2018

A year in limbo

After announcing Kirby Next in Summer 2017, everyone was waiting for the new version. We expected to get it out there in early 2018, but it turned into our vaporware horror story. By the beginning of the new year we were not even half done. While we made amazing progress in the first months, we ran into one conceptional problem after the other.

Sales dropped. Why would you buy a v2 license when v3 was just around the corner? But it wasn't around the corner. Not even close.

The crowdfunding budget shrinked and shrinked. We tried to communicate openly, but it didn't help much. It was a tough year, and the pressure was extremely high. While the Kirby Next group was one of the best things that ever happened to us, the way we announced Kirby Next and the plans for v3 were one of our biggest mistakes.

Workshops, workshops, workshops

On the upside, I was able to run a bunch of really great Kirby workshops, as side events for Marc Thiele's Beyond Tellerrand conferences in Munich, Düsseldorf and Berlin.

Those led to various private and public workshops in the following years, such as the one in Nottingham at New Adventures Conference in 2020.

Statistics: How do they work?

Then one day, we received an image from Net magazine. Their CMS survey went really well for us. We will not question their scientific methods.