Today marks a new beginning and a very special time in my wife & my (but especially my wife’s) life: Jeanne officially started trading in her new business (a bricks & mortar retail + services store) today.

In the last 2 years, I’ve witnessed Jeanne marrying me & becoming the best wife any husband could ask for. She quit her corporate job at a law firm and established her own boutique legal agency to much success. Then she put that on the backburner to take care of our new-born son, adapting to her new role as “best mom in the world” seamlessly.

So with Adii Jr growing up nicely, Jeanne started looking at business opportunities a couple of months ago (deciding on a new avenue and not returning to her legal roots). It took quite some time for the right opportunity to pop up and I witnessed my wife frustrated with the search & waiting at times, but she continued to amaze me with her...

I’ve been feeling incredibly blessed of late and feel that - as an entrepreneur and business owner - I have quite a few privileges. If I made a list of those today, these would be the recent highlights:

• I get to hack my life, make my own rules and make things better.

• Earlier this month I was in Boston for Business of Software and I got up at 6am to go for a run in the hotel gym. It was still dark out, but as I was running on the treadmill and looking out on a new, unexplored city, I just felt incredibly honoured to have the opportunity to get invited to speak at conferences like BoS and travel the world for my business.

• We’ve had the whole WooThemes team (up to 26 now) in Cape Town the last couple of days and it’s been amazing to spend time with my “work family”. I’m privileged to be a senior member of that family and to be the “provider” (in a way), which helps my family pay their...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how our ideals & idols are totally broken and that we needed to re-evaluate how we work on & within online / digital / technology companies.

So I was quite sad to see another idol admitting that same brokenness. [1]

I’m trying to figure out when & why it became so acceptable for us to:

• Leave the office at 7pm AND then go home to work some more.
• Not take any kind of non-working holiday.
• Working every single weekend.
• Compromise on every, single aspect of our lives in favour of work.

The thing is that this has really become the norm within our industry, so whenever a new entrepreneur or startup employee want to figure out how they’re supposed to succeed, we tell them to “Hustle!”. We direct them at the most prominent & experienced bloggers within our space, who will perpetuate this “work/life balance isn’t really important; you just need to work...

On 1 October we did something spectacular and totally unheard of (at least in terms of our own history) at WooThemes: we launched a complete overhaul & redesign of WooThemes.com in only 2.5 months. We re-did absolutely everything: redesigned every single page, stripped out our backend, replaced with a new system and migrated all of our old data across.

And oh my [insert expletives here], has it been the most painful experience since… We’ve had to fix so many bugs that were out in the public domain and our support channels have been over-run. It’s really been bad.

Ask me whether I will do that again and I will say “Yes!” with the kind of gusto and confidence that belies the challenges we’ve faced since 1 October. That “Yes!” is entrenched in my opinion that you need to feel the pain, because that pain becomes the incentive to put a band-aid on it and stop the bleeding.

The fact is that...

A couple of months ago I was listening to the Emerging Music Chart (by We Are Hunted) on Spotify, in an effort to discover some new music. I can remember the second song on that playlist: Some Nights by Fun.

When I first heard the song, something immediately struck me about it. It wasn’t that it was perfect in my taste of music, and neither did it sound like a masterpiece. It was a bit different to what I had been listening to at the time perhaps, but on first listen and in terms of my logic reasoning, the song was unremarkable.

Yet I listened to it over & over again, which eventually lead to listening the entire album. A couple of full cycles through the whole album later and I was really into Fun.

The remarkable thing was that this happened about 8 months ago. Fast-forward to today and Some Nights - along with a couple of other songs by Fun. - have been on mainstream radio charts...

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and it’s come up in so many conversations I’ve had about anything that even remotely sounds like a freemium model.

At WooThemes, we have quite a few free products which is some kind of freemium incarnation: the free products help us with distribution, but there’s no obvious paid plan or product to which you can upgrade. As such, we’ve always limited the amount of support we’re willing to give to users of our free products, but we’ve never just said “No!” completely. The reason being that we’d hoped that by going over-and-beyond and actually helping those users a little bit, we’re giving them a great, first impression of Woo, which means they hopefully spend money with us in future.

The only problem is that this doesn’t work. We’ve seen a very small percentage of free users ever pay us anything. And obviously, once you’ve helped them a little...

I stumbled onto a new Vanity Fair article by Randall Stross, in which he shares some behind-the-scenes insight into Y-Combinator after he followed the 2nd class of 2011 during their 3 months with the incubator. Whilst it was generally a fun read, one specific section left me appalled:

The most successful start-ups, Graham says, are the ones that completely remove distractions: “They just sleep, eat, exercise, and program.”

The Zenters were in Y.C.’s winter 2007 batch. “They got this apartment together a couple blocks from here,” says Graham, “and just got a bunch of Lean Cuisine and put it in the freezer, and they programmed and occasionally played tennis and ate Lean Cuisine.”

Standing to the side of the room, Jessica Livingston calls out, “They each lost 15 pounds!”

To distill the advice given to new Y-Combinator startups, Paul Graham & Jessica Livingston basically advised startups...

Last night I started playing NFL Kicker 2013 on my iPhone, having previously been addicted to the 2012 version. The new version however only had one new feature: you could buy various power-ups / upgrades that would allow you to perform better or accelerate your progress in the game. Whilst the game was still fun, it felt lame that the game pushed so hard for me to pay for upgrades, instead of just earning them.

I’ve never been a massive gamer, but I remember a time when your progress in any game came down to your skill, execution & time (read: patience). I loved games like Railroad Tycoon, Age of Empires & Football Manager, because the only way to excel in the game, was to put in the time. I couldn’t pay to actual money to do better.

I remember a couple of months ago, I really got stuck into Tiny Tower & I just absolutely had to build the biggest tower in the fastest way I could. So I...

I’ve been doing a few pre-sales & account-related customer e-mails in the last couple of days & the one thing that still surprises me is the quality (or lack thereof) of English that a large percentage of our customers use in their e-mails.

I know that English is not the most spoken language in the world, but 56%-odd of the Internet’s content is English and only Chinese users even closely rivals their English counterparts. When I think about this, I’d thus assume that most Internet users would need a better understanding of English to get around the web successfully. This is also reinforced by the fact that English is only my 2nd language, but I’ve had to refine it over the years to stay relevant online.

What further compounds my surprise though is that I’d expect the WooThemes customers I’m interacting with to have better English. They’re at least somewhat-technical and know enough...

I recently had a conversation with one of my team leaders about some of our newest additions to the WooTeam (whom we’d not met, since they’re based remotely) and realized that we didn’t know how old these individuals are. We soon concluded that we don’t know their age, because we don’t care about that.

This reminded me of a sports-related cliché that I was brought up with:

“If you’re good enough, you’re old enough.”

This specific cliché related to how some sports coaches question the merits of including a youngster into their teams, fearing that their lack of experience will be exposed by their opponents. Time & time again though, other coaches have shown that by including an individual based purely on merit (of their abilities) mostly leads to success. If you’re good enough, nobody seems to care how old or experienced you are.

This seemed very apt in explaining our (obviously...