Starting A Commercial WordPress Theme Company
I’m often asked how I started a commercial WordPress theme company, so I’ve put together a series of posts to explain how I got started and how you can too.
Do we need another theme company?
You may wonder if there is a need for another theme company with so many out there and that is a valid question. It’s also a question that needs to be addressed before we go on. While it’s hard to say how many theme companies exist, the number is probably well over 100. If you include designers who sell through marketplace sites the number is many times higher. That’s quite a different situation from 2008 when I started Organized Themes, but has the market already been saturated? With millions of websites running WordPress, I believe there is room for new companies to start and flourish. Why? Here are a few reasons:
- Most theme companies have a “style” that is characteristic of their designs. Even if the theme has all the features you want, but the style isn’t right, a customer may keep looking elsewhere. So don’t worry about competing with larger companies, offer what they don’t.
- There are lots of similarities between the themes that are out there, especially in “business” and “magazine” style themes. There is plenty of room for innovation that will set your designs apart.
- Most WordPress users are bloggers who tend to change themes often. This creates room for new companies to emerge as many bloggers want something that is new and will make their site unique.
- There are unfilled niches even now. If you aim for a smaller niche, you may not have the growth potential out of the gate, but you stand a much better chance of dominating that niche. Did you realize that at $50 per theme, only 5 sales a day is $91,250 a year? Plus once you dominate that niche, you can move beyond it if you want to. You’ll have resources, experience and reputation to help you expand.
Is selling WordPress themes for you?
Selling themes isn’t for everyone so how do you know if this is a good move for you? Most of the original theme companies began with the authors giving away their themes. If you haven’t given away free themes, that’s a natural place to start. You can track downloads to see if there is demand for the themes. You can respond to support requests to learn how to help others with WordPress questions. It’s also a great way to grow your reputation. If you can give away themes and do it well, that’s avoid indicator that you’ll be off to a good start selling.
You need to be honest about your design and development skills. Do people like my freelance work? Are my clients happy? Do other designers compliment me? Do I really understand how WordPress works? If you can’t honestly affirm that people like your work and you know what you’re doing, then spend some time growing before you launch into theme sales. Be good at what you do before you offer it to a large audience.
Why I began selling commercial themes
I choose to get into themes basically for one reason. One day while working for a client, I realized that if I wasn’t designing, I wasn’t getting paid. I offered some residual services, but for the most part, if I wasn’t actively creating there was little income headed my direction. That’s why I created Organized Themes as a store to sell my WordPress themes. Now when I’m on vacation, or sick, or just want to spend time with my family, I still earn income.
Yes it is a lot of work, but it can change your life.
The next posts will cover all aspects of starting a theme company from designing your site and themes, what services to offer, defining your niche, marketing, providing support and more. Be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed so you don’t miss any of them.
If you’ve sold or ever considered selling WordPress themes, let us know in the comments.
Hey Bill,
thanks for the post, as it is something that I am also seriously thinking about starting. So you say 5 sales a day makes you 91K. How many sales are averaging a day now? And how long has it taken you to get to this point?
thanks
Brad
Brad, I think there are lots of people who could benefit from selling themes. I hoped to get people thinking about it more seriously. We’ve been averaging 4 to 6 a day. For the first year I sold 1 or 2 a day, but that changed last fall. Just last week we made the decision to stop accepting client work to focus on theming. With the growth in that side of my business, it just makes the most sense.
Starting off can be slow, but if you keep at it, it can really be a great thing.
Great Post!
Such a good guide with great inspiration!
Neat stuff….Thanks for sharing !
Hi Bill
I love the look of your themes.
I’m in transition from construction to small business marketing, social media. In talking to folks (mostly one and two person business) I’ll start to share my wealth of knowledge (what I’m interested in) and then they say, do you do websites? There seems to be a huge gap with folks who have no website or got one built a while ago and it looks dated. WordPress seems to be such a natural for these businesses.
I like what I think WordPress can do. Maybe there are limitations I don’t know about yet. But we’re not talking about JC Penney or Kohl’s here.
Anyway, thanks for sharing your experiences here and compliments on the look of your themes.
Thanks Rick. I think WordPress really is a great long term solution for people. Once they’ve had their site up and running for a while and it’s time for a refresh, they only need to change their theme. All their content says in place.
Best of luck in your new business.
I can’t believe there are so little comments on this post, it’s still fairly relevant in todays WordPress themes world.
The reason I found it was I was looking to see if there was a pre-built plugin for selling (or sharing free themes in my case) themes. There’s plenty of marketplace and payment gateway plugins but none that cater exactly like what I want… and that’s what I wanted to hear cos I can go ahead and make my own using all the fancy dodas and sleek jquery I want and add it to the repo without thinking about too much about the current market competition
Anyway before I go ranting off in too large a tangent I better leave it at that in case you steal my idea lol
Just had to comment and tell you that I read and enjoyed it, wasn’t what I was looking for but offered some good insights into the whole theme distributing world.
Also I can’t find the rest of the posts about this, did you ever get round to writing them up?
Sounds like you’ve got an interesting plugin idea cooking. I’d love to see it once you get it finished.
Sadly, I haven’t written the rest of the posts in this series…probably time to change that. Thanks for prompting me to finish what I started.
I will come back and comment once I have the plugin done, experiencing some issues with slow work likely caused by laziness at the moment haha
I always make a promise to write a series and end up only adding one or two posts to it as well. I will be coming back to read them if you do write another one or two posts on the topic. Maybe I could get my new plug-in included in them somewhere… *wink* *wink* I’d love to get some info on how the theme market has changed since you wrote this post and personally I think that would be quite a good place to start if you need an angle on one of the posts.