Adii Pienaar

Today, 4 years ago, WooThemes was born.

I've never spent much time scrutinizing my own birthday, but every year on the 9th of July I reminisce & reflect on the year that's been for WooThemes. This year WooThemes turns 4 and thinking about the magnitude of the impact that it has had on my own life, leaves me with little words.

In searching for words, I guess the easy way out would be to say "In the last year, we more than doubled the size of the team, revenues are continuing North and even though we experienced a life-threatening hack, we've recovered well." (ala last year's post). Yet, this wouldn't encapsulate any of the real, true & sincere things that happened in the last year.

Today, WooThemes defines a large part of my life. And this has been the case for at least the past 4 years. Regardless of how confident, self-assured, independent or autonomous I am, I can't deny the inherent hand that WooThemes has in most things in my life.

WooThemes is the source of all of my income and thus also the source of most of my (materialistic) blessings. Similarly, WooThemes has given me a platform from which I've gotten many great speaking, investment and other professional opportunities. I've also met many great people, mentors & friends via this platform. But it stretches further than that... If I've had a shit day at the office, WooThemes has a direct, negative influence on all other spheres of my life. WooThemes is my creative & professional outlet and if I'm not happy within that space, I struggle to find energy to pour into those other spheres.

I'm not a workaholic. Instead I'm only human. I'm my own man, make my own rules and have a very happy, multi-sphered life. I would however be selling you bullshit if I said that my work with WooThemes has not had a far-reaching impact on my entire life (both good & bad).

This makes me feel vulnerable. When things like the hack happens, it just naturally spawns a complete evaluation of absolutely everything: the business, my livelihood, myself.

The good news is that I've learnt in the past year that even though this is a natural reaction (which I'm unlikely to ever evade), this isn't the truth and not an accurate representation of who I am. Yes, my daily life is inter-related with what's going on (and sometimes, not going on) at Woo, but it doesn't define who I am.

Instead this is me... "Hello! My name is Adii. Amongst other things I'm co-founder of WooThemes and we're celebrating all that's good on our 4th birthday today. Let's break out a couple of beers."

A lot has been written about Y Combinator's decision to allow founders to apply to the program without necessarily having an idea.

I think Vinicius Vacanti's opinion is mostly spot-on and summarized well with this quote:

"And, so I thank Y-Combinator for helping to dispel the myth that to become an entrepreneur you need a moment of brilliance."

You definitely don't need a moment of brilliance and your first idea won't be the only determining factor in whether you're a success or a failure (eventually). But that's pretty much as far as I can agree with this whole concept.

Whilst a moment of brilliance or a first idea doesn't define whether you're an entrepreneur or not, it surely neither warrants that you should be funded (i.e. risk other people's money for you to figure out which of your ideas will eventually be successful).

This explains perfectly why the "money makes money" plays such a huge role here: if you're funding someone without an actual idea, you're taking a gamble. There's just no reason to determine the founding team actually warrants that investment.

I'm open to someone convincing me that funding an entrepreneur without an idea is actually a rational, viable & generic decision that applies to all investors (and not just those with pockets that are inevitably too deep). Or we can all agree that this strategy is at best a calculated risk and semi-gamble.

I read Ben Horowitz' post about their investment in Instagram that made them a 312x return, turning a $250k investment into $78m. Most people would regard that as a shrewd business decision on Andreessen Horowitz' part, but I think it actually comes down to money making money.

Andreessen Horowitz has raised a venture fund worth almost $3bn in the last 3 years. So for them to make a $250k investment represents 0,0083% of their total investment fund. Considering that Instagram ended up being a pivot from the business that they actually invested in, I'd argue that the $250k investment was a "calculated" gamble. Sure, you might argue they backed the entrepreneurs behind the original idea, but that too is a calculated risk / gamble at best. (I'd stick to this opinion regardless of whether or for what amount Instagram was eventually acquired.)

Compare that to Y Combinator that invests an average of $18 000 into approximately 120 startups every year. Or Yuri Milner & Ron Conway that puts $150 000 into any Y Combinator startup that wants it (via Start Fund). As of last year, Yuri Milner alone had a net worth in excess of $1bn (Wikipedia), so putting $150 000 into a startup represents small change.

Their respective returns on these investments are however a far cry from small change, making their investment status a goal for most other investors. Myself included.

