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How To Get Your Program Professionally Marketed?
one-man orchestra writes "I'm the sole programmer of a small, multi-platform, commercial audio program (a spectrogram editor). After over 6 months on the market, I realized that the program would never just sell itself, and that I need some real marketing done for it. Being a one-man orchestra is becoming increasingly difficult; I only can devote so much time to marketing, my skills in that department are lacking, and I'd much rather spend more time coding. Despite my lackluster part-time marketing effort, I still manage to make a modest living out of the sales. My logical assumption is that with someone competent taking care of that part, revenue could greatly scale up. But what's the right way to go about doing this? What type of people/company do I need to contact? What to expect? What to look out for?"
CPA marketers are the perfect answer for you. They do marketing online full time and know how to reach the target audience for you, and you also wont be paying for nothing but the sales.
They generally get ~25% of the sale price, and you wont need to try to get converting users from adsense or any other ad service where you just pay for clicks or banners and have no idea if they will actually buy your product. With CPA model other people will do that for you. This works great for both; you get to do what you know, aka the coding and dont need to spend your time on the marketing, and they get their pay depending on their performance. It also works good for minimizing fraud, since you will be only paying for real sales.
CPA companies usually also have a good support managers that teach you what to do and how to go about it. After all, they'll profit also depend on how many sales their affiliates can deliver to you.
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Do you have a web site? Have you done any search engine marketing (SEM)? How does your product rank for the keyphrase "spectrogram editor" (assuming that really is the keyphrase)? You could do some basic, but effective SEM yourself and for very little money.
I just Googled the term and there are no relevant links, which means you could probably get a high ranking pretty easily and quickly if you put up some quality information like an FAQ.
"Program" and "commercial audio program" are two different beasts. Have you sent press releases/info to the bigger music software news sites? (KVRAudio, harmony central, etc). Or to technical forums? (Gearslutz, ProSoundWeb, etc). It's not like you're selling an anti-virus package or an MMO, this is kind of a specialized market...
Joel Spolsky's The Business of Software discussion group has tons of relevant info. I suggest looking and/or re-posting the question there.
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?biz
Clearly slashdot is broken. The first reply is a useful and informative comment? I don't come here to read that sort of nonsense, I come here for for 'soviet russia' jokes and legal advice without any connection to reality.
air and light and time and space
There are a heap of independents out there doing low cost marketing and can do things on the cheap.
Two possibles:
http://www.fullycaffeinated.com/main.htm
http://shoestringmktg.com/About_ShoeString.html
Two independent marketing people that do it on the cheap.
There are others as well.
Its a starting point!
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
1. Embed security within your program. Generate (1) a version of the program with a unique lock and (2) a unique password (for that unique lock) for each customer who buys your program. Sell it by allowing the customer to download it.
2. Create a binding, toughly worded contract that each customer must sign by hand.
The aim of point #1 is to be able to trace the source of each pirated copy of your program. (The password that activates it immediately identifies the customer who pirated it.) You slaved for years to create it. You deserve all the profits.
The aim of point #2 is to facilitate suing the customer identified by the method implied in point #1.
Write press releases. This document [netpress.org] does a good job of outlining how to write on. The next step would be to get a list of contacts to relevant press and personally write them whenever you have something to talk about. (Examples: KVRAUDIO, Audio Magazines, Industry Websites, User blogs, Etc.) If they reply, write back.
I haven't found press releases to be that useful, but developing press and analyst contacts absolutely is.
An easy trick is to Google the term, or the nearest relevant term, and find out what writers have written articles about the subject. In many cases this will be their area of coverage (their beat), or at least an area of interest, and within reason they will actually want to know what's going on in the field.
I got a chapter in a Grid Computing book out of one such contact.
Finding out who the relevant writers and analysts are is much more effective than sending tons of press releases to random people at random publications.
If you are serious about selling something like this, hit Winter NAMM.
Don't have to have to have a booth or anything, just bring along a few dozen CDs and give them away to folks you talk to and get the big boys looking at it. While you are there, look for representatives looking for products...I have several friends that do this...generally, there is a honest to goodness analog bulletin board set up that folks leave Looking For Representation or Looking To Represent signs...
