Hello MOD community! A few words from the new CEO

MOD_Ronny · February 27, 2018, 3:06pm

Following Gianfranco’s post from last week I’d like to use the chance to personally introduce myself to the community and simply say hi.

My name is Ronny Krieger and I am the new CEO of MOD Devices.

As Gianfranco mentioned last week, I started as a musician myself in the late 80s. First as part of a synth-pop band, then going solo and starting to produce underground dance music with the rise of techno in the early 90s. I released about 2 dozen records and remixes and also used to DJ for a couple of years. More on the experimental side of things than with a pure focus on the dancefloor. Music was always a passion and a hobby for me and I never wanted to rely on it as my main source of income. That’s also why I never had to care about trends and hypes. I believe in uncompromising authenticity. In music and in life.

After school I first started as a banker, quite honestly simply to please parents and family, but after 3 years I finally decided that I had enough and went into the music industry.

For several years I worked at EFA distribution in Berlin doing PR for many international labels, that needed a representative in Germany. EFA in my opinion had the best distribution roster worldwide. Not only did EFA have pretty much all of the most essential early dance and electronic music labels under contract, EFA also combined some of the best labels of alternative, punk, dub & reggae and jazz under one roof.

After a few years at EFA I moved on to work with record labels, helped build Beatport as VP of Content and later CPO and worked as a consultant for several companies like Digitally Imported, Shutterstock, Native Instruments, LANDR and others. Occasionally I was teaching Digital Media and International Music Business, because I always enjoyed sharing my knowledge and experience.

I am also a board member of the vut, the German association of independent labels, for quite some time now and I am quite dedicated to a regular fitness routine and a healthy lifestyle. I train CrossFit 7 hours per week, I run my annual Tough Mudder, eat mostly clean, don’t drink alcohol, don’t smoke and enjoy being fitter in my mid 40s than I have ever been in my life before. A strict routine helps to develop discipline, dedication and grit, which are crucial for any successful business.

What else?

I have 2 wonderful kids and a lovely and very supportive wife. The anchor in my life.

When I was presented with the opportunity to become the CEO of MOD Devices, I didn’t have to think about it for too long. I loved the concept from the start and my mind immediately started to develop plans. That’s always a good sign.

In January the team and I started to lay the foundation for a proper business plan for the year. In the coming weeks and months we’ll continue our planning phase to outline a long term vision and roadmap for the company.

In 2 weeks we´ll hold a strategic company gathering in Berlin. We will be discussing new features, product updates and also new products for the months and years to come. As always, your feedback is welcome, so please reply here and let us know what you´d like to see MOD Devices fix and/or launch.

It’s a busy, but extremely exciting time for the company and we seriously can’t wait to present our ideas to you. Be sure that there’ll be plenty of surprises and long overdue announcements coming and you’ll be the first to know.

Thank you for your dedication and support!

Ronny Krieger

plutek · February 27, 2018, 4:09pm

welcome, @MOD_Ronny… great to have you on board!

i’ll look forward to news and plans, and will be delighted to be involved in whatever way i can; the active community of users, and the company’s responsiveness to us, have always been a huge strength in this whole endeavour.

carry on… cheers!
.pltk.

ssj71 · February 27, 2018, 4:15pm

Great to meet you Ronny and glad to see you join the Mod team.

my top requests:
Features:

Midi learn filtering (allow plugins to midi learn from midi outputs from other plugins, opens door for more modulation too)
Pedal board sharing for community plugins, (perhaps as a second community pedalboard section?)
Momentary switch behavior (so you can use e.g. the infamous stuck such that as soon as you release the switch the pedal bypasses rather than needing 1 click on and another click off).
file loading/management (allows IRs, samples, etc)
double click pedal or knob to move backward in list

Launches:

a synth control chain device, with at least 16 knobs (please please please!)
more powerful CPU coreboard

MOD_Ronny · February 27, 2018, 4:18pm

Thank you @plutek!

plutek · February 27, 2018, 4:23pm

ok, i’ll add my 2 cents…

fix the buffering noise issue.
allow selection of a subset of presets instead of just “assign all”, when assigning to a controller.
i’ll echo the need for a more powerful CPU

…for now.

MOD_Ronny · February 27, 2018, 4:49pm

Thank you @ssj71! Some of these are already in the works, others in consideration and the new additions will be added to our discussions. Keep the wishes coming!

Skydiver · February 27, 2018, 6:33pm

Hi Ronny,

Nice to meet you.
Looking forward to working with you!

Dave_Parker · February 28, 2018, 1:12am

Only request at this point:

Expression pedal

brummer · February 28, 2018, 5:35am

Welcome @MOD_Ronny

eggsperde · February 28, 2018, 6:29am

Hi Ronny, great to hear that the MOD team found such a dedicated and passionate CEO. Look forward to reading more from you in the future!