Yet, these guys have a head start: they have bucketloads of money. Marc Andreessen co-founded Netscape back in the day. Yuri Milner created DST which has become a premier investor in so many awesome tech companies. And Paul Graham has become the leader of the whole startup community with his work with Y Combinator. So they deserve their success & all these new opportunities now.

The one thing all of them have in common now is that they had one big success as an entrepreneur; one big success that propelled their reputation into the higher echelons of our community & gave them the capital (or access to it) to make all of these investments. It only took one big success.

Ultimately I'd probably be able to make quite a bit of money if I had a $5m venture fund and I could invest $250k into 20 hot startups right now. You could too. Provided we're not totally shit at making our picks.

Money makes money. And it only takes one, big success to get there.

24 hours after yesterday's V1 release of our new product, WooDojo, and we have more than 7000 users already. I wanted to share some insight into how we managed to achieve this...

Not only was this a major victory for the team, but getting 7000 users for a brand-new product - one that nobody expected us to release - represents some major traction. This is also the kind of traction which I wouldn't describe as being a fluke, but instead the culmination of truly getting to know our users and evolving both our product & marketing strategy over time.

This is how we did it:

1. Know Your Users

WooDojo wasn't the result of a popular community request, instead we conceptualized a holistic solution for a bunch of minor problems / gaps that we had identified in the last 12 months. The trick here wasn't to spot the gap, but to understand how our users would want to plug those gaps without us even talking to them about it.

A lot is made of customer development and validated product feedback these days, but in our case we skipped that step, because we felt that we had an intimate understanding of the problems our users were experiencing without them perhaps even realizing they were. We know our products & users inside-out, which meant that we could distill WooDojo - as a concept - over time and shape it into an actionable project.

2. Build on what you have

Before WooDojo was released, we had two things: 1) an audience of almost 200 000 users; and 2) our existing product line. Each of these represents a validated & viable distribution channel for new products. With WooDojo we leveraged both of these.

WooDojo compliments our existing product line perfectly by augmenting & extending on the feature sets that we have released in the past. This means that the product has an inherent appeal for each & every member of our existing audience. We could've obviously released something completely unrelated to our existing product line and audience (and thus hoped that they'd still pick it up), but I doubt we would've had the same kind of traction.

3. Go beyond what you have

We had always envisioned that our existing user base would be our main audience for the V1 release, but we also knew that WooDojo would appeal to a whole new audience: the audience that didn't want to use our existing products. WooDojo is "vendor-agnostic" in that regard and enhances **any* WordPress installation, so with this release we're targeting a market much bigger than our existing audience.

4. Free & Easy

As things stand, WooDojo is a free product, which of course means that traction & adoption will be much quicker than if it were a paid product. We've implemented the classic freemium model and have a clear monetization route, which we'll flick the switch on in the next couple of weeks.

I think what's important with freemium is firstly that the core product is & will remain free, but also that we already have the revenue model figured out (based on our experience implementing a similar model for our other products). So it's not like we've made a huge time investment releasing something that we don't know how we'll make money from it.

5. The Surprise Factor

The fact that we didn't do any customer development before the release, meant that no one expected yesterday's release. From what we've seen, this has elicited the "Wow! WooDojo looks fantastic!" reaction from our, unexpecting users. If we had announced or even teased the release beforehand, we would not have had that surprise factor and were unlikely to get so many of the "Wow!"-type reactions, which obviously means the viral appeal of the release would've been less.

Delegation isn't something that comes easy for me. But as such things go, running a team of 23 talented individuals means that you either sink or delegate (swim). So delegation has been an evolving skill for me in recent years; one that I believe I've gotten considerably better at through all the practice.

Today I'd like so celebrate a major, personal victory as the result of excellent work by a team. Woo's release of WooDojo represents one of our finest hours; not because our V1 release is the best in history (probably not even ours), but because this was a team - and not a management - effort.

As a management team, we gave the team only two things: 1) the roadmap & direction of our strategic journey; and 2) a very raw concept that barely resembles WooDojo in its V1 state today. The brilliant execution of these these two elements is testament do the fantastic work of the team to distill our concepts & strategic notions into digestible, action items.

For me - as co-founder - this is reward of the faith & trust we've put into our team to take us to greater heights. We have given them the platform & safety net; all they need to do is shine. And how they have just done that.