Oshine

6 Years and 29000 customers later, I decided to pass on the baton of my theme business. I wanted to go all-in on our SaaS platform Swipe Pages, and a good offer came along. It was a tough decision to part ways with Oshine, my favourite product, one that's made me a millionaire. If not for my partner Pavithra I wouldn't have been able to scale these heights.

Over a period of 3 years we rolled out over 100 updates and dramatically improved our product. We add a fully visual page builder that would rival other platforms such as Wix and Square Space. We understood that as the marketplace became crowded with too many themes we had to stand out. We built all our plugins in-house, instead of depending on 3rd party extensions. We were able to carve a brand for ourselves and ensured we had repeat customers. We transformed from just a theme to a complete website builder and added over 5 members to our team. We also started moving to modern javascript-based tech stack like ReactJS long before WordPress introduced Gutenberg and were able to stay ahead of the curve.

It took 20 months to get here. Faster than we expected. One thing we learnt from our previous launches was that we had to prepare for success. That is to create the infrastructure to handle more customers than you anticipate. Two other themes that we launched prior to Oshine were decent hits. But they didn't take off, because we weren't prepared for the surge in traffic and support when the product was actually taking off. So we moved to high quality cloud servers when most other theme authors were using shared servers. We focussed on website performance and also added a couple of members to our support team, to ensure that we were able to offer same quality & responsiveness that we offered our first 100 customers. We also started to do our marketing and weren't reliant entirely on the marketplace. We also put everything into this theme. We wanted this to be the last theme we created and the last one anyone would require to build websites. We were constantly rolling out updates adding features and fixing bugs. This helped us get from 100 - 10K customers

We didn't do any marketing to get to this. Our themes are sold through a marketplace which meant we just used the exposure new products get in their first few days of launch. We also had some existing customers whom we emailed. We were very active at the time of launch and ensured that we responded to any support & pre-sales questions swiftly ( within a couple of hours ). Even prior to launch we had prepared a couple of updates to be launched during the first two weeks. We were seen as highly proactive and responsive and we were able to generate quite a few positive reviews quickly.

During the course of the hackathon I discovered that our framework was really versatile and that we don't have to stick to the photography category. We also noticed the trend of Multi-Purpose WordPress themes picking up and quickly pivoted the idea to add features and templates that appealed to a wider audience. We launched with 12 templates ( demos ) though it all started off as a photography theme that was supposed to be done in 2 weeks.

Key Learnings:

1. Don't be afraid of change - Adaptation is the key to survival as well as success.

2. Originality Wins - Most new themes usually looked up to existing popular ones for inspiration. Most ended up looking like clones. When we were designing this theme, I decided not to look for inspiration from other products. Ended up creating something original, that become a trendsetter.

I wanted to design and code a photography WordPress theme as a part of a 2 week hackathon. We had already launched a couple of WordPress themes on Envato Marketplace prior to this. They were fairly successful but sales waned away after a while. We had a solid code framework for WordPress themes and wanted to capitalize on it by quickly launching another theme, but for a particular niche.