Family man, seeker and learner. Revealing my inner-poet. 2X Founder: Conversio (acquired by Campaign Monitor) + WooCommerce (acquired by Automattic). Ex-Rockstar.
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Family man, seeker and learner. Revealing my inner-poet. 2X Founder: Conversio (acquired by Campaign Monitor) + WooCommerce (acquired by Automattic). Ex-Rockstar.
Today, 4 years ago, WooThemes was born. [http://www.woothemes.com/2008/07/woothemes-launched/] 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
24 hours after yesterday's V1 release of our new product, WooDojo, [http://www.woothemes.com/2012/04/woodojo-enter-the-ninja/] 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 [http:
Delegation isn't something that comes easy for me. But as such things go, running a team of 23 talented individuals [http://www.woothemes.com/2012/04/growing-globally-from-humble-beginnings/] means that you either sink or delegate (swim). So delegation has been an evolving skill for me in recent years; one that I
I'm a firm believer that perfection doesn't exist and even less so for a new startup. When it comes to startups, I think the "Done is better than perfect" [http://lifehacker.com/5870379/done-is-better-than-perfect] mantra fits perfectly. And if a startup holds that mantra close to heart, it should result
WooThemes has become a Mothership. A team of almost 20, more than 150 000 users and revenues / profits that most business owners would approve of. This is fantastic of course until the engine breaks, because I'm not necessarily able to fix the engine and neither are my co-founders. See -
I guess this is likely the most obvious thing I can say about bootstrapping or running a lean startup: it seems that the obvious thing to do is to cut away all of the unnecessary expenses and only spend money on things that are needed in furthering the business. Yet
In the past, I've been very critical of (some / most, but not all) South African startups that tend to work on ideas that are either a poor man's version of an existing (international) product / service or just completely lacks any kind of quality. Stumbling onto new startup, MoneySmart [https://moneysmart.
Scaling any company's staff / team is probably one of the hardest things that any business owner needs to do. I think this has become even more difficult & complicated recently, since it is really difficult to find quality, technical skills that are still affordable. As an example... At Woo, we recently
Part of our massive overhaul of the WooThemes Dashboard [http://www.woothemes.com/2011/09/a-tour-of-the-new-woothemes/] last month, was to improve our support structures. Our aim is to deliver customer happiness & we felt that beyond the obvious willingness to do so, our structures needed to be better. So we improved
I gave this talk at last week's WordCamp Cape Town [http://2011.capetown.wordcamp.org/] 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