In business, you’ll often find references to risk & reward and how those two things are intertwined: the greater the risk, the greater the (potential) reward. And vice versa.

As a result, you’ll also find that doing something yourself is always more profitable compared to involving others. This extends to things like hiring a team or entering into a JV / partnership (the margins go down) to taking on co-founders or shareholders (the profit sharing - relative percentage at least - goes down).

Yet many (most?) of us still involve others in our endeavours, because of the risks involved with doing it ourselves. Doing it yourself, involves quite a few potential “risks”:

• Success is dependent on yourself;
• It’s gonna be a lot of hard work; and
• Your initial investment (and thus your exposure to the risk) is much higher.

All very reasonable considerations when thinking about the risks vs...

In the last year, I’ve been lucky to pinpoint my true passion in life (professionally at least): I love helping other entrepreneurs.

This has partly been an evolution of the mindset we have at WooThemes about creating opportunities for others and partly because I’ve always loved giving back.

To this extent, I’d like to share two of the big loves & mini-passions in my love…

Kiva

I first joined Kiva and made my first loan in October 2008. I’ve since invested a total of $9k in Kiva, which has funded almost 800 loans worth almost $22k over the years. (Once a loan is re-paid, I automatically re-lent the money to the next entrepreneur.)

I love Kiva, because a $25 loan goes a long way in most developing countries and most entrepreneurs can fund their little startups on a $300 - $600 budget. I especially love lending money to entrepreneurs doing anything food-related, as that helps solve...

A couple of months ago, I implemented a few “lifehacks” that would allow me to have better balance in my life (according to my unique set of variables & wants / needs). One of the consequences and / or requirements of these hacks were that I simply had to spend less time working / in front of my computer.

I wasn’t ready to compromise on my professional ambition though, because I’m passionate about what I work on. So instead, I forced myself to become better at prioritizing the things that I work on / spend my time on, which meant that I could still have the same lofty goals without compromising on my work-life balance.

This resulted in a couple of things:

1. I stopped working on things that just aren’t that important right now; and
2. I needed to get better at upskilling my team and delegating the things that I didn’t absolutely have to execute on myself.

The experience of how...

Yesterday I got an e-mail from a prospective WooThemes customer enquiring about our products and specifically asking about the “negative reviews that we’ve been receiving lately”.

Whilst I’ve seen my fair share of negative feedback about Woo in the last 5 years, I wasn’t aware of any recent / significant increase to this, so I enquired about which review the customer was referring to. This is what he sent on.

Here’s my response to the customer:

So I can transparently say that WooThemes isn’t perfect and unfortunately that means that there’s individual, isolated situations / experiences where a single customer falls through the cracks. This is mostly due to a bad support experience or an expectation of where the customer thought a product could do something / was easier to use, when it wasn’t.

Judging by the ThemeGrade comments though (which has 40 bad responses over the last couple...

Yahoo recently announced that they were stopping their work-from-home arrangements for remote employees; thus requiring these employees to move back to the Yahoo office instead.

I initially saw the announcement and my first reaction to the news was “Ah well, that makes loads of sense.”, because we recently made a similar decision at WooThemes.

To backtrack first… Two-thirds of the WooTeam is based remotely. My co-founders & I worked together on WooThemes for 16 months before we met in-person for the first-time. I truly believe that it’s been an integral part of WooThemes to trust in people.

The flexibility of remote working is in our DNA. But that doesn’t eliminate the challenges of remote working.

The decision we recently made at WooThemes was to revoke Fridays as a work-from-home day for our Cape Town-based staff. We made this decision due to suspected abuse (of the privilege)...

Lately I’ve been bemused with all of the new solutions that are popping up to fix e-mail. Wait! E-mail is broken? I must’ve missed that…

A large part of my working day is spent in whatever e-mail client I’m using at that moment. I’m not a creator or a builder, which means the majority of my tasks involve communication to varying degrees. And e-mail is my tool of choice. (Obviously I use other mediums too like Skype, actual meetings & some project management apps, but most of these also makes it’s way back to e-mail eventually.)

I get that all of us suffer from e-mail overload. I do too and I’m by no means an A-list Internet Celebrity that gets 1000’s of new e-mails a day. That said though, e-mail is still a fantastic tool for communication and there’s no alternative technology for that at the moment.

Similarly, I don’t believe that we can just wake up one morning and decide that...

Yesterday I was involved in the launch of Lunchbox, a startup that I have invested in and have high hopes for.

Prior to launch, Lunchbox had signed up about 3000 interested and beta users, which gave us a nice, initial channel to look for our first paid signup. So the Lunchbox team pulled the trigger, made the site live and we proceeded to anxiously wait for that first sale & the first Dollar of revenue.

The wait lasted for 63 minutes before Lunchbox made its first sale and during that wait, I was reminded how exhilarating, fun and stressful the launch of a new startup is.

Experiencing those emotions over again, made me reminisce about the very first Dollar that WooThemes made all those years ago. And whilst we’ve made lots of money since, that first sale & first Dollar will always stand out as the tipping point of great things to come.

It is for this very reason that I plan to...

“These days, my idea of success is a well-managed balance between time with people I love and a project I’m deeply passionate about. Right now, that’s Campaign Monitor. Time spent with each one of these has a huge impact on how much I enjoy the other. When I get that balance right, I’m at my happiest. And in the end, isn’t that what success is all about?”

Dave Greiner in the latest version version of Offscreen Magazine.

This is such a lovely quote and awesome mindset, which is also proof that it is possible to fix the “generally broken startup mindset” that most of us within the industry has.

In my post “We’ve Broken This Startup Thing”, I say this about balance:

“I also wholeheartedly agree with Micah Baldwin that things don’t need to be in balance to be in balance. Balance is whatever makes you happy at any given time.”

So if balance = happiness = success, why then are we always...

This has been bugging me for ages now… Every time that we announce a promotion with a discount or sale of some kind on WooThemes, we get loads of e-mails like this:

I just purchased Product X at full price 2 weeks ago. Now I see you have a sale going on. If I had known, I would’ve waited to purchase it now instead. Can you refund the difference on that product?

So, we end up retroactively issuing partial discounts, because we choose to deliver the best possible customer experience. But I have a very different opinion about this…

If you purchased something for $100 last week, you did so because you believed that it was worth $100 to you. If it wasn’t, you would not have spent the money. So yes, it sucks when you see the same product on sale a week later, but such is life. The important factor is that the value proposition hasn’t changed though; even when buying the product at a...

I’ve come to the conclusion that some good things in business are totally unanticipated & even more so - unexpected.

Regardless of how big my ego is and how I rate myself as a strategist, visionary & leader within my company, some things are the results of the unknown and not my (or anyone on my team’s) doing. At least not consciously.

Here’s an example:

Two weeks ago we switched WooThemes’ support helpdesk to use Zendesk instead. Within a week, our support numbers, capacity & performance were under control (in stark contrast to previous months where we struggled to maintain things sustainably).

Having investigated this and having accounted for all of the quantifiable variables (i.e. has the number of support tickets created by customers dropped?), I can say that everything is pretty much 99% the same. So whilst there’s obvious advantages that we’ve gained from switching to Zendesk...