Ask HN: My Startup is floundering. Pivot, persevere, or pull the plug? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: My Startup is floundering. Pivot, persevere, or pull the plug?

Hi guys. I spent the better part of this year developing and launching my unique take on a theme/template search site.

The result was Themebeacon (www.themebeacon.com).

I launched a trial Adwords campaign several weeks ago, and the results thus far have been pretty discouraging to say the least. The short version is that for every dollar spent on PPC, I'm making only about 10 cents back in actual sales.

Is the concept itself flawed? As a semi-regular theme buyer, I find myself reverting to more conventional theme search websites rather than using my own creation. I can't tell if this is because the concept itself is fundamentally flawed, or if the ux just needs a bit more refinement.

Any feedback or advice would be most appreciated.

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Your website is pretty bad.

Look at your competitor (http://themeforest.net). From the second you arrive you are seeing possible themes to try and buy. There is no "How It Works" section because you instantly know how it works. Your site forces you to think about what you are looking for before being able to see options. It's exhausting. And as someone who has spent hundreds at Envato I would never use it.

The concept is NOT flawed. Envato is a massively successful company and as web sites become more complex sites like yours will be increasingly relied on. It's a growth market.

So: Fix your site. Model yourself on Apple's App Store. Have a popular section, comments/reviews, curated themes, everything visible on one page.

Haha, well thanks for not sugar coating it :)

Anyway I hear what you're saying. I agree that it's a growth market - my question about the concept being flawed was not so much about theme/template marketplaces in general, but rather on my particular execution of it.

I agree with threeseed and I'm also someone who has spent hundreds with Themeforest. Viewing demos one by one is too slow. It doesn't live up to your promise of finding themes quickly.

However, the larger problem you discovered is that spending adwords is not cost effective for theme affiliates. It's common knowledge that the bigger players like Themeforest, ElegantThemes, etc. have better economics so they will always outbid you. But if you reduce your CPCs down to your breakeven, the volume will be too low to bother. Ultimately you need a more cost effective traffic channel to have any chance of making this work.

I also own a premium themes business and a theme review blog so I will share the ways I get cheap traffic:

1. For the premium themes, I rely on marketplaces and blog reviews/roundups. I let them drive the traffic while I focus on building great themes.

2. For the theme review blog, I rely on super long tail search traffic driven by the hundreds of theme reviews I've written. I also gain traffic and links by writing guest posts on prominent WP blogs.

3. Another big traffic driver I see a lot but don't use myself is to release high quality free WP themes. Then mix in premium affiliate themes on your Themes page to make a little money.

Be prepared to spend a solid year working on the above before you see significant traction. It's a tough space to play in these days, but it does eventually pay if you work really hard at it. If that scares you, I would probably pull the plug now before you spend a lot more time.

Best of luck!

I agree with others who said that the site looks good, but it may be better to show a grid of themes immediately on the first page, and then using the filters would narrow what is shown. Currently users need a minimum of 3 clicks before they see any of the themes (in worst case they need 9 clicks when they specify each 4 category). That's maybe not a huge issue but it could be improved even just by showing some themes after the first category is selected, then narrow the list after the other filters are changed.

Another thing i noticed is the loading animation before showing the themes. It may be a little slow because I'm viewing it from the EU and the servers are in US, but it could be improved a little if the next template would be preloaded after the current one is loaded, or even when the filters are already selected but the "Show templates" button isn't clicked yet.

For advertising you could try the more design-oriented ad networks: http://vandelaydesign.com/ad-networks/

And in your AdWords campaign you could create ads with more specific keywords that are linking to a page with prefilled filters, for example: users who come from a "Responsive Wordpress themes" ad would have to click only on the "Show themes" because the filters are already set for them on your page. And also more specific keywords could cost less than general more competitive keywords (but specific keywords has less volume so you need to create more of these keyword combinations to get more traffic).

Thanks Spyder. To address your last point first - I'm actually already doing that :) For example, if someone does a search for 'premium wordpress portfolio themes', then I would send them to something like this: http://www.themebeacon.com/landing/wordpress/portfolio/

As for your point about the grid results page - this is actually something that keeps coming up again and again, so if I do decide to persevere, that will be one of the first features I add.