My wish from the MOD team concerns the software and it is to “release early and release often”. Or some news about the expression pedal. Whatever is easier for you…

MOD_Ronny · February 28, 2018, 6:54am

Thank you @eggsperde and everbody else for the warm welcome.

I realize that too many promises have been made for too long. There were good reasons and @gianfranco and his team did the best they could. From now on we´ll have better preconditions and will make sure that we deliver when we announce something.

While we are already discussing a plan to launch several software updates in the coming months, we will indeed frequently launch new updates instead of many at once. We don´t want to keep you waiting.

Footswitch and Expression Pedal are in discussions right now. I can already reveal that one is already in the making. Expect an official announcement very soon. The other will unfortunately take a bit longer, but I am confident that we will find a solution still in the first half of this year. Watch this space for more info in the coming weeks.

Yan · March 2, 2018, 7:56pm

I believe that the focus now must be on delivering the peripherals we buy at the kickstarter’s initial funding.

Skydiver · March 2, 2018, 10:46pm

I can’t wait to get my expression pedal…

lunardigs · March 4, 2018, 7:26am

Hi Ronny,
Welcome! Glad to hear of big plans for the future.

Things I’d like to see added/improved:

A way to view and manage all controller assignments from within mod-ui
‘Controller macros,’ so multiple parameters can be affected at once
Recognition of footswitch gestures e.g. press-and-hold (hold to toggle); successive-double-press (‘double click,’ so to speak); press-duration (momentary parameter change as long as switch depressed, originally brought up by @nils)
Tap-tempo
Ability to change parameters within mod-ui that are controller mapped (otherwise locked from editing within mod-ui, as is now)

I’m not sure what these enhancements would entail, fully realized. Although, to me, they’d be very advantageous.

Btw, thank you for engaging us in this discussion!

MOD_Ronny · March 4, 2018, 7:41am

I agree. We are doing our best to get all the legacy problems solved. We also need to make sure it´s a great product though and that is our main focus right now. I can only ask for a little bit more patience

aspiers · March 4, 2018, 6:18pm

Welcome @MOD_Ronny! Sounds like the MOD team have a great new addition

Regarding gathering feedback from the community:

Since everyone obviously has different views of what they consider important for MOD Devices to focus on, would it be worth setting up a topic here or other system where we the community can vote on the various topics? Then you would get a more accurate sense of which are the most burning issues.

MOD_Ronny · March 28, 2018, 1:35pm

To be quite honest, as great as democratic voting for the community sounds, it reality is pretty much impossible to run a business that way. There are always very complex reasons why some things need to be a priority instead of others.

We definitely want to be as close as possible to our community and the feedback here takes a large part in that. Nevertheless, in the end we´ll have to consider the big picture and balance all aspects.

So sometimes it will seem like we´ll prioritize exactly what the community wants, other times it might not always seem the “right” order in which we do things. That´s natural. Trust that we have a plan why we do things the way we do

We´ll aim to be as transparent as we can be about the process though. Promised.

brummer · March 28, 2018, 2:26pm

Very well spoken.
While input from the community is highly appreciated, and may have a influence on decisions, it’s much more important to have a plan.

And that is not only true for business, even for non profit projects.

aspiers · March 28, 2018, 3:20pm

Sure, I’m well aware of that (one might even say painfully so), after 13 years of experience working with an ISV whose primary business is supporting Free (Libre) / Open Source Software.

But I wasn’t proposing a democracy in which the community usurps your role as decision-maker I was merely proposing that you set up some mechanism by which you can numerically quantify the strength of the community’s feeling on various issues. Then you can combine those data points with your other commercially-driven considerations in order to make planning decisions which are as well informed as possible.

In contrast, if you only gauge community opinion qualitatively, e.g. by keeping an eye on which issues people tend to vocalise most often on these forums, then you’ll have a much less accurate picture of what your userbase cares about. For example, many people won’t post about an issue which affects them, simply because they notice that it’s already been reported, or because noone asked them and they’re not inclined to proactively share that information through being too busy, or too shy, or other random reasons. So if MOD doesn’t proactively canvas relative importance of issues via some kind of survey, issues could appear to only affect one or two people when in fact they affect many more.

That’s way more than fine by me I would far prefer your company to be financially successful so that it can keep doing awesome stuff, rather than go bankrupt because it cared about its community more than its survival But as you have already pointed out in such an encouraging fashion, community and business success are not mutually exclusive. I’m very optimistic about the future based on what you’ve written so far!

Yes, that is hugely appreciated too. Thanks for the reply!

MOD_Ronny · March 28, 2018, 4:11pm

Agreed.

We will do a comprehensive customer/user survey soon.

As you said, the forum isn’t the ideal way to gather qualitative feedback, but a direct way to engage in an ongoing communication. At least for those who participate.