 Hello, everyone. All right. Well, don't clap yet. Got to wait. So my name is Jonathan Wamsen. And today is going to be a little bit of an experiment. Basically, what I wanted to talk about today is business, specifically Blender business. For one main reason, which is I would really like to see more Blender businesses start up. We really, honestly, don't have that many right now. Blender is the single most used 3D package in the world, at least as far as the number of people using it, the number of people involved. And it is continuing to grow a lot. And what is growing very slowly, though, is the business aspect of it. And for a lot of people in open source, that's great. There's actually a decent amount of animosity towards business in open source. And I think some of that is founded. Some of it is unfounded. But what I wanted to do today, basically, is to talk about businesses and kind of open the discussion for that, such that we can build better businesses around Blender since it is basically fledgling. So specifically today, I'm not even really going to talk about Blender. I'm not going to talk that much about businesses. I'm not really interested in numbers. We're not going to see any graphs. We're not going to see how to make a profit in a business. It's none of that. Rather, about people. Because one of the things that makes Blender what it is and that makes it so compelling for, I think, all of us here, but particularly for those of us that have been using it for a long time, but also new people, is the fact that it's open source. And a lot of people coming in from the outside see the open source aspect of it as a flaw. In fact, it's like, oh, it's open source. How do I trust it? It's free. How do I know that you guys are going to be here tomorrow? Well, the fact that it's open source means that it will be here tomorrow. But more specifically, the beautiful thing about open source is that it's community. It's about the people. I mean, if you look at the Blender conference here, name another conference that is like this one. They basically don't exist. There are small ones, absolutely. But this is not a normal software conference. This is not like SIGGRAPH. This is not like most any others. This is a conference of people about a community that all have a common interest. I mean, the number of people that come every year, myself included, because of the people here, I don't come for Blender. I don't come to learn new things. I come to see the people and all the friends that I've made throughout the years of using Blender and being involved in this community. And that, I think, is the most compelling aspect of Blender. And it should be the most compelling aspect of Blender businesses. So to give you a little context, I'm going to start with our story. So we are now at this point. I run two businesses, CG Cookie and the Blender Market. And we fluctuate a little bit between basically 12 and 15 people on the team. We have a core team of basically nine people spread across at least nine states and two different countries. We are entirely remote. I can't really see this very well. Actually, maybe can we dim the lights a little bit? If not, that's fine. I don't really have that much information display. But we're completely remote. We're in South Dakota, Illinois, California. Depending on the time of the year, Portugal, Germany, or Czech Republic, several of our team literally have made a pledge to live in a different country every single year to raise their daughter as a global citizen. And that's really cool. But it's, again, focusing on the people aspect of it. And so we are remote for that reason, specifically. Because number one, we are both a content company and a technical company. A very large part of what we do is web infrastructure for the most part. But it's web infrastructure that then enables content. And so we definitely have the advantage that we can do much of this remotely. But specifically, we do it remotely so that it enables people to live wherever it makes them happy. I think most of us, at some point in our careers, have probably moved somewhere that we didn't want to move for the sake of a paycheck. And that's really not a very fun situation to be in. Yes, it broadens our horizons. It puts us in a new scenario that we're likely to learn something from. And who knows? Maybe we even surprisingly fall in love with a place. But we all definitely have a place, for the most part, that we want to be. And so that's one of the things that we've tried to enable is to put them in those places. We started the first company, CG Cookie, in 2008, literally from a dorm room and a train. My partner was working in the game industry, commuting back and forth in Chicago, a two-hour commute each way every single day. And when you are a little disenfranchised with the industry and you're commuting, you tend to come up with ideas to great new things. And so my partner started CG Cookie originally. And then I was going to school for ceramics, started getting involved, creating tutorials. He had no idea what Blender was at the time. I had no idea what I wanted to do other than I was having fun teaching topology. And it just kind of worked out. We started doing tutorials, actually, just because they were fun, or for me at least. That was just something that I enjoyed doing. And specifically, also, because there weren't any. I actually remember the very first tutorial I created was 2006, I think it was. And it was on modeling a human face, because there weren't any. For those of you that have been using Blender for a while, you'll probably remember this guy's tutorials. Bart, I think, literally had some of the only Blender tutorials on the web at that time. And so that was one of the reasons that I kind of started doing. I was like, well, there aren't any. Why are these not online? And now it seems completely normal. But you've got to remember at this point, YouTube wasn't even a part of Google yet. YouTube was not a learning resource. YouTube was videos online. Who watches videos online? It was not normal at all. So we got started in 2008. We ran into a lot of snags along the way. Happy to share any details. But I had a couple of things that I wanted to touch on. Not as a, ooh, look what we overcame, but simply as a context for, if you're starting a business or you're thinking about starting one, you're going to hit these things. You're going to hit roadblocks. And just because you do shouldn't deter you. Some of our main ones, we started literally in the peak of the 2008 financial crisis while most people, or many people around us, some of