The WooThemes Blog

When we first launched WooThemes, it was only the 3 co-founders on the WooTeam, which meant that most decisions could happen pretty quickly, efficiently and without having to involve a massive team with varying opinions. 3 decision makers also seems to be a perfect situation in that no decisions will be caught up in a “draw”.

We have however never enforced a 2 vs 1 situation that is sometimes just natural when 3 individuals have to make a decision. Instead we’ve preferred to spend more time discussing our decisions and whilst it would be impossible for all 3 of us to be similarly passionate about each decision, we at least want everyone to feel comfortable with the suggested decision(s).

There thus is no majority vote at WooThemes and we’ve never used the 2 vs 1 situation to force a decision through. This just isn’t the way we do business.

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Nothing in life is ever free, right? Let’s debate that.

Since the very early days of WooThemes, we’ve always focused on releasing the odd freebie, which has normally been in the form of free themes, icon-sets and more recently our WooTumblog plugin. There’s currently 12 free themes available, from our total collection of 86 themes, which isn’t a bad ratio (one out of about 7 themes are free) we believe. And the beauty of those themes, is that they’ve been released completely free for you guys & girls. Built on the same WooFramework that powers all our themes.

But how much do those themes cost us?

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Since our beginning we’ve opted for a very simple strategy: maximize both value & revenue for every single WooThemes customer.

This means that we are constantly looking at ways in which we can improve your experience over & above the purchases you have already made with us. So it’s kinda saying that you make the decision to buy X from us, but we’ll give you X + 10.

And this approach obviously has a knock-on effect: we create more loyal users who spend money with us more regularly. This is both profitable and it allows us to repeat the process of re-investing in value additions which we don’t necessarily get paid for (directly).

Try this in your business.

If you are anything like us, you like two things: 1) Apple; and 2) learning from other great companies & entrepreneurs. So when we came across this post about Apple’s recent success (and their strategies in this regard), we figured it’d be a great idea to latch onto that and explain some of our strategic decisions in the last year.

Taken from Jason’s post, here’s how we have applied some of those strategies in a very similar way…

1) “You don’t need to be first.”

You should know by now that we have a “release when ready” mindset with regards to putting out new stuff, which means that sometimes things simply take longer to see the light of day. We also love innovating and pushing unique awesomeness your way, but we have never tried to be the first to market with everything.

This is probably most evident in our recent real estate theme – Estate – which most definitely isn’t the first to market. We’ve been more than happy to bide our time and develop something that will blow your mind, instead of trying to rush a product simply to be first. Quality takes time; sometimes you’ll be first, other times you won’t.

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As a company we’ve continued to evolve as our users, the community, technology, WordPress etc. have imposed certain demands on us. One of the areas of our business that has undergone a complete revolution since Magnus, Mark & I started the company, is the WooTeam which now has 8 full-time members (almost 3x the size of the team when we started out in 2008).

So how did we do this? I’d like to believe that we’ve always allowed our team to grow from within. For example, prior to Cobus & Fox joining the team, they were working with me on a side-project (radiiate) – so I had known them both and even though it was with a difference, they grew into more prominent positions.

In a similar vein, Tiago started out as a (junior) support / forum ninja and grew into the position of Master Ninja in our support forums, whilst also becoming our lead (and only at the moment) Drupal developer. Kirstin too started out as a (junior) forum ninja, turned into an Affiliated Woo Worker and we’ve now also released some of his designs as themes on WooThemes. The latest feather in Kirstin’s cap is the upcoming release of Coda, which Kirstin both designed & developed.

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A quick Google search would tell you that the idea of great customer service being marketing is most definitely not a new one. In recent months however, we’ve started to truly see the power of valuing excellent customer service…

We get a slew of e-mails every day and most of them are our own imperfect doings (i.e. our themes do at times have bugs, user accounts are sometimes exposed to glitches, and our website isn’t always as clear as it could be). The tone in these emails normally ranges between being neutral and being negative; and we have thus learned that the only way to counter these imperfections is via truly valuing our users and giving the best possible customer service experience.

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As we start finding our feet in the new year, we – as a company – are making plans not only about growing the business, but also about improving what we have and adding further value (as we have already demonstrated with the increase in our permanent X-for-1 offer). So whilst this may seem like a pretty standard exercise for most companies, we’ve tried to really delve deep into our ethos and ambitions in formulating our strategies for the year ahead (with a sneak peek of what’s to come in early 2010 here).

The “Small” Stuff

One of the things that has become more & more evident as we’ve grown & learned more about our customers (and how they use our products), is the fact that the seemingly minor improvements are generally those most appreciated. We’ve found that you don’t necessarily want us to release 10 new themes a month, but that you’d be happy for us to balance new releases with fixes & improvements to older versions too.

To put that into a little context for you… We will continue to develop, evolve and add new functionality to our WooFramework. Having announced a new version of the WooFramework in mid-December, one of our biggest priorities in January is to deploy this to all of our themes. We’ve also already started working on some pretty extensive & unique new functionality so watch this space.

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