Turning a love for music into a hardware product

✍️ Show Notes

Tobias Butler shares his journey of building Tuneshine, blending software and hardware. He talks about the challenges of switching to hardware, the importance of prototyping, and what he learned along the way. He also dives into supplier relationships, scaling smart, and the emotional rollercoaster of entrepreneurship—all while finding joy in creating something meaningful.

🔗 Check out Tuneshine: tuneshine.rocks

🔗 Follow on Instagram: @tuneshine.rocks

🔑 Bytes:

• Understanding the assembly process helps in improving design.
• It's important to focus on growing the business, not just building products.
• Creating a physical product can bring joy and delight!

💬 Full Transcript

Vignesh Rajagopal (00:00) What is going on, Fika fanatics? I know, I know, long time no pod. I&pos;m currently coming to you from a small town here in rural Germany, where I now live. Six months ago, I decided to pick up my entire life from Chicago and move over here. Naturally, I took a break, but Fika Bytes is so back. I&pos;ve got some really impressive founder stories lined up for you guys over the next several weeks. And you know, I&pos;m just really pumped to be back here sharing these stories about different hardware founders from all different walks of life, different backgrounds, just creating these products, building companies around these products. And it&pos;s just so fascinating to me. So without further ado, This week we&pos;ve got Tobias Butler from Tuneshine. Now Tobias used to work as a software engineer and some people might say that software and hardware are total opposites, right? So what Tobias realized early on was that there were all these little things that he needed to learn in order to build a product, in order to build a company around a product. And what did he do? He simply started to go and learn each of those things and he literally willed this company into existence. And I think it&pos;s a really impressive story about how Tobias is able to run this company as a solo person. And keep in mind this episode was recorded about six months ago. So what I think is interesting is listen to the episode and then go check out to TuneShine&pos;s website, go check out Tobias&pos;s LinkedIn and just see how they&pos;re doing today. It&pos;s cool to be able to encapsulate six months of progress and just instantly go and see how people are doing, what progress they&pos;ve made, things like that. Enjoy the episode. Vigs (01:30) All right, we&pos;re live Tobias. Thank you so much for coming on the show. You&pos;ve got such a cool product that has uses for people of all backgrounds. I came across some of your social media marketing and that&pos;s how this connection happened. And yeah, super excited to hear about how you&pos;re doing this all as a one man show. Tobias Butler (01:47) Thank you, I&pos;m super excited to be here. This really seems like the ideal podcast for me to be on. I&pos;m so excited that you&pos;re telling these stories and excited to tell you more about my story and how I came to be doing this and how things are going. Vigs (02:02) Yeah, I appreciate the kind words. Start us off with where did the lightning bolt of inspiration for this idea, where did that come from? Tobias Butler (02:09) Yeah, was so so to shine is a lo fi album art display uses these 64 by 64 pixel LED panels that are kind of a single segment of a large indoor or outdoor display. So you see them at, you know, music festivals. I saw it in a airport recently showing something about the customs and arrival thing. But basically, usually They&pos;re set up to make a larger display, but you buy them in little panels. something that people do with them is people like to hack on them with Raspberry Pi, ESP32s, Arduinos, things like that. And so it was late 2020, early 2021. I was inside a little more than I usually am. I got a Raspberry Pi. I did the thing, which I think is a very classic story when someone buys a Raspberry Pi or Arduino, where you&pos;re all excited about it and you get it and you&pos;re just like, well, I have no idea what I actually want to build with this thing. There&pos;s a million possibilities, but what could I actually do? The very first thing I built was actually a sensor with a little E -ink screen that used little Tamagotchi images to create a little like emotional face for your plants so that it would remind you to water them. Vigs (03:27) cool. Tobias Butler (03:30) That didn&pos;t instantly strike me as something that I wanted to go into as a business, although I did see that someone else might have recently done that with something called Plantagotchi. But what did strike me once I had the idea is I got the square LED panel. I thought, okay, well, now I have this. What do I do with this? And I figured that album artwork was square and it might be really cool