Quick navigation in this article:

• Weather forecast
• Revenue and Expenses
• Dryland on WordPress.com  
• A squad under the weather
• Upstairs Community rays of sunshine
• Scattered to the four winds

Revenue

These past months pushed our revenue down further still. While we have a budget allocation in place when it comes to actual numbers, the last six months look like this:
$19,716 total monthly average revenue (−32% down from $29,187)
↳ $8,264 from our shop at Pixelgrade.com (−38% down from  $13,359)
↳ $9,988 from the WordPress.com marketplace (−20% down from  $12,557)
↳ $1,463 from the Envato marketplace (−53% down from  $3,157)

I suspect that the best explanation we have for these low numbers is that the market for classic WordPress themes is shrinking faster than we thought, the effects being visible both in our shop and in the marketplaces on which we operate.

In order to meet this change, behind the scenes, we’ve been working for the last 2-years on a new system to build sites based on the new Full Site Editing (FSE) experience that the WordPress ecosystem will shift towards in the future. We’re excited about the potential that this project has and how well could empower our clients—as long as we manage to successfully deliver it.

Expenses

The decisions that we made two years ago seem to lend us a good helping hand in these times. Our average monthly expenses hovered around $26,200 (–5% from $27,500), broken down into:
→ 76% of salaries
→ 19% maintenance (rent, software, accounting fees, suppliers)
→ 5% occasional expenses (office remodeling, hardware)

The negative cash flow is suppressed by the resources accumulated so far, and we’re confident that we have what it takes to navigate further through this journey.

🏜️ Dryland on WordPress.com

On the 1st of September 2021, WordPress.com initiated the retirement of all premium themes, our included, of course. 

Not sexy news. We always had this scenario in the back of our heads, but it does not mean that it’s fun when it turns into reality. Even though the timing was awful, (synchronized with one of our frontend developer’s leave), we tried to grasp this move with maturity and professionalism. 

It’s not an easy feat to establish such collaborations in today’s business landscape. We’re thankful for the chance. 

Sometimes, you just need to tell yourself it’s going to be okay even though you don’t believe it fully either. It might be the only option to get out of the bed in the morning and show up.

Seven years ago, we uploaded our first theme on WordPress.com. We started with Hive, and one after the other, we brought more products in front of WordPress.com’s customers. And oh boy, they use them massively! 

It was a beneficial partnership for quite a while, and we’re grateful for having this experience. It’s not an easy feat to establish similar collaborations in today’s business landscape, so we’re thankful for the chance. 

George, our CEO, was in touch with both the guy in charge of the decision and other theme authors to better understand the harsh line in the sand. It was some back-and-forth in trying to get a better deal or even drop the plan at all, but with no real chance to turn the ship around. 

The fellows at WordPress.com have quite an optimistic promise around the new program, but the truth is that this move hit our cash flow and our trust as a meteorite. We don’t know yet which one left the unsightly scars.

At the time being, we’re still making around 8,000$ by selling our premium themes on the platform, but our guess is that the revenue there will get smaller because of the v2 Premium Themes Program. This new endeavor is 100% focused on the Full Site Editing (FSE) and block-based themes. Today, we have no real incentive to invest in this scheme, so yeah, it’s probably a matter of time until we will hit the final lap.

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☄️ A squad under the weather

We are only five folks left: George, Vlad, Răzvan, Andrei, and I (Oana). We split ways with Mădălin (3 years), Alin (8 years), and Alex (3 years). 

It was a decision from both sides, but not necessarily reciprocal. Let me explain. 

Due to dozens of reasons, some obvious (running thin on money), some more on a subconscious level (lack of direct contribution or a low level of motivation), Mădălin and Alin decided to go to interviews for other companies*, far bigger and profitable than ours, while Alex was let go by us. 

*Alin landed at Automattic, as did Robert, our ex-customer support teammate, a few years back, and Mădălin joined the local chapter of Deloitte. We wish both a serene journey ahead!

I blame none because I believe we have a finite number of tools to navigate through life. Depending on where you locate yourself on the map, some are more suitable than others. Mixing this with the fact that the landscape has been shaky in Pixelgrade (full of uncertainties and anxieties) for almost two years in a row, set us off the rails.

When you have an elastic stretched on both ends, only one thing can occur: it breaks. 

The five left don’t wear any badge of honor for still being around here. Because it’s not about that. While the Romanian culture often cherishes people for sacrificing themselves (check the Miorița reference if you’re curious), we don’t think it’s neither healthy nor sustainable. So keep the emoji with 👏 for yourself.

The truth is that the reasons we’re still playing the game are different, and so are the incentives. We can still resist these weather conditions, even though not equally. Some of us have broader bandwidth, while others do not. Some of us have bigger expenses than others. Some of us are in a more balanced moment in life than others. 

But for these amazing guys (Mădălin, Alin, and Alex), things looked terrifying. And I get that. When the pandemic is still playing hide-and-seek and leaves marks on our lives, we could all use more safety and support. If another professional adventure can provide a reliable ground, with a higher level of joy and excitement, why not?

The rumbles will continue in Pixelgrade’s life for some time, while the tolerance of my teammates got close to the limit.

It was hard to handle these months and even tougher to keep our ducks in a row. Often, the emotions caught us off guard and made us blame others. When we were tired of finger-pointing ourselves for landing here, we threw arrows externally. 

It’s just human nature. Our brains needed a certain kind of closure to let it go and move on. This is how some of us manage to get pressure off our chests.

As a CPO, I’m at peace with how I’ve handled these crushing episodes. I mean it. Even though I’m in the process of letting go of a fair share of self-doubts and critiques, deep down, it feels liberating. I went through everything with an open heart and mind. From my side of the world, my teammates’ leave would have happened in a way or another. Our weapons to avoid this ending are simply too fragile.

When you have an elastic stretched on both ends, only one thing can occur: it breaks. 

We have various ways of digesting these internal events, and while everyone has their own rhythm, I know that we will continue to tell ourselves nuanced versions about what happened. But that’s okay. Time is the best filter, so I’m hopeful it will bring clarity, stillness, and acceptance.

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🌞 Upstairs Community rays of sunshine

During 11 years of doing community work within creative industries, I realized there’s no such thing as the right time to celebrate our members’ contributions. I learned that I need to consciously create space because it does not just happen out of the blue.

Community building is all about relationships building. There are no magic tricks, no gimmicks, or shortcuts. It’s all about trust, reciprocity, and shared goals and identity. All of them need fuel and consistency.

Eighteen months after launching Upstairs Community by Pixelgrade for creative professionals worldwide, our team ran a unique campaign for our members. As a small gesture of gratitude, we created a digital Hall of Fame that contains a designed avatar of our contributors to celebrate their involvement in the community. 

The ripples it echoed gave us fuel to keep nurturing the Upstairs Community and make it even stronger. We got plenty of taps on the shoulder and cheerleading messages from the members featured and the broader community. You are amazing!

We don’t have 3954 pages of a master plan to grow this community up to the sky, but we’re confident we will continue iterating and making it more valuable one step after the other. As with anything in community building, it takes time, and a lot of fine-tuning, but Andrei and I have the energy and mood to keep playing, and that’s enough for the moment.

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💨 Scattered to the four winds

On the product side, it’s still work-in-progress on multiple levels, so there’s not so much to share at the moment. There are plenty of moving parts that George tries to put into an order and makes sense of them all. Sometimes, it feels like Sisif’s work, while other times, the light at the end of the tunnel appears.

As for motivation, it comes at the surface in every corner of our activity, so it will be hard to pretend.

Innovation needs a high level of energy and a clear head, which we did not have with all the changes. Considering that we have even less manpower and a black hole regarding motivation, we can only hope to get our shit together and focus on things with high priority. 

How? We don’t know yet, but it will probably be a different route for each of us remaining.

What’s distinct from other hard times we endured in ten years is that now we have an articulated deadline. Even though it’s a mix of internal (drive) and external (money) pressure, it paints reality in an accurate manner. If it’s something good about numbers, then it’s the fact that they’re more neutral. You either have big numbers or not. 

You can’t lie about money, or, at least, we don’t want to do that. Nor are we okay with tricky alternatives such as credit loans. We’ve been bootstrapped from day one and hopefully, we will continue to do so. As for motivation, it comes at the surface in every corner of our activity, so it will be hard to pretend.

If we succeed with our existing resources (team, money, product), great. If not, not. Something whispers to me that I will write a book in my 50s about all these experiences I’ve been through.

Transparency Report #14 might seem like a casual article picturing business as usual, yet it’s not. It’s far from it. It took me a lot of internal talks, therapy & coaching sessions, and chats with my current and former colleagues to get here. On the other side, this is life. It’s full of ups-and-downs, of shitty moments, of losing and the like.

It’s hard to adequately explain what here means and feels like, but I’ll give it a try. 

Walking through these events fully awake made me more humble. It also revealed, clearer than ever before, that adaptation and flexibility are the best bets we could make in today’s reality. A combo of breadcrumbs of faith and trust plus the delicacy in front of life’s waves. 

As would Leonard Cohen beautifully puts it:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

Take good care of yourself, and if you reached this point, I hope it did not feel like weather talk.

The post Transparency Report #14: rumbling skies across Pixelgrade appeared first on Pixelgrade.

The last few months brought on a pace we never had in almost a decade. We’re slower, more exhausted, more scattered. It’s a reality we could sense on many levels within Pixelgrade. 

The most direct effect is reflected in our cash flow because the revenue got thinner and more erratic. The not-so-obvious, yet important ripples are across the team. In the first half of 2021, some of our colleagues were sick, had faced unpleasant events, so their energy and drive slipped accordingly.

A small crew of only eight people is a fragile system that absorbs vibrations more intensely when someone is out of duty.

Swimming in the sea comes with both serenity and burden. The water is calming, the horizon line brings hope and tranquillity, the sun heats our bodies and takes the pressure off our shoulders. But there’s also uncertainty and tiredness, physical and emotional. It’s hard to keep the tempo, be safe, maintain a certain amount of control. 

As if by a reverse-miracle, some unfathomable hand decided we didn’t have enough and we should swim with our heads underwater, for added urgency and drama.

As with most mammals out there, we couldn’t live underwater for too long. We have limited resources in our bodies. They are finite; it’s that simple. As much as we find meaning in embracing conundrums and complex challenges, there’s a point where we need to ask ourselves how much we can carry on.

In this report, we try to depict an honest image of our becoming in this specific moment in time and space. As we’ve always done, we are committed to be transparent and surface the whole landscape (yes, the cracks, too). In the end, stormy seas (and unfathomable hands) are part of any organization’s path, so why try to hide them?

Quick navigation in this article:

• Overview of the deck
• Revenue and Expenses
• Team momentum changes
• An updated version of the employee handbook
• The first book signed by Upstairs Community is here
• We have a new business partner, captain!
• The next big wave

Revenue

Six months ago, we had one of the smoothest and most predictable sailings of all time. While not unexpected, now it seems like we are taking a look at the seabed. Hopefully, it’s just another journey of discovery which we will swim through successfully without emptying the oxygen tanks. It won’t be a quick bounce to the surface, but we will do our best.

When it comes to actual numbers, the last six months look like this:
$29,187 total monthly average revenue (–6.5% down from $31,217)
↳ $13,359 from our shop at Pixelgrade.com (-7.3% down from  $14,414)
↳ $12,557 from the WordPress.com marketplace (-3% down from  $12,943)
↳ $3,157 from the Envato marketplace (–10% down from  $3,510)

Murky waters and all, we thought we had been alone underwater, but maybe we weren’t. Speaking with other people from the WordPress community, it looks like it’s an overall drop in the field of traditional WordPress themes, sales being affected regardless of whether the products are available through a marketplace or independent shops (like ours). 

One likely reason might be the impact of shifting to the new Gutenberg editor and the confusion created by the way the future of WordPress themes might look like, taking some prospective customers aback. Some just sit-and-wait for things to become clearer, while others look to other solutions, hopefully only temporarily. I think this attitude will change once the trend of creating block-based sites in WordPress will get more traction.

Expenses

Our average monthly expenses increased slightly to $27,489 (+6% from $25,934), broken down into:
→ 76% of salaries
→ 19% maintenance (rent, software, accounting fees, suppliers)
→ 5% occasional expenses (office remodeling, hardware)

The numbers and percentages are in line with the previous months with a slight increase in salaries and maintenance costs.

The next big wave

Swimming with our heads underwater managed to open our eyes in ways we never experienced before. 

One of our core values is excellence, and we put it at the forefront of everything we do. Sometimes, this means looking at the opposite side of the spectrum most Valley-entrepreneurs are focused on. 

When they shout out that the secret is to create MVPs and launch them fast, we take a step back and ship when we think it’s good enough. We’ve always been embracing this attitude in the last decade, and we like to believe it’s a substantial part of what brought us here today, with all the goods and the bad.

The project we’ve been crafting is a massive, deep-sea creature that has the power to make memorable ripples within the WordPress ecosystem and bring us closer to our mission. It’s also one of the most challenging in terms of motivation across the team. The road is full of ups and downs, we iterate a lot, there’s plenty of back-and-forths, and we don’t release stuff loudly, which definitely impacts the squad’s mojo and makes their wheels spin slower. 

We’re looking forward to shipping it in a couple of months and celebrate accordingly. Big time! And hey, once it is there, it’s your turn to tell us if you feel safe enough to scuba dive with us and discover the fascinating beauty underneath in a way that will stick with you forever. Can’t wait to enjoy such adventures together!

The post Transparency Report #13: underwater is breathtaking appeared first on Pixelgrade.

Quick navigation in this article:

• Overview
• Revenue and Expenses
• Improving the site creation system, slow and steady
• Our product documentation is going places
• Wonder rooms for wandering people
• Be gentle in 2021 and beyond

Overview

We’re still trying to remind ourselves that we have the freedom of choice. We can keep the lenses we’ve been wearing, or we can grab a new pair. Cleaning up brings clarity in areas that have become messy, for whatever reasons.

From a macro perspective, we’ve experienced a slight drop in revenue compared with the first months of 2020. At the same time, we’ve made an impact more valuable than money per se. Working with local businesses, putting even more skin in the game, and dropping discounts as a marketing tactic are just a few decisions that brought us closer to who we are today. 

Taking these particular steps opened doors that shaped our becoming in unexpected ways, for which we are thankful. It wasn’t a walk in the park, but we’re confident we did the right thing. This attitude and way of thinking toward work and life serve us well — they keep us sane and balanced. It might simply have been our coping mechanism when faced with all the gloom and doom brought by the pandemic, but hey, it kept our wheels spinning.

Now, get yourself comfortable, play one of your favorite songs, and read our latest transparency report from top to toe. It’s the only way to grasp the challenges we’ve been through and glue all the pieces together.

Let’s go for a ride, dear Internet buddy!

Product and support

• We made huge leaps around ↬the system of site creation and put it to good use for a few local businesses; the results are promising and the lessons learned priceless (you can check this section for more information)
• Over 30 theme and 17 plugin updates with improvements and fixes to make sure everything runs flawlessly for our customers
• Pushed the experience of reading and interacting with our blog articles on Upstairs to new highs with a new conversation and sharing system more in alignment with our values (you can read an in-depth article right here)
• We launched the Upstairs Community; twice a month, we publish vulnerable stories from people around the world, with a focus on what makes them better persons; we’ve sent our readers 18 such gems so far (save some time to skim through the archive)
• We had the appetite to keep writing in-depth articles (18 of them) that help our readers either achieve concrete results with their websites or get meaningful inspiration from other people’s endeavors, including ours
• Learned a lot from the wide range of product reviews we’ve been collecting (75+); it is wonderful to see that our custom product review system continues to reinforce honesty and depth
• Reimagined a better experience for using the documentation of our WordPress themes and improved most of our articles with new content, screenshots, and videos to help customers get the job done (more on that later).