us included were losing homes, losing jobs, losing retirements. There was no industry to speak of for us to open. There wasn't a marketplace. And so suddenly we were starting a business within something that everybody was losing money at was not the greatest idea. But it worked for one reason, I think, which was basically there was a lot of people out of jobs and suddenly needing something else to do. And people suddenly saw that, well, maybe I could actually turn this into a career. And so we got lucky in that sense. But basically it meant that we started because there was a void. And so then we started to fill that void. We sold training that anybody in the industry would tell you, who the fuck uses Blunder? Nobody uses Blunder. Why are you teaching Blunder? That was one of the better choices that we made, I think, without ever knowing that we made it. Because we started, when my partner started CGCookie originally, like, because I got involved three or four months after the project started. He didn't know what Blunder was. He actually was requesting people to do tutorials for him and I submitted a request or a proposal and he was like, what's Blunder? And just went upon doing some research. I think his reaction was, nobody uses Blunder. I'm not gonna pay you to do a Blunder. Ah, fuck it, we'll figure it out. So we did it. And it was like three months later that it accounted for 95% of all traffic to the website. So that worked. But the point was that it was, again, it wasn't something that people used, or nobody used it. And we're also, I think the biggest challenge actually was from the community itself. We got told many, many times that everything should be free. How dare you charge for a tutorial when Blunder is free? What would, actually, my favorite quote, I think I've shared this at a conference before was, what would Tom think if he knew that you were selling this? I'm like, he does? No? So that was that. And the second business, then, is we started the Blunder market. And it was very different for us. We started CJCookie completely organically. We never intended to start a business. We never intended to even work together. My partner, literally, we've been working together since 2008. It wasn't until 2011 that we ever met in person. And that was to literally sign our incorporation papers and to make it real. And that was kind of strange. But we started the second one with every intention of starting a business and a business to actually bring in money and to enable other people. And that was in 2014. That was the Blunder market. And the Blunder market is a marketplace for people to sell Blunder add-ons, resources, and assets. And the challenge in this case was that there was no market. And in the business sense, there was no market for Blunder products. There was literally like two products, I think, available on the web that anybody had sold in Blunder. And one of them was a donation model. And that it was donation in order to then go completely GPL and open source. And so why would you start a business when literally there's no customers? Well, so we decided to create it. But again, we're told that everything should be free as in beer. Again, and again, and again. I still hear this at least three days a week. The thing that is a little bit of a misnomer with the Blunder market is everything. It's GPL, everything. If it is a Blunder add-on, it's GPL, it's open source. And so that discussion has evolved a lot over the years. But again, I bring it up only as a, this is an example of challenges that you're going to run into. And so you have to ask yourself, why? Why do I want to start this business? Why do I want to, why do you want to get into discussions over and over about why this is a positive thing? Or if it's not a positive thing, or even be willing to admit to yourself if you made a mistake. And that's really where it comes down to this. We have a very, very vested interest in people and inherently then in Blunder. Kent is not actually explaining Iron Man. I actually, I asked, Kent Tramel is the content lead for CG Cookie. He's the primary Blunder tutorial author at this point. And I asked him, hey, would you give me a caption for this photo, Decarp? I use it and was like, I'm explaining Iron Man. It's like, okay, as long as you're okay with me putting that on the slideshow. So that's what he's doing. But specifically, where the open source aspect of Blunder comes in is because of people. One of the things that businesses that are built on Blunder have a really unique thing to do, and this applies to basically all open source projects. WordPress is probably the biggest example of something that's already doing this and doing it quite well. And Blunder can definitely take some suggestions from that, I think. But where it really has a potential to do incredible good is in its ability to both further the software and to further people at the same time. Because what I mean by that is if as an individual I start a business and I build that business on Blunder, whether I'm creating freelance services, whether I am selling renders, whether I'm enabling other people to sell things, doesn't really matter what the business is, but the point is I have made a stake in Blunder that when Blunder succeeds, I can succeed. So when Blunder grows its user base, I can grow my customer base and vice versa. As I grow my customer base and build up my business, my ability to contribute back to Blunder goes up. To give you an example, and I have to figure out how to phrase this right because it's not intended as a brag by any means. The Blunder market now is growing a lot and it's doing well. And so far it is now at this point I think the single highest contributor to the Blunder development fund of anything. We're doing typically about $1,000 a month to the development fund and over time have done, it's right about $35,000 in the last couple of years to the dev fund. It's not a ton of money in the scheme of people's salaries and things like that, but what it is, what's really, really cool is that's $30,000 that was contributed by you guys. Because the way that the Blunder market works is anybody that sells on the market can choose to allocate a portion of their earnings to the development fund and then we will donate it on their behalf each month. And suddenly just because of that, it's enabled $30,000 to go towards Blunder's development that would not have been donated otherwise. I know a lot of people would like to say, oh yeah, if I made $1,000, I'll go ahead and give 100 of that to the development fund. But the vast majority of people won't. You