 I feel like I've been here for a long time. Again, my name is Dennis Bossiere. I'll be talking about building and selling WordPress themes. But I feel like some already talked about building themes quite a bit. So I'm not going to get any technical with that stuff. I'm just going to talk about the business aspect of it. Yeah, so let's go. Let's do this. That's just my introduction. I'm going to just try and make it really short and sweet. See how I can get with this. So I've been a web developer since 2008. Well, to be honest, back then I was just playing with code. I wasn't really doing anything important. I started building themes in 2014. And I started selling themes in 2016. You can see there's a two-year gap there. And that was a really difficult time for me. It really suffered a lot trying to get my themes on Theme Forest and whatnot. They still haven't let me in. So generally, this is all a story of passion and persistence. To be honest, where I've gotten, it's all through that. Being passionate about what you do. And being constantly just persistent because I'm very lazy. So those two things are really helping me out. So I'm going to talk about building WordPress theme. I'm just going to try and make this very short. So the first thing you need to do is really just research and choose your niche. Because what you don't want to do is build a theme that nobody wants. So you do your research, go on Theme Forest, do everything else, ask people what they want to see. And then build that. I'll try and tell you to really avoid building multipurpose themes. I know my friend Franke will disagree with me. But try not to build a theme that does everything. So try to build a theme that we're very focused on one thing. So if it's a real estate theme, build that. If it's a portfolio theme, build that. Even make it more focused. It's a portfolio theme for photographers. It's a lot easier to market that. It's a lot easier to build that than trying to build a theme that just does everything like a sesame knife kind of thing. You're most likely going to mess up with the code or something when you're doing that. The next thing is just use a starter theme like the underscore, ask by automatic. Don't try to reinvent the wheel. Use the starter theme that's already there. It saves you tons of hours, to be honest. I use it for every project. If you're interested in all that DevOps stuff, if you're on SAS and Galpin 8 and whatnot, comes as options for that as well. The other thing is just follow what press coding standards. They're pretty easy. They're no secrets or anything. There's not like a secret committee of guys you say. You have to do your theme in a certain way. So just follow the standards. Just make sure your theme is secure, do things like escaping strings, sanitizing inputs, and whatnot. So if we developers pretty much understand what I'm talking about, do internalization. I know somebody's talked about translation and whatnot. Make sure you do that because you find that your theme's not just going to be used by English-speaking users. I think probably about a third of my themes is used by like Spanish guys. So if I never made them translatable, that's a very big part of the world I would have left out. And just make sure your code is clean. The other things also make it simple to use. I know this sounds really easy to do, but a lot of team developers fall short when it comes to this. If any of you ever go into a team forest and you see one of those really beautiful themes and you're like, I want this, then you download it and install it and you're just like, what are they doing with this code? It's so complicated in the back end that I personally sometimes find it difficult to install. And I build themes. So imagine what other people are going to go through. So make it very simple to use. This is also going to save your ass a lot later. Another slide that's coming up. So yeah, see this. All right. So these are things about distribution. So use channels that are already there, like WordPress.org or team forest. Team forest, you're familiar with team forest, right? So the good thing about team forest, you can get rich like really, really fast. Like you can start balling like the next day, right? But chances of that happening is really small. Like, do anybody know the most popular theme on team forest? Avada? Yeah, Avada. Anybody knows about how much he sold? 460,000 copies, right? It's made about $22 million. This one theme has made about 2 billion shillings. Yeah, from a theme. You'd really be balling that Lamborghini if you did that. But chances are, you are not going to get that shot of like, you know? I wouldn't be standing here if I was doing that. Nah. Right? Be building my own roads. You know what I mean, like, so it's a great avenue. It's a great thing. It's a great distribution channel and everything. But remember my first slide I showed you. I saw you building themes 2014. And I saw you selling them 2016. Those two years were lost in team forest, all right? Those guys just wouldn't let me in the club. Maybe I wasn't cool enough for them. Well, yeah, I've got a friend of mine here who actually sells things on team forest. But he can tell you how much rejection he gets. He's constant. And he's one of the best developers I know. Probably the best developer I know. And he still gets rejected. So if you're just starting off now, I'd save you the time and the worries and sleepless nights to just go on WordPress.org. So the other thing about WordPress.org, you give it away for free. So you get a few eyeballs in there. You get downloads and stuff. I distribute all my themes on WordPress.org. So they are free. And I think right now, about maybe half a million downloads on that. That's like last year and a half or something like that. Probably more. You see, you get a lot of users there. So I don't do a lot of marketing. I'm not good at that stuff. I hardly treat about my own themes there. So WordPress.org is giving me an avenue where I can just give up my themes for free and everybody enjoys them and whatnot. Then the other thing is now you sell premium features. So I give away the theme for free. Oh, that's all yours. But if you want all the premium features, give me some part of your money. You know, like you reach into your pockets and get something back. And like Moco is selling, gives out his free plugins. Well, we're just not cut from the same cloth, I guess. No. So I didn't make my money somehow. So I sell premium plugins. Also, Sam