I was recently away on holiday in Italy and missed WooThemes official birthday on 9th July. It was over one year ago that me, Adii and Mark brought our new venture online and it’s been a one woopping year for us, with myself leaving my job in August and also our team growing from five strong.
I started my own startup company last year called WooThemes in case you didn’t notice. Before I left my day job to work full-time on Woo, I probably had the same idea that everybody has about startup companies, especially those dot-com-bubble online startup companies. They all seemed like they needed a ton of work and funding to get off the ground.
It was from actually doing stuff on the side from my normal day job, that I realized that it does not take very much effort to get your startup up and going. WooThemes has now grown into a successful business, and we have been approaced by others who are interested in buying us out. It’s tempting to want to sell what I built up in the last year, but I always ask where I would be after I sell. And the answer is that I would be without a business and with some extra cash on my bank account. Now that might sound great for everybody who is in a day job… if somebody offered me a lot of cash to quit my day job, I probably would, but as I’m already doing what I love, it would be pretty stupid to exchange that for some cash, since I’m already making a profit on what I do.
David Hansson from 37Signals, who is behind great services like Basecamp that I use every day, has hit the nail on it’s head in this great presentation about creating a startup company. At the end he answers some questions about working 14 hours a day and getting things done, where he answers that they work 4 day work weeks, at about 8 hours a day where he is probably productive about 3 hours a day. I always though I was being a slacker if I didn’t work productively for 7-8 hours a day, but I think the fact is that you can get more done if you try to focus only a few hours a day on what you are supposed to do. Anyways, watch this presentation and be inspired.
I haven’t been designing anything new lately, since I’ve been put on the task of coding some of the themes from our WooContest held back in ’08.
Irresistible
The first theme I finished coding on (basic coding done by PSDtoWP) was Irresistible, which we release as a free theme on WooThemes. It was designed by Izzudin Helmi who also designed the whole Groovy Series which I’ve now been put in charge of.
Groovy Video
First up was Groovy Video which I coded from scratch to lay the foundation for the other two themes in the series. After I designed and coded WooTube, I sorta got the hang of how to do a video theme, so this was naturally my first pick to code.
Next themes I will be working on will be Groovy Photo and Groovy Mag(azine), and hopefully the base work I’ve done with Groovy Video will make development time much faster for these new ones.
As a follow up to Adii’s blog post about The Freebie Culture, I wanted to share my thoughts and hear yours on what expectations the freebie culture have, and how much we should adhere to their expectations. As Adii explains in his blog post, we use freebies as a great marketing tool for WooThemes, by giving away free WordPress themes. Our latest free theme called Irresistible, has been well received by those who downloaded it, and we also made some initial changes to the theme based on the first feedback we got on our blog.
Giving away freebies is very good marketing for you site, but we at WooThemes also offer support for our products in the form of documentation, tutorials and last but not least, forum support. All our members get all this information readily available, but if you are not a member you can’t get a step by step detailed instruction for installing your theme or figuring out any problems you might have.
After the success of Busy Bee, it was time to focus on a more niche style theme, and since we still didn’t have a video theme in our WooThemes arsenal, I thought it was about time.
It’s not a secret that Fresh News is the most popular theme on WooThemes, and that it has been customized far beyond what I ever intended the theme to be when i first designed it. One of the best customizations of this theme came from GoMediaZine, who are experts in graphic design.
It’s been a few weeks since I first sat down to doodle up something in Photoshop and walked away with a brand new theme concept. During that time I’ve been on holiday in Florida playing some golf and visiting my sister. I was supposed to be travelling to South Africa last friday, but on the last day of my stay in the US, I woke up feeling dizzy and almost fell over on my way to the bathroom. Turns out that it was case of vertigo, which led to cancelling my trip to SA, where I would have been caddying on the European Tour and visiting Adii in Cape Town. My balance is almost back to normal, and I don’t look like Ozzy Osbourne when I walk anymore.
Anyways, the cancellation gave me some extra time to finish up Busy Bee, and it is now available over at WooThemes. According to the feedback I’ve gotten on my blog and on the official release post, it looks like the design is to most people’s liking, which I’m really thankful for. I tried to replicate all the things that has made Fresh News the most popular theme on WooThemes by far, so that is why I didn’t try to do anything experimental with this, but rather improve on both the design and the features available in the theme.
On friday evening, I had a little time to myself, so instead of doing the normal stuff (tv, movies or misbehaving in town), I decided to start up Photoshop. I know that sounds incredibly geeky, and I won’t deny that it is… but I enjoyed the heck out of it
A couple of beers later and I had a new theme designed for WooThemes, and we’re planning on releasing it sometime in December. Let me know what you think!
October ended on a high for WooThemes, with the first WooContest coming to a close. We got a lot of great designers joining in, and I was really surprised over the quality of some of the entries. We ended up picking one winner and two runner ups, and also got our hands on several other designs which we thought were a good match for WooThemes.
So as thanks to all the participants, we thought that we should release the first theme for free. The design is from the very talented Armono Wibowo, who lives in Jakarta in Indonesia, a place I visited last year when I caddied for my buddy on the European Tour.
I was recently away on holiday in Italy and missed WooThemes official birthday on 9th July. It was over one year ago that me, Adii and Mark brought our new venture online and it’s been a one woopping year for us, with myself leaving my job in August and also our team growing from five strong.
