How WooThemes Quietly Built A $2 Million Per Year Business Selling Themes | Hacker News Reader

How WooThemes Quietly Built A $2 Million Per Year Business Selling Themes

mixergy.com

47 pointsiisbum40 comments

Mixergy is always a gold mine for me. I get the same feeling listening to Andrew's interviews that I used to get browsing Napster for all my favorite music. I would easily pay $20 per month for this stuff.

This means a lot to me.

I got a couple of crappy emails on vacation this weekend from 2 viewers who thought I wasn't doing enough. For some reason I let it get to me. So I'm esp grateful to hear that you appreciate my work.

The vocal minority is almost always negative. (But that's just what it is -- a minority.)

Keep up the great work. There are plenty of entrepreneurs who draw tons of knowledge and inspiration from your interviews, myself included!

I also greatly appreciate your interviews. Your mix of different business covered and the view points they bring is very educational.

I also appreciate your hard work. There are always assholes out there that are jealous of someone else, who have to share some sort of negativity even when deep down inside they really admire what you're doing. Keep up the good work man and don't let the less intelligent people in our world get to you.

Hey Andrew, I really like the way you conduct the interview and the research you and your team does in the background.

For a change, I would like to listen to your interview regarding how you started your career and what were your experiences. If you have given interview previously please provide the link on your website or on HN.

Hi, there are two interviews that talk about Andrew's career: http://mixergy.com/how-must-marketing-helped-me-bootstrap-a-... A fan interviews Andrew.

http://mixergy.com/christel-hyden-bradford-reed/ Andrew talks to the first person he hired.

Hey Chris, Thanks for providing the links....

Don't let it get to you. You have lots of fan here and it's well deserved. Keep up the good work.

Yeah, I think you've got great stuff. I started just by reading the transcripts of the interviews, but I now try to set aside time to watch the full videos. Keep it up!

You do an excellent job capturing the essence of the entrepreneurs you interview. The program just feels honest and natural. I also, wouldn't hesitate to sign up for a sub.

Andrew, when life gets to me I look at postcards sent by third graders praising their reading lesson in crayon. If you need motivational postcards, I can buy myself crayons on the way home from work.

my response to this: http://i47.tinypic.com/2eg5j4o.jpg

I'm betting that if I'm not an a-hole entrepreneurs will be more open with me than they would otherwise.

The live audience heard me tell Adii don't give me a number that will hurt your business and don't lie about the number you give or the audience will catch it.

I certainly think that's spot on. I knew adii's revs had to be great, but this is really awesome. Showing the revs are important because it gives a good actualization of the rest of the process they describe.

Andrew Warner is the Charlie Rose of startup founder interviews.

I have been trying to think of a slightly different analogy, but it hasn't come to mind yet. Andrew is certainly a prolific interviewer, but I see him as more of an explorer looking for the essence of entrepreneurship through people's stories of success and failure.

Once Andrew finishes his run of interviews (hopefully he has a long way to go), he will have developed one of the most comprehensive catalogs of tech entrepreneurship of the web 2.0 era.

Jesus I knew these guys were doing good, but not THIS good. 2 mil a year on WordPress themes is absolutely insane!

There are over 18 million active WordPress blogs at the moment. It's a huge market. I spent a couple hours building a WordPress plugin and sold $200,000 in licenses for it in a year and a half.

Can I ask what it did, and the price?

I'm assuming this isn't sensitive since it is listed in his portfolio: it helps affiliate marketers build review sites on top of Wordpress, and costs about $100 a license.

I've made about $8,000 in sales selling my own theme modeled after the site I built for iJustine (theme link: http://whalesalad.com/tasty) but that's just a teeny fraction of what you made, let alone Woo! I have more in the pipe... but there's only one of me =/

I'm still under the impression that WordPress themes have to be GPL'd (because WordPress is).

Is this not the case?

Regardless, it's impressive.

from what I remember from the interview the themes are indeed GPLed, so you can get it for free if you want. You just don't get the support. Or something along those lines.

That's my understanding from the interview.

they are GPL'd. you still have to buy them tho. so essentially you could buy it then distribute it,etc.,etc. but that's not happening.

There's no legal precedent that a theme is somehow a derivative work of the software it's designed for. There haven't even been any good cases to give precedent for dynamic linking creating a derivative work. That's the only way the GPL could possibly apply, since nobody's distributing WordPress with their themes.

How is taking the HTML for a webpage you've created, replacing the title with <?php the_title(); ?> and putting <?php the_content(); ?> in the content area, a derivative work of the WordPress code base? Yet that's the argument they're making when someone say you're bound by WordPress's license by creating a theme that will work with it.

You can't just throw a license at someone that hasn't agreed to it. It's a completely untested legal theory Matt relies on when he says WP themes have to be GPL. There are lots of people that don't buy it at all, like the creator of Thesis, which is one of the best selling commercial WP themes.

Themes are more than dynamic linking, are they not? After all, they require PHP code to function properly.

I understand with regards to artwork, but a theme is more than images and CSS.

There's no legal precedent, but if you want to read a ton of legal speculation on a related topic (some by informed people, some by those less informed), there's a pretty large body of writing on the hypothetical issues of whether proprietary Linux kernel modules violate the GPL.

edit: here's a pretty thorough law-review article: http://web.bu.edu/law/central/jd/organizations/journals/bulr...

That article is a nice find. Thanks!

That was a good read, thanks. It supports that WordPress themes are likely not derivative works, though -- dynamic linking, use only minimal non-complex interface code, are primarily unique code that could run on any platform (HTML/CSS/etc) with only a small amount of WordPress "compatibility code" as the paper calls it.

That's my understanding. We frequently build websites for clients on Wordpress, and certainly aren't intending to release them under GPL, although I don't think it would make a huge difference in practice.

The fact that Wordpress delivers the content to the theme is basically irrelevant in my eyes. All the work goes into the design, HTML, CSS and Javascript, and the end product is an original work.

This was the first interview I've ever seen on mixergy, and I can proudly say I'll be coming back. I thought the questions were great and I absolutely didn't mind that the video went for over an hour. Truly an indept look at WooThemes and how Adriaan was able to start up his business. Thanks for the fantastic tips and keep up the great work Andrew. And just in case you're wondering, I found this intervie from @Woothemes on Twitter (with whom I am a Standard member and own a theme from).

I really liked this interview. I esp. liked the little preview of the revenue question. That could be used to increase the number of people who stick with the interview if you gave a preview like: I'm going to ask him X, Y, and Z.

I really am interested in how these companies really get off the ground - going from doing consulting for example to selling a product and making enough from that they can live off of it - I think an earlier interviewee called it getting "wife profitable".

Another great interview Andrew.

It would be good to illuminate your face better. The lighting in that room cast long shadows over your eyes. Perhaps a light facing you to the left of the computer would help.

Oh and that other themestore is no longer a sponsor of Mixergy, maybe that sponsorship was holding this interview? I love Mixergy and I can't wait for the audio to land on my iPod.

Nah. I just didn't realize WooThemes was as big as it was until a few readers filled me in.

Excellent interview and inspiring story. Always great hearing about companies like Woo Themes who have grown organically from self-funding.

Is WooThemes in anyway related WooFu?

No, Wufoo and WooThemes are not related. Other than phonetically, that is.

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