

Bootstrapped, profitable and proud: WooThemes - adamhowell
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2359-bootstrapped-profitable-proud-woothemes

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chaosmachine
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.

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jules
Was this intentional?

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ddemchuk
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.

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AndrewWarner
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.

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ahoyhere
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>.

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adamhowell
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.

~~~
patio11
_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.

~~~
adamhowell
"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.

~~~
bad_user
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).