to use the panel to show album art for the music you&pos;re listening to. And pretty quickly I realized like, yeah, this is obviously a product that should exist. I don&pos;t, I don&pos;t know if I&pos;m to be the one who makes it. Maybe I will, but, but this is cool. I started to show it to my friends. said, this is cool. Like, are you ever going to make this at that point? You know, I had a day job software engineering and I was thinking, I don&pos;t know. I seem super far off at this point. I don&pos;t know everything I need to do for this, but eventually the more I thought about it, I realized. Okay, I&pos;m a musician, I&pos;m passionate about music. I&pos;m not gonna get tired of talking to people about a music related product. It&pos;s a good time in my life to be doing this. Got some experience under my belt. Don&pos;t have any kids yet, so I don&pos;t have as much pressure to make a bunch of money to make sure that everyone&pos;s got food in their bellies. And I figured that I had about 80 % of the skills that I needed to do And so I decided to go for it. It just seemed like a great opportunity, a great time to try starting a business. And we can get into the different sub steps of that, but that&pos;s the main story. I was just looking for projects to do, made this, and then it seemed like the pieces were just all coming together in a way that I couldn&pos;t and should not ignore. Vigs (05:16) Yeah, so just to kind of make sure I got that right. Essentially, you made that first one of one unit, showed it to your friends, got some interest from them. Did you do any other sort of, you know, the official word is validation, but really, did you ask other people if they would like it, if they would put money into Tobias Butler (05:31) Yeah, at that point, it wasn&pos;t until a little bit later that I was kind of seeking, maybe not like product validation in the sort of classic hungry startup, you&pos;re out on the street asking people what they think of a mock -up kind of way, but got some expert validation later on. But it was really just a matter of thinking that, you know, I&pos;m not building this because I think my main goals weren&pos;t to find the, the product that was a perfect fit to the market. think there is a little bit of an artistic touch to this product. And so once I got a little bit of validation that my vision was resonating with a few people, I figured that the people in my peer group, they are a lot of the target consumers. think I&pos;m like a target consumer as a gadget lover, music lover, someone who&pos;s, you The whole house speaker setup is very important because I want people to have the best music listening experience when they come to my house. And so it sort of was maybe a hybrid of looking for the right fit for the market, as well as thinking like, I think I&pos;ve actually got a strong vision myself here and I&pos;m going to follow my heart on that vision, if that makes sense. Vigs (06:49) It does. I love that. And so when you decided that, I&pos;ve got 80 % of the skills, let me go ahead and give this a shot. it like a, tell me about that decision. Was it like, I&pos;m quitting my day job and then I&pos;m starting this the very next day. Was it more kind of a gradual crossover between the two? Tobias Butler (07:06) It was a bit of a gradual crossover. I had separately decided I was going to quit my day job and take a little break and think about some different options for what I wanted to do. At the time, I was doing some work with nonprofits, thinking that, okay, maybe like both from just a, I had founded a nonprofit with my family that supports designers and architects who are entering undergrad want to be able to support their education. And so we do a scholarship for them. I also was helping with strategy for a music school nonprofit in San Francisco called Blue Bear. And so I thought, okay, maybe that&pos;s a direction where my career could go. But after maybe five or six months of doing a broad exploration, I figured, well, I&pos;ve been a software engineer for all of my 20s. And it turns out that this what I actually really like to do. I really like writing code. I really like solving problems with code. I really like that moment where you whip something up and people are just like, wow, this is exactly what I wanted. Like you were able just to create a tool to, you know, maybe I&pos;m solving a problem or maybe I&pos;m just creating something that just creates a moment of joy and delight. And so I wanted to come back to that. And it was around then that I decided. Okay, let&pos;s figure this out. Let&pos;s make a bit of a plan. I had a rough idea in my head of what the pieces were to get to a stronger prototype stage where I could have a few friends using it. And then from there, I was figuring out how to actually produce and market them. And so that more or less brings us to where