the launch of echo | collective

After several months of development my coworker Brad and I have finally unleashed echocollectivefx.com on the world.

We decided to enter what is a pretty crowded indie sfx market, and we didn't make that decision lightly.  There are many very very good libraries and indie guys out there, and our goal from the outset has been to rise up to the level of the guys that are doing this the right way.

It took a fair amount of learning on different platforms to pull it all together.  This was the first wordpress site that I've ever built, so there was a learning curve there.  This was also the first site I've built with online purchases, so I had to learn the ins and outs of that whole paradigm. 

On top of that there was all of the content creation, documentation, marketing materials and file hosting.  To further complicate things, we decided to launch with 5 full products and 5 freebies.  Oh yeah, and our full versions had dozens of fully fleshed out Kontakt instruments as well.  There is tons of room for human error in this process, and everything required double and triple checking to avoid stupid mistakes. 


We actually ended up launching the site a day behind our target because I had to troubleshoot a download issue with our flagship product, the forgotten zither, and my website host was undergoing a ddos attack to its severs while I was trying to solve the problem.  This caused me a lot of stress because I really hated missing a deadline (even if no one knew about it).   I was determined to get everything up, tested, and triple checked before announcing the site to the world though, so I swallowed hard and pushed the launch back until I could get every product re-hosted and double check all of the downloads again. 

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Despite all of the newness and craziness we had an incredibly successful launch.  Designing Sound did us a tremendous service by posting a feature with a Q and A, and many of my twitter friends supported the launch with compliments and retweets.  We also got plenty of love from the soundcloud digital music crowd that Brad travels in.  Also the site didn't crash and all of the links did what they were supposed to.

An event like this fills me with gratitude for my lot in life, my friends and the support of the online audio community.  I'd like to take a moment and specifically thank a few people who influenced the success of the site and the launch:

Michael Raphael - Michael is one of those top-shelf recordists who has always lent me his ear and lets me bounce all kinds of crazy ideas off of him.  This thing would not have launched as well as it did without his input.  He's been eternally supportive of the ideas and endeavors we're putting out.  His stuff rocks, go buy it.

Tim Prebble - Tim is the guy that constantly comes up with interesting and useful things to record and put out there.  His is the the highest level of stuff in the sfx market, and his advice and mentoring have been invaluable.  He's also the gold standard with regards to promo vids.

Miguel Isaza - Miguel runs designingsound.org, which has become the daily must-read site for sound designers of all stripes.  His support both with this launch and other things has been invaluable, and his platform is unmatched.

Varun Nair - Varun is an editor at designing sound, and did me the tremendous service of testing our Kontakt instruments out in the wild.  He's got other stuff brewing as well....

Paul Virostek - Paul has been posting a very good series on launching a library which I've been reading and re-reading voraciously.  This guy knows his stuff, and he's incredibly generous to put that stuff out there for guys like me to learn from.

Samuel Justice - Sam bought the first library.  This makes Sam the man.

I'd also like to thank all of the twitter peeps who retweeted the launch and the good good people who actually jumped onto the site and bought something.  I'm filled with gratitude.