From Vision to Victory: ThemeSelection's Remarkable Journey to $300k Revenue and 100k Active Users in 2023

First of all, Team ThemeSelection wishes you and your loved one the best time in 2024. 🎉

Well, last year was full of fun and innovation for us and we couldn’t be here without customers’ trust and faith.

So, we are thankful for the love you guys have shown to us and our products. Now, let’s take a ride on the 2023 Journey and how we managed to touch the milestone of $300K in revenue and 100k Active Users this year. 🚀

Introduction: Celebrating Our Journey

Established in 2011, our company began as a small team of just two individuals. Our founders, Ajay and Vrushank, were colleagues at a software firm where they identified a widespread need for reusable UI Kits and Admin Panels for apps and platforms. Recognizing this gap, they set out to provide a solution.

What if we create a UI Kit and Admin Panel ourselves which will be…

Easy to customize based on the requirement
Easy to get started or integrate
Available in cutting-edge technologies
Backed by quality code, detailed documentation, and top-notch customer support.

Previously we were selling our products on different marketplaces (ThemeForest, WrapBootstrap, and more…) and found many challenges. But the primary challenge for us was to compete with low-quality products at non-reasonable prices & many more…

To overcome this we’ve decided to create our store ThemeSelection and started actively focusing on it actively since 2022.

At present, We’re a team of 22 passionate individuals, engaged in activities ranging from research, brainstorming, and creating user-friendly interfaces to development, integration, testing, support, and beyond! 🚀

Overcoming Hurdles: Our Expedition Through Challenges

Following exceptional sales and customer support for our premium products on various marketplaces, we gained confidence in our abilities for research, brainstorming, and crafting user-friendly interfaces and quality code.

However, creating your own platform to sell your products on your efforts presents numerous challenges, such as…

Setting Up a Digital Product Store with a License
Content Management
Generate quality traffic and convert it to our customer
Finance & Payment Processing
Security & Legal Compliance
Pre-purchase and After sales support & many more…

To resolve the first two challenges we have researched several platforms for selling digital products, such as Gumroad, Sellfy, Podia, Paddle, and many more…

But, We’ve decided to go with WordPress and its amazing plugins. Because…

We’ve known WordPress since the beginning of our career journey.
Having your own platform/store gives you all the freedom

We are sure you might be thinking, “Are these guys serious? WordPress seems a bit old-fashioned.” But, stay tuned for the answer in this post.

Owning your own store certainly provides more freedom, but it also comes with many challenges & responsibilities.

Generate quality traffic and convert them to our customer: Freemium Model

In today’s competitive world generating quality traffic and converting them to our customers isn’t easy because there are many alternatives and similar versions available.

If you’ve made something unique, though you have to build trust with your customers by offering a free version or trials. That’s what big companies like Uber, Spotify, YouTube, Dropbox, Zoom, Slack, and many more are doing successfully.

This way, everyone gets a chance to understand our product’s code structure. Sure, not everyone who grabs a freebie jumps to the premium stuff right away.

On ThemeSelection, there are a total of 30+ Free (Open-source) products that can be freely used by the community for their projects and products. In this year, we are planning to offer more helpful resources for the community. So, stay tuned with us.

In our case, out of the 5,500 free downloads each month, approx 250 users decide to switch. So, the conversion rate is ~4.55%. But we’ve seen people who’ve hung around with our free versions for years and then decided to go premium, which is pretty cool.

Plus, we’ve also created free useful tools for designers and developers like Free UI kits and a Bootstrap 5 CheatSheet, which is a win-win for the community and us. It helped us a lot to generate relevant quality traffic.

SEO and Marketing Hurdles

Luckily, WordPress has a large community of plugins, and it’s known as the best platform when you think about SEO and speed.

For us, resolving this involves utilizing well-known WordPress SEO plugins and CDN platforms.

But, one of the challenges that remain constant every year is to tackle Google updates as the core changes in the algorithm affect the site in many ways. Our Marketing team makes sure that the site never falls in this time by following the proper content guidelines. Throughout the year there were 2 major core updates which affected our ranking a bit but we managed to rank again our aimed categories.

