I used to make my own effects pedals and sell them under the “electric toad engineering” moniker. It’s a lot of fun, but the market is way too crowded and you’re not going to make much money at it! Still, my pedals are very good.

The last design I came up with I only made one of, and I use it for myself.. but, it is the best overdrive I’ve ever heard, or at least, after years of fiddling with it there’s nothing left I can do to make it any better. I just don’t want to spend my time doing screen printing, advertising, shipping, drilling, soldering, and so on just make 50 bucks on each unit.

There is a lot of hokum that people believe when it comes to overdrive, but it comes down to a really good signal to noise ratio, and a thousand tiny details, and very close attention to pre/post gain eq.

I think the same is true of the “tube sound” mojo- the tube amps that are most sought after are great because they were a labor of love, and people sweated over the tiny details. Solid state amps are designed to be cheap, so they have worse speakers, and so on. You can get just a good a sound out of transistors, you just have to spend some money and time to do it.