I've repped a few products in the past, but I won't do it anymore (I like being an amateur in the industry and not wanting to get sucked back into that hellhole! I like only having to visit lalaland a few times a year!).
Generally NAMM is mid to late Jan...Summer NAMM is probably going on soon, but it is pretty much a geetar show and doesn't geek out like the big one. Save some money and fly out to LA.
I hear bit-torrent is a good place to publish your work....
Just post the source with your full name, home address, SSN#, DOB, and banking information and a-wait profit.
2. Create a binding, toughly worded contract that each customer must sign by hand.
This could just scare off potential buyers.
Good idea. Make your program less convenient for legitimate users, it's a method guaranteed to increase goodwill and word-of-mouth sales.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You fail to see though that unless he offers a demo version, people will want to pirate it to try it. I know I'm not going to pay $30 or more for software from A) an unknown company B) Haven't tried it and C) Might not play nicely with my hardware/drivers. Plus this isn't going to give him very good reviews. A contract you have to sign by hand? No thanks, I'm not going to buy that even if it was best software ever written.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Are you crazy?
That stuff turns off any normal buyers. It might work if you're doing something uber-specialized you sell to large companies, but normal people stay far away from anything like that. Just for a start, how would I sign this contract by hand while being in another country? Do you really expect somebody to print and mail a contract, and wait for a week or two until it gets to the destination?
IMO, for a program destined to the general public abstain from any of the following:
* Required registration
* Required email address
* Price not listed on the website (since that usually means "an arm, a leg, and a kidney", or "as much as we can get you to pay")
* Dongles and other intrusive methods of control
* Lack of specific information on what exactly the program does
I was in a very similar situation about 7-8 years ago. I had a halfway decent product, and trying to be marketer, coder, salesman, and customer relationships management was just asking too much. I was struggling to make ends meet.
After attending numerous small business workshops that didn't help me at all, I attended an excellent program put on my by local city Chamber of Commerce and the "Golden State Capital Network" on how to prepare your business for Venture Capital. This gave me *exactly* the information I needed to figure out how to succeed. (And I have done quite well since then) It very literally changed my life; I was able to see exactly what a business needs to succeed and why. Although I'll summarize here, the workshop went into extreme detail and I was like a sponge, gobbling up every little morsel with zeal!
The three major planks in a business:
1) Production. Duh, right? Cost to market? Quality control? Disaster recovery? What about scale? What do you do when you get an order for 100,000 widgets?
2) Marketing. Can you sell it? What competition do you have? What is your market? How are you going to position your product against competitors? How can you prevent other companies from stealing your clients? How are you going to make your company name "stick out" in clients' minds?
3) Administration (finance & legal) How much did you make? What do you owe? What's your profit margin? What's your net/gross/adjusted gross/taxable profits? How do you minimize tax liability? Business risk? Personal risk? Are your sales contracts solid? How are you going to protect your "mojo", including your IP?
You need all three major planks Any business without all three of these planks put in solidly will almost assuredly fail. The amount of detail to consider is off the chart. They even had a simple worksheet that resulted in "likelyhood of success", with little 1-10s by every category so that you could quickly analyze your business and see its weak points. It was very, very, very humbling for me to do this, I think my fledgling business ranked somewhere around 7 on a 1-100 scale.
Very, very hard to swallow. I didn't have a bat's chance in Hades of making it a success.
But unfortunately, it was a correct assessment! Quickly I realized that there was just no way I was going to be able to keep all the points in line myself - there just weren't enough hours in the day. So I went out and looked for some good partners that I could trust to build a business with. It took me just over a year, but I found 'em and have since built a million-dollar business that's literally growing as fast as we can sustain.
After some analysis, I determined that our marketplace was too narrow for VC funding, we've instead gone more conservatively, and grown organically. The end result is that we have a heavy stream of new clients, a well-written, highly cohesive software stack, a well-defined market place, top-notch legal and accounting, excellent customer service, and "street cred" so good that our clients just RAVE about us at conventions.
