 We have an adapter for a small Mac, which doesn't have HDMI, but it has Mimi something, something. It has a VGA and... It's fantastic. Yeah. I had to use it, because I only... No, we were using Macs. I'm not using Macs. I'm using... It is... It's only have a DVD and... Same board. It's working. Hey. Ah, no. Okay, we'll get started. I'm Jonathan Williamson. I run CG Cookie, along with my partner and our team. And today, I want to mostly talk about kind of building and running a predominantly blender-based business. So we're not exclusively Blender, but Blender does account for probably 95% of all business that we do. Just a little bit of backstory real quick. CG Cookie is kind of two things at the moment. It is both an education training company and a marketplace of sorts. So basically, we have two sites. We have CGCookie.com, which is then the education site. And we have the Blender Market, which is then the marketplace for Blender artists and developers to sell resources, tools, et cetera, et cetera. So, first of all, I want to talk about why we do what we do. I think that the environment for business in Blender is growing really, really quickly. And I think that there is a lot of businesses just getting started. And so if we can take some of our experiences and share those, then fantastic. At the end of the day, I think the next few years within the Blender world for business is going to be really, really exciting. Not just for the sake of commercial entities using Blender or anything like that. No, but instead for businesses that really try and instill a lot of the open-source spirit, promoting open-source, focusing on individuals, on people, supporting people as independent artists and developers. That's kind of our goal, and that's why we do what we do. So to talk about that, basically, forgetting about the what we do. CGCookie makes education. We do products, whatever. But the reason we do what we do is to try and help independent artists and developers to succeed while supporting open-source. And that can mean a lot of different things. That can mean contributing to the Blender development fund to help ensure that Blender continues. It can mean helping freelance artists build the skills that they need in order to be a successful freelance artist. So that's really the goal. Like Tom said in his opening speech, Blender is designed and built for independent artists and small teams. And I think that those independent artists and small teams need a better support network. Of course there's things like the Blender network that's just fantastic for connecting. But we also need the ability to learn how to become a good artist or to become a good developer. And a lot of those resources don't really exist in any kind of structured format outside of more traditional education routes. Now I should say that a lot of the ways that we do business with CGCookie and the way that we produce things and make content is designed around our own experiences based in the United States. And one of those is the ridiculous cost of education in the States. I realize it's a bit different in Europe, but in the States the average student currently graduates with $30,000 in student loan debt. And most of them right now don't get jobs out of that. There is no guarantee even though that's what most people go for. And like I went to school for two years after high school before dropping out to then just do CGCookie. And I am still paying those student loans. And that's kind of ridiculous to me. You know it's two to four years of education to help become an adult, to gain real skills and to be a successful person, however you want to define that within society. And yet most of us, at least within the States, have debilitating debt that we have no hope of paying off in any kind of reasonable term. Particularly for artists. Noah Bradley who is a concept artist who does a lot of Magic the Gallery cards and things like that. Fantastic Artist, he wrote a really really good article I think last year on basically his experience in becoming an artist and why he fundamentally believes you should not go to art school. And it was cool. To me it was really spot on. But a lot of the basic or the key art schools, like if you want to go to the Rhode Island Institute of Design or if you want to go to the Vancouver Film Institute. These are all established schools, really really good curriculums, very very good student based, great support networks and yet you're going to spend $100,000. For a lot of these schools a two year program is $45,000, $80,000. Nobody, well not nobody, vast majority of us cannot afford that so you take loans. But when you get out of school you have all of these loans and debt and whatnot that you've then spent to get this education and yet then you get an entry level position that's probably going to pay 20, 30, if you're lucky $45,000 a year which is basically the cost of living in most places in the states. So you spend the next 20 years paying off your student loans. That's kind of ridiculous. So basically with CJ Cookie what we want to do is to, for the digital artists, for 3D artists, for 2D artists we want to create a real viable alternative to art school. If you want to go to school to learn animation or if you want to go to school to learn game development don't spend $45,000 a year to get taught things that chances are just because of the university structure they move pretty slowly and most of the techniques and things that they teach are already out of date. So what's your money good for? If you're going to school for the experience for the networking and things like that that's awesome and for me that was the most valuable thing from my time in school was the experience. I didn't gain anything in terms of practical skills from that experience. So that's basically the gist of it. We want to help independent artists, small teams, independent artists and developers to find a way to educate themselves without going into debilitating