I want to touch upon a lot of things in this report, so here’s a quick TOC just to keep things organized (and in case you’re not interested in all of it, which is fine):
1. On being transparent | 2. Why you need company retreats | 3. Working from home and the problems with it | 4. The value in vacation days for all team members | 5. How we’re improving team management and performance | 6. Auto-renewals and how they’ve been working for us | 7. Conferences coming up – let’s meet!
Overall, we experiment quite a lot as an organization. We try to learn from other business in the same niche and outside of it, and then fit new methods and approaches into our own workflows, mission, etc. Sometimes, this leads to reinventing the wheel (unfortunately), but, other times, it leads to innovation and making our work a lot easier and effective on a daily basis.
Great insight, and it’s fantastic that you put so much thought into taking care of your staff. I always read your transparency reports but never comment, so just wanted to say it’s great that you publish these!
Hey Raelene,
I know I am not treating people who comment that good (even forget to answer some times), so I appreciate letting me know that you’re still reading those.
I think is natural for people or at least for me to look at numbers mostly, the reports have usually <10 shares, few comments and few hundred visitors, probably among the least read stuff we write, just by looking at those and 0 comments sometimes I feel that it may be not super useful anymore.
I know what you mean… it’s not fun spending so much time on something that doesn’t have much ROI! But if it has another benefit, i.e. forcing you to think about your business, helping promote your business, helping foster relationships with other businesses, etc. then it’s definitely worth doing.
Thanks for sharing. I am in a very similar position with many of the things you talked about (similar team size; office vs. remote; transparency; motivation; etc.). Looking forward to meeting you at MicroConf!
Glad to hear Thomas, it means we’ll some quite some stuff to talk about 🙂
Thanks for so transparently sharing (again) the businesses you’re running. The subscriptions/renewals part was very interesting to me.
And we’ll meet both is Bucharest and in Lisbon (I’m attending microconf as well)!
Thanks for stopping by @primozcigler:disqus and see you soon!
Regarding the renewals, I think you should also take a look at the websites using them,if you can do that, and see if the’re still online. If there are bloggers or marketers that start a website, buy a theme/plugin and a few months down the line they see they have no traction they probably won’t renew. But that doesn’t mean that the product does something wrong here. What I’m trying to say, I think numbers alone don’t tell the full story.
Hey! Luckily we have this data since a while, if I remember correctly 50-60% of a pro theme users still use it after 1 year, so yep, having that in the article would have helped more with context 🙂