Team and culture

• We’re proud we stuck together as a team and kept everyone on board because it helped us maintain course (the power of solid relationships is beautiful indeed)
• Since each of us behaves in accordance with our values on a daily basis and things run smoother inside the squad, we dropped the leadership talks in an official format and gathered more casually, from time to time
• We learned plenty and narrowed the empathy gap through the intimate stories we’ve written for the Upstairs Community; we discovered nuances about each other and we’re grateful for that
• We had a team huddle for a couple of days to run a workshop about non-violent communication with a local consultant; it facilitated difficult conversations that are necessary for any team out there
• We finished the process of redesigning the first floor of our office with a local architecture studio and celebrated the new place on our 9th birthday (you can read more later on)
• As a way of showing gratitude, we created the website of a local chef that’s cooking for us daily, at the office, via the site system we’ve been working on for the last year (yap, we’re one of those privileged to come at the office; we’re six souls in 150 square meters)
• We ran a few interviews with backend developers, but unfortunately, the overall expectations and values were in opposition to ours, so we’re still searching for the right match (know someone? ping Oana at oana@pixelgrade.com).

Team members’ happenings

• 🚘 George bought an outstanding Alfa Romeo Brera as its daily ride and went on a trip across Europe to bring it home
• 🍾 Oana celebrated her birthday with a couple of friends and family members in a beautiful garden with a private chef experience
• 🧱 Vlad was the “devil” (with angel eyes 🤷‍♂️) who supervised the process of bringing our office into today’s reality and worked closely with the architects and the builders to make it happen
• 💇‍♂️ Răzvan embraced “his premature” balding process by shaving his head, which makes him look more attractive and younger; chapeau!
• ❄️ Alin is the only one from the squad who has enjoyed snow properly so far; he returned with his son on the ski slopes to improve Victor’s riding skills (we’re a bit envious)
• 🔥 Andrei celebrated four years of marriage at a posh resort with his wife; he had quite a lot of fun riding bikes in the forest and paddled nicely; cheers!
• 🥕 Mădălin installed an app for a few months to keep track of his calories; he quit using it because now he can easily stay away from fizzy drinks
• ☕ Alex finished refurnishing his new apartment and moved in with his family; we gifted him a coffee machine to enjoy his mornings with a nice espresso.

Revenue

After a swift drop in July, our revenue settled back to pre-pandemic levels. When it comes to actual numbers, the last six months look like this:
$31,217 total monthly average revenue (-11% down from $35,422)
↳ $14,414 from our shop at Pixelgrade.com (-22% down from $18,508)
↳ $12,943 from the WordPress.com marketplace (+8% up from $11,933)
↳ $3,510 from the Envato marketplace (–25% down from $4,732)

Looking at this almost horizontal line, I realize that it was the smoothest and most predictable sailing of all time. Even with all the activity around the office and the uncertainty around the world, we managed to keep a steady and comfortable pace with our revenue. 

Honestly, as an entrepreneur, I never thought that there’s something positive about a business that has neither increased nor decreased its revenue significantly in a six-month period. It’s actually a relief, and I’m happy to get some anchoring and space for planning for the future. I don’t know when we will have the luxury of such days again.

Expenses

The decisions that we made a year ago seem to pay off further. Our average monthly expenses hovered around $25,934 (+4% from $25,002), broken down into:
→ 78% of salaries
→ 18% maintenance (rent, software, accounting fees, suppliers)
→ 4% occasional expenses (office remodeling, hardware)

Besides those numbers, we invested around $22,000 into the redesign of our office’s ground floor. It was a great opportunity to rediscover our needs and how they have morphed in the six years since we moved in. You can read an in-depth case study about the process on the A+noima‘s website. Thank you, ladies!

Our product documentation is going places

Usually, when someone reads a product’s documentation, they most likely already own that product. At least that’s the norm in the non-digital world. You buy a product → read the instructions → start using it. Or maybe a more realistic description of the process is: you buy a product → start using it → doesn’t work as you expect → read the user manual.

But when it comes to digital products, that’s not always the case. Most of the time, people can read through documentation for products they do not currently own or use. They might do that to see if they can figure out how it works before purchasing or to discover additional features. Other times, people are looking for a solution to a general problem they have and stumble on a docs article that provides just the right steps.

Our documentation covered the entire range. A few months back, while doing the rounds through our analytics, we noticed that about 70% of the traffic for certain documentation articles came from organic sources like Google searches, not from our search or WordPress-integrated help widget. At first, it was a surprise: it seemed that we’ve missed something in a big way. By having a closer look at the most popular searches, we soon realized that people were seeking for solutions to problems not specific to a product. Instead, they wanted answers to common questions regarding WordPress and its various moving parts.

One great example is a documentation piece about “How to improve the quality of images in WordPress”—even though we wrote it thinking that it will help our customers, the information is clearly applicable to other WordPress users too.

We saw this as an opportunity to figure out what documentation articles are getting us organic traffic and develop a plan to improve them. Our goal was to provide maximum value to our customers and non-customers alike.

Not long after, this process triggered a series of realizations that would eventually make us spend more than six months improving our documentation.

Once we were done with the high-ranking articles, we identified areas where we lacked content that would really help out our customers. That meant writing about certain new product features (especially regarding Rosa2 that received regular updates) and expanding the knowledge-base on general, WordPress-related subjects (e.g., website translation). We aimed to offer our audience a one-stop-shop for all their website-related needs.

Since the list of refreshed articles got bigger, and our to-do list never seemed to end, we realized our categorization system no longer matched the variety of topics we now covered. This kick-started an in-depth evaluation of our over 250 documentation articles and a recategorization effort for all of them. After about a month, we ended up with a refreshed list of categories and a more natural flow for finding the right information.

Excellence being one of our core values, we felt that all this work wouldn’t be complete without a redesign. Our goal was to help people quickly find a solution for their struggles and, as customers, have a more transparent way to get in touch with us for additional help.

Keeping our documentation fresh is an on-going and probably neverending process. Even though we tackled the most pressing issues, there’s still more work to be done if we want to keep up with the rapid pace of change WordPress is experiencing due to the new block editor. Not to mention the ever-growing list of new features added to our products. It’s clear that taking care of 22 products is no easy feat.

Wonder rooms for wandering people 

The initial idea of giving our office a new look popped-up somewhere during 2019. I, Oana, told George, our CEO, that the ground floor’s current look-and-feel is outdated. There were photos of ex-employees hanging on the walls; thank you cards between people no longer with us; illustrations that made little sense in our new reality. 

It was a heavy feeling that floated above us, especially me. It started to impact my mojo, my mood, my energy level. In many ways, I felt that this is not who we are anymore — why do we behave like it is still our shared reality?

While I genuinely value our history and respect everyone’s contribution to Pixelgrade’s becoming, I wanted to make sure that our environment highlights who we are and what we stand for today. My Chief People Officer hat encouraged me to address these questions, in various ways.

It started with a naive intention to repaint the walls, do some thorough cleaning, change a few things here and there. Thankfully, both George and Vlad have a thing for architecture and design. They kindly told me that the journey is more challenging than having some fun on a Saturday afternoon. 

Back then, I was collaborating with Alexandra Berdan — architect and owner at A+noima, a local architecture studio — for a gathering I used to organize for creative entrepreneurs. I was blown away by her perspectives on light, size, textures, on all those invisible forces that model our thinking and behavior. Our frequent meetings at Pixelgrade allowed us both to see the office space with fresh eyes.

Since our mission is to support people who want to make an impact in their communities, it was a no-brainer that we would collaborate with local entrepreneurs. A+noima orchestrated the concept and the architectural frame, and Alexandra, together with Vlad, brought along other creatives to leave their mark on the first floor of our little home in the heart of Iași.

We were super lucky to have Vlad at the site daily, carefully making sure that everything runs smoothly. He took care of our needs as a team and gave it his very best to find witty and timely solutions for all the complexities generated by such a process.

Now, six months since we’ve been settling in the new space, and more than one year from the initial brief, we can only be grateful to the people who accepted this challenge and got their hands dirty to make this project happen. Without a doubt, we’re proud of ourselves for being brave enough to put our money where our mouth is. Once again, we walked in alignment with our values (excellence, care, and gratitude), not with what society expects from us, nor what other big players choose to do with their resources. 

We’re beyond happy that we were in a position to invest in this project and get an office far better tailored to our needs and beliefs. 

It’s no coincidence that we now have a proper library with plenty of mesmerizing books, a gorgeous dining room to have lunch together, a few reading nests that encourage us to look out the window more often, a suspended installation as a token to our brand and aspirations, a wall full of pins to hang bells from (want to send us one?), a dramatic, deep-red staircase wrapped in a metal grid, and plenty of other goodies just waiting to be discovered.

If you’re keen to know more about this transformative partnership, feel free to read the article put together by the A+noima crew on their website. 

Be gentle in 2021 and beyond

We saw that times are changing and accepted that, at least for some time, we will be sailing through a deep fog. Uncertainties have always been around us, and in us, even if the type of threats they bring forth has changed dramatically. 

We learned to accept the areas where we have little to no control and, instead, focus on those where we can realistically move the needle. Fortunately, there are plenty. It is our way to not only keep a healthy level of motivation but also gain the confidence to show up in the first place. 

In the end, it’s a choice: keep ranting about this pandemic or initiate more fruitful conversations around the table. Detaching a bit and changing the narrative makes room for new ideas and fresh hopes to flourish.

Being gentle and kind is always a wiser option if we want to go far. So let’s do more of that. Keep dreaming and enjoy 2021 in a meaningful way. Cheers from all of us at Pixelgrade!

The post Transparency Report #12: burning rubber for a change appeared first on Pixelgrade.

Quick navigation in this article:

• Overview
• Revenue and Expenses
• A step further in the site creation process
• Customify is getting more stable and reliable
• Temporary suspension of our WordPress.com themes
• A review system to match our values
• An affiliate program that works for us
• Uplifiting the local community
• Meet up, Upstairs
• Our work and life through a pandemic

Overview

We can easily get trapped and say that we did not do a lot of stuff this year, but the truth is that we did plenty and it’s more than enough. We try to make comparisons only with our past selves because it’s healthier and more relevant — previous versions of both the organization and its people to mirror our evolution.

While we narrowed it down in some areas and explored a lot in others, in between, we put our values at the forefront, and this helped us navigate through it all.

Since the last report, we dare to say that we become better people. We practiced patience and resilience, even though in different ways. We embraced uncertainty even more and accepted that it’s part of life. We understood what empathy and kindness could do to humanity — a lot! 

Without further ado, please grab yourself your favorite drink and read till the end. There is a good chance you already know how generous we are when it comes to sharing our lessons. Contextual transparency is quite a powerful tool, and we are happy to say that we’ve been practicing it since the early days.

We are excited that people both within the WordPress ecosystem and our local community take a lot of value out of these transparency reports. Okay, let’s dive in! ☕️

Product and support

• Over 30 themes and 25 plugins updated with various improvements and fixes making sure they run flawlessly
• We considerably evolved ↬ the system of site creation and improved the entire stack of its components
• Reimagined our blog under the new “Upstairs” concept and subsequently restructured all its categories
• Started the “Upstairs Community” with stories that make us better people
• Kept a steady pace on our Upstairs blog with 26 new long-form articles and a more focused approach to writing either from our experience (educational content) and the customers’ (interviews to inspire the world)
• 19 customer interviews taken via video call to get more insights about how they experience our products from top to toe
• Collected 91 new reviews through our custom review system that promotes in-depth feedback for our products
• Reinstated most of our themes back on WordPress.com, after all of them have been suddenly suspended due to their lack of Gutenberg integration and poor communication
• Answered over 3,500 customer service inquires with an 85% great happiness score

Team and culture

• We kept all players aboard and we’re super happy for that because we’re a great team (we are eight: seven guys and a gal)
• We continued to have leaderships talks, even though more informally and with a shorter list of topics on the agenda
• Fewer 1:1 sessions to remain in sync with the reality from the trenches (we guess this is what happens when all our people share the same values and trust our mission)
• We ran a pilot project within our local community (în Iași, Romania) to help three local businesses reinvent themselves during this pandemic and build beautiful websites with our products
• We experienced remote work in quite a hybrid way: Alin and Alex are customer support folks and they’ve been working in this way from the beginning; Răzvan, Mădălin, and Andrei stayed home most of the time, with spontaneous ins-and-outs; Oana, Vlad, and George used to come to the office on a daily basis
• We’ve been paying more attention to the psychology of the Romanian people for a better understanding of both our past and present

Fun facts

• 🛵 George bought a beautiful Vespa from 1974, with a story worthy to be told to future generations.
• 🎾 Oana is having fun on the tennis court, where she plays like a champ aka she’s working hard to win against her colleagues. 
• 🤓 Vlad has been writing long-form articles on his blog. It’s full of food for thought, give it a go.
• 🛴 Răzvan dumped his car and is using an electric scooter to promote eco-friendly transportation and a healthier lifestyle.
• 📸 Alin captured daily moments of his village’s mood and shared them with the world.
• 👩‍❤️‍👨 Andrei taught his wife some PlayStation games to have fun and enjoy the time spent home during this pandemic.
• 💇🏻‍♂️ Mădălin is like a soldier who keeps his haircut short and sharp; he does not miss any salon visit. 
• 🗺 Alex relocated from western Romania to the east; he’s closer to us and our office, so we can’t wait to catch up over a beer.

Revenue

Things started to get better with the start of the new year — “Up and to the right”, as they say. More so, once the current pandemic kicked in, the revenue took off in stark contrast with what happened around the world.

When it comes to actual numbers, the last six months look like this:
→ $35,422 total monthly average revenue (+21% up from $29,182)
↳ $18,508 monthly revenue from Pixelgrade.com shop (+99% up from $9,258)
↳ $11,933 monthly revenue from WordPress.com marketplace (+10% up from $10,811)
↳ $4,732 monthly average from Envato marketplace (–60% down from $12,110)

The various forms of lockdown had a positive impact on our numbers, like on most other tech businesses. We expect that in the long run (the next two years or so) this excess revenue will subside and growth will depend solely on our own efforts.

So, the landscape helped, but we genuinely believe that we would not have got the same results without everything we’ve done in the past few years.

On the other hand, it’s great to see the upside of our decision to focus our efforts on in-house distribution and strengthening the “Pixelgrade” brand. Our shop sales percentage is growing steadily and, for the first time, we crossed the 50% mark.

It’s a lesson that we’re aware now more than ever:

Marketplaces help you with sales but do nothing to help you build a long-term brand and sustainable business. Be aware and choose wisely where you sell your services and products!

Expenses

Six months ago, we took some hard decisions to restructure our running costs, and it seems to pay off already. We caught a breath of fresh air, relaxed a little bit, and were able to navigate comfortably through the turmoil and chaos of the last few months.

We like to believe that we have a particular discipline regarding how we spend money. We strike a healthy balance between making valuable investments and ensuring savings as well.

Life showed us that nothing is guaranteed. Things can, and will turn upside-down quite quickly.

So, our average monthly expenses hovered around $25,002 (-5% from $26,500), broken down into:
→ 71% of salaries
→ 20% maintenance (rent, software, accounting fees, suppliers)
→ 9% occasional expenses (office remodeling, hardware)

Numbers aside, we’re in the early stages of rethinking the first floor of our office. 🏡 It’s exciting and a privilege to have a space that better reflects our values and how we changed in the last six years since we moved in. It’s an update that will positively impact our way of working and evolving.

On top of that, our approach is wonderfully aligned with our values and mission: we chose to work with a local architecture studio that was up for the job. But more about this when we’re done with it, in the next transparency report. 🤞

A step further in the site creation process

Our bet for the future of site creation is a system of individual components, each one accountable for a specific task and able to work together to create a coherent visual experience.

We imagined our latest theme Rosa2 to be a foundation upon which various components come together and control the entire site system. We built custom editor blocks (deposited in the Nova Blocks plugin) that provide the necessary structure for the user’s content, while Style Manager offers an interface for styling consistently across the site.

With the new block editor (Gutenberg) and the explosion of available blocks, we believe complexity is becoming overwhelming for regular and professional users alike. While achieving a great level of flexibility, the complexity of building a site has gone through the roof.

This is a serious threat on how we envision the site creation process: users are accountable for the content, while we provide the context. We took this as an opportunity to make the process better.

