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Looper's Delight
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> From: Joshua Carroll > I'd recommend checking out the manuals for the EDP and the > Looperlative before you deal with the patent office too much. > I've dealt with them before, and it can cost you a ton of time > and money if you've overlooked Yes, if you're going to whip out the lawyers, be prepared to have a few tens of thousands of dollars laying around (that you can risk losing), and set aside one or two years for distraction, anger, bitterness, and all those lovely emotions that seem to happen whenever lawyers are near ;-) Look, I'm sure it's obvious by now that I wrote Mobius and it may sound like I'm trying to discourage you, but I've been in the software business a lot longer than you have and I'm just trying to bring a little reality to the discussion. Maybe the reason you didn't think anyone had done this before is because you were looking at the major software vendors: Native Instruments, Cakewalk, Steinberg, etc. and not the "hobbyists" that do it because they love it and are happy to get an occasional donation. Maybe the reason that the major software vendors haven't done this is because it isn't worth their time? You've written something really cool, with what appears to be a nice clean interface that will be a lot easier to understand and use than some of the existing loopers. I encourage you to develop it, anything that makes the world of looping more accessible is fine by me. How much were you thinking you could make on this? A million dollars (10,000 copies at $100)? No one makes that on software like this. And don't even think of trying to sell this in the $500 range, people expect everything short of oral sex from $500 music software. I've lost interest in trying to measure the size of this market, I can only relate my own experience. Mobius is a relatively popular software looper within our little looping community. I give it away for free because I reached a point in my life where I wanted to use my talents to support the arts (but that's another long story). There are about 100 people in my Yahoo group, I estimate that maybe half of those are serious users that would be willing to give me a donation. Donations for self-distributed software usually run in the $50 to $100 range. Maybe there are 100 more users that just haven't bothered to join the group. So that's 150 users at $50 for a grand total of $7,500. This is going to sound arrogant, but that isn't a lot of money to most professional engineers. It isn't worth my time to go "commercial" for that kind of return because once people start paying you for software, they expect a certain level of support and "polish" that I just don't need to mess with. Maybe if I took out some ads in Electronic Musician or Guitar Player I could generate more leads. But I'm simply not willing to risk thousands of dollars in advertising on a product that I can barely give away for free. Again I do encourage you to continue developing this. Who knows, maybe you'll have enough energy for promotion to become wildly successful. If so I'll be cheering for you from my little corner of the looping world. But I strongly advise that before you start investing thousands of dollars in advertising (or legal fees) that you have a really good idea of how large your market is, and what they're willing to pay. Regards, Jeff