The CodeinWP Family in 2015 – Transparency Report #1

This headline might not sound very clear at first, so let me explain…

I believe in transparency in business.

In short, me and the team are here to help out the WordPress community and to try make working with WordPress easier, more time efficient, and more effective for us all. We love interacting with you guys through the comments, various forums, the official WordPress.org theme/plugin boards, social media and so on.

That being said, we also aim to grow our business along the way, and, what follows, make money doing so. And that’s what I want to be transparent about today.

I’m absolutely fascinated by what the Buffer team is doing when it comes to transparency and how much they’re sharing with the world. The data from their transparency dashboard is a true goldmine of ideas and inspiration in terms of what we could do next as a business and as a community.

So long story short, this is the first edition of what I hope to turn into an ongoing thing – our Transparency Report #1.

What’s been going on recently?

If you don’t already know, some time ago we built and launched a WordPress theme store called ThemeIsle.

The original idea was born back in November 2012 and it took us nearly two full years to create the initial offering, test it, do some introductory campaigns during the beta period, and finally go into a public launch in September 2014.

That being said, we were doing a lot of client work during that time, which had its impact on the number of hours we could spend building Themeisle.

Anyway, wondering how much work was involved vs. how much revenue the project brought during the whole of 2013? Here’s a graph:

What the above means in plain English is, in a word, trouble.

Fast forward another six months:

Things starting to pick up…

And another six months:

And finally, a couple of snapshots that we’re really proud of:

We actually project that we’ll close off March somewhere around the $45,000 mark in revenue for that month alone. This is incredible considering how much time was needed to make our first $45k before that.

In fact, it took us over a year to make the first dollar, and then another six months to make any noticeable dollar.

But after that, we’ve managed to experience some great growth at a rate of around 1000 percent in the last four months. This is something we’re really grateful for and something that fuels us to keep going and bring even more great things your way in the coming months. I’d like to take this opportunity to say thanks to you guys, it wouldn’t have been possible without you!

If you’d like to be kept up to date with what’s going on at Themeisle, feel free to follow us on Twitter (you can also follow these folks). If you don’t plan on spending any money on any of our themes, that’s quite alright, we also have free themes in the official directory. Which brings me to…

Our themes hitting WordPress.org’s “most popular” list

At Themeisle, we have a premium theme called Zerif. In short, it’s a responsive, parallax scrolling, one-page theme for creative agencies and businesses. It’s been our top best-selling theme of 2015 so far.

But there’s also a free version, available in the official WordPress theme directory. For the last couple of months, it’s been sitting on the most popular list, hovering around spot 8-14.

Basically, it’s a simplified version of the PRO theme, with some of the functionality removed, but still perfectly functional and as great looking as ever. It’s being downloaded more than 1,000 times every day and we’re excited to see the numbers continue to climb steadily.

Free CodeinWP plugins

We’ve also been working hard on our free plugins. Just to bring you up to speed, there are three plugins in particular that make up the core of our collection:

Here’s the breakdown of how well each plugin is performing:

• Revive Old Post – currently our most popular plugin, sitting at 455,000 downloads and 40,000+ active installs.
• WP Product Review – 90,000 downloads and 20,000+ active installs.
• Custom Login Page Customizer – 10,000 downloads and 5,000+ active installs.

We’re planning to keep improving these plugins even further and also introduce a couple of new ones.

Top content on the CodeinWP blog

If you have some time on your hands and would like to do some catching up, here’s a breakdown of the top content on the blog right now:

• How to Simplify the WP-Admin to Get It Client-Friendly – 3,596 total social media shares.
• The 6 Step Process of Designing a WordPress Site From Top to Bottom Quickly (& In a Way That Your Client Will Love) – 1,065 shares.
• 30 Experts Share: The Top *Non-Obvious* WordPress Plugins That’ll Make You a Better Blogger – 969 shares.
• Top 101 Blogs About WordPress and Their Most Popular Posts – 900 shares.
• [Infographic] WordPress 4.1 Gets Roughly 1 Million Downloads Every Two Days + Other Mesmerizing WordPress Stats – 390 shares

New design at CodeinWP.com

Lastly, we’ve designed ourselves a new version of the main CodeinWP website.

We’ve restructured our main offering to include two additional components into our business mission. Right now, the tagline reads: PSD to WordPress, Tailor-Made Themes and Plugins, Custom WordPress Dev.

In other words, if you need your WordPress website sorted, hit us up, we’re here to help.

Oh, and don’t forget that you can stay updated with what’s going on at CodeinWP via our newsletter. At the time of writing this, there are 1,980 WordPress enthusiasts on the list already. How about joining the bandwagon too?

What have you been up to lately? Do you have a WordPress business of any kind you’d like to share a word about with the community? Feel free to comment.

Thanks so much for your time, and look out for our next Transparency Report. I hope it’s going to be out in a couple of months time.