How To Get Your Program Professionally Marketed? 131
one-man orchestra writes "I'm the sole programmer of a small, multi-platform, commercial audio program (a spectrogram editor). After over 6 months on the market, I realized that the program would never just sell itself, and that I need some real marketing done for it. Being a one-man orchestra is becoming increasingly difficult; I only can devote so much time to marketing, my skills in that department are lacking, and I'd much rather spend more time coding. Despite my lackluster part-time marketing effort, I still manage to make a modest living out of the sales. My logical assumption is that with someone competent taking care of that part, revenue could greatly scale up. But what's the right way to go about doing this? What type of people/company do I need to contact? What to expect? What to look out for?"
Search Engine Marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
I just Googled the term and there are no relevant links, which means you could probably get a high ranking pretty easily and quickly if you put up some quality information like an FAQ.
Re:CPA (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is this the product? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Protect Your Intellectual Rights Before You Sel (Score:2, Insightful)
2. Create a binding, toughly worded contract that each customer must sign by hand.
This could just scare off potential buyers.
Re:Protect Your Intellectual Rights Before You Sel (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Protect Your Intellectual Rights Before You Sel (Score:3, Insightful)
Partners? (Score:5, Insightful)
I was in a very similar situation about 7-8 years ago. I had a halfway decent product, and trying to be marketer, coder, salesman, and customer relationships management was just asking too much. I was struggling to make ends meet.
After attending numerous small business workshops that didn't help me at all, I attended an excellent program put on my by local city Chamber of Commerce and the "Golden State Capital Network" on how to prepare your business for Venture Capital. This gave me *exactly* the information I needed to figure out how to succeed. (And I have done quite well since then) It very literally changed my life; I was able to see exactly what a business needs to succeed and why. Although I'll summarize here, the workshop went into extreme detail and I was like a sponge, gobbling up every little morsel with zeal!
The three major planks in a business:
1) Production. Duh, right? Cost to market? Quality control? Disaster recovery? What about scale? What do you do when you get an order for 100,000 widgets?
2) Marketing. Can you sell it? What competition do you have? What is your market? How are you going to position your product against competitors? How can you prevent other companies from stealing your clients? How are you going to make your company name "stick out" in clients' minds?
3) Administration (finance & legal) How much did you make? What do you owe? What's your profit margin? What's your net/gross/adjusted gross/taxable profits? How do you minimize tax liability? Business risk? Personal risk? Are your sales contracts solid? How are you going to protect your "mojo", including your IP?
You need all three major planks Any business without all three of these planks put in solidly will almost assuredly fail. The amount of detail to consider is off the chart. They even had a simple worksheet that resulted in "likelyhood of success", with little 1-10s by every category so that you could quickly analyze your business and see its weak points. It was very, very, very humbling for me to do this, I think my fledgling business ranked somewhere around 7 on a 1-100 scale.
Very, very hard to swallow. I didn't have a bat's chance in Hades of making it a success.
But unfortunately, it was a correct assessment! Quickly I realized that there was just no way I was going to be able to keep all the points in line myself - there just weren't enough hours in the day. So I went out and looked for some good partners that I could trust to build a business with. It took me just over a year, but I found 'em and have since built a million-dollar business that's literally growing as fast as we can sustain.
After some analysis, I determined that our marketplace was too narrow for VC funding, we've instead gone more conservatively, and grown organically. The end result is that we have a heavy stream of new clients, a well-written, highly cohesive software stack, a well-defined market place, top-notch legal and accounting, excellent customer service, and "street cred" so good that our clients just RAVE about us at conventions.
So, to recap.....
1) Learn to analyze your business the way (smart) VCs do.
2) Look for the right partners.
3) Work your ass off.
4) ????!!??
5) Profit!
Easy, good answers (Score:3, Insightful)
(moderately) Easy, good answers:
(1) Hire a firm that knows about marketing software.
(2) Sell it to a company that already markets software to your target audience.
Difficult, good answers:
(1) Make a serious stab at starting your own software company and hire people who know how to do this.
Easy, bad answers:
(1) Ask some random bloke on Slashdot what he thinks.
I've been down this road myself, and believe me there are thousands of things that seem obviously true about selling software that turn out to be horribly wrong in ways you couldn't possibly imagine. Take pricing, for example, one of the most basic decisions you have to make. We thought we'd price our product low because killing ourselves to make sales wasn't appealing. Boy was that ever wrong. We ended up killing ourselves to make small sales. I finally browbeat my partner into raising the price, and suddenly sales became a lot easier. What happened was that the pragmatic adopters always wait for the early adopters to take the risk, and the early adopters were turned off by the low price because they wanted the shiniest, coolest toy. Until we raised prices, we had two or three really good customers who kept us going, and dozens of whiney, tight fisted bottom feeders who'd paid next to nothing for our software and thought that entitled them to endless free consulting.
It turns out the pricing decision was waaay more complicated than we ever dreamed. You can price your product too low to sell, or price it too high. In some cases you can make money with a really cheap product (think stuff like ring tones and really asinine iPhone apps) as long as it's the kind of thing nobody would ever dream of calling for support.
If you really want to make a serious business out of selling software, you've got to prepare yourself to learn a lot about business and marketing, even if you hire people to help you with this. Oh, and of course business law. You do have liability insurance, don't you? A lawyer to write your license agreements?
