My new year wishes for NI

So I'm going to be controversial in a few areas. I think honesty is important, but only in this instance for debate; not to beat down on NI - I think there's a lot of fine people working there.

Subscriptions
I own a software as a service subscirption business. Subscriptions for tools is the ideal scenario for both cash flow and investment in new products. There are no two ways about it, but NI is in the very fortunate position where it has both subscriptions (I'm estimating less than 10% of userbase), as well as physical and digital product. Music Tech subscriptions are being driven primarily by software creators, rather than hardware, and is traditionally around 3-4 years behind other software income streams. Where Music Tech is ahead, is in the application of AI (really machine learning) into new products. This is why I'm surprised NI hasn't pushed into this area as yet.

The challenge, is that even though your original product might be great (mine is, because it was designed to be), that original great product might feel like it gets stagnant over time. You have to add more features, or expand upon the feature set and listen to your clients. What do they want, what do they need, and how do they want to use your products?

But that leads to problem #1

Data-led or Data driven (user product data)
There is a subtle difference between the two. My subscription business is data driven. We use and expose data to clients, and we analyse editorial and influencer behaviours to project coverage. We also have the other parts of the marketing cycle; distribution. The second stage of this business was always going to be Music Tech, but it's such a small industry, we decided not to do this and focus on one industry; building all the tools needed by clients to do the job themselves and automate a bunch of functions.

Had we been data-led, I would be charging less for the same services (when there's inherent value in what my platform does) or I might have gated certain features at the detriment of users (media and influencers). Neither of these would have helped generate and measure engagement and results.

NI might be data-led or data-driven in different areas of the business. For instance, I'm data-led in the financial elements of my business. I'm data driven in the design of future features.

Yes, NI has a bunch of user data on what products are used, and how they're used. Designing a future product line around what your users are doing is great. But it's a niche, not a growing market. I'm pretty sure there's some very clever folks at NI looking at data and using that to inform decision making, rather than using data to make those decisions.

NKS Standard
There are, in my snapshot of the market, more NKS products created by users here, or elswhere, than by companies who create products. There are likely a number of reasons for this. Firstly, the NKS standard was a brilliant idea, or parts of it at least. It's the reason why UVI (with some former NI people there) have created the tag browser and previews for its products. It's why Steinberg brought in previews. Mapping is essential to increasing workflow, and NKS really made this important.

Here's the thing a lot of previous supporters of NKS are missing out on, such as Sample Logic: when software creators release NKS product, that means they can take part in marketing activities, like sales on the NI website. These sale periods are brilliant for lifecycle management; how many units do you expect to sell of a product over its lifetime (1-5 years traditonally) and at what price?

When NI has a partner sale, that sale generates likely 70%+ of that companies sales expectations for the year. Success will vary by product, and by partner, but consumer behaviour has changed so much in the last five years, that people wait until a product hits 'x' price before buying. It's the single reason I don't own Fab Filter products or Serum - I don't see the value at the price they are at present.

During NI sale periods, the website traffic increases massively. During partner sales, more products are exposed to NIs userbase like last year's AI sale - albeit that was without proper NKS partner support or messaging (a learning for next time - if XO had official NKS support, I would have bought it - but it didn't have that label, so I didn't buy).

Unofficial NKS support is brilliant for the community, but it doesn't help the creators of product unless they adopt it and then sell more product. Part of me hopes that having done the NKS for Equator 2 or Phaseplant, that Roli and Kilohearts will say "Oh, that big ass amount of work has been done. Let's assess this, make some changes and go from here!" - but truth be told, I've never reached out to them to tell them.

All this comes to a point. The problem is, creating NKS for the average product is time consuming. It is for NI's teams, and it is for 3rd parties. How do you solve that issue? I think it's three fold.

1. Create better tools to enable NKS authoring.

The tools we had 18 months ago were better than the tools we have now. We've been skirting the sidelines with small hacks to make life easier, but if the tools aren't there, build them, or let the community build them. Which leads to the next point.

2. The community is your evangelists for NKS. Have them help create NKS compatibility for 3rd parties in advance.

In video games (the industry I work in), you have things like creator clubs, where you invite x influencers into the marketing cycle.

Feedback on new builds? Check.
A/B testing? Check.
A million other things that add to succes? Check.

You could take 4-5 people from this forum, give them proper tools, and they'd create the NKS compatibility for the products in short order before release. I know this is possible, because there are one or two on this forum who have created official NKS compatability in the past.

The challenge in all of this boils down to a couple of things- bandwidth and cash. Everything you develop as a software company has limits; either a time limit, a spend limit or a bandwidth limit. Developers can only do so much at any given time. I'm not a developer, but I understand developers more having worked with them for the last five years. I have so much respect for them now. Yes, I get annoyed that things take time, which means I don't make as many sales, but I would always rather something was right than quick.

Now imagine you're working with code, some of which is 20 years old. NI has a tough task, and our priorities are probably different from NI's priorities, because they're growing a company focused on facilitating the creation of music, and we just want to make music.

The moment NI opens up the store for 3rd parties, it effectively becomes the #1 storefront for music technology digital product. It will sell more hardware because of this. It will retain profit from the sale of other people's products, and become a focul point for user aquisition. NKS because the standard by default, because NKS products are effectively the gold standard for accessiblity.

I could type about this stuff for hours, so I'll stop now. But there's so much potential, and I promise you, the product owners at NI feel exactly the same way, but everything has limits. It's how you bend those limits that can sometimes make the difference.

For the moderators, this wasn't a slight on any of you - you're doing a great job - but it'd be good to understand why those posts went to the moderation queue. Was it length, or certain words I can steer clear of in future?