we are today. Vigs (08:47) Yeah, we&pos;ll get to the commercialization and the whole product line setup that you did afterwards. First, I want to touch on going from one to just like, I don&pos;t know, was it five that you gave out to your friends? How many was Tobias Butler (08:58) It was about maybe like 15 or so that I gave out to friends. Vigs (09:02) Okay, 15. And so those 15, were you just like recreating that initial one that you had, maybe making improvements along the way? Were you already sort of thinking about the manufacturing process or were you still just like, I&pos;m just gonna try this out, make them by hand, don&pos;t optimize anything? I wanna know your thinking behind that, Tobias Butler (09:18) Great question. Yeah, so there were a few things that I realized basically from my own feedback to myself as a user of my very first initial prototype where I thought, okay, I&pos;ve got to change this before it goes out. The first one was that I was using a Raspberry Pi for the very first version, which was not only a bit too expensive for a production version, But in particular, it&pos;s too expensive because it&pos;s completely overkill. And in fact, has some aspects to it that made it not as ideal because it was overkill, namely the startup time, because you have to boot an entire operating system rather than just being able to run the firmware and go. So I knew I had to get off that. The initial version also used It used like a barrel jack with a kind of hefty plug behind it to power it because the screen plus the Raspberry Pi was a little bit too much power than you could do just over USB -C. And so that was feedback I was getting. Actually, no, sorry, I&pos;m getting ahead of myself. That was until the second version. I was stuck with the barrel jack for a while, so we can come back to that when we talk about going to production. I suppose the Raspberry Pi to ESP32 transition was really the main thing, but I was able bootstrap it a little bit because me not having an electrical engineer background, I needed to find something to get a leg up with the circuitry. And there is fortunately a out of the box solution made by a guy named Brian Lau who has something called ESP32 Trinity, where if you want to hack up with an LED display and an ESP32, it&pos;s exactly what you need. A little bit too expensive still for production stuff, but I was able to use that get to the next stage of validation and get those 15 out there. And from there, do another round of testing, see where the limitations were and figure out what I need to do to perfect to get to the production stage. Vigs (11:19) Nice, I want to zoom out for a second. So I know it&pos;s a hardware product, but can you just quickly give, help me understand, like what are all the different components? There&pos;s the hardware, obviously. Do you have a backend? Is there a phone app, some kind of web portal? Can you just give me a rough idea of the overall system? Tobias Butler (11:34) Sure, so there&pos;s the hardware. It&pos;s got the firmware running on it, which does the final image display logic and handles things like connecting to Wi -Fi, making sure you stay connected, you reconnect if you get disconnected. There is the phone app, which is used mainly for setup via Bluetooth, but also for account management and connecting your accounts. There is a server that&pos;s used just handle all of that account configuration and also just generally makes the user experience of the setup better. That was another piece of learning between the very first prototype and the first ones that left my house and went to my friends is that I realized that I couldn&pos;t get quite the UX I needed by doing everything on device. And then, you know, there&pos;s additional support stuff for marketing and some other features, but those are the main pieces. Vigs (12:24) Okay, yeah, And then you said that you used to be a software engineer. So I assume that was kind of your forte was setting up the backend, the login stuff, the app even maybe. And then the hardware side of it was more on the learning, like the hardware firmware. Is that Tobias Butler (12:40) That&pos;s somewhat true, although there ended up being a lot of learning for different pieces of it because I was mostly making web applications and websites. I was able to use React on both the websites I used to work on and React Native for the mobile app, which gave me a leg up. But React Native has its own learning curve. Learning the app stores is certainly very different than the process of being able to put up a website and no one can tell you if you&pos;re compliant, except maybe the EU if you&pos;re a big enough business. so that was a little bit of learning as well. But for the embedded stuff, the firmware, I had never done anything with C++ before except for a little bit of Arduino experimentation. So that was a big