debt and at the same time support open source particularly in the case of Blender. Like I said in the beginning Blender accounts for 95% of all business that we do and even if we forget about the fact that we really like open source and we're passionate about it it's a really good business investment to ensure that open source continues because that's paying the bills for us right now. So what do we do? How does that actually look? Basically CG Cookie does a few things as far as the courses and learning flows. We launched a new site back in July and that was basically seven years of experiences built into one site final. We started back in 2008, 2009-ish kind of between there. It was originally created in 2008. I came on board in 2009. At the time we started out as just a basic tutorial blog news site. It wasn't even focused on Blender, it was just a general tutorial site. Over the course of the next few years we started doing more and more Blender training because we did one Blender tutorial and it got a lot of views. We did another one, it got a lot of views and then a lot more and a lot more and it just kept going and over the next five years we basically have slowly transitioned to start creating a complete Blender curriculum. Which is something that I think every single Blender conference that I've been to, this is my fifth one now, there have been discussions on how can we make a Blender curriculum? How can we provide the resources for schools or groups or studios to just say hey if you want to learn Blender, here's a curriculum. A curriculum that's up to date, that's simple, it's modular, that you can apply to if you want to learn animation, you can learn fun, if you want to learn modeling. That's what we're trying to create now. And we're doing that through what we call learning flows, which are nothing more than basically curated sets of courses. But I don't want to get into too many specifics and more focus on just the generals. With that though, since we are talking about trying to create a real viable education source that also means you've got to have applicable knowledge. You've got to be able to test yourself in those skills. So if you take a course or you take a learning flow, are you actually learning from it? So then, you know, just building in things like the exercises and testing. And then there's gamifications of whatever, it's fun, just encouragement. Beyond that though, you know, part of helping people succeed is making sure that there is a community network behind it. So as CGCookie, we run two forms. We maintain and pseudo run the Blender artist forms, mostly just making sure that it stays alive, that it stays independent, and that it's always there as an unbiased source of Blender community for Blender artist. And then we also run our own CGCookie forms. And both of those, you know, the goal of each of those is to have a community behind Blender. You know, Blender is very, very community driven, and we want to make sure that that stays alive. Beyond that, we also run the Blender market. Tom hit on a little bit, but basically it's... The Blender market's goal is to give creators in Blender an audience. You know, if you want to be a successful, successful independent artist, you need two things, fundamental. You need skills, and you need an audience. Whether that audience is a client base, a fan list, some kind of audience that is willing to reimburse you for your work. And that's what the Blender market's goal is, is say, look, if you are creating things in Blender that you think are worth selling, and that you want to continue creating, whether you are creating Python scripts, whether you are creating reusable models, it doesn't matter, you should be able to do that independently and be able to pay the bills. You know, it's one thing to try and support all of your work just based on donations. But the problem is that doesn't tend to keep up. You do a call for donations, you get a lot of contributions, you get the funding to build the initial tool or build your initial resource. But what happens six months down the line when most of the interest outside of the people that have contributed fizzles out? How do you maintain it? Most cases, it's not. You know, Blender itself is an exception because it has such a strong following and we've got the development fund and things like that. Most independent people can't just create a, you know, my tool development fund and have people sign up for recurring subscription just to support you. If you can, awesome. Most people don't have that ability. So the Blender market's goal is to provide an audience just through its traffic for anyone, even if you have no prior history. You know, if you create something really, really good and you're coming from 3ds Max or you're just new to the Blender community, you don't know very many people yet. How do you build that audience? Well, one way to do it is through the Blender market. The last thing that we do, we built Retopoflow, which is just a retopology modeling add-on for Blender that then is sold through the Blender market. And that really has just basically been, it's been two things. Number one, it's been a passion project for myself. I really like designing tools and building tools and then working with other people to actually make things happen. But it's also been the test case. You know, when we launched the Blender market back in June, we were pretty skeptical of whether it would work. Whether there was enough interest in doing something like that. So we said, well, let's build our tools first and we'll sell those and if that succeeds, then there's at least a suggestion that this might be viable. And so far, I think it's worked. So, CJ Cookie by the numbers. We are six full-time employees, 12 to 15 contractors on and off. Since we are a video streaming site, you know, basically all education is streamed online. You can also download it if you choose. We are now doing over 10 terabytes of video streaming a