Instrument/synth designer here.<p>There are many possibilities for Phil. He really has to think in terms of musician value, not the software artifact.<p>My first suggestion is to sell a playable instrument, e.g. to bundle a controller with a pre-installed RPi. The real market is for something a musician can switch on and play. Musicians want a box you can open, turn on, press buttons and hear sound. No logins, configuration, compilation, boot-up, login, installation. Make sure you have the right jacks (MIDI, 1/4" audio output, 3.5mm headphone). Notice all this hardware is difficult to pirate. Musicians only have limited time to pirate and a surprising number of them actually pay for software after pirating it for a while. They are mainly motivated by reliability, getting the newest thing (piracy has some lag associated with it) and <i>resale value</i> (pirated stuff can't be re-sold) and to some extent social embarrassment. Basically, if they're making money from your software, they're more likely to pay you.<p>I have found the overlap between programmers and musicians to be a thin-ass Venn diagram. You can't sell possibilities or flexibility (only expandability, but that's a low priority). You have to sell playability. Most musicians will take chances on something new, but they don't want to invest a ton of time in it. They'll see what it does NOW, not in the future and introduce it as an accompaniment to an existing track. As they build a relationship with it, they'll rely on it more and more.<p>My suggestion to Phil is to put together a small run of about 10 immediately-playable systems and sell them. Stay close to the people you sell to, encouraging them to use it and listening to them. Use their feedback to iterate. Standard startup stuff.<p>You'll have some pirates, but those will mostly be people who are <i>good at the Raspberry Pi</i>, not people like my uncle, who can turn on a laptop, but find computers tedious and prefer to spend their energy strumming, knob-twiddling, looking for people to rehearse with, etc. In fact, your pirates will help spread the word to musician friends.<p>After that part is covered, you can get into the marvelous flexibility of software synthesis! But again, make it easy for musicians. You won't want them to have to learn a new skill, such as RPi, just to use your synthesizers!!!