I've done this before profitably. I ended up leaving the market in frustration. I can give you one piece of advice, don't deal with club owners. They are the scum of the earth.

Owners of night clubs don't get into the business for profit, but rather for lifestyle. Your fancy code will just be seen as "huh it lights some shit up".

If you can put yourself above dealing with individual owners, more power to you.

I'm quite familiar with club owners, and I'm well aware that they have no idea why lighting control matters[0] even if it's explained to them in painful detail. I'm honestly not sure how best to go about marketing such a product. I suspect I'll do better to market directly to people who will be using the product and make them handle selling it to club owners.

What was your product?

[0] I'm not sure if it actually does matter in the sense of making an event more popular, which matters to both profit and lifestyle oriented owners. It can make a huge difference with a live band, but a lot of times it's below the audience's conscious awareness.

I may be speaking out of turn, since I have no special expertise with either club owners or club lighting, but you might try taking it to the channel to market. If you can find club lighting supply houses (which I am only guessing exist) -- and allow them to make hearty margins, they'll push your software for you as part of their new installs / sales.

Again though, I don't know the market or niche, so take this suggestion with LOTS of salt.

It's not a bad idea. At the consumerish end of the market, people often buy club lighting from Guitar Center[0], which sells a large selection of generally low-end to midrange DJ and club equipment. An aggressively-priced low-end version could sell very well there.

The higher end of the market is served by specialized lighting dealers. Professional lighting equipment is very expensive, such that prices are not usually listed. A lower-end professional console goes for around $10k (based on used prices I've found for an Avolites Pearl Tiger).

LightJockey, the market leader I mentioned in my original post costs about $1300 and sits somewhere between consumer and professional. It is not available at Guitar Center, so that's a potential means of displacing it in the market. All I need to do is make a superior product, and I'm sure I can do that.

[0] A US chain store that sells and services musical instruments and related equipment.

I bought my first Les Paul at Guitar Center, so I'm familiar.

I think if you could get them to push for you, and maybe MusiciansFriend.com (a similarly sized competitor, a la New Egg vs. Tiger Direct), you'd be in decent shape, distributor-wise.

Either way, best of luck. Let us know how it goes.

Have you seen Mike Sperber's papers on stage lighting using functional programming? http://www-pu.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/users/sperber/pape... (I haven't read them, you just reminded me of their existence.)

I'm reading them now. Thanks for the link.

The Lula software he wrote looks interesting, though it's theater-oriented and not directly applicable to what I'm doing in a UI sense. The source isn't available, though it's old enough (runs on PLT Scheme 103) that I suspect he's largely abandoned the project and might be persuaded to release it.

Many of the underlying mechanisms are probably very similar to what I'm working on. I'm glad to see that someone else has had good results in a research context.

Wow, awesome to hear there are other people into lighting on here. I'm spending my weekend working on a Max/MSP patch that spits out patterns onto an LED grid controlled by a 4/4 time signature. I plan to tie these patterns to music clips within Ableton once Max for Live comes out later this year. The idea is to have layered patterns corresponding to my layered music clips (minimal techno) during my dj performances.

I think you may have just signed up to beta test... something. We'll see what it turns in to.

When I'm not coding for money, I'm a lighting designer - mostly live concerts, but I do some club stuff as well. I've found the options in that market very unsatisfactory. There are some good options starting in the $4000 range and up, but they all require a trained LD. The average DJ is unlikely to be willing to deal with the Emacs-like learning curve of a real lighting console.

I think the market needs something DJ-proof, high-quality and affordable, and I think my first product will be along those lines.

This is really interesting. I am running Mugasha.com. Electronic dance music service. Essentially making it really easy to listen to long dj sets. We should all talk more.

Awesome. I'm interested to see what you come up with. Shoot me an email at the address in my profile.

I would expect nothing less fun from you Zak :-P

what is your hardware platform?

PC and an Enttec USB/DMX interface. It's common practice to require software controllers to use a proprietary DMX interface (as an anti-piracy measure), and I may look in to having one manufactured.