learning curve and had me facing a lot of... Vigs (13:08) Is Tobias Butler (13:34) corners of the software engineering world that I had been able to avoid thus far due to my concentration in websites for my career prior to this project. Vigs (13:44) How did you split up the responsibilities? So is the firmware just sitting there and receives an image displays it? Is the firmware actually doing any API calls? Talk a little bit about that and how you kind of decided what does the firmware do? What does the backend Tobias Butler (13:59) Yeah, wanted to... I mean, my main priority was to have the best user experience. And so, one of the things that was important for that was that if I could have many of the features be dictated by how the server works, then I can update those features and fix bugs by just doing an update to the server rather than doing a firmware update to the device. And I do, of course, have the capability to do firmware updates as well, but those are much rarer and there&pos;s less chance of there being a version drift where people have a certain version on their device and a certain, you know, their phone is expecting something else. So that was a major factor. But that also allows me to offload some of the image processing off the device, which is not really heavy duty stuff, but it&pos;s something a web server can do much more easily than an ESP32, which is much lower power than even your least powerful web server out there. Something that did change that calculation a little bit was when I decided I wanted to support Sonos, that does require you to do some image processing on device because you are loading the images across your local network from your Sonos, but initially it was really set up so that you were just getting images according to the server and you just showed those images. And I have built in some features that I haven&pos;t really figured out how to best utilize, but the device features some animations just as a part of its overall UX when it&pos;s connecting to Wi -Fi, Bluetooth, things like that. And the server can also send animations. And so in the future, I&pos;d love to be able to utilize that more to have animations in conjunction. with the music that people are listening to, but I&pos;m still figuring out the best way to achieve that. But that was a fun challenge in terms of figuring out how to process the animations in parallel with displaying them so that you would avoid frame rate drops and things like that. And so people haven&pos;t really seen that work yet, but it is something that I wanted to lay the groundwork for so that I would be able to enable that without requiring a firmware update. Vigs (15:53) Yeah. Tobias Butler (16:15) And there&pos;s a few more surprises in there in the firmware as well that will come to light in the future. Vigs (16:16) Yeah, Nice. Yeah, it reminds me of a similar project that I worked on. was similar idea except audio based, not visual, where the device had like, let&pos;s say four or five audio files saved on device. Primarily it was playing back streamed audio from the web, but every now and then like a wifi connection or a power off sound, would play from the local stored audio files. But the thing that we built in was a way to update the stored audio files just because You might be happy with a sound today, but then if you ever want to change it, you want to make sure that that pathway of like, you know, download this file, don&pos;t play it back, but instead save it to the memory, overwrite the previous one. We wanted to make sure that that pathway was clear, which sounds like, you know, kind of like what you got going Tobias Butler (17:03) Yeah, a little bit. For certain features, that was another change that I made that change in the firmware at some point where, for example, what it shows when you&pos;re in the idle state, when it&pos;s not playing music. Originally, those images were hard -coded. Now, those are sent over. As far as some of the other UX elements, things you described like Wi -Fi, I will have to do a firmware update for those, but fortunately, if I really have to, I can do that as well. Vigs (17:32) Cool. Okay, going back to those 15 units, you know, it must have felt good to complete those units, give them out to your friends. At that point, I&pos;m sure the feature set was probably a lot less compared to where it is today. What were you doing once your friends had these plugged in and connected to Wi Tobias Butler (17:50) Yeah. Well, I think that one of the main things that I did pretty quickly after that is I was like, I was operating with like 10 kilobytes of free memory on the original ESP32 chips that I had. And so I had done some hacks, for example, where the images sent from the server are in the WebP format and I was using Google&pos;s code decode the images, which of course, it&pos;s not a hugely memory intensive