Starting a boutique audio plugin business
Early this year, I quit my job at Google to start my own venture in building a business that builds and sells boutique audio plugins. I’ve been working on my first product, Anukari, for about six months now.
This has been a really interesting experience! At Google I was responsible for a small fraction of some really huge products, and now I am instead responsible for 100% of a really small product.
I was part of projects at Google that had many millions of dollars of revenue impact, but that impact was always fairly abstract and distant. For example, even after 10 years at Google I never directly spoke to one of Google’s customers, at least not in a formal business-related role. Sure, I read user feedback in forums (or the news), but again, it was all pretty indirect. I enjoyed being a part of some really large product launches, but they felt rather impersonal. I was layers and layers removed from the people impacted by those launches.
Contrast that with Anukari, which isn’t even finished or on sale, and I’m already having direct 1:1 conversations with (potential future) customers, for example in YouTube comments and in Anukari’s Discord server. This is the opposite of abstract! I’m hearing about what people thing is interesting about Anukari, what they hope it will do as a product, etc. This is already really rewarding. I’m looking forward to the Alpha testing period where this dialogue will get much more involved.
Later this year, I’ll be giving a talk about Anukari’s engineering internals at Audio Developer Conference 2023 (ADC23) in London. And again, I’ll be fielding questions from real, live people in the audience, and hopefully getting feedback from other interested folks at the conference. I’m relatively terrified of the live Q&A session, but at the same time I think it’s likely to be the most valuable part of my trip to the conference!
Of course, there are downsides to leaving the warm corporate embrace and striking out on my own (and not just the health insurance situation). For example, I am not just the chief engineer for Anukari, but also the chief marketing executive. And given my background as an engineer, it’s perhaps not super-surprising that I’m not very good at that yet. Learning how to build interest in a product, develop an audience, have a presence on social media, etc, has been tricky. And it’s been hard to figure out how to balance time spent on marketing, versus the engineering work to actually build the product. A product that nobody knows about is about as useless as a product that lots of people know about but which never launches.
If I were to give my 6-months-ago-self advice, it would be to get off my butt and start working on my social media presence earlier. Developing an audience takes time, and there are feedback effects. It’s much more interesting for new subscribers if you have a bit of a back catalogue of posts to look at, for example. And having a presence across different social media platforms is helpful, as they tend to reinforce one another (e.g. people who see my Substack newsletter might check out my YouTube presence, and vice-versa).
Anyway, this has been fun and exciting, and I’m very much looking forward to the day that I can start selling Anukari, when it will change from vaporware to software. :)
In future posts, I plan to go into more detail about the engineering details about Anukari: how it’s built, what it’s actually doing, and why it works. There are a bunch of directions I could go here, so feedback on what folks might like to read about are welcome! Thanks for reading.
Until next time,
-Evan