Four years ago, Garrett Kessling and Daniel Wendt were Tiger Band members on opposite sides of the football field. Each had a saxophone, and they didn’t like each other.
Now they’re business partners, Business Report details in the Entrepreneur feature from its current issue.
Kessling and Wendt founded Tonal Innovation, a company that creates a device called eFlip, which allow musicians to mount their smartphone or tablet to their instrument. Kessling and Wendt are hoping to get the product in the hands of as many bands as possible.
“Helping someone else play music is really exciting,” he says.
The idea for eFlip began in the LSU band hall in 2013. Kessling and some friends were looking at a tiny piece of sheet music for Callin’ Baton Rouge. A friend made a pinch motion, jokingly wishing for a zoom function. Kessling paused, considering the statement.
Enter the eFlip. “I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but that’s what I wanted,” Kessling says. An entrepreneurship professor recommended the LSU Student Incubator at the Louisiana Business & Technology Center, which accepted his idea. LBTC helped it grow with everything from engineering and patents to prototypes and pitches.
“They’re fantastic,” he says. “If you have a question and they don’t know the answer, they know four people who do know.”
In 2015, LBTC chose eFlip to represent LSU at the SEC Symposium’s student entrepreneur pitch competition. That’s when Kessling officially asked Wendt to come on board to focus on marketing and finances, and Tonal Innovation was born.
They placed fourth, and successfully perfected their pitch in successive competitions to take second place at the LSU Student Incubator’s 2016 Venture Cup Challenge.
Skilled in the art of sales, they had yet to make one and turned to Kickstarter for capital. “We got tons of emails from schools who wanted to buy, but they couldn’t put funding toward a maybe,” Kessling explains. They scrapped the crowdfunding effort, took individual orders and ran Facebook ads.
Since that time, Kessling and Wendt have sold eFlips to the University of Illinois and to LSU.
Kessling is amazed at seeing his idea become reality and being used in ways he did not expect—like by a legally blind trumpeter who reads music on an iPad.
Read the full Entrepreneur feature. Send your comments to editors@businessreport.com.
