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When the first oeksound plugin, Soothe, was created in 2016, creator Olli Keskinen and his friend Hannes Andersson were studying music technology to become recording engineers. And as Hannes puts it, they weren’t in the plugin industry or experienced with software ecommerce when Olli’s plugin quickly became popular, thanks to a simple post on a popular online audio forum.
Today, oeksound is a global software company in the audio and video space, with their plugins used by some hugely recognizable names in the music industry.
To learn more about how they did it, listen for the full insights into:
- How oeksound’s pricing and trial options make their products more accessible to more users.
- Why the user experience and user feedback is so important for improving and marketing plugins.
- Why a frictionless purchase process is such a key focus for oeksound to continue expanding their sales.
To hear all this and more about oeksound’s experience with taking their plugin business global, listen or watch now!
Jump to video. | Jump to transcript.
Podcast Full Interview: Audio
Listen online or find it on more podcast services.
Podcast Full Interview: Video
Transcript
Jesse Paliotto (00:04)
Hello everyone and welcome to Growth Stage, a podcast by FastSpring where we discuss how digital product companies grow revenue, build meaningful products and increase the value of their business. I’m your host Jesse Paliotto. I support the digital product community as part of my role with FastSpring and I love being able to hang out with just phenomenal people here on the Growth Stage podcast. And today the phenomenal person I get to hang out with is Hannes Andersson, CEO at oeksound. And we’re going to talk a little bit about how they build a globally recognized brand in this audio plug-in space that they operate in, take a little bit of a dive into their journey and their expansion and challenges, opportunities that they encountered along the way. So, Hannes, thank you so much for doing this, man. Really, really excited to hang out for a few minutes with you here today.
Hannes Andersson (00:49)
Thank you for having me.
Jesse Paliotto (00:52)
Hannes, maybe a good place to start. Could you give folks a little bit of context? Can you briefly describe what oeksound does, especially for people who may not have any exposure to the audio industry?
Hannes Andersson (01:04)
Yeah, sure. So oeksound is a software company and it’s a software company active within the music and audio space. When it comes to tools that we use when mixing, recording, producing music or then editing audio in post-production for a film or maybe even something like a podcast, a podcast like this. So we have a few
Jesse Paliotto (01:30)
Mm-hmm.
Hannes Andersson (01:33)
plugins is what we’re calling them. We call them plugins because they work within these larger software packages that exist, production programs like Pro Tools, Steinberg Cubase, Ableton Live, Logic, and even GarageBand that we can find on any Mac computer. So these plugins are these smaller tools that you use inside of software
Jesse Paliotto (01:57)
Mm-hmm.
Hannes Andersson (02:03)
packages that you can use them to manipulate or enhance or just better your audio.
Jesse Paliotto (02:12)
And you guys have three plugins or maybe you can just give a quick sketch of what oeksound offers. I think you’ve got a few and maybe a new one. Yeah.
Hannes Andersson (02:22)
Yeah, so right now we have three studio plugins. So what we mean by studio is that they’re used in more of a studio setting, maybe be this bedroom producer or a lone pod podcaster or maybe a big commercial studio where they make music. So we have three plugins called Soothe or Soothe 2 is the current version of that. And we have Spiff and then we have Bloom.
And then on the live side, we also have a live version of Soothe 2, which is kind of Soothe 2 quickly became our kind of most popular plugin and that was the product that really took off for us. so one and a half year ago, we released it for live use. That meaning that it’s also now being run on shows on, for example, huge…
for huge artists like Harry Styles or Red Hot Chili Peppers and those kind of artists. So it’s also being used in that kind of setting.
Jesse Paliotto (03:24)
wow.
that’s amazing.
Yeah. In terms of how you sell them, are they standalone or is there a subscription side to it? And I ask because for folks that listen to the Grow Stage podcast, a lot of what we end up talking about is sort SaaS businesses where they’re kind of building subscription model. But I think you might have a few options there. Yeah.
Hannes Andersson (03:50)
Exactly. Yeah. So oeksound is actually pretty much a very, very traditional e-commerce business. And so we sell perpetual licenses and that are perpetual. I mean, those are every individual product is bought individually. Currently we don’t have a bundle of any sort. And that’s how we’ve been doing it for…
a while now and that’s how the plugin industry has been working for most of the time. Subscriptions are mostly, you find subscriptions mostly when it comes to larger companies that might have 30 to 200 products out there and so there’s a large selection and for somebody that doesn’t know where to start they might just like jump on a subscription and then start using the tools that they need.
But otherwise, have our products, our studio products, our perpetual licenses range between $149 and $199. But a new thing that we did last year during summer was actually launch our rent to own pricing, rent to own way of purchasing our products. And that’s a very, very popular way.
Jesse Paliotto (05:00)
Mm-hmm.
Hannes Andersson (05:13)
or it’s been for us very, very popular. And I don’t see a lot of other companies doing it. There’s some availability on a website called Splice where you can rent your own products. And essentially what that means is that it’s kind of a payment plan, but you never commit to pay the full sum. And so you can just rent the plugin, but one month at a time making a payment. And after
Jesse Paliotto (05:35)
Mm-hmm.
