Better Startup (Part 3): The 15 Web Apps that powers WooThemes

For the new Better Startup post, I figured that you may find value in knowing what web apps we use (and right highly) at WooThemes. These are the applications / services that completely runs WooThemes on a daily basis and I don’t think it’d be possible for us to get this much work done without it.

The Website

WordPress (Link)

WordPress

We’d be hypocrites if we didn’t use WP to power our main website, right? Basically when we set out to design & develop the WooThemes website last year, we only knew how to use WordPress, so we never really considered any alternatives. But looking back over a very successful year (and massive growth), I think that WooThemes is evidence that you can build a very efficient business (website) on WP. It’s definitely not just a publishing platform…

bbPress (Link)

bbPress

We use bbPress to power our support forums on WooThemes and whilst it is most definitely not the best or most mature forum / discussion board platform out there, it plugs into our WP setup beautifully. Also, along with the “Support plugin” for bbPress, the forum functions completely like a support ticketing system.

aMember (Link)

aMember

aMember is responsible for the magic that happens behind the scenes. aMember too plugs into our WP + bbPress setup and is responsible for the user management bits on WooThemes. So the user dashboard, downloading of themes, affiliate program and buying / checkout procedures are all controlled by aMember. We also use 2Checkout.com as our payment processor, which integrates into aMember to include the transactional functionality.

Feedburner (Link)

Feedburner

I have a tendency of thinking that RSS’ days are over, since it’s so much easier getting information from Twitter (then again, it’s all information overload anyway)… But we still use Feedburner religiously in tracking the amount of subscribers on our RSS feeds and up until now, there is no real alternative to Feedburner. If you’re into your stats then, Feedburner is a kinda non-negotiable element within your arsenal.

Pingdom (Link)

Pingdom

Beyond being online 24 / 7 and refreshing the WooThemes website every 30 seconds (to check whether it’s gone down), there’s not much you can do to ensure 100% uptime of a website (which is very important for us, as we’re actually selling something). So we use Pingdom to notify us via SMS & e-mail instantaneously if everything weird is up with the server. The SMS functionality is nice, as it then allows us just to send a quick mail to our web support guys; most of the time from our iPhones…

Communication & Project Management

Gmail (Link)

Gmail

Considering that we’re very much a virtual company, our whole team needs to have access to the WooThemes e-mail accounts, so that we can basically cover for each other should Magnus go fishing in Alaska for a week and a half (for example hehe). We’ve tried other mailroom applications in the past, but found that Gmail is the easiest and most efficient in terms of dealing with the bucketloads of mail we get on a daily basis.

Basecamp (Link)

Basecamp

Basecamp is probably the cornerstone on which we build all of our planning & communications. Whilst we probably don’t use Basecamp as much as we should, all of our most important decisions, to-do’s, ideas and data is on our Basecamp profile. The nice thing about Basecamp is that it’s always there, without getting in our way or forcing us to use it instead of e-mail / Skype.

Prologue 2 (Link)

P2

This is something new that we’ve been experimenting with in the last couple of weeks… We use P2 as an internal Twitter of sorts, where we get to keep each other updated on what we’re doing in a more real-time way. Since we don’t work from the same office all the day, it’s important for us to know what’s happening during the day. We’re definitely still figuring out how to get the best value from P2, but initial signs are promising in terms of increasing our productivity.

Marketing

Twitter (Link)

Twitter

We’ve slowly been building the WooThemes presence on Twitter and whilst we don’t have a set strategy in terms of how / when we use Twitter, we find the most value from using it to broadcast our news, as well as add some interaction between ourselves and those interested in interacted with us (albeit customers, users of our free themes or just any Average Joe).

CoTweet (Link)

CoTweet

In addition to Twitter, we’ve started to use CoTweet to allow the whole WooTeam to monitor our Twitter account for @replies & DM’s. And the initial thoughts on CoTweet is that it’s an extremely sexy web app that does what it promises extremely well.

Peashootapp (Link)

Peashootapp

Peashoot is another of those apps that we’ve only recently started using, but we’re really enjoying the experience whilst figuring out exactly where the benefit of using the service is. We’re currently using it to track (especially) our Twitter marketing campaigns (in terms of clicks on links and re-tweets). We’ve also added our custom domain (woourl.com) for URL shortening, which allows us to use Peashoot (along with our affiliate program) to track conversions on our paid advertising (on other sites) much more accurately. Even though we’re thus still finding our feet with Peashoot, it’s definitely worth the $25 / month!

Campaign Monitor (Link)

Campaign Monitor

We’ve been using Campaign Monitor since the Premium News Themes days and haven’t looked back once. Our monthly e-mail newsletters are sent out with Campaign Monitor and beyond the ease-of-use (in terms of managing our subscriber lists & sending out new newsletters), we absolutely love the bundled analytics that we get after each newsletter. In addition, this is the newsletter software (??) for designers, so why wouldn’t we use it?

Development

Beanstalk (Link)

Beanstalk

I’ve mentioned this on multiple posts that I’ve written before, but using SVN has completely changed the way we develop our themes. In fact, it’s changed the process so much that I’d never be able to work without SVN again. So Beanstalk is just our hosted SVN repository, where all of our themes are housed. Benefits of going hosted compared to self-hosted? I dunno… We never explored that option, but having it hosted makes the admin side of things so much easier.

Lighthouse (Link)

Lighthouse

Whilst we use bbPress for a public support forum / ticketing system, we use Lighthouse to track all of the reported bugs, which needs to be fixed in themes. Along with the bugs, we also have a separate list of potential new features which we review regularly in terms of deciding which will make it into the packaged themes. Since we’ve started using Lighthouse, I believe we’ve missed very few bugs and it’s also sped up our bug fixing / updating processes. We probably also need to integrate this into our Basecamp profile sometime…

Other

Vimeo (Link)

Vimeo

You may ask why not YouTube? Well, no other video service is as cool and fun to use as Vimeo. We don’t use Vimeo too often at the moment, but all of our promo, tutorial & support videos are housed on our Vimeo account. We’ve found Vimeo to be quite fast and it does exactly what we need it to do. So nothing special to rave about; instead it just allows us to focus on creating the content and then effortlessly publishing it online.

And that’s the list… Don’t think we’ve left anything out, but if we did, then it’s probably because it’s not *that* important to us. So ask us any questions about why / how we use these apps / services listed above and maybe also share some of the things that you’ve found useful in running your businesses / projects.ww