The loading thing - yeah, that sucks. It's not just because you're in the EU, it's pretty much across the board. We're actually already doing the next template preloading trick, but it's still slow. The big issue is that all these themes are hosted offsite on servers that I have no control over.

Thanks for the tip on those design oriented ad networks :)

I think the site is definitely slick, but I have two main problems with this:

1. The site doesn't really add much value on top of existing template sites that already have a search feature. In some cases an even more feature full one.

I think for me the value would be in not having so many filtering options but actually less. Build something smart that figures out why I want without me having to make many different selections. Reduce the options.

2. Even if you do that, is the market for templates that big and is what you're building hard enough to replicate that the template sites won't copy it immediately if it succeeds?

aka. are you solving a real problem? or is this solving a problem that doesn't exist?

I don't buy templates but I'd guess the market is fairly small and most template buyers aren't recurring buyers.

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So what do you do - I think you should explore what you've built and look for something you can salvage. Then apply it to a real problem.

I think it's your UX. You have two big flaws:

1) You don't have a search. You have four filters, three of them with over 20 choices each. You've well over quadrupled the number of choices a visitor has to make before they see any results.

2) You don't let me quickly browse a list or grid of themes. You show themes one at a time, which feels like the slowest possible way for me to find a theme.

If you can fix your UX, something I'd think about for your marketing is talking about how many additional (quality) themes people will get a chance to see. I buy or recommend themes to buy for clients pretty often, and I pretty much only go to ThemeForest. My impression is they have the largest collection. If you can convince me I'm going to get a lot more good options, from one place, and be able to evaluate them as easily as I can on themeforest (reviews, Wordpress & browser version support, etc.), I'd be interested.

I'm a UX Designer & this is bang on.

Thanks Jay - I hear you on both points.

Actually, your second point in particular is one that has come up again and again over the last couple of months, so that will definitely be my #1 fix if I decide to persevere with this.

Also appreciate your advice re the marketing angle. The 'aggregator' aspect does seem to resonate well with people. In hindsight, perhaps I should have simply more or less copied a more conventional approach like Templatemonster, themeforest, etc., and focused more on the 'meta-search' side of things rather than trying to re-invent the ux wheel.

Hi,

The site seems pretty slick - you've obviously spent a lot of time on this, not just thrown something together over the weekend.

Are you all affiliate-based? I usually just go to ThemeForest when I want to buy something, and while I hate their browse (why would I want to see some logo for the theme instead of a thumbnail??), it does basically work.

I think you need to focus on content marketing and building an email list, so that you have some kind of community around your site (like DesignModo does). I don't think the theme search is enough to pull in customers, especially because you'll need to rely on organic search and not PPC if the margins just aren't there.

FWIW, I own www.themepuppy.com, which was originally meant to be a gallery of commercial Drupal themes, but that's not really much of a market, so I'm not using it right now.

Hi Jeff... yep, all affiliate based at the moment.

I hear you on the content marketing - I think that's a good idea. I'd feel a lot more comfortable if the theme searching / browsing component was at least as good as the incumbents.

Most of the other commenters have focused on whether the business is viable - but it may just be you need to try a different marketing tactic. Paid search is very difficult to turn an ROI on. I ran a search consultancy for awhile and I would tell people that PPC was a lot like blackjack - you can lose a lot of money if you're not paying attention or are new to the game.

The big players like themeforest are going to enjoy higher conversion rates off their paid traffic because (a) they are well-known and (b) they also rank well organically (there have been multiple quantitate studies examining the correlation of high converting paid search campaigns with high organic search rankings).

Try a few other marketing vehicles, get more data, and only then make decisions about what to do next.

Exactly. It is the same story when people say "Facebook ads don't work" or whatever the new ad platform is. If you could simply hand $X to an ad company and reliably return $2X or even $1.2X then the money would simply not last because there would be no barriers to entry.

Customer acquisition is not something you can leave to chance, it would be like placing a bet a blackjack table and saying you better quit if you lose. If you dont know how to count cards, you should have quit before even sitting down. If you dont know how to utilize different ad channels, you are better off studying them before betting anything, otherwise you are just playing blind.

Find a repeatable way to profitably onboard customers. If you cannot do that and have truly put the effort in to understand the different channels, then it may be time to pivot. Otherwise, you are just gambling.

