Here’s a tech prod­uct which should stir a lit­tle envy-tinged admi­ra­tion amongst chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cers, chief rev­enue offi­cers and busi­ness devel­op­ment asso­ciates: an elec­tric gui­tar which uses an embed­ded iPhone to teach any­one to get a tune out of it.

A musi­cal instru­ment for the musi­cal­ly challenged

gTar, an addic­tive­ly grat­i­fy­ing giz­mo devel­oped by tech start­up Inci­dent, is now avail­able for pre-orders. The instru­ment uses inter­ac­tive LEDs along the guitar’s fret­board that show users exact­ly where they should place their fin­gers to get the night notes. Dif­fer­ent songs can be loaded onto an app-enabled iPhone which then “tells” the LEDs what to do once it’s insert­ed into the dock.

The gTar has been three years in the mak­ing and is the brain­child of Inci­dent CEO and co-founder, Idan Beck. With design­ing and pro­to­typ­ing now in the bag, the prod­uct is ready to hit the mar­ket and, judg­ing by the suc­cess of its Kick­starter cam­paign last year, it’s set to cre­ate a storm: the cam­paign yield­ed 1,000 orders and $350,000.

Man­ag­ing backer expectations

This took the com­pa­ny by sur­prise – it was expect­ing a few hun­dred orders but end­ed up with orders for five tons worth of gTars.  But scal­ing up turned out to be rel­a­tive­ly straight­for­ward – Inci­dence has the gad­get assem­bled in the Chi­nese tech cap­i­tal, Shen­zhen, by sev­er­al high­ly expe­ri­enced fac­to­ries. Man­ag­ing the expec­ta­tions of back­ers has been a more com­pli­cat­ed busi­ness, however.

Beck explains: “We got a lot of real­ly, real­ly main­stream back­ers, not ear­ly adopters.  And the response they had was that they expect­ed it to be com­mer­cial grade — some­thing that you could put on the shelf and buy it ready-to-go. But the thing is that Kick­starter projects are still pre-production.”

Get­ting to com­mer­cial grade

The prod­uct need­ed a num­ber of refine­ments before it could make the grade as a com­mer­cial­ly viable piece of kit.  These includ­ed mak­ing the strings more sen­si­tive so that they’d respond to ordi­nary gui­tar picks, eas­ing the process of get­ting firmware upgrades by using remov­able car­tridges (who wants to send the whole instru­ment back?) and increas­ing devel­op­er access.  More iPhone apps can now be built for the gTar as a result.

The key, says Beck, “is to grow at a pace that you can control.”

The gTar retails at $399. Is that the sound of an online stampede?