Calling all plugin publishers!

[tulamide]

Martin asked two times without any answer, so I assume it is because not so many people read in the DSP subforum. So here I ask on behalf of Martin:

"Who has experience with releasing stuff at KVR Audio or elsewhere, and would be willing to do some marketing noise at some point?"

Here's the background:
We're planning to release a professional convolution plugin as a community project. We further want to sell it, with the purpose to spend the income on development of Flowstone's audio part, especially 64-bit support, VST 3.x and overall improved stability of the edittime.
Martin has made a lot of effort in creating an already impressive convolution engine, that will be finetuned now to the needs and wishes of the community. I am working on a GUI and Spogg contributed self-made IRs and an application to create unusual IRs.
We don't ask for help in development, I know that you all prefer to stay out of the way. But none of us has any experience with releasing/marketing! Anyone who has ever sold his/her plugins has more experience than us! I think it is not asked too much to find just one person who wants to help with this specific part. Not for profit, not for fame, just for the future audio support of Flowstone.

You want Flowstone to be able to create VST 3 or 64-bit plugins, don't you? Here's your chance to contribute to this goal.

So, read the line in bold - and then help us out

[adamszabo]

Oops, I indeed missed Martins post. Here is my experience:

One can very simply set up a website and a paypal account, and sell the plugin through that. Adding the plugin to the KVR Audio database is easy as well, so thats no problem. The hard part is getting it out there to the people. We would have to come up with a developer name, and have to convince people to buy it. There are already lots of free convolution plugins so we would have to offer something thats not available in other plugins.

My suggestion would be to release a normal version for free, so people notice us, and then later sell a bigger "pro" version with much more features.

[MyCo]

I've only released 2 free plugins on KVR, I didn't need any advertisement at all to get my shared web space to be not accessible anymore. When KVR updates it's like an immediate ddos attack on your hosting. For some reason most of that came from Japan
I guess that's only the case for freeware... people are greedy

[kortezzzz]

One can very simply set up a website and a paypal account, and sell the plugin through that. Adding the plugin to the KVR Audio database is easy as well, so thats no problem. The hard part is getting it out there to the people. We would have to come up with a developer name, and have to convince people to buy it. There are already lots of free convolution plugins so we would have to offer something thats not available in other plugins.

+1

All true. Other than that, I wish you all the luck in the world since you guys gonna need it: When KVR members don't see cross platform and\or 64bit icons on KVR, they just ignore it and pass over. The only reason I had some sales about 2 years a go is because my last synths and drum sampler where stand alone version that related to live using (buttons based preset manager for quick preset changing in tablets). My customers gave me good feedback, but never even came back to download the update...

Moreover, this year was the best year ever in the varez world. People downloaded so many new rare toys for free that it's hard to believe they would pay any attention to something that has been made with FS.

My suggestion is to try to hit the market with a creative stand alone product that works on both 32\64 systems (and in this case, nobody cares if they are 32 or 64). Lately, I started a stand alone project that tries to capture those karaoke fans that sing with the playbacks. There are lot of them around the world. I already have a working FS prototype and it works pretty well with both pro audio interfaces and asio4all. That's where FS can shine in those days. There and at the midi section. Other than that, you gonna need a serious help from Fortuna.

Anyway, if you need any help with designing, I'm here to help

[Nubeat7]

first of all, GREAT!

some things i would reccomend,

make the buying process as easy as possible, the best thing would be to just have a buy button and a accountregistration just with name, e-mail and password which is enough my system has adress too but this makes no sense at all and just makes it complicated and people don't like to give all their dates...

like myco said free plugins arrive people pretty fast and wide, so i would wisely think about the price, i was thinking about a very cheap price culture at the beginning but then i thought i don't want to sell underrated with dumping prices, maybe it would be better to have 100 customers who pay 100€ instead of 500 who pay 10€
any plans how to go already?

kvr is not that bad but everybody is there and you will have just 2 or 3 days to be in the news, (short time updates makes things better there) but it will not be enough to go just with that, when you also will do a forum there it will be much better i'm sure, but also a lot of work..

its important to have a small presstext and NFR's too and let all the vst info sites know about you, rekkerd, producerspot, bedroomproducers, ... but also the big ones like computermusicmagazine,...

the biggest advantage at the beginning is that you are NEW, so everybody wants to know about you and there are lot of buyers who buy at the first view, so the bigger your start the bigger are the firs trigger sales...

i think a facebook site with more admins is very good too, so it multiplies the nr of people you will reach at the beginning..also twitter is important..

sadly i'm afraid that i cannot spend a lot of time but for sure i will buy one, share it, vote for it, giving likes and things like this
just keep me up to date!