Many thanks thegrif. I'm actually quite experienced with PPC - though admittedly in completely different industries to this one - and it had occurred to me before I started that PPC was simply not a viable strategy for this particular market. Having said that, I'd still expected to get a lot closer to break-even, and the fact that more people aren't clicking through to the various theme description pages (regardless of whether they're actually buying or not) makes me think I've screwed something up on the ux side of things, particularly as the traffic coming in should be pretty highly targeted.

As I mentioned in my initial post, the fact that I personally would still use something more conventional (like themeforest) to find a new theme makes me think I am missing a crucial piece of the ux puzzle.

Any startup takes time to get traction, regardless of whether it is unique or a different way to do what other sites are doing.

Google AirBnB 1000 days and you will see that what is perceived as overnight success is in all reality years of hard work and struggle for people to "get it".

Unless you have taken on venture capital or mortgaged yourself into bankruptcy, keep working on it and improving what people click on and get rid of what people don't click on.

Overnight success takes years.

As things get easier for most people to do on their own, the value of the task decreases. At one point, putting something on the web meant needing to know how to compile, install, configure and connect a server, as well as how to manually write correct HTML code. These days, we often just type out some text, and click "submit".

Just like everything else, theme creation (configuration) will continue to get easier for most people to do on their own. As the barrier to entry is reduced, the market for themes will be reduced.

Can you think of any recent advancements enabling most people to create or configure their own themes more easily?

Respectively disagree. Web development is harder than it has ever been.

Sure there are CMS e.g. Squarespace but if you want to customise your own site then themes are basically a necessity. There is just so much complexity even with starting platforms like Bootstrap or Wordpress. Front end build pipelines to learn, SASS/LESS, responsive etc.

I doubt we really disagree; you're completely right on the ever increasing complexity of web development. What I was talking about is how things tend to get easier for "normal" people, not developers (but I usually try to avoid calling "most" people "normal" since it also implies that developers are "abnormal" ;).

When you take a step back from the actual complexity of themes, you realize the mere existence of "themes" to control how things look has made the task of changing how things look by just changing themes extremely easy. A person using a theme enabled tool like Wordpress or Bootstrap can figure out how to replace the default theme without much effort, even if creating a theme from scratch is still difficult. The ease of use with applying pre-existing themes is what makes the good ones valuable. Plenty of people value their time a whole lot more than they value their money, so buying a theme makes sense for them.

The trouble I was pointing to is the point when actually creating themes becomes nearly as quick and easy as applying them. When the choice is between easily spending a few bucks and 20 minutes to find, buy and install a new theme versus just as easily only spending 20 minutes creating your own theme by picking out some colors and styles, then the value of pre-existing themes will drop. At present, good themes are currently the result of skilled labor, but when the task becomes easy enough for everyone to do on their own, it no longer requires skilled labor.

> Just like everything else, theme creation (configuration) will continue to get easier for most people to do on their own. As the barrier to entry is reduced, the market for themes will be reduced.

Thanks for the reply. Your post initially hit me pretty hard, because to be honest I had never really considered that I might have been entering a shrinking marketplace.

But after spending some time thinking about it, I'm not sure I agree with your premise. It seems to me that a barrier to entry being reduced is more likely to lead to an increase in market size than a reduction. For example, programming, web design, video production, etc. Due to improvements in editing software, educational resources, etc., these things are more 'amateur friendly' than ever before, yet (as far as I know) there is no indication that these markets have reduced in size. On the contrary, the reduced barrier to entry seems to make people appreciate a premium offering all the more.

I do take your point though, and I could see how something like the premium wordpress theme market's growth rate could potentially be reduced because new users are shifting to non technical / newbie friendly platforms like squarespace, weebly, or wix, though I think the closed ecosystem and lack of flexibility that are inherent to these approaches will frustrate more experienced users and people looking for custom functionality. One could even make the point that these services may ultimately increase the number of Bootstrap/Wordpress/Drupal, etc. users in the same way that smartphone users often 'progress' from iOs to Android.

I like your site. It looks nice. I think the big thing your missing is a grid or list view. Paging over all the themes one by one seems like a pain. Don' give up! keep going!

Few more points:

-You need to make it clear what filters are selected.

-You need to make it easy to change the filters.

-I love the feature where you can try it on multiple screen size/ devices (thats killer)

-There are too many pop-ups and animation for my liking

-Its a bit slow (maybe bcs of HN traffic)

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