Hannes Andersson (05:42)
I think in our case after 18 months, then you get your perpetual license and then you own it for the rest for perpetually after that. And I think that really helped us grow from from kind of more globally to countries where, for example, two hundred dollars is a lot and you might not actually need the plugin.
every month, you might not just need it for an album that you’re doing this month or next month and so then you rent it for two months and then the next time you rent it for two months and then after let’s say multiple years you get a perpetual license when you’ve gone through that 18 times.
Jesse Paliotto (06:28)
That’s amazing. Like what a very thoughtful sort of win-win scenario for people using it, like you said, where they get to use it when they need it. But as a company, you get the full kind of value that you need out of the purchase eventually. Like it’s timed out. I know, you know, there’s companies that
provide sort of this payment plan option. know, Klarna does this, Affirm does this, and buy now, pay later is the phrase that is often used in the industry for that. But that comes with, you know, finance charges and you’re committing to the full purchase up front. So it’s very interesting. So like when you guys are doing this, is it the same price? Like if it’s a $200 plug-in?
and I do the payment plan, does it become a $250 purchase at end of the day or you’re just, you’re kind of covering that financing cost yourselves.
Hannes Andersson (07:20)
We’re covering that finance cost ourselves to the most part. The end sum gets for the customer, the end sum might be somewhere like $5 more, $5, $7 more. So it’s pretty close to the original sum. so we just made sure that at least at the rental price, you don’t get it cheaper than for the full price.
Jesse Paliotto (07:32)
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Hannes Andersson (07:46)
But then again,
we wanted it to be as close as possible to the full price. And that has a lot to do with how kind of our ethos work with our plugins. We are very confident in how good our plugins are and that they’re useful and that users find them useful. And also if they don’t find them useful, then I don’t see any need for…
our users to buy them and just like having that as the ground rule, make something useful and sell it. And if it’s not useful, then we’re going to know about it. so for example, yeah, go ahead.
Jesse Paliotto (08:18)
Mm-hmm.
It’s funny how like
that can sound almost like obvious when you say it out loud, but unfortunately there are things I’m sure all of us have bought that you’re like, why did I buy this? This sucks. Like this was not worthwhile. It didn’t actually do what I thought it was going to do. So it feels, I know what you’re saying sounds like this should be obvious, but it actually is like to hold yourself to the standard that we’re going to sell something that’s so good that somebody is glad that they paid us for it. Like that’s a pretty, pretty cool standard to be living up to.
Hannes Andersson (08:58)
Yeah, it’s pretty interesting because you see a lot of kind of race to the bottom pricing wise in the industry going on right now. And that kind of, I feel a bit unsure about what that communicates about the company behind the pricing. When for example, you see something like a bundle costing something like $899 and then it’s like
Jesse Paliotto (09:04)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Hannes Andersson (09:27)
crossed over and now you get it for $40 or something. When I see that and I’m am I supposed to am I like supposed to be happy when I see that I’m not like yes that is a good deal but why would anyone buy that for $899 to begin with then either either your your products were never that valuable or they were actually never that useful they were never actually that worth it.
Jesse Paliotto (09:31)
Yeah.
Hannes Andersson (09:57)
or then you’ve kind of like, I don’t know, there’s might be some other. Yeah, yeah. And so kind of having all of that. And I think also something we started off with our plugins and with our products is that they all have 20 day trials and these 20 day trials are just, they’re not restricted in any other way that they’re gonna stop working at after 20.
Jesse Paliotto (10:02)
Or they were, and why are you marking it down to $40?
Hannes Andersson (10:27)
days. So you get all the features that the plugin has and you can use that plugin. So for example, if you’re a professional mixing engineer, you can actually use the trial to make money during the trial so that you can then invest and get the plugin if you like it. And so having that honest, extremely transparent and honest discussion with the users of here is the plugin, you can use it for three weeks.
Jesse Paliotto (10:40)
Mm-hmm.
Hannes Andersson (10:55)
decide if you like it or not if you find it useful You can tell us you can let us know if you don’t understand it if you do understand it because we are all at different levels When it comes to users where you can be a super pro user and still don’t understand how it works So you can be a bedroom producer just starting off and getting exact getting immediately what it does. There’s so many different users available, but one thing that I like always to kind of
repeat is that our customers are not stupid. They’re never stupid in any way. We don’t have to ever tell anyone why they should kind of buy our plugin, but we could tell them why they should try it. I mean, and then every single user is going to make a purchase decision on their own. We’re never going to have to tell anyone. And we’re never actually in our marketing. We’ve never asked anyone to buy our product.
Jesse Paliotto (11:46)
Really? We should try it, right?
Hannes Andersson (11:48)
Yeah, I don’t think we,
I don’t actually think we’ve ever used the word by now or something like that as a call to something, something like that. I think we’ve, of course, when we have a sale, we direct people like we have two sales a year. And so usually Black Friday and then a spring sale around spring. That’s usually how we do it.