At Pixelgrade, we have a large variety of customers with wildly different sets of skills and goals. While some of them are very technical and need to control the layout on an in-depth level, others simply want to enter their content and rely on an intuitive system to lay it all out with minimal interaction on their side.

Are they different types of users, or are they at different points on the learning curve? From our experience, the latter seems to be more plausible. Within WordPress, each user starts as a newbie that wants to build their site as easily as possible and only later dig deeper and tinker with all the bits and pieces.

How do we use this insight and create an interface that makes sense of it?

Researching the current options available in the site-building ecosystem, we observed that all strive to cover the entire spectrum by aiming for the lowest common denominator: giving the user all the possible options. Do you want to change a CSS margin? You have a text field to set your value. Do you want to change the font of a paragraph? You have a selector with hundreds of fonts — and you can have a different font for each paragraph. Sounds easy… or overwhelming?

For this project, we chose to challenge the status quo and explore a solution that would allow the user to smoothly navigate between high-level and low-level options, at the same time, within the same system.

Think of the difference between (1) a manual and (2) automatic gearbox: both systems help you move the car forward, but only one comes with the option of using it without too many technical skills.

Or think of having dinner by (1) going to a restaurant and ordering your favorite dish: it’s easy and plausibly a great experience too. Or, (2) you can get your friends together and order through food delivery and still enjoy the same dish from the comfort of your home. And (3), if you have some cooking skills, you can prepare the whole dinner yourself. All three options have the same outcome (considering that you’re a good chef), and it’s great to have access to all of them, but having the freedom to choose the right one depending on your context.

These examples are analogies for the solution that we propose in better structuring the block options throughout the new WordPress editor.

We want to tackle sites that aim to be above-average in terms of aesthetics and visual coherence, and we bet that such a system will greatly contribute to the quality and raison d ’être of information in digital space.

We’re currently offering this expanding set of tools for users to install on their own self-hosted WordPress installations. At the same time, we’re considering making it available as a fully-fledged service and assist people in creating their WordPress sites without worrying about maintenance, security, or other technical jobs.

Customify is getting stronger and more reliable

Customify is one of the first and most important site building blocks we’ve released, more than four years ago. And it started to show. We’ve learned plenty from those days, both in terms of development and what we wanted out of this WordPress plugin.

With the start of the new year the time felt right to embark on a serious overhaul of the code base. While wary of not overdoing it, we’ve pushed through years of legacy-code, redundant pieces of functionality, and overly complicated, fragile logic. It’s nerve racking when you need to account for 30.000+ active WordPress installations, but it needed to be done.

Customify is the component that handles all the customization logic for our themes, including the high-level Style Manager sub-system providing Color Palettes and Font Palettes. Needless to say, the level of complexity involved commanded a very careful reengineering process.

Nine updates later, out of which four big ones, we are glad to report all is in top-notch condition. We’ve had some setbacks with a couple of bugs, but we’ve prevailed. Now we have a system capable of properly helping our customers in customizing their sites, and a trustworthy building block for our creative endeavors.

There are still plenty of ideas to improve the experience, both for customers and developers, but those are nice-to-haves — their time will come. What’s important is that the critical part is done with.

Temporary suspension of our WordPress.com themes

March 2020 brought beside the suspension of most social interactions a further suspension for us: all of our WordPress.com themes have been abruptly retired from sale. The reason? Their lack of integration with the new Gutenberg block editor. Lemonade anyone?

You may ask: Well why didn’t you do the integration? After all the new editor was released more than a year back, in December 2018. You should have seen it coming. You had plenty of time.

Sorry to disappoint, but: wrong! Sometimes reality has a way of twisting and turning in the most bizarre ways. We wanted to work on the integration many months before but have been instructed by the WordPress.com representative not to do that and wait for their queue. That person left, and the queue never came. A complete suspension came instead, for most of the third-party themes on WordPress.com.

After overcoming the initial feelings of betrayal and frustration, we embarked on an overly long review process, with slim guidelines and many back-and-forths. No walk in the park, but our design and development team pushed through this process and managed to get three of the four themes reinstated. Regarding the fourth theme, Jason, it was decided, by the WordPress.com people, that it didn’t meet the current design standards, and it wouldn’t be put back. Tired and powerless, we let that slide. It is what it is.

This whole situation reminded us once again that you cannot trust and build upon partnerships with large power disparities. Envato showed us that, now Automattic. We don’t blame them for playing a bigger game, but we need to remember we are not partners, but small cogs in their game. Pixelgrade needs to stand on its own two feet, for better or for worse.

A review system to match our values

We already wrote an in-depth article about how to create a customer review system for your site with lessons learned in the last years of serving thousands of customers. It’s a thoughtful essay where we walk you through everything we’ve discovered and how we packed the best insights into a complex review system.

It makes little sense to double the information here, so we’d like to add a few ideas that we did not cover when writing it.

First of all, the framework we designed is getting traction. More people who decide to use our WordPress themes leave public reviews that other folks can read before spending their money on our work. Felt and Rosa2 are the products that are getting plenty of attention from this perspective. 

What’s relevant to say is that we make constant efforts to remind our customers about reviews. We do that mostly with the help of Alin and Alex, our customer support fellows. They have the most direct experience with them, so it makes perfect sense to be the ones who encourage this behavior.

Second of all, we’ve been keeping our promise of publishing every single review, as long as they respect our simple yet straightforward review moderation policy: no promotion and no offensive language. We also reach people back by answering all the messages, regardless of their nature. We think this is the right thing to do because it aligns with two of our core values: gratitude and caring. 

We are happy about how things are working out with the whole system. Hopefully, we started a conversation about the importance of being honest and avoiding cherry-picking big words just for fame and glory.

An affiliate program that works for us

We put together a transparent article on building our affiliate program too. It packs the effort of two and a half years of trial-and-error in running an initiative of this kind.

At the time being, we’re noticing new affiliates every two weeks or so, and we follow-up with all of them. The first email is to say Welcome and ask if they need any helping hand. The second one is to remind them that this is a partnership, and my job is to walk them through to have the best chances to earn cash next to us. 

Unfortunately, most do not reply, and in time that became a sign that we will not work together. There are a few exceptions, but the number is insignificant. If people do not make space to ping me back after the first two emails, there are high chances I will close their affiliate account sometime soon. It’s not that we are extreme, but it’s useless to continue since the relationship is already broken right from the start.

We learned that if we want to help them more than they do, it’s time to let it go. While we are perfectly aware that we are both interested in making it work, it’s hard to find common ground when you feel solo.

However, we are happy with those few affiliates who have skin in the game and are open to all kinds of ideas. The bond is more reliable, the trust is there, the will to explore various directions is valid.

As a small team, we plan to keep improving the existing relationships and shaping these partnerships for the better. We also hope other professional WordPress affiliates will show-up.

Uplifting the local community

It’s not news that we’ve been writing from our experience. We’ve been embracing this mantra from the early days, so we don’t imagine manufacturing stories that are not ours. It’s just not who we are.

Our mission at Pixelgrade is to support people who want to make a positive impact in their communities. There are plenty of gateways to reach it. The most direct is through the way we create and maintain our digital products. Another approach, less visible though, is by lending a hand to local businesses from our hometown (Iași, Romania) to publish their presence online through an outstanding website.

In the last couple of months, we’ve been investing resources in this area. Once COVID-19 started to get traction in our country, and some of our favorite venues were closing their doors, we initiated a project to give them a digital alternative.

We took interviews with two owners who now have up and running websites made with Rosa 2, our product. We invite you to read both conversations (with Carmen and Andreea) to understand how it feels to be hit by a new reality overnight. 

On top of that, we documented the entire process. It helps us to grasp everything that happened and how we can do it better next time. It also provides information for those of you who consider supporting your local community but don’t know how to do it. It does not have to be only with creating websites per se. It can be almost anything: from taking photos to writing content and promoting their products on your social accounts to help them start a newsletter.

As for our team, the project led to more collaboration between us, more meaningful dialogue, and a better understanding of how we will twist and turn our products and offer in the future. This experience made us a better version of ourselves.

Meet us, Upstairs

Hold on. There’s something we want to clarify first. Context is essential, so don’t skip lines, por favor.

The redesign of the blog was left behind for solid reasons. In the end, we’re a small team that’s already keeping many balls up in the air. While starting to make progress and think about how to twist-and-turn it, we began to have mixed feelings around the ”blog” name. It felt neutral, detached, impersonal, and we are miles away from that. We care, we get involved, we put our souls into our work.

There’s an entire story regarding why we chose Upstairs as the name of the blog, so please read it thoroughly. What’s important to share here is that after we were sold that this is the best concept for the place where we host our in-depth articles, we went further and elaborated the Upstairs concept towards a community based on stories that make us better people.

So, the difference lies in the intention. Upstairs is where we write thoughtful stories written from our experience only. In the real world, it’s the place where we do actual work in our office (we spend our time in a beautiful house in Iași, Romania). We wanted a metaphor to invite people to see how we do stuff since all our articles come after a result of getting our hands dirty.

Upstairs Community is the name of a project we’re super excited about. We plan to nurture a trustworthy tribe around stories that make us better people. We wrote an article about this early-stage endeavor, so feel free to give it a go. If you resonate and feel the beat of what we are creating, join the adventure. You can share your story within the Upstairs community, too, since there we want to make room for more diverse voices, including outside our team.

We genuinely believe that Upstairs can work as a juicy source of learning for plenty of people, while the Upstairs Community aims to inspire you and help you feel less alone through stories that reinforce belongingness. Great things happen when we put excellence, our value, at the forefront of our ambitions. There’s a lot of room to play, so we are super excited to get going.

Our work and life through a pandemic

Life does not give you a technical manual with tips about how to behave in extreme times. As everyone out there, we needed to adjust to the new reality, in line with our culture.

One of the first things we did was to help our team satisfy their basic safety needs. A few days before the lockdown, we offered the option to work from home. We helped them move whatever they needed in terms of infrastructure (chairs, monitors) to have the best possible work conditions.

We’re a small team, and almost all of us live in small flats, so we kept the office open because we’re working from a house with a generous courtyard. We thought it’s crucial to be careful with our core needs and don’t let them sink. Therefore, a few of us kept coming to the office and work from here. 

During this time, we regularly checked the team’s morale on Slack with a couple of questions. The goal was to offer a safe place where each of us could share how they cope with the situation and check if anyone had any symptoms. It wasn’t the case, but they could rest without cutting days off if it would have happened. We also did a few calls on Zoom to see each other and change perspectives about what we accomplished during the week.

As leaders, we were more tolerant and patient during these last months since it was hard to do “business-as-usual.” We tried to offer as many securities as we could in terms of money since nobody was threatened on the financial side. We gave our best to provide whatever was needed to make sure our teammates keep their energy to deal with their own emotions and anxieties.

We’ve been working on the projects that were work-on-progress at that moment while trying to stay away from the noise made by social media or news. We succeeded to some degree, and the progress we made is good enough considering the circumstances.

We know that we’ve all been affected by this period, even though in different ways and degrees. We believe that the next months will highlight the stress and the pressure accumulated since the pandemic kicked-off. On top of that, the opportunities for signing-out and relaxing are fewer, which will make things even harder. We’re just humans after all, and we need rest, balance, time-off, and experiences to refill our tanks.

Even though we have quite a few years of working remotely and selling products on a global scale, this does not mean that this challenge made our lives easier. On the contrary, it made us realize the importance of human contact. We are social animals.

One fun fact was the way we celebrated the birthdays of our teammates. We captured videos to wish all the best and such, and Andrei turned them into a short movie. 

In the end, it has been a time that made room for us to question assumptions, learn new behaviors, and leave some behind, to remind ourselves that we have plenty of reasons to be grateful and should express that frequently.

😷  Enjoy the summer safely

We hope this pandemic will not create even more divisions than we’ve already faced. Now, more than ever, we need to trust, respect, and support each other. The power of overcoming COVID-19 and adjusting to the new reality is a mission on everyone’s table. It’s up to us to contribute in any flavor we want, but one thing is clear: apathy is not a solution.

We trust that each of us has a sense of purpose and responsibility, and we will enjoy this summer in a way that rings a bell for our inner-why. Regardless of how you decide to spend these hot months, make sure you take time to sleep, rest, read, and do whatever else brings you joy and happiness.

Stay kind and safe. The world needs more of that.

The post Transparency Report #11: adjusting is mandatory appeared first on Pixelgrade.

Quick navigation in this article:

• Overview
• Revenue and Expenses
• An ambitious plan to strengthen all our products
• A 3-months marketing plan to test assumptions and move forward
• Rosa 2 became our hit theme straight from launch
• Black Friday and Cyber Monday worked out beyond expectations
• No communication leads to bad scenarios and broken relationships

Overview

The road was not only intense but also full of discoveries on a personal and business level. During a lunch to celebrate eight years of activity, George asked us what kind of drink would we associate with the journey we had lately. With a few flavors, everyone mentioned țuica, a national drink with plenty of degrees (over 50°), which feels sharp in your throat, punches you in the stomach, gives you headaches, but it also warms your face and hands. 

It’s a proper perspective of the last six months. Actually, to be honest, of the entire year. It kicked our butts at every corner, but it also brought us closer together. In the end, to celebrate implies to gather your dear ones around the same table. Cheers to us!

Get yourself a coffee or a hot cup of tea, and enjoy one of the most emotional transparency reports we wrote so far. ☕️

Let’s start with a quick summary of what we’ve been up to these past six months.

Product, support, and marketing

• A new theme released — Rosa 2, the sequel of our best selling WordPress theme, reimagined for the new Gutenberg editor. Read more about the process here.
• Officially launched a new plugin — Nova Blocks, a collection of design-driven Gutenberg blocks, committed to making your site shine like a newborn star.
• Over 60 themes and plugins updates following our plan of consolidating all our products and making sure they run flawlessly
• A new free theme released on WordPress.org that already amounted over 1,000 active installations
• A companion plugin, Pixelgrade Assistant, to improve the onboarding and support experience of our free customers
• A flawless integration of Customify (Style Manager) with all our free themes
• A more relaxed approach on writing on our blog with 23 new articles (some about our products including customer interviews, some opinion pieces on the WordPress community, others part of a rewriting exercise with SEO in mind, and the rest with educational content) 
• An in-depth review system on our shop to promote transparency and facilitate building trust with those who are interested in our work
• A performance-optimization marathon to make sure our shop runs as fast as a Ferrari and offers the best experience possible
• An insightful SEO analysis on our shop and plenty of interactions as a result (from the unique selling proposition — WordPress themes for an easy start — to other areas)
• A successful Black Friday & Cyber Monday campaign with $11K net revenue, yaaay!
• A series of consolidated and meaningful relationships with our affiliates and partners.

Team and culture

• We kept our transparency promise towards our team and openly shared the financial struggle we’ve been facing; as always, we did it with care and kindness, in alignment with our values 
• Due to this new reality and the new marketing strategy we put in place, we had to part ways with three comrades: Maria, graphic designer, Ioana, content writer, and Cosmin, backend developer
• We continued our leadership chats, even though under different formats and sizes, to try to stay afloat 
• We stayed close and active in the local community by attending all kinds of meetups and events
• We gave our best to keep costs under control, without intervening in the overall mojo of the team, but we did get rid of some tools that we used sparingly.

Fun facts

• 🌌 George went to a family constellation workshop and discovered more about past events than he was aware of.
• 🎤 Oana was brave enough to return to the university she graduated and give a talk about the power of storytelling, woohoo!
• 🤓 Vlad started to write on his personal blog all kinds of inspiring and provoking articles; give them a go, you will thank us later
• 🍼Alin is a father for the second time and moved into a new home; enjoy it fully and best of luck with those sleepless nights
• 🥁Răzvan started to play drums and he is pretty excited about it; we can’t wait to see him on the stage, yaaay!
• ✈️ Andrei signed out for a couple of days to visit some friends; he enjoyed Strasbourg and plans to move there already, ha, ha!
• ️🎮 Mădălin became a FIFA trader and he’s doing a good job with his investments; no surprise for us, he’s a pro!
• 🏔 Alex is savoring remote work from Maramureș, a stunning Romanian region, where his mother lives. 