piece of code. I&pos;m sure it&pos;s very efficient. However, it does assume you have a bit more memory than the like 256 kilobytes, I think, that is available on the kind of ESP32 that I was using. So I had to, for example, do a little, make a modification to that library where because I knew that the decoded images were always going to be the same, resolution, I was able to have it reuse some of the space and memory so that it wouldn&pos;t randomly allocate new memory and crash the device. So I was thinking, this is not sustainable, I need more RAM. And I knew that ESP32, I knew that Espressif had chips available that had more RAM. And so I was able to find a contractor who could help me make my own. circuit board that removed some of the features of the original ESP32 Trinity and added a version of the ESP32 that had more RAM. And that let me start adding some things related to the animations and things like that. So that was a big part of it. I also just needed to solidify what Suppliers are going to be once I went to production. So that was the point where I was getting on Alibaba, figuring out the bulk orders for the screens, power plugs, USB cords, little instruction cards to go inside the box. A box, I didn&pos;t have a box before, but I needed to have a box that had the right padding to mail these in. So that was like a six month process getting all of that together. From there in the summer, I did a few more test units that I gave out to a few more friends, which were pretty much designed to be as close as possible to what I planned on releasing. And so that was the next phase was getting to solidifying who my suppliers are going to be and then making a few more test units to get those tested and working. Vigs (20:23) Okay, and at this point, this is all, you&pos;re not collecting any money from your friends, whoever you&pos;re giving these out to, right? It&pos;s just like, test it out, let me know what you think. And then what were they saying? What was their feedback? Tobias Butler (20:33) My friends were willing to, they basically just paid the cost of the materials. So they were essentially, you could say, buying the materials from me that happens to be assembled into a completed product for free. the feedback was good. I had people sending me pictures, just talking to them. People would say, my friends come over to my house and they tell me how cool this is and ask me where I can get Vigs (20:38) Okay, nice. Tobias Butler (20:59) And so there was a nine or 10 month period between the first ones going out and the full release where I was just kind of saying, yeah, soon, soon, I&pos;m working on it. I&pos;ve got to figure out the suppliers and it&pos;s going to come out soon enough. I did get a couple of bug reports in that time. I had a very funny experience before the very first ones went out One of the funniest bugs that I&pos;ve had where my friend came over just to me debug to make sure that it worked with multiple users. And the library I was using to connect to the Spotify API had this funny foot gun where it was kind of easy to accidentally share credentials between users. So I was super glad to have that sorted out before people&pos;s Tuneshines all started showing the same images. During that initial phase, was lucky to have no major bug reports came in. A couple issues here and there, but that let me focus just more on the production and not so much fighting fires during that period of Vigs (22:00) And I think it&pos;s important to note here, you&pos;re already kind of thinking of production. Like I know you saw the RAM limitation, but it feels like there were probably other things that led you to want to create a custom PCB, put down an upgraded ESP32 chip. And then that timeline of nine to 10 months. So coming from a software background, I can imagine that&pos;s a very long time in the software world. In the hardware world, that&pos;s kind of par for the course, right? And so what was your kind of mentality with dealing with that? If I&pos;m someone that wants to do this, let&pos;s say I don&pos;t know a thing about hardware, and I give out some units to friends, and then like nine to 10 months, there&pos;s just no new product coming out. Obviously, I&pos;m doing a lot of work in the background, right? But I guess how do you deal with that length and timeline of hardware compared to software Tobias Butler (22:45) You know, I feel like when I first started to get the sense of that reality of hardware development, it was very frustrating and it was a big adjustment. think the biggest ones is like, was just early in the prototype stage, I&pos;m getting Raspberry Pis, I have to solder something on so it can get extra LED display. I haven&pos;t done a lot of soldering before. I, you know, I make mistakes, like positive and negative, negative gets flipped and the board is fried. And I&pos;m like, are