Adii Pienaar

I woke up this morning thinking about how blessed I am to actually love my job. That thought process led me to think about success and how I - in the context of being an entrepreneur - define success for myself.

From the top of my head, I guess success could be defined as any (or a combination of) the following:

• Profitability or the more precisely, the extend thereof (I drive a Porsche, so I'm successful).
• The freedom of working for yourself and doing a job that you love / find challenging.
• (Alarmingly) mainstream tech media sometimes seem to believe that raising funding equals success.

Faced with the challenge of defining success for myself, I'm reminded of a quote (unattributed as far as I know) that my wife once shared with me:

The true definition of success is when you stop making excuses for yourself.

For me this has always been one of the most difficult things, because we are wired to measure things relative to each other. And that's how we measure our personal success, or are at least tempted to do so.

John Wooden gave this fascinating talk about success at TED back in 2001 and he basically says that success is only relative to yourself & whether you gave your best (paraphrasing massively there). In my mind, this thinking gets me closer to what my own definition of success may  be. 

Towards the end of last year, Chris Brogan published an article "That Sense of Overnight Success" which included this striking paragraph (as his definition of success):

Success, you see, isn’t a mansion and a yacht. Success is living the life you want and doing the work you’re best at doing with the people you know will help you reach the next level. Success means working on projects that you know will fulfill a deep felt passion within you, and yet, will feed your family. Success is knowing that you’ve built a thriving network of people who all work hard to grow each other’s capabilities. Success means finding a next angle and vectoring your efforts towards growing that out. Success means having the means and capability to make better decisions. Success means getting home in time for dinner. Success means leaving the house when I want to, and staying home with the kids when I want to, all while making a future for my family.

I  specifically bolded one line in that paragraph about coming home for dinner, because that really resonates with me. I really, really love my job (it has never felt like one) and I'm a passionate entrepreneur, always on the look out for the next big growth spurt or adventurous marketing campaign. One of my favourite things though, is coming home to my wife and an amazing home-cooked dinner.

My peers would probably / generally regard me as being successful and they'd probably base that perception on the reputed size of WooThemes, the house that I live, the holidays I take and perhaps the fact that I get to work for myself. My definition of success is slightly different though.

Success for me is having the opportunity to work on something I love and be allowed to build a business around that. There's a little bit of success in the knowledge that every decision I have to make isn't influenced by money as the determining factor. More so, money can't buy time and success to me means I have the freedom to spend my time on the important things in my life (home, my wife, family, friends). Success is the opportunity to shape my life to find the best fit for my natural personality. Success is making my own rules (for myself & the things over which I exert control) and not making excuses for those decisions. Success is the opportunity just to be me and feel content about that. (I guess too that this will soon change with a baby on the way...)

What is your definition of success?

Before going to bed last night, I noticed quite a bit of chatter & linking to this beautifully crafted landing page (also pictured above). Most of the chatter centered around what this could be, yet that seemingly quickly faded in favour of how sexy the design (erm, lady) was. This reminded me of another little project called Hipster that got 10k+ user signups in 2 days without revealing what it actually does.

Everyone hates spam and sensitivity about online privacy is probably at an all-time high, so if you are given a company your personal details (even if it is just your e-mail address), I can only assume that you are afraid to miss out. That in my opinion draws similarities with how sheep blindly follow each other, without question the validity of the group's decision.

In both these cases, I think their marketing campaigns are superbly executed and they've managed to generate loads of hype without revealing what they do. I don't have a problem with this at all. This does however give us a bit on insight on how we interact online and how we'd rather follow like sheep in fear of missing out.

Am I being harsh in my opinion? Have you given your personal details away like this before?