Revenue

Our revenue these past 6 months followed the old saying: “It’s going to get worse before it gets better.” Despite our hopes before summertime, as you may recall from our previous Transparency Report #9, life had other plans. We simply had trouble getting to grips with how stubborn this reality actually was.

When it comes to actual numbers, the last 6 months looked like this:
→ $29,182 total monthly average revenue (+7% up from $27,190)
↳ $13,735 monthly revenue from Pixelgrade.com shop (+48% up from $9,258)
↳ $10,811 monthly revenue from WordPress.com (+94% up from $5,571)
↳ $4,466 monthly revenue from Envato (–63% down from $12,110)

Envato’s income continued its slow, excruciatingly predictable, becoming our smallest source of revenue. We have little hopes for it going forward. That is why we try to convince as many potential customers to buy from our shop instead. Some do, some still prefer to purchase from Envato.

We don’t discriminate between the two groups. They are all our customers, and we give them their due care and respect.

WordPress.com’s revenue thankfully remained stable during the summer months and started to increase come autumn. We currently have little leverage there to influence things one way or another. This is our second-largest source of revenue.

The place we invest most resources, our Pixelgrade.com shop had grown, but not always in line with our hopes and needs. Only recently we managed to meaningfully increase its revenue to a comfortable place. Hopefully, we can maintain this trajectory in the future.

Expenses

The reality just described above meant that our revenue simply couldn’t keep up with our expenses. We are not a wasteful bunch, but times of plenty have a habit of sneaking small expenses everywhere — expenses that add up when you take a few steps back. By mid to end of July, we knew something had to change if we were going to survive this.

George took the reigns and forced our entire leadership team to get to grips with the harsh reality and start asking questions to identify areas of expenses exceeding our current capabilities. We quickly realized that this is going to take cuts all around. Any single area could not help us stay afloat. We were also mindful of the danger of overdoing it and hampering all our future growth prospects.

The three main areas we identified were tooling, marketing, and, sadly, salaries. Tooling was the easiest one since it’s very much about cold facts. We organized a document with all our expenses with licenses, servers, apps, services, however large or small, and analyzed the benefits and wiggle room we had with each. The nice-to-haves were the first to go away, but there were few we could identify. For the rest, we reduced waste in terms of packages and consolidated servers and tools.

The second area was marketing expenses (or investments) where we decided, half-heartedly, to not have a budget and instead focus on what we could better do with our existing systems and products — a harder, slower, agonizing at times but maybe more sustainable way to grow. More on this, later on.

The third area of our expenses, the largest one by far, is salaries. It is many orders of magnitude harder to make cuts here, at least for us, because people earn their paycheck, rely on it, make plans with it, people glue with each other, create relationships of all kinds.

People are not to be treated as a number in a spreadsheet. Yet, that is exactly what we had in front of us. After much thought, we decided to reduce our team by three people. After a few months, time had shown us we made the right call for everyone, even for the ones we had to part ways with.

So, our average monthly expenses hovered around $26,500 (-6% from $28,100), broken down into:
→ 73% of salaries
→ 20% maintenance (rent, software, accounting fees, suppliers)
→ 7% occasional expenses (conferences, marketing, hardware)

Starting with October, our revenue to expenses ratio reached much more sustainable levels and we have reasons to be mildly hopeful of the months ahead. We will definitely be more cautious with hiring new people, but we will let time have the final say.

🥋 An ambitious plan to strengthen all our products

Back in August, it became clear that it was no longer business as usual. Things will have to change because the wave we were fortunate enough to catch and ride on has run its course. Pixelgrade, as a product company, would have to rethink its fundamentals and seek new ways forward. We didn’t know those ways, but we were confident that, with some breathing room, we could find them.

To gain this crucial breathing room, our current products should be less demanding in terms of development and ongoing support. We’ve wholeheartedly enrolled in a time-limited push, half sprint, half marathon, to stabilize all our themes, plugins, and shop. We gave ourselves three months to pull it off — a stretch by any standards.

We missed the deadline and, to some extent, we are still going. Not for lack of trying, but due to ideas that popped up along the way. Our new theme, Rosa 2, was not part of that plan. So it wasn’t a bunch of new functionality added to our shop.

Midway through, we silently decided to divert from the original plan because the initial assumptions had changed.

Much to our credit, we managed to update all of our themes and plugins (both premium and free), upgraded our shop in meaningful ways, released a new theme based on a new paradigm and pushed the boundaries of what could be done with the new Gutenberg editor through our Nova Blocks plugin.

Throughout this intense, but exhausting process, we identified ways forward through which we could build upon our legacy, ways we simply didn’t have the patience to see a few months back. We will rethink our fundamentals but will do so incrementally, without losing sight of the unique advantages we have today. We learned to see our past in a different light.

🛠 A 3-months marketing plan to test assumptions and move forward

At the beginning of August, we, the marketing and sales team, started to seriously think about the fact that the way we are doing marketing is not sustainable anymore, for multiple reasons. On the one hand, our cashflow went sideways, to say the least. We were swimming in murky waters with little to no control — it was draining, even terrifying at times. On the other hand, we were all over the place due to the variety of things and projects that we juggled with. 

Mix these two areas and the mindfuck was soon to come, hitting us face-first.

It was the moment when we started to have panic attacks, white nights, no appetite for a lot of stuff (food, people, going out).

We honestly, but seriously self-questioned about how to maintain our mental health. How to keep things manageable without losing our minds and souls. 

We needed a way that, however things would pan out, we remained healthy and functional. It was the first time when we hit the ground so hard that our self-esteem was almost nonexistent. The same was with energy and positive vibes. They were all gone.

That was the moment when we had to go back to the drawing table and make a pragmatic analysis about how we can do less, but with impact (both motivational and efficient in terms of revenue). At that moment, we were four in the marketing department, and as we all know, marketing activities require a lot of resources, money included. Not only in terms of salaries per se but also by investing in various channels.

We, Oana, Andrei, and George, came up with a plan to regroup in terms of people, narrow and give the best chances to our efforts, and establish guidelines on how to navigate the next three months. The main areas that we covered, starting with September, were:

• Affiliate program — better connections with people we like to work with, people that have an authentic approach in promoting our work and are open to meaningful dialogue.
• Free themes — continue to add themes (Rosa Lite is up and kicking, with Rosa 2 Lite in the queue), but also grow a system to get in touch with our free users and have the chance to provide meaningful content to them; we believe this is the way to gaining their trust and earning their money down the road
• Themes Bundle — we tried to directly sell this package to agencies, but with no luck whatsoever; we will not experiment again in this area (too much time, too little to learn)
• Strategic partnerships — we reached some reliable deals with partners we believe we can associate with, based on the quality of their work and shared values 
• SEO — an in-depth audit across our website to improve rankings, but, most importantly, to make sure we don’t mislead potential customers on any level.

We focused on these areas for more than three months, and we’re happy with the results, both soft in terms of relationships and hard in the form of income. 

The main lesson we want to share is this: in marketing, it is okay to be laser-focused on specific tactics because it forces you to make the most out of available resources and be creative. However, wandering for too long in such a tight playground, with so many constraints and limitations, can become frustrating and overwhelming. 

It’s a thin line between narrowing the gap and making sure that you don’t lose sight of what may lie just behind the fence.

🏆 Rosa 2 became our hit theme straight from launch

We will not rephrase here what we already said in the official article that accompanied Rosa 2 — the sequel of the best-selling restaurant WordPress theme. We think it makes more sense to share some insights about how did it become our hit theme from its first 30 days, with around $5K in revenue.

First of all, let’s face it: Rosa 2 is, by far, the brand new way of creating websites within WordPress. It may come as cocky to say that, but let’s admit that the way we’ve been building it will challenge the status quo of premium WordPress themes in the ecosystem. And we are not done with it, not by a long shot.

It is pure joy to do marketing around a product that is well designed and developed. We don’t shout, we just wisely pack the story and place it in the front of the right people.

Second, we did quite a lot of things to keep momentum with Rosa 2, from pre-launch activities to after-launch tactics. Here is an overview:

• Reach out to our most active affiliates to test-drive our product and share feedback
• Reach out to publishers who wrote about the first version of Rosa to check out the theme and update the roundups and articles with relevant information
• Reach out to big publishers — who don’t usually answer our e-mails — to explain what decent media coverage should look like and argue why Rosa 2 deserves a chance
• In-house testing sessions to make sure we capture different perspectives on the product
• A comprehensive checklist for launch day (official article, videos, visuals, copy, e-mails, etc.)
• Guest posts on the relevant websites highlighting the theme’s features and functionalities (WPBlog, WP Pluginsify, Themeora, etc.)
• Articles on our blog to show how Rosa 2 is being used (examples, interviews).
• Personally reaching out to Rosa 2 customers to schedule Skype calls and find out more about the ways through which they manage to make the most out of our product (work in progress).

One of the best things we did was to keep putting all our perspectives on the table and take advantage of the complementary skills we have: from design to development, from marketing to support and everything in between.

Moreover, we’ve been consistent in how we’ve been communicating about this product, and the results didn’t disappoint. We plan to continue this approach and give our best to understand more about the people who are using it because Rosa 2 hosts a wide range of websites from diverse industries: tourism, food, beauty, lifestyle, etc.

👏 Black Friday and Cyber Monday worked out beyond our expectations

This year was the second time we run a Black Friday & Cyber Monday campaign. We don’t usually run discount campaigns, so this is the only time of the year when people can purchase our themes and services with a generous discount — 40% off everything.

Given that last year we decided at the very last minute to have a Black Friday sale, this time we took our time. We started about a month and a half back and gave ourselves more breathing room and time to explore ideas.

A big bonus was that last year’s setup significantly decreased our workload since we could update and reuse most of our previous efforts. We’re talking about social media ads, email design and schedule, videos, banner notifications, and more. Since this campaign overlapped with other priorities, we decided to keep the necessary resources focused on other tasks. The fact that we were confident with what we managed to do in the past definitely helped.

Our first initiative was to reap the rewards of months of establishing stronger bonds with publishers and get mentioned in relevant roundups. Apart from this, we pretty much duplicated what worked best last year:

• Social media remarketing ads — in 2018, we learned that targeting new people who didn’t know us before is not cost-effective, and results are lackluster. This time we decided to focus all our efforts in promoting our offer, through remarketing ads, to our past visitors and potential customers that were after a special deal;
• Emailing — this was our best conversion channel a year back, so this time around we only improved our messages and fine-tuned our targeting. We sent a series of emails to all our existing customers, people that have shown interest in our eBooks, and all our free themes users.
• Affiliates — we made most of the efforts in this area in a leading couple of months by getting more members on board, improving communication, and improving our WordPress themes’ exposure through reviews and mentions.

We managed to generate $11,012.55 net sales during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaign. In just four days, we generated +244% more than we usually make in a regular week and +134% more than what we made during last year’s campaign.

To fully grasp the entire picture, I have to mention that all of this would not have been possible without all the efforts we did in the past year. That includes: bringing our themes portfolio from Envato on our shop, launching a successful premium theme — Rosa 2, improving our SEO game, releasing five new free themes and offering premium support for our free themes customers, significant website speed improvements, the addition of add-ons, and much more. 

Every piece contributed to this year’s campaign surprising success. For full transparency, here is a breakdown of our revenue sources for this year’s campaign:

Of course, when we sell a few weeks’ worths of themes in just a few days, the area impacted the most is, without a doubt, customer support. It was no surprise when we saw a significantly higher number of tickets, but our customer support fellows managed to be on top of things and answer requests in due time. The fact that they have a lot of expertise under their belts made a huge difference; without it, we could have easily got overwhelmed.

In the end, running a big campaign was another opportunity for all of us to overlap and help each other in many areas. It was once again an opportunity to put our complementary skills to work, collaborate, discuss, and create an exciting environment in our office. Building trust among us all these years pays off big time in moments like this. For that, we are grateful.

💔 No communication leads to bad scenarios and broken relationships

I, Oana, already have a lump in my throat, and I did not even start to share what difficult times we experienced at Pixelgrade during October. We (meaning George, Vlad, and I) had limited to no patience and inner resources to hear each other actively and fully. We were so tensioned with everything going around that we did not have the mental space for more. 

On top of that, we already reached a critical point where we lived more in our heads than in reality. We imagined various scenarios on an individual level, but also on a collective one. We were drained, exhausted, pissed off in such a way that things started to crack between us too. On a relationship level, I thought I was going to lose the battle. 

I was so overwhelmed with everything going on — from the harsh business reality to the lack of meaning to even show up at the office — that I thought it’s just a matter of time until it’s over.

I felt it was the final lap. 

For more than two weeks, I worked remotely to protect myself, and I did not have the energy nor the motivation to show up and spend time under the same roof. The tension was too hard to bear. The atmosphere was too dramatic to get along or to get things done.

I was on the edge.

After signing out for a short trip to Amsterdam, I came back with a different perspective, thanks to the multiple discussions I had with my mentor. She succeeded, once again, to mirror my words and behaviors and find light in the dark.

What followed was a super vulnerable yet honest and kind leadership gathering. We used to do them weekly, but at some point, we skipped this habit. We entered the maker mentality and stuck to it. The get the shit done attitude was the new mantra. You work, work even more, and keep things afloat. Because the faith is that more work will generate better results, right? Not so fast, Houston!

We caught up for a few hours of tough but authentic and meaningful talk about what’s going on. How each of us faces reality? What drives us ultimately? What’s the deal-breaker? What fuels our energy in such hard times? What hurts so hard at the end of the day?

We went through each question governed by plenty of emotions: sadness, frustration, disappointment, fragility, confusion, nostalgia.
However, the fact that we genuinely share similar values, even though we live and express them with nuances, helped us navigate the conversation and make it thoughtful and valuable. 

We realized how much does a lack of communication damages and impacts everything: relationships, collaboration, trust, teams, businesses, families, humanity, and so on. 

Better embrace and make the most out of a broken communication approach, than signing out and running from it. As long as it is kind, it is safe.

I am proud of both George and Vlad for being present and sensitive in listening and behaving, but also of me, for my bravery. As a woman in a leadership position, it is often hard to get your voice heard. Not because my partners aren’t able to fulfill my needs (in many senses, they succeed brilliantly, and I am grateful). 

Mostly because I live in a society and culture where women are still considered weak and somehow obliged to prove themselves regularly. I’m not trying to throw any feminism flavor here. It’s just reality as I’m experiencing it.

At the end of that leadership gathering, I felt that the healing process started to install. I was empty, but damn, it was such a beautiful hollow. You know why? Because I knew it was a moment from where I can choose to change the narrative and reconstruct the puzzle. 

I took George and Vlad into my arms, hugged them properly, and let them know I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to do more. They accepted and resonated because it was hard for them too. We agreed that it was a tango. Now, we’re relearning the steps together. 🤗

🎅🏻 Merry Christmas and be gentle with yourself in 2020

We’re grateful for all the lessons we gathered so far, and we’re eager to see what’s cooking next. No matter the ways we will continue to push boundaries at Pixelgrade, we’d like to remind ourselves more often that kindness and acceptance are the most powerful fuel. 

We will continue to change the narrative and make room for new stories in our lives, and hopefully, this will help us become better versions of ourselves. Meanwhile, we’ll sign out from the mundane, catch up with our family and friends, give some proper hugs and say it out loud how much we care about each other. Keep being awesome and gentle. The world needs more of that.

Merry Christmas! 🎄✨

The post Pixelgrade Transparency Report #10: hell and heaven at once appeared first on Pixelgrade.

Quick navigation in this article:

• Overview
• Revenue and Expenses
• Non‐exclusive Envato authors
• To Gutenberg or not
• Temporary suspension of our WordPress.org themes 
• Uplifting our goal system with the OKRs Champ role
• More educational content
• Insights on running Facebook Ads for WordPress themes

Overview

Many initiatives, great effort back-and-forth, and a lot of giving back.

