/instrument signals.

After doing all of the preliminary business research and prototyping, I found a small-business development non-profit which would ultimately fund some of my startup costs and set me on a solid path for figuring out the legalities of the endeavor.

I currently offer about 20 different guitar pedal designs. All of which have my ‘signature’ low noise design and span a wide spectrum of different sounds/tones.

Regarding what I believe sets me apart and what I’m most proud of: I can’t emphasize enough how annoying noisy audio gear is. I’m the only pedal builder that I’m aware of who specifically designs all things to be as noise-less as possible. I also offer most of my products at a much more affordable rate than most of my ‘one-man-show’ peers. I source what materials I can from local businesses, work directly with whichever up-and-coming musicians who will work with me, and I run the whole endeavor out of my bedroom.

I’m super proud to be doing everything in such a low-key way, but to also be shipping pedals all over the world on a regular basis. It’s so wild to me that any of this ever went anywhere whatsoever. I was a random kid in a small town dreaming of being involved in music somehow, and now I get to work directly with musicians that I grew up taking inspiration from on custom designs for whatever sounds they’re looking to achieve. How did that happen?!

As far as what I want people to know about me: I’m literally just some guy. People have started having very excited and complimentary reactions when they find out I’m the person who runs the business. It’s flattering and much appreciated, but I’m literally just a random dude trying to do things that are interesting.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

There have been quite a few times where I thought the whole thing was going to dissipate into nothing. I’m currently dealing with yet another such time.

The products I make are very much non-essential. Every time the economy seems to be heading somewhere negative, my sales fade away. There’s also a million competitors, so trying to be seen through all of them is incredibly challenging as well.

For the first 3 years of the business, I was putting thousands of dollars into it, and getting hundreds back. By the time my 3rd design was out, I was only selling maybe one unit per month? I really wasn’t sure it was worth it to keep going. I was spending quite a bit on ads/promotion, getting demo videos made, pushing photos/content out on social media, etc. Things just weren’t catching on. Then we got to early 2020 and Covid. The first couple months had me, just like millions of other people, really questioning where I was going, what I was trying to do, and where I wanted to end up. I was on furlough every other week due to the stay-at-home requirements and I thought ‘what if I just make a really simple circuit that does one cool thing and sell it for cheap?” I did just that with the expectation that a few more people would find me, be able to justify spending a modest sum on that new design, and ultimately buy one of my other offerings, a few people posted about it on a popular Reddit thread, and basically overnight, things blew up, leading me to be able to quit my job altogether. Pretty crazy.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Riffing off of multiple points from the last question, I’ve had to repeatedly pivot over recent years. There was a ‘boom’ in pedal sales while people were still trying to stay home because people were bored and wanting new toys to play with. Now that everything is more or less as it was again, that need for new things to occupy one’s time doesn’t seem to exist, so sales quantities have been all over the place. I’ve had to branch off into doing amplifier repair (which is starting to be my primary work at this point), live sound engineering, and most recently, doing various ‘odd jobs’ at one of the local guitar shops. It keeps me involved directly with music still, offers different challenges from day to day, exposes me to a lot of new people and pieces of gear, keeps me independent, and comes with the added benefit of getting me out of the house more often.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://dirtyhaggard.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dirtyhaggardaudio/?hl=en
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@dirtyhaggardaudio7907
• Other: https://gasppdx.bandcamp.com/album/circinate-or-a-fervor-in-testimony