jimhenry wrote: ↑08-04-20 11:53 amCustomers want a steady stream of latest and greatest products. It is an irrational desire.
I (intentionally) do several things counter to "good business practice" out of distaste. The whole world has been jumping on the software subscription bandwagon for several years at this point, to the point that it's nearly become the default expectation for Synthesia's users. (I've answered "$29 seems pretty steep for a monthly subscription" emails more than I care to in the past several years.) This is not a direction I ever expect Synthesia to go without a serious technical reason (like the ongoing cost of having to maintain a bunch of user data on servers).
One of my biggest business "sins" is my complete lack of price differentiation. You could argue (correctly) that I'm leaving piles of money on the table by not having some premium SKU (say, at $60-80) and perhaps something else at the entry-level (say, $19?) I remember reading a Gabe Newell
interview ~10 years ago and hearing the term "pricing as a service" (in the final answer at the bottom of the page). It seemed kind of wild at the time, but the idea of finding the exact point on the supply/demand curve where each user is the happiest seems to be a sensible one. (So I'm failing this one less out of intention and more because I simply haven't gotten around to offering different product tiers.)
As for marketing, annual releases, and people losing interest, have a peek behind the curtain:
- invariant revenue.png (28.64 KiB) Viewed 39099 times
That's monthly revenue for 2015 through 2019 (with the axes conveniently
unlabeled and
not showing the zero crossing).
The lines you can see coming in at the bottom right are holiday seasons from years past. The blue one that jumps the highest was the month Synthesia switched from "Pay for Learning Pack features" to "Pay to unlock Synthesia", which paved the way for the trend since.
I don't do any advertising. I'm generally a terrible businessperson and marketer (being more of a cross between an engineer and citizen scientist at heart). And yet these people keep coming from
somewhere. I don't know where. It's a little spooky, actually. Sometimes I worry that if I change anything, it'll break the spell and they'll all disappear. But within some noise threshold, demand has been absolutely invariant for the past five years. It's completely uncorrelated with Synthesia updates.
The one thing this affords me is the luxury of not having to worry about annual cycles, or drumming up interest, or wowing customers in the fall, or any of the usual greasy salesman stuff that makes my skin crawl. It has slowly become one my favorite facets of the job. I get to focus on the things I care about instead: making improvements based on direct user feedback.
So, happily, we can dispense with all thought of marketing. I've heard the horror stories of businesses failing when engineering has absolute control. I've also heard the horror stories of businesses failing when marketing has absolute control. I try my best to thread that needle, but it's clear which side I lean toward.
jimhenry wrote: ↑08-04-20 11:53 amYou have always taken the approach of the next release of Synthesia is done when it is done. I think that was working through Synthesia 10. But I think Synthesia 11 is breaking the model because of the magnitude of what is being put into it.
I completely agree. I lamented this a year ago when I
set the new course. (See the paragraphs just before the lists.)
This is the reason there are (at least) eight planned releases before Synthesia 11. It's too big to bite off at once. A few months into working on one embarrassment per release, it occurred to me that working on one sheet music feature per release would also make things rather bite-sized and tenable. So that's what I've been doing. Just as I started posting this auto-updating chart, I reworked the schedule to break things into these nice, small pieces for more frequent (i.e. not annual) updates. Synthesia 10.7 is "recording" and "down stems". Synthesia 10.8 is "frame hiccups" and "better multi-line sheet interaction" (really, finishing up the work I omitted from 10.6).
In a world where I had actually been working on these things this whole time, at least those two updates might have already shipped. Bite-sized. More exciting for users. All of that.
Assuming this plan works, people will have been enjoying the majority of the new sheet music features (for MIDI files) long before Synthesia 11 officially goes out the door. At that point, switching from 10.xx to 11 will really just mean those last 180 MusicXML lines.
Now it's just a matter of getting myself to do the work!
)
