Newbie curious about plugin startups

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what you did in 2007 is not possible any more today.
Plugins were selling in the "thousands ballpark" easily, and there was far less competition. Today you need to invest a lot of money and time for a decent product, which will be scrutinized a lot and will be lost in the mud soon. I'm not saying that a business is not possible, I'm saying that you need far more investment today for getting a brand properly working, and you cannot be sure about results. Maybe you create a product which catches the imagination, maybe not.
I think something similar happened to videogames. Titles require far more investment, so you can go broke easily. Let's make a clear example: doom1 was created in 6 months by 4-5 programmers and it sold for millions. Today a game requires years of investment, you pay millions easily (hundreds of programmers easily) and maybe it doesn't recover properly from costs.

A thing to take in account is what fabien tdr said. There are a lot of cross disciplines, so unless you are a coding genius you need properly skills shared between a basic team, which needs money. So things can be even worse. Companies established several years ago are lucky, because today they have a proper workforce /or a proper knowledge. If you start from the scratch you need a lot of things: artwork, coding, product knowledge, market knowledge, maybe you should be a musician (or someone who uses tools), have a basic knowledge about vintage gear (depending on the market segment you belong to), and use those tools on daily basis. You need accounting and other stuff. And expect to release the best product possible (better than competitors) and sell less than 1000 copies for a list of possible reasons. Your selling window is pretty small. Maybe after a month a product released in a different segment catches all the immagination on forums, magazines and your product suddenly stops selling completely.

So I think aleksey is correct.
Just saying.

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Thanks for the replies, I was expecting a few days of silence but you all have come through with some great insight/advice.

I wanted to address a few points that came up in different comments:

"Learn C++...."

Thank you for the motivation. I am beginning to look into this and have now realized that a pathetically designed "example/sample" of my ideas is exponentially more valuable than my ideas alone.

"Do you want to do this as a business or just for myself?"

I honestly have no opinion. My assumption was that if I were to go to all the effort then why not, at the very least, release it for free? Crummy gui and all, if it's a good idea, a few people will at least appreciate giving it a try

"Why would I even want to do this/Why would I waste my money"

Why does anyone do anything? Why do many of us spend more on gear than our cars or our rents/mortgages? I'm just somebody looking to make a potential investment, however small, in a niche industry that I happen to LOVE. Plus, shouldn't you motivate me to jump off this bridge? Imagine the years of references on the KVR forums about "that idiot who went broke thinking he 'invented' stereo widening..."

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KvvvR wrote: "Do you want to do this as a business or just for myself?"

I honestly have no opinion. My assumption was that if I were to go to all the effort then why not, at the very least, release it for free? Crummy gui and all, if it's a good idea, a few people will at least appreciate giving it a try.
Hi KvvvR

If you don't need to make a profit then it may turn out to be easier and paradoxically also less expensive.

A fella who finances open source software might be a modern-day equivalent of a "patron of the arts". Back in the day, and I suppose today as well, wealthy princes or business moguls would finance musicians, sculptors and painters. Much of classic art was financed that way.

The company I worked with, we would occasionally need code not in our skill set and too expensive to take the time to learn and not purchasable at all, or only purchasable at outrageous prices.

We occasionally hired excellent code geeks for such situations. With the agreement that we just wanted the code for our own use. The consultant was free to either sell the code to other folks, or give it away. We just needed it for inclusion in our programs. It was no harm to us for other folks to be able to use the code.

The open-source community, many good coders care about "fame" or "reputation" from other open source coders. If you pay such a fella to write a good tool, he will possibly be as highly motivated to release the tool and garner admiration of his peers, equal to his motivation to earn some money.

In other words, trying to hire an expert geek in some obscure specialty because you want him to write code that no one will ever see except secretly buried in some commercial application-- It might be difficult to get him interested and it might take a large cash offer to get him interested. But if he can publish or re-sell his code, it seemed easier to get him interested in the job. It was also a good thing to finance code that might be useful to other folks worldwide.
KvvvR wrote: "Why would I even want to do this/Why would I waste my money"

Why does anyone do anything? Why do many of us spend more on gear than our cars or our rents/mortgages? I'm just somebody looking to make a potential investment, however small, in a niche industry that I happen to LOVE. Plus, shouldn't you motivate me to jump off this bridge? Imagine the years of references on the KVR forums about "that idiot who went broke thinking he 'invented' stereo widening..."
Going broke on a dream is scary. There was a local fella who managed to spend his entire life savings developing and marketing yet another "easier to learn and play" music keyboard. Took him years of hard work in order to spend every penny. A nice bright likeable fella. A hard worker and faithful family man.

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Of we speak about an hobby it would be easier
Better of you learn to code then.
If the idea is good and you have a lot of time available (years) you could do amazing things.
The investment is the same: your time has a cost, only you are not paying physical money.
You need a good motivation.

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Zaphod (giancarlo) wrote:Of we speak about an hobby it would be easier
Better of you learn to code then.
If the idea is good and you have a lot of time available (years) you could do amazing things.
The investment is the same: your time has a cost, only you are not paying physical money.
You need a good motivation.
Giancarlo is right. (and was right before, about how there's not much room anymore: it's like game development, especially mobile games. There are enough already)

I would add this: learn to code SOUND. I'm pretty useless by normal coder standards, but most normal coders don't understand sound. You can't just go by textbook information: for instance, it's very easy to learn how to code linear phase EQs and one can make an argument that they're more accurate, but they pre-echo and require latency. Nobody needs more textbook DSP code, but even 'wrong' code can produce a distinctive sound.

