ThemeAvenue
ThemeAvenue, originally a theme shop, pivoted towards product development. It has been the home of some very successful products.
TL;DR
I acted as the Product Manager and Lead Developer at ThemeAvenue. I have been managing 4 commercial products and 4 free products (as part of our global digital marketing strategy). I have also been managing a team of several collaborators (up to 16 people) while working on open source projects.
Origin
My main company, N2Clic Ltd. has always been providing tailor-made services and products. However, we have always received requests from small businesses who needed quality work but didn’t have the budget for it.
We created ThemeAvenue to get into the theme market. It is the kind of work that is affordable for small businesses thanks to its generic purpose and re-usability. Instead of charging big bucks to one client for entirely custom work, we were charging less to a lot more customers.
Pivoting
After we started releasing our first themes, we realized that we needed to provide support. Quality support. In order to do that, we needed quality tools. Unfortunately, nothing was satisfying for our needs and size. We then started developing our own support tool: Awesome Support.
Awesome Support quickly gained traction and, in time, became a very successful product. Read more about Awesome Support.
After seeing the success of our first product we realized that the potential was good and it was much more technical, hence more rewarding. We dropped the theme business and entered the digital products business.
Free vs Paid
Over the years, we developed a strategy that involved releasing and maintaining free products. Those products were used to increase our brand awareness and funnel more users into our paid offerings.
Thanks to this strategy, we have gathered a total of nearly 45,000 users. Sure, not all of them became paying customers, but we managed to get more than 2,000 paying customers all products included.