Re: OT $1.95 synth!

["Tony K" <bigtonyk@gmail.com>]

First off, Wuskstation is very very nice.  Makes nice ambient textures.  I played with the demo and a friend of mine bought it.  Good stuff.

Like Jeff, I think they are a bit off in the marketing.  Assuming the DO manage this, they'd make roughly $300,000.  I think they'd be way more likely to sell 15,000 copies at $20 each.  Or 10,000 at $30... but 150,000 users?  I think that's a tad high.  But, for their sake, I hope we are wrong.

And some music software companies do price their stuff pretty low.  Tunafish (Brambos.com) is $35, I think, but he's not selling enough to support himself.  Selling software is tough.  Very tough. I've worked for enough startups to know that even if you have a great idea, that's not enough.  

Tony

On 6/13/07, Jeff Larson <jeff.larson@sailpoint.com> wrote:

> For so long I've wondered, "Why don't music software companies price
> like game software?"  Sell many units for less.

Because the size of the markets aren't even close to the same.  I
don't have any hard data, but I'd be surprised if the number of units
of game software sold isn't at least a hundred times larger than the
number of units of music software.  You can't "make it up in volume"
if there is no volume.

> How the hell is Mobius free?

I only do it to meet girls.

Anyway, I think the synth is well worth the full price of $99, but...
> $1.95?  A steal.

Frankly I think this is a clever but dangerous marketing gimick.  They
aren't going to sell 150,000 of these.  But they may get 50,000 people
to pay a non-refundable $2 deposit.  What happens if only 149,950
people pay their deposit.  Oops sorry, we didn't make it to 150,000 so
you lose.  If they actually think they can get close to this
number this is a huge marketing risk that may backfire.

Their analysis of the market size doesn't show much thought.  "All in
all there must be over 10 million VST users around the globe" is just
a wild guess.  But even if we believed that, the VSTi market is
extremely crowded.  Hell there are probably 150,000 VSTi's available,
half of them free.

A mistake a lot of software developers make (not just in music software)
is thinking it is all about cost.  People are willing to pay for
quality, but they have to know something exists, and that thing has
to be somehow different than the things they already own.

I wish them well, but they show all the signs of being a group of
talented engineers that know nothing about marketing.

Jeff

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Tony