Jesse Paliotto (11:54)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Hannes Andersson (12:14)
We never know like how we’re gonna change it up or if we’re gonna do something different, but that’s been kind of the way we’ve done it so far. We let people know, people that are on our mailing list two weeks before that we’re gonna have a sale. So if anybody’s been waiting around, that’s usually the only reason why they’re on our mailing list is to know if we have any new product or run there’s a sale. So, and then we tell everybody beforehand and then they…
take care of telling everyone else like word of mouth is everything in this industry. It’s like 95 % of the marketing is done word of mouth. And after that, they just kind of that’s like the only time where we say, okay, here’s the link where you can buy the plugin for this price now. And so you can kind of like that’s because it’s a sale. Of course, it’s now it’s about now it’s about buying it, but that’s something we do.
Jesse Paliotto (13:05)
Yeah, yeah.
Hannes Andersson (13:08)
twice a year and then we’re back to our normal programming.
Jesse Paliotto (13:12)
That’s, love that in terms of like leading with value, like we’re gonna just give you value. And for folks listening who may not have kind of ever worked in sort of the creative side of software, my exposure is that limiting the ability to export final products was always like the trick to get you to, try the creatives, whether it’s photo or drawing or music. And then when you finally create something and you wanna export it, now we’re gonna use that as the hook to force you to pay us money. Like, you actually want that track exported.
And so to actually give them full use is a big deal, but it does lead with value. it, it strikes me that, it, it creates, it builds it into a workflow, which is very important. I would expect for this user base is that they’re creating things. And so the ability to create tool chains of software that work. And if it works, then you’re built in going forward. And now I want to buy it because I have a proven workflow that created a great thing. Is that, is that a fair analysis or.
Hannes Andersson (14:09)
Yeah,
exactly. So a really good example is we talk about something like vocal chains or master chains when we talk about these tracks, these audio tracks that we have in our software. So vocal track is obviously a track where you have your recorded vocal and then you put these plugins on in order to make that plugin, that vocal sound professional and make it sound ready, ready for the radio or ready for the streaming service where you’re going to put it.
And so there we have our plugins, but also plugins from probably 20 other different companies. so they’re constantly changing out these tools that they have there to get to a better result than earlier. Every single engineer is constantly tweaking and constantly changing out things there. And so when they trial our product, our plugin,
Jesse Paliotto (14:48)
Yeah.
Hannes Andersson (15:05)
put it there, maybe at the end of the chain or maybe at the start of the chain. And then they understand or they kind of like, yeah, get to the point where it’s like, this is actually better than before. And then after a while, let’s say after three weeks, they open up a project where they have used it. And then that’s when they’re going to notice that, okay, whoa, my trial has expired here. And then that purchase decision is going to feel so natural. It’s going to…
Jesse Paliotto (15:18)
Mm-hmm.
Hannes Andersson (15:35)
feel like a no-brainer for them at that point because, I’ve already used it on like two, three tracks and I know I’m going to use it again. This is an obvious purchase decision. And that purchase decision, especially if it’s done at full price, for example, which is not common in the plugin industry that you like ever buy something at full price, but our plugins do sell a lot at full price. What I find or what I believe
is that you get a user that is so proud of their purchase. They feel like they have made an investment because it’s already in their workflow, so to say. It’s already part of their toolbox and they’re really happy about the decision that, okay, I’m actually know that I’m going to need it. And then when you have that kind of a user, that kind of a customer,
Jesse Paliotto (16:11)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Hannes Andersson (16:34)
they’re going to tell everyone. So again, word of mouth, again, we have the perfect customer. And again, if you compare that to somebody that sees an email that says flash sale today only, and then there’s usually a timer that says like 72 hours. I don’t know how that’s today only. then maybe, maybe. then
Jesse Paliotto (16:36)
Yeah.
I don’t know, multiple time zones? No, I don’t know.
Hannes Andersson (17:04)
they buy it during that flash sale, they’ve never seen that plugin before, they use it once in their project, don’t understand it, don’t understand the value. It might be a super product, it might be great, but they just don’t put it on the right place or don’t use it right. And then they feel bad about the plugin. And so next time they’re in a room with other engineers or they’re hanging out with other music creators,
Jesse Paliotto (17:14)
Yeah.
Hannes Andersson (17:32)
somebody goes, hey, have you tried that plugin? And they’re gonna go, yeah, I tried it. I actually bought it. I know it, we use it. Yeah. And compare that to, oh, so do you use Soothe? It’s like, yeah, I use Soothe. I actually bought it like a few months ago. It’s on every track. Love it. Recommend it to everyone. Like that’s the difference. You have two completely different customers, but…
Jesse Paliotto (17:40)
Yeah, you’re get negative word of mouth because the experience was so bad with it.
