Strategies for marketing your software?

[Kraku]

What are good rules of thumb to follow when marketing your software or plugins?

What to do?
What not to do?

Have anyone of you ever partnered up with some other company or developer to market your products? I.e. one company handles development while the other handles or helps with marketing?

[Zeisner]

Pay people known in the industry to advertise your plugin. Musicians, engineers. Remember - it's not about the plugin itself or its usage, it's about the names you associate it with.

[FigBug]

Tracktion has Tracktion Presents, it's like a record label for plugin developers. You provide the plugin, they do marketing, sales, distribution, etc. https://www.tracktion.com/develop/plugin-developers

What type of plugin do you have an is it close to release ready? I could be interested in taking a look at it.

[Kraku]

Tracktion has Tracktion Presents, it's like a record label for plugin developers. You provide the plugin, they do marketing, sales, distribution, etc. https://www.tracktion.com/develop/plugin-developers

What type of plugin do you have an is it close to release ready? I could be interested in taking a look at it.

This is not like that. Not a plugin. I'm doing my own thing, a DAW software

The download link to open beta version 2.0 can be found from the bottom of the web page:
https://www.decyne4.com

[Tone2 Synthesizers]

Looks great!
The workflow of trackers was fast and inspiring. I am missing this in modern music software.
btw: I was one of the devs of All Sound Tracker for the AWE32 soundcards back in 90s. If you need sourcecodes just let me know.

[kernaudioio]

been going through this exact process right now, shipping our first two plugins after years of building in the background. a few things that have actually moved the needle:

being specific about what the plugin does technically tends to attract the right early users. broad claims ("warm sound", "professional quality") get ignored. specific claims ("ERB-domain detection across 40 psychoacoustic bands") get curious people through the door who actually want to understand it.

showing the thinking behind decisions, not just the decisions themselves. why no iLok, why this CPU target, why these five controls and not ten. people who care about that stuff will share it.

for the paid influencer route, zeisner's point is real but the ROI is unpredictable. an honest post from someone with 2000 followers who genuinely uses it daily tends to outperform a sponsored video from someone with 200k. community-first beats reach-first when you're small.

KVR and forums like this are still underrated. people here actually read.

[Zeisner]

("ERB-domain detection across 40 psychoacoustic bands")

Yes please! More plugins with functions involving ERB/Bark/Mel!

[Kraku]

been going through this exact process right now, shipping our first two plugins after years of building in the background. a few things that have actually moved the needle:

being specific about what the plugin does technically tends to attract the right early users. broad claims ("warm sound", "professional quality") get ignored. specific claims ("ERB-domain detection across 40 psychoacoustic bands") get curious people through the door who actually want to understand it.

showing the thinking behind decisions, not just the decisions themselves. why no iLok, why this CPU target, why these five controls and not ten. people who care about that stuff will share it.

for the paid influencer route, zeisner's point is real but the ROI is unpredictable. an honest post from someone with 2000 followers who genuinely uses it daily tends to outperform a sponsored video from someone with 200k. community-first beats reach-first when you're small.

KVR and forums like this are still underrated. people here actually read.

I've heard someone say about marketing that "people don't buy what you do, but WHY you do it". Your list seems to follow this idea.

[Tone2 Synthesizers]

What are good rules of thumb to follow when marketing your software or plugins?

What to do?
What not to do?

1) Invest enough time and effort into creating a really good product. It must be polished on release.
2) Do proper bug tracking and testing before you release it. You won't get a second chance if people downloaded a buggy version and are disappointed
3) Offer quick, free and personal support
4) Build up a faithful customer base by keeping support for your products over many years

[pekbro]

Pricing: determine desired pricing, multiply that by 3x, put it on sale for 50% off.

[kernaudioio]

kraku that Simon Sinek quote gets thrown around a lot but it actually holds up in practice. the why has to be genuine though, people clock it pretty fast when it's manufactured. if the decisions you made actually came from real constraints and real convictions, it's easy to talk about them naturally. if it's marketing backwards, it reads like marketing.

pekbro's pricing point is unfortunately accurate for a lot of the market. we went the other way, fixed price, no sales, no artificial inflation. partly principle, partly not wanting to train buyers to wait. will see how it holds up long term.

tone2's list is the fundamentals and they're right. the support one especially. the plugin market has so many abandoned products that responsiveness alone is a differentiator these days.

[Kraku]

I never gave out anything for cheap or for free. A proper price every time. That's always been my approach to things. Works well. I did it my way. The same way I never bought anything which was priced to be too expensive to what it actually was. I do consider raising my product prices even more though. As a developer and consumer myself I always think of those two sides. Also the good thing for me is that I offer only specific products for specific types of people, so what I offer is not for everyone, but directed for specific target audience. That makes it easy for me to compare features/quality/prices of others, while also at the same time knowing fairly well who my customers really are.

Evil bugs from sales are terminated.

[pekbro]

As a consumer, I'm not really a fan of fixed pricing. It's fine up to about $30 for me,
beyond that, it can push something I want way to the back of the line. There is always
a chance to save money elsewhere and that can get in the way, for years even. It will
really boil down to a products desirability and cost, of course, those can be metered
by many differing factors.

[Kraku]

I don't want to sell anything for less than what it's worth. Nor do I want anything getting in the way of things working out right. So I observe what others are doing, how things are going, what's causing trouble or might cause trouble and I negate those things.

If one doesn't observe what works for others, it usually is a bad idea. You're in trouble you can't get out of. So that's why I'm looking for what works and what doesn't and I pick the options, methods and route which works as well as possible. So I am very unforgiving to anything that tries to cause trouble. I eliminate those things and move on to the next one. It's a process basically.

[Kaijeaxn]

I got better traction for my plugins by pairing community posts with small PR pushes, and savonpr.com helped me figure out how to time announcements so they didn’t get buried. Even though they focus on artists, the way they handle cross‑platform visibility translated well to software launches. Mixing that with demo videos and regular forum engagement gave me a steady bump in interest.