get caught up in bills and you realize, oh my mortgage is late, or this is that and that. But it's very easy to say, you know, if I'm gonna sell a product and I'm gonna sell it for $100, I don't mind giving $10 of every product to the development fund because that's future earnings. It's just, it's the exact same idea of, hey, the best way to save for your retirement is just make sure you never see it land in your account to begin with, just take it out. It's the same thing. And so what it is, is suddenly we've enabled people to take a vested interest in Blunder by taking an interest in themselves and in other people. And that's kind of cool. The other aspect of that is suddenly we now have several hundred people earning money with Blunder every single month that were not earning that before. Now it's not that they've changed their career necessarily or that they've suddenly just moved from one set of earnings to another. It's no, it's literally a new marketplace that did not exist previously. And for reference, that is over $500,000 now of money that has gone back into the Blunder community's pockets to further Blunder. And I think that's personally pretty cool. So where this starts to come into play though with businesses is you have to take care of your people and be really diligent to do it. And I'll give you an example and then I'm gonna stop talking about me. I stopped doing Blunder training. About two years ago because I burned out. Really, really hard. At this point in time, I basically don't consider myself a Blunder artist because I don't do Blunder anymore. I don't. I mean, part of it is I run two businesses and that's a very normal nature of growing up a business is you start doing things that you never intended to do like running payroll and filing tax reports and figuring out if you have Nexus in Texas and stupid things that you never intended to do. That's normal. But I have a partner who does most of that. I stopped doing Blunder training because I didn't take care of myself. I basically did nothing but training for like 18 hours a day for like 15 years and I burned out. That's it. I still love it. I still like to try and do it, but I don't. And then when it started becoming a concern was like, you know what, that's just me. If I need to change, that's all right. But then I've started seeing it in our team members where Kent was starting to burn out, Tim was starting to burn out and we realized wait a second, we don't have this balanced. We're like these guys, we're gonna lose these guys because they're working too hard. They're somehow or another, we have to take better care of them. And that's where I think all of us can be really careful as we're starting businesses, if we're building an existing business, don't burn out your team. And that means like a couple of things that we have done that is I think been really helpful, although we have yet to know for sure, is two things in particular. So now this is slightly specific to us just as a full dedicated team that we're all working full time, doing nothing but this, as a freelancer, it's very different, but the same thing applies. Two things that we did, number one, we have basically a maximum number of hours you're allowed to work per week. And in this case it's most people don't work Fridays. So we all tend to work slightly longer days just because we love what we do and we care. But that ends up being are you working 70 hours, 90 hours, 100 hours a week? You don't know, like how long can you sustain that? So what we did is we said, fine, don't work on Fridays. That's it, just four day work weeks. And it's worked very, very well. And we still get the same amount of work done. We just do better work in more efficient time. The other thing that we did though is we set a minimum vacation policy. You are absolutely supposed to and required to take a certain number of days off. And if you don't, we are going to disconnect your login and you are not going to login to work. Because it's more important to you, the employee, the person and the business that you don't burn out. So get out of here, get out. And I only bring those up as examples because when you're starting a business is when you can most easily make those changes. It's really hard to do something like that after you're really established and you've already made all of these practices and you all have bad habits already because we all have terrible habits, we all do it. So if you're thinking about it and you're worried about, now is your chance to do it. So enough about us. I'm gonna talk a little bit about just some overall suggestions based on our own experiences of how you guys can do it. And I'm not talking about, how do you build a business? It doesn't matter what you build. But in terms of some overarching things that you can do. Specifically because these are, they may seem like common sense, but the number of people that don't do these things is mind blowing. So as an example, or not as an example. First of all, be honest with yourself and your team. That one's pretty straightforward. I don't think I really need to elaborate on that other than honesty matters. And it's really nice when the team trusts each other. And if suddenly a member on the team is intentionally trying to hide a mistake that they made just because they don't wanna be embarrassed about it. Well what happens the next time when you make a mistake or I make a mistake, am I gonna trust you to tell you that? It's you ought to be able to trust each other completely. And if you don't trust your team members, take a good look. But that also applies to your customers. If you make a really bad mistake, admit it, be open with them. Some examples, and yes, these are all mistakes we made. If you store your passwords in plain text and then discover it, tell people because they probably wanna change their passwords and you should enable them to do that, not sweep it under the rug. In our case, we were using a membership software that we didn't build, we just, we bought it. And they were all passwords were stored in plain text and we had no idea. And then a customer approached us and was basically like, are you guys aware that you have one of the biggest security breaches that a business can have right now and you can get sued into the ground for good reason? No? What? So that's, you know, when you discover those things, you A, you fix them immediately, but you admit it because it's very easy to say, oh, we're gonna sweep it under the rug and nobody will notice and it's fine. You know, don't blight the reputation. Yeah, but what if people already know and