The Last Mile, Part I: Launching your first audio plugin

This is Part 1 in a series taking you through my thought process and experiences launching my first audio plugin.

I've run multiple businesses over the last 20 years, offline and online, but this is my first time in audio. Luckily, I have good friends who sustain themselves via their indie plugin businesses. I've quizzed them endlessly as well as interviewed many established indie and pro developers in my "Made With JUCE" interview series.

You can think of this series as the advice I've distilled and synthesized (pun intended) from dozens of developer's experiences mixed in with my prior experience running businesses.

The Last Mile

If you are like me, your plugin is approaching done. Congrats! I bet it was way more work than you originally expected...

The focus is shifting from the programming trenches to how exactly to get it out there.

Here's a cold hard truth: As far as business is concerned, you are approaching day 0.

Day 0 is when your product first goes on sale. Businesses take time and effort to build. It's pretty normal for a business to take 2-3 years (from Day 0) of selling to break even. It takes time for word of mouth to spread organically.

Luckily there's a lot you can do in this "Last Mile" to increase your visibility, chances of success and achieve sustainability.

After all, nobody wants to launch their baby out into a void!

Marius' ADC talk

Firstly, I highly recommend watching Marius Metzger's ADC 2023 talk titled "How to make a successful plugin from scratch as a solo developer."

It's about the whole journey of creating and selling a plugin, from start to finish, including the "Last Mile."

Marketing is an overloaded term

"Marketing" is often a scary word for many developers trying to sell something for the first time. Our world is filled with noisy, blatant and sometimes scummy marketing. We can feel unsure about what tactics will even work and why. It's common to feel paralyzed by options — or even to rebel against the idea of needing marketing at all.

One key thing I love about Marius' approach is he considers marketing to be a holistic topic. It's not something slapped on at the end of the process.

Instead, you can choose to frame the entire product itself as part of the marketing — from "what type of thing did you build" down detail in the UI design. It all matters, it all contributes, and the more you consider the topics while you wrap up building, the better.

So don't worry about blindly adopting advice or buying courses or running out to buy ads. Just put in some thinking and effort about what "levers" you have access to while sticking to your values and budget. We'll get into more specifics in Part II.

People hear with their eyes

Vibe is all important. Especially in audio — it's a creative industry. You are selling to other creative people.

People "eat with their eyes" but they also hear with their eyes. If your effect or instrument is unique, solid and looks great, you'll have the ability to catch people's attention and give them a great experience that they'll want to tell others about.

Now imagine you are making a LA-2A compressor clone. Let's say it's a bit buggy and looks like JUCE's default UI — in this situation, it will be very tough to generate self-propagating word of mouth. You're product has been done 100 times before, so it's going to be very hard to stand out, even with a great design. Even if you managed to get it in front of 5,000 people, it's unlikely people are going to use and recommend it forward.

So the fundamentals of the product itself — what it does, how unique it is, what it looks like, the quality of the product, how intuitive it feels — are all-important. After all, this is software that people will be using when making things, when in the creative zone — you want to inspire them and keep them in the flow state (vs. interrupt them with technical difficulties).

This can sometimes be the elephant in the room, especially for solo developers. We're just happy we are "done" with the development, maybe a bit burnt out from it taking longer than expected. We're often eager to ship and move on.

Design is not the average dev's strong suit, but that's fine! There are workarounds and compromises. Investing a bit of time and/or a bit of money (ideally both) will go a long way.

Make it look nice and work well

I'm indie and on a tight budget — so I'm not doing something like paying a design agency 30k for product and brand design. I'm assuming that's not in scope for you, either.

One obvious solution is to hire a designer to reskin your product (like Marius did) to ensure it feels tight, appealing and intuitive. If your plan is to sell a plugin and start a business, the impact is more than worth the few hundred or couple thousand you spend. It's pretty easy for a designer to get in there and in a small number of hours, produce something with better spacing, better colors, better UX.

If you can't spend money on design, the other option is to level up your own skills, at least enough to make something that appeals to your aesthetic. Those skills definitely pay dividends down the road, it's a good long term investment if you plan to do other software.

I personally chose something in-between, similar to what Matt Tytel from Vital does. I'm very interested in UI, but I'm not a designer (I'm terrible with color). But I've built many UIs across multiple product categories over the years. So I'm experienced, know what I want, and can get most of the way there.

But I want things to feel polished, so I do pay a freelance designer friend here and there for a few hours. He helps me "translate" some of my ideas, polish the details and helps me solve UX problems that I feel stuck on.

I don't have beautiful well-organized Figma files with every last detail on each screen accounted for. In fact, the product itself is the only place where the full design actually exists. Figma is just a prototyping area where we problem-solve, come up with ideas and fine-tune the details.

There are ways to do this on a budget. You can find someone's work you like on instagram and DM them or ask around to see who designed some other plugin you admire. You can pay for premade Figma designs. There's often designers hanging around in the Audio Programmer discord who might be up for collaboration. You should expect to pay something, but not break the bank.

Here are some resources I like for leveling up my own design skills:

• uiadrian puts out great pdfs, some are free. Don't get distracted by them being for web or mobile — most of the principles are the same.
• The old apple interface guidelines are top notch to learn from, and have great advice for desktop apps.
• Fun game to test your UX awareness.

QA via a private beta

In addition to design, it's important to make sure the product UX is tight from a user point of view. That also means reducing the number of papercuts users experience when interacting with it, ensuring they have a great experience and happily tell others about it. One of the best ways to do this is to run a private beta.