What a rollercoaster ride these past six months have been! We can’t really believe that all that will follow has happened in such a short timeframe. It feels more like years than months – talk about a way to live a couple hundred “years.” 🤔

Lots have happened since our last report. We’ve put our hearts and minds into numerous new initiatives and experiments, doubled-down our efforts towards our day-to-day fundamentals, had the same hearts and minds stretched, we’ve poked and stepped upon, all while finding the energy to give back, and a lot. Don’t know about you, but we must have some secret sauce (or grit) since we are still here to tell the story. 😏

Product and support

• A new plugin released: Nova Blocks (a collection of design-driven Gutenberg blocks).
• Two in-depth free eBooks, one on improving writing, and the other on coming to grips with web performance in this day and age.
• Four new free themes released on WordPress.org (the lite versions of Felt, Vasco, Noto, and Timber).
• An updated and comprehensive portfolio across all the marketplaces we’re part of (Envato and Creative Market). Now, we almost have the same list of products on these marketplaces, including our shop (the only tweak is that Noto is not on Envato due to its “non-conventional design” 🤷‍♂️).
• An intense writing activity on our blog with 26 articles (from educational content, stories around our culture to interviews with our lovely customers).
• A well thought-out flow of emails with valuable knowledge for those who use our free themes to help them shine in the digital world.
• A bunch of Thank You Letters sent to our awesome customers around the world.
• A WooCommerce Add-on for a few of our WordPress themes to help people expand their revenue streams while maintaining design consistency across the board (Felt, Vasco, Osteria).
• 6 interviews with our customers to know more about their struggles, and to capture various ideas from the day-to-day use of our products.

Team and culture

• We’ve expanded our marketing department with a designer, Maria, and a content writer, Ioana; we also brought fresh blood for web development, Mădălin, and Alex on the customer support side. Welcome, mates!
• We’ve diverged paths with George M., mostly because we could not find common values and approaches to make things happen. 
• Our leadership meetings continued at a different pace, but with the same core desire: to become better leaders.
• 1:1 sessions to provide guidance for everyone’s growth and to make sure we are all aligned around the same values and goals.
• We’ve held coaching sessions, both inside the team and with external collaborators.
• We’ve created a performance evaluation framework adjusted to our mojo and way of working (based on a six-month frequency).
• We have an in-house chef, Dana, to cook us healthy food from time to time (we can’t wait to get back in the pre-summer rhythm).
• We attended WordCamp Europe 2019 in Berlin and experienced this edition quite differently since many things regarding the WordPress ecosystem are in flux these days, at least for us.
• We also had some team bonding activities, such as visiting a local brewery to taste some interesting beers, going to the movies, playing soccer and tennis, simply to sign-out for a bit and just hang out together as a team.
• We stepped outside of our comfort zone and tried to connect with the community: from marketing events to more technical ones, it was quite fun to get a feel about what’s happening in our close proximity.
• We tested a one-week of remote work across the team to see how things work out, and shared the experience when we got back to the office.
• We started using Know Your Team, a tool that helps managers facilitate dialogue and alignment on a more disciplined level. Today, we use it mostly for social and cultural questions, as well as for reading a bunch of insightful guides, while being aware there’s much more to discover than meets the eye.

Fun facts:

• 🏍 George had plenty of challenges with his motorcycle while traveling across the country, but he learned a lot of useful stuff, including asking for help from locals. 
• 🛫 Oana traveled around Europe for a full month and published authentic photos with the places, people, and food she’s experienced along the way.
• 🌤 Vlad went to Tel Aviv with his wife to unwind a bit and to get lost in an eclectic city, where he admired architecture gems at every step; btw, this was our way to wish him a Happy Birthday.
• 🏡  Alin is going to be a father for the second time, so big congrats and enjoy the new adventure, as well as moving into a new crib.
• 🎤 Răzvan launched a new rap track on YouTube, and he finally created his official Facebook page as an artist; let the fans join the gang!
• 🏆 Andrei won a city-break (thanks to his wife’s initiative to participate in an online contest), so he “chilled” at the foot of mountains.
• ⚽️ Mădălin loves Arsenal from head to toe and he’s a beer enthusiast. What a better combination than this?
• 👟 Cosmin has spent a lot of money on sneakers of all kinds; it seems that this is his new obsession.
• 🇮🇹 Maria went to Italy for the first time (Bologna), and she’s thrilled about returning again in August.
• 👶 Alex had a baby (son) and he’s quite mesmerized about the new lifestyle he needs to accommodate to. 

Revenue

While we focused our efforts on our own shop – where things are moving steadily (+41% increase), the decisions we’ve made and the events that took place during this period caused an overall –13% decline in our monthly revenue. 

• After dropping the ↬ exclusivity with Envato in April, we lost more than 60% of the revenue through that channel, as expected. This change instantly affected our short-term income, making room for a whole range of benefits that we believe will come in the long-term.
• Pretty much throughout all this time, the WordPress.com platform had been having problems with a broken script that helped measure product usage. This lead to unreliable data and the impossibility for us to get paid correctly. Fortunately, the situation seems to be getting closer to an end, and we will see the benefits in the next months.
• For almost two months, we’ve had all of our WordPress.org ↬ themes suspended. The back-and-forth effort and confusion drained us of energy and pushed us a couple of steps farther from this community.

One thing led to another and we hit rock bottom in June, one of the most unprofitable months in our short history. Things are looking better in July, and hopefully, we will recover from this sharp downward trend before it’s not too late. Until then, this is the ugly reality we have to deal with.

When it comes to actual numbers, the last 6 months looked like this:
— $27,190 total monthly average revenue (-13% down from $31,297)
— $9,258 monthly average revenue from Pixelgrade Shop (+41% up from $6,536)
— $12,110 monthly average from Envato (–33% down from $18,247)

Expenses

While the WordPress themes market seems to suffer from a lack of clear direction, internally, our team evolved and, as our main expenses are from the salaries, the total amount of expenses remained about the same.

So, our average monthly expenses hovered around $28,109 (-2% from $28,729), broken down into:
— 69% salaries
— 21% maintenance (rent, software, accounting fees, suppliers)
— 10% occasional expenses (conferences, marketing, hardware)

The numbers and percentages are in the expected range of the last few years. The real challenge comes from the negative cash flow and how we will make use of the resources accumulated thus far, to be able to create the best opportunities from this point onward. One thing is certain: it will not be smooth sailing.

Non-exclusive Envato authors to bring everything under the same roof

We’ve built and sold our first WordPress theme at the start of 2013,  one year after setting-up Pixelgrade as a company, providing custom work for clients at the same time. It was (cleverly) called B:LIV, and it was launched exclusively on the (Envato) ThemeForest marketplace. 

More than six years have passed since then, and in all this time, we have steadily released new themes and built adjacent design tools. We’ve deeply enjoyed the newfound freedom, overwhelming feedback and the authority we managed to gain. 

Two years ago, we went through an in-depth rebranding process and launched our own shop with the main intent of being a fertile ground for growth. Well, our plan paid off quickly, as we’ve simultaneously improved the customer experience and opened doors towards new revenue streams (e.g. selling services). 

Being exclusive authors on Envato meant that we were not able to sell a large part of our portfolio on pixelgrade.com. So our shop started with only 7 WordPress themes, mostly focused on blogging and magazines, even if we had 10 more products.

The frustration with our two disconnected product offerings never went away. It only grew. On Envato, we lacked the freedom to do the changes we felt needed to be done, and, even more than that, we did not know much about our own customers (e.g. where they come from, who they are). Our natural inclination towards a more humane, personal relationship with our customers got roadblocked at every corner.

All these difficulties, mixed up with the downward trend, unpredictable and mostly uncontrollable climate on Envato, led to our decision to give up the exclusivity and bring all of our products into one place. It surely is a financial hit as our monthly revenue from this channel dropped from more than $15k to less than $6k (not taking into consideration the decline of the general sales on ThemeForest since way back in 2016), but we still think it’s the right move in the long term, and that we will be able to compensate through our shop.

What did we get? It feels truly liberating to have full control over our own products, opening a greater spectrum of possibilities in the way we pack and deliver them to the public. Now, we can target new clients by offering themes in the form of bundles, create loyalty campaigns, provide complementary services according to our customers’ needs (starting from installation and setup to the optimization of the site in terms of performance), or even give away themes for free to support initiatives we have faith in.

To Gutenberg or not

During these past 6 months, the new block editor became the new reality of the way people created content with WordPress. It landed in the core and the development has kept an upbeat pace, and from the outside, everything seems to progress in the right direction.

Ever since it was announced, we chose not to take sides and join either of the bandwagons: not the one that was entirely in love with it, nor the one bashing it at every corner. We saw its strong (philosophical) points while, at the same time, we acknowledged the challenges it faced down the line, factoring our own experiences and explorations (notably Flamingo).

We were not early adopters by any means. However, once it was part of the WordPress core, we felt confident enough it was a piece of engineering we could reliably build upon, to further enhance the experience we would offer to our users.

In line with our way of approaching products, we aimed at customizing the editing experience to be in harmony with the goals of each theme we had. We strongly feel that each part of WordPress should cater to the user and, at least, not get in the way. If it can help, even better. 

Gutenberg promised to allow precisely this kind of “power” in the hands of those that “learned JavaScript deeply” as Matt put it. We trusted that the project would live up to the same promise of extensibility that the rest of WordPress strived for.

We decided to introduce two intermediary levels of consistent customizability between our Style Manager system living in the Customizer and the styling and functionality offered by each theme. 

The first level was a WordPress plugin called Nova Blocks through which we could offer Gutenberg blocks that were built with our design principles in mind. We aimed at providing blocks with a low cognitive load, where things would work naturally, and in line with each problem (hero, media card, and slideshow to start with).

The second level was a higher-order one acting as an intermediary between the decisions made in the Customizer and each post or page. We aimed at helping people consistently style their blocks across their site. This was also meant to be a plugin, Blocks Style Manager.

Sadly, that promise of extensibility we hoped for, is not something the current Gutenberg can live up to. Not by a long shot. It is quite clear to us that the editor technically lacks in some fundamental areas that make changing predictable things a complete nightmare. It feels like we are back to the monolithic apps of the past, and it is a big disappointment to us.

Sure, you can create your own blocks and do a bunch of exciting things. You can also add elements to the existing interface areas. But that’s about it. The minute you want your code to interact with existing blocks or interface elements, you realize very little thought was put into this.

As a consequence, we managed to create the Nova Blocks plugin despite the struggles and compromises we had to make. It is not where we aimed at, but it’s the best we could get in the current architecture of things. Sadly, the Blocks Style Manager plugin was a no-go despite our in-depth explorations of possible ways around the limitations of Gutenberg’s code.

What’s more worrisome is that Gutenberg is already talking about legacy and has to improve things while considering all the content already created. Making fundamental changes in this scenario is exceedingly harder and unnecessarily complicated. There are talks around these shortcomings, but it all feels like pulling teeth. 

Temporary suspension of our WordPress.org themes

On May 18th 2019, we were alerted about some talks related to us in the Themes Review Team (TRT) Slack channel. To our surprise, we found out that all of our WordPress.org themes were suspended (and unavailable in the repo), and that our account was locked from sending updates to them. The conversation concerning us was straight out of dystopian novels. We couldn’t believe our eyes about the manner we were being portrayed. 😳

We tried to communicate as openly and honestly as possible, but it all fell on deaf ears. Almost everyone (to be fair) was throwing big words around, with frightening ease and basically, all that was lacking were some pitchforks. It was the first time we had to seriously ask: what kind of a community have we gotten ourselves into? 😕

What spurred all this? About two months back, we decided to do something about the terrible onboarding experience (aka non-existent) people had when trying to use our free WordPress themes. We leveraged all the infrastructure we’ve created for our premium customers, to put it to good use for our free users. The main hub of all this is a custom plugin called Pixelgrade Care that we use for starter content, in-dashboard theme documentation, and in opening support tickets.

We wanted to offer all of these to our free users, in exchange for securely connecting their site with pixelgrade.com. To put it bluntly, in exchange for their email address, we would offer one-click demo content, easy-to-access documentation, and premium support — a fair deal by any standard. To achieve this, we had to recommend the Pixelgrade Care plugin upon theme install. For this, we’ve devised an easy to understand notification and a smooth onboarding experience. We don’t like to make things unnecessarily difficult for people.

At the same time, we restructured (modularized) our latest themes, so we would be able to use the same code for both the free and premium versions. Basically, our free users would get the core of a theme, and the paying customers would get one or more premium modules. We made this move so we could maintain and enhance both free and premium themes, while the honest reality is that when the two got disconnected, it was far harder to maintain them – naturally, PRO versions getting priority over the Lite ones. 

The fact that we had the audacity of doing this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Without any notice, we’ve been suspended, and a long, arduous road of getting back to the previous state began. What was a simple revert in terms of code, turned into a saga of endless back-and-forth communication, weeks of not getting anything clearer to move further, days of waiting for a simple answer, and decisions made without a shred of context or explanation. Shoot first, ask questions later kind of situation.

Needless to say, that the nice image we had of WordPress.org, being a kind community, focused on helping each other and, most of all, having the WordPress user at its core, well, that naive picture was smashed to smithereens. It was a very saddening process to go through, as it meant reconciling our expectations with this all too clear reality.

After about two months of mind-twisting compromises, we managed to get our themes reinstated. Recently, we were removed without notice from the Trusted Authors program. We will continue to be on WordPress.org, but it is quite clear to us that there is no space for change or innovation driven by the needs of your average WordPress user.

Uplifting our goal system with a new role onboard: OKRs Champ

It’s been more than a year since we started working again with the OKRs methodology. For those of you who don’t know what that means, here’s the long story short: a framework — Objectives and Key Results for defining and tracking objectives across a team to measure outcomes and assure alignment. It’s been highly promoted by Google, but nowadays, a bunch of companies of all sizes are trying to embrace and make it work.

The best thing about OKRs is that this system allows us to give our efforts the best chances to succeed while making sure we share the same understanding about where the company stands, both during and at the end of a cycle.

We experienced this approach a few years ago, and things went a bit crazy from a certain point, but that’s nothing new under the sun. Since Oana is a member of The Watercooler, a global community of leaders around the world, she often noticed conversations where managers shared their struggles and headaches with OKRs. 

Therefore, there’s no doubt that it took us a bit of time and plenty of iterations to shape this framework to our particular needs, but, most importantly, to our culture and way of getting things done.

A key factor, in helping us smooth things along the way, was the introduction of a new role within the system: OKRs Champ. At Pixelgrade, it is filled by Oana, our Chief People Officer, where she acts as an ambassador of the framework and makes sure everyone is accountable for at least one objective. 

It is relevant to highlight the fact that after playing around for almost three years, we came to the conclusion that we should split objectives in two: one laser-focused on the company’s success (such as: building valuable products which are used by a lot of people or putting in-place upselling strategies to level-up our chances to earn more money: from free themes to premium ones), and another one individual, shaped in such a way that all the people from our squad gain more clarity in terms of personal growth aka learning and acquiring new skills (packed under knowledge-sharing sessions, taking courses, reading books, and so on).

There’s a great deal to share regarding the impact that an OKRs Champ has on both the system and the people, but here are some of Oana’s main responsibilities:

• Coordinates and facilitates the process of defining and fine-tuning the OKRs right from the start of the cycle.
• Keeps track and reinforces the necessary habits of working with OKRs across the cycle (writes weekly check-ins, pushes people to measure their progress and the level of confidence on a regular basis).
• Runs a follow-up and feedback meeting at the end of the cycle to capture insights and what to improve for the upcoming session.

This role is a mix of evangelist and project manager who needs to have strong communication skills, as the main job is to coordinate the various puzzle pieces while keeping the bigger picture in mind. For us, the OKRs champ makes sense both in the short and long run because we’d experienced first-hand how solid habits need reinforcement, good practices, loads of positive examples, and plenty of stories to keep everyone on the same page.

More educational content

We’ve been writing even more in-depth content on our blog, that was better tailored for the specific audiences we outlined when defining the key results within the OKRs system. This way, we succeeded to have more focus on crafting the best articles, which has helped us get closer to the desired business outcomes (having a coherent content calendar was super useful as well, because it projected a clear path towards what we want to accomplish with our blog). 

On top of that, we’ve been far more strategic with our content: we wrote by following a specific funnel in mind, known among marketers as content pillars. 

