This morning whilst washing the office’s dishes (which have piled up significantly, since our cleaning lady is still on leave after the holidays), I was reminded of how seemingly insignificant obstacles sometimes result in more significant consequences. [1]

As CEO, I don’t necessarily think that washing dishes is part of my “job description” and it doesn’t carry any obvious priority in terms of things I need to get done today. Similarly, I could have just asked / commanded anyone in the office to get it done and that would be totally acceptable.

I mean, I am the CEO. Right?

I don’t share this view though. My job (as CEO / Co-Founder / insert whatever “important” title here) isn’t always glamorous and neither can I describe all my tasks with fancy corporate words like strategizing, business development or leveraging synergies. Instead, sometimes the best thing I can do in my business...

One of my biggest challenges at WooThemes in the past year has been to become more data-driven in everything we do and especially with regards to our decision-making. Analytics & measurement isn’t something which we’ve historically done well, so I emphasized that this was something we needed to learn about in 2012.

This “need” was mostly fueled by the growing pains that we experienced in the last 12 months. We found ourselves in a space where we needed to accelerate the scaling of our team and - at the same time - we needed to optimize our existing structures & processes.

We found ourselves in the middle of a contradiction between revenue & longer-term strategy too; whilst the actual dollars pushed us in one direction, we needed to pay royalties to our past and also to the bigger (future) picture.

We had sometimes burnt our fingers trusting our intuition in the past and we wanted to...

Maybe if we did more of that, less of this would happen.

I believe that the recent attention that startups, angel investing & crowdfunding (Kickstarting?) have received has been fantastic for entrepreneurs worldwide. This attention highlighted the opportunities that does exist and the gaps that entrepreneurs could plug, which in turn has seen more entrepreneurs coming to the fore.

But maybe we got swept up in all of that romanticism about raising money, failure & pivoting along the way? Maybe we’ve lost focus on the things that are really important when building a business?

I’ve had an interesting and - at times - challenging year. I’ve had to learn how to be the dad that I want to be. I’ve had to question the way I work, what I work on & what I’m really passionate about.

Beyond this, I was lured into the romanticism of angel investing (from which I learnt so many lessons, but that’s for another post) and got (actively) involved in one of these startups that almost saw me leaving WooThemes. After I decided not to pursue that opportunity, I helped to oversee a massive scaling & growth effort at Woo in the second part of 2012.

The thing about many of my experiences & subsequent decisions this year, was that I had to go through those experiences to make the decisions. I guess this would come down to failing / making mistakes in an effort to learn in a “you have to break a few eggs to bake a cake”-way.

2012 has been a year of learning for me, partly because...

We live in a time where we are always trying to work more, be more efficient, increase our productivity. We strive to do more, so we get involved in more projects & take on tasks & To Do’s that aren’t that important.

Heck, everyone has a side-project these days.

I guess we’ve become so used to diversification. “Don’t put your eggs into one basket.” says your investment manager. So instead of putting more money into AAPL (which has made you good money until now), you find lesser stocks just for the sake of diversification.

This works for financial investments, but not for investments of your time.

In the past 2 years, I’ve made this mistake twice.

First up, I decided that it would be a good idea to diversify my interest (both financial & personal / passion) in WooThemes by creating a new entity, Radiiate (R.I.P.). I wanted it to be an incubator for my other ideas and had a bit of...

A few recent happenings has gotten me thinking about my initial motivation to switch my blog to Svbtle a couple of months ago. On the surface this would seem to be an odd decision on my part, considering that I’m CEO of one of the biggest WordPress product companies around and a switch of platform (away from WordPress) wouldn’t make loads of sense.

I first fell in love with Svbtle when Dustin first previewed the UI, which I felt would be perfectly suited to clutter-free idea generation & writing (something which WordPress isn’t doing so well these days).

But most importantly, I wanted into Svbtle because of the exclusivity. The fact that Svbtle was invite-only made we want into the action so badly. I wanted to be part of the crowd where the cool kids hung out.

And I don’t think I’m the only one… Immediately after Svbtle’s launch, there was a self-service copy created. And over the...

As an enthusiast photographer, I’ve recently been fascinated with film photography. In the past 2 months, I’ve started using my Polaroid SX-70 & Canon FTb on more occasions (instead of relying on my DSLR or iPhone to capture moments).

The thing about both of these camera’s are that they were produced in 1972 & 1971 respectively. The technology is old & not as streamlined or easy-to-use when compared to our digital alternatives today.

Playing around with these manual, film camera’s though got me thinking about how that experience compares to digital photography, where we can take a photo and immediately see the results. Instant gratification.

This got me thinking about the way we run our businesses online these days. We’re focused on iterating in the most agile & efficient way. We implement tweaks that aim for small, daily victories. We monitor our key metrics in real-time (and across...

A year ago my son was born. Today I get to have the privilege of celebrating the last year and this really significant milestone with him & my wife.

To say that it’s been an epic journey would be an understatement. I’m sure most new parents would attest to the experience feeling similar to jumping into the deep-end of the pool and learning to swim on-the-go.

For me though, this year has been about rediscovering myself in all facets of my life: as a new dad, as a husband, as a family member, others’ friend, an entrepreneur & business owner. Just discovering who the heck this Adii guy really is.

You would’ve seen me write about balance quite a bit recently and that’s been a direct result of this journey of rediscovery that I’ve been on. A couple of months ago, I had to admit to myself that deep-down I was very unhappy (even though everything on the surface of my life seemed to be...

Yesterday, during a little video interview, I was asked what WooThemes meant to me. Initially I was a little stumped, but then said “WooThemes is about opportunities.”

My personal perspective & experience was my go-to when I said that, as WooThemes has created so many opportunities for me:

• I have the opportunity of working on something I’m passionate about & building a business around it.
• I have the opportunity of earning a good living and supporting my family.
• I’ve had the opportunity to travel, speak at conferences and meet loads of awesome people (some who’ve become really good friends, mentors & advisors).

And that list can go on.

As I was thinking about all of this though, I realized that opportunities were at the very core of what we were doing at WooThemes too: we were giving our customers the opportunity to build better websites, quicker and more cost-efficiently. Our...

I used to be a firm believer of this mantra:

“When you love your job, you’ll never work again.”

Today, I’m not convinced that I believe it as much any more.

See, in terms of that mantra I guess I’d be considered to be living the dream. I co-founded my own business, get to work with an awesome team on awesome products, we make good money, I get to travel often and I have loads of flexibility. It’s a privileged life.

And all of this has been fuelled by my passion for business, my passion to create, my passion for a challenge, my passion to start something.

When I created the very first WooThemes product 5 years ago, I did so because I was passionate about getting my hands dirty & creating. It was only ever intended to be a nice side-project that generated a bit of passive income. Instead it took off like a house on fire and evolved into the global business it is today.

Throughout the...