Lekker more people... August update.

Wooting news

Wooting two lekker edition

I hope you had a great summer, enjoyed the weather and feel excited about what’s to come… Fall (on 23 September)!This last summer was great for me. I was able to visit The Netherlands again after 2.5 years. See family, enjoy good bread, cheese, and affordable yogurt. It didn’t put a pause on work, especially not after Computex, but it gave a pause to these updates. I could take it a bit easier. Oh, and of course, we had the first-ever Wooting meetup in Arnhem, The Netherlands.The meetup was small, loosely organized and tons of fun. Erik and I did a small presentation about Wooting’s future, we organized some small activities throughout the day, talked a bunch with each other and ate pizza. With the added surprise that Mrpleasant who unfortunately was not able to attend, had delivered an additional pizza with an amusing note attached. Again in 2021? We’ll see if Quinn will get us to do it again.

Now I’m back in Taiwan again and laser-focused on the future. Getting ready for what’s to come and steer Wooting in the right direction. We’re still far from where we need and want to be. And it’s a rocky road, hard to get a grip on everything.In the previous blog, I touched a bit on growing the Wooting team subject, because we’re short on hands for the amount of work there is. Though we don’t exactly have a large budget for it, we try to invest whatever we can to address our weaknesses.This starts the first topic of this month’s update. We’ll be covering:

See below
The new Analog SDK
The Lekker Edition release & pricing

Please Welcome: Kevin - Product Designer

Kevin joined the team in July 2019 and is here to stay. He’s a product designer by profession but his value to the team is beyond that. He’s young, independent, creative, pro-active and has a desire to learn and tackle issues. A perfect fit.Until so far, we made two products, Wooting one and two. We established the Wooting brand and made clear what our perspective is on product design and function. However, our in-house skill for product design and construction… is non-existent. We always relied on our toddler drawings, freelancers and our manufacturer to realize both the Wooting one and two.It’s an extremely crippling, slow, time-intensive and frustrating process. Besides, outsiders didn’t fully understand our vision, feeling, and ID. That’s why we had decided to bring Kevin on board and invest in his future at Wooting.I met Kevin at a mechanical keyboard meetup in Taiwan, Taichung a few years back. He had won one of our giveaways at the meetup and he radiated a style/character that caught my attention. After having a conversation with him, I kept in contact and thought he’d come into play for one of our future designs as a freelancer. But when Jeroen had the chance to also talk with Kevin during Computex, we quickly concluded that he would be an amazing addition to the team, full-time.Lucky us, Kevin felt the same and now he’s already doing an amazing job working on the Lekker Edition and wrist rest. Wrist rest? Yes, it’s coming and I will share about it in another update.

Community help

We didn’t stop at Kevin. We couldn’t afford another full-time position, but we could afford flexible hours. We needed more help with customer service and finally, get some more consistency with our social posts. Instead of looking outwards, I looked inwards to our Discord community and asked two active young members if they wanted to help with customer service emails and social posts respectively.Copvampire - Ed, a bit of a crazy brit (he sleeps at 4 am), but an amazing dude that is willing to tackle things and already spent countless hours voluntarily working on the Wootabase project. He didn’t hesitate to help out with customer service emails and improving the Wooting knowledgeable.Not Darrel - Darrel, quiet, kind young guy, sharp mind and creative. He’s been around for a while and helping out as WootHelp and even offered to help voluntarily. I declined, he needs to save up for a Lekker Edition (j/k). He’s now making sure that we consistently post things on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.The flexible work is nothing to flex about on Instagram and it’s limited to a maximum budget we can afford. Thankfully they accepted the conditions, we needed the help <3.The process made me look forward to being able to seriously hire employees and grow the team. There are still 2 positions that I’m dire to fill once we can afford it. Meaning, we need more revenue, a serious nice big fat investment or an amazing credit line.

Full-time (technical) marketeer, needs to execute online advertising campaigns, manage review samples and actively work on automating inbound marketing.
Full-time software developer, this requirement is bit wider and boils down to a Jeroen junior without all the specific hardware knowledge. The main job activity is Wootility’s interactivity and logic. Furthermore, assist in related projects and further automating processes.

Right now, we are considering interns for both positions to fill the gap and explore options. The internship position has less high requirements and more space for learning.

Try out the new Analog SDK

Speaking of Internships, Simon, whom almost finished his summer internship at Wooting, released the first version of the re-designed Wooting analog SDK. He’ll not be entirely gone after the internship, thankfully. He’ll keep on-board helping out with the continuation of the SDK while finishing his study. I have not mentioned Simon often enough, but he deserves more praise.Simon is behind the project Aurora, software that unifies RGB effects from multiple brands. He has a great set of skills and knowledge that we’ve tapped for the redesign of the Wooting SDK.As you might know, the Wooting analog SDK can read raw analog values from analog input devices and provides developers easy-to-use tools to create integrations for their application. The goal is to get more native game compatibility for analog input keyboards, instead of relying on unreliable and limited solutions such as Xinput and DirectInput.He wrote in entirely in Rust, it’s open-source and available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. The redesign is a lot easier to use and maintain for developers. It’s written with the feature in mind and is here to stay long-term.However, right now, we need your feedback on using the SDK before we start building more blocks. Right now we’re still in a phase that we can make major changes without any consequences. Simon very active on the Wooting discord and GitHub and is looking for new ideas and feedback.You can find the documentation here: GitHub - WootingKb/wooting-analog-sdk: Native support for Analog Keyboards #WootDevYou can get started by downloading the Wootility beta found in the Discord # Wootility_beta_feedback channel’s pinned post. This will also install the analog SDK.You can immediately take the SDK for a spin with this Piano project from Microdee: Releases · simon-wh/WootingPiano · GitHub

The Lekker edition

The Wooting two Lekker Edition will launch pre-orders on the 26th of September. If you’re part of the notification list, you would already know the details.We’re all super nervous about the launch because it’ll be entirely on our platform, it’s a limited edition and we went pretty bold with the colors. If this succeeds, it’ll give such a great confidence boost to the team and help us fund speeding up our development.If you’re interested in the Lekker Edition, make sure you sign up for the notification list and claim a priority seat for the launch.I’ve left the official introduction for the last part of this update blog. Hopefully, you’ll become one of the few Lekker edition owners!

Wooting two Lekker Edition Intro:

The limited edition of a unique Wooting two design with the all-new Lekker switches. It’s our most ambitious project thus far and marks another important milestone for Wooting and most important our stakeholders, that’s you.All the revenue we generate from the Lekker edition will go into the further development of the Lekker switch and strengthening our software team. This will allow us to keep innovating and add more product value to all our existing and future Wooting members. Adding more groundbreaking analog input and not-so groundbreaking other (RGB, Macros) features to all our Wooting keyboards.Embark this journey with us on the 26th of September, when we launch the Wooting two Lekker Edition pre-orders. You will start to closely follow and join the development of the Lekker edition from manufacturing up to delivery in 2020 Q1, in real Wooting fashion. Vlogs, blogs, live streams and educative information about manufacturing, running a business and withholding our customer integrity.You will have a limited time to make a decision, as we will only produce this keyboard once. There won’t be any stock, there won’t be any re-run, this is it. We will make only a thousand unique models when it’s sold out, it’s sold out.The pre-orders will launch on and are only available in our Wooting stores.