See my homepage ;-)

No idea why you were modded troll, but yeah, I kind of reached the same conclusion, that it's worth giving it away when you're asked because it doesn't cost you much to do that and a good review in a popular blog can feed you for a few weeks. I just wish there was a way to make the people who ask for a free copy agree to a kind of contract of what they have to do in exchange...

Actually it started off as an open source program, and with those things it's either you start working full time on it and do something great but you make it commercial, or you work on it thirty times and keep it free.

As for my actual business plan, I arguably have an innovative technology in that product which is meant to be a fairly generalistic implementation of that technology (meaning it lets you do pretty much anything you can possibly do with it, but not in a way focused on any practical application) and well for the future I plan to make a few derivative products that use the same technology but focus on doing one thing but doing it right and simply enough.

You're right, it shouldn't crash. It's supposed to give out a pop up and cancel the loading. I'll look into that.

And actually the main point isn't to spray paint. The main point is to export the image and work on it externally, because you can do some very powerful stuff in Photoshop that you just can't do with a mere spray tool, and then import the changes. I have some work to do regarding improving the spray tools and how it reprocesses the whole thing, unfortunately I have to split my work time between fixing those things and keeping the sales rolling in, which is actually very time intensive.

As for collaborating, well I appreciate any input, but as for splitting my revenue with anyone right now I'm only looking for someone in the marketing department, although it'll probably all end up like Cartmanland with me hiring progressively more and more people.

Are you kidding? Spectrogram editing is to sound processing as the Singularity is to artificial intelligence.

Except that spectrogram editing actually exists. Where's your strong AI Kurzy?

LA you say? I'll consider it, but I live in western Europe, I'll have to save quite a bit for that ;-).

I had a lot of discussion about this with fellow developers prior to releasing the first version, and I've been repeatedly advised to not worry so much about it and mostly not do anything that would get in the way of legitimate users. I settled for using two binaries, a demo one, freely available but devoid of the code needed to turn it into a full version, and a full binary, only accessible by a download link given after you bought it, validated by part of your serial number in the download url.

It may seem weak, but not making the full binary available this easily seems to work well. over 6 months and over a hundred sales later I still can't find anything on torrent sites, rapidshare and the like or eD2k. Let's hope it goes on like this.

As much as I could enjoy some slashvertisement, I really want to talk about how to find an answer to my problem more than make a quick buck off getting Slashdotted and have the discussion drift towards explaining things about the software itself.

Yes, this is the product in question. If you want a tutorial on how to create snare and kick drums in GIMP you might want to follow the tutorial on how to do that in Photoshop (same thing basically, brushes, layers and rectangles) on the YouTube channel. I unfortunately am not bored at all, between coding/debugging and trying to keep the sales going in any way I can while trying to figure out how to solve the problems this Ask Slashdot is about ;-).

I sent press releases for the 1.0 release of my program, then I tried again for a couple of other releases but this time no site would publish them.

I do however frequent all the forums of the sites you mentioned, not to announce new releases but usually to present new achievements and experiments done with my program, but my problem is that this is the bulk of my current marketing strategy, and this yields irregular results and is I believe not sustainable.

I haven't done any search engine marketing and the only keyword that people find my site with is the name of the program. Strangely enough I have a FOSS project and while I did no SEM either with it it would rank high for a whole lot of random words that were found in the website's pages. Why it doesn't work like this for this site, I don't know.. There are lots of links to my website in tens of forums and blogs, yet Google seems oblivious to that..

developing press and analyst contacts absolutely is.

How do you do that? I've had quite a few people from blogs/magazines asking me for free licenses with the promise of writing an article/review about my program, but everytime they ran with it and did nothing of what they said they would.

Listen to your users. If your users like your software, they will talk about your software. Word of mouth goes far. If your software gets feedback from an active community, you will go far. It's like a Moebius loop of good times.

I pay attention to every blog and forum post that links to my site (using the referral information) and quite often I see my program being proposed as the answer to a question. Unfortunately while it works it currently works on too small a scale to make a real difference. I also regularly get e-mails regarding bugs or feature requests and I try to update my program accordingly as quickly as I can.

Windows is all over the place, so I guess list in as many places as you want/can?

Oh I tried doing exactly that, and when you google the name of my program you see it on a lot of shareware sites and such, unfortunately I don't think that works so well. I'm afraid that these sites (at least for Windows, haven't tried Mac yet as the Mac port was only recently released and still is in beta as a couple of features are lacking) aren't the right target for my program. It's hard to know for sure but I'm not sure any sale ever came out of any of these sites.

We have a lot of community driven music competitions

I just started my first processing challenge, but I felt that starting a challenge and "announcing" (almost spamming) it on any forum I could was probably not the optimal way to do marketing. No IRC channel yet, until now I haven't deemed my following large enough to warrant the creation of a dedicated IRC channel, although I may reconsider it now.

we're interested in doing hardware partnerships / have our software included with hardware

How do you do that? Like, who do you contact? That would interest me.

We are also keeping our eye on audio trade shows like NAMM / Musik Messe.

What does keeping an eye on them consist in exactly?

Hope this helps.

I greatly appreciate your insight, thanks a lot!