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290 | Owning Your Niche with Integrity | with Kris Kaiser and Stephen McCaul

Honest Ecommerce
Honest Ecommerce
Episode • Aug 12, 2024 • 29m

Kris Kaiser and Stephen McCaul met at a pub in Santa Monica, California, and hit it off immediately. A shared interest in sound brought them together. Kris and Stephen's professional paths were quite different, but audio was a common thread throughout their lives. 

Kris's PhD dissertation studied the effects of urban noise on the breeding behaviors of frogs. Stephen developed audio software for video games. Both shared a love for spreadsheets, food, and the glorious sound and invitingly impenetrable interface of the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer. 

A few years later, Kris was a professor and Stephen worked on increasingly complex audio problems in his day job. As an escape, they began experimenting with home-built synthesizers and wild DIY noisemakers. Stephen developed a Eurorack module over a weekend after a dare from a friend, and the synth community took notice. 

That was the beginning, and in 2016 they quit their jobs and took Noise Engineering full time. Now a staple boutique developer, their hardware and software products are used and adored by hobbyists, composers, artists, and producers around the world. 

In This Conversation We Discuss:

  • [00:59] Intro
  • [01:26] A hobby into a full-time endeavor
  • [02:18] Turning hackathon ideas into tangible products
  • [03:26] Navigating the challenges of early manufacturing
  • [04:25] Finding solutions through industry connections
  • [06:13] Collaborating within a niche community
  • [07:42] Gaining traction using marketing platforms
  • [09:50] Episode sponsors
  • [13:04] Balancing quality & price in a competitive market
  • [15:35] Attracting early customers through trade shows
  • [17:06] Educational content as top-of-funnel strategy
  • [18:05] Connecting with people via face-to-face outreach
  • [19:29] Tapping into LA's vibrant music community
  • [20:00] Showing prototypes & gathering real-time feedback
  • [21:50] Attending trade shows for customer interactions
  • [22:33] Finding success with in-depth blog content
  • [24:54] Expanding into software for flexible compositions
  • [26:45] Developing innovative guitar products
  • [27:53] High-quality instruments at Noise Engineering

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