Hannes Andersson (18:00)
I think the other plugin probably also deserves a chance. It’s just that that funnel has become so like, kind of like FOMO based that you just try and grab, yeah, it feels more like a money grab. And then if you like it or not, that’s up to you as the user. You’re not giving them a chance to even like question you.
Jesse Paliotto (18:04)
Right.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of sort of the age old wisdom that people value what they pay for and they don’t value stuff that’s free. Like, which is, you know, I remember hearing that as a kid, like I could give you this, but you’re you’re just going to throw it away. If you’ve got to save up your money and buy it, you know, what’s bike or something like, then you’re going to you’re going to be super proud of it and you’re going to you’re going to show it off. There’s almost like a a personal investment, which the other thing that was striking me while you were kind of describing that is the picture in my mind a little bit is of like
somebody who builds things with their hands, like they’re building furniture or something, and they have all these tools. And a big part of those tools and what they choose to buy is their ability to successfully use it. And so kind of, it’s not just, bought this thing as a status symbol. Like, no, I bought it because I actually have to learn how to use this thing to make cool stuff at the end of the day. And so you’re kind of building the learning pattern too at the same time, which kind of stands out to me.
Hannes Andersson (19:18)
Yeah, exactly. And we’re trying to make that as easy as possible. So both Soothe2 and Spiff, they have both integrated tutorials. So what that means is kind of like, this is something you might see in SaaS websites, right? So you have like the pop-up screens that you show, and then you might have a test project going on and stuff like that. That’s not something you
see within a plugin within a DAW. That’s something very unique, but we have that going on. And so you can open up a small tutorial that is going to go through the parameters for you. And then you also have some test audio material running through the plugin that you’ve installed together with the plugin. So kind of like you have some demo material in a way. I mean, yeah. So that way you kind of, you don’t need to,
Jesse Paliotto (20:09)
Yeah, to kind of get you started. Yeah.
Hannes Andersson (20:15)
read the manual, you don’t need to go to YouTube and watch some videos and get stuck in a rabbit hole on YouTube. You can just stay within your DAW, within your project, go through that tutorial and when you’re done, you’re back where you started and you’re still in your own project and you’re still using our plugins on your music. And so that’s something very unique in the plugin space, even though that’s something we pretty much took from, again, yeah, something more like the SaaS side.
Jesse Paliotto (20:40)
Yeah,
yeah. The just to quickly ask you said something a couple paragraphs ago that was interesting. How many you said there might be 20 pieces of plugins or software on a given track that you’re working on. Is that the right number? I’m curious. Like if I’m a music producer and I realize this is a hard question because there’s everyone from bedroom producers to professional, you know, working on, you know, Taylor Swift level kind of producers. But how many?
How many plugins or pieces of software are on a given song or album?
Hannes Andersson (21:15)
Yeah, I think if we start from the track level, I think Pro Tools, like the default number of inputs or kind of like plugin inputs you can have there is like five plus five, so 10. So usually if that audio track is well recorded material and you’re not in a genre where you have very
Jesse Paliotto (21:33)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Hannes Andersson (21:45)
over-processed material, then you’re going to be fine with an EQ, an equalizer. That might be the only thing you have there. Another thing is usually you go for something like EQ compression and maybe saturation or distortion, and then you have like three. But I’d say kind of like when you go for, when you have those more, let’s say,
Jesse Paliotto (21:51)
Mm-hmm.
Hannes Andersson (22:10)
music tracks, the instruments and those tracks you might have somewhere between like one and five plugins. And then when you have your most important tracks, like a lead vocal, for example, like the main vocal that everybody is listening to, then we’re probably up. If it’s a, and if we say the genre is pop or EDM, then you’re definitely going to have like seven, eight plugins on that.
Jesse Paliotto (22:15)
Mm-hmm.
Hannes Andersson (22:37)
And also that track being sent to some buses that also had the reverbs and the delays and everything like that. So there you have five, maybe some parallel tracks as well. So there you have five plugins.
Jesse Paliotto (22:49)
So I’m giving song,
this is all multiplied, right? So there was the five on the one and the five on the other and the seven on the vocal.
Hannes Andersson (22:52)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So, so in a, so in a, in a production project where the producer has produced a track, you’re definitely going to find, let’s say, I don’t know, 80 plugins and on a track, on a pop track. then that all already gets like committed. And so you kind of like print the tracks as they are. And that goes to mixing and the mixing engineer adds 40 plugins more. And so this is the way, this is just the way we manipulate, manipulate audio.
If we are not editing it, so like just cutting and pasting and copying and doing stuff like that, doing our fade ins and fade outs, the other way we process our audio is with plugins. And so that’s kind of the main way that we go about. And so yeah, we can have anywhere from like 20 plugins to 200, depending on the project. And don’t get me started on cinematic projects like for film, for cinema, because those projects might have…
Jesse Paliotto (23:48)
yeah.
Hannes Andersson (23:51)
If it’s for a whole feature film, you might have 2,000 tracks.
