After leaving DJI, he achieved 1 billion in revenue with a stringless guitar!

"Another niche track generates hundreds of millions in revenue"

If someone told you in 2019 that they were planning to build a guitar without strings, you would probably think they were unreliable.

In traditional perception, the soul of a guitar lies in its six strings. Without strings, can it still be called a guitar? This sounds more like a wild experiment than a serious business plan.

But a few years later, the market feedback forced people to reconsider this "counter-intuitive" decision.

A brand named LiberLive, whose parent company Unknown Planet, achieved revenue exceeding 1 billion yuan in 2024. As of April 2026, its products have been sold to more than 50 countries and regions worldwide, with cumulative users exceeding 1.3 million.

You have to admit that sometimes, it is not the seasoned players within an industry who disrupt it, but the "barbarians" who dare to break the rules from the outside.

Image source: TIME

The Rebellion of a Robotics Engineer

It is reported that LiberLive's parent company, Unknown Planet, was founded in Shenzhen in 2016 and is one of the incubation projects of the XbotPark robotics base founded by Li Zexiang. Belonging to the same lineage as DJI and Narwal, the team's DNA comes from robotics and consumer electronics, rather than traditional musical instrument manufacturing.

The resume of founder Tang Wenxuan speaks volumes. He holds a bachelor's degree in Automation from Hunan University, went on to pursue a master's degree in Robotics at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, and after returning to China, worked as a navigation algorithm engineer at DJI. When these tech-savvy people entered the musical instrument track, they were not concerned with timbre and craftsmanship, but with a more fundamental question: There are so many people who love music, why are so few able to actually play an instrument?

In their view, traditional musical instruments have evolved over hundreds of years, yet the learning logic has barely changed. The long practice cycle keeps most people out. If the music experience could be deconstructed and reconstructed, could there be another possibility?

In 2019, the LiberLive team started R&D, targeting a "common sense" stringless guitar. Four years later, the C1 was officially released.

Image source: YouTube

This product requires no pressing of strings; chord switching can be done via buttons. Traditional instruments follow the path of "Learn - Practice - Perform", while LiberLive attempts to rewrite it as "Play - Experience - Learn", first allowing users to enjoy the pleasure of performing, then decide whether to dive deeper.

Centered around the concept of "One Person, One Band", the C1 has built-in multiple tones and accompaniment functions. Combined with the app's song library and follow-along feature, even zero-basis users can quickly get started with singing and playing. The foldable design frees the product from being confined to a home practice room, allowing it to be taken to camping, travel, parties, and other scenarios.

LiberLive targets not professional musicians, but people who love music but cannot play an instrument, those who want to sing but lack accompaniment, short video creators, and mass consumers seeking instant entertainment experiences. Essentially, what it sells is not a more professional guitar, but a lower-threshold way to participate in music. It is this logic that has helped it capture 1.3 million users worldwide and support an annual revenue of over 1 billion yuan.

Image source: Google

Going Global: Not Lingering in Traditional Channels

With the product ready, selling it became the top challenge.

For mature categories like headphones and speakers, brands only need to tell consumers "I have high cost performance" or "I have good design". But the problem with a stringless guitar is: you have to first explain what it is.

The first step of LiberLive's overseas expansion followed the traditional path of authoritative endorsement. After starting global operations in September 2024, the brand frequently appeared at international exhibitions and design award podiums. During CES 2025, the C1 won the "Best of CES" award selected by media such as Rolling Stone. Before that, it had already won the Red Dot Award, iF Design Award, and Japan's Good Design Award. These awards are hard currency in European and American markets, helping the brand complete its first round of trust-building.

Image source: LiberLive

But awards are just the primer; the real job of explaining the product's functionality is done by the independent website.

Unlike many brands that treat their independent websites as discount-driven sales channels, LiberLive's official website is more like a product education center. Large amounts of video demos, feature breakdowns, and user real-life stories occupy the main body of the page. For a new category that requires high decision-making cost, making users understand is more important than making them think it is cheap.

Image source: LiberLive

Social media marketing: letting the product speak for itself

Of course, if we talk about what really made LiberLive take off overseas, it has to be TikTok.

The logic is simple: the biggest advantage of a fretless guitar—zero learning curve, minutes to play and sing, foldable and portable—cannot be explained clearly with words, but with a short video, a few seconds are enough.

When we see someone who has never touched an instrument pick up a LiberLive and play a song within minutes, or see a guitar fold up like a folding chair and slip into a backpack, the product's value is instantly conveyed intuitively.

The brand's official account @liberlive.official currently has 12,200 followers and a total of 37,500 likes. Although the follower count is not large, the content strategy is very focused, all revolving around a few core selling points: zero foundation for playing and singing, social scenarios, and portability.

Image source: TikTok

More traffic comes from influencer collaborations.

Indigo Star, a fashion and lifestyle influencer with 1.3 million followers, once posted an experience video showcasing the guitar's folding design and live playing. That video garnered 8.6 million views and over 1 million likes. In the comments, a large number of users wrote 'This is so cool' and 'I want one too,' instantly converting the product's novelty into purchase desire.

Image source: TikTok

Video source: Influencer @Indigo Star's TikTok account

Another influencer, cahilxmanila, with 4.7 million followers, used a LiberLive to play Lady Gaga's hit song Shallow. The video reached 6.1 million views and over 480,000 likes. This kind of content is more effective than any advertisement because it gives users a strong sense of identification—not 'Can I do it?' but 'I can do it too.'

Image source: TikTok

Video source: Influencer @cahilxmanila's TikTok account

Going global is timely, but the path is ahead

Looking back, LiberLive's success is no accident. It has leveraged the dividends of the smart hardware supply chain and also caught the global trend of musical consumption democratization.

From a data perspective, although the overall scale of the global smart musical instrument market is not yet comparable to that of consumer electronics giants, the growth trend is clear. Market Report Analytics predicts that the market size will grow from approximately $250 million in 2025 to $589 million in 2031. North America, as a mature market, provides a stable demand base, while Asia, with its supply chain advantages and rising music consumption, has become one of the fastest-growing regions.

Of course, this track is far from settled—products are still being updated, people's awareness is gradually being built, and the content ecosystem is still under development. The race has just begun.