you swept it under the rug and then suddenly your reputation is, oh, they're the ones that hit it because they didn't want anybody to know, but everybody already knows. Your reputation really, really matters because then it enables you to do things like this. Like email 100 people that an event is going on, but then email all 100 of those people 100 times each. It's not very fun to suddenly discover that you've sent out 20,000 emails to just a handful of people who should have only gotten one email. And what's great is if you're honest with your customers from the get-go, people don't care. People realize that mistakes happen. It's totally normal. But you know, an email is a little thing. You know, yes, our inboxes are very, very private and that's our space and we would rather people not abuse that. But it starts to have real consequences when say somebody has paid for a subscription and then they think they've canceled and they did cancel and something went wrong in your system and you've continued to bill them for a year. That's not a very fun problem to have, but it happens. And the only thing you can do is be honest about it and you just tell the person, I'm so sorry. Here's absolutely a refund, no questions asked and you move forward, but you don't hide it. You know, you don't say, oh, I wonder if that person won't notice that we've been billing them for a year. They should notice. Nothing, I already covered that. Just own your mistakes, don't cover it up. So then use that, admit what you don't know because there will be plenty of things that you don't know and that's okay, but admit it because if anything, it's an opportunity to learn what you need to do. This is, oh yeah, don't work too much. We already talked about that. So what can you do? If you're starting a business, is it, are you doing freelancing? Are you solving somebody's problem? Are you building a tool that then enables them to save a hundred hours of work in the cost of an hour? I don't know, that could be one thing. Are you providing a benefit for expanding other people's abilities, training? Are you creating something that people want, making them happy, open movies? Are you making people happy, there you go. You know, all of these things are businesses. So my point is not to tell you what to do, but simply if you've had an itch at the back of your mind that's I really, this needs to happen. Like why doesn't this exist? Why is this problem still not fixed? Well, maybe that's your chance to fix it. Some examples, Mr. Bart runs Blunder Nation and it is, Blunder Nation? This is an example of an existing Blunder business that's been around for a long time. Maybe a lot of people don't think of Blunder Nation as a business, but it is. It is absolutely a hub that connects all the other little parts of the community together. The number of times that they're like, I mean, I know for me, I actually learned Blunder through Blunder Nation originally, which that part of Blunder Nation doesn't really exist anymore, but it is still absolutely a hub for connecting, connecting healti to what Sebastian's doing or connecting this little micro portion of the community to this little micro portion of the community. And that's a real need, and that's what it is. Another example is Calguimilo Softworks. This is actually one of our sellers on the Blunder market and they are actually a production studio in Brazil that they're not running an add-on company, they're running a production company. But one of the great things about running a production company is you discover that you have lots of, lots of problems that you would like to solve and so you tend to build in-house tools to solve those problems. But you're not the only one having those problems. Guarantee it. Like for them, they built a product called Bake Tool and Bake Tool just basically makes it easier to bake out your scene. Bake out 100 objects at a time and then just do it in one step. Anybody doing baking has had that problem. So they just realize, well, why don't we just sell our byproducts and say we can polish this up, which will make it easier for our own artists to use and we'll do it and then we can sell that and then that just funnels into more development efforts. Another example then is Nimble Collective. This is a fairly new one, but a lot of you guys have probably heard of them and Nimble Collective is, A, they're contributing a lot back to Blender, supporting the development fund, hiring developers, but they are basically a Blender-focused animation platform in the cloud and that means two things. One is they're offering actually animation as a service. They will help you animate. At least I believe they're doing that. I hope I didn't misquote that. But specifically what they're doing is they're connecting people to the production pipeline. If you think of what you need within a production pipeline to build a film, be that a 30 second short film to a full feature, there's a lot more tools that you would like to have than maybe you have on your laptop, particularly if you're starting out and particularly if you own a Chromebook or something that doesn't have a hard drive that you can install local software to. Suddenly your ability to reach production tools is challenging. So that's one of the things they're doing is they're enabling people, as long as you've got a decent internet connection to access the entire production pipeline of tools from the cloud. And this is particularly important for things like Chromebooks, and I don't know what it's like in Europe, but right now one of the things that's happening in the States is the shift in middle schools and high schools for what type of laptops do they use has changed. It used to be mostly Windows machines, then it was mostly Macs for a while and now it's Chromebooks. And that's awesome. Chromebooks are easy. They're light. They're nice machines. They have one big problem. They install software on them. You can't run Blender on a Chromebook unless it's in the cloud. So that's something that they're doing that I think is pretty cool. So then the other part of that, we've talked about people, we've talked about what you could do and how you can do it, but how does that play into Blender? And really it comes in in a couple of ways. First of all, the simple one is contribute. Make your voice heard, hopefully politely, but firmly. Be a voice in the community for the things that you care about in Blender, whether that is commenting on Blender Nation, whether that is submitting bug reports, whether that is developing yourself, doesn't matter. Just become active, be a part