Tone Locker

Cameron Hawkins and I had been talking about gear for years before we talked about building anything. Both musicians, both collectors. He had a real observation: the way people relate to their instruments has almost nothing to do with buying and selling, but every product in the space treats it like it does.

That observation was sharp. It was not a product yet. My job was to work with Cameron and the early team to figure out what it actually is, in what order, and build a plan they could execute against with a bootstrapped budget and a rotating cast of freelance engineers.

I leaned on twenty-five years as a musician to inform these calls, and that was deliberate. It's rare that a designer's life outside of design maps this directly onto the problem space.

Reverb and Sweetwater are good at transactions. You show up when you're selling. That's the entire relationship. There was no reason to build another version of that.

Tone Locker is inventory and community first. A collector's relationship with their gear starts long before they'd ever consider selling it, and the product has to live in that space before it earns the right to facilitate a transaction. Messaging, offers, negotiation all exist in the plan. They come after the identity is established.

Dark, warm, and specific to collectors. The visual system had to feel like the gear itself, not like a marketplace listing page.

Identity became structure. Once we knew what Tone Locker is, the roadmap wrote itself in sequence.

The sequencing gave Cameron and a small team a clear picture of what they were building this quarter, what was coming next, and why the order was the order. It also gave me a design roadmap I could work against without waiting for decisions that hadn't been made yet.

I broke the product into four phases, from community through monetization. All four were designed during the same period. What shipped first was a sequencing decision, not a scope limitation.

Two phases are live. One is being built. One is ready for when the business model needs it.

The social experience and locker builder shipped in early 2025. Share your gear and build out an inventory in the same motion.

User growth has been nominal, tied to marketing pushes, giveaways, and trade shows. Organic pull hasn't been the driver yet. The app sits at 4.7 stars, and early feedback has been positive. Retention still leans on incentives, which is an honest limitation of where the product is.

More effort on organic-growth research. What makes browsing and community sticky for this audience. That research is what the roadmap should be built on.

On Tone Locker, I had a rare overlap: the designer was also the target user, with twenty-five years of context to pull from. That let us build with conviction before a single user tested or validated anything. It worked because the overlap was real, not because skipping research is a good default.

On your product, that overlap probably doesn't exist, and I wouldn't pretend it does. If a founder comes in light on market research, that research becomes a precondition of the engagement. The instinct that worked here was specific to this project. The process of knowing when you have that instinct and when you don't, that's what transfers.