I'd like to share a recent exchange I had with a customer:

1. Customer notes to us that he is struggling to achieve something with our product.
2. We explain that this is currently a limitation, but immediately update & release a new version of the product to help the customer achieve their goal.
3. Customer isn't happy, e-mails us for refund.
4. [This is where I come in.] I ask the client whether the fix worked in an attempt to determine how I can help the customer.
5. Customer says they didn't try it and won't try it, because they don't want to be a guinea pig. Insists on refund, threatens with chargeback.
6. I explain that we released a fix for the problem and hence it's not about being a guinea pig; we're just doing our job & helping them out.
7. Customer ignores last e-mail, rudely threatens to publicize this and again threatens to go the way of a chargeback.
8. I issue refund and at least attempt to explain our actions in this regard & how we actually tried to help. Still awaiting response (if any is going to be forthcoming).

AirBnB just announced a whopping new funding deal worth $112 million. Sheesh. What do you do with $112 million?

I come from a bootstrapped background and I've never been close to seeing anything like that kind of money in my own business (not even on wishful projections or targets), so I have no idea how to spend $112m. If I were given a $112m investment at WooThemes right now, I would honestly not know how to spend it.

And I guess therein lies the difference... I'm co-founder of a very successful business that exceeded 40k paid users over the weekend and we are very profitable (and have been for a while). We don't however operate on the kind of level where a $100m would ever even come into a serious conversation.

Guess I have a lot to "(l)earn" yet...

In the WordPress world, there's been a trend of simply bundling as many features and as much functionality into a single theme as possible. Because more features equals more sales. Neither right or wrong...

I believe - and this is something we try implement at WooThemes - that there is always a balance in anything that we do and thus include into our themes. Some things that we could be including for example would look fantastic on paper, but could perhaps be counter-productive in how that affects the usability of the theme and subsequently the user experience.

So I drew a little graph (Photoshopped it actually, since Excel was too complicated) to explain:

[caption id="attachment_1157530265" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Measuring the effect of theme features against usability & user experience"][/caption]

The graph above basically shows that usability & user experience increases steadily with more theme features until it reaches it peak and then decreases thereafter at the same rate (as more features is added). This creates a pretty average-looking bell-shaped curve (for the statistics whiz kids, you can read this). 

The Analysis & Considerations

The above is obviously just an opinion, but from experience these are the considerations I included in suggesting the above graph:

• More theme features means greater flexibility in terms of what a theme can or can't do. Greater flexibility increases the usability and thus the user's experience working with the theme.
• More theme features also generally means that the codebase is extended, meaning potential code bloat which in turn impacts flexibility.
• The shape of the curve above totally depends on the audience. I suspect that for an advanced developer the curve will be flatter i.e. they'll reach the peak much quicker (developers prefer less code). For end-users though, the curve may be substantially taller, as those users prefer more features / options for greater flexibility.
• Requiring an user to install a plugin to activate or add certain features to a theme, decreases usability / user experience. Again, end-users would prefer a solution that is more out-of-box, whilst developers wouldn't flinch when tasked with an additional plugin installation.
• The implementation & execution of any feature is important: if it's done badly it will decrease usability / user experience regardless of the fact that the theme has an extra feature / option.
• A badly executed feature / option also creates a greater demand on support resources. Rather half a theme, than a half-assed theme (h/t 37Signals).
• More features / options requires an initial learning curve and the setup of a theme. I however don't think that this is contradictory to improved usability and a better user experience, as long as the process is properly documented and the UI isn't confusing. I think users would rather spend 5 minutes setting up a theme that offers them greater flexibility / functionality, than activate a limited theme which requires no setup.
• Fallbacks & defaults should be implemented i.e. if an user doesn't go through the complete setup, a minimal viable version of the theme should still be active. The setup then serves as "extra reward" by activating the rest of the functionality. This isn't a half-bad compromise between having something that basically degrades gracefully to still work out-of-box.

I don't think there's a right or wrong answer here. I don't even think that it is possible to determine where the peak on this graph would be, as there are too many non-measurable consideration that would influence it. If anything, I'd advocate caution and a balance when deciding what should go into your themes (this is also true for non-WP products).

I definitely believe that a WordPress theme shouldn't simply include any imaginable feature out there. Every WP theme shouldn't do everything. I also think the developers that potentially miss the balance do so for the supposed marketing value thereof (more features = more sales).

Opinions?