month. Everything is handled via Wistia.com, who is, shout out to them, fantastic video host if you're doing any kind of business video. On a general month, there's over 20,000 logged-in visitors within somewhere in the realm of 60 to 80,000 visitors, unique per month, I think. We've got approximately 5,000 paying members at the moment through our citizen membership. Tends to fluctuate. It's growing slowly. And then, you know, we've been seven years in the making and at this point, we're doing just over a million dollars a year in total revenue. Not any profit mix in there, but right now, I think we're growing about 30% year to year. So, you know, our very first year, I think we did about $500 approximately. It may have been more than that, but it wasn't much. You know, when we first started, we had no business model. We didn't know what we were doing. You know, my partner, Wes Burke, was the actual creator of the site. And initially, it was simply, hey, let's try and build traffic, and then we'll figure out how to monetize it. Which, I mean, it's worked, but we really had no idea. So, everything up until this point has been a completely organic process. You know, never have we had a dedicated business plan or anything like that. Personally, I'm very interested in building things. I'm not good at planning things. You know, if somebody comes to me and says, hey, I want to start a business in the next three years, how do I do this? I don't know. You just, you make things. You start making things. And if, you know, if people are interested, they'll tell you. As long as you get yourself out there. So, I mean, one thing that I would suggest, and I've got a couple of, well, we'll get to that. I do have a couple of suggestions to follow this. If there are, is anyone looking to start a blender business? Because I think that there's a lot of people that are, and I think that there's a lot of room for more business within blender. Done well. Done right. Before I get to that, though, I want to talk about some, oh fucks, because if you run a business, or if you run any kind of service, it doesn't have to be for profit. It can be non-profit. It doesn't matter. If you are providing a service that people are paying for, you are going to have those moments where you sit down for breakfast, you're getting your coffee, and then you get a text message. Or you get an email. And your heart sinks, because you realize, fuck, people are sending me money, and they can't access it. Or everything that we just did for the past six months is completely broken. And it's one thing if you're doing something for fun and people just contribute to it or whatever, and then can't access it. No harm done when people's wallets aren't involved. Soon as you involve people's wallets, they get really, really touchy. It's not very fun to send $100 to somebody, and then the next week you can't access anything. That's kind of frustrating. So we had three... Well, we have a lot more than three, but three of those experiences that I wanted to share just for the sake of realizing that everybody is going to have oh fuck moments. And if you are a business, you need to learn how to handle those. Not saying that we have, but you can at least learn from them. So I don't know if anybody is familiar with PayPal or Stripe as far as implementing it in your site, but the first one, for getting the PayPal IPN link. When we launched the new site, CGCookie 5, we upgraded to a different version of PayPal subscription services. PayPal, I don't know if you know, has something like 35 different payment products, and they all work differently. So we switched to a different one because it handled a lot of things a lot better. Turns out the IPN, which stands for the instant payment notification, is basically the system that PayPal uses that when they receive a recurring payment, they then notify our system and say, hey, you received a payment, make sure you update the person's account and do anything else that you need to do. That IPN link is hard-coded in the payment profile. And we forgot to update it. So for the first month and a half, every single person that subscribed via PayPal on the new site didn't update correctly. They sent us their money, but the site didn't know it. That sucked, and we are still dealing with that today. The same thing. Stripe is our credit card payment processor, and they use web hooks. And so anytime they receive a payment, they send us a JSON data, and they say, hey, here's the data, here's the customer, here's their payment status, et cetera, et cetera. Go ahead and update them and do what you need to do. Now, we still don't know what happened. It failed. And for an entire month, recurring payments weren't getting logged. And we kept seeing, we'd see a whole bunch of sign-ups, and then they'd drop off. And we're like, well, that's weird that people aren't sticking around for more than a month. I mean, if people don't like the service, that's fine, but typically most people stick around longer than that. And then you realize, oh, all their payments are still there. What is going on? Those are the kind of moments that are a little heart-sinking. So if you're doing this as a business, just prepare for that kind of thing. And the way that you prepare for it is customer support. You have to build customer support loyalty from day one. There is a lot of businesses, I dare say people, that focus 110% on the product and only on the product, and then say, well, you know, I'll deal with the support issues later. I'll figure out how to solve the problems afterwards. First, we're going to build the thing. But then you've lost the trust. So when you have these kinds of, oh, fuck moments, you have to deal with them. The way you deal with them is building customer trust, or user trust, community trust. If you have the trust, well, for the most part, people will forgive you as long as you don't keep messing up. So I think what I would suggest for anybody that is starting to