Get some beta testers who are online a lot to spread word of mouth. Perhaps see if any pro reviewers will review it. And find the kind of dealer that trusts their own ears rather than marketing to see if they will champion it. That's what comes to my mind and yes audio clubs are also a good idea.
If you were to market a product, what would you do?
My question is a simple one. If you had a product that you wanted to market, little budget, how would you go about getting it out there in the market? In home dealerships, audio shows, online reviews, audio clubs, find people who are distributors for other non-brick and mortar audio products, etc?
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Beta testers as @jond suggests, is certainly one avenue, though this is more common with items that are easier to ship, and less susceptible to damage from shipping, like cables. For larger items, perhaps asking if you could host at some audio clubs could also provide some feedback, or stimulate sales. Peter, you might try giving Bob Backert of Backert Labs a call, as I'm sure that he would have more developed ideas. He has launched his own brand after many years of providing repairs and upgrade service for many big brand name electronic gear. Good luck, John |
My partner and I are building Direct Heated Triode DAC and preamp. We also build a phono stage. These are hand built, point-to-point wired with customer transformers and the best resistors, capacitors, etc. Power supplies are about 30 lbs., each. I have had a few people in the industry hear the products and one local dealer. So far as we bring the products to each individual it has taken only 30 seconds to hear how our products perform and that has resulted in immediate sales. I have had offers by these people to take out products to the audio shows but we were really not ready then. The past eight months were spent on a new chassis where we could have just one power supply for the products and helping us to be able to make the products easier to produce. Dealers may be an issue because I have to increase the price to allow for dealer mark-up. I am working on attending a show with a speaker manufacturer who has already heard the products. I am thinking that I would like to start out by having a few manufacturer reps in a few areas within the US. I am working on a person in the northeast. As far as Pro reviewers you really have to basically pay for the review and I would have to provide an industry accommodation price as I don't expect to get them back. Any other suggestions? I am all for input. |
Get a website going with high quality pictures and text. Get professional help with this even if it cost a bit - I can recommend people for this if needed. Open a dealer account here on Audiogon and don't forget USAudioMart. Offer a short in home demo period money with a $ back guarantee less shipping of course. Be aware of "Trieres" VS "Buyers" once you get familiar with the process "Trieres" are easy to spot as they focus more on the possibility of return than how the components will fit in their system :-) Best of luck Peter |
I’ve walked down this road, and had success... As the entire world is connected these days, standing up a decent website becomes the obvious first step. From there, focus on audio shows and the day to day interactions that build relationships with customers / end users, the high-end audio media (both print and online), suppliers, and other manufacturers. Represent yourself honestly, professionally, in a caring and passionate manner, as a person who follows through on things and requests for reviews will follow by the bucketful. Many you view as competitors will become your biggest facilitators, helpers, fans, and friends. Act and react strategically in terms of the long-term viability of your business, as opposed to trying to have the business pay for itself before it’s mature enough to do so. Success depends more on you than the product you offer. While I established a mushrooming dealer network in one of the roughest times, I don’t recommend taking that route. With a few exceptions, dealers today offer little in the way of value to a manufacturer. That’s as much a statement about the consumer as the dealer, and how the past two decades have hollowed out that business. Only a handful of viable dealers remain, and are a shadow of what once existed considering overall services (including technical / product knowledge and awareness, delivery, setup, replacement, repairs) on offer. Beyond that, handling the infighting and bad blood created by selling the product around each other took me as one of the most unexpected realities of supporting the dealer network. After the lessons learned through a couple of iterations, I finally got that right, and in time became one of the biggest reasons dealers came looking for me. Home dealers generally have little to no business acumen, ability, stake, commitment, or desire toward their business or actually representing the lines they carry. Most of the time, they’re people looking to buy equipment at a discount. I’ve watched companies make some short-term money from that model, but it always cannibalizes a business. Manufacturers once possessed the technical, business, sales, customer service, and product support / service people to adequately cover most of the bases, along with obtaining a lot of overlap of same from their dealer network. With pricing dramatically rising in the past generation, customer expectation in those areas of sales and service have obviously not lessened even if the infrastructure and abilities to provide it has. In fact, the overall abilities in the aforementioned skills of 95+% of high-end audio manufacturers has reached an all-time low, but that’s a topic for another post or thread. Like so many fields, a husband and wife or their children run a viable company. An outfit sharing the technical, business, sales, service, and advice giver hats once spread around to the internal, external, and dealer resources real industries maintain but no longer exist in high-end audio increases effectiveness as the typical person does well with one or two. However, these entities collapse once the driving force of the company comes to the point in life where they no longer provide what they used to. It’s a tough business that’s only become tougher. Like the dealers, there are very few manufacturers who actually make the sort of income that would displace a day job. Wishing you the best of luck, and offering myself if you ever want to talk things over. Finally, I leave you with the well worn adage, want to know how to make a small fortune in the high-end audio business? Start with a large fortune... |