of it. Obviously investing in its development is a pretty clean cut one. As long as you've got money to spare, you can chip money in and you take no responsibility and it's kind of great. You just like make Blender better. Obviously you're not, invest is maybe not necessarily a good word choice initially because you're thinking, well if I put $1,000 in, what am I getting back? And that's not the way that open source development works. But in reality when you realize if your business is built on Blender and you're built up of Blender users, it is absolutely investing in Blender to contribute to the development fund because you are contributing to ensure that Blender continues to exist and to get better each day and that suddenly the tools that your business is built around is getting better every day and the customers that your business is built around are happier each day because Blender is getting better and better. So you're absolutely investing in Blender's development and in your own future in that sense. And that's really, I think... Oh, I actually missed my example. The other one was literally to hire a developer. Particularly if you're running a production house, if you're doing anything where you're using Blender on a regular basis, hire a developer. Let them work on your own projects but contribute some of those projects back to Blender as a whole and your ability to make Blender better at the same time while improving the life for all of your customers is also pretty substantial. So that's it. That's my pitch is build a business on Blender but let's do it right because one of the things that's great about Blender right now is that we are very much... We have a very fledgling market of sorts. There's not a lot of business in Blender yet. It's not a very big number of companies, not a whole lot of individuals. And so we have a good chance to really make an impact and do it well and continue in the spirit of Blender. And at that point, I would kind of like to just open up. We've got... We're technically scheduled till another 20-some minutes. And so I would like to just kind of open up as a discussion from here as far as anything Blender business related. Whether you have a problem that you're trying to solve and you don't know how to solve it, let's talk. If you have a problem with something that you see that's going on around business, let's talk. If anything. Floor is yours. Actually, do we have the microphone? Perfect. Actually, yeah, or Bart, would you want to? Would you be willing to run the mic? And then Dylan, add something. Okay. Hi, I'm Christoph. I am a teacher. This is my business, part of my business. I teach at schools for over seven years. And at the first of November, it will be my official business. Germany is a very, very, very strange place for some stuff like this. And being a freelancer, which means I do a whole lot of different jobs. Summary topology for VR or maybe objects to print, character development or reconstruction for museums. I did a lot of stuff and I will do a lot of more, but well, I think one of the most important points you just said is don't do too much. I had a very, very rough half year because I go from mission to mission to mission to mission to mission. And I'm realizing I'm very tired. Learning to say no is a very, very important skill that most of us tend to ignore, myself included. That was part of my burnout, was I didn't say no. Nearly often enough. Yeah, very good point. Yep, and I miss your voice. Well, thank you. Dylan, you had something? I know you mentioned there's not a lot of businesses based on Blender right now. So maybe there's not an example out there, but you mentioned like building it for the people, making sure you focus it on the people. Do you have any examples where there was a business maybe based on Blender, maybe not, that didn't do this and failed? Not one that immediately springs to mind, in part because I don't really pay attention to those as much as I can, but I'll give you an example of one that I'm aware of. Aware of in the sense that I've talked to the owner and I know what they do and how they work. And this is very, very common, I think. And it's a business that basically they provide a service that's valuable, but they're doing it for all the wrong reasons. And what it has led to is they do absolutely everything they can to cut the bottom line. Where in this case, the person is in it exclusively for themselves, which is, I'm not saying that you shouldn't try and make money from your business or anything, but that means that he's effectively violating and taking advantage of all of his team. He goes out of his way to make sure that he can hire the cheapest possible person in the cheapest part of the world, not because they're the best person for the job, but just so that he can pat his bottom line more. And I think that's very, very common. And that's actually one of the points that I meant to make in this. There's a, one of the things that we ran into a lot starting up CJ Cookie and the Blender Market for sure was effectively came down to accusations of saying, oh, you're just trying to make money. You're just trying to rip people off and when something should be free. And the point is that, yes, a business needs to make money. Ideally, it makes more money than it spends. Ideally, it's profitable, but it doesn't have to exist solely for making money. And I think that becomes a very simplified argument against businesses is because, frankly, there's many like the example I just gave you that do do that, that they're just trying to make as much money as possible for themselves while stomping over everybody else. So that happens, let's not have it happen here. Okay, thank you. Hi, my name's Mark Kings North. Hi. I currently have to have a lie down every now and again when I get an email saying I've sold something. Very nice. Which you've gotten a lot of emails recently. Yeah, I'm like, oh my God. Yeah, so I'm a software engineer by trade and that's kind of what I did for a big organization. So yeah, so my story is that, yeah, I got into Blender a few years ago and then kind of realized I could write Python in it this year and started playing about Blender Markings and other stuff. So yeah, I suppose my question is kind of like the burnout side of it really, because this isn't my day job, it's what I do at night and although I've got plenty more ideas, I know that the more things I make, the harder it's gonna be to support and maintain those. So I suppose this is kind of a longer chat but it's kind of like what would you say should be next when you get to that