Bootstrapped, profitable and proud: WooThemes | Hacker News Reader

Bootstrapped, profitable and proud: WooThemes

37signals.com

41 pointsadamhowell10 comments

An interesting thing about WooThemes: Their products are all GPL'd. There's a bunch of sites exploiting this by reselling their entire theme collection as a bundle for about 1% of the normal price.

I bought some themes directly from them last month. I did it a little because of the support, but mostly it was because I wanted to help a company I believed in that was creating something I like.

Was this intentional?

It was most likely so you could freely use and modify them when using them on your own sites. Someone with a good eye spotted the opportunity though.

From what I know, the owners of those sites are being approached and asked to shut down.

Great interview.

I don't think they said it here, but when I interviewed Adii, he revealed for the first time that his company exceeded $2 mil in annual revenue.

Excellent!

If you're in Europe, you might want to come see Adii speak at at my bootstrap conference set in Vienna, Austria. We haven't announced speakers formally yet, but he was the first one to say yes. (I'm gonna bring the bootstrap mentality to Europe if it kills me!)

A few more details are up on http://schnitzelconf.com.

Their "Permanent 3-for-1: Buy any one of our WP themes, and get two more FREE!" and "Can't choose a single theme? Join our theme club and get them all for only $125" deals make this seem like such an undesirable business model.

It's like the constant sales at low-rent retail stores.

undesirable business model

In which sense of undesirable? Their club pricing model convinces a non-trivial amount of people to pay monthly for GPLed bits, which is so astoundingly desirable that I would be inclined to file it away mentally next to unicorns and bug-free software if they weren't actually showing evidence of succeeding with it.

Disclaimer: customer.

"In which sense of undesirable?"

In the sense that it's not much of a longterm business. There are thousands of other people offering both a similar service and even WooThemes's own services resold for less.

Also, just because they're "GPLed bits" doesn't mean they don't cost money to produce. They have both fulltime employees and high-profile designer contractors working to sell designs that are then immediately repackaged by others.

In case you've never dealt with real people before ...

WP designs are hard to modify in case you want little modifications here and there, and you have to be a developer to do it. WooThemes can assist you with customizations, and knowing they can do it matters.

And people in general always have ideas ... especially when they don't know shit about publishing (like when some people, everything they do or write on that website has to have a visible place ... ever tried to explain to such a person that the site's readability will suffer? good luck with that).

Also, when you're setting up a website, it's great the first time ... and many people want more. I have a friend that's a psychologist, and she has something like 5 blogs (I shit you not ... it's like she's setting up a new blog every 3 months). She also bought something like 30 shitty stock designs that she never used (thinking that she will someday).

Having a central place where you know you can find good stuff when you need it is valuable ... instead of searching for it all over the web (you can find gemstones for free, but you have to go through shit to find it).

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