Wiardgroup

I hear what Grant is saying loud an clear! :)

Muff is 100% right when he states many people are sheepish to post-
a) what they think are 'silly' or 'stupid' questions relative to the expertise of others
b) 'inferior' sound/music samples based on what is already out there

My group used to have many lively discussions with lots of people being "active participants" but as time goes on, it all seems very 1-sided (me announcing stuff) which *if* I *had* any hair left would be pulled out.

WHen I started almost 11 years ago (and I think Grant and I are roughly the same age) I was REALLY (almost an old man 'get-off-my-lawn' thing) a newbie about the....errrr...nature of how Internet forums operate in terms of:

a) people that don't have your product (and more importantly, have no intention of ever owning your product) still give long and often incorrect (technically at least) opinions of the product

b) people who are sincere but quite ignorant reading something said as a 'joke' or other intentionally snarky comment and thinking it's true (the old 'if it's on the Internet, it must be true!'). What comes to mind in my case is someone said something like "the touch of some MOTM pots are so light the knobs will move if you blow on them" and I literally had emails from people stating they were going to buy modules but no longer because this "knob thing" was "a real design flaw".

About 5 years ago, Rex raised all the Serge prices simply to reduce demand but I doubt that worked. I myself have raised prices at *least* 3 times (maybe as many as 5 times) and I'm still 100% bandwidth allocated :) Some increases are due to parts going up (can you say "Tyco is an evil empire..") but some were just "I'm tired of making $4/hour let's see if I can at least get $6/hr so I'm at Taco Bell standards".

The reality is: the market is very small compared to say...Boss guitar pedals (the owner of a small local brewery stated his dream was to 'sell in 1 year what Budweiser spills in 1 day').

I'm also detecting, as time goes on, a sort of overall impatient urgency in people that use Internet commerce. Everyone expects everybody to be like Amazon.com with next day ship and pretty UPS tracking forms (that are generated by a $3million SAP program). Initially, my customers were *VERY* forgiving about deliveries. Today...errrr...not so much. Like Grant, I will pick up the phone for most every new customer and explain just what they are getting in to :) 

Most of us are botique supplier that do this non-full time (the only true full-time people are Serge, Cynthia, Blacet and Doepfer. Nope, NOT Buchla, synthersizers.com or MOTM. Not even PAia [90% of that business was metal shop work unrelated to synthesizers]).

I personally have thought about "throwing in the towel" twice. Once, that towel was in my hand twirling overhead :) But, dammit, it's still *FUN* on most days.

Paul Schreiber