Magic Instruments
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Magic Instruments was a San Francisco music-technology startup, a Y Combinator Winter 2016 company founded by Brian Fan. Its product, the MI Guitar, was an app-enabled digital guitar with chord buttons instead of traditional strings, designed to let people with no musical training play songs within minutes via a companion iOS/Android app selling individual songs for 99 cents or a $5.99 monthly catalog subscription. The company raised over $412,000 in a 2016 Indiegogo campaign for the instrument.
02 / Magic Instruments FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Magic Instruments never published a postmortem, and the story of its end is told through backer reports: the MI Guitar, promised for March 2017 delivery to crowdfunding backers, slipped through repeated delays - from late 2016 into late 2017 - with the team periodically going quiet on backer questions. The company ceased operations in 2019 without a public shutdown announcement.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
First Stage Investor co-founder Andy Gordon wrote 1 Jul 2019 that YC W16 Magic Instruments (MI Guitar) appeared to have folded after a May 2018 update; BBB complaints cited sudden silence and undelivered pre-orders; Kingscrowd likewise marks the Reg CF issuer no longer in operation.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Y Combinator Winter 2016 company founded by Brian Fan; raised over $412,000 on Indiegogo in 2016 for the MI Guitar.
- 02
Promised backer shipments for March 2017; missed successive ship dates through 2017 amid backer complaints about long silences from the team.
- 03
Companion app model sold songs for $0.99 each or a $5.99 monthly subscription for the catalog.
- 04
Ceased operations in 2019 with no public shutdown announcement; no reliable loss figure disclosed.