point where you go, oh man, what do I do with this now? I mean, I would ask you, what are you doing it for? Are you doing it because you're interested in tons of ideas and so each one that you do is just a new idea that you gotta pursue that's interesting or is it because you're trying to walk away from a job that you don't like and so you're working to enable that is those kinds of questions come up a lot but also then we all have a ton of ideas and that just comes down to, sometimes you just need to say no even to the ideas that you like. Even to myself. Yeah, oh my gosh, absolutely to yourself. And that was the thing that I had always struggled with and still very much struggled to this day is I'm really interested in a lot of things to a severe fault because I tend to say yes to all of those things and I always regret it. That's it, yeah, yeah. I would just say, decide which of those things you're most wanting to focus on and intentionally focus on those few. Yeah, sure. Okay, yeah, maybe we'll chat more after. Oh, absolutely. I have a question for you about burnout as well. Okay. I've been in the situation and I think that doing work that you love with people that you love, it's a real trap. It is. And add on top of that working from home with having no boundaries between work and private time, how do you manage that? How do you switch off at the end of your day? It took about eight years of practice. I know. Couple of things. Yeah, I mean, you actually just said it really, really well. Doing stuff that you love with people that you love is really dangerous because you tend to do too much. Now, at the same time, if you're gonna spend over half your life doing these things, it's nice if you love what you do and you like the people that you're around. For me, it's, I don't have a clear answer. Other than just working really, really hard to build better habits. Cause like what I used to do, when we were starting CGCookie, I was a college student. And so I was single. I didn't have a very heavy class load. I dropped out after my sophomore year to continue doing this. And I had, effectively, all the time in the world. My expenses were incredibly low. I think I was literally living on like $200 a month. It's at a college, I had student loans, so that helped. But one is I had all the time in the world. And so what I did is I built really strong habits of I would work 16 hours a day. And sometimes I wouldn't see people. Like I wouldn't leave the house. I would just work all the time. I mean, it did great things for progression, but it paid a price. And so what it's taken now over the last like, basically as I started burning out on training was when I realized, hey, I have to get better at this. And so a couple of things that I did was, number one, if it's 6 o'clock, laptop's closed. Specifically, the laptop is closed. Because I typically work from two machines. I have a home office. That's my desktop. And that's where I tend to do my very intensive work. So whether that is solving, whether it's a Python problem, if it's working on a model, if it's doing course production, that's where the real work gets done. And then my laptop is where I do customer support. I do emails, do outreach. All of the less tangible things. And that's where the trap always happened for me, was like, oh, well, I'll just get one more email in. I'll answer that one more person. I'll answer a bunch of forum threads. There's always one more thing that you could do. Then suddenly, oh, I got a new tweet. I'll go ahead and reply to that. Watch television, answer email at the same time. Yeah, exactly. You're sitting on the couch next to your wife, eating dinner with a laptop. So I just made habit of, I close the laptop and I always leave it on the table. So I have a physical separation. The other one was actually having a home office helped a lot because then if I'm in the office, I'm working. If I'm not in the office, I'm not working, with the exception of the kitchen counter. I always work at the kitchen counter in the morning because there's sunlight and my office is dark. So that's really, it's just being really diligent about building better habits. And now it's not hard for me. Now come six o'clock, I just shut it off. Like I mean, I'm still absolutely guilty of every now and then like, oh, I'll do email for a while in the evening or sometimes I'll have a late night just because I feel like it. But what it also means is when you're more disciplined on that means, you know what? I'm having a crappy afternoon. I'm gonna walk away for four hours, tackling the evening, work, change your schedule. And sometimes that can really help too. But that's it. It's just, how do you build the habits? And there is no good answer because we're all different. But I think just being aware of it, yeah, having family around helps a lot. If you're living alone, I think it's much, much harder. It got much easier for me when I got married because then I wanted to spend time with her and wanted to make sure that she wasn't resentful of me working on the things. So yeah, good. Thanks. Anyone else? And by all means, if anybody has something that they're thinking about, bring that up as well. I'm happy to share anything that I've done, any advice, but now it's also a chance for you to take the stage and, you know. So yeah, hi, thank you a lot for the nice talk. One, because I think everybody here have been in this burnout thing. Everybody has worked a lot. One thing that I do, me and my wife and my daughter, we try to do is like, when you are going inside the home, before you go, take a deep breath and don't speak about working inside the home. If you want to speak about something very important, okay, but I believe everybody here has or making work that they don't like or because it's money and you have to live with money. So just go away, take a walk with your wife, your best friend, doesn't matter what. And set the work aside? Yeah. Completely agree. Because working is not, is he eating you alive sometimes? Yeah, well and it can, just because you love what you do doesn't mean that it won't wreck it. And it's very easy to stop loving what you do because you loved it too much. Especially with computers because when I started using Blender and I was learning Blender, I was spending really 18 hours per day just. My wife was saying, was saying that my new girlfriend is my computer, so it was a little bit strange to hear this kind of thing. But it's a very strong hint. And also it's not paid, let's say. This is important time for us and the time is passing very fast. Sean was first and then. So how, the