Net Prophet 2010 - The Woo Themes Story (By Adriaan Pienaar)

Net Prophet 2010 – The Woo Themes Story (By Adriaan Pienaar)

AdiiRockstar (born Adriaan Pienaar) is an entrepreneur, the co-founder of the very successful online start-up, WooThemes, and a general creator of Rockstar Awesomeness. Along with being a serial entrepreneur, he is also a designer and developer (CSS, PHP and WordPress), which has spawned his other company – a boutique design and development agency – Radiiate. At the young age of 25, Adii has revolutionised both his business and personal life, and in 2007 he decided to call himself a “rockstar”; so the rockstar-tag is very much a result of subjective marketing on his side.

“When we started up we never started a South African company – we were an international company from the get-go.”

A summary of Adii’s presentation:

WooThemese started with Premium News Themes and initially we only had 1 theme launched. After meeting Magnus Jepson online, he then joined our team and we soon launched our 2nd theme. Thereafter we welcomed Mark Forrester…we launched our 3rth theme – and so things continued.

In July 2008, WooThemes was rebranded and we were then in a position to employ 2 new developers, and May 2009 was the first time the entire team met together, in the same room.

In November 2009 we welcomed another new member to the team, and by January 2010 we launched “EspressionEngine themes” and were featured on TechCrunch.

March and April 2010 proved to be busy months at WooThemes as we began creating tumblr and Drupal themes.

The WooThemes Business model: We charge for products since the very beginning, however offering “freemium” products, but with our core being the premium service.

Start-up tips:

Start anywhere, where no funding is required (bootstrap and monetise). Funding is very important, but it certainly isn’t the be-all and end-all for a start-up.

There’s a perception that entrepreneurs in developing countries like SA have a tough time starting up – use this to your advantage.

Be unique and personal in your branding – you’ll need this to stick out in an over-crowded market.

Listen to your audience and pay attention to what your users are looking for and what they need.

Fight for their attention – ensure that people know who you are and what you are doing.

Design is more important than technology – with the current overload of tech, your work needs good design to make it noticeable.

Your customer is even more important than design.

Technology is half as important as what you think it is. Highly developed themes do not sell as well as the simple ones that just look really good. The average user does not care or understand the tech you are running in the background.

Stay ahead of trends.

Diversify your income.

Limit your exposure to risk. The nature of the technology industry is that everything grows quickly and creates a massive amount of risk for start-ups.

Conclusion: Smile and Enjoy! Every start-up has its ups and downs, but you need to be doing what you enjoy in order to be successful!