So, to recap.....
1) Learn to analyze your business the way (smart) VCs do.
2) Look for the right partners.
3) Work your ass off.
4) ????!!??
5) Profit!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
(moderately) Easy, good answers:
(1) Hire a firm that knows about marketing software.
(2) Sell it to a company that already markets software to your target audience.
Difficult, good answers:
(1) Make a serious stab at starting your own software company and hire people who know how to do this.
Easy, bad answers:
(1) Ask some random bloke on Slashdot what he thinks.
I've been down this road myself, and believe me there are thousands of things that seem obviously true about selling software that turn out to be horribly wrong in ways you couldn't possibly imagine. Take pricing, for example, one of the most basic decisions you have to make. We thought we'd price our product low because killing ourselves to make sales wasn't appealing. Boy was that ever wrong. We ended up killing ourselves to make small sales. I finally browbeat my partner into raising the price, and suddenly sales became a lot easier. What happened was that the pragmatic adopters always wait for the early adopters to take the risk, and the early adopters were turned off by the low price because they wanted the shiniest, coolest toy. Until we raised prices, we had two or three really good customers who kept us going, and dozens of whiney, tight fisted bottom feeders who'd paid next to nothing for our software and thought that entitled them to endless free consulting.
It turns out the pricing decision was waaay more complicated than we ever dreamed. You can price your product too low to sell, or price it too high. In some cases you can make money with a really cheap product (think stuff like ring tones and really asinine iPhone apps) as long as it's the kind of thing nobody would ever dream of calling for support.
If you really want to make a serious business out of selling software, you've got to prepare yourself to learn a lot about business and marketing, even if you hire people to help you with this. Oh, and of course business law. You do have liability insurance, don't you? A lawyer to write your license agreements?
If you just want to make a few bucks out of something you've done for fun, and have no interest in the headaches of running a business, then at least get a little legal advice about how to protect yourself from liability. Then don't worry, be happy. You're doing this for fun.
Or you could open source your software. If writing software is something you love to do, and the money is something that you don't want to worry about, then this might be a better choice for you. You see making money and looking after a business takes money, so unless you're willing to devote some effort and investment into those things, you're almost certainly going to lose money, especially if you account for the trouble and opportunity costs the headaches you'll inevitably have. Having written an open source product that people use and appreciate can be a very economically valuable thing to you. It can open doors to new jobs or consulting contracts, for example. And if you are coding this thing for fun, you'll get to do more coding when you hear back from users about what they want. That's really the most personally rewarding thing about owning a business: learning about customers and getting better at serving their needs.
At least that's the most rewarding thing about owning a moderately successful business. It's possible that owning a business that makes you fabulously wealthy means never having to say you're sorry, but I couldn't tell you about that. It sounds like that's not what you're looking for, in any case.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Highly specialized applications such as yours are rarely marketed successfully by outsiders. Some strategic keyword buys might boost your web traffic, but unless your site is set up to sell, you won't convert enough sales to make the effort worthwhile. So first you should have a professional-quality e-commerce site set up for your product. If you can't do that yourself, it's something that you need to pay for.
After that, you can drive traffic to your site with keyword buys, maybe small ads in journals. Send press releases to any of the journals or magazines that apply to your application.
But I think that you'll find that the most effective thing will be for you to establish a personal presence on the Internet, and to link that presence to your product's web site. Are there USENET newsgroups or web-hosted forums for people that could use your program? Don't just spam the forums, but participate genuinely in the discussions. Of course, your sig must have a link to your web site (the name of which should minimally define the product). Share your personal expertise in the specialized field your software addresses, and it will reflect positively on the product. You could also set up your own forum, but without a means to attract users it would probably languish.
Finally, look to conferences and conventions applicable to your product. Many (but not all) of those conferences are quite willing to let you give a seminar or poster session for an application using your product. Purely academic conferences usually don't allow this type of semi-commercialism, but many others do. The good part about giving a talk, seminar or workshop is that you usually get into the conference free as a VIP, and you don't have the expense of purchasing or manning a booth. Running a booth at NAMM, AES or other major shows is not feasible unless you already have substantial sales.