people that complain that you're charging for something that they feel should be free, right? Because everybody thinks if Blender's free, everything relating to it should be free. How do you deal with those people? Because it's gonna happen, right? Everybody's, I mean not you, you've had an established business for a while now, so. And you say you still hear it, but. Oh yeah. People starting a business who are intending to sell something, it's gonna happen, right? Like I remember when Andrew Price would start selling his courses, people just went through the roof, right? Blender artists, how do you deal with that never will thread? Do you just ignore it? Do you go on and say well, obviously it's not for you? Like what do you do? Couple things. For one is I don't look at it as a threat. I look at it as a point of education of this person has an opinion and that's fine. But at least from my experience, I believe that opinion is wrong. And so like oh I try to make that clear from the get go is this is fine. If you're going to make this argument that everything that we produce with our time around Blender should also be free just because it's for free software, fine, make your case. Go on, make it. Like there is no argument there because you have to inherently then say that your time is not worth anything. Sorry. That's not an argument that anybody can make in the case of when you're working on addition. That's one thing where Blender the core platform is free and people get paid to work on it. So should everybody that does Blender development should that be free? Should they not get paid for their time? Because that's what the argument is. So that's one way that I deal with it is just use it as a point of education. And typically whether or not I do that and whether or not I decide to have that exhausting conversation is just depends on how reasonable the person seems to be from the get-go. If you come yelling at me, just how dare you fucking sell this? I'm not going to respond. I'm just going to ignore it and just say, jerk. Sorry, there was a comment on YouTube from somebody saying, oh, why are you selling this when animation notes is free? My wife actually went, block him. Block him. Are you sure? And she kind of like took the mouse from me and blocked him. And honestly sometimes that's the best thing to do because there's a trolling aspect to it. Some people are just trolling it. But I think it has gotten better. I think that that mentality has slowly faded away as basically people have realized that no, Blender's still free and just the onset of selling things is still fine. But the thing that always stuck with me was when people would argue that training had to be free because Blender was free. I'm like, I kind of get the add-on argument. It's still GPL and you're selling a GPL out on that. I don't agree with it, but you can make that case. But to say that, no, this training that I spent a lot of time and money in building for you that suddenly I shouldn't be allowed to charge for it. And it's not that I shouldn't charge for it. I shouldn't be allowed to charge for it. Yeah, no. In short, Sean, I mostly ignore them now. So, I have another question. Yeah, I would be interested. Who here has a business with Blender? Do you pay your bills in part with Blender or in form? OK, and who here has like a company or something like a team or your own thing, like not just being a freelancer, but an actual company thing? Sure, I mean, of course. But you're just one guy. You still count, but yeah, interesting. OK, I'm just asking because we're two guys now and we try to grow and we're thinking about how to do that. And we realize that now that we want to grow, that there probably is going to involve like not growing just a bit, but a lot, like not by one more guy, but probably suddenly like five guys. Because when you want to grow, you have to manage your team. So you need a producer and then you have one more guy. So you have to pay more bills. So you need more jobs. So you have to get more jobs. You need one person to doing like marketing. So now that's four. And yeah, that's just I don't have an answer. That's just the point. Like it's tricky. It's an interesting problem. But yeah, growing is apparently hard. Yeah, well, you either you either have no growth and you have no ability to do anything. You have more growth than you can feasibly handle and it can be just as dangerous as no growth or you have negative growth and they're all hard. Yeah, I had a question about what you see as the greatest business opportunities as the blender user base increases. Do you see it as proportional to the kinds of services and products that have been provided or do you see a change? I feel like I heard two questions there. So one is what what are the big opportunities that are currently out there for blender businesses? And then and then going forward. The big one that exists right now is professional support. Nobody's doing it. Professional support for businesses in that if somebody is running a production studio, who does that production studio go to for help and on demand help for? Hey, we need this. We need this add on built because we can't get our jobs to the render farm quickly enough or hey, how do you solve this problem? Or hey, we have this critical bug and we have to deliver tomorrow. Who is doing that level of support? Several of us have tried and failed for various reasons, but nobody is doing it yet. There's lots of people doing consulting and or at least offering to do consulting and things like that, but nobody is staking their business on we will help you succeed with one. Somebody needs to do it. And if you're interested, by all means come talk to me because I've wanted to do it. I'm not going to do it because I have to say no, but I'd be happy to share anything that we have already, you know, worked through if you're determined to do that. You know, the risky thing is that it's it's it's absolutely a bigger business to get into because it's very or tempting when you start out to take all of the little tiny small jobs and the small jobs don't tend to pay off because, you know, if you get paid 100 bucks and you put in four hours of work, okay, you're not going to pay for a team of four people on that. So you have to basically make a claim, say, no, we're going to do this for real and we're going to be looking at, you know, 10 to $20,000 jobs and do a lot of them. And I will tell you that those businesses that need that support, that have that kind of funding, absolutely are out there and they're kicking down the door. I had a team from China recently