This is great advice, thanks so much for it. If you can’t tell im definitely new to this and big chunks of advice like this are amazing!
100% on everything @parawave said, but also: make a polished video of this thing in action and make this an important feature on the sales page.
Another book you might want to check out is Pitch Perfect by Erica Sadun. It’s really more for mobile apps and a few years old now but most of the advice applies to selling any of kind of software.
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Hello this is Gulshan Negi
Well, when you’re just starting out, marketing and advertising a new plugin can be hard, but it’s not impossible. You can develop a targeted marketing strategy that will assist you in effectively promoting your plugin and reaching your target audience by adhering to the aforementioned recommendations. Keep in mind to concentrate on developing a website, making use of social media, making a demonstration video, providing free trials or discounts, contacting influencers, and participating in forums and communities. You can successfully market and advertise your new plugin and attract a user base that will assist you in expanding your business if you have patience and persistence.
I hope it will help you.
Thanks
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It would be interesting to identify all the additional skills a plugin developer needs to acquire in order to market his product. Like web site development (including e-commerce, connection to payment gateways, etc…), SEO, e-marketing, accounting (government will want their share on that;-), social networks, packaging (printed as well), …
Haven’t watched it in a while, but I think @ncthom touched on this in his ADC18 talk: Nick Thompson - Breaking into indie plug-in development - YouTube
@DirektDSP , you may also find this thread useful if you haven’t seen it already: Indie VST Developer Expectations
You can surely see that for £250 if you ask around…
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That’s a pretty good list already. Not all needs to be too much in-depth though. But thanks to Pareto it’s amazing what a small team or single person can achieve compared to a large and mature organization with specialists for everything.
But I’d say the absolute quintessential skill especially if you’re basically doing everything yourself (like I do right now), is self-management. There are so many different balls to keep in the air and there are deep rabbitholes everywhere. I keep falling into a lot of those tbh. Being able to focus and move the needle on something every day is really hard. Especially if there’s some ADHD-induced volatility to that, which I guess isn’t unusual among entrepreneurs.
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Just want to mention that the very successful https://minimeters.app (which i love) is also only sold on itch.io (coincidentally by an artist named Direct!).
Some more things come to mind: companies law (to set up a basic company), digital certificates and signing, VAT/sales tax laws in the destination countries you may ship (was more the case before, downloads are now the norm)
IANAL but when you’re just starting out I’d recommend not setting up a company and just take it as personal income.
I made that mistake and had to do taxes and stuff, it was horrible.
Thats the plan for now, im just operating under a seperate business name which is fine in my country once you fill in the forms required
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Even then, you probably change status as an independent worker, instead of employee. At least here in Switzerland that requires being affiliated to some kind of pension account.
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Well im looking into all that but for the moment its me as a solo person and then i just say “Hey yeah im selling some stuff, but im not a business tho”. That’s super simplified but thats how some stuff here works anyways 
It totally depends on the country where you do that.
In Germany they will go after you and you will have to pay the VAT that normally your customers would have had to pay. Not a good idea.
While when you were registered, you can opt for small business and don’t pay VAT, if you stay below a certain threshold. But there is no chance to get that option afterwards.
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So I guess we can all agree that knowing the subtleties of taxation in your country is a very important skill to acquire 
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Absolutely Agree to that!
This is exactly why I use a so-called “merchant of record” to take care of collecting money from customers and remitting the appropriate tax worldwide. No need to understand any of it; just set your price and pay a percentage.
Setting up a limited company in the UK is extremely easy, paying an accountant a few hundred pounds per year takes care of most of the rest, what remains is simple enough. Of course it all depends on which country you reside in, and I imagine some places it’s easy, others it’s a complete ball ache.
HI direkt!
Congrats on your first plugin!
I assume you used the JUCE framework?
As for the buttons and interface have you thought of drawing your own buttons in adobe illustrator or maybe photoshop?
Cheers,
Brian
Hiya, ive been doing most of the artwork in illustrator myself. I personally prefer it since i can export the files to whatever resolution png i want to use in JUCE. For knobs i use JKnobman, which is a great free software and has the same control over resolution exporting!
I’m probably going to create a separate thread soon about automating the video recording of plug-ins for the purpose of demos / marketing. I think most of the time people are doing this by hand using some sort of screen recorder and moving the mouse around themselves, etc. So when something changes in your plug-in, with the sound or appearance, you have to do it all over again.
I have a custom solution for this, where I just run a Python script and it renders any number of frame-accurate video recordings with particular automation points. The master recording is then cut into segments for usage in documentation, etc. It isn’t perfect, and I think a JUCE framework solution could be better, but it’s one of the decisions I’m most happy about making early in development. If a slider gets moved, or you change the font, or whatever, you just click a button instead of manually recording everything over again.
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