

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

Hi guys. I spent the better part of this year developing and launching my unique take on a theme&#x2F;template search site.<p>The result was Themebeacon (www.themebeacon.com).<p>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&#x27;m making only about 10 cents back in actual sales.<p>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&#x27;t tell if this is because the concept itself is fundamentally flawed, or if the ux just needs a bit more refinement.<p>Any feedback or advice would be most appreciated.
======
threeseed
Your website is pretty bad.

Look at your competitor ([http://themeforest.net](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.

~~~
jonathanleane
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.

~~~
bkrull
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!

------
spyder
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/](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).

~~~
jonathanleane
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/](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 :)

------
arielm
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.

\---

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.

------
JayNeely
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.

~~~
jonathanleane
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.

------
jefflinwood
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.

~~~
jonathanleane
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.

------
thegrif
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.

~~~
andyakb
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 $2 _X or even $1.2_ X 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.

------
brothe2000
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.

------
jcr
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?

~~~
threeseed
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.

~~~
jcr
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.

------
dk8996
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)