Listen to your users. If your users like your software, they will talk about your software. Word of mouth goes far. If your software gets feedback from an active community, you will go far. It's like a Moebius loop of good times.
I pay attention to every blog and forum post that links to my site (using the referral information) and quite often I see my program being proposed as the answer to a question. Unfortunately while it works it currently works on too small a scale to make a real difference. I also regularly get e-mails regarding bugs or feature requests and I try to update my program accordingly as quickly as I can.
Windows is all over the place, so I guess list in as many places as you want/can?
Oh I tried doing exactly that, and when you google the name of my program you see it on a lot of shareware sites and such, unfortunately I don't think that works so well. I'm afraid that these sites (at least for Windows, haven't tried Mac yet as the Mac port was only recently released and still is in beta as a couple of features are lacking) aren't the right target for my program. It's hard to know for sure but I'm not sure any sale ever came out of any of these sites.
We have a lot of community driven music competitions
I just started my first processing challenge, but I felt that starting a challenge and "announcing" (almost spamming) it on any forum I could was probably not the optimal way to do marketing. No IRC channel yet, until now I haven't deemed my following large enough to warrant the creation of a dedicated IRC channel, although I may reconsider it now.
we're interested in doing hardware partnerships / have our software included with hardware
How do you do that? Like, who do you contact? That would interest me.
We are also keeping our eye on audio trade shows like NAMM / Musik Messe.
What does keeping an eye on them consist in exactly?
Hope this helps.
I greatly appreciate your insight, thanks a lot!
Get more people involved. Get business partners. It will greatly increase your chances of success.
You can generally devide partners into two categories: internal partners (who own a chunk of your business) and external partners (with whom you share a set of common business goals IN ADDITION to simply earning profit).
It is hard to find people you can actually partner up with, and share your business with (internal partners). You need mutual trust, good chemestry, and to some extent agree on the strategy of the business and the product. But it is not impossible. Use your personal network. I am not talking about "LinkedIn", I mean real people. Talk to friends and family and tell them your thoughts. Talk to Ask them about prospective partners. And be open to people who disagree with you when you talk with them.
Stay away from "business angels" and venture capitalists a little longer. You are not ready for them - you need to get a more clear picture of your product and your business (or they will rip you off and leave you with only a fraction of your original potential).
For external partners, look for companies that your product can complement - or vice versa. Could be other software vendors, hardware vendors, system builders, studios, etc. Find someone who sees your product as a valuable supplement to their existing business. A good business partners is ALWAYS someone who can see more potential than just simple profit. You need happy customers and a lot of success-stories. An external partner who is only interested in fast cash will care less about customer satisfaction.
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
Before you give up on solo marketing take a look at the book Duct Tape Marketing. It gives you a basic understanding of marketing and is geared towards doing it on the cheap. If you still want to hire out then you will at least be able to talk intelligently and have a better idea what to expect from whoever you hire.
To a degree, that's the price of doing business.
Don't give stuff away if you can't afford to (which is the beauty of selling software versus hardware).
Back in the day (which was pre-blog) I wouldn't give software to anyone who hadn't been published in a major trade publication. That kind of worked, and kept the guys looking for freebies in check to a degree, but you have to just accept that only a percentage of the people you contact will reply and only a percentage of the people who reply will actually write something. That's why it's a bit of a numbers game (lots of things in the funnel for a few things out).
For my book "Elevator Pitch Essentials" I have probably sent out 50 review copies and gotten 5 articles in return. That's kind of depressing, but it's the way it is.
I will say that the whole blog thing has changed the question of accreditation. I will send free copies (both PDF and hard copy) of my book to bloggers but I have had a very high success rate (80%) and it costs me nothing to send a PDF and only a few bucks to send a hard copy.
I always hated the phrase "You have to spend money to make money" when I was just starting out, but now I find myself telling it to people.
