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Comment by vilius | Hacker News Reader

$5k per month for 18 months in a row.

Made a portfolio website for my girlfriend. Got positive feedback, refactored into Wordpress theme and published on ThemeForest. Not 100% passive as I spend 3-4 hours per week for answering support emails.

ThemeForest is a perfect place for passive income if you are a website developer. At first it challenges your skills as you need to create the concept, design it and code it. Then it challenges your business, marketing and support skills. You become a one man factory and learn a lot.

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I just typed in "portfolio" onto ThemeForest and I have to say, pretty stiff competition. Many of the themes I looked at are VERY high end, clearly created by some kind of design professional.

Definitely not an area your average web-developer can just drop into. I can definitely write the code but you also need a good artistic/design mind. Just to make everything more coherent and to create a real theme that runs through the template.

Not only that but ThemeForest users now demand support for their investment. It mostly means keeping up with the rapidly updating Wordpress framework but most of the highest rated themes have some sort of post-purchase support. I think that is why most of the coders are from areas where the cost of living is lower (Eastern Europe/Asia).

Interesting - you've basically accomplished the 4-hour workweek : )

I've been considering doing the same thing with some of my sites. Do you have any tips on refactoring something we've designed and selling it on a theme marketplace? Are there specific site features that sell better than others and/or are requested a lot? Do themes with wordpress/php included sell better than ones without? I'm very curious - thanks!

Except that I have a full time job, so I end up at 44-hour workweek. Not that I do not enjoy it :-)

If you look at other themes on TF you will notice how many features they have. Building your first theme with the same amount of features would be very time consuming. I went with "Getting Real" approach and focused on doing the fundamentals right. At the time I launched there were no customisable fonts, colors or sidebars (something that most of other themes had). But it still sold well, because people liked the way it showcased their portfolios.

Do a Wordpress theme. It sells much better than HTML only and selling price is 4 times higher.

Thanks for answering. I'm looking for any additional income I can squeeze out in addition to consulting while building my startup. Getting Real talks about "Selling Your By-products" which didn't sink in when I read it. Now it makes a lot of sense. I suppose I could change a few things, list the theme and add features based on requests/feedback if necessary.

https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1620-sell-your-by-products

Is this all from a single theme? What percentage are you at?

I've contemplated converting some of my custom WP themes to sell on ThemeForest but I didn't think it would be worth the time.

edit: I often wonder if it would be worth it to try to compete with theme clubs. They seem to make a killing on recurring revenue and release a couple of themes a year.

Theme clubs? Are those the places where you pay a subscription fee to be in a limited club of people that get a new theme every couple weeks?

In general people spend a lot of money on themes. I think you might be better off competing with themeforest or more likely, any of the number of bootstrap theme website popping up.

There a few but elegantthemes.com is one that comes to mind.

You pay yearly to access to a bunch of quality themes. They pay out 50% commissions (and on renewals too) to affiliates but they have 200k+ plus users. They have to bring in a couple million a year.

I believe they started out at much lower prices and started raising it as they released more and more themes.

Yes, it's from single theme. I'm currently at the highest rate of 70%.

There are a couple of high-selling authors on TF that established their theme clubs. They build up customer base using TF and then invite people to subscribe for a yearly fee to get access to all of their themes plus the ones to be released. I guess after you reach certain amount of customers such model is much more profitable.

Eg. http://www.themezilla.com/ and here's a link to their TF profile http://themeforest.net/user/OrmanClark

Impressive. Link to the theme? curious.

Link to theme's landing page: http://themeforest.net/item/fluxus-portfolio-theme-for-photo... (affiliate)

Direct link to the demo: http://inthe.me/demo/fluxus/

That is a really nice, well polished theme. Hats off to you.

What do you charge for your theme? Is that typical? How much of a cut does ThemeForest take from you?

You start at 50% then it increases by 1% for each $2500 you earn. You continue building up like this until you reach 70%.

The interesting thing is that you can't control the price of your theme and it is set at the time of publishing by TF. Price range for WP themes is $35 - $50

Are you actually based near Old Street? Would love to meet you for lunch some time, I'm at Google Campus every Friday.

You should try pluginbag.com which offers much more than ThemeForest.

Except how could anyone tell? It wants you to sign up before anything? Or at least that's what it looks like, I'm not punching an e-mail address into a form just to see what's behind door number 1 when there's no information for a shopper and very little for a seller.

We are still building the platform and inviting early adopters. We are a team of designers & developers and wants to solve the pain of giving away 50% of our sales on envato marketplaces.

Pluginbag offers 80% to the seller with No Exclusive lock in

Shoppers will benefit from the latest, well managed and quality work of the sellers.

PS: I'm the cofounder at pluginbag.com

That's cool. How about putting it on your site, even if it means making an 'About Us' page (although it'd probably be better integrated into the landing page)? Pointing people to your domain at this point doesn't help them unless they already know what it is... make people WANT to join your site, even if they can't yet.

Hope it works out, sounds like it's a better deal for sellers (which often makes buyers happier in the long run).

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