Interview With Adriaan (Adii) Pienaar of WooThemes + Giveaway

Adii: I’m a co-founder of WordPress themes giant WooThemes, along with being the founder of Radiiate (due for a reincarnation soon) and The Rockstar Foundation. I have a huge passion for business, strategy & entrepreneurship and at the moment that passion is being completely directed towards online channels.

Adii: This is not something that we’re overly concerned about just yet, as even though mobile is literally taking the world by storm, most people still use mobile as a complimentary medium to access online content. So the main focus is still on websites accessed via a browser on a computer. This is something we’re continuing to monitor, but we have no definite plans to roll out extensive support of this just yet.

Adii: First off, I don’t want this to come off as me saying that *my* business strategies are responsible for WooThemes’ success, as I have two great partners and all the strategies we have implemented is a collaboration of our combined efforts. So each of us brings a different angle to the conversation and it is within that fusion that we have found extremely valuable ideas.

I think generally, our success can be attributed to a few things:

Our focus on proper design and valuing design as top priority in each and every decision.

The fact that we have created a cashflow-rich company and that we have never needed to take outside funding to finance further growth / innovation.

Our unique approach to marketing ourselves to the extent that it is impossible to ignore us (with our products & services backing up our marketing messages).

To sum up our approach, I’d say that it’s all about being WooThemes and not trying to be like any other company that we know. This means that both our successes and failures have been completely unique to Woo and as a result we have grown further as WooThemes and not just as a generic company.

Adii: The competition has been good to us in the sense that it keeps us on our toes and we gather a lot of derivative ideas from what they are doing. But that said, we’re not overly fussed with what they are doing, as we’re keen to focus on our own approach.

If there’s anything that I think we’ve done differently to them, it’s the fact that we have collaborated with the best of the best web designers on the planet (which perpetuates our extreme focus on design) and our marketing which truly sets us apart from anyone else.

Adii: I’m not SEO guru and neither am I a big fan of SEO (I believe in other ways of marketing a website). That said, I think our themes are above-average in terms of SEO and whilst our SEO capabilities aren’t one of our important selling points, we’re looking to improve this for our users, as some of them do prioritize the SEO on their site. I however don’t think that we’d ever get to the point where – like Thesis – we market our themes as being perfect for all SEO purposes, because we tend to shine the spotlight somewhere else instead.

Adii: This is actually rather easy if you’re willing to look & work outside of the box. We have an established company and have enough resources to invest in innovation; so we will continue to explore & experiment with new niche areas in 2010.

The first area that we will make groundbreaking progress in, is our tumblog / Tumblr-like themes that will be powered by WordPress. We’re planning a bunch of behind-the-scenes things that we haven’t talked about; so we’re sure we’ll surprise quite a few people when these themes go out soon.

Adii: Start as early as possible and back your ideas. It doesn’t require a lot of cash to get started either; so just bootstrap as far as you can and when you have enough traction from users / customers, you can expand and maybe take on debt / funding.