Jesse Paliotto (23:56)
mind-boggling. So let me use this as sort of a I’m gonna use that as a turn into a little bit different sort of question. So obviously a lot of competition in this industry right like there’s a lot of plugins out there it’s not like you know there’s you know five main ones that’s what everybody use I mean maybe there are five popular ones but there’s a lot out there. And I believe you guys are based in Helsinki and so how do you do how did the company and how did it think about going global?
Hannes Andersson (23:57)
Yeah.
Yes.
Jesse Paliotto (24:25)
Because if I’m creating software, I’m in Helsinki and I want to suddenly take this to the world, there’s a lot of other plugins that people can pick from. How did you get started and how did you do that? I know that’s a very broad question, so please feel free to take that wherever you want to take that.
Hannes Andersson (24:38)
Mm.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I can start really shortly talk about the history. So the company was founded by Olli Keskinen. So he’s a dear friend of mine. were both studying at the Sibelius Academy. We were studying music technology. So we were both becoming recording engineers, mixing engineers in that sense, or was at least dabbling in that. And yeah, got to do that a lot.
Jesse Paliotto (24:46)
Yeah.
right on.
Hannes Andersson (25:10)
Oli made the first version of Soothe pretty much on his own. Like that’s a solo project. And not only did he made the plugin, but he also made the website. He made the web store. that was like a WordPress, WooCommerce based store back then. And he also made the copy protection for the plugin back then. And that’s both now both the store of course is FastSpring now and then the
Jesse Paliotto (25:27)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Hannes Andersson (25:40)
Copy protection is also done by another company that we then, or we implement their technology into our plugins. But yeah, that was all made by one person in November, 2016. And then we’re not in the plugin industry or in the, guess, in the software e-commerce side, you’re not thinking about going global. Anything is by different, by like start by default, it is global. And so he…
Jesse Paliotto (26:05)
Yeah. Yep.
Hannes Andersson (26:10)
started the web store and he loaded up the plugin and then he just wrote something on one of the more popular forums in the audio space and said that, hey, I made a plugin. I hope you like it. Here you can buy it and here you can download and try it. And then it took off from there pretty fast for a single plugin done by a single person. And so pretty quickly he understood that he should be focusing on
Jesse Paliotto (26:27)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Hannes Andersson (26:39)
squashing the bugs and making sure that the code is good. And so I jumped on the business side, on the marketing side, or mainly focusing on marketing, getting more people to know about it. And Tommi Gröhn as well jumped on as another DSP engineer is what we call it. So digital signal processing. that’s, those are kind of like where all the code starts. It’s the algorithms that do the processing for the audio. And so we became kind of like the core
Jesse Paliotto (26:50)
Yeah.
Hannes Andersson (27:07)
team and now we are now the partners of oeksound but that’s where I mean my how it started for me was actually just cold emailing reaching out to Grammy winning engineers and a lot of them answer I mean they’re not I mean engineers are not that kind of they’re not that secluded and they’re not there a lot a of them like when people reach out to them and
Jesse Paliotto (27:23)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Hannes Andersson (27:34)
especially like when somebody has a plugin that they haven’t tried before because we’re all geeking out about plugins. so, in a way, that just kind of shows that we were all musicians, recording engineers, mixing engineers, and just kind of had, we were all users of this plugin as well. So reaching out and just getting to geek out with other people about the plugins that we have was the best kind of marketing, again, word of mouth, getting the word out there.
Jesse Paliotto (27:37)
Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Hannes Andersson (28:02)
was the way I went about it. And then at some point we released Spiff our second plugin in 2018, grew the company to up to about six, seven people. And then Soothe 2 we released in 2020 before COVID really hit. So that kind of like, there was a lot of things happening there. Obviously COVID was good for software, COVID was good for music in general. When it comes to the business side,
Jesse Paliotto (28:22)
Mm-hmm.
Hannes Andersson (28:32)
horrible event, all in all, but just…
Jesse Paliotto (28:34)
Yeah, but yeah, so many people had to invest in tools and so many people were making music at home because they couldn’t go play the gigs.
Hannes Andersson (28:38)
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. They were making music at home. They couldn’t go to a commercial studio and so they were recording in their bedrooms and something that Soothe, for example, was pretty much made for was to make cheaper microphones sound more expensive, cheap rooms sound more professional and all of that. it kind of got released and came out into the world at the perfect time.
Jesse Paliotto (28:56)
Mm-hmm.
Hannes Andersson (29:07)
in that sense. so Soothe two was for us, the plugin or the product that really, really took off and put us on the map. And after that, it’s been crazy. Everything changed after January, 2020. And that’s when we also understood that we need a better partner on the, on the e-commerce side and not maybe like trying to do all the e-commerce our side ourselves with the, with taxes and, and everything. And so that’s when
we started to look for other partners there and found FastSpring.
Jesse Paliotto (29:44)
Was there any particular headaches that you ran into or was it just you could see that it would help in the future or was there specific pain points where selling like the popularity that surged? Did it create kind of growing pains or?