do a blender business or is interested in doing something based around blender, non-profit business, doesn't matter, something where you are building a service or offering a product of some kind, prepare yourself for that kind of thing, because it will happen. It's really easy to say, oh, we've only got 100 customers, Stripe is working well, PayPal is fine, we're only accepting one-time payments, yeah, no problem. It will happen, I guarantee it. And it will be when you don't expect it. Everything will be going rosy, it's super smooth, it's sailing, and then it happens. So you have to deal with it. But with CGCookie now, after seven years, and we've got, again, we're up to six full-time employees and 12 to 15 contractors typically, one of the things that we have gotten to the point of is realizing we are just now big enough that we can't just work together. We have to actually start adding some structure, making sure that we are consciously taking care of people and that we are consciously providing for people. So one of the couple of things that I would suggest for anybody building a team, or if you already have a team, and maybe you already want to strengthen the team, number one, just remember, family time is way more important than work. We have to find a balance with our work. Just by the fact that all of us here traveled to Amsterdam, well, and then it's kind of simple, but a lot of us traveled a long ways. We're all really, really passionate about what we do, and it's really easy to get completely consumed in things, particularly when you have a messed up moment. It's very easy to say, I'm just going to work 17 hours a day, I'll get a couple hours of sleep, I'll eat, and then I'll work 17 hours again. You can't do that. You can't sustain that. But also, open source really, really matters. Like this stuff that Taun and the Foundation and the Institute, all these things that they've started are really, really important, and I think that there's a lot of things that businesses, or blender businesses in particular, any business built around open source can do to sustain that, make sure that it continues to work. As individuals, we all like to try and contribute and give back and do things like that, but sometimes we need to do more than that, and I think that there is a lot of room for businesses in particular to contribute back to open source, whether that is a studio hiring a developer and contributing code right back to Blender Master, whether that is businesses working on building more training, more education, more documentation, we can always use more documentation. That kind of stuff really, really matters, and it's not just about the bottom line. I mean, sure, being a blender-based business, it's really beneficial for us to continue sorting Blender because it helps ensure our future. It's more than that, though. It helps ensure that there is open source tools that are free and open for the future, and I think that it's really important that businesses make sure to instill that from the very, very beginning. It's easy to think of the open source aspect. You're like, oh, well, as it is, well, I don't have to buy any licenses, I don't have to do anything to that, and that's all great, but you can do more. And I think that it's important that we do. But also, next to that, we are also a remote team, so we are in, I think, four, five different states and three or four different countries. We're completely remote, nobody works in the same building. Every now and then we get together and work together. We have a small studio space outside of Chicago, but for the most part, we're all remote. And when you're remote, there's a unique set of challenges that you have to figure out how to work around. Number one, everyone has to have a sense of autonomy. You have to be able to, not only you as an individual, but also everyone on your team, have the power and the confidence to make the decisions that you need to make to do your job if you're a support person. And somebody says, hey, I'm not happy with the service, I want a refund. Well, it's terrible if that support person then has to go back to somebody else and say, hey, is it okay if we give this person a refund? Give them the confidence to do that. Empower people with the autonomy to make the decisions they need to make. Everybody's going to mess up. It's okay. But it's a lot easier to correct a mistake later than it is to just try and never prevent the mistake. If you try and never have the mistake in the first place, you're just going to spend too much time trying to put in too many rules and too many checks and balances that nothing's going to happen. It's going to move too slowly. I think most of us probably feel the same way about bureaucracy. It's slow. It doesn't move very fast. Empower people with autonomy. Let them make the decisions. If they mess up, it's a learning experience. It's very seldom that somebody can mess up bad enough to really hurt you significantly. Pass that. Take care of your team. Particularly if you're a remote team, it's really easy to forget about the day-to-day well-being of the people involved. If I'm busy doing my thing, I'm working away, working away, and then I realize, wait a second, I haven't heard from David in Prague, I haven't heard from Matthew in South Dakota for a week. How are they doing? Are they working too much? Are they working too little? Most of us, because we really care, work way, way too much. And it's really valuable, particularly in the long term, to say, dude, take a day off. Go have a coffee. Go on vacation. This is particularly a problem in the States because we don't have a lot of rules as far as mandatory time off and things like that. People work way too damn much, and we all burn out. And if you're building a team, or if you have a team, make sure that people aren't doing that. Take care of them. In the States, we work really hard to try and provide health care since everything is privatized. We provide health