at SIGGRAPH just flat out asked, does this exist? And do you need money to build it? So it absolutely, it's there and people are trying to, there's lots of people that want that to happen, but aren't in a position to do it. So that's the big one that I would see. As far as the opportunity scales, it changes a lot. You know, I probably would not recommend today that somebody try and start a training business 100%. Not because I have a monopoly or anything like that, but between CGCookie and BlinderGuru and a lot of the really successful YouTube channels, there's just a lot. There's not necessarily a need for it. Now, if you believe that you can do the training a lot better and offer something new, by all means. But as far as a niche that is waiting to be filled, there's a lot of niches waiting to be filled. And so if you're looking for one, you know, training would not be an easy one to choose. I mean, if you've got, yes, absolutely. There is a large demand for native language training, particularly Spanish, French, many of them. So I don't know if that answers your question or not. It does in terms of the immediate opportunities. I was just wondering in the future, let's say the demand for studios to have a team on site to solve problems to develop and other things. Are there other segments of the market that are large enough to consider? I totally get that you don't wanna go after every little thing. I would say that then some of the other ones that particularly the individuals might consider, there's always more need for development. So if you're a developer, or interested in becoming a developer, even if it's just an add-on developer, like custom Python development for studios is really, really, really valuable. I mean, think of all the tools that you guys made throughout the open movies that you just made because it needed it for that project. Now you guys are lucked because you have a team of developers on hand. Most people don't have that. It always breaks my way, I don't know. And then they fix it. So doing custom, like on-demand development is a big one. Just doing development in general is a big one. It's just like you just identified a possibility of taking the stuff that was done in-house ad hoc and raising it to a commercial standard. Absolutely. So you develop those relationships so that everybody gets a piece of that along the way, but you get a much more polished final product. I mean, one of the reasons that we started the Blender Market to begin with, and I only bring that up because it kind of applies, was I got really frustrated with the number of add-ons that would be created for Blender that were awesome, and the next month an API change would go in and the add-on would be abandoned because there was nobody to maintain it. And so one solution to that that we did was simply have a profit incentive to maintain your add-on. If you're getting paid every single month from sales of your add-on, you've got a little bit more incentive to make sure that that little API change doesn't break things and that it's actually maintained. And there's no reason that somebody couldn't step in and say, well, why don't I just, if you build this thing and make it awesome, I'll then maintain it. Whether or not that's a good solution, I don't know, but it's something that could be done. I think there's a lot of need for basically service-level Blender work that doesn't involve art production. And obviously, people are doing art production for paid for a long time and continue to do it and it's awesome, but Dylan? Last question, I think? Yeah. You mentioned, I know we talked a little bit about growing pains and stuff like that, and I know you guys have a pretty big team. 12, 15 people is not huge, but it's sizable and I wanna know the kind of, maybe any kind of stories about how you guys grew and be the first few people who joined the team full-time and stuff like that. Yeah, so the first two people to join the team, we've worked with a lot of different people over the years. The team that we have are not the only people that we've done, we've hired a lot of contractors for small gigs here and there, but as far as the dedicated, the core team goes. The first two employees were actually Tim Von Rieden and Kent Tramiel. Tim was the concept artist and Kent, it was originally a blender artist and now is the full content lead and still primary blender producer. A lot of, honestly the biggest growing pains is basically what Sebastian is talking about, where you need more people than you can afford because there's not enough man hours in the day to do the things that you need to do, not only that you need to do to bring in more business and grow, but the problems that you have today. We struggle with that every single day. To give you a couple of concrete examples, we really need somebody to own and drive customer support and community engagement. Somebody that is basically going to be the shepherd of the community and make sure that if somebody has a problem with their account that it gets fixed and that they're fighting on the customer's behalf every single day. We don't have that person because we can't afford that person, but we really, really need it and we have problems every single day because of the lack of that position. In order to get that position, we have to grow. So then we have to focus on things like marketing, better sales, et cetera. That requires another person because right now we're just trying to produce the content and we don't have time to do that marketing. So yet again it comes down to, it's the number one problem that I think probably most businesses have, but it's definitely our problem is we need more people in order to grow and to be able to do the work that we already have, but we can't afford more people. The customer support one is probably the big one though. Like for example, I still do a lot of customer support as one of the, as the co-founder and as basically the project lead on the Blender Market and one of the original leads on the CGCookie side, I shouldn't be doing customer support. I should be doing it every now and then for the sake of making sure that I stay empathetic with customers and the problems that they're having and not to lose connection with that. But I don't need to be the person they're going in and manually refunding their payments and connecting their account and doing all that. There's more valuable things that I can do for the business than that. So that's the, you know, but I still do it because somebody has to do it. So yeah, and I think that's it. We're out of time. Thank you everybody.