Hannes Andersson (29:58)
Yeah, definitely created growing pains. think bookkeeping was, for example, just keeping books clean on like the different countries and having that going on correctly. It’s just having pretty much… We couldn’t focus as much on the marketing side when there’s a lot of like technical things that you need to take into account and bureaucracy and…
Jesse Paliotto (30:24)
Mm-hmm.
Hannes Andersson (30:27)
legal matters and stuff like that. so it was just like we’re a small company of and especially back and back then we were a small company where most of the founders of the partner was pretty young and like I haven’t worked at another company in my life. This is my kind of first company. And so in a way it’s not like we could have we had like a
Jesse Paliotto (30:47)
Mm-hmm. All right, on.
Hannes Andersson (30:55)
consultants or a CEO that have started like four different companies before and say like, yeah, this is just how you do it. I mean, and we never were a startup either. And so we’ve never thought like a startup. We’ve never had the kind of like the way of thinking. And so we were always just like this artisan, plugging company making these tools. And so I think…
Jesse Paliotto (31:15)
Yeah.
Hannes Andersson (31:24)
What I remember now, it’s all a bit fuzzy just because of how fast everything happened. I think it’s just we needed to be able to handle scale and needed to be able for customer support as well to be able to handle orders correctly and fast and something that also would work with our licensing system because
Jesse Paliotto (31:30)
Yeah, I’m sure. Yeah.
Hannes Andersson (31:53)
because oeksound and our licenses are handled by a third party in a way, and then fast spring. So there’s always this kind of like Trinity of actors when somebody buys a plugin or license to use our plugins. They buy it from us, they get a license, an activation code that they activate with pace with ILOCK is called. And then…
Jesse Paliotto (31:54)
Yeah. Yeah. Yep.
Hannes Andersson (32:19)
that’s what they receive when they’ve made the transaction over fast spring to us. And so, yeah, there’s always that going on. it’s a bit of a complicated system, but again, it’s perpetual licenses. So it’s one transaction for most and then rent to own, of course, then makes it again, a bit more complicated.
Jesse Paliotto (32:24)
Yeah.
Yeah, but I can imagine there’s, start making decisions like am I putting my developer time into solving that triangle of software integration or my building the next, you know, soothe or improving the next feature or whatever. And so, it sounds like a bit of it is sort of just optimizing what do we spend our time on versus what do we outsource to, you know, a partner who can potentially or hopefully solve it for us.
Hannes Andersson (33:05)
Exactly. Yeah. And to not have to worry about some percentages being off when it comes to VAT or something like that and not having to keep track of it that often at least. I’d say as well, most of our, the sales we do is kind of B2C. mean, there’s a customer, but that customer is often as like,
Jesse Paliotto (33:20)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Hannes Andersson (33:35)
solo owned business. And so it feels like B2C for most parts, but it might be that it’s B2B. And that’s why always like, it’s like a lot of customers that’s always going to write off the VAT. There might have a code for VAT in Europe or then some other company ID for tax purposes. And then
Jesse Paliotto (33:37)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hannes Andersson (33:58)
there are also B2B customers. So large companies like game companies or movie companies that are actual businesses that want to buy in larger volumes, for example. And so that’s something we’ve noticed with FastSpring that it doesn’t matter. There’s going to be a possibility. have the tools through FastSpring to offer what the customer wants and also to keep that.
Jesse Paliotto (34:12)
All right.
Hannes Andersson (34:25)
funnel as clean as possible. That’s always been super, super important for us is that we’re not using an account. We don’t have accounts. We don’t have oeksound accounts for our users, which is pretty unique as well. Usually for a lot of software companies, you need to log into your account in order to make a purchase and something like that. We thought since you’ve already trialing our product and you don’t have an account for trialing our product as well. And so.
Jesse Paliotto (34:36)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, right.
Hannes Andersson (34:54)
when you make the purchase decision, we’re trying to be by all means not be in the way for you to make a purchase. So kind of like when you’re going through the purchase funnel, get out of the way. You as a company need to get out of the way and you need to just make it as easy as possible for a customer, for a business, for to make a purchase, to make a volume purchase, to make a…
Jesse Paliotto (35:02)
Right.
Right.
Hannes Andersson (35:21)
purchase with VAT code to be able to add your address or whatever you need there. And it should just be so seamless and like simple so that that happens without doubt. It feels like because we’ve been super transparent up until that point. So we’re not going to ask you to to kind of like, you want to buy our plugin? Well, first log in and so you can see
Jesse Paliotto (35:24)
Yeah.
Right.
Hannes Andersson (35:50)
what kind of coupons you have in your account. No, no account, no coupons. The price you see is the same price for everyone. You don’t need to worry that somebody else gets a better deal. And you just go through it and then you have it and then you get on with your life and you get to mix more music.
Jesse Paliotto (36:00)
Yeah, right.