[tulamide]

Thank you guys so far!

There are a lot of tips that sound very professional, and I still hope to find someone that says: "Yes, it's worth it. I'll do the marketing."

What was missing in my last post was a link to the actual thread, where you can follow the progress and participate (creating IRs, posting feature ideas, discuss the overall direction of the plugin, etc.). Here it is:
http://www.dsprobotics.com/support/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3879

(It started out small, so the first few pages may be less interesting)

And please remember, it is meant to be a community project, not a three man project. All we do is shared on that link, but without input and contribution from you it may not succeed.

[tulamide]

it's hard to believe they would pay any attention to something that has been made with FS.

That's pretty much the motivation for this project. A versatile convolution engine is state-of-the-art in DSP. You won't find much that is more complex, both, programming-wise and challenging for PCs (when, like the engine Martin has layed the foundation of, making it zero-delay realtime processing)!

So, presenting a product to show that Flowstone can still keep up with top-notch technologies and produce fast, reliable, good-looking VSTs, that's certainly a great plus for Flowstone. It's time to stop all those nay-sayers, that mostly argue with the speed or unreliability of such VSTs.

[Spogg]

As a side issue I think we should avoid using the Synthmaker name in any connection.
It was a truly great app for sure but it may have associations for many that might not be ideal. I personally hadn't heard of Flowstone until I looked on the Synthmaker site so it's probably got a low profile generally at the moment.

The name Flowstone is cool and we should push that name forward I believe.

Cheers

Spogg

[Perfect Human Interface]

One can very simply set up a website and a paypal account, and sell the plugin through that.

I would consider this a dramatic oversimplification. Handling online sales is not so simple as pasting a Paypal button into a website unfortunately. Especially if you want to implement any kind of copy protection. There are things like Wordpress that have fairly robust online store plugins like WooCommerce, but those always have particular nagging limitations (especially with digital goods and copy protection) and you often have to pay a significant amount for added functionalities. I'm sure someone who knows what they're doing with this stuff could get a website and webstore set up but I would never call it trivial.

Regarding the original topic, the lack of 64 bit is definitely going to put a damper on interest/sales. I believe under the current state of things it's possible to get a non-zero amount of sales with a 32 bit plugin, but cutting the potential number of sales to a fraction of what they would be otherwise is also cutting your chance of "success" by the same margin. I recently spoke with a company who showed interest in handling sales/marketing of some of my own plugin designs, but naturally they're looking for cross-platform and 64 bit (currently looking for a "proper" programmer). I completely understand the desire to show off Flowstone itself and I think that's a great idea, but purely from a numbers perspective you're likely to earn so much more if you were able to write your plugin in 64 bit compatible format. As such your goals are somewhat working against each other.

As far as marketing goes though, it's something that I think about often and I'd be happy to offer any ideas, or write some blurbs or just help work out how to present/communicate the product effectively. Of course the biggest thing that will help market a product is having an established brand/identity behind it, but as mentioned you're not likely to get that with a 32 bit product. An exception might be if you were to ask a well-known indie plugin dev if they'd be willing to give you a signal boost. Bootsy comes to mind. Beyond that I can come up with a number of ways to garner attention for a product, if it's inherently marketable. It will really feel like trying to overcome a handicap though.

[martinvicanek]

Thanks everybody for their valuable inputs. Ihave been thinking that we should target for a free product. Here is why:

• 1. I doubt we could earn any amount to significantly influence 64bit progress - a development effort likely measured in man years.
• 2. I would agree with PHI that it is much more work to set up a Web shop with licensing, payment handling, copy protection (which will be cracked anyway) etc., compared to offering the product for free.
• 3. With a free offer, we would reach far more people and could create a greater impact.
• 4. If we succeed in shifting the current perception of FS as a "nice toy", we could perhaps attract more customers to DR and contribute more efficiently wrt development funding.

That being said, we would still need some voluteers to do the marketing fuzz.