Helix Marketing

[lotus2035]

833 buyers of Alchemy at $125 = $104,125 FOR ONE MONTH'S WORK (for SpecialSpecimen's benefit).

You have to subtract the calculated future expenses for supporting 833 new users.

That's assuming all 833 are dumb and wont RTFM.

[LiteOn]

That's assuming all 833 are dumb and wont RTFM.

No, it means you have to be prepared that every single customer could have a question/support request at any given time. And usually, they expect the reply within in a certain time - if not, it could happen they could start a huge "rant: XY customer support - WTF!!???" on the internet.

Look, some fellows even manage to become a sort of support case without actually being a customer.



Cheers,
LiteOn

[brok landers]

guys, just don't bother to convince sonkeysankey, he just doesn't get it ... in another thread (exactly the same issue on helix) me and a lot of knowledged others explained in detail why a group buy isn't always the goal and helix isn't overpriced ... he just doesn't understand, it's just a waste of energy and time to reply to him ...
jonas isn't going to dump the price anyway, according to his earlier statement ...

[sonkeysankey]

Please enlighten me

Sure:


To respect and to be respected is infinitely more important than being right.

1) Nothing I have written is 'disrespectful'. Perhaps some people here are unable to indulge in lateral thinking, and are unable to think "what if I did this" and "or what if I tried that instead, what would be the result", without massive emotional attachment to a pre-ordained result...

2) Being right is infinitely more important than "respecting", if people's lives depend on it. (Obviously, in this case they do not, but there are plenty of terrible things going on in the world today that are only occurring because some people refuse to admit they are wrong.)

Essentially, what you appear to be saying is - don't question or think for yourself.
I don't see the problem. I have no power over any developer whatsoever, do I. I merely outlined a series of ideas that I had, about pricing of VSTs. Is this 'sacrilege' now? Am I going to be excommunicated from the 'Church of VST' for questioning the sanctity of its holy books?

[sonkeysankey]

833 buyers of Alchemy at $125 = $104,125 FOR ONE MONTH'S WORK (for SpecialSpecimen's benefit).

You have to substract the calculated future expenses for supporting 833 new users.


LiteOn

I don't know whether you're being sarcastic or not!

[sonkeysankey]

That's assuming all 833 are dumb and wont RTFM.

No, it means you have to be prepared that every single customer could have a question/support request at any given time. And usually, they expect the reply within in a certain time - if not, it could happen they could start a huge "rant: XY customer support - WTF!!???" on the internet.

Look, some fellows even manage to become a sort of support case without actually being a customer.



Cheers,
LiteOn

How long does it take to answer one support question, and how much does that cost CamelAudio? What sort of support questions are they likely to get? "I can't get Alchemy to work with DAW X" ? That's more likely to be a bug report, which is what they presumably want to know about.
All this talk of 'support' costing any noticeable amount is absolute rubbish. If you can type properly, you can answer a support query in a very short period of time. How many of the 833 current buyers are going to be asking more than even ONE question? The only support questions I have ever sent a developer is when I wanted to sell a VST, or ask about my account in some way (such as with Wusik) - William K answers his support questions personally, incredibly quickly, and all the while he is working on the latest version of Wusik. If he can do it, then how could it even become a problem for CamelAudio?ddd

[sonkeysankey]

guys, just don't bother to convince sonkeysankey, he just doesn't get it ... in another thread (exactly the same issue on helix) me and a lot of knowledged others explained in detail why a group buy isn't always the goal and helix isn't overpriced ... he just doesn't understand, it's just a waste of energy and time to reply to him ...
jonas isn't going to dump the price anyway, according to his earlier statement ...

If only I had the intelligence to understand you Brok...

What does "dump the price" mean?

Did CamelAudio "dump the price" of Alchemy? Is that why they're going to turnover more than $100,000 or whatever it is, this month?

Helix is in obscurity. That is not a good thing for anybody, unless Jonas just wants to wash his hands of it, do no 'support' work, and hope that the money will keep coming in. How many copies will he be selling in five years' time? Not many, I imagine, even if he did bring the price down then, which is why time is of the essence, and selling as many as possible, as quickly as possible, is the way to go.