If you just want to make a few bucks out of something you've done for fun, and have no interest in the headaches of running a business, then at least get a little legal advice about how to protect yourself from liability. Then don't worry, be happy. You're doing this for fun.
Or you could open source your software. If writing software is something you love to do, and the money is something that you don't want to worry about, then this might be a better choice for you. You see making money and looking after a business takes money, so unless you're willing to devote some effort and investment into those things, you're almost certainly going to lose money, especially if you account for the trouble and opportunity costs the headaches you'll inevitably have. Having written an open source product that people use and appreciate can be a very economically valuable thing to you. It can open doors to new jobs or consulting contracts, for example. And if you are coding this thing for fun, you'll get to do more coding when you hear back from users about what they want. That's really the most personally rewarding thing about owning a business: learning about customers and getting better at serving their needs.
At least that's the most rewarding thing about owning a moderately successful business. It's possible that owning a business that makes you fabulously wealthy means never having to say you're sorry, but I couldn't tell you about that. It sounds like that's not what you're looking for, in any case.
You need more people! (Score:3, Insightful)
Get more people involved. Get business partners. It will greatly increase your chances of success.
You can generally devide partners into two categories: internal partners (who own a chunk of your business) and external partners (with whom you share a set of common business goals IN ADDITION to simply earning profit).
It is hard to find people you can actually partner up with, and share your business with (internal partners). You need mutual trust, good chemestry, and to some extent agree on the strategy of the business and the product. But it is not impossible. Use your personal network. I am not talking about "LinkedIn", I mean real people. Talk to friends and family and tell them your thoughts. Talk to Ask them about prospective partners. And be open to people who disagree with you when you talk with them.
Stay away from "business angels" and venture capitalists a little longer. You are not ready for them - you need to get a more clear picture of your product and your business (or they will rip you off and leave you with only a fraction of your original potential).
For external partners, look for companies that your product can complement - or vice versa. Could be other software vendors, hardware vendors, system builders, studios, etc. Find someone who sees your product as a valuable supplement to their existing business. A good business partners is ALWAYS someone who can see more potential than just simple profit. You need happy customers and a lot of success-stories. An external partner who is only interested in fast cash will care less about customer satisfaction.
- Jesper
Re:Is this the product? (Score:2, Insightful)
$25 for a non-commercial version of an audio editor of all things? For one thing, a short sentence describing the "license" is not helpful at all. Can I sell my audio on a CD to people? What do you mean by "commercial product." I can't reasonably determine the legal difference between the $99 and $25 version one.
I just don't get it. It would seem to me that a lot of people that would be interested in the rather unique way your software does things would be quite skeptical of it in the beginning. Charging $25 and not allowing commercial redistribution of the end products is really just another way for you to get beta-testers that *pay you* for the privilege. If there is any company that could do this, it is probably Apple, and not even they do it too much.
That is the perception I have. If I have your demo, and want to use the software, why do I want to pay $25 for crippleware, that stuff is free.
Your second marketing error is probably that $99 is probably too much money. How did you land on this price point? If it had to do with your costs and what you thought was "fair", then it is most likely wrong. Your price can only be properly determined in terms of your market. The last program I remember purchasing for personal use was this one: http://www.hamrick.com/ [hamrick.com] I probably would have paid $20 more for it, but look at that website and the community that uses it and compare it to yours. Actually, now that I recall, I just purchased a large piano sample set for a few hundred, so I'm not one of these cheap punkass bitches that never spends money on software.
I buy good software, I do audio, your price is too damn high for what it is. Take that as constructive criticism.
Really, look at some other company's pricing plans. There is such as thing as tiered pricing done right. Having a "tier" where the product is essentially useless but costs more than a couple bucks is a joke.
If I pay $99 I do want some kind of support channel. You might be a really conscientious person, but your website does not instill confidence. Think about it. $99 is for a product. Anyone that told you a lump of code you run through a compiler is the *product* lied. The website, your support channel, they are all part of the product.
Minor nit: I would completely avoid telling people in your manual what they can do in "all legality." Have you consulted lawyers in all the jurisdictions you're distributing your product? Probably no one is going to get sued over that statement in your manual, but remember that when you tell people what they can do in "all legality" in a product's documentation, it can be interpreted as practicing law without a license, and it really is stupid to do anyways.
Re:Protect Your Intellectual Rights Before You Sel (Score:3, Insightful)
Adding anti-pirate measures takes a lot of your valuable developer time and may well piss off your paying customers. Both are bad things.
Re:Protect Your Intellectual Rights Before You Sel (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, that pretty much wipes out web sales. Most people buying software on the web are going to be put off by #1 all by itself. Number 2 absolutely eliminates web sales because nobody is going to do it.
Suing people? Sorry, in today's climate you can't sue people in foreign countries. Unless you have millions to pay the lawyers, nobody is going to even bother and unless you have a rock-solid case and going for millions, nobody is going to touch it. They will just tell you to suck it up.
Yes, there are hardcore people out on the Internet that make it their business to ensure that software, books, movies and music do not generate revenue. They will do this by whatever means they can, including using stolen credit cards to purchase products and post them for others to download. If you are relying on Internet sales you are going to run into this and there are very few ways to successfully combat it.
Nothing the parent had to say is at all useful towards this.