I would love to see how you ended up doing that. Not having to worry about changing an icon background or slider imgstrip would make things so much nicer in the future!
Just as a questions, what do you usually use as a sound for testing in plugin videos. I’ve found myself using a lot of bassy synths but guitars also sounds super cool through my plugin.
That’s a brilliant idea. I’d love to see more about how you did this!
Thank you for posting this topic! I’m Marko from Estonia and I’m also just released My first plugin and seems I also have the same kind of questions in my mind. So I read all these answers you got here. It was very helpful.
I see you posted this thread in Feb 28, so how is going today. How many sales you have made so far?
You can take a look to my VST also and feel free to comment, ask or whatever comes to your mind:
Cheers to Dublin!
Marko Karja
SlapAsSound
Estonia
Hi Jimmi
I can confirm that your advice is the best one here. When I started my first plugin I got no sales at all within several months. Then one nice guy (DixonBeats - 70k subscribers) from Youtube just found my free VST and did a free review of it (I was not asking him to do that). Only then I got my first sales. It was amazing feeling 
Now I’d like to repeat that process again and it is quite hard to do. I have emailed to many YT influencers but have not got any feedback yet.
You said that you have emailed 100-200 YT influencers. May I ask you, what was your lesson back then? What strategy you used, short or long emails, what exactly you wrote them? Which emails got the desired attention. If you just reveal some key secrets here, I would be very happy.
Thank you in advance for your help!
If you wish you can see my VST here:
PS! And also one guy from japan discovered my VST and did a review in Japanese language, that was also very funny, because I did not understood any of that
Marko from Estonia
I didn’t really have a strategy at all, other than trying to maximise coverage so I wanted to send as many emails out as I could in as short a time as possible.
For any sufficiently large channel I’d assume they get a lot of emails every day so I want to make sure my emails are short and to the point. Let them know what you want (a review, a promo, etc.), what you’re offering (money, free serials keys to hand out, a discount code for their followers, etc.), and what’s so special about your product that they should give you their valuable time.
Make sure you actually personalise the emails too. Don’t just make a template and replace the name of the recipient, they’ll be much more likely to respond if they feel you’ve reached out to them specifically rather than a mass email to a mailing list.
Something I did find useful was to make a dedicated YouTube account and start subscribing to lots of relavent channels and then let the recommendations algorithm help me find more. When you’ve found a channel, they often have other linked/associated/friend channels who you could reach out to too.
Thank you so much Jimmi!
These tips are just greate and resonate with my thoughts also. Everything sounds so logical.
I’m also so very curious abou your business, what kind of plugins you develop, do you still make them, sell them? How long is the life cycle fore one VST plugin? I mean how long is the time period you can sell just one plugin and the sales are linearly growing until it reaches to the maximum point and sales starts to go down. Or it never happens if you do the right marketing? Is it better to keep sharp focus on one plugin or add some more plugins also into your arsenal? How is your experience? So sorry if here are so many questions at a same time
I hope you can share your website also. I’m not very familiar with this Juce stuff and I can not find your website there.
And about this influenser thing…I also think that it is so far the best strategy to get sales. I just watched the video which was pointed here, and there Nick Thompson also said that he got sales growing only after the influencer did a video about his plugin.
Now I think maybe I should do some personalized video appeals towards the influencers to get their attention. I just have to test what works.
As a starter, I see that this is so intresting world!
Thank you so much for your answers.
Marko Karja
marko@slapassound.com
Hey @DirektDSP, how has selling plugins in itch.io been working for you? I see there are fairly few tools tagged audio-plugin (I don’t see yours on the list, either!), it might not be the best place to list them compared to ADSR Sounds, Pluginboutique, KVR Marketplace,etc.
Hey there!
it’s actually been going quite well! Over the last 8-ish months I’ve managed to get about 4k downloads across both my plugins. I’ve also realized I misspelled one of my tags so it could have probably been a lot higher!
I personally think itch is a great addition to selling on KVR, Plugin Boutique or ADSR since its free and Itch has a huge community of creatives already. You also have the freedom to choose what percentage of revenue goes towards Itch.io itself (imo the best part)
After talking to some other companies (Much larger than me might i add), i learned that a lot of them have very little marketing or advertising strategy, mostly since word of mouth is the best way for them to grow their products. A lot of them focus more on making good software over making it popular through marketing since a good plugin will usually spread quickly anyways between creative people.
Anyways, i hope that helped and that you have some good luck if you decide to start selling / releasing software!