I love it. I can’t tell you how many times I have stopped because you go to buy or to do a trial and you’re in it and like, oh, quickly set up your account. I’m like, I don’t got time for this. And I’m, I’m in my head. wondering, like, if I set up the account, are you going to remember what I was purchasing? Is the cart going to stay permanent through my exchange or might have to start back over on the homepage? Like forget it. And I just move on. Like that’s so smart. Like reduce as much friction and just allow the purchase.
Hannes Andersson (36:23)
Yeah.
Yeah. And if you, and
also all of that, like if you sign off, sign up to our newsletter, you get a 10 % coupon and it’s like, so there’s coupons involved as well. Well, is there a 20 % coupon somewhere? And then I go to Google and then I try to Google out like, okay, where can I get a 20 % coupon? And, and stuff like that. It’s just like, it makes it such a gray area and it doesn’t feel, it doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel like you’re treating the customer correctly because it’s
Jesse Paliotto (36:39)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hannes Andersson (37:00)
Yeah, just… Yeah, I think it’s good.
Jesse Paliotto (37:02)
It’s interesting.
I don’t hear people talk about that a lot, and it may just be me missing it, but like it’s very popular with retail sites, right? Like clothing stores or something where, you know, send it for email and you get the pop-up, you know, get 10 % today signing up. And what you’re introducing is cognitive load to somebody who’s in a purchase funnel.
And it’s not like typically in the digital world, we tend to think in terms of there’s more clicks and that’s friction or creating the log in is friction. Cause you have to think of a pattern, but just the question I asked myself of wait, am I getting the best deal? That’s friction. And so, yeah, you’re reducing sort of that whole kind of internal slowdown.
Hannes Andersson (37:31)
Mm.
Yeah,
yeah, and that’s actually funny that you mentioned that because you can actually trace that back to the way we develop our plugins. So plugins pop up when you make your music, they pop up in a separate window in front of your track, and then you adjust your parameters and then you close the window. Now, for many sites and for many, let’s say,
Jesse Paliotto (37:52)
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Hannes Andersson (38:08)
let’s say content on social media, they kind of count how long the user has spent with that content and that’s positive. I mean, the more time they’re on a site, the better or something like that.
Jesse Paliotto (38:22)
Yeah, that’s quote
unquote engagement and that’s what everybody wants in order. Yeah.
Hannes Andersson (38:26)
Yeah, but that’s completely the opposite for a good plugin, right? When you know how a plugin works and you’re mixing music, you want to get to an end result fast. shorter while you have open our plugin and it stays on, it’s not in a bypass state after you close it. So it stays on. So if you open a plugin, you spend, let’s average seven seconds, like looking at it.
Jesse Paliotto (38:47)
Yeah.
Hannes Andersson (38:56)
And then you close it. That’s good. Like that’s amazing. If you spend a little time on it. And I think the same way you think about, okay, now I’ve used the plugin and now I want to purchase it again, the shorter time it takes for that person to make that person to make that purchase for better. Right. Because they’re wanting to get back to mixing music, right? They don’t want to spend time in their browser. They don’t want to start questioning. Like if they’re getting the best.
best deal possible they want to get back to making music
Jesse Paliotto (39:27)
Yeah, especially
if they’re going to have 200 plugins they’re using on this track. Like I don’t want to do this 200 times.
Hannes Andersson (39:31)
Yeah.
No, this is just a plugin exactly. This is not like, we’re not changing the world here with what we’re doing. We make kind of like really flashy toys in a sense, but they’re super good tools.
Jesse Paliotto (39:47)
The that that reverse metric on engagement is funny. It takes me back to the analogy of like somebody building something with like physical tools like the tool that I like the most is the one that if you tell me, Jesse, here’s this tool for building stuff with wood. And every time you use it, it takes an hour to set it up and it takes an hour to clean it. You guess what? I’m never going to use that tool. The one that like does it fast and I can just keep building. I’m going to use that every time. It’s interesting sort of reverse metric from a lot of marketing funnels where yeah, engagement is the.
the currency.
Hannes Andersson (40:17)
Yeah,
of course that’s different if the tool is the thing you’re doing. I mean, if I’m sitting down and I decide that today I’m gonna explore plugins, then of course I will spend time with plugins because I’m not working on a track, I don’t have a client waiting for me to send over a finished version. I’m not getting paid by the hour when I do that. And so in that sense, it makes sense. I mean, if you buy a golf club,
Jesse Paliotto (40:24)
Yes.
Mm-hmm.
Hannes Andersson (40:47)
the more time you spend using that golf club, the better, of course. But because that is the hobby, that is the thing you’re doing. And that’s the same thing with an instrument then as well. I mean, if I buy an instrument, the more time I spend using that instrument, the better probably it was for me. It was a good purchase. But for a tool that’s there to kind of like get to the end result, it should not be in the way. It should just do its job and get out of the way.
Jesse Paliotto (40:50)
Yeah, true. Yeah, really good point.
Yeah.
You
Yeah, it really you have to understand the user journey or the user story. And maybe can you talk for a second? Before we started, we kind of talked for a second around the idea that you guys are your own audience. Can you just go back to that like about how you guys use your own stuff?