Basically, what it means is that you put together articles aimed at hitting one of the three main stages: Awareness, Consideration, Decision. 

Therefore, we had the chance to genuinely lead visitors from one step to another by offering the right educational content for the right action he or she is going to take. No push, no fake news, just the right message packed and delivered at the right time.

Let me share a specific example for the photography and visual artists tribe, our core target for the last cycle within the OKRs system:

• Awareness — How to write creative content about your photo sessions: a valuable article with plenty of tips and ideas about how to start creating engaging stories about visual work without feeling overwhelmed along the way.
• Consideration — Where to grow your business as a photographer: site or social media: a walkthrough about what you need to know regarding these two ways of building a creative business, and which one fits your goals the best, so you take well-informed decisions.
• Decision — How to choose the right photography WordPress theme for your website: a kind of statement about where to look for when buying a theme to showcase your work, in such a way that makes sense for your brand, but also why Border might be your go-to product.

After repeatedly putting in practice this way of approaching content, we’ve noticed that we have quite a lot of thoughtful knowledge to share in order to help people build more attractive digital experiences and level-up their online presence. 

So guess what? We went the extra mile and put together our first free eBook on How to improve your writing style to educate folks on how to craft engaging digital stories. It was downloaded (and hopefully read) by 1,185 people from a wide range of industries (marketing, software development, arts & crafts, PR, entrepreneurship, photography etc.). Plenty of them reached out to us via email, to thank us for giving something back to the community:

“I think this eBook is great because it shares the experience from somebody who has actually been writing professionally for a number of years, so they’ve really learned by doing. Most of all, it’s great because it’s not a “what to do”, but rather what I’ve done and what works for me, and could probably also work for you. It’s more of an inspiration rather than a checklist. The thing is, writing is something very personal, and you need to find your own style, and this eBook takes you through Oana’s journey as an inspiration to your own.”

A few weeks ago, we launched another free eBook — WordPress website performance in this day and age,  this time far more specific and better tailored for those who want to make the most out of their digital game. We’re still promoting it, but so far it reached almost 400 folks, which is already a good result since the profile of this resource is far more narrow. However, we got some nice feedback from people active on Reddit too:

“Thanks, Vlad. That was one of the greatest texts about website performance I have read in a long time, and I could not write it better myself, love the style of writing and relaxed view on performance and life pulled together.

Guys, even if you are “experts” in website performance, read it, it is definitely enjoyable as a read, even if it was a long read .. and if you are new to website performance, there are a lot of good thoughts and knowledge in this ebook.

Thanks again for writing such an outstanding piece of work, much more fun to read than an A-Z performance list article, everyone else is writing on their blogs. Well done!”

We’re not ashamed to say that we take pride in giving so much back to the community while also helping people achieve success with their websites. Regardless, if individuals need a helping hand with the way they’re putting together online stories or if they require reliable tactics about offering a flawless experience for their visitors, we are a reliable resource for them. For those in need, feel free to spread the word!

Insights on running Facebook Ads for WordPress themes

We started using Facebook Ads to promote our products for more than a year ago, so these insights are not strictly related to the past six months. 

We haven’t run any ads in the past, but we felt like we could benefit from sharing our educational content with more people and see if we can drive extra sales. At the same time, during these past months, we managed to validate and also invalidate some of our hypotheses and draw some conclusions.

Our first dab in Facebook ads started with the promotion of several blog interviews with customers of one of our WordPress themes. Once that was completed, we moved further and created retargeting ads to those that showed interest. These retargeting ads promoted our theme and were designed to get us conversions.

They didn’t manage to do that. That was our first signal that something might be off. 

We didn’t give up and continued experimenting with remarketing ads, promoting blog posts and running discount campaigns (either as part of the Black Friday campaign or stand-alone). We even managed to get an Account Manager from Facebook that assisted us in running some test ads and provided valuable insights regarding our campaigns.

So, after a year of running ads here are our conclusions:

#1 Promoting blog posts is a sure way to get more visitors on your blog and (maybe) generate conversions. 

Boosting that post on Facebook does work and it has brought us plenty of new people into the fold. The cost is decent and should be considered an investment. If one is looking for conversions, the story is quite different. Certain articles managed to generate sales at around $45/conversion – a very high cost, especially for the WordPress market. So, I recommend seeing these direct conversions as a bonus. 

#2 Running discount ad campaigns timed during popular yearly events will work out for you. 

One of the most prolific campaigns for us was on Black Friday, but results came with a twist. We managed to generate sales from remarketing to current customers at $10/conversion but not from reaching out to new audiences. 

Our suggestion is to use these “sales periods” to convert undecided customers, since people who haven’t heard of you before are way less likely to convert (and are more expensive to get).

#3 Promoting a single WordPress Theme does not work. 

What I mean is using your product presentation page and promote it either to people who interacted with it or to new audiences (people who might need a product similar to yours). 

It seems like, in the WordPress themes market, no matter the methods or how much we fine-tune our audiences or ads, getting direct conversions either does not happen or happens at a cost that doesn’t make sense business wise. Still, it might be different for you, and I’ll be happy to hear more if you managed to make it work, but for us, this strategy is a dead-end.

#4 The best performing ads are free content ads, like eBooks. 

As you read above, we launched two eBooks in the last six months and using Facebook Ads to get more downloads has proven as a solid strategy. 

The key is to create valuable content that answers people’s needs and to make sure your landing page follows all the right principles. For the first part, I recommend taking Skype calls with your customers to find our their needs. For the second one, I recommend Rob’s talk from WCEU 2019 or to watch the Landing Page Sessions from Unbounce for more insights on landing page creation. 

If you want cold numbers, we’ve managed to convert at $0.65/download for the eBook on writing, at a conversion rate of 62% and at $1.82 for the one on web performance, with a conversion rate of 47%. 

As you can see, there’s a big difference in cost between the two, even though we targeted the same audience. Therefore, keep in mind that the topic of the eBook is going to influence your results big time. If you want to generate sales from free resources, make sure the eBook offers educational content strongly related to the product you’re selling.

⛱️  Enjoy the summer

If you managed to plow through everything we, so whole-heartedly, wanted to share with you, raise it up 🙋‍♀️. You deserve a big hug and so do we 🤗, but we’ve made it!

Now take your eyes off of whatever screen you are looking at and let everything sink in. Go for a walk in the park, find a sunny beach or a shady spot under a tree, and enjoy the rest of this summer. Challenges and headaches will always be enough to go around for everyone.

The post Pixelgrade Transparency Report #9: the costs of change appeared first on Pixelgrade.

Overview

Facts or it didn’t happen. Let’s start with a summary of the small and big wins that helped us move further:

Product and support

• One new theme released: Noto (a notebook inspired concept blogging theme)
• Two free themes released on WordPress.org (the lite versions of Julia and Jason)
• A fruitful writing activity on our blog with 22 valuable articles (from case studies to interviews with our customers and educational resources)
• A new ↬ pricing strategy better anchored in the overall market mindset and expectations (read below)
• Our first ↬ Black Friday marketing campaign (read below)
• A bunch of Thank You Letters sent to our beloved customers around the world
• Big steps forward for ↬ Flamingo, a design systems creation tool we are developing as a side-project (read below)

Team and culture

• We’ve expanded our marketing department with a new designer, George M.
• We’ve had our first full-featured ↬ internship programme, and Cosmin is our new colleague (read below)
• We’ve diverged paths with three of our mates: Ilinca who moved to London and decided to broaden her professional challenges; Radu who switched to a fully remote company; and Adi due to values and culture misalignment
• Our ↬ weekly leadership meeting continued with remarkable regularity, helping us to navigate murkier waters than we would have liked (read below)
• Plenty of 1:1s sessions to invest in everyone’s growth and make sure we align around the same values and goals
• An intense recruitment journey both for filling the pipeline and having interviews and chats with new people from the community

Revenue

There were a lot of headwinds for our revenue streams in these past 6 months. While we’ve done our best to increase numbers on our own shop, external streams constantly eat that progress. This is why we find ourselves with a more or less constant monthly average, despite nearly doubling our shop revenue.

Things on Envato and WordPress.com are murky at best. The whole themes marketplace is shaking both due to external trends (moving to platforms for creating sites) but also internal ones (inertia and lack of knowledge about what comes next).

In our own shop, we’ve pretty much done what we intended. Especially starting with September (with a new pricing model) and peeking with our Black Friday campaign in November, things seem to be aligning for further growth.

When it comes to actual numbers, the last 6 months look like this:
— $31,297 average monthly average (–3% down from $32,266)
— $18,247 monthly average from Envato (–12.3% down from $20,801)
— $6,536 monthly average revenue from Pixelgrade Shop (+89.5% up from $3,448)

Expenses

Our expenses haven’t dropped (quite the contrary), but they are at a level suitable for the transition we are going through. The fact that the gap between them and revenue has shrunken is no reason to panic, but it is something we need to keep a closer eye on.

So, our average monthly expenses hovered on $28,729 (+2.3% from $28,074), broken down into:
— 72% salaries
— 20% maintenance (rent, software, accounting fees, suppliers)
— 8% occasional expenses (hardware, marketing, traveling)

While not easy, we’ve done our best to be more efficient when it comes to maintenance and occasional expenses, thus gaining more room for salaries as we try to bring new talent into the mix.

Themes subscriptions… Not so much

A year back we’ve introduced a new pricing strategy and product offering centered around subscriptions. It was all based on thoughtful analysis and predictions about the state of the WordPress themes market, all filtered through what we believed would make for a sustainable business model. We had high hopes that we could communicate this to our customers, and they would jump on board.

We were wrong. Reality has shown us that we were overly optimistic about our capability of shifting long established market expectations regarding price and package offerings (yes, Envato casts a long shadow). Despite our best efforts, the overall mindset is, sadly, against a subscription-based model when it comes to WordPress themes.

Something had to change. But what? To answer this, we’ve doubled our efforts of talking directly to our customers and ended up doing countless Skype calls and email exchanges with anyone who would be willing to help with their insights. At the same time, we went further with our market analysis and got a better grip on its ever-shifting dynamics and constraints. Thirdly, we navigated a much broader process of building a pricing model, factoring in our newly acquired knowledge, like the psychology involved, average price distribution, the value proposition of our competitors, big and small, etc.

What we’ve done?

With this new found understanding of what our (prospective) customers really need and their pre-existing expectations, we decided to introduce a new pricing strategy for our shop, one that is more focused on one-time, single theme purchases. While it may seem like a significant setback from our previous setup, we are confident it is more like a reframing of our initial goals.

So far, the new pricing strategy seems to be working well. Our shop revenue has been continuously growing, and our customers feel that current price options are better aligned with their needs. It is still too early to draw any definitive conclusions, but we will come back to this in our future transparency reports.

Internship programme

During the summer break, we’ve planned and organized our first fully-fledged internship programme. It was a (backend) development programme aimed at Computer Science students, and our primary goal was to try and bring promising new people in our team that were, first of all, a good match regarding culture, core values, and overall work ethics.

We’ve set it in such a way that would push for a steep(ish) learning curve with plenty of feedback and hands-on mini-projects related to our current market (WordPress). We’ve set clear rules and expectations right from the start, allowing our interns to have a pretty good idea of what they are embarking on. We can safely say this worked beautifully making the whole experience a win-win situation for all involved.

Although we had more candidates, we settled on three students since we felt that was a number we could safely handle in our current conditions and would ensure a healthy dynamic among them. After the first month or so, we reduced the team to two since one of them couldn’t keep up with the pace. At the end of the three months of intense learning, we made the decision that Cosmin was the right fit for us, and he gladly joined our team as a Junior Backend developer.

The entire experience was beneficial beyond having a new crew member. Vlad, our CTO, and mentor in this programme gained a great deal in terms of reconnecting with the teacher inside of him. The team as a whole benefited from the boost of energy brought along by people at the very beginning of their professional life. And finally, Pixelgrade gained further exposure and notoriety among the next (local) generation of developers.

We can safely say we will definitely do this again!

Our first Black Friday campaign

We’ve always been skeptical about offering discounts and running pushy marketing campaigns. We know how much time, energy, and money we invest in creating our products, so yeah, we sincerely believe what we offer deserves every single cent (and even more).

However, we’re also pragmatic, and we keep an eagle eye on how things are changing within the landscape of themes and plugins, so we decided to create our first Black Friday / Cyber Monday campaign. It was also the right timing to make such a move because now we have three people in charge of all the marketing efforts.

Therefore, in only one week we made it happen: from the creative concept to the execution, we managed to create a coherent red thread.

The deal was generous and straightforward: 40% off for themes and services listed on our shop, running from Friday 23rd to Monday 26th of November.

Here’s what we did in terms of marketing actions:

• Social media ads — we run dedicated ads for a bunch of specific segments on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter; we also used video ads and we’re eager to experiment even more in this area
• E-mailing — we created a series of e-mails focused on the deal, without losing our tone-of-voice or authenticity, and that’s huge for us
• Push notifications — we have used an internal system to send contextual notifications with the offer inside the WordPress dashboard
• Affiliates — we informed our affiliates about the promo campaign and got a boost from their side as well

We succeeded to earn $4,692 in just four days and that’s an amazing increase of +485% from the average we made in the weeks before and it’s almost as much as we did in the whole previous month.

On top of that, what’s interesting is that the last year, in the same timeframe, things were the other way around. Basically, the revenue was down with around -35%.

In terms of performance, we’re proud to say that e-mailing was the main hit concerning conversions (25), followed by social media ads (9), push notifications (4), which led us to an overall conversion cost of $10.90.

On the other side, what’s even more important for us is that we learned a bunch of lessons on a team level:

• We improved our communication skills and we managed to make the most out of both joyful and pressing moments
• We exercised how to organize and track tasks more efficiently thanks to our daily standups
• We proved, once again, how much complementarity matters in getting the best possible results.

All in all, it was a beautiful exercise that helped us create stronger bonds, earn more trust, and highlight a great feeling of belonging. These are traits and perks hard to convert them into money, but they are definitely priceless for both our evolution as professionals and how we are going to approach upcoming marketing campaigns.

Flamingo: Getting a grip on our future

In our previous Transparency Report, we’ve talked about Style Manager and how we were pushing things forward for the way a customer customizes its site style consistently and predictably. Even though we haven’t posted any updates, the whole project is alive and kicking in most of our themes.

The last six months represented an intense period of research and development, often ending up in places we didn’t quite expect. And when we say research, we really mean it. We’ve squeezed all the extra time we could “steal” from our primary focus (WordPress themes) and deep dive into a wide range of human and technical subjects, discovering whole areas of knowledge we were oblivious before.

While our journey started as an additional layer on top of our products, we’ve realized soon enough that we were in a rather advantageous position. By being so stringent on design and “decisions, not options” since our beginnings, we’ve sort of trained ourselves to constantly think of systems, constraints and, more importantly, conveying design intent through code. Throughout the research, we’ve realized that we already had what it took to tackle a more meaningful problem than merely offering a set of style guides.

We got hooked by the challenge of enabling a more balanced, two-way relationship between design and development. If “OK. Yet another project about bridging the gap between design and development with standardized components gathered in a design system” sprang to mind, you are on the wrong path. The whole hype around “everyone should have and maintain a design system” (pushed by designers) is not our main focus.

With Flamingo we aim at bridging the gap between minds and the actual medium the end digital product will live in (the web, mobile apps, AR, VR, who knows what else). We want to help designers break free from the (digital) pen and paper they have been forced to use for years and instead use a tool that is adapted to their way of thinking, and to their processes, and ultimately help them make better, more informed product decisions.

For such a tool to exist and deliver on its promises, the relationship between designers and developers needs to change because we need to infuse the work environment with the end medium knowledge held by developers. The tool needs to provide feedback about the real-life capabilities and constraints of the digital medium(s). By going there, we open the possibility of two-way collaboration between design and development, significantly improving communication (and eliminating that dreaded handoff), cutting down product creation and maintenance costs, and deliver products that make full use of their digital medium.

We are fully aware this is a very ambitious goal, and it could take a very long time to reach it. We are also aware we are a small team, with limited resources, and big delays could drain our energy and determination. That is why we will do this in stages, starting with the low hanging fruits (instant gratification FTW).

