WooThemes

Our “Apple-like” Strategy

27. Jul, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooCamp

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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Growing Within

18. Jun, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooCamp

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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On Great Customer Service

01. Apr, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooCamp

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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A Designed Startup

11. Mar, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooCamp

Ever since we started WooThemes, we’ve been absolutely fascinated with top notch design and we’d like to believe that this focus has been evident throughout all of our activities (from our themes, to the user experience on our site, our content and also our marketing campaigns). This should also be fairly obvious when you consider the amount of amazing web designers we’ve collaborated with, plus we’re always harping on about how awesome our designs are anyway…

Whilst design is ultimately subjective, one thing that can’t be disputed is the fact that our designer focus has probably contributed significantly to our success. This seems to be confirmed by startup guru, Dave McClure, in a recent BusinessWeek article about the value of design to startups:

“Design and marketing aren’t just as important as engineering: They are way more important.”

So in a very techy industry (the interwebs), there seems to be a lot of room for the more design-orientated folk among us. In the past, you could probably get by if you had a superior & groundbreaking product, but these days your competition is much tougher and you need to fight for every person that gives you their attention (superb design tends to be successful in this regard).

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Imperfect Systems

25. Feb, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooCamp

Everything at WooThemes is the way it is due to an evolving process.

See, when Mark, Magnus & I started WooThemes we had limited experience & knowledge in running a business, and much less in establishing new online brand. To say that we’ve had to learn on the job would thus be a gross understatement; beyond knowing how to design & code, we really don’t *know* much more.

That is why I started off by saying that what you see in front of you today, is a company & brand that has undergone continuous tweaks & changes in the last 2-odd years and the only reason we’ve managed to pull it off is because we have never been fearful of taking a few risks and investing heavily in our ideas, vision & ambitions. Had we however allowed that “fear” to consume us, things may have been a little different… Let me explain…

As an example, I’d like to point to our existing backend system: when we first launched WooThemes, we realized that it had some glaringly obvious limitations and whilst the launch of WOO2 last year went a long way in addressing some of those limitations, we still don’t have a perfect system. Consider the odd login & billing imperfections / glitches in our system and it is clear that we’re a long way off from offering our users a perfect environment. But that’s not the point…

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WooBranding

25. Jan, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooCamp

We really love and nurture our WooThemes brand.  It would be ignorant for us to ignore how proper branding & marketing have helped us to create the WooThemes that we are today. Maybe it’s because we’re a creatively-focused bunch, which when mixed with some (hopefully) shrewd business decision-making, you get a proper, longer term strategy that can prove to be sustainable for the brand.

So it’s great when we get to see, that we’ve influenced people’s perception of “Woo”; but not just the way we use it – but the word as a whole. Last night on TechCrunch, they covered a new startup called WooRank, in the comments on that post some people believed that we were behind this new startup. Pretty neat, hey?

Now this post isn’t intended to gloat, but I’d like to point out two reasons why I think we’ve had this success in “owning” the “Woo” enterprise online (if not completely, we have a massive share of the “woo” market…).

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Marketing: Success in Persistence

14. Oct, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooCamp

A while back I published a post entitled “8 Ways to Guarantee Steady, Incoming Traffic” and a little over two months later, we still find ourselves implementing the exact same strategies in attracting traffic to our website. The great thing about this strategy is the fact it has resulted in a constant 10%+ month-to-month traffic increase for WooThemes. So it actually works.

What we’ve found though is that irrespective of implementing specific strategies; it has been our persistence that has paid the biggest dividends in our growth over the last 12 – 18 months.

So what is this persistence that I’m referring to? Well, basically it’s just deciding on a plan / strategy and then sticking to your guns in executing those decisions – even if you can’t necessarily immediately see the effects of those plans. Here’s a few reasons why persistence pays off…

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Real-Time, Productive Communication

12. Aug, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooCamp

For about 2 months now, we’ve been using the Prologue2 theme for WordPress as an internal Twitter- (i.e. Yammer) and Campfire-like communication method. Why? Well, the team was working slightly different hours (so Skype not always an option and sometimes too demanding & in-your-face) and e-mail became too much.

We still needed to keep up to date with what the team was working on at any given stage though. So Prologue2 was our solution. (Preferred over Yammer or Campfire, because it’s awesome and it’s free.)

Before I tell you how we’re using P2, here’s some extracts from Matt Mullenweg’s blog post on the matter:

We found a solution in Prologue which added a posting box to the home page and gave it a Twitter-like feel. Now Automattic had a pulse, a place where the incredible amount of activity was chronicled and captured. It was low-friction and hassle-free, we all started using it more.

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The Science of a Freebie

09. Aug, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooCamp

Over at WooThemes we’ve released our fair share of free WordPress themes in the last couple of months and we’ve even dabbled in the odd free web icon set as well. And the reasons behind these freebies are simple: 1) we like to give back to the community; and 2) it is a great marketing tool.

The one thing that we’ve always been pretty adamant about though (with regards to the freebies we release), is that the quality of those freebies needs to be right up there. so the free themes that we have released are all top-notch themes and they include all of the functionality that our paid themes would.

Why? We want to impress you guys enough to consider signing up / purchasing the real deal, instead of just using the freebies.

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8 ways to guarantee steady, incoming traffic

03. Aug, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooCamp

In the past few months, we’ve been trying a few different marketing strategies to increase the incoming traffic to WooThemes (including WooCamp & The Showcase of course) and we found that by far the hardest part of that is to ensure that the traffic comes in constantly and consistently i.e. not peaking every 2 weeks and then just flattening out.

And we believe we’ve been relatively successful, considering that our unique visitors are up 16% and pageviews, 25% from June to July. Also, if you look at the following two traffic graphs, you’ll see that the incoming traffic line is a lot flatter in July compared to June. Weekends will obviously be more quiet, but the aim is to even get visitors to your site then…

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

23. Jul, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooCamp

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…

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45 WordPress People you need to follow

15. Jul, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooCamp