CGWire Kitsu
Collaboration Platform for Animation Studios
We were able to close a deal with a major US startup. They have strong policies and requirements about legal and security. Thanks to our hard work, we were able to fulfill their needs and now we are working with them. We learned a lot from that experience.
Kitsu is now deployed as a SaaS service in more than 25 countries.
For the second time in a row, an animation movie using Kitsu won the Annecy Feature Film award. It is the most prestigious award in 2D animation. We were very proud that our customers were able to get it two years in a row. The 2021 winner was Le Petit Nicolas and the 2022 winner was Chicken For Linda.
During 12 months we experienced a 100% growth. It was something new to us. It was very exciting but led to a lot more work too. We had to increase our pricing to stop the customer stream. The ratio cost / onboarding was not good and we were not able to serve properly our customers anymore.
That said, we were able to hire a new Software Engineer in the team and now we can provide better services. We ran an ad-campaign too on niche websites. The ROI was not obvious but we became more visible in our industry.
After a long period of negotiations, we were pleased to have our first enterprise customer. It made us happy because it showed that our solution is mature enough to handle a big load of data and provide a reliable service.
It had a significant impact too on our MRR.
During the first quarter, something unexpected happened: several studios made significant code contributions to our platform. We always thought that we will only have minor contributions. But recently, several studios decide to make our software evolve faster.
Three of them decided to ask a developer to work full-time on our platform for weeks. It's something special to handle because on one side they give you a hand, on the other you have to integrate the work they did without extra revenue to deal with it. It's a very interesting situation. It changed our roadmap but thanks to them we were able to ship more features faster.
The strongest point is that we have now more brains thinking about our codebase. This leads to better software and a stronger community. Open-source products are so exciting!
Last month, we reached a new milestone. Our users uploaded an overall of 1 million videos on our platform. Every video is aimed at being reviewed by a director. It shows how much the platform is used. We are so happy to see that! We hope that this number will keep going up!
Blender is a renown open source software in the Animation Industry. It's a digital content creation tool that gained a lot of traction during the past years. Recently, many big companies joined the funding of the foundation behind it. Which means that they will keep improving their software and growing their audience.
On a regular basis, the Blender studio produces movies to show the capabilities of Blender. These productions are awaited by many animation fans. It grabs a lot of attention. The next one, Sprite Fright, creates a lot of expectation.
During the past months we had the opportunity to talk a lot with their team. They helped us to improve Kitsu by providing feedback and funding features. We adapt Kitsu to fit with their pipeline. Which led to something big for us: they decided to use Kitsu to collaborate better with their artists for the Sprite Fright production!
To us, it's a great recognition both as an animation tool and as a FOSS software. It created a lot of excitement into our community and boosted our motivation!
Even better, we'll keep on working with them. We will have probably more news about it! Stay tuned!
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I want to start an animation project, and I have to learn Blender. I feel so frustrated about this. I want to do it on my own, but I just can't wrap my head around Blender's functions-I can only do somewhat basic modeling/sculpting. What about UV Editing? Geography nodes? Not in this lifetime. It is very stressful for me, and I'm getting overwhelmed. I know I need actually to understand what each function do then apply it, but I don't know how. Am I trying to learn too much at one time, or it's just me being stupid? I'm thinking of giving up and getting the job done with a blender render farm. For more information visit https://www.forgehub.net .
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Thanks for the information.
One of the main features of Kitsu is to allow validation of media previews. Because of the many shots needed to build a whole movie, our users push a lot of media files into our platform. We are now sure that they use Kitsu intensively. Recently we count the number of media files uploaded on our platform. It reached 1 000 000. It shows how intensively our users use the platform!
We are super proud of this achievement and hope that it will continue this way!
We reached a simple milestone: we fully bootstrapped our business. Last year we earned more money than we spent. Even better our subscription MRR is now good enough to allow us to pay all our expenses without the need to charge professional services.
It's a big step forward for us. We will be able to focus more on our product. So what do we change to reach that milestone? We built a stronger sales pipeline by describing every step of the customer lifecycle. Then we improved our tool stack (mainly we switched from Hubspot / Stripe to Pipedrive / Chargebee), last year we significantly raised our prices too. And of course, the product is way better than 12 months ago.
Overall we are very proud and satisfied!
Last week, a major player in the video game industry recognizes the importance of our software for animation movies and video games. They granted us $75 000!
To achieve that we applied and presented a project we have to build stronger integration between Kitsu and digital content creation tools. They accepted, which made us super happy! It will add more fuel to our project without compromising our independence.
Epic Games has a great strategy, they foster innovation in the industry with their grants. We are glad that they included us in their program.
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