you kidding me? Now I have to purchase a new raspberry pie and wait for it to ship. it was just, it almost never occurred to me that there was anything else besides the really rapid development pace. But early on I got somewhat used to that. And now I think I just sort of haven&pos;t built into my mentality where you just, you just got to order a few extra pieces, make sure you don&pos;t just have one. For the actual production stuff, I&pos;m working on mostly kind of four to six month lead times. And so a lot of my mental model of how everything works and when I want to order parts, that&pos;s all taken into account. I have this sort of occasional electrical issue that I&pos;m still trying to squash where the startup doesn&pos;t go quite right and the screen can come off in like kind of a few percent of cases. and the process for that, because I have to work with another electrical engineer who then fixes that. And then I go back to PCB way to get the fixed board and that takes a month. And then after that, I&pos;m ordering another board a month later. That&pos;s the kind of time where I really wish that I had the electrical engineering skills. And I see people with their YouTube channels where they&pos;re just like, yeah, just printed a PCP stuck it in my reflow oven, soldered this, soldered that. And I&pos;m like, wow, If I could go back in time, maybe I would have tried to study electrical engineering instead of what I did in college. But it&pos;s an adjustment for sure. Occasionally you just have a moment that&pos;s like, crap, am I just going to be stuck for a month because this didn&pos;t work out? And it&pos;s in those moments where I just kind of remind myself of The journey of a founder is not always up into the right. I used to work with someone who described it as the drunken walk of the entrepreneur, where you&pos;re kind of meandering in and out of success and failure. those are moments that somewhat test my patience and moments where I have to tell myself, you know what, this is just par for the course. Like if it was easy, if it wasn&pos;t easy, then maybe it wouldn&pos;t be rewarding. That&pos;s what I taught myself. Vigs (25:21) That&pos;s a good mindset just to stay level -headed about the whole thing and not go through extreme emotional ups and downs and just stay calm. A lot of these things are a part for the chorus. So good on you to realize that with no prior, harder experience. Tobias Butler (25:31) Yeah. Thank you. was a learning experience for Vigs (25:38) I do want to talk about the production ramp up and relationship with suppliers and stuff, but real quick, wanted to ask, you didn&pos;t mention anything about mechanics. So did you do any custom mechanical design? you learn CAD or using like an off the shelf enclosure for the housing? Tobias Butler (25:51) Yeah, so I wouldn&pos;t say I&pos;ve CAD, but I do know a little bit of blender. That took some time. The very first version of the wood enclosure, well, the very, very first version, I actually made myself out of like balsa wood. But the next versions after that, I worked with a wood shop and just kind of drew it out. I think I may have made a SketchUp mockup and they sort Fiddled around with it and were able to create a working CAD model for the wood. Eventually I was able to make my own model for that and at one point switch suppliers and of course they wanted a totally different format than what I was getting out of Blender. So I still feel like I&pos;m not quite using what the pros use but I&pos;m doing a little bit of that and then I have a 3D printed part that I&pos;ve... print out on the 3D printer behind me that comes out in these sheets and that&pos;s the little like power plug insert. And that&pos;s been fun. I actually only just recently got my own 3D printer so I&pos;ve gone through some iterations on this piece to make it fit in a little bit better. It snaps into the wood part so figuring out how to design it in a way that is a little bit more forgiving of the Vigs (26:58) That looks nice. Tobias Butler (27:03) slightly looser tolerances of the wood because wood can grow in strength and you&pos;re not going to get it down to exact millimeter accuracy. So it&pos;s been fun to iterate on that and figure out just use the experience to make a better part. And that&pos;s also what&pos;s really fun about making it at home. There&pos;s a lot of disadvantages, but something like this, if I want to just make a new batch with a slightly improved part, then I&pos;ve got the flexibility to do Vigs (27:06) Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Yeah, and that looks super flush, so nice job on that. So for production now, tell me a little bit about how did you reach out to suppliers, build those relationships, and where are at today as far as production quantities and orders Tobias Butler (27:35) Thank you. Yeah, so the last few