Vetting audio plugin ideas

How do you go about vetting audio plugin ideas?

All I can think of is asking people on Reddit/KVR/etc. “would you pay X amount of money for a plugin that does such-and-such” and that seems like a pretty biased crowd and low sample size.

For reference, I have an idea for (1) a pretty simple no-frills low-cpu brickwall limiter and (2) a nice “sample rate reducer” type effect. I’d probably sell them for cheap, like $5-$30. So not huge undertakings compared to some ideas, but still significant by my standards, especially when you consider getting all the infrastructure together to sell the plugins and whatnot. I’ve been thinking about what it’d take to get a business off the ground that sells audio plugins, and for me I think I’d basically have to have no life for a few weeks/months while I throw all my free time at this thing (I work full time), so I want to make sure I have a viable idea.

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I think you will just have to implement and release your stuff, that is your “vetting”. If that is too much trouble to go into without a guarantee for financial returns, maybe the audio plugin business isn’t for you. (I am myself wary of releasing even free software, because that will often already mean some kind of a support burden because the download links should be kept working and there can be problems because of OS and CPU versions…)

One common technique is to make a website for the product idea (before you even create the product itself), then measure the statistics for visitors to gauge which of your ideas generates the most interest.

Tim Ferris uses this technique, he even provides a “Buy Now” button to identify exactly how many sales he could potentially get. (because this is more useful metric than merely how many people viewed the page).

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Some support burden? That’s understating it a bit :wink: I am constantly surprised by the level of entitlement some of the people looking for support exhibit in support requests for free software.

If it’s something unique, then once you’ve convinced folks that it’s useful and that there’s a market for it, others will also implement their own versions of it, unless it’s very difficult to make. So if it’s something that you don’t just want to exist but also want to be the first to make and sell it, then vetting in open forums is probably not a good idea.

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