Like I said - no skin off my nose, and undoubtedly the other 900 odd, or whatever it is, new owners of Alchemy, for less than the price of Alchemy, agree with me - we aren't interested in Helix.

I'll come back to this part of the forum in a year's time, maybe it will have had an extra five or ten threads by then...

[jsp1979]

guys, just don't bother to convince sonkeysankey, he just doesn't get it ... in another thread (exactly the same issue on helix) me and a lot of knowledged others explained in detail why a group buy isn't always the goal and helix isn't overpriced ... he just doesn't understand, it's just a waste of energy and time to reply to him ...
jonas isn't going to dump the price anyway, according to his earlier statement ...

+1

[1-2-Many]

guys, just don't bother to convince sonkeysankey, he just doesn't get it ... in another thread (exactly the same issue on helix) me and a lot of knowledged others explained in detail why a group buy isn't always the goal and helix isn't overpriced ... he just doesn't understand, it's just a waste of energy and time to reply to him ...
jonas isn't going to dump the price anyway, according to his earlier statement ...

+1

Yes - a toad, if ever there was one.

$149 isn't too much to ask for this synth, in fact a great deal already - those continuing to harp on a GB are being cheap and idiotic IMO.

[contrary]

Helix is in obscurity. That is not a good thing for anybody, unless Jonas just wants to wash his hands of it, do no 'support' work, and hope that the money will keep coming in. How many copies will he be selling in five years' time? Not many, I imagine, even if he did bring the price down then, which is why time is of the essence, and selling as many as possible, as quickly as possible, is the way to go.

I thought a very definative answer was give a few months back . I think there are plenty of buisnesses that are a local or regional sucess , and there proprietors have been told they can expand if they do this or that . They choose not to and are happy with what they have . Respect their decisions we must because they are in control and like things the way they are .




On the support angle I do see that CAmel is offereing a lot of video tuitorials , and are keeping the manual evolving instead of cast into pdf's .
How many owners are really getting under the hood and tweeking , or , how many are using the presets and morp pads ??

It would be very interesting to have a candid conversation in a years time and find out if they get a tsnuami-wave of support request. Maybe they will ; maybe they won't ... It's obviously a calculated risk they have taken in that regard . Johnas probably does'nt like that risk ( maybe he has other balls in the air to juggle ) so he ain't risking that ...to rich fer his blood .





Honestly , wht do you keep drudging it up . Dead horse baby !!!



.

[timandmonica]

Sorry - I couldn't read all those posts so I hope this hasn't been covered before.

Affiliate ads are a huge way of getting your product known on the web. You create a nice looking ad and anyone with a site can put it on theirs. Then if a buyer buys Helix due to someone coming to your site from a banner from another site, you pay that site a commission (10% or so).

I think this can be cheesy in many markets but in this one I think it's cool to see an ad like Helix while I browse a recording or plug-in site!

[kv331]

Affiliate ads are a huge way of getting your product known on the web. You create a nice looking ad and anyone with a site can put it on theirs. Then if a buyer buys Helix due to someone coming to your site from a banner from another site, you pay that site a commission (10% or so).

Could you tell me more on that? That's what we need right now with marketing SynthMaster 2.0 Are there any sites willing to be affiliates/partners?

[Ben [Camel Audio]]

Seeing as Camel Audio is getting discussed quite a bit in this thread, I thought I'd contribute. I think Helix looks really cool and I hope it does well for Jonas. I think its completely up to him how he wants to price his product.

Firstly, regarding support - we definitely do expect to have more support to deal with this month. We work hard to make our products as easy to use as possible and make our website easy to navigate, but there's still going to be plenty of email - partially simply because not everyone reads stuff before emailing Thus Andy who normally does support is being joined for November by Ugo. I'm not going to go into exactly how much we pay here, but support costs for this month will be quite a few $1000s. We're also spending more to have 10x the bandwidth on our second server to try and ensure customers get their products rapidly. So in short, of course there is cost associated with each sale.

