The downside of having one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns in the site's history is that Mike Butera's startup now has 3,000 orders to fill across 70 countries. To accomplish the task, Butera's Nashville-based company, Artiphon, is starting slowly.
The company shipped an initial, small test batch of its Instrument 1 on Friday, which means a lucky group of early Kickstarter investors will have the futuristic instrument in their hands at some point this week. Many of them live in Nashville.
In the following weeks, the company will continue with incremental shipments of the product to its 3,000 Kickstarter backers and more than 500 customers who preordered the product. Then, at an unchosen date in early to mid-July, consumers will be able to order the product to ship immediately, ending the long wait for one of Time magazine's 25 best inventions of 2015. On the same July date, the instrument will begin to be sold at the Museum of Modern Art Design Store in Manhattan, Butera said.
Butera, though, doesn't plan on selling tens of thousands of instruments all at once. He wants to be more careful with the product he has spent half a decade developing.
"We're just trying to respond to market demand at this point. Supporting our initial customers, the first 5,000 or so, is our focus right now," Butera said.
Butera said his team decided not to pursue Series A funding after the success of their Kickstarter campaign because they were weary of "locking into a jet-pack take-off." In the past, he said, routing new technology into consumer products and then quickly selling those products en masse hasn't worked out for companies in the long term. He cited Tickle Me Elmo and Guitar Hero as consumer electronics and technology companies who failed to have legitimate commercial success beyond two years.
"The market potential is insane, but we don't think we're going to hit it on our first shot, despite great market feedback so far," Butera said.
If investors want to get on board in the future, Butera said they will have to be excited about constantly improving the product as well as entering the fields of music education, virtual reality and artificial intelligence, all areas the company wants to pursue in the next couple years.
What would an Instrument 1 equipped with artificial intelligence be able to do?
"If you come home from work, have a couple minutes and put on your favorite song, it instantly can hear that song and know what song it is, know what tempo it is and know what key it is," Butera said. "It would configure itself to that song and your playing style, so you can pick it up and play along with the music."
"It's really not that far away."
Artiphon currently employs 10 people, six of whom work in Nashville full time.