An example of integration with the default WordPress 5.0 theme.

Today, the Flamingo platform is at the stage where one can create and manage basic design systems (color, fonts, and spacing) and deliver them to WordPress via a custom integration (a WordPress plugin), keeping the end site config in sync with the applied design system.

Stay tuned for more and we would love to hear your thoughts about it.

Leadership team huddle

Every single week we (Oana, George, and Vlad) gather to run an informal leadership meeting to align our vision on both business and non-business topics.

The huddle changed quite a lot over the last six months since we noticed the needs shifted as well. If in the early days we talked a lot about operations on a particular project or tasks, now, at the #37 episode, we focus far more on dealing with our own ups-and-downs as leaders.

We often found ourselves centering heavily on the rest of the team, and we forgot that we too require attention, interest, and motivation to keep our wheels spinning. That doesn’t mean that we became opaque to theirs. Not at all. We just aimed for a better balance.

The blunt truth is that the risks are way more dangerous if we’re the ones who are not okay, whatever that means: sometimes it could equal all kinds of frustrations around how things work, in other scenarios could mean personal struggles and dilemmas of all kinds.

Our current mantra is that if we don’t protect ourselves, everything could easily fall like a domino.

That’s why each of us is investing a lot of time and energy in becoming a better leader: from being a member of The Watercooler gang, going to therapy or taking coaching sessions — we genuinely embraced them all and we’re quite proud with the progress we’ve been making so far.

Therefore, before being obsessed with the team’s needs and requirements only, we learned that we should stop a bit from the rush and relearn how to keep a healthier rhythm. This means that we allow ourselves to let our voice heard as well, no matter if the echo is sometimes irritable, anxious, lost or at the opposite side of the spectrum: joyful, optimistic, uplifting.

The same applies in the airplanes. In the case of emergency, if the oxygen masks fall, you need to put yours first and then help your kid or the one who sits next to you. And that’s OKAY.

If we should name one single advantage of doing such a gathering with regularity than this one beats them all: the simple fact that we nurtured a safe and friendly environment, where we can share vulnerabilities of all kinds, means the world to us. The path we chose is tough and we clearly need more kindness, tolerance, empathy, and care. We decided to lead by example.

❄️ Happy Holidays

Now that everyone in the team got some top-notch gifts at the Secret Santa’s gathering, we’re ready to unplug a bit, take distance, reset the speed, and make great memories with the dear ones.

We wish you all Happy Holidays and an end of the year full of beautiful experiences that will give you drive and optimism in 2019. Stay awesome!

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The post Pixelgrade Transparency Report #8 appeared first on Pixelgrade.

Overview

We’re living in an era where you can feel pressure on multiple plans. Pressure to have a successful career, pressure to build something long-lasting, a pressure to grow both as a person and as a professional, pressure to deliver, pressure to lead by example, pressure to know the answer for any question out there. It’s not only chaotic, but this permanent state of mind brings a tone of damages.

However, we deeply believe that we need to relearn how to slow down, how to say no or I don’t know, how to take the time to make an in-depth analysis, how to nurture relationships or accept failures and celebrate wins. We have our rhythm and we practice resilience on a daily basis since we’re confident that putting the best version of ourselves out there is the best thing we can do.

Read further to find out what we managed to create in the last six months and what happened across the team. Let’s dive in!

Product and support

• one new theme released — Vasco for travel bloggers, and another one on the final lap — Noto 👀 (stay tuned!)
• launched Pixelgrade Woof, a new marketing campaign for the shop with our dogs at the forefront (Paco and Arlo)
• three new free themes for WordPress.org (the lite versions of Hive, Gema and Patch)
• an active writing activity on our blog with 19 valuable articles (from case studies to interviews with our customers and educational resources)
  
• scored 116 WordPress gems using our themes in the Showcase
• a pilot yet promising episode around our attempt to run an ambassadorship program
• a bunch of Thank You Letters sent to our beloved customers around the world
• the beginnings of a new way of customizing the style of a website – Style Manager 👀 (more on this later)

Team and culture

• two new great folks joined the team: Minela (to help us embrace the administrative ocean) and Andrei (to drive our products even further through marketing efforts)
• our first intern is here: Răzvan (frontend developer) plus we’re on our way to bring another one on the backend side of things
• a weekly leadership meeting to make sure we’re aligned and we’re sharing the same understanding on business and non-business topics
• a leadership workshop with an external consultant to help us better define the mission and the values to align and guide us all at Pixelgrade
• better leadership roles to help us navigate with ease and agility (CEO, CPO, and CTO)
• 1:1 sessions to keep track of everyone’s realities and perspectives
• an intense recruitment journey both for filling the pipeline and having interviews and chats
• some extra activity: Oana is an ambassador for The Watercooler (an online leadership community), and Radu made a 3-months internship at Automattic
• last, but not least, almost the entire crew attended WordCamp Europe 2018 in Belgrade, Serbia

Fun facts:

• 🏍George traveled by motorcycle for a few days, but he never showed us pictures during his holiday
• 🎤Oana was a speaker for a local marketing meetup and she survived (she even said yes to another one)
• 🤩Vlad was, by far, the most energized and engaged teammate at WordCamp Europe #welldone
• 🚴🏻‍♂️Alin finally got his dream bicycle, and now he’s riding it every single day #keepitup
• 👑Răzvan easily became a CSS Grid connoisseur and discovered a bunch of exciting stuff
• 📚Radu finished his internship at Automattic and started to create Lite versions of our themes by the blink of an eye
• 🏡Andrei took good care of the house while we were in Belgrade, at WordCamp Europe #thankyou
• 🎨Ilinca participated with other fellow illustrators in a live-drawing session
• 👩🏻‍🍳Minela cooked for us from her early days at Pixelgrade and it was delicious
• ⚽️Adi went to play football and never came back (we wish him a speedy recovery)

Revenue

Our overall revenue has been a little bit smaller than the previous six months which is not something to brag about, not by a long shot. Despite this lack of [average] growth, we are glad we could offset the slow, but steady, decline in ThemeForest sales with our own Shop.

On the WordPress.com front , things haven’t moved since they are still not accepting any new premium themes in their marketplace, at least not until they manage to decide on a new attitude towards themes and what they should offer (especially with Gutenberg coming). The revenue here has remained relatively stable compared with the previous six months. Not bad, but not great either.

The place that fills us with hope and around which we can build with confidence is our own shop. It has been growing steadily, actually picking up quite a bit of steam recently. We are more empowered and happier to play the long game in this scenario.

— $32,826 total monthly average (–3.8% down from $33,682)
— $20,814 monthly average from Envato (–16.3% down from $24,877)
— $4,857 monthly recurring revenue from Pixelgrade Shop (+240% up from $1,467)
— 198 new active members in the Pixelgrade Club out of 408 that started the free trial

Expenses

Thankfully we’ve managed to keep our expenses in check and in line with the revenue. We are grateful for what we have and what we can afford, especially since our team has shrunk a little bit since a year ago.

We’ve managed to mostly shield the team’s income from the downturn of the previous year. We are glad we’ve been able to pull this off and we are confident each one’s efforts and loyalty will bear fruit in the not so distant future.

The average monthly expenses hovered around $28,491 (very much the same as before –  $28,292), broken down into:
— 69.5% salaries
— 19% maintenance (rent, software, accounting fees, suppliers)
— 11.5% occasional expenses (hardware, marketing, traveling)

There is one more relevant thing to note about our revenue and expenses: the currency fluctuations. This is especially important for businesses like ours that are not based in the United States, or to some extent the Euro Zone, that have most of their expenses (salaries) in a local currency.

Early on, we’ve decided that since we are targeting the whole world we should keep things simple in terms of pricing: the same price in the same currency for all. We’ve chosen the US Dollar as we believe it is the de facto currency of the internet. This was advantageous while the dollar was strong against the euro (some predicted parity a year and a half back), but not so nice in the current times where tides have turned towards a stronger euro. This can have as much as 5-6% of an impact on our revenues in our local currency (conversion fees included). Just something to factor in when trying to make sense of the numbers.

Going back to basics: Values and Mission

When things are going great, who has the time to pause and consider the fundamentals? Why change it if it works, right? It seems out of place, even the wrong thing to do since you risk disturbing that wonderful momentum. The picture changes completely when the tide turns (and it always will). Suddenly we find ourselves in a storm of questions to be answered and decisions to be made, with our feet sinking ever deeper in the mud of uncertainty. This is when frustration sets in, people lose their focus, their drive, and bad decisions are made, if any at all (don’t know which is worse).

For too long we’ve been trying to fight our way out of the swamp by doubling down on the same things that served us well in the past: can do attitude, work hard, resilience, loyalty, technical ingenuity, trying to come up with the next cool product. These help and shouldn’t be taken lightly. We’ve managed to rebalance our revenue and expenses, or successfully shift our efforts toward our own shop – this should be enough, right? The reality showed us that things are a lot harder to turn around once uncertainty and confusion take over the hearts and minds of people. Our best efforts [as leaders] were faced with excruciating reluctance and lack of forward progress. Something else was at play here.

Going back around two years now, we’ve come to grips with the main culprits: insufficient clarity around who we are and why we exist as a company and as a team, on the one hand; our personal difficulties as leaders to convey and reinforce whatever clarity we have in the hearts and minds of those around us, on the other hand. It turned out that there is a huge gap between facing this reality and working towards a better scenario. Thankfully, we are a stubborn bunch that doesn’t give up so easily.

Right from the start, we knew this was too hard and too important to try and tackle it ourselves. After all, how could the same thinking that got us here could pull us out? We’ve reached out to people around us who’ve been there before and asked for their assistance and advice. We’ve been truly blessed in this regard: wonderful people responded and agreed to help us out at various stages. Lucky as we are, it turned out that there was no easy fix and the bulk of the problem lay with us [the leaders], or better yet, in us. We needed to find the courage to look in the mirror, and accept and embrace whatever we would find there.

A couple of months ago, we’ve really managed to smash through long-standing barriers thanks to Adriana Truong who really clicked with us and knew how to adapt her approach to the given moment. There were a couple of days of careful scrutiny around who each of us is and stands for, around having a firm grasp of our reality, all culminating with three days of intense, mind-bending introspection and sincerity. It felt like a month’s work, but it was all well worth it because we’ve managed to achieve a level of clarity unknown to us up until that point.

There were three clear outcomes: our core values, our core purpose or mission and our long-term goal (BHAG). These have served us well in staying sane and tackling whatever life throws at us. Things are still early and all could very well be undone and reduced to a couple of empty words on a flipchart. That’s the trick with these “soft” areas of a company and team: they require constant communication for reinforcing and reframing them throughout our time spent together.

Style Manager – Rethinking the Way You Personalize Your Site

If you’ve kept tags with us throughout the years or had a quick look at our products, I am pretty confident you know we have a thing for design [thinking]. We drool over things that look and feel right, well thought, things that have human ingenuity and passion embedded in them. This is the fundamental drive behind our products. It often leads to leaps of faith and going down the rabbit hole with nothing more than the self-confidence and trust in the ones along for the ride.

One such endeavor surfaced from our belief that there is always an easier, smoother way of doing things – we’ve rarely shied away for tackling elusive problems (at least from where we stand). While interacting with our customers, probing at the unexpected ways people are using the tools that we provide, trying to gauge how much are we helping them on their road to success, something seemed out of place.

Many customers kept the default styling that we provided, and more so, tried to stay as close to the demo that showcased our product. We’ve strived to bundle a decent amount of flexibility with our products so each person could adapt it and infuse it with its’ own character and personality – to make it their own. Some took advantage of the customization controls, some even took things too far, but a fair amount of our customers were missing out, at least from our point of view.

It turned out that people really took our “we are the designers” stance to heart. The styling options that we provided, limited as they may be, were still too much and things felt too easy to mess up. Our customers were right. We’ve also been right. We are the designers and it is up to us to do better, much better. Challenge accepted.

When we envision a product, when we create a website around that product, we make hundreds of design decisions, big and small, often just by following our [trained] instinct. To help people navigate a similar path we needed to find a way to grab those decisions and distill them into principles that could be set in code.

We decided to create a customization system that would be highly intuitive, flexible enough to allow for true personalization, but smart enough to keep the overall look and feel consistent and in line with the design thinking that came with the product. Like the saying goes “Easier said than done”. And no, we haven’t thrown machine learning at it. Not yet, at least.

After rewiring our customization logic, trying things first by hand, then distilling decisions into code and determining the satisfactory point of compromise, we are now in a position to say we’ve managed to lay a solid foundation for the whole project. Our customers can already play around with the first version of Color Palettes and we hope in the not so distant future to be able to complete the styling picture with Font Palettes options.

These are the first two stages of the vision we have for the Style Manager – the third one being Layouts. The road is long and with lots of unknowns, but we are confident this a worthy undertaking to take our products to the next level. Stay tuned.

The next lap

We will continue to invest our best efforts into what’s already in the pipeline, but we’re also going to keep an eagle eye on both the market and the WordPress ecosystem per se. The only thing that slightly changed is our ambition to be even more agile and on top of things while bearing in mind that we’re here to stay for the long game.

In just a blink of an eye, here’s what we are going to focus on:

• Style Manager — we’re going to iterate, improve and ship the actual system to many more customers.
• Pixelgrade Shop — all speed ahead in this direction: from new products to a smoother experience for our customers.
• Goals and Objectives framework — to help us work better and more efficient across the entire team.

🍸Summer is here

We wish you all an inspiring summer, full of new challenges and great memories. No matter the nature of them, don’t forget to enjoy the ride and make the most out of it. Thank you for reading the Transparency Report #7 and feel free to share your thoughts with us. We’ll gladly answer any questions. Stay awesome and be brave!

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Overview

We’ve experienced first hand how hard it is to change behaviors, and shift mentalities, but it’s mandatory in building a consistent, healthy team, ready to face all kinds of endeavors, especially when you dream big and plan to achieve spectacular results.

Our feeling is that we’re getting there, but we still need to make small tweaks with time and continuous effort from our side. All in all, in this Transparency Report you can get a clue about the ups-and-downs we encountered. Grab a coffee, enjoy the reading, and share your thoughts!

Product and support

• a new subscription business model for Pixelgrade Club
• two new themes released: Fargo (photography) and Felt (magazine)
• an intense session of theme updates to keep our products up and kicking
• a well-improved plugin to help customers have a great onboarding and self-service experience: Pixelgrade Care
• a dynamic blog with 10 fresh articles on several topics
• 97 (and counting) beautiful websites in the Showcase
• a bunch of Thank You letters for our customers around the world
• a new Made by Pixelgrade page to list all of our tools and services created along the way.

Team and culture

• two members joined the team: Victor, Adi
• three members left the adventure: Andrei, Robert, and Eugen
• plenty of 1:1 sessions to facilitate the overall communication and set expectations
• multiple interviews and other recruitment experiments
• dozens of coaching episodes with Laura to become better players

Fun facts

• Vlad brought in Paco’s brother-from-the-same-mother, so now we have two lovely dogs around the office
• Adi had a hard time finding wood for his fireplace #FirstWorldProblems
• Alin continues to self-praise the village where he lives with his family
• George used to go to the gym but stopped after we made way too many jokes
• Ilinca ran a DIY session for crafting a paper Christmas globe (and bought a new camera)
• Oana challenged a few teammates to cook a cozonac (Romanian traditional dessert) #battletime
• Radu bought an apartment, and we’re still waiting for him to throw a party
• Răzvan is searching for the right filmmaker to help with his first music video
• Victor helped us gain some weight thanks to his wife’s culinary goodies

Revenue

Not great, but not bad either. Overall we’ve experienced a large -27% drop in our monthly revenue. While we’ve increased the revenue through other channels, the change was mostly due to the Envato marketplace saturation and overall decline. We’re confident that in the long run, we can better serve our customers through our own channels while using third-party marketplaces only as additional selling points.

