GrowthPress WordPress Theme : ProteusThemes Forums

Let me tell you a story behind GrowthPress. It all started 5 years ago, when @primozcigler came to me and said: “Jaka, let’s join forces, make a WordPress theme and then sell it on Themeforest.” I said yes immediately and after a few months we’ve launched our first WordPress theme called HairPress on Themeforest (a marketplace for selling WordPress themes). Out of nowhere, it started generating $5k in monthly revenue without spending a dime on marketing. Smiles on our faces were bigger than ever. Soon after the launch of HairPress, other authors on Themeforest started copying us. HairPress started to get fewer and fewer sales every month, but we were not worried. We thought we would just make new unique niche themes and we will be back on track, easy money (yeah, right). Again, with such loose copyright rules on Themeforest, we were copied again and again and we just couldn’t keep a steady revenue. Then we said: "OK, let’s do an in-depth research, buy premium photos, make a unique design and write a professional copy for demo page instead of industry standard Lorem Ipsum." Let’s make a theme that nobody will be able to copy and so BuildPress was born. It was the first construction WordPress theme on Themeforest. In the beginning, our plan paid off incredibly well. When we’ve released BuildPress, we were making over $40k per month. For a couple of guys in their early 20’s, living in a country where the average salary is less than a thousand, that was a lot, I mean A LOT! But sadly, history repeats itself, copycats arrived, and today there are 502 construction WordPress themes on Themeforest. Remember, we were the first one. The revenue also split almost into 500 pieces back then, and we decided that it’s time for a change. We opened a WordPress themes shop and started selling themes ourselves. Interestingly enough, we stick with the same strategy creating niche WordPress themes. We thought that with selling on our own, we won’t have a direct competition, who will be able to see how much we earn with a particular theme and then copy us right away. Even though that was true, the results weren't nearly as good as in the early days on Themeforest. We needed a different approach. We started talking to our customers using Skype, live chat on our website and we’ve sent emails on our mailing list to get in-depth insights about what they actually want from us. The message was pretty clear. Our customers didn’t want us to make micro-niche themes for plumbers, but more broad, multi-use themes. It seemed pretty logical, since we don’t have any direct competitors on our site, that we need to broaden our target. When a user visits proteusthemes.com, he only sees our themes and we started to make our portfolio as diverse as possible with multi-niche WordPress themes. The first result of the acknowledgment was Readable - a theme that reached 5th place on ProductHunt on August 24th, with over 420 upvotes. That gave us an incredible momentum. We repeated the process from above and asked our customers what kind of WordPress theme they want this time. We made mockups and asked for feedback. We created first designs and asked again. A total lean approach about which we’ve all heard of from the startup world, but we’ve never really used it as a real-world example. When building GrowthPress, we’ve included almost every advice we got from our customers. On top of that, we talked to the digital marketing experts we knew, read a few dozens articles on conversion optimization and included all the experience we got from the results of A/B tests on our own website. Just to make the ultimate, all-around marketing WordPress theme called GrowthPress. That is the story about how our product was born. I'm super excited to get your feedback on how we could improve GrowthPress to be even more suitable for online entrepreneurs like yourself. Every single comment will be much appreciated! #1 Lesson learned: even though something works quite well and brings you money at the beginning, think ahead and don’t be afraid to tweak and switch your business plan. The competitors will always follow, you just need to be one step ahead. #2 Lesson learned: Listen to your customers. I repeat, listen to your customers. Did you hear? LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMERS. Lean methodology is not a fairy tale story. Steve Jobs and Henry Ford are fun to quote, but rather take proven techniques from the majority of entrepreneurs instead of blindly following the few. #3 Lesson learned: Even though we don’t earn nearly as much money as we did in the past, we are getting valuable knowledge beyond designing and programming. In the past year, we’ve learned A LOT. We now have an understanding of how to do proper email marketing, how to increase conversion on a website, how to do proper A/B tests, how to set up the optimum pricing, how to run social campaigns, how to build up search engine rankings, how to benefit from content marketing etc. Even though it doesn’t yet return in revenue, we are confident about running an online business more than ever. #4 Lesson learned: Read the stories ‘till the end. Sometimes you get a reward at the very end. Luckily for you, this is one of those stories. Use the code GROWTHPRESS20 and get 20% OFF when buying a ProteusClub, which includes both GrowthPress and Readable (and a whole bunch of other WP themes).

GrowthPress WordPress Theme - THE all-around digital marketing WordPress theme

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