care for every single full-time employee. We're trying to limit the number of hours to work. This year, we instituted a four-day work week. So we take Friday off every single week. We were initially going to do it just for the summer and see how it went. And it went really well. Basically, we got the same work done. We did better work. And we then got a three-day weekend, which to spend with family. And that worked really, really well. So it's easy for me to stand up here and say that... I mean, I'm saying this a little... It's easy to try and say that when we're successful, we've got a good revenue stream. We're growing. But really, my point is more that most people fear that you have to work more. You have to get more done. You have to check off that to-do list. But that's not the case. What really matters is how much work you get done at. Well, not how much work you get done. The work that you do. Jason Freed, who runs... Basecamp out of Chicago. They used to be known as 37 Signals. They run basically a project management system. He has a really great quote in one of their books. I think it's in one of their books. It may have been in a blog post. And he basically said, look, there are basically zero decisions or zero tasks in a day-to-day business that can't wait until tomorrow. Seriously. Yes, there is that occasional thing that you feel really, really strongly about that needs to get done. If somebody's having payment problems, try and address that as quickly as possible. It just makes for happier customers. But as far as business decisions go, as far as actual work getting done, what's the actual harm if it takes one more day? So take the day off. It's okay. So we were pretty thrilled when the experiment worked out. And we've now instituted it full-time. And so year-round for the foreseeable future, we are doing four-day work weeks. And it's working really well. And that's been one of the most exciting things as far as CGCookie goes internally, because, yeah, we did not increase the hours. So there's been a few companies in the States now experimenting with the four-day work week. And they've basically done, most of the companies have done one of two things. They either just say, just don't come into the office on Friday and just do your normal day and go home. And then a few companies have said, oh, well, don't come in on Friday, but stay two hours longer. That doesn't do anything. Then you're just more exhausted at the end of the day and you just need more time to recover. No, the point is do more, better work in less time. And it works if people are refreshed, they're not burned out. That works. It really does. So that's basically it. Any questions, comments? Yes? Online tutorials? In what way? Your tutorials are very much, you sign up, you do the tutorials, you're in a self-paced learning environment, you stop when you want to stop, you pick it up when you want to carry on. Have you got any plans to expand on that model and go in any other directions of the type of learning resources that you offer? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so with all of the learning resources that we do, the end goal is again to enable somebody to either expand on their existing skill set or to build a new skill set as an independent artist or as a small team. And really that means empowering people to be self-directed. And that's really the goal. We want to provide some direction, but mostly it's, we want to say, hey, here is a suggested learning flow or a path that you can go down, but at the end of the day, we want to make sure that if you want to become a model or if you want to become an animator, you should be able to just make that choice. Does that answer your question? Maybe? Yeah. Very quick one for me. Yes. As a business person, you should also have a business plan for the next five years. Yes. What are you guys going to do in five years? I don't know. I mean, we, so we, I will say, we don't have a concrete plan for the next five years in the sense that everything that we've done up until this point has been pretty organic. You know, we had no intention of launching a blender market whenever we first started and hadn't crossed our mind. We had no intention of creating the learning flows, the curated curriculum when we started out, but all of these things came about as, you know, results of our experiences. So with, for example, with the learning flows, one of the things that we constantly ran into when we were doing just, you know, one-off courses of, you know, create this or introduction to this or, you know, make that animation or whatever. These were all really, really well received and they were cool things. And it was great seeing people's results from them. But the problem that we would always run into is there was no direction within. You know, if, if you wanted to, you know, if you wanted to learn modeling, well, I was like, well, you can kind of take the introduction character modeling course, but really that course should be more focused on modeling. I mean, on characters, not necessarily on modeling. And so then what you have is you have a 25-hour-long course, which is what it was, when really you should have two, like, two-hour courses. So, to answer your question, we have ideas. We have a lot of ideas of what we would like to do. But really it's building on... If you'd like to be distributed, there's not a central office. You're not going to move to the Bay Area. No. You've got 20 million of sheet fundings. No. By buildings. We are very determined to stay bootstrapped. So we are completely self-funded. We've never... Well, that's not technically true. We had... My partner had a small investment from a family member of, like, $1,000 when he very first started. But other than that, everything is self-funded just through organic revenue. One last very quick. You can talk to him the whole conference. Because we had some time for lunch now. So thank you, Jonathan. Have a short break. 25 minutes.