— $33,682 average monthly average (–27% down from $46,274)
— $5,881 in Support Packages on Envato (+28% up from $4,580)
— $1,467 Monthly Recurring Revenue in the Pixelgrade Club
— 98 active members of the Pixelgrade Club out of 196 that started the free trial

Expenses

With a significant drop in our revenue, our expenses had to be adjusted also. With a combination of lowered salaries, a smaller team and some housekeeping in terms of the services and tools we use, we’ve managed to keep expenses at a manageable level.

The average monthly expenses hovered on $28,292 (–28.5%—down from $39,520), broken down into:
— 75% salaries
— 21% maintenance (rent, software, accounting fees, suppliers)
— 4% occasional expenses (hardware, marketing)

The Pixelgrade Club

Through our Pixelgrade Club offering, we’re now focusing only on bloggers and obsessively converge all of our efforts to create the best solutions within this niche, crafting themes that provide specific answers to specific needs.

There are too many generalist products in the site-building ecosystem and they all compete to offer the highest level of flexibility. This fails to address the core need of creative people nowadays: how to focus on what really matters for them, not having more challenges to solve, while making a great impression.

We decided to take a different route, by offering our customers access to a different set of tools: like a researched content strategy that they can use to kick-off their site structure or opinionated branding decisions that they could really resonate with, not the same blunt options that they could find in any other product.

Unlike most of the market, we chose to offer it as a subscription business model with a 14-days free trial and $9.95 monthly fee. You get access to all of the themes available in the club, and you can switch them with ease when your needs or preferences change.

We found out that only a recurring pricing model could create sustainable value in the long run, both for our customers and for us as a business. Even if upfront costs are lower and risks are higher, the continuous commitment that we can maintain through a customer lifecycle is what drives us every day and make our products perform better.

Theme Components

For the past year or so we’ve been hard at work at something very exciting while quite challenging: a new development system and architecture for our themes. It is now ready for active duty in Fargo and Felt.

What was the driving force behind this massive overhaul of our way of developing WordPress themes? With every new theme, we were constantly reinventing the wheel and, while reusing previous code, reimplementing and adapting already learned lessons. While this seemed like the fastest and cleanest way to get our designs in the hands of our customers, with time the technical debt kept piling up, making maintenance increasingly time intensive. A lesson learned in a theme often would take a long time to reach the others.

This very inefficient status quo had to change for us to be able to develop and maintain a growing portfolio of products and keep the quality bar as high as we like it.

Another WordPress theme framework you may say?! Not quite. We’ve been big fans of the Underscores starter theme for quite some time as it forced us to keep bloat at bay. We still very much dislike bloat and slow running code, but we also love a consistent customer experience and ease of use.

Our solution to this puzzle was to identify common theme patterns/sections and fuse their templating, control logic and/or styling together into what we now call components. These are to become the backbone of all of our themes and the main focus of our development efforts.

The overall goal is to offer our customers solid products in terms of speed, flexibility, security, and ease of switching between them. All this while maintaining things scalable regarding the amount of work involved. We will surely follow-up with a dedicated article about this adventure.

Pixelgrade Care

We care! We care about design, craft, speed, security, but most of all we care about our customers’ experience and the ease with which they solve their digital problems. Pixelgrade Care is a tool to help us achieve this: a free companion WordPress plugin to all of our themes.

The first version was released in early January 2017, and we’ve been improving and expanding it ever since. For the past six months, our focus was on making things more helpful and customized for each of our customers by better integrating the various data sources.

We’ve improved the licensing system, the in-dashboard documentation and ticketing system, and the overall stability and security of the plugin. We have many things planned out for the future and believe the plugin is now in a better shape to serve our customers.

Building the right team

The last six months have been eye-opening in terms of what it takes to build the right team, and we definitely came across some harsh lessons along the way.

The good part is that today we have fewer (or at least different) struggles that we’re facing. For instance, we can’t stop the game since performant crews need constant attention, time, and energy to reach its potential, both personally and collectively. So yeah, we will undoubtedly encounter more challenges, but that’s okay as long as we grow and remain true-to-ourselves.

After several internal debates and way too many sleepless nights, we decided that sometimes it’s better for everyone to let people explore other professional playgrounds.

We said goodbye to two of the colleagues who were aboard from the early days of Pixelgrade, and one who joined the adventure almost one year ago.

We ended the collaboration with Andrei, our second employee (backend developer) who’s been working alongside us for six years in a row. We believe it was the right time to let him connect with different teams and mindsets. We’re grateful for all he has done for us, and we’re also happy he joined ThemeIsle’s band.

We also decided to let Robert go, one of our customer support fellows. He agreed to continue his professional path with a trial at Automattic, which is awesome. We’re confident that he’s going to evolve and become a better player, whatever the challenges he will embrace in the future.

Regarding Eugen, also a backend developer, the reality showed us that sometimes there’s nobody to blame or to point the finger when facing a professional separation. The simple fact that we’re in different moments in life can be good enough to push the stop button. We appreciate Eugen for improving Pixelgrade Care, and we hope he will find the right place for his current needs.

As for celebrating small wins regarding team development, we’re grateful to have Victor and Adi home.

Victor’s been freelancing for a couple of years, and he joined the party as a curious and caring front-end. Adi’s an experienced customer support professional with excellent written communication skills, which we think are super valuable.

All in all, we’re always happy to work with autonomous people, who posses the skills to self-manage and focus on the bigger picture. Welcome and let’s break a leg together, dear fellows!

We’re genuinely grateful for the people who’re now part of the Pixelgrade story, and we are excited to continue to craft things that make us proud in the long run. Keep being awesome!

The next lap

Affiliate Program — we kept this idea in the back of our minds since the launch of the shop, but frankly without taking it too seriously. This time, we changed the whole puzzle and things are getting traction with the new yet well-documented affiliate program.

Extended Portfolio — we’ll continue to focus on growing the number of themes exclusive to the Pixelgrade Club members. We plan to address the entire spectrum of bloggers and their particular set of needs. Stay tuned for our upcoming gem!

How We Work — we’ll continue to develop and fine-tune our internal systems to be more productive and efficient in all our endeavors. We’ve already implemented some changes, and we’ll continue to focus on improving our way of working across the entire team.

People — we will continue our recruiting efforts in order to attract and keep the right people for meeting our goals. We’ve already identified and detailed a couple of roles that we believe will help us stay focused and successful.

Enjoy the winter holiday 🎄

Oh well, the only thing to add here is that we encourage everyone to take some time to express gratitude to your teammates, family, and friends. You might be quite surprised about the positive impact, and there’s no better time of the year to reinforce your appreciation and positive thoughts. Slow down a bit and make it count!

Have a great holiday, mates! 🙏

The post Pixelgrade Transparency Report #6 appeared first on Pixelgrade.

We’ve managed to find a deeper sense of clarity and determination both as individuals and as a team. It wasn’t easy, and we still have a long way to go, but we are confident this is the right thing for us at this time in our journey. We are better equipped to build a more consistent product portfolio coupled with enjoyable, meaningful customer experiences.

All this would not be possible without the right team and the needed structures and systems to support us along the way. Our support team was the first to embark on an internal process meant to help them focus and work together towards better results. Moreover, in the next months, we plan to extend it to the entire team since a bunch of good things happened ever since.

Overview

We’re living times where everything seems to be pretty challenging. From building and consolidating a vibrant team to adapting and innovating in a competitive, dynamic WordPress market.

This transparency report gathers the main insights about how we did as a company in the first half of 2017. We encourage you to stay around because we introduced some brand new goodies. Let’s walk the tracks!

Product and Support:

• two new themes released: Osteria and Julia
• over 30 theme updates following our Theme Updates Calendar
• a better licensing and support system through our Pixelgrade Care plugin
• all the customer support toys under the same roof: we moved the documentation entirely on our shop, and we switched to Help Scout as the only client communication system.
• a blog well-aligned with our branding system with 7 new articles.
• an eBook on how to write WordPress Documentation that people read and use

Team and Culture:

• three members left the team: Alex, Cristi, and Alexandra.
• a one-week support policy from those who don’t do customer service on a daily basis, to better understand our products and the problems clients are facing (great results so far).
• an improved recruitment process that helps in bringing the right people on board.
• almost the entire crew attended the stellar WordCamp Europe 2017 conference in Paris

Fun Facts:

• 🏆 Radu bought his first 3D printer and made us a trophy cup for our tennis championship
• 🎙 Răzvan privately shared one of his new hip-hop songs, and it sounds awesome
• 🏫  Ilinca is on the final lap with her college degree (and she’s stressed out)
• ☕  Andrei was caught up with way too many flat whites on his desk
• 😎  Eugen is enjoying a Placebo concert while we’re writing down these lines
• 🥞  Alin has a bunch of culinary whims that his wife makes them happen (and we’re jealous)
• 📽️  Oana finished watching House of Cards on Netflix in just a few days #KevinSpaceyLove
• 🏎️  George took a three months break from driving, and now he can properly enjoy a Cuba Libre
• 🚴‍♂️  Robert is using the bike to survive the chaotic urban jam – keep it up!
• 🏰  Vlad is making bold plans to visit Disneyland with his uber cute son
• 🏞  Cristi is heavily packing to leave for Trento and enjoying La Dolce Vita

Revenue

One of the best things about our new shop is having a single point of contact for all the info we need, no matter the source nor the destination: themes, documentation or licenses. We keep a consistent flow, and we’re far more efficient regarding discipline and organization.

Overall we’ve experienced an –8.2% decline in our monthly revenue while selling 33% fewer themes. While no reason to cheer for, we are glad that during this downturn we’ve managed to increase our average theme revenue by 36%. This gives us the confidence that we are on the right track and the steps we have taken will eventually pay out.

— $46,274 average monthly average (–8.2% down from $50,423)
— 3,498 sales (–33% down from 5,243)
— $79 average theme revenue (+36% up from $58)

We continue to give our best to focus on the customers’ needs and to improve our products to match their requirements for the long game. That’s why we launched our new themes on Envato instead on our shop, and this strategy automatically led us to a lack of increases regarding revenues on pixelgrade.com.

The main idea is that we’d like to invest time, money and energy in making beautiful products, accessible and easy to use, rather than focusing on marketing campaigns directed solely on sales. We embraced this particular tactic ever since.

Expenses

When it comes to expenses, we have allowed ourselves to steer off course and end up outside our comfort zone. While we are past the investments we’ve made in our branding, strategy, and site, we are not there yet in terms of having the leeway to stay agile in these changing times. There is no panic, but we need to learn our lessons and take it for here.

The average monthly expenses hovered on $39,520 (–6.7% — down from $42,360), broken down into:
— 72.3% salaries
— 16.5% maintenance (rent, accounting fees, suppliers, software)
— 11.2% occasional expenses (like conferences, hardware, marketing)

The WordPress.com Journey

We’ve been theme authors on WordPress.com close to three years now and it’s been a beneficial experience. It wasn’t all smooth sailing, and at times we were quite taken back by reviews or market dynamics.

We still believe WordPress.com and Jetpack are heading in the right direction with a recurring revenue system. In the long run it might just be the trigger needed to bring some sanity in the WordPress themes ecosystem.

For about half a year, WordPress.com (and Automattic) has introduced some big, unexpected changes in their overall strategy:

⓵ The first one was offering our premium themes to their Premium plan (currently at $99/year) customers also, besides those on the Business plan ($299/year), with a significant reduction in our revenue share. While scary at first, we’ve managed to come to terms with this move due to a much larger customer base of the smaller plan.

Obviously, at first, our revenues took a hit because the incentive to buy a theme individually was greatly diminished; customers, getting more from subscribing to the Premium plan instead. The key here is “subscribing.”, as from that initial downturn, we’ve seen our recurring revenue slowly, but steadily climb and we don’t envision it flat-lining anytime soon.

⓶ The second shift came quite recently, and it’s an eye-popper: premium themes from WordPress.com will also be available for self-hosted WordPress sites through the Jetpack Professional plan ($299/year).

At first sight, this change is a direct threat to our self-hosted themes, but we wouldn’t urge jumping to any conclusions yet because, in the long run, it might just be the trigger needed to bring some sanity in the WordPress themes ecosystem. We would rather give up on some of our efforts if this means a smoother, more consistent experience for the customer.

Recurring revenue is the only way we can all have a more predictable income and a firmer basis on which to grow and expand.

There are surely some concerns regarding Automattic’s transparency and business decisions but we still believe they are heading in the right direction with a recurring revenue system. While there is room for adjustments, the steps being taken are welcomed and we are looking forward to keeping up with the latest developments.

Recurring Income

As long as you are after building a long-term relationship with your customers, there is no getting around the idea of recurring revenue. This is the only way we can all have a more predictable income and a firmer basis on which to grow and expand.

The theme business is the only remaining component that somehow lagged behind traditional pricing systems.

There is nothing new in this, as the whole tech and media industry embarked on this train quite a while ago. In the WordPress world, while hosting companies and WordPress.com service have always been subscription based, self-hosted plugins have mostly made this shift, the only remaining component that somehow lagged behind is the themes business. It’s about time we change that.

While we are still in the early steps we can see good signs ahead: on Envato, the support renewals generate almost $1.000 per month, while on WordPress.com we get about $4.500 revenue from theme usage. The trend is positive, and we are confident it will stay that way.

Pricing Strategy

From our own experience thus far, a fair number of WordPress users are willing to invest $100+ in a theme as long as the value proposition is right. While fewer, there are plenty of people looking for a special experience and are happy to go to $200 or even higher. If you are looking for validation, the current surge in managed WordPress hosting offerings is more than enough to acknowledge that the WordPress ecosystem has matured and people have more confidence in it.

We believe that whatever the price point, there is an audience out there that will gain value out of it. We will continue to test different price ranges and encourage other fellows to do the same and share their findings. After all, we are all in this together.

Team Moving Forward

We’d like to start with a big round of applause for all who contributed to what we are today.👏 Hopefully, we’ll have the chance to catch up again in different scenarios.

We noticed that having a more precise recruitment approach allows us to make better decisions regarding the team we want to build in the long run.

It’s mandatory to get used with some level of risks in the digital endeavors.

For instance, Alexandra didn’t pass the 3-months trial and there’s definitely nothing wrong on a personal level (in fact, we all are quite cool people), but we weren’t on the same wavelength in other regards (eg. why it’s mandatory to get used with some risks in the digital endeavors or how going the extra mile is something ordinary for us, not a nice-to-have).

On the other hand, two other folks left the team on entirely different terms. Alex was one of our first Happiness Engineers and the one who tried to teach us more about mindfulness and why it matters these days more than ever. He decided to experiment an entrepreneurial journey and to balance his time in other ways. Keep up the Serenity saga, dear friend!

Cristi is a significant part of who we are today, and a chunk of our success is due to his skills and effort on the front end area of our themes. He’s the one who tried to help us have a more balanced and healthy life. We welcome his desire to follow his journey in Trento, a beautiful city from Italy, where he wants to push the restart button on multiple levels. We will catch up with him on a mountain peak for a nice session of skiing.

The next lap

We came to realize that, sometimes, the next lap is actually an extension of the current one. There are plenty of things on our table and we want to make sure we understand how to manage them.

We enjoy questioning everything and digging for answers that fit who we are today, so there’s no restart per se. Instead, it is more like a ‘‘will be continued’’ kind of statement.

Therefore, some of our goals remain the same, while others will pop-up on the fly:

• Build a better team — we’re eager to continue the journey of supporting each of our teammates achieve their potential and making the most out of it through a thoughtful chain of steps and processes.
• Grow a consistent portfolio — we’re pushing to create a few more WordPress theme and keep iterating on the infrastructure behind the scenes to make sure we deliver solid solutions for digital pains.
• Improve the Customer Experience — we will continue to invest all kinds of resources into our customer-service ecosystem to shape even better experiences for our beloved customers.

Summer is here — enjoy it!

Guys and gals, thanks a bunch for joining us until the end of the Transparency Report #5. 🙏 We hope these thoughts will help you draw better decisions and will inspire you to share your journey as well.

We wish you all a great summer, full of delightful experiences and people 🌞. Make sure you have some fun, and you gather lasting memories. In the end, we all need to recharge our batteries and come back with a more positive attitude and an energetic drive. Keep being awesome!

The post Pixelgrade Transparency Report #5 appeared first on Pixelgrade.