Hannes Andersson (41:32)
Yeah.
Yeah, and so I think actually I think I actually bought Soothe before I started working for all with Olli, which is really funny because I needed it. I needed it like it was a good tool and I needed it for my own music or for the music I was making for artists. And so that really shows kind of where where the core is at the company. I think everyone
dabbles in music in some form at oeksound, be it in recording or mixing when it to engineering or then producing music, playing music or then DJing or yeah, being, having something to do with music. And so a lot of us use our tools at least at a weekly basis, use our own plugins and we also use all the competitor, let’s say competitors plugins, even though we don’t.
Jesse Paliotto (42:18)
Yeah.
Hannes Andersson (42:34)
like to think of them as competitors, or they’re just other plugin companies whose tools we like. And then, so that’s always present when developing a product. Everything we do starts in product development. All marketing starts in product development. All kind of ethos starts in, it’s not a separate thing in any way. When we start thinking about a plugin, a new plugin, or an upgrade to a plugin,
Jesse Paliotto (42:56)
Yeah.
Hannes Andersson (43:03)
everybody’s involved. Everybody’s involved in what is it, what it’s going to be, what is it going to do, who is it for, and because it should be for us, like mainly. The plugins we do, we do for ourselves. We do take a lot of feedback. We do test it with users, have user testing and have alpha tests and beta tests and everything like that. But if we don’t like the plugin when we’re done, we’re not releasing it.
Jesse Paliotto (43:30)
Yeah.
Hannes Andersson (43:30)
I
mean, even though everybody else would say that it’s amazing, we still need to understand it ourselves because it’s really difficult to market something that you don’t understand.
Jesse Paliotto (43:41)
Yeah, that’s such a superpower to be the audience. I can imagine there’s maybe complications there, but you know, especially like in the B2B SaaS world, I think that can often be a problem where people aren’t using the product in their day-to-day lives. Especially if that’s not there, you know, if you’re selling whatever, you know, in my world, it would be sort of marketing tech. But if you’re, if you’re somebody who’s not marketing and it’s a B2B software, it’s very hard to figure out like.
Hannes Andersson (43:52)
Hmm.
Jesse Paliotto (44:06)
what are people actually doing, but there’s such an intuitive knowledge, I would guess, and kind of the oeksound team, where you guys like, no, this is how a producer uses it, because I just did that yesterday, and this was the problem I had.
Hannes Andersson (44:15)
Yeah,
exactly. Yeah. It’s so, and that’s, I love having those conversations with users where I can, I can just go up and ask like, Hey, so what do you do? Are you an artist or a producer or you’re an engineer? And then we talk about it. They tell them where they come, where they’re coming from, what kind of music they make, how they like to work and what their workflow workflow is. And then I can just immediately be like, that’s great. I do that. I do that as well.
That’s something new for me. Do you mind telling me more about that? this is where I see our plugins come in. Like when you do that, you might want to try this there or this there. And then just kind of like putting our plugins into the context of what they’re already working with instead of being like, this is going to fix all your problems in your life. And without having even listened to them to begin with about what their problems are.
Jesse Paliotto (44:56)
Yeah.
Yeah, talk about over promising. That’s going to be very hard to follow up with actual delivery. Well, Hannes, this has been so good. Thank you so much for joining today. I’ve I’ve so enjoyed this conversation. It’s very interesting. And I feel like there’s just kind of so many insights along the way around how you guys have structured, how you price things, how you sell things, how you develop things, how you’ve expanded.
Hannes Andersson (45:16)
No, yeah.
Yeah.
Jesse Paliotto (45:38)
Before we wrap up, there any, if people wanted to connect with oeksound, what’s the best way to maybe connect with you or with the company? Just go to the website or what’s the best thing for people to do?
Hannes Andersson (45:49)
So our website is oeksound.com. That’s O-E-K-sound, all in one word, dot com. There you can find our, our plugins. If you’re making music, you can download the trials there and use them for those 20 days. And, I’m not going to tell you to buy it because I don’t do that. And and also on socials it’s oeksound — O-E-K-sound — on, on all socials. That’s, Facebook X, TikTok,
Instagram, Twitter, everything out there. And so that’s where you can follow us as well. We’re a very small company. So if you send an email to contact [at] oeksound wanting to speak with me, we’ll know about it. Or if you send a DM, if you send a DM to any one of our social channels, I will know about it. If you connect with me on LinkedIn, just Hannes Andersson there, I will know about it. And so that’s the best way to connect with me.
Jesse Paliotto (46:33)
Nice. I love that. And we’ll add those in the show notes, of course. Thank you so much, man. I’ve appreciated this today. Thanks, everyone, for joining us on the Growth Stage podcast. I’m your host, Jesse Paliotto. Love being able to hang out with you and with the best in the business here on the podcast. Really pumped to have been able to get Hannes on here and talk through kind of their journey. Have a great week, everybody, and catch you on the next one. Cheers.
Hannes Andersson (46:55)
Thank you.
