If I can spend 15 minutes removing an obstacle for my team and the rest of the team can cumulatively save an hour in happiness & subsequent productivity, then I'm winning, they're winning and WooThemes is winning.

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I thought that data would help us navigate a potentially slippery slope and we subsequently used data to pre-validate every potential decision we made. Much to our own detriment.

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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."

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.