There has been some talk the past few weeks in the WordPress world about the GPL and marketplaces. I’d like to share some lessons on building a profitable WordPress business without a marketplace.

What about marketplaces?

Marketplaces seem perfect on the surface for a few reasons:

• Free marketing and awareness for your product.
• Built in tools to sell your product.
• Minimal friction getting to market.

These are good reasons to use a marketplace, but consider some caveats:

• Subject to the whims (and terms) of the marketplace.
• Lock in factor. How can you leave?
• A (usually) hefty fee structure.
• Brand dilution and customer loyalty.

Notice anything about these caveats? They are easy to dismiss when you start, but they become increasingly unwieldy as you grow. Think of it like bringing home a cute cuddly bear cub. He’s great until one day you look up and realize he could tear your head off. These caveats get scary quickly and can start effecting your life, business, and livelihood.

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We’ve been working hard on a new service for well over a year now and I’m really excited to share it with you. It’s called Memberful, and we’re now accepting beta customers. Memberful makes it easy to sell your digital downloads: software, graphics, fonts, icons, templates, themes, plugins, etc. You can also use Memberful to monetize your content by selling monthly or yearly subscriptions to your website. Head over to the site to learn more and sign up.

Memberful is really easy (like point and click) to set up. It also optionally integrates quickly with WordPress via a plugin. We’ve been using it for a year now here at The Theme Foundry to sell our WordPress themes on this WordPress powered website. If you’re the technical type, we also have an API available for integrating Memberful with any third-party CMS or custom application.

We’re really excited about Memberful, and hope you are too!

This week, I am joining The Theme Foundry team as a Developer and I am absolutely thrilled! I have been a big fan of The Theme Foundry for a long time. Their themes are beautiful both in regard to design and code quality. I look forward to helping the team continue in this tradition.

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Watson was inspired by the clean lines and bold strokes of a classical newspaper. From the typography to the uncluttered article view, we focused on bringing that clean and classic look to your website. Watson boasts a neatly organized front page layout, a myriad of in post styles, and the option to set your own custom accent color. It may be our finest magazine-style production yet.

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Does building beautiful and functional WordPress themes for an audience of thousands sound like fun? If yes, we’re hiring a smart and self-managed developer like yourself who communicates effectively and loves getting things done.

You’ll spend your days here at The Theme Foundry building new themes with the team, fixing and improving existing themes, and working with the terrific folks over at Automattic to launch and support our themes on the WordPress.com platform.

We take pride in how we build our themes. We discuss and debate what features really matter, and more importantly, which features don’t. We’re not held back by the whims of a client or the narrow scope of an internal project. We build for the end user. This gives us the freedom to make the right decisions and the satisfaction of seeing those decisions applied in real life.

You won’t just be implementing basic features. We’re looking for someone who wants to make an impact. We need you to take our themes and service to the next level by delivering big picture solutions that do real jobs for our customers.

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Over time, even WordPress themes can show their age. As the months roll by after a theme is released, we slowly build a list of improvements and bug fixes for that theme. Sometimes we miss a small styling bug. Other times, we decide to wait and see on a feature.

Regardless of the nature of the improvements, we make a commitment to keeping our theme collection up to date by providing bug fixes, new features, and interface updates from time to time, so that users buying themes today get the same quality experience users had yesteryear, when the themes were originally released.

Until recently, we would do theme updates every 2-3 months. Every theme was updated at the same time, which lead to a number of issues:

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We’re looking to add a community manager to the team! We’ve grown this year and the number of emails and support questions has increased quite a bit. Up until this point, Andy, Scott, Jennifer, and I have been sharing the load. It’s time for someone special (maybe you!) to take our support to the next level.

Support is great source of pride at The Theme Foundry. You should be a proficient communicator with excellent writing skills and naturally enjoy helping people solve problems. You should also know WordPress inside and out and have lots of experience using and customizing WordPress themes. You don’t need to be a developer, but you should be capable of writing CSS, HTML, and basic PHP.

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We’re proud to announce that our latest release Avid is now available for sites hosted on WordPress.com! Avid can be purchased from your WordPress.com dashboard or from the Avid theme showcase page.

When you buy a theme on WordPress.com you get the same quality support, but your theme and website are hosted in the WordPress.com environment. It is easier to get up and running and your theme is automatically kept up to date.

Read more about the differences between WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress and browse all our themes available on WordPress.com.

I was listening to the latest Please Advise podcast, with guest Jason Schuller of Press75. The show’s hosts Mike McAlister, Jake Caputo and Chris Molitor cover various topics related to WordPress and WordPress theme development.

About midway through the show, the subject of theme options and the new WordPress theme customizer (built primarily by Daryl Koopersmith and Dominik Schilling) came up. I was really surprised to hear the guys on the show say the following about the customizer:

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Over the past two months, we’ve been working hard with the extremely talented Dave Ruiz of Foundation Six to build our latest WordPress theme. The team was given the task of translating Dave’s original and visually rich design to the browser. After many long hours of tweaking and polishing, we’re happy to announce the release of the absolutely stunning Avid photography theme.

Every detail of Avid is optimized and carefully crafted with photographers in mind. The theme gives you the power to quickly and easily showcase your images, galleries, videos, and blog posts in a beautiful and responsive layout. Take a spin through the live demo of Avid to see it in action.Read more