Ask yourself: Have you tried out your plugin in Ableton Live, FL Studio, Bitwig, Logic and ProTools? On all platforms? On older versions of DAWs? On older OSes?

Unless you are superhuman or tediously thorough, the answer is "No." Which means it's likely you'll have a slew of usability and maybe even session-interrupting bugs at launch, which will impede customers from spreading the word.

Therefore, it's incredibly valuable to outsource this work to a diverse group of users before going live. But how to find initial testers?

The first step is to ask friends and acquaintances. There are many enthusiastic and technically talented people out there happy to give feedback to devs and get be a part of your journey. (I used to be a passionate beta tester before I became a dev!)

If you have a bit of money to offer to a one or two key people, even better. Any experienced plugin dev will tell you that reproducing and reporting bugs is a rare skill, so if you find someone good, make sure you treat them well and hold on to them!

You can also announce a beta test period on forums, communities and social media you are a part of. If you aren't a part of any existing networks, you could start by asking around in The Audio Programmer's Discord.

Important Note: The developers I know who have run "open betas" (public, where anyone can sign up and play with it) have all consistently told me it's overrated and waste of time.

An open beta is often seen by users as synonymous with a "launch" — you'll get a lot of people excited to play, expecting to get value out of it, but not necessarily talented people willing to help with QA.

For this reason, most devs prefer to privately interact with a small handful of really good beta testers (who will exercise lots of code pathways and make clinical reports) — in other words, a private beta.

Get started early with SEO

Having built several online businesses, I'm a HUGE fan of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It's underrated by a lot of programmers. It's just a fancy way of saying "make it easy for people to find you."

You want people to find you via google. So, it's worth thinking through how people might search for your product. Having a unique name is helpful, but showing up under your product category (for me, "additive synth") is also important.

Spend a couple hours doing the following:

• Register your domain and get some temporary content on it as soon as possible to establish a presence.
• Think through how a user will search for your product. What keywords will they use? What are they looking for? Make sure the variations exist in your copy. For example, I'm selling an additive synth, so my keywords are things like "additive vst" and "additive synthesizer."
• Make sure you have an xml sitemap of your pages and feed that to Google Search Console. Sometimes google will get lazy about indexing pages, but this will keep indexing new pages in lock-step.
• Setup open graph on your website. This is also underrated, and gives you nice descriptions and images when people share your site on social and messaging platforms.
• Write about your topic. Even outside of SEO, this is a superpower for indie devs. Sean Costello was doing it for Valhalla in 2008, before his first product and still does it to this day. Don't worry if it's too technical for a general audience or too general for a technical audience. People will always show up with curiosity about what you are up to. Read "A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people." Your job is to find the people fascinated by the same audio technology you are.

Depending on your product category, if you do this far enough ahead of time, you might place on the first page of google before you've launched. 🙈

Setup a mailing list

Running a mailing list is "Plugin Business 101". Every single indie company depends on it.

It's also another reason to setup a domain ASAP. When people stop by, they can express interest in being notified when you launch, release something new, etc.

Don't worry about building a fancy website yet. You literally just need a signup form. Maybe throw up a video there. That's all that I'm doing until my product is ready to buy.

Having people waiting on a list will make you feel some amount of confidence that when you launch, at least there's a few people who will step up to buy.

Mail deliverability is basically a disaster in 2025 (SPF, DMARC, etc) and difficult for an indie business to easily navigate — so most devs use a service like MailChimp (free until you get > 500 contacts) MailerLite or Brevo. Be warned, some of these services charge per contact (email address you store) and not by email volume sent, so the charges can add up as you grow a list to 2k, 5k, 50k subscribers.

At first, it'll be hard to get any subscribers. How will they find you? To start with, put the website in your bio on social media. Make an effort to talk about what you are building.

Building in public

Being an indie dev on a shoestring budget doesn't leave many options for getting the word out ahead of time. "Building in public" is one hack to help generate interest.

It just means "sharing what you building while you build it." Just like blogging, it's a way of putting yourself out there to find interested people.

You can do this as soon as you have a functioning prototype. It can start lazily and informal. Just post a quick video clips of your product in action onto social media.

Yes, it should be video — people want to see and hear it in action. If you don't want to show UI, pick some visualizer (I use minimeters!) or stock footage and get creative.

There are a few different routes:

• Post video clips to social media / forums / wherever is relevant for you. I'll spend a lazy hour demoing a new feature, maybe once a month or something, with no editing. Just a few attempts to get an interesting take. Here's an example of mine that did well after some months of being regular about it. My experience is that a good percentage (~10%) of the people who engage (comment or like) will click through my profile, land on my website and sign up to my mailing list. I chose twitter, but it could be instagram, youtube, a forum you are a regular on, etc. Because it's musical, video makes more sense than screenshots.
• Stream or produce videos. For example, Mario Nieto streams jamming with his tools regularly. He doesn't talk or use face cam. When I asked him about effectiveness, he said it's one of several aspects of putting himself out there and that they add up and multiply against each other. He also produces YouTube videos of his products. He's just doing what he feels comfortable with.

There are a few downsides to building in public. Pressure can build to keep posting. People start asking "where is it?!" as you enter your 5th big refactor (trust me). You are also "giving away" what you are working on. You may want to do that selectively — no, not because of "competition" — but because you might still want to surprise and delight people at launch.

But if you can stomach doing this regularly, the benefits are:

• Building a group of interested people.
• Many will come to your website to sign up for your mailing list.
• People will talk about it and spread the word. Which is motivating.

What's next?

Part 2 will get into the nitty gritty around dealing with storefronts, licensing, Merchant of Records, pricing, discounts, oh my!

Until then, happy building.