Build Your Own Clone Message Board

Keith,

Whatever you are doing (or is it your new crew?), keep it up.

Yesterday, I received the three pedal kits I ordered (Comp, Delay, Vibrato) and immediately did a parts inventory. Every single kit was spot-on; every single part called out on the Parts List was in the box.

OK. That's what we should expect, right? But the two kits I ordered in early December were each missing something - quickly replaced with an email to sales, but still a bit discouraging.

I know it's difficult to stock each kit correctly, especially the parts-heavy VB2, so thanks for the extra effort. Whatever part of the process you worked to fix, well, you fixed it!

Robert

I put an order in on Fri, and got kits today! Fastest ever! Woohoo!

Wish I lived on the west coast, takes a week to get out to the east coast....

Keith, if you ever think about adding a distribution center somewhere a bit east of Oregon to help speed up shipping times (like Musicians Friend does with warehouse in Oregon and Kansas City) let me know. I need a job...

I had to fire, Scott. He was f'n up too much. I can't really blame him for the missing parts in the kits though...I should have checked his work myself more often. Now it's just me and my wife, Darcy. She puts the parts in the little pink bags and sometimes puts the parts in the larger clear bags. She won't go near the drill press, and that's OK....I don't really want her to anyways. She helps out in the evenings after the kids go to bed. She's very meticulous and I have more confidence in the kits she puts together than the kits I put together myself.

I've almost got the CNC machine going. The difficult part about that is constructing a jig that can hold 96" x 46" worth of enclosures well enough to drill accurately. I've spent the last week, in between filling orders and sleeping, messing with it....measuring and making little prototypes with scrap wood....very time consuming, but it will be well worth it. I should be able to drill over 200 enclosures in under 4 hours...and be able to work on something else while that's running. Production should be able to step up a bit.

Once I get the CNC rolling and I'm happy with the level of QC, you guys can expect a flury of new kits.

Awesome Keith... I can't wait for the new kits....

hey Keith!! a couple perhaps personal questions i've been wondering...

how'd you get into this stuff? just take a pedal apart one day and figure you could do better?
and is this your only means of income? or do you have a "day job"?
and if so, how long after you started this did it finally pay off?

i'm just curious. and in awe of what you do. it amazes me, and i'm eternally grateful. seriously. you're a wonderful man. but you've given me GAS, and that hurts a little

I got my first taste of DIY in my early teens, but I didn't take it seriously. Just some projects my guitar instructor gave me. The internet hadn't really caught on yet so it was very hard to find parts. Can you imagine trying to build pedals from scratch and your only resource was radio shack.

When parts and schematics started becoming easy to find, I started to tinker again. Then when I went on ebay for the first time to sell a bicycle, I took a look around at some of the guitar stuff...amps and pedals...and there was a lot of stuff on there that was obviously made by someone in their garage. The first time I saw a Zvex pedal and how much they cost, I was floored. I had no idea that people actually wanted to pay good money for handmade electronics.

So I started bigtonemusicbrewery in '03 I think. It was an OK little side job....a hobby that made money, but not a lot. And one day I was thinking about how BS and hyped up some of the boutique pedals are and how I would have to play that game too if I wanted to compete. So I thought, since there really is no secret to building pedals, why not put together a kit that has the exact same stuff the boutiquers are using with really simple instructions and let people decide for themselves.

The first kit was the fuzz face. I figured it was a very simple build, a very popular pedal, and very inflated too. It was on eyelet board. No pcb's yet. I really didn't expect it to catch on. BYOC was not the first to sell kits. There was Heathkit and PAIA....they've been around for ages. But no one really cared about their pedal kits because they were based on circuits that you'd build for a physics class project...not tried and true circuits that all guitar players wanted and were paying a lot of money to get clones of. So in that respect, I think BYOC is unique.

Anyways....I orderd parts for 10 fuzz face kits and put up one spam thread over at harmony-central.com. They all sold in about a week and about a week later everyone was raving about them. THe reaction I was getting about the final product made it easy for me to give up trying to build pedals and put all my effort into BYOC. The thing is, even if the pedal you built from a kit only sounds as good as your boutique version of the same thing, you will love the pedal you build so much more because you built it.


3 years later. This is my fulltime job. After about a year I was funnelling enough paypal money into our bank account that my wife made me get a business license and account. It wasn't a lot of money and not enough to quit my day job, but enough that if we were audited, someone might notice. BYOC became BYOC, LLC last year and this has been my fulltime job ever since.

When did it pay off? Well...I just bought a CNC machine and remodelled the shop, so I'm actually in debt. And there's R&D for a few more new kits I'd like to do. And when that's paid off, I'll start investing in advertising so it probably won't "pay off" for another year or so. Dont' get me wrong. I'm not destitute. BYOC pays the bills. BUt sometimes I see threads on certain forums and people talk about BYOC like it's some sort of multimillion dollar corporation. For the most part, BYOC is still just a one man operation.

well man, i'm grateful to you, your wife, your family, for what you do. seriously. it makes me happy to know that someone else out there is appalled at the price of pedals, and doing something about it. dare i say it, i think i love you

I have tons 'o respect too! Thanks to you I will NEVER pay the ridiculous prices botique pedal makers are charging again! Power to the people!