talked about how you need to choose a theme that's just focusing on the looks and you leave the functionality to the plugins. And that's exactly what I do because I don't want when users change over for my themes, they lose their data. So that's why every functionality you have is on the plugins. Right? So what I do is I sell on my own site. As I said, I'm still not cool enough to get into theme forest. So all I have to do is build my own website and set it up. And that's where I sell my stuff from. I use a plugin called Easy Digital Downloads. I know everybody has WooCommerce, WooWoo and everything, but I now I don't mind. I don't like a plugin that much because it's great for selling physical products. It really sucks for selling digital products. I might be wrong. Don't kill me on this, but I don't use it. So Easy Digital Downloads, what they did was they took the same concept as WooCommerce and build a plugin that just focuses on selling digital products. Right? So obviously they do that better than WooCommerce because WooCommerce is just trying to, you know, try to sell everything. You can also use some PayPal or credit card for checkout. PayPal has become very common in Kenya right now. And you can like withdraw your funds to impasse in like two hours. Kind of draw it to equity and whatnot. So Easy Digital Downloads actually gives you a free plugin for PayPal, for integration. If you're thinking about maybe getting an impasse, I check out for this, maybe talk to Moke about it. But I doubt he was gonna make it for Easy Digital Downloads. The other thing is pricing. It's a bit trivial because you're building your own software, right? And you're like, oh this thing took me like two months, how much should I sell it for? You want to sell it for, obviously you want to sell it for like a thousand dollars, but nobody's gonna buy that stuff. So what you need to do is also do research and check out pricing and whatnot. What you don't want to do is price it too low. So you don't want to sell your themes or plugins for like a dollar and 99, right? Because with a dollar and 99, you're gonna get a dollar and 99 clients. I mean those are shit clients, to be honest. They're really going to push you and make your life a living hell, right? So the other thing is you don't want to sell it too high because nobody's gonna buy that. So you try and look for like a balance. So I sell my plugins between 39 dollars and 49 dollars. It's pretty reasonable, I guess. Also realize like low pricing attracts students and students, I mean even guys who are learning how to code and stuff, bloggers and DIY guys. So the one thing all these guys have in common, they're really not technical people. So they're always going to need support, right? And support is the next thing I'm going to talk about. So funny thing is, if anybody runs software business, no, oh god, I'm alone. Oh geez, man. All right, okay. I'm still going to talk about it anyways. For anything about running a software business is most of it does not involve writing code. And you realize this. That's why it's called a business. There's the business part of it and that's the most important part of it. So for me when I'm building my teams and I'm selling my teams and whatnot, I realize majority of my work, about 80% of it is support, okay? So it's me sitting down and just replying back to guys and telling them what to do and what not to do. I love guys who download your teams. They don't even know what's happening. Like yesterday I had a guy who downloaded a team and we're like, oh, your software is not working. I want a refund. And I'm like, what do you mean? And I didn't even install WordPress, all right? So yeah, you get those guys. You get a guy who double clicks on it and go like, it's not running. And you're like, ah. All right. So what I did was created a documentation, very well written documentation that anybody can follow. Very, very simple. So even if you're not technical at all, you go into my documentation, you download my team, you'll be able to set it up. Doing a video is a plus. I found like doing videos is actually a lot, lot better than just writing. People really don't like reading, right? That's what I found out. Like people really don't like reading. You write the best documentation in the world and they'll always constantly ask you for the same questions, yeah? Then the other thing is be accessible on the forums. Like on my side I've got like a little chat thing that pops up when I'm around. So I'm quite accessible when it comes to that and try to help people out. Yeah, I think I already talked about the other one. Also remember that support, during support, this is your only opportunity for you to interact with your users, right? So all the improvements I've made, all the updates I make for my themes and plugins always comes from suggestions from users. But the other thing is also try not to code in every feature they ask for because then you're just gonna end up with this monstrosity of a code that nobody else wants to use. So be a bit picky, quite a lot of times. Right, so the last bit is marketing and affiliates. So if you're not technical, but you still want to sell themes, it's not like only tech guys can sell themes now anymore. So what you can do is you can either set up an affiliate marketing site. So if you're writing something about word prayers and whatnot and you're doing marketing, you're a CEO and whatnot, get affiliate links back to it. For instance, for my site, I give away like 35% for every sale you make. So you take a link and you blog about it or write a review, but every user you send back to my site and they make a purchase and you're gonna get 35% of it, right? So we all get to it, that's great. So the other thing you can do is sell other people's themes on your website. I guess is what I've just talked about. I do marketing for team developers. I said initially I really do suck at marketing. Like I don't know where to start from, right? I am not ashamed to say I really don't know how to do it, right? So we get other people like there's a guy, actually he's not here today, but he's the one who's gonna be working on my SEO from next week I think, and then we'll see where he goes from there. Then the other thing is I do neither of these things, right? So this is a one slide. I will just cut it short from here and instead of going on and on and bullshitting everybody about what I know about marketing and I don't know it, all right? So, right, any questions?