How to market / advertise new Plugins as a beginner

Audio Plugins
1

Heya!

I’ve just recently released a v1.0 for a plugin I’ve been working on. I’ve had 2 sales so far but I’m not sure about the best ways to advertise / market my plugin in such a competitive industry.

So far I have sent messages far and wide on discord, sent emails to people doing plugin reviews and gotten some small adverts on some instagram pages. If anyone has some good recommendations from their experience or if they have any knowledge about the Audio Software Industry it would be super helpful!

(Also, shameless plug, get it here for 25% off :smiley: )

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That’s one very complex topic, but it can probably be boiled down to two major things:

  • Making people aware you exist (get them to your website)
  • Convincing them your product is useful

And out of those two, you want to build a viable business model.

An easy way to get people on your website is to just buy them with something like Facebook Ads, which are nicely measurable in terms of what you get out of them. They need to be the right people though, the people who might be interested in something like what you sell. The good thing about that is that you don’t need permission for that, and don’t need to get past any filters (Youtubers get a lot of emails and will not review everything).

Then you need to convince your visitors they need your product. It helps if you’re convinced of that yourself. Why would people want this? What are their needs? How does your product help scratch those itches? Can you answer those questions confidently?

One thing I’m noticing on your product page is that the copy says “Hot Potato is the perfect tool for taking your music to the next level”, but the price says that it isn’t at all capable of taking anything to the next level. People don’t like contradictions. :wink:

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Thanks so much for the detailed advice. I’ve been looking into Facebook ads and the same for instagram.

As for the pricing I was concerned a small startup might have issues selling a new product at a higher price mostly because of brand reputation.

I’m assuming the convincing part is a bit more important than the reputation part though and I’ll probably end up working on that a lot more.

Thanks again and have a nice one!

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A low price will only build a reputation as a cheap throwaway product with no real value besides being cheap. My advice would be to aim for a solid (or even high) price point and make sure to deliver a product that’s worth the money.

Also there’s basic economics. Let’s say you don’t have any organic reach yet and need to buy all your visitors from Mark Zuckerberg, and he charges you 0.20$ per visitor. If 2% of visitors buy your product, that will mean you need to spend 10$ to get 7.50$ (less fees, taxes). You’re basically losing 2.50$ per sale. These numbers can vary a lot though, you need to track them and identify where you need to improve.

Also, you need to run those numbers over and over and make some realistic (and testable) assumptions to build a viable business model (if that’s what you want). If you just want to get your feet wet and see how the market reacts to what you’re building, it’s probably better to start by giving it away for free and that way create an audience you can get to know and build stuff that they’ll be willing to buy (for a healthy price). Make sure to collect those emails then!

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Another advice that I’d give you is to invest a bit in a professionally looking website. I had a look at https://direktdsp.com and was pretty surprised to see a white logo on a bright background

image

and then a few blue buttons taking me to some external websites and nothing else. To be honest, I would probably not even consider this an active website and would probably not follow any link on that if I came there. You can advertise your website as much as you want, but if that is the first impression a visitor gets I doubt that a lot people will stay on your website. Make that website visually appealing, there are multiple ways to achieve that nowadays, hire a professional to do that for you, do it yourself with some website builder like wix.com or whatnot. You only have a single plugin out right now, so put that on the top of your website, along with a download link for a free trial version and a buy now button, you don’t need much more than that currently.

People say that there is no second chance for a first impression, so care about looking as professional as possible so that people even consider having a further look at your products.

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Thats great advice, thanks a bunch for that, I didn’t even consider the losses i might make on adverts!

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Thanks for pointing that out. It was a bit of an oversight as a developer to assume everyone uses dark mode lol. I’m considering doing a whole redesign in wordpress and using a bunch of plugins to make it look more professional.

As for the actual plugin I’m selling, i’ve been thinking about working on some more marketing designs / adverts / stuff to put on my site and try give a better impression of the plugin.

Just curious about the opinions on Shopify for this, I know its pricey but from previous experience it works very well for this kind of thing and doesn’t require a lot of web dev knowledge upfront.

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Search engine optimization was not mentioned. Some people claim that it’s even more effective than paying for ads. I wonder what experience people here have with SEO?

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Congrats about releasing your plug-in, but what’s so special about it that people will want to pay for it? What does your plug-in do that the other 1000 distortion plug-ins don’t? If you have an answer for that, then figure out a way to tell people about it. Right now your website doesn’t do anything to convince me I need this. (In fact, the website seems to be more about you than about me the potential buyer.)

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Hi, my 3 cents:

make some youtube videos / tiktok / insta showing you using the product or get some music production youtuber doing it for you.

Also a distortion PlugIn is not really a big thing so you might plan to sell your next Plugin and make this one free. I know it suckes but if you look at all the free stuff around, why should anyone pay for this?

OOT: Just a hint, maybe I am wrong but to me it seems these rotation knobs look quite familiar, do you own a license for them that cover commercial use? Most of the free stuf is only free if your product is free. This can get you into some trouble.

Despite that, congrats on your release and good luck - may the $$$ start rolling in :wink:

Jens

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My advice would be to focus most your efforts on finding influencers to do a review of your plugin. Spend as much time as you can making a huge list of YouTube channels, Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, etc. with all their contact details and then go through and send them all a (personalised) message asking for a review - be sure to give them a free copy!

When I started selling plugins, I made around £2000 in my first 18 months, mostly with traffic from KVR and other forums. Eventually, I had a YouTuber with around 100k subscribers make a (not very flattering) review of my latest plugin, and I made £2500 in 2 days.

