Why the Thummer Will Succeed

Proposed new musical instruments tend to fail in the marketplace because:

1. they have to be much better – not just slightly better – than traditional instruments in at least two or three different ways that consumers care about, and
2. they are sold through a traditional bricks & mortar distribution channel, which favors "me-too" products over radically different designs.

The Thummer and Thumtronics' sales model solve both problems.

1. The Thummer is WAY Better

• The Thummer allows novices to learn music much faster – at least three time faster, and (with the ThumMusic System) perhaps ten times faster – than traditional instruments.
• The Thummer is has far more expressive power than any other instrument, due to its thumb-operated joysticks and internal motion sensors. With these, musicians can control up to ten different independent musical variables simultaneously while playing, instead of the two or three variables available in most traditional musical instruments.
• The Thummer offers artists the opportunity to explore vast new creative frontiers through its novel support for Dynamic Tuning.
• The Thummer is tiny – potentially even pocket-sized.
• The Thummer can be very affordable, due to its being made from standard, off-the-shelf consumer electronics components.

Simple, Powerful, Portable, & Affordable – these are the keys to success in ANY market. That’s why the Thummer can – and will – succeed.

2. The Thummer Has Low Inventory and Distribution Costs

Most musical instruments are large, heavy things, made from special-purpose components. For example, my Roland ep-97 digital piano weighs 32 pounds, which means that it would cost over $105 to ship it across the USA overnight. The Thummer, on the other hand, weighs about a pound, and would cost only a quarter as much to ship. Furthermore, the Thummer occupies only about a tenth of the volume of the ep-97, reducing my inventory and bulk shipping costs accordingly. Keeping inventory and distribution costs low is essential for products that are likely to start out as low-volume niche products before they climb up the Long Tail up into the mainstream. Most proposed new musical instruments are simply too big, too heavy, and too expensive to be profitable in a small niche, so they never get the opportunity to climb out into the mainstream. The Thummer can survive profitably as a niche product while musicians and music educators learn to exploit its revolutionary strengths. World-changing revolutions take time, and the Thummer can be profitable throughout.

That's why the Thummer will succeed: because it addresses both the product issues and the business process issues that have led other new musical instruments to fail.

Better

Potential investors often smile knowingly at me and say, “Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the Thummer is better than every other musical instrument available today. So what? Being ‘better’ really doesn’t matter. Entrenched standards are impossible to displace.”

Common sense tells us that this conclusion can’t be true, or we’d all be living in the Stone Age – so why does this urban legend persist?

One reason is that consumers and experts disagree on the definition of “better.” Consumers tend to prefer solutions that are cheap, simple, and powerful, in that order, but experts & specialists tend to prefer “power” alone. As a result, experts’ published reviews tend to rate the most powerful products as being “better” – yet consumers keep buying the cheap & simple stuff. This can create the impression that the “best” products aren’t winning in the marketplace, when really it’s just a disagreement over the metrics of better-ness.

Another reason the urban legend persists is that being “just a little bit better” is not enough. To quote W. Brian Arthur, a leading academic expert on the subject, a new product has to be “200 or 300 percent better than its predecessor before it can take over. Without that shift, the old product stays locked in. The best technology is not necessarily the winning one.”

That is, if your product is 10%, 20%, or even 50% cheaper, simpler, and more powerful than its competition, then it’s going to lose, because it’s not enough better. Your product has to be enough better to overcome the inertia of the status quo, and that requires being at least two or three times better.

But what if your product is, say, three times better than its competition in ways that were important to its potential consumers? Say, three times cheaper, three times simpler, and three times as powerful? If your product were that much better, in those ways then it would be the odds-on favorite to win.

That’s why I’m so excited about Thumtronics’ Thummer and ThumMusic System. They have the potential to make music-making three times simpler, three times cheaper (counting instrument & lesson costs), and three times as powerful (in terms of expressive potential and new tonal effects).

So if you’re trying to decide which innovations have the best chance of market success, don’t get trapped in the Stone Age. Use your common sense to see that being ‘better’ matters. It is one of the most important predictors of an innovation’s rate and extent of market acceptance, giving an innovation the potential to disrupt its industry and topple its market leaders.

[Note: The original version of this posting claimed that the Thummer was ten times better, not just three times better, which attracted comments that this was perhaps gilding a lily -- so I reduced the claim from ten to three. Underpromise & overdeliver, as they say.]