There are potential dangers in terms of effecting the perceived value of what you make by discounting, but if you run the promotion for a limited time (2 weeks), you do it very rarely (last one was 4 years ago and don't plan one for similar time), you make your product a lot better at the same time as part of the promotion (we're adding lots of stuff - samples, presets, videos), and you invite anyone who has purchased in the last few months who is even vaguely irked to email you and sort something out with them, then you can mitigate pretty much all the downsides, I think. A couple of people were unhappy, but we're straightening things out with them. The vast majority of our existing customers are very happy and some are even emailing us just to say how happy they are that the GB is going well for us.

In terms of the wider reasoning surrounding our decision to run a group buy, here's an extract from an email we wrote to a customer who was a little unhappy.

Many of the companies who make software for musicians such as Native Instruments and IK Multimedia have recently been running extremely heavily discounted promotions, which is difficult for small companies like Camel Audio to compete with. In light of the current world recession, people have less money to spend, so it makes sense for us to respond both to this need, and other discounting that's going on. I would like to reassure you that this is not something we will be doing frequently - the last time we ran a promotion like this was four years ago, and we won't do anything like this again for years.

This promotion is also an opportunity to make Alchemy even better for existing users - we'll be almost doubling the core library of samples with 1.7GB of choirs, basses, keys and synths, as well as offering more presets and potentially new video tutorials. The other good thing about a group buy is that it will increase the user base of Alchemy which will help create and even more active community of people discussing Alchemy, and making presets for it - all of which ensures Alchemy will have a better future than it already does.

Camel Audio is a small company who cares greatly about our users and we are passionate about making great software for musicians. We don't have anyone dedicated to marketing, but the business is run in such a way as to ensure we are financially secure. This has benefits for customers, since it means we will be here in years to come continuing to support our products. We believe that being a good company is about how you treat your customers, how the people who work for the company are treated and whether the company seeks to actually do some good; we are a member of 1% For The Planet, and as such make a commitment to giving at least 1% of all sales to environmental charities, and aside from that we also donate software to charities.

Anyway, I'm certainly not trying to convince Jonas or anyone else of anything. I just saw Camel Audio getting discussed a lot, including what might be perceived as criticism and thought I'd explain my perspective.

Thanks
Ben

[contrary]

Who know's.......BEN knows. Ears burning alittle . I'm an existing Alchemy customer and don't feel slighted in any way (nor would I have , even without the extras you included for me ) When the LCD TV I bought a year ago drops in price , I don't go down to the mall and yell at the store manager cause others are getting a better deal now . BABY's.

If a VSTI cost a bit much to me , I don't start threads trying to brow beat the dev into a GB ... I just move on to the (millions ) of others out there (when I should just spend more time with what I have and quit being such a slut and buy more !!)


Thanks ben . You rock .
Thanks jonas . Gotta respect someone who stcks to there guns !!

[standalone]

Please enlighten me

Sure:


To respect and to be respected is infinitely more important than being right.

1) Nothing I have written is 'disrespectful'. Perhaps some people here are unable to indulge in lateral thinking, and are unable to think "what if I did this" and "or what if I tried that instead, what would be the result", without massive emotional attachment to a pre-ordained result...

2) Being right is infinitely more important than "respecting", if people's lives depend on it. (Obviously, in this case they do not, but there are plenty of terrible things going on in the world today that are only occurring because some people refuse to admit they are wrong.)

Essentially, what you appear to be saying is - don't question or think for yourself.
I don't see the problem. I have no power over any developer whatsoever, do I. I merely outlined a series of ideas that I had, about pricing of VSTs. Is this 'sacrilege' now? Am I going to be excommunicated from the 'Church of VST' for questioning the sanctity of its holy books?

No sonkeysankey, you attack blindly for the mere pleasure of proving you are right and the rest are wrong. You don't have a single idea to offer, just confusing arguments that you change more than your underwear.

You attack everything from Spectrasonics to death and workship Sampletank like if it was the Holly Grial. You began crushing Spectrasonics for charging a transfer fee in their products' resellings... but IK Multimedia does the same thing and it's OK for you!!!. In one thread you say how happy you are with the tons of gigabytes you got with Wusikstation, and in another you assert Spectrasonics is fooling their costumers filling discs with gigabytes of samples to make their products look better.....you-just-don't-care.

Essentially, what you appear to be saying is - don't question or think for yourself.

That's why you are so disrespectful, manipulation is your only way to comunicate with other people.