A lot of influencers will only do paid reviews, typically around £1000 for a 10-15 minute video. So if you can find one to do it for free, you could then re-invest those earnings into future reviews. Getting that first one to start the ball rolling is the tricky part though…

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:exploding_head:

I can’t get my head around this concept. Unless the review is basically blowing cocaine up my ass I’m going to have a very hard time paying someone a grand to create content for their channel which will then be earning them more revenue, although to be fair it does seem a pretty decent ROI based on your data.

I guess this is why people like Wytse labour the point that they are not getting paid for reviews and not giving the vendor any heads up about the result of the review in the case that they’ve initiated the review with a NFR license.

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I’d pay £1000 to see that.

Tbf, “a lot” is maybe misleading. I probably emailed ~100-200 content creators, 1 did a review, 2 or 3 came back asking to be paid. The rest ignored me (but several still claimed their free license keys the cheeky $&%*@).

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thanks for the opinion, I’ve been working hard on a second product and I’m heavily considering what you’ve described. I am a bit reluctant to provide something I made for free when I don’t have anything else released.

As for the licenses, I’m pretty careful with those. I know the feeling of having some of my work taken and not used with the proper licensing agreements and I won’t ever intend to do the same to someone else.

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Hi Direkt,

I fullly understand your feelings about this. But to be honest I was considerig makeing software and sell it some time ago but there were two Problems:

Every Idea I had has already beend done at least 100 times and much better than I could have done it. And very often the best software was actually the free software.

Look at for example Blender (3D modelling and rendering software) It is slowly becoming industry standard and people stop using maya. And its completely free.

Mabye you could release your sw on a donation based model or make e restricted version of it and to unlock the full feauture set you must buy it.

Its really hard to compete with all the free stuff and also never forget almost every DAW has a stock distorion plugin (amongst many others) and you could easily work on stock plugins or even completely free daw / plugins and get a professional result (if you cant, you would not get it better with payed stuff)

This does not mean that great software should always be free, but making yourself a name with a couple of freebies might not hurt…

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that’s a great insight into software, i didn’t even consider the donation based model like Blender. I’ll be looking into this path a lot more now! thanks a bunch for the inspiration

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There are many problems.

Marketing wise - Why is your plugin …

  1. … not on KVR, the biggest audio plugin/developer database?

  2. … only on itch.io, a site mostly know for indie games and assets?

  3. … not for sale on any of the big plugin markets, like Plugin Boutique?

Design

The UI tries to be reminiscent of guitar fx panels, but does it in a strange way.
It uses fancy “hand drawn” fonts, but the color choice is grey / white and flat.

It’s a hot potato, so why is the burning logo at the top not bright red but white?
The knobs are skeuomorphic, the fonts and BG are flat. Which style is it now?
If the hot potato is the catch phrase, perhaps a cartoonish stylised potato,
similar to Dada Life’s incredibly popular Sausage Fattener is more suited?


Visualisation

The parameter numbers are arbitrary decimals. Why not frequency, decibels and percent?

I think in 2023 a Waveshaper / meter visualisation is mandatory.

Audio

Only two audio examples, which are inharmonic, synthetic and muffled.
Please, why, why always the inharmonic examples !! Really, the sound examples are dull and badly chosen.

Why not a clean e-guitar as input, or an ACID arp line, or high resonance bass / synth.

Anything interesting that really pushes the distortion to it’s limit shows its versatility

A shameless self pluck, but no other examples at hand. Take a listen at some distortions from our Rapid Synth:

Use actual music and melodies, not test tones!

Personally

If I had to start using it instead of the already owned distortion FX,
it absolutely needs at least one feature that is extraordinarily well implemented. Like an insanely clean oversampling method. Or an interesting dynamic response with easy to grasp use cases. Pre-Post filter. Multi stage/band distortion. Really anything that does not scream “already exists”.

Price Model

I would absolutely argue against making it free! Blender is a strange example. It is an insanely complex software with alternatives that cost thousands of dollars, sponsored by industry giants like Intel, NVidia, AMD. You really can’t compare anything to it.

Instead! - Make it premium, HQ and easy and enjoyable to use.
But most importantly, make good audio examples!

Also: Study your competitors. Is your product doing anything different? If not, you already lost. There is no reason to choose your product if another more established product does everything better.

Hope this was helpful and doesn’t sound too harsh. I’m optimistic that with a few changes and a bit more work and refinement you could drastically improve every criticized point.

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I would highly recommend the book Traction by Gabriel Weinberg.
On top of that, influencer marketing is really great to get first attention. We got really lucky with two completely free reviews that changed everything financially. I think in the end you simply need a product that the influencer is personally interested in.

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The biggest hurdle at the moment is, not to feel down by all the criticism.
Most of it is as correct as generic. Imagine you want to sell a car: if you make the door handles out of gold more people will buy it. It is as correct as useless.

While you should try to incorporate as much of the feedback as you can carry, don’t let it all get to you.
Because: while a polished GUI is certainly better than stock juce widgets, it is no guarantee you will get any additional sale.

Improve things bit by bit.

About marketing and campaigns: my impression is, that nothing works better than testimonials and reference tracks. Be generous to give your plugin to friends and friends of friends. Just ask them, if they created something with it, to share a link with you and ask for permission to use that link on your website.
If people love their music, they will also like your product.
Ultimately, if you happen to know somebody your audience knows, that is the big price. If they use your plugin and allow you to brag about it (testimonial), that will open the producers purse.

But it’s a long way… good luck

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thanks a bunch for the recommendatin ill definitely have a look!