For me, it's not the price of boutique pedals that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It's a simple matter of supply and demand. It's just not possible to crank out huge numbers of handmade pedals. Take Jaques for example. A few years ago his pedal were hot stuff. Then I guess he hooked up with some venture capitalists or something and started mass producing his pedals. Now Jaques is pretty much off everyone's radar...or at least with all the people on the forums. Keeley could certainly sell his compressor for $99 and still make a profit, but then he'd have a 5 year backorder. But it's a catch 22....if they were cheap, no one would want them.

What I don't like about the boutique pedal industry is how a lot of builders make it seem like they had to meditate atop Mt Everest for 7 years before they could perfect their product and then had to venture into the Amazon with a machette to find the last remaining members of some indigenous tribe who possesed the only know supply of a special NOS component which gives their pedal it's mojo (although getting those BA662a's for the vb-2 was quite an ordeal and I spent many hours staring at the schematic till I went into a trance) when all they are really doing is just cloning a fuzzface or a rangemaster or a ross compressor.

Sometimes I am guilty of this, but it's not done on a conscious level.

Right on!

I hear what you are saying about the botique makers…..I ordered a Fulltone Fulldrive 10th anniversary pedal when it first came out…..it was on back order forever! I opened it up and it’s basically a tube screamer with a few more parts. Nothing in the guts should have caused that thing to be held up and the chassis is the same as the other Fulldrives….so the only conclusion I could draw was a deliberate delay in getting them out. I strongly feel that it was to boost the hype of the pedal and jack the price up.

isnt marketing fun?

Truth in marketing is funner.

I lost respect for Fulltone for that. I won't buy another one of their pedals. There are some pedals companies I like. I WILL buy a Visual Sound pedal if they come out with another. They are a decent company with good values.

everyone told me to get the Fulltone Bassdrive. i played one. i wanted one. then a friend of mine opened his up and showed the JRC4558 op amp, i knew that i would never buy one. hell, i've got a piece of crap pedal called the Roadkill (and it sounds like it) that has two of those, so i could make my own Bassdrive. the price just isn't worth it.

+1 to Keith and what he is getting done here. I have great respect for someone who cuts thier own path, and invents a niche. Continued success, Keith.


Geek

oh, he'll have continued success if we keep buying. i'm not taking my money anywhere else, thank you

I've got to tell you that the advertising works. I bought my first BYOC pedal this last December after reading a little ad in the January 2007 Guitar Player (pg 150). In 15 minutes, I was on the BYOC site putting in my order.

You can really have a good thing going with word-of-mouth - as long as you have a lot of mouths saying good things in the right places. Still, I wasn't on any of the pedal forums and never really considered building my own (or even knew there were pedal kits) when I first saw Keith's GP ad. I needed a kick-start. Now I have 5 and I'm contemplating the Wah kit to replace/supplement my vintage (read ancient) Itallian Vox wah.

It's all a matter of putting your ad money into the correct pockets, of course - sounds perfectly easy!

But

Robert

the same for me.

I found out by word of mouth. I hang on forum that is a non profit group in austin supporting local musicians. One of the guys has a few BYOC pedals and posted that they are great stuff....that got me interested and now I'm making the same types of posts on how great they are.

I found out about BYOC from a post on the Fender Forum. I can't wait until I have the time/resources to build each pedal, but that will be a while since when I have one I don't have the other.

The Jan issue (really came out on Nov 28th) Product spotlight of GP was the first and only paid advertising I've done thus far. It's been hard for me to gauge how successful it was because it came at the end of the last sale. Which was huge. Too big. I released 3 new kits and had a buy 3 get one free sale all at the same time and we got more orders than we could really handle. And while I am very thankful for the business, and BYOC is now starting to cope with the sudden growth spurt, I am very dissapointed that so many first time customers tried BYOC at a time when we were not providing the best possible product we could produce. I would estimate that about 1/3 of the kits went out missing one or more parts. Half of the ktis were out of stock for a long time. And there was about a week long period where all of the tremolo kits that went out had bad PCB. So Oct, Nov, and Dec were very bad months for BYOC as far as QC goes. Things are much better now, but still not as good as I want them to be.

I think the GP add did bring in a decent amount of new customers though, because the level of web traffic that we had durring the sale has pretty much been sustained long after what I would consider a reasonable cooling off period.

Anyways. As far as advertising goes, I guess I'm pretty lucky. Word of mouth is always the best advertising you can get. But I think BYOC has reached a point where pretty much everyone who is a regular member of just about any guitar oriented forum has heard of us. The nice thing about having such an esoteric product and finite demographic is I know exacty where to put my advertising money. The bad things about that is you end up with a very limited number of platforms to do your advertising on.

are you in Austin?!?

Just stick a little "Where did you hear about us" on your order page - where the buyer fills in address info. It always helps to find out where your customers are hearing about you. First, because you can gauge the effectiveness of any ad or word-of-mouth. Second, because it gives you an idea of places where you're not reaching an audience.

But, hey, you know all that. You're running a business! I'm just someone buying your products and cheering from the sidelines.

Robert

That would already be implimented if it was a "drag n drop" feature.