The classic Scream Tracker resonant filter famed in psytrance is a slightly screwy implementation with a jarringly unnatural quality, except it's awesome. The supersaw of JP-8000 and JP-8080 fame involves glitching and aliasing to produce the 'white' hissy quality that filtration can maximize. A lot of classic hip-hop is strongly affected by the tone of old Akai samplers which really trash the audio quite badly and then run through analog stages that (certainly this is true of some old Yamaha FM synths of the era) have the same 'magic' slow and grainy op-amps found in collectible Tube Screamers…

Find sounds you crave, and get ready to go down the rabbit hole. This can be a very interesting and rewarding field to work in, but NOT if you only care about money or fame. If it's the sounds you crave, you are more than welcome to jump in the (very crowded) pool :D

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Hey I think the more people that get into experimenting with DSP the better. PERIOD.
I have been teaching myself various DSP related things, and reaktor for nearly 10 years(in my very small amounts of free time) and I'm slowly getting to the point where I may one day make something cool.

Sure the Audio plugin world its a tough one for 'business' as all the people are saying, but come on people, but what is NOT in this day and age?
Try becoming a pro photographer, or a pro graphic designer or just about anything technology related. It will take you many many years to catch up to the leaders in any field like this.

It could be 'far' worse, the OP could be thinking about trying to make a living from making MUSIC bwhahahahaha
Hypnagog (Experimental Electronica) |
Terrafractyl (Psytrance) |Kinematic Records (Label)

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it's daft really. rudolf steiner "seems to have had very good results" with music in education, imo we can update this to audio dsp. immediately informative "both" about the world we experience and ideals, helping increase perception of both. course there's always the alternative of keeping things "hard" and the public disempowered, which imo is about as considerate as having your eyes sliced out with some kind of horrible slicy thing.
you come and go, you come and go. amitabha neither a follower nor a leader be tagore "where roads are made i lose my way" where there is certainty, consideration is absent.

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Programming in General is something that REAlly should be part of every education system already!!
I wish it was when I was younger.
It seems completely nuts that the world is now run by people who understand code, but in general we still think it is not important enough to teach our Kids.
Hypnagog (Experimental Electronica) |
Terrafractyl (Psytrance) |Kinematic Records (Label)

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I didn't know r.steiner had also done some down to earth things that did not require getting high on acid to appreciate. Overall, he seems to be a very strange person working on things that would require extraordinary evidence to get accepted as being "scientific". His work on music education might be lost among his non-earthly stuff for this very reason.
~stratum~

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Terrafractyl wrote:Sure the Audio plugin world its a tough one for 'business' as all the people are saying, but come on people, but what is NOT in this day and age?
Try becoming a pro photographer, or a pro graphic designer or just about anything technology related. It will take you many many years to catch up to the leaders in any field like this.
Plugin dev is MUCH tougher that building the most prestigious websites for PR or making a fortune with basic expertise of the SAP ecosystem. Developing and selling plugins is ridiculously more demanding than making high end ios apps, websites or e-commerce systems.

Playing around with DSP is not difficult. But it has little to do with the demands of the modern plugin market.

I am not trying to demotivate. All this is a lot of fun, fun enough for me to ignore more beneficial markets/jobs. It's definitely tougher than any other business I came in touch with, both regarding business and intellectual demand.
Fabien from Tokyo Dawn Records

Check out my audio processors over at the Tokyo Dawn Labs!

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Programming isn't a part of foundational education because you have 1/20 people who are capable at even the most fundamental level of thinking in the ways required to accomplish anything. You'll find far fewer with the motivation to set a goal, perform research and development and achieve that goal.

What we need is perhaps replacement of a large majority of the current elements of foundational curriculum with logic and critical thinking. We need to eliminate as much rote memorization as possible by disqualifying any skill assessments which can be defeated via rote memorization.

Unfortunately we're still sitting at that 1/20 or two-sigma percentage of people who would cope in such a system.
Free plug-ins for Windows, MacOS and Linux. Xhip Synthesizer v8.0 and Xhip Effects Bundle v6.7.
The coder's credo: We believe our work is neither clever nor difficult; it is done because we thought it would be easy.
Work less; get more done.

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A few suggestions.

Get a tutor to get you started.
Your tutor can be across the world
and can see your screen.

Try the local craigslist for help.

Check out tour local computer club.

Review all plugins that are close to what you plan to do.

Contact small independent developers for collaboration.

Consider going outside the USA for your needs.

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Terrafractyl wrote:It seems completely nuts that the world is now run by people who understand code, but in general we still think it is not important enough to teach our Kids.
No way us programmers Rule the World. That's still the law school bully club.

And learning to code is getting into (some? ) schools already. I was a volunteer for Devoxx4kids this year in Amsterdam, guiding some kids with the Scratch language. To my surprise well over half the kids had been playing with Scratch already.

Getting into contact with programming early is important. To discover your talents. Same as with music..
We are the KVR collective. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. Image
My MusicCalc is served over https!!

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BertKoor wrote:No way us programmers Rule the World. That's still the law school bully club.
Are you sure about that? If I look at the most valuable companies, those are tech companies such a Apple, Google, IBM, .. Banks, which are nothing else than computers that trade your moneh and a couple of Retail companies. If look at the richest people, the list again is full of IT folks.. Gates, Zuckerberg , Page & Brin ..
I don't think that kids necessary need to learn a programming language, but at least they should get some clue about how that stuff works.

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terrible thing about working in software, you're always filling out applications.

i'll go out and come back in again.
you come and go, you come and go. amitabha neither a follower nor a leader be tagore "where roads are made i lose my way" where there is certainty, consideration is absent.

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