Interview with Bastian Allgeier

Hey Jens,

I’m happy to answer your questions as good as I can:

1. How much mone do you make?

I’d say 3.95 :slight_smile: In general I’m very happy with how Kirby’s revenue has evolved over the last years. It’s now at a point where it makes around 90% of my living. That’s a very priviledged situation and I’m aware of that. I still say 3.95 because it’s not yet enough to constantly hire people like @sashtown or @distantnative and pay them as much as I’d like to. Whenever I get them on board I need to find more additional client work in order to balance it. That’d be the only reason to “complain” but Kirby is on a very good way and I’m sure the last .05 will be solved soon :slight_smile:

2. Does Kirby grow in sales?

Yes, it does. Kirby always grew very natural and organically and it still does. It’s a couple more licenses every month and over all those years that’s exactly the kind of growth I always hoped for.

3. How much do you like working with Kirby?

Definitely 6! It’s more than a dream. Kirby has become my “digital baby” and I’m extremely grateful whenever I can spend time on it. It’s a wonderful situation to work on such a product and being able to earn a living with it. I absolutely love it!

4. What inspires you to make Kirby

My own clients and their projects. I always tried to come up with something that is as easy as possible to use for my own clients and at the same time speeds up my development time as much as possible. jQuery’s syntax inspired me because I always found it to be extermely easy to understand — even for beginners. I’m also inspired by LEGO even if that sounds weird. All the things I add to Kirby follow the idea of improving the set of building blocks for more creative work.

5. How many work with you now?

@distantnative has been working with me in the last months, especially for the release of 2.1. He has also started a massive new permission feature for the panel. Right now, I’m working alone on decrufting the panel (Behind the scenes) but as soon as that is done, I hope to get Nico back on board to finalize his work on permissions.

@sashtown has been supporting me massively last year and still sends in site updates from time to time. He’s in a huge client project at the moment though, but we still talk regularly about Kirby’s future and ideas and we plan to work more closely together again.

In general I plan and hope to get more people on board in the coming months and years. There are so many loyal users who regularly contribute bug fixes, ideas or are just constantly helping out in the forum. One of my biggest wishes with Kirby is to move the model forward to be able to share some of Kirby’s revenue with the community and its biggest supporters.

6. Do you do anything else than Kirby at work

Yes, I still work regularly for all kinds of clients as a developer, designer and consultant. I have some very old clients, I absolutely love and some exciting new ones. I like the mixture of work for Kirby and client work. It puts me in the position of being my own worst critic when it comes to Kirby, because I have to work with it myself on a daily basis.

7. 1-2 people make more features than 100+. How is that possible

Well, I think in general it’s easier to move quickly as a small team without the overhead of constantly organizing your work. Communication is faster and ideas are easier to realize. Especially when you are working alone you can often just throw stuff out there without any additional loops. That’s sometimes great and sometimes not. With a big team and a big product such as Wordpress, you have to be a lot more careful and strategic how to move forward. I realized with Kirby how much harder it gets to come up with new features and ideas the bigger the community gets. You always have to think about the consequences of every little step you take. I think it’s a big advantage to have a smaller digital product around as it offers more interesting ways to evolve and move forward. I will definitely try to keep it that way :smile:

8. Do you read all the posts in the forum?

I’m really really sorry, but I don’t. I try to read all new upcoming topics and cross-read posts from time to time, but that’s definitely one of the issues of being mostly alone. I get a lot of support tickets I have to reply to in time, because that’s part of Kirby’s professional license model. That’s already pretty tough, because I’m really just the only one doing that. Then there are all the Github repositories with dozens of issues and additionally I try to be active on Twitter as well and recently started the Gitter chat. The new forum has brought such a massive boost in activity that I’m in the lucky position to know that here are always fantastic people around who get connected and talk to each other. I try to be around from time to time as well, but it’s just not possible to read everything.

9. What do you think of demanding people?

Feedback and ideas are always helpful and I’m very happy about that. But I can’t make everybody happy. There was a time with my former product (Zootool) when I really tried and felt pushed to react to every feature request and add ALL the features. But to be honest it went horribly wrong. That’s exactly how bloat-wear starts. I have a pretty clear vision of what Kirby should be and some requests simply don’t fit in there. This is nothing personal. Of course I might even be wrong sometimes, but in general I’m sure it is important to keep an eye on the direction of the product and don’t react to every wish. But if you follow Kirby closely you all know that there’s a lot of stuff in there, which comes directly from your suggestions and ideas.

10. More podcasts or interviews online?

I’ve been on a couple German podcasts, but there’s also another English one, which has been huge fun: http://descriptive.audio/episodes/4

There are a couple written interviews around as well and I will be speaking on HybridConf in Dublin next week and at NightlyBuild in Cologne September 4th. Would be great to see you there :slight_smile:

Thank you for your questions and your constant support. Please feel free to post more!!

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