months I&pos;ve averaged about 100 sales a month and I try to make about 40 a week. Sometimes I&pos;ll take a week off if I&pos;ve run through my supplies. Finding suppliers was more of a mental hurdle than anything else. I feel like a lot of my software engineering nearing experience, I&pos;ve felt very self -sufficient and very much like I can just go and go on a stack overflow or whatever, figure out the answer, get the problem solved. For this, I have to reach out, I have to evaluate people, I have to figure out what they can do, and I feel like I got pretty lucky finding people who, I went with PCBWave for the circuit boards, they&pos;re a reliable source for that, but. Yeah, the suppliers I found, they&pos;re all in Shenzhen. They&pos;ve been super responsive to feedback. If the wood tolerances aren&pos;t good enough, they&pos;re able to dial that in a little bit and the next batch comes out better. So I&pos;ve been really happy with that so far. The biggest adjustment has been the occasional issues with customs. Actually, that&pos;s really the main thing. Sometimes things will get stuck in customs. I get hit with tariffs on the circuit boards and things like that. But for the most part, just going through Alibaba has made me really feel like the supply chain coming out of China feels like it&pos;s a different century than trying to figure out stuff in the US, which is somewhat disappointing because I would reach out to suppliers in the US to try to figure things But usually what I found was a combination of their processes would be a little bit weird. They wouldn&pos;t tell you when an order was ready for pickup. They like, one order they would assemble the boxes for you and the next they wouldn&pos;t and it wasn&pos;t really clear why. And then there was a lot of suppliers who I reached out to who just never emailed me back. And I don&pos;t know if that was just because figured that I wasn&pos;t serious enough or if they&pos;re just, you know, maybe it&pos;s an old email address that they&pos;re not monitoring, but as much as I would love to say otherwise, I&pos;ve just, the suppliers coming out of China, the process is just so streamlined. Everyone&pos;s so responsive and that&pos;s made it super easy for me to get off the ground and be able to realize this vision. Vigs (29:53) Mm -hmm. Alibaba really is like a modern day platform, like all the messaging and stuff that you&pos;d expect, notifications, it&pos;s built very well. And what&pos;s next for the product and for the company? Tobias Butler (30:22) Well, I wanted to spend a few months just figuring out what my limits were for home production. I thought that would be a good way to bootstrap the process instead of investing a bunch into making an order of 1000, 2000, 10 ,000, whatever I might have to do. I knew I could get things off the ground building it at home, but I think I&pos;m starting to hit my limit for that. Both just feeling myself. getting a little bit fatigued on the building and wishing I had more time for the other components of the business. But I also just talked to someone a couple of weeks ago and what he said was basically like, if you&pos;re building these things every week, that&pos;s time that you&pos;re not able to actually run your business. And that just has really stuck with me where I think I sort of was starting to feel that where I was like, okay, this is sort of thinking in terms of like computer science algorithms, if this is a framing that makes sense, like at best building them at home is like a linear growth activity. It is definitely not an exponential growth activity. And I&pos;m not building this because I think it&pos;s going to be the biggest company in the world or even a particularly big hardware company. I&pos;m building it because I think people might like it and saw an opportunity to make something that people could like or even love. But I feeling that I&pos;m at the limits. know that there&pos;s more people who would buy this if I could maybe get the price a little bit lower, get the marketing a little more streamlined, and just have more coming in the door and free up time for myself to be able to focus on really growing things. And so that&pos;s really the next step. And so I&pos;m fortunate to have some friends who have experience with this sort of stuff that are helping give me feedback getting that process up and running, but that&pos;s what I&pos;m in the middle of right now. But meanwhile, I&pos;ve still got orders to fulfill, so this week I&pos;m building and just snapping the pieces together, uploading the firmware, screwing the housing onto the screen, and slapping the labels on the boxes, and then UPS picks them up. Vigs (32:27) Nice, you&pos;ve got your schedule and your kind of workflow down it seems. Tobias Butler (32:32) Yeah, more or less. It&pos;s I&pos;ve got it down and I&pos;m realizing that