VST Development: Salary required

[stratum]

Bring half of that money (per person) to Turkey and I'll arrange you a team:) No experience beyond C++ programming is guaranteed, and you 'll need to find GUI and patch designers yourself:) (OK perhaps I also know a guy who does fancy GUI's).

Just kidding.

[Lotuzia]

If you're going for an emulation, like Diva, you should also invest and get the hardware original unit(s) in working condition, preferably recaped, and measure/calibrate all controls, curves, signals etc. This is not only an additional cost, depending on the units, it can also take a lot of time and seriously slow down things.

If you're going for a fully digital thing, like Massive, you'll have to define a design, a global project, a topology etc, and still invent a few things meanwhile. Because very few people will be interested in a synthesizer that offers similar things to what NI did 10 years ago (or any other iteration of what the market offers literraly by dozens)

Don't forget proper sound design. It takes time, and ressources as well. And a good GUI designer. Possibly an UI designer needs to be added, if the main coder is very focused on dsp, and less on designing some usefull/innovative instruments.

With a very focused team of two/three people, one year is probably the minimum.

I won't elaborate on the global price. Everybody have a price, and some prices exposed here seem rather high. (ime). But yes, all this definitely has a price.

[aciddose]

Well you have to give worst-case estimates. It can't be overlooked that we all have 20+ years experience in not just programming but multiple languages, platforms and applications in addition to experience in electronics, music, synthesizers, effects and production. In addition some of us like myself have professional contacts with large scale studios and 50+ years of experience available.

If you just want one of us to leverage all of our resources and provide a product in the least amount of time with a non-exclusive license, that's 1-2 years and a lot less money.

If you want source-code written from scratch with massive R&D involved including 100s of components for the GUI, DSP, databases, copy protection, authorization, webservers and so on that makes it a bit more expensive. Since what is going on here is really a purchase of that X years of experience and all those resources, especially where it is done through an outright purchase of rights as opposed to a non-exclusive license.

So what are 20 years of resources worth? At least as much as the next 20 years we'd spend to rebuild them.

If the OP wants a Diva, they need to consider purchasing U-he. What would they pay then?

[fese]

Just out of curiosity: are there any successful software synth companies that haven’t been founded by talented and persistent developers, often starting as a one man show or small team, but by a project manager?

[aciddose]

I don't believe so. The general rule is that developing something yourself from scratch is always vastly more expensive than utilizing the services of those with decades of experience and resources at hand.

A product like Diva (or any other medium scale audio plug-in) must be recognized as the result of leveraging the resources U-he had available from all their previous products and experience.

It may have cost tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop, with those resources available!

What would it cost without them?

[stevieoswald]

Thanks guys, I appreciate the serious replies. I may be a relative novice in the field of C++ and VST development but I do have many years of experience of leading successful multi-million pound programmes and projects in other fields, some of which I was not technically proficient in either (it was not my job to be). So all this information is useful. I'm late 40's and got some good contacts from 25 years in business so the question was asked in some seriousness. As mentioned before, all insights gratefully received.

[fluffy_little_something]

The guy behind TAL works alone, if I am not mistaken. He had also made lots of freeware for years before he started to make commercial plugins.

[stratum]

If you can demonstrate your marketing capability by revealing who your contacts are, you can get some actually serious replies.

[Lotuzia]

Just out of curiosity: are there any successful software synth companies that haven’t been founded by talented and persistent developers, often starting as a one man show or small team, but by a project manager?

Arturia. IK . Maybe LinnPlug ? (Maybe not the best example as they recenly bite the dust, but I tried to find a medium siez company ) And the software sequels/departments of big hw companies like Roland, Korg, or Waldorf. But this should be seen as an extension of their usual domain of expertise, and it took time before they really had the necessary knowledge of this specific market to become successfull in it.

A few sound designers did it as well, like Eric Persing and Rob papen.

And NI is probably not dev ruled now, though the beginning of the story was indeed a small team of talented devs.

[Dozius]

Arturia. IK . Maybe LinnPlug ?

Bad examples. Arturia and IK both started as 2 engineers with talent and an idea/problem to solve. Linplug started as a one man show (maybe two? I don't think Pavol was there from the beginning. Could be wrong.)

