NDSP on the Nano Cortex's infamous launch campaign: "We weren’t thinking, oh, people are gonna hate this.”

Jarick said:
I don't really care what the marketing department does, but it's a bad look when you're constantly putting out content on social media while your products are lagging behind in development.
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They do this a lot, too. I distinctly remember last year when they dropped this super sleek, amazingly produced ad video...



...for the launch of Cortex Editor 🤦‍♂️ , three years after the QC's release.

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Then again, they're selling QCs by the truckload, so wtf do i know. It works.
 
“But it taught us a lot of lessons about when to take the risk, how to take the risk, and to discuss it further before, maybe plan it differently.”

We'll see if those lessons learned translate into not doing the same things in the future. NGL, I'm a bit skeptical.

Side note: it feels weird to be a big enough fan of the QC (and their plugins) to switch from my beloved FM9 while at the same time being fairly annoyed with the company.
 
Lysander said:
Francisco Cresp and Doug Castro, the co-founders of Neural DSP, have finally opened up on the controversial Nano Cortex teaser videos the company launched in September, which perplexed the guitar community.

www.guitarworld.com

“We thought they were quite fun and funny. We weren’t thinking, ‘Oh, people are gonna hate this’”: Neural DSP co-founders reflect on the negative response to their Nano Cortex video campaign – which went viral for all the wrong reasons

Co-founders Francisco Cresp and Doug Castro shed light on Neural DSP's off-kilter promotional videos that stirred up the guitar community
www.guitarworld.com www.guitarworld.com
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Any word on other gimmicks TINA?

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deadpool_25 said:
I think this statement is true and quite telling:

“Companies – even big companies – reflect the traits of the people that make them. We take our work very seriously in terms of how good the products have to be. Our quality standards are very high. But at the same time, us as individuals, we love to have fun, and do goofy, silly things sometimes. Why would you work 60, 70 hours a week if you’re not having fun?”
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That's such a problematic statement in many ways.

Let's tackle the marketing first. Like you said, positive > negative > no reaction. But since the campaign was 99% negative, how can it be anything but an expensive failure? I would not have minded one half hour video like this, if it had a payoff where the product was revealed. But it didn't have a payoff at all. That's just smelling your own farts and thinking it doesn't stink.

Why would you work 60, 70 hours a week if you’re not having fun?

This is a real C-suite answer. CEOs tend to think they are super hard workers, when they say they work 60-70 hour weeks. But they ignore that they are not doing 60-70h of programming, assembling QCs or other "grunt work". C-suite pay also tends to be anything from 2-100x times better to make those long hours worth it.

Considering the music industry tends to pay less than other software development fields, I am pretty sure NDSP developers are not being paid well enough for those long hours to be anything but brutal. Yet they still don't seem to be able to get anything out, so that points to management issues. Why can't they get their work done within the normal work week? Why can't they get updates out in a prompt manner?
 
Karl Houseknecht said:
It IS a joke but not a particularly funny one, right? We all know from hanging out on forums where we routinely answer “soon” when what we mean is “we have no idea when or if this thing will ever get released”. Unfortunately NDSP thought it was a knee slapper.
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This was actually an "inside joke" I wasn't in on until well after everyone had grown weary of it.

Before NDSP, I'd spent all my time in Helix threads, where "soon" meant, "very very soon". And before that, I hung out in Roland threads (VGuitar forums, mainly.) Roland never says "soon", because Roland never says anything. Because post-sale, Roland almost never does anything. :D
 
deadpool_25 said:
“But it taught us a lot of lessons about when to take the risk, how to take the risk, and to discuss it further before, maybe plan it differently.”

We'll see if those lessons learned translate into not doing the same things in the future. NGL, I'm a bit skeptical.

Side note: it feels weird to be a big enough fan of the QC (and their plugins) to switch from my beloved FM9 while at the same time being fairly annoyed with the company.
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I love my QC that I’m admittedly in a honeymoon phase with, but it’s always valid to constructively criticize any of these companies for anything they do - if only to get the word out and have meaningful conversations about these (expensive) fun guitar toys
 
Can't really make broad statements about CEO's IMO...every one is different and depends on their background, the company, and the culture. Some CEO's are really hands on, some are not.

To me the slow pace of development may indicate a couple things:

1. There's an issue with the hardware design where it's extremely difficult to port code
2. They don't have the resources to support the development work
 
deadpool_25 said:
Side note: it feels weird to be a big enough fan of the QC (and their plugins) to switch from my beloved FM9 while at the same time being fairly annoyed with the company.
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This is all good grist for the web forum mill, but I honestly couldn't care less what NDSP's marketing team does. There are millions of hipster guitarists filling up YouTube with video content I don't need to watch. So (for the most part) I don't.

It would be nice if the QC team could get their firmware updates moving faster, but I'm not convinced the one thing (marketeers playing with cameras and video editing software) has anything to do with the other (techs analyzing amps and devs writing code.) Even this is kind of a passing interest for me. The QC works great, and as long as it continues to do so, I'm happy.
 
Fwiw, I'm sure nobody would worry about them to come up with such videos in case everything else was golden in QC land. But as there still seem to be some longstanding issues, especially their existing user simply *must* think along the "WTF?!? They're spending big bucks for a video while development is on a halt?" lines.
 
mbenigni said:
This is all good grist for the web forum mill, but I honestly couldn't care less what NDSP's marketing team does. There are millions of hipster guitarists filling up YouTube with video content I don't need to watch. So (for the most part) I don't.

It would be nice if the QC team could get their firmware updates moving faster, but I'm not convinced the one thing (marketeers playing with cameras and video editing software) has anything to do with the other (techs analyzing amps and devs writing code.) Even this is kind of a passing interest for me. The QC works great, and as long as it continues to do so, I'm happy.
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Well, what they probably paid for those marketing videos could have possibly paid for an extra developer for one year at least.
 
Karl Houseknecht said:
3. Beyond their slick UI, they really didn’t have much else up their sleeves.
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The plugins are really good! They are very popular because they sound great with minimal fuss, and they look really good and are fun to use.

QC sounds really good too! And it's also easy and fun to use. It just doesn't have as much stuff under the hood because of slow development.
 
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