From now on, we'll publish our bi-monthly update on our blog. Before that, it was shared only on our Discords. But we would like to make it available to all newcomers. That's why you will now be able to read it directly from here!
Kitsu
We had a lot of new Kitsu users in the past months. In terms of maintenance, it was very intense. Nevertheless, we found the time for adding new features:
1. Sequence and Episode tasks
You can add tasks at the sequence and episode levels. It's handy to manage macro tasks or specific layout workflows. It was the opportunity to add dedicated management lists for sequences and episodes instead of confusing edit functions in the statistic pages.
2. Breakdown redesign
We changed the layout to make it based on columns. The displaying is clearer and easier to read. We also added a second export mode that matches the displayed list instead of listing every link one by one. Thank you to Monello for sponsoring this.
3. My Checks page
In partnership with the Fost studio, we added a new page for supervisors: My Checks. It allows listing only the tasks requiring validation. Your supervisors will be able to go straight to the point and make sure that everything is ready to be shown to the Director.
4. Studio-wide newsfeed
The newsfeed is a very handy tool in Kitsu, but it's limited to a single production. For studios managing many projects at the same time, it doesn't allow them to know what is going on easily. That's why we decided to extend it to the whole studio.
5. Improved playlist design
The playlist page is now more pleasant to look at and will feel more serious for your clients. That's it for Kitsu, we did a lot of improvements to the internals which should lead to slightly better performance and stability.
Infrastructure
Nicolas, our Engineer in charge of the hosting, added the capability to choose your deployment region. For countries far from France, it can improve performances significantly. Let us know if you want to try this new feature (we support only OVH regions for the moment). https://www.ovhcloud.com/fr/public-cloud/regions-availability/
Integrations
Kitsu has a new integration: Prism2. Prism is an open-source asset manager. They are working on a more evolved version which is currently in private beta. They decided to use Kitsu as their primary production tracker.
Events
1. FMX We will have a booth at FMX Stuttgart and will run a workshop on Tuesday morning. Please come to meet us, we would be glad to talk about your workflow and the future of Kitsu. Both Gwen and I will be there.
2. Annecy MIFA We will have a booth too at Annecy MIFA near the welcome room. We will stay the whole week, so please come here to meet us too!
Finance
As usual, we updated our finance charts, you can check them via the dedicated URL mentioned below. We made good sales again and increased our Monthly recurring revenue to 36k€/month. All these new customers showed us that our pricing was way too low: it was too cumbersome to onboard new users and keep good service.
So, we decided to match the market average to be able to keep serving quality. As a result, we noticed a slowdown in our Sales, which allowed us to stabilize things. Yet, we are still discussing with many leads, so things should get back to normal very soon. https://metrics.cg-wire.com/
Communication
To sustain this growth, we are still running an ad campaign with Animation Magazine. To be more visible to the VFX world, we sponsored the Befores And Afters podcast too. https://beforesandafters.com/
We are in the process to improve our website to show all the capabilities of Kitsu. The current version shows only a limited view of Kitsu and our offering. So we will add a bunch of pages with some new illustrations. For that, we work with the Naolito studio which helps us to make our website more lively! https://naolito.com/
NB: And of course, we use Kitsu to validate all the illustrations!
Team
We hired Nicolas Pennec, a senior Javascript Software Engineer. He has 15 years of experience and will help us to maintain and improve Kitsu. It's a big addition to the team, so we are glad to share this new hiring with you!
Studios and productions
We onboarded new studios, so welcome to them! We are glad to see them in the Kitsu community!
Alba Sotorra - http://www.albasotorra.com/
Animaskin - https://animaskin.no/
Les Valseurs - https://lesvalseurs.com/
NextFrames - https://www.nextframes.com/
Phanta Animation - https://phantavision.com/
Rave Growl - https://ravegrowl.tv/
Skyhouse Studios - https://skyhouse.studio/
Spacestation Animation - https://www.spacestationanimation.com/
The Seed - https://www.the-seed.fr/
To conclude
Thank you for reading! Feel free to ask any questions. For your information, we would like to work on a new application dedicated to our customers. It will extract data from one or several Kitsu instances to build reports for your Producers, clients, and studio owners. If you are interested, please contact us, we are still in the specifications phase!