Another challenge was to start with the new platforms: YouTube and Meta Ads. Both platforms were new to us as we never have used them before for marketing. Our marketing team has started with these newbies with great confidence and we are looking ahead to master them both.

Conquering Milestones: A Tale Of Our Achievements Throughout 2023

Well, this year we achieved a great milestone – 100k Customers..!!! Isn’t it fantastic? 100k customers are now part of The ThemeSelection family for which we will be eternally grateful.

Another milestone we achieved this year is maintaining a sales streak of around 207/month. Our target was to sell at least 200 products per month and we have succeeded In it resulting in 2495 sales throughout the year.

On the product production level, time plays a vital role. It is very important to release the products as per the promised timeline as promised to the customers. Well, we have made sure that our customers are not left to wait longer. Our Developer team has worked hard to achieve the milestone of releasing 9 products last year.

Along with the new products, keeping the old ones up to date is also necessary and again, our hardworking developer team has completed the challenging task with sheer brilliance. With the help of the design team, testing team, and marketing team, it was possible to manage 40+ updates throughout the year.

Year In Numbers: Impressive Growth And Engagement

The year 2023 was indeed phenomenal in terms of growth in general. From Organic reach to monthly downloads, we have seen immense growth throughout the year. Following are some of the amazing stats:

Statistics That Matters The Most

Our organic users grew 24.97% compared to 2022
Organic search grew by 36.3%
Site sessions increased by 25.1% and engaged sessions spiked by 27.98%
Collectively events noted were 5,748,734 which is 38.3% higher than the previous year.

In the year 2022, we got 1727 sales (Premium products) in a year which increased to 2495 in 2023 which is 30.80% higher to be exact.
If we take just the freebies then it went 93.13% Higher..!! From 30,445 to 58,798 downloads of free products in a year. (Ref: ts sales report)
Our revenue increased by a whopping 47% compared to last year. ($157,896 to $298,512 ref: ts sales report)
And here is the mind-blowing state of new user growth: From 49k to 100k, It grew 106% in a year..!!
Talking about the Social media family, we saw a 42.86% growth (14,000 to 20,000)
Total 210+ articles on various platforms.

Top 3 Products:

Out of 15 products, these 3 were the top-selling products of the year 2023

S neat Bootstrap HTML Admin template with 509 sales

B ig Bundle with 450 sales

Materio MUI React NextJS Admin Template with 346 sales

Sales by Country

New Products Released and Updates:

Our goal has never been to offer numerous products with extensive integrations.

Instead, we concentrate on developing a select few, exceptional design systems, such as Sneat and Materio. We provide integrations exclusively for technologies that surpass the average demands.

On the public demand and research, we decided to bring some new members to the TS family last year, and here is the list of the products that we released last year.

In addition to launching new products, we prioritize keeping our existing ones up-to-date. We strongly believe that long-term customer support is a crucial pillar of our business.

Throughout the year there were 40+ Major & Minor updates

Innovation At ThemeSelection: New Features And Templates

As said by the legend himself, we agree with him. Innovation is not only a need for business but an opportunity to learn new things. We at ThemeSelection, always try to learn and implement new designs and techs for our product’s improvement and for ease of the customer.

Well, the year 2023 was full of an adaptive approach with design and tech innovation. Before 2023, we started with the Bootstrap admin templates and HTML themes, later we implemented Laravel, Vue, React & NextJS.

In the year 2023, we implemented some new techs in our products which are as follows:

Django admin template

Asp.NET Core Admin Templates (Razor Pages & MVC)

Nuxtjs Admin Template

Indeed it took time but there is an old saying “Good things take time”, and with time, we have improved our products with the latest updates as well as launched new products with the new techs as well.

Not only that, we are planning for other techs & design after research and on public demand which are as follows:

Angular
Tailwind CSS
Shadcn UI

Apart from that we are also excited to try our hands on No-code tools and AI as well. It is a fact that AI has revolutionized every field. There is no denying that, those who know how to harness AI in their respective work, will be at the top of the race so, yes, we are also planning to harness the power of AI for our products to boost productivity.

After all, “change is the only constant”. Right?

To dig deeper, visit the official blog on ThemeSelection 👉🏻 Year in Review Post