Adii Pienaar

I gave this talk at last week's WordCamp Cape Town and thought that I'd post some of the details here (a video of my talk should be up soon).

As an introduction to my talk... I've been making money with WordPress for many years now and WooThemes is almost 4 years old with 45k paying customers. And lately I've been thinking a lot about how WordPress mimics other industries worldwide and how it has thus become ripe for the picking for entrepreneurs

Here's some of the highlights from my talk:

• Slides 6 - 18: I believe that WordPress as a community, should instead be seen as an ecosystem with its own economic principles applied. And within this ecosystem we currently have many money-making opportunities (custom services, themes, plugins etc.)
• Slide 15: I think we're going to see more hosted, SaaS-like apps appearing for WordPress in the very near future. See my previous post - WordPress + SaaS - for elaboration on this.
• Slide 19: There are so many opportunities left for entrepreneurs to fill the gaps and monetize their proposed solutions. Considering that the latest stats reveal that WordPress powers something like 15% of the whole web, there are millions of users out there looking for specific solutions.
• Slide 20 - 22: I also see an alternative view to this WordPress ecosystem. There are multiple companies that have built loyal customer bases comprising of thousands of users, which in their own right becomes a niche market. Take WooThemes as an example: we've got 45k-odd customers, which is a pretty considerable niche opportunity. Could you develop something that specifically targets these 45k WordPress & WooThemes users? I think there's a bunch of very attractive opportunities out there for this.

I published a complete overview tour of the new WooThemes dashboard experience earlier today, and since this project has been my little baby (more like a ten ton gorilla, but let's leave it at that), I wanted to share some of the thoughts that went into this major overhaul.

At the forefront of the reasons for the overhaul is experiences. Not just a slick-looking UI, but also an interface and environment where users enjoy spending time. An environment where users can find help, find value & find happiness.

So with this in mind, we created a new experience that is consistent with our brand & personality throughout. In the past, we had little gaps in the holistic experience, where mini-experiences just weren't great even though the overall opinion and feedback from users were massively positive. Still it wasn't consistent and the awesomeness didn't extend to every corner of Woo.

We're not a hosted, web app and thus most of our users' interaction with us happen away from WooThemes.com. This doesn't mean however that users shouldn't be coming back to our website. Often.

With this redesign we wanted to build an experience that would ensure that our users spent more time on the site. We also didn't just want them to waste time either (we're not in the game of compromising on our own or our users' productivity), but instead wanted them to find reciprocal value within the time they spend with us. We want to enhance their overall experience, from first contact to purchase to every single support ticket thereafter.

And we've done this, because we believe we can monetize that increased / improved interaction that happens when users are having fun & finding more value. We're aiming to grow our business based on incredible experiences.

I don't learn by being told what to do and what not to do before even doing it. Instead I learn from my mistakes. I learn from the reflection that happens afterwards. I learn by talking to others about it.

I learn by writing about it, being ridiculously transparent & honest in sharing my experiences and mistakes. Writing leads to understanding.

Sometimes I learn by having to apologize publicly for my mistakes. There's no better way to learn than having to stand in front of the firing squad and answering to critique.

I learn by doing, by trying new things and by committing to improve on this every day.

Obvious answer: we had no money and probably didn't know enough or think far enough to consider outside funding (not that I think we would've gotten it had we look for it).

But seeing this post - Ten Highly Successful Bootstrapped Startups -  over the weekend though, reminded  about the feature WooThemes got on 37Signals' blog last year and that made me all tingly inside again about our journey thus far.

See, I honestly think that we didn't have many options when we started WooThemes. We had no experience of running a business or fundraising, so we did the only thing we knew: work hard & make money.

From day one, we were profitable. We worked hard, charged for our work, made sure we were making money and we put that money in our own pockets. Seeing the immediate gratification (spare cash in our pockets), meant we worked harder, were more ambitious and built a profitable & sustainable business.

We never made an explicit choice to bootstrap WooThemes. We did make a choice to work hard, make money and grow our business organically. Today we can boast more than 43 000 paying customers and a team of 15. Not bad for 3-odd years' of work.

I don't really believe in titles within company context much and to this extent we've avoided using titles over at WooThemes. But I recently realized that sometimes a title of sorts does become valuable.

In the last couple of weeks, I've been speaking to loads of WooThemes customers (an extraordinary amount compared to a general weekly average) due to vulnerabilities in our products or issues with user accounts relating to our new user dashboard. Chaos management basically.

During this time, I took it on myself - as co-founder - to handle most of the incoming mail, because I wanted to know exactly what was going on. So I also started doing something different and started to sign my e-mails as "Adii (Co-founder)" instead of simply "Adii" like I used to do. I did so, because I wanted to reassure our customers that their issues were important & significant enough that one of the co-founders of the business took the time to help them out, explain the issues and clarify what we were doing to fix.

What I found was that even the most vehement e-mail could be diffused with a kind response and due partly to the fact that I, as co-founder, answered the e-mail. Many users actually noted this specifically and expressed their surprise that they got an e-mail from a senior member of the company. So by adding my "title" to the e-mail, I was also adding weight to the response.

I don't propose the widespread usage of titles in a company now, because I still think that they're mostly useless. When dealing with customers though - especially difficult customers - I think a title communicates a certain level of reassurance & trust to the customer, which greatly influences the outcome of that conversation.