Big Update, the state of Kurzgesagt (Patreon)

So in June I did a post saying that I was pretty unhappy with how things were going and that we needed to work on our process and improve ourselves. Time for an update.

We improved our productivity something between 50% and 100% (depending on metric, department etc). In less than three months. Without working more hours. If anything working got less stressful than before. I’m honestly kind of in shock how well this went down and insanely proud of my team. 

This is why we declared to publish two videos a month. Because we can do it now without killing ourselves in the process. I don’t want to promise that this will stay like that forever but at least right now it seems that we will be able to keep this going for the rest of the year.

So how did we do it? We updated our processes. Kurzgesagt did start out as a one man team and stayed like that for one year. In the second year we were two people. By the end of year three we were seven. Now, by the end of year four we were sixteen and we are planning to hire three more. 

It was mostly a failure on my part that we didn’t update our processes that much while growing to this size. For the longest time I was violently opposed to change because, you know, Kurzgesagt is very personal to me. My baby and all. Changing things felt like losing the magic of the early days. But this only held us back and made day to day work frustrating. 

So we changed how we communicate with each other, we set weekly goals but most importantly, we gave ourselves strict limitations. 

Before that we had worked ourselves into a corner. Without limitations we were never finished. As we got better and better this got more and more extreme. The pressure rose while you never felt like you really got something done. In the end we worked absurd hours on details that did not improve the final product.

Self set limitations are giving us an objective way to measure if we achieved something. So for example I set myself a 6300 character limit for new scripts. I have finished more scripts since June than in the whole rest of the year. This does not mean that all of our scripts are the same length now (they are not) but if I go beyond 6300 characters I now need a very good reason for it.

Kurzgesagt was never as much fun it is right now. Things feel dynamic and creative and free. You guys are extremely important in enabling all of this, without Patreon we more or less would need to shrink the team by 40% immediately. 

With our new system so many new possibilities are opening up and I’m really super excited of how things will develop next year. I hope we can keep this up and expand Kurzgesagt slowly and in a healthy way, into something that will last for a while and produce a lot of stuff for many to enjoy.  -Philipp

TLDR: We changed things. It worked. Much more content in the foreseeable future.

PS: Basic Income Script is almost done. Late fall/early winter release (yes, for real this time)

PPS: We are working on a behind the scenes video. No schedule yet. Late this year or early next year.