it&pos;s not enough. So I&pos;m I&pos;m keep still going with it while while aiming for the next step for the better workflow that should be coming in a few months. Vigs (32:44) Yeah, and it does sound like for you the next kind of personal level of growth is reminds me of a quote I heard. It&pos;s going from working in the business to working on the business. And so yeah, it&pos;s great that you&pos;ve got friends like that that are in your ear kind of holding you accountable to, hey, don&pos;t just get caught up building units and shipping them out. Make sure you&pos;re working on your business. Tobias Butler (33:02) Yeah, totally. And I think it&pos;s something where I think I&pos;ve romanticized the working in the business a little bit because I am very inspired by friends of mine who are essentially artisans, artists. I&pos;ve got a friend who makes really amazing knives. He just started working with Bernal Cutlery and SF doing their in -house line. So you should check that out if you&pos;re listening to this and you&pos;re a knife fan. And I love going to his shop and I love seeing the way that he works. But ultimately, while it is, I am really aiming for this to be a high quality product and a product that has a lot of personality. It&pos;s ultimately not an artisanal product. It&pos;s a very personable gadget. And me putting the time into each one. is not actually how I&pos;m going to get the highest quality, most effective product. The most effective product will come from me figuring out the direction I&pos;m going in and using that energy to make a product that gets better and better rather than just using that time to make the same product over and over. So as much love as I have for the artisanal... practice and as glad as I am that I gave that a shot and was able to get off the ground with that. That&pos;s another piece of personal growth that I&pos;ve been experiencing is just recognizing the limits of that and recognizing when it&pos;s time to do a mindset shift and figure out that next step for growth, I guess you could say. Vigs (34:32) Yeah, I do think that the way you&pos;re doing it, I&pos;ll commend you for it because you are getting hands on dirty with parts and everything. And so you like intimately understand the assembly process. So now when you have someone else assemble it for you, you know all the pain points, all the optimizations. And so I think the way you&pos;re doing it, if people can do it, I would always suggest build the first hundred units yourself so you know the pain points, you can improve the design and all that Tobias Butler (34:56) Yeah, it&pos;s true and I am very grateful for that and it&pos;s something that I really celebrate. It&pos;s amazing that it&pos;s something we can do now. It&pos;s amazing that 3D printers are as cheap as they are because this is something that even 10 or 15 years ago would have been really hard to do at home in the way that I&pos;m doing now. And when people see Tuneshine and they say like, you know, I think I could build that. I always tell them like, you know what? You should, like it&pos;s fun. If you think you can build this, I&pos;m not gonna sit here being like, that person should give me money. No, they might be missing out on a super fun experience that I open the door for them to try their own product and come up with their own thing. Hopefully not the same product. Please don&pos;t directly rip me off. But that I feel like is just such a gratifying experience and something I encourage everybody to give it a shot if they have interest or feel like they&pos;ve got the sparks of the skills there. Vigs (35:55) That was very well put. And I admire the, you know, encouraging people to try it on their own. Cause you&pos;ll always have that segment of people who are willing to pay for a completed product, but then you want to give joy to the DIYers and you know, the people that get something from building with their hands. Tobias, thanks so much for spending some time with me here today. I will put your website in the show notes so people can check it out, tuneshine .rocks. But is there anything else that you would like to add for how people can support you? How can they help you grow? Tobias Butler (36:09) Absolutely. I would say just, yeah, check out the website, follow me on Instagram, that&pos;s my main marketing channel right now, it&pos;s also tuneshine .rocks, so I&pos;ve been really trying to share some pieces of the process, give my personal take on the stuff I&pos;m building, so if this is exciting to you, you can follow the Instagram and get a little bit more of a taste of how I work, what my office looks like, the ways I&pos;m figuring these things out, and hope you enjoy it, and maybe you&pos;ll even decide to get one. Vigs (36:52) Thanks so much, Tobias. Tobias Butler (36:54) Thank you.

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