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I had a lot of discussion about this with fellow developers prior to releasing the first version, and I've been repeatedly advised to not worry so much about it and mostly not do anything that would get in the way of legitimate users. I settled for using two binaries, a demo one, freely available but devoid of the code needed to turn it into a full version, and a full binary, only accessible by a download link given after you bought it, validated by part of your serial number in the download url.
It may seem weak, but not making the full binary available this easily seems to work well. over 6 months and over a hundred sales later I still can't find anything on torrent sites, rapidshare and the like or eD2k. Let's hope it goes on like this.
$25 for a non-commercial version of an audio editor of all things? For one thing, a short sentence describing the "license" is not helpful at all. Can I sell my audio on a CD to people? What do you mean by "commercial product." I can't reasonably determine the legal difference between the $99 and $25 version one.
I just don't get it. It would seem to me that a lot of people that would be interested in the rather unique way your software does things would be quite skeptical of it in the beginning. Charging $25 and not allowing commercial redistribution of the end products is really just another way for you to get beta-testers that *pay you* for the privilege. If there is any company that could do this, it is probably Apple, and not even they do it too much.
That is the perception I have. If I have your demo, and want to use the software, why do I want to pay $25 for crippleware, that stuff is free.
Your second marketing error is probably that $99 is probably too much money. How did you land on this price point? If it had to do with your costs and what you thought was "fair", then it is most likely wrong. Your price can only be properly determined in terms of your market. The last program I remember purchasing for personal use was this one: http://www.hamrick.com/ I probably would have paid $20 more for it, but look at that website and the community that uses it and compare it to yours. Actually, now that I recall, I just purchased a large piano sample set for a few hundred, so I'm not one of these cheap punkass bitches that never spends money on software.
I buy good software, I do audio, your price is too damn high for what it is. Take that as constructive criticism.
Really, look at some other company's pricing plans. There is such as thing as tiered pricing done right. Having a "tier" where the product is essentially useless but costs more than a couple bucks is a joke.
If I pay $99 I do want some kind of support channel. You might be a really conscientious person, but your website does not instill confidence. Think about it. $99 is for a product. Anyone that told you a lump of code you run through a compiler is the *product* lied. The website, your support channel, they are all part of the product.
Minor nit: I would completely avoid telling people in your manual what they can do in "all legality." Have you consulted lawyers in all the jurisdictions you're distributing your product? Probably no one is going to get sued over that statement in your manual, but remember that when you tell people what they can do in "all legality" in a product's documentation, it can be interpreted as practicing law without a license, and it really is stupid to do anyways.
These are niche players, specializing in helping small businesses and solo entrepreneurs with everything from data entry to (drum roll please) marketing.
Depending on where you live, you might find someone local, you may find one across the continent. Research them first, gather client feedback if possible, and hopefully you'll come up smelling like roses.
Here are some I found on Google:
http://www.davisvirtualassistance.com/
http://www.paulahill.com/about/
http://www.trinityjacobs.com/virtual-assistant-marketing-services.html
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
Adding anti-pirate measures takes a lot of your valuable developer time and may well piss off your paying customers. Both are bad things.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
Well, that pretty much wipes out web sales. Most people buying software on the web are going to be put off by #1 all by itself. Number 2 absolutely eliminates web sales because nobody is going to do it.
Suing people? Sorry, in today's climate you can't sue people in foreign countries. Unless you have millions to pay the lawyers, nobody is going to even bother and unless you have a rock-solid case and going for millions, nobody is going to touch it. They will just tell you to suck it up.
Yes, there are hardcore people out on the Internet that make it their business to ensure that software, books, movies and music do not generate revenue. They will do this by whatever means they can, including using stolen credit cards to purchase products and post them for others to download. If you are relying on Internet sales you are going to run into this and there are very few ways to successfully combat it.
Nothing the parent had to say is at all useful towards this.
"One-man orchestra" is a name I just made up today as a metaphor for the situation I'm in. I didn't want to give out too much about the actual program because then usually the discussion drifts towards "I tried the demo and how do I do this and that?" when what I really want is an answer to my questions.
I really don't need that when already a majority of answers tell me how to do the marketing myself better when I was asking how to not do the marketing by myself ;-).