Web site mandatory, IMO. Beta-testers a great idea, as long as I'm on the list ;-) dealer/club demo days probably a good idea. Shows like RMAF and the one in DC might be pretty expensive, unless you can find an established speaker manufacturer who thinks your products show theirs off to such advantage that they would cover much of the cost. I think that pretty much covers it. Aside from the ethical and cost issues, a review by one of the big mag players is not likely in the cards due to their dealership policies and the advertising $ commitment that, despite all protestations to the contrary, is most likely necessary. One of the on-line only review sites might be a possibility. In-home trials seem like a good idea but not sure how a start-up deals with the cost of having a bunch of inventory in circulation without any guarantee of a sale? Maybe multi-tier pricing, kind of like Sophia does for their tubes. X dollars for a purchase, X + Y dollars for a 7 day trial, X + Y + Z dollars for a 30 day trial. Shipping costs (both ways) NOT refundable. Based on what I've read here, I'd be pretty careful about accepting paypal; seems like the risks are very much on the seller and there appear to be a lot of unethical buyers out there who are quite adept at gaming that system. |
I have a website now and it needs to be updated with the new chassis pictures. We are in the process of building the products in the new chassis so over the next month we will be ready for all the pictures. Beta testers, well we offer a trail period with refundable deposit program. So far, nothing has really come back. A few people just want to have the newer chassis. Swampwalker - are you close to the NYC area? Let me know. Trelja I think you are close to NYC area right? I do appreciate all of the responses. The units we build are expensive so most people would not be interested in our products. For those who want to hear something different then our products are up for consideration. In our comparison tests, we have pretty much sold ours over what our customers had. It takes about 30 seconds and you should know if our product will work for you. If anyone is in the NYC area drop me a line. Thanks for the suggestions. Happy Listening. |
A most interesting thread, thank you. I too am on the road to going back into the hi-fi business. I did this once before in 1970, grew it to 40 employees and 50 dealers. A California Divorce took care off all of that and I moved into the back of a friend's a friends warehouse. After that I became a techno-whore designing lots of products for many companies, until Noel Lee talked me into becoming an Evangelist for him as the head physics guy. I became VP his fiber optic project, a spin-off located in Austin, TX. You are right, you can make a living in audio but, well, you won't get rich. So I changed course, designed and founded a company making the Blade computer and something called vitalization (got 30 patents) and retired after 20 years, spent the last 10 years taking a medical device company I started and now I have taken it public. Now it had time to play with audio again. I spent 3 years messing around with state-of-the-art and developed a phono-preamp and a headphone amp to offer a vinyl disc auditioning system. These are in the first article production status, build a few to evaluate, sold all the prototypes to betas who wanted what they heard. I have a DAC on the bench am building a prototype 50-watt amp using my no-feedback, current-mode headphone amp circuit. My betas gave me good feedback, loved the sound, started to fund a company though sales. This is classic bootstrapping, something considered high-art here in Austin. Having been a mentor and done 5 startups I decide it was time for me test all my theories and write a book about how 70 is a good to start doing something you like and make a few bucks on it. So my wife (see is also from the audio industry) and I decided we would look into starting a bootstrap audio manufacturing company. I called old Reps and few surviving retails, old friends who are now still sales managers for contemporary companies, most of the young and old guys I know, did my market research and go a finger on the pulse.. What you have described as the evolution of the industry I will affirm as being accentuate. No one knows (Expletive Deleted) today leaving an incredible vacuum. Your suggested are all good, what is missing that creating a business is not an accident, itis a dream. Somewhere there has to be a plan and a goal, one that is clear enough for you to be able to find the path to it knowing that it is slippery slope.. My wife and I are going to RMAF this next week end to immerse ourselves in the flow, visit old friends, make new ones, and lock down our plan moving from vapor to jello on the way to executable concrete. Given that your assessment of the industry and the players is very on target, and that the old rules don't work, it is a good time to take all that Seth Godin marking stuff and be creative. What fun! More after I get back from Denver Barry Thornton |
C1Dad - the DAC is a direct heated triode design using 101D tube. R2R discrete is incorporated in our design. Vujadeaudio.com is my current website but like I said I only have one pic of the front of the DAC with the old chassis. I am planning on updating the pictures over the next several weeks. The phono and DAC will be in the same chassis so other than the back panel wording they are the same. The preamp will use the same PSU so that will not change. Currently it has a wood frame for the main preamp unit with the tubes sticking out of the top. If I get the time over the weekend I will try and add pictures and put them in my system on Audiogon. |
C1dad - at first I built the DAC for my own personal use. I was using the 26/226/326 tubes. I preferred them over the 101D tubes. When everyone asked me to make them one, I had to use the 101D tubes. They did not originally sound as good as the 226 tubes but we made adjustments to the voltage and that is when things just seemed to click. No going back now. We are using the Full Music brand. What are you using? |
inna3,402 posts 09-27-2017 6:34pmEuropeans often are more open to new things, Americans tend to be more conservative. I would try to involve them too. Americans tend to be less educated and easier to trick than most other places including Europe. The toys they make in Europe for audiophiles are also designed to trick our Americans that are wealthy and unaware of their spendings or spend unreasonable (good and permissive credit system too!) so the marketing strategy should be towards large amount of bs. The more bs in your story, the more probability to market your item and more profit you will make and that works just about around anything you can think and one of the brightest example -- meds and pills (perhaps there are some Rx for marketing inspiration and motivation or similar kinda bs) For cost efficiency, you can stick to Audiogon and other famous sites so you don’t spend extra monies for publishing your bs. Raw materials to build your ultra-high-end unit can be purchased in bulk directly from China including precious looking chassis which is another way to trick. Chassis must be WAF-friendly and an eye turner. So my advice is to TRICK as hard as you can and as much as you can and the more you trick the better marketing you get. Also ye gotta make an impression of BIG corporation by saying WE instead of I. |
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