[aciddose]

I suspect Lotuzia was agreeing and providing examples of small time hobby projects that grew over time and just misunderstood the phrasing of the question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korg

All of these companies started out with young entrepreneurs who wanted to solve a small, specific problem using their own talents and resources and only grew larger and included investment from external sources after they had already become successful.

The external investment stage is what the OP is proposing. He wants an existing, successful product to purchase outright and talks about "skipping" the initial R&D phrase by targeting an existing successful product to copycat.

This is the point generally where people say "okay, I have a design and it works great but I need $1mil to start up a production run that puts it in the market at a competitive price. I can only get $1/2mil through loans and I need a backer to provide the other half to bring the product to market."

So the author has invested 50% cash plus 100% R&D while the investor is only offering 50% cash. So this works out to 1/4(R&D) + (1/2 + 1/2)(cash) = 1/2.5 external investment or 40% share for the investor.

The investor could also offer to make the complete initial investment (1mil) and buy out the developer for 1/4mil ($250,000), although the developer might not take that if they're primarily interested in bringing the product to market.

[Lotuzia]

Yes I forgot the 'Storm' adventure, with Mr Brun and Gilles Pommereuil (Still have a CD of it, *somewhere*, I was -still- very young at this time ). For the VSTs, it became another story iirc. LinPlug, I heard stories from a friend who worked for them, but it has little importance. Maybe I understood wrong, and anyway, it was private, so it was a good idea to ask.

So, the only valid examples left seem to be the sw departments derived from hardware manufacturers like Roland or Korg. (Even if it should be considered that those companies were themselves founded by genius engeeners and pionners), and the couple of ones founded by SDs

Wich says a lot.

I think anyway it's difficult to think of doing anything in the synthesizer domain without having at least a good culture about them, their history, music/musicians , various legacies etc, not counting simple maths & physics. Most of times, you'"ll find very dedicated people, couple of friends or individuals etc at the origin of projects. Then, it's the chance to meet the right people at the right time.

One last thing to the OP, most people working in this area would probably earn more with equal skills/knowledge in other domains. ( And it's also true for legends like Robert Moog, Dave Smith, Peter Zinoviev or Buchla ) Passion matters here I think. So, it's not really a multizillion business, and the rules are probably a bit different that what you might have seen elsewhere. If it helps ...

[FabienTDR]

All of these companies started out with young entrepreneurs who wanted to solve a small, specific problem using their own talents and resources and only grew larger and included investment from external sources after they had already become successful.

IMHO this is a critical point. Money can only scale a business model, i.e. in the best case, multiply its results. "The best case" happens when your model can gracefully scale, without increasing in complexity (something particularly well understood by coders). Cutting edge tech, highly specialized product development is not the type of model that scales with money.

Most coders are aware that you can take any number and the result of this multiplication can still be very likely zero. This is particularly certain when no working biz model exists at present, i.e. no cash flow around. You can multiply a turd, sure, but where exactly is the value?

Once the model is running as expected, one can try to run ad and PR campaigns, maybe find an great dev somewhere. But that's it. Cash cannot really improve the biz model. This is of course much different for classic consumer products, where scale effects can quickly reduce the production costs. But in the software world, it is a huge fallacy. In this area, more budget typically just translates to much longer project phases, worse code quality, more expenses and most of all, weaker products.

Most truly valuable and experienced developers (those you'd need) understand their own market and value very well. Most have an income far above average. They can work almost free of expenses for machinery. You need a very good reason to convince them of slavery.

[FabienTDR]

double

[deastman]

A point which has already been made but perhaps not spelled out clearly enough is that there is a very small pool of developers with the skills you require. You are looking for highly competent programmers who are also experts in real-time environments, mathematics, audio DSP, the various plugin formats, multiple platforms, and high quality UI development, not to mention expertise in music, audio engineering, and related fields. Not only that, but you aren’t even looking for an average developer- you want a world-class developer capable of building something like Diva. The number of developers working at that skill level can be counted on two hands, possibly one. And they already run their own successful plugin businesses! Why would someone of that caliber give it up to come work for you as a salaried employee and not even retain the rights to their own work? I can only think of two times that has happened in recent years: when Roli bought fxpansion and when Apple bought Camel Audio. The common denominator there is that someone with a lot of cash acquired the entire company.