I wrote it to make a living. It might seem like an absurd move but I couldn't find a job for the 6 months I looked (I'm young and without any prior experience) and that was before unemployment in the country I live in started sky-rocketing. And that's most likely all I'll have until I return to college in over a year and get a student loan.
Hi omo, I run a recording studio and produce music so I guess I'm in your target market. I think it's really important not to alienate your potential customers, especially online. If you get in someones face, online, who might be able to help you it kills word of mouth marketing very quickly.
In other words, ask yourself if it's a problem with the program or if the problem could be you.
Running a recording studio is hard and producing music is extremely challenging. After setting up a room, miking up the musicians (and each band has it's own complexities just there), making sure no dumbass has brought a powered up mobile phone into the studio, doing the recording session and producing a mix for musicians who can't make up their mind about the final result the last thing you need is to rely on a production tool from someone who has an attitude and can be regarded as unhelpful.
You may have a good idea, exporting a sound file to a graphic image and then use photoshop or something to edit it but I question why a producer is going to use/learn a *visual* tool to do *sonic* work. I know of a lot of good producers that don't want to see their video monitors and hang towels over them while they listen to the mix on a four inch auratone. They don't want to engage their eyes because the visual cortex causes a distraction when setting up the 'ghosts' in the audio monitors. It's about sound and the illusion it creates, not about the illusion and the sound it creates.
Clearly, your program is used during the production phase and being a 50/50 proposition it very much comes down to how *you* come across to your market. If you are reasonable, they might give it a shot, if not word will spread very quickly. Be realistic and have some humility about your program. It's not essential or even revolutionary but it could have a place so make sure you don't come across as a buffoon and try to make out that it is. Leave the attitude behind, know when to say sorry when appropriate and, most important, try to make friends. Those things will gain you respect and credibility.
That said, it looks interesting and I wish you the best of luck.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Do keep in mind that marketing is in general an honorless and greedy profession. The odds are that the people you will have to work with will be quite happy to destroy you if they see an opportunity to take your product for themselves.
They will wait until after you have paid them to market it first, but act before the marketing has actually begun, of course.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
Get your existing customers to bring in new ones by focusing on your Net Promoter Score. This is the % of customers that, when asked "would you refer this to a friend or colleague?", rate you 9 or 10, minus the % that rate you 6 or less. There's a lot of data showing that this metric correlates with growth.
Work on your Search Engine Optimization, i.e. appearing on the first page/first few hits, and buy key adwords.
Lastly, if you believe your app would be valuable to enterprise customers, hire an offshore concierge at $3/hour to do research on potential buyers. They work damn hard for their $3/hr.
But most of all, focus on your Net Promoter Score. You're literally investing in viral marketing probability. Traditionally marketing cannot fight the exponential growth of referrals.
That's the one piece of advice I'd offer.
True story: a company rang me up about a year ago to ask if I'd be interested in buying some imaging software (think Ghost, Acronis etc).
I asked where they'd got my name and number from.
It turns out they had partnered with a company that produces imaging software that I had previously had contact with and were using the information they got through that partnering agreement. Specifically, they were using it to sell a competitors' product . And they honestly seemed to have no idea why I might be a little nervous about doing business with them.
it looks like you need Photoshop to get the most benefit out of it
You'd be surprised but according to many users it's the main selling point. They'd rather edit with something powerful they're used to like Photoshop or GIMP than have to deal with a new app's clunky way of doing things (and my spray tools are definitely clunky, they need some work).
I'd be more likely to load up Coagula
Coagula doesn't load sounds.
how about slowly ramping that up from 1/10th to 1:1 over the first minute of the track?
As it is that wouldn't work for Photosounder even if you could automate the knobs the way VST allows you to because it needs to resynthesise the whole sound when you do that. I have plans to make it possible to change those things live, although it will take obscene amounts of CPU power.
In general, the closer you can get to something that's usable 'live', the more situations it can be used in.
I have an idea for something that could be used live, however that would pretty much require a multi-touch screen.
You've got good points though, it's just that actually following your suggestions for this actual product would take it far from where it's headed.