Lets face it guys… you’ve got an excellent product, and you need to figure out how to get higher volume sales. Perhaps the community can help with some ideas!
My first idea is as follows:
Renoise in the Schools
Start a “Renoise in your School” program!!! You could give schools a discount price for mass-registration, and get students hooked on trackers at the SAME TIME! The benifits of using Renoise in schools? … it’s one of the most innovative sound design applications on the market! It will give students real-world sound production experience! IT’S FUN!!! Most of all, it’s cheaper than most of the other DAWs in existance, and it’s constantly being updated!
You could do something like the following for a pricing scheme:
$500 for 30 licenses with a year’s worth of updates
$1000 for 40 educational licenses … one full version of updates
$2000 for infinite educational licenses … one full version of updates
or whatever really… just make it worthwhile to all parties involved!
I think this would greatly benefit a lot of people, and help generate a lot more buzz around Renoise
If they were to do something like this, I think they should find out what the other programs they are competing with are charging, what services they are providing, and the additional features that are included. They would probably have to figure out a away to teach it for the schools so the teachers themselves have some sort of ultimate reference book available. Given that renoise is quite the innovative product, that the developers communicate with end users directly to help further the software, and that I can only imagine that they would have great customer service (never needed to find out), renoise could sell itself on it’s prestige for a premium if they wanted. I know I would have paid more and some institutions (at least here in the states) look at price pretty heavily as an indicator of quality.
How about a subscription option? It’s working for almost every major company. I would not mind shelling out $5-$10 USD per month for future updates.
Possible implementation:
Someone buys a license. In my case, that was for “3.1” (3.1.1). So I’m good until “4.1”.
Assuming the average release cycle of about 5 years between each Major Version release, that’s $75 every 5 years to stay up to date with the major version and only $75 of revenue per licensee every 5 years.
[Assume 100 licenses, that’s $7500 dollars every 5 years, or $1500 dollars per year in revenue]
With a subscription system of $5 per month, I’d pay significantly more over the long run ($300 every 5 years). This is more in-line with standard Retail practices, as far as markup goes.
[Assume 100 licenses, that’s potentially $30,000 every 5 years, or $6000 per year in revenue]
With the subscription, I get every release, Major and Minor.
You could setup an opt-in option at the point of sale. Maybe give a discount on the initial license for those that choose to opt-in, with a minimum 3 or 6 month subscription. Keep the option to just buy the license per Major version.
The potential increase in revenue could be substantial and it also provides a steady revenue.