From Zero to 150,000 paid users in 5 years with Adii Pienaar of WooThemes

CEO / Co-Founder @WooThemes. New Dad. Ex-Rockstar – Adii Pienaar

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Adii delivers what branding techniques he used to help his company from from zero to over 150,000 paid customers. Hugely impressive when he is competing with similar products that are offered for free!

Adii distilled exactly how he branded WooThemes. But even better, he explains how he is currently building and branding his new company PublicBeta.

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$200?Worth- Including:

• Brandiing ? The Book
• 60 minutes of Video Content (my first PB course I shot about branding)
• 3 Months free access to PublicBeta
• PLUS a 30-min free Clarity call with Adii

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To Buy Adii’s Book Brandiing just go to: http://brandiing.publicbeta.co/

Get a 10% discount on Brandiing“using the coupon “eventualmillionaire“.

Resources Mentioned on this Podcast:

• Dan Martell’s Interview
• The Start-up of You by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha

Check out Adii.me for more info!

You can follow Adii on Twitter

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy, and I'm really excited today to have on the show, Adii Pienaar. He's super cool. I didn't realize that I was a customer of his as we were chatting on Twitter the other day because he actually created WooThemes. I mean, I've used them before; they were absolutely amazing. He's been doing that, but he's also starting a new thing, PublicBeta, and we're going to really get into and dive deep on what he's doing and how it's working and fear and all that fun stuff. I'm really excited to have him on the show. Thanks so much for coming on, Adii.

Adii: Awesome. Thanks for having me, Jaime. 

Jaime: So I think it's hilarious how we actually got in contact together because I had used your product for a long time before. One day I get a tweet from you, and I was like "Oh, cool." Then I looked you up, and I was like "No way, you're the guy from WooThemes." Which is amazing because you actually listened to the show before. 

Adii: Yeah, totally, and I mean just from my side, I think it's always fun meeting customers, WooThemes customers out in the wild, and especially in this way. So yeah, coincidence, but small world. 

Jaime: I love how we call Twitter in the wild. It's in the wild. That's awesome. Tell me...

Adii: It totally is. For me anything for that's not self-contained, that's community driven is ultimately in the wild, and there's some wild things that happen out there.

Jaime: There totally are. Our connection being one of them, definitely. Tell me a little bit about what happened for you to start WooThemes. Was that your very first business?

Adii: Well, yeah, I would classify it as my very first serious business. I ran a few, two or three side projects whilst in university, so prior to WooThemes. One being a, the one that I find the funniest was a modeling agency. At the university where I got pretty girls to pose for photos, and this was the day before I even yeah.

Jaime: I'm impressed.

Adii: It's weird because I'm not good, well, I wasn't really good at chatting to ladies, but yes. Those were the things that I did before WooThemes, you know, the first serious business I had. The first one where I felt there's some kind of traction here that deserves more attention. 

Jaime: So you didn't get traction with the modeling business? Come on, no?

Adii: I totally know sex sells, but as a setup I think you need to have a very outgoing personality which I don't think I had. I think it was prior to the days where social media made things easy. We were talking, oh quick dates, 2003, 2004-ish. That's definitely before, I think that's kind of the start of the Twitters and Facebooks which meant that Africa being like two years behind all the major trends. I think about it, the business model, I totally think it was too early for those kind of things.

Jaime: That's amazing. Thanks for mentioning you're actually in Africa right now. Where in Africa are you located? 

Adii: Cape Town, South Africa. Right at the very bottom. 

Jaime: Nice. It's ten AM here, and it's four PM there. Totally different time zones, so thank you so much for doing this, winding down your work day. Tell me about how you got into doing WooThemes to begin with. Are you a geek? Were you like "I know how to code, and I think this is a great idea?" Or what?

Adii: I think back in the day, yeah, I would classify myself somewhat as a geek, at least in terms in having an interest especially about the internet. I can remember back in the dial-up modem days, the internet always fascinated me. I did some computer science at school, and I lacked the ability to think logically and solve problems. That's something that I've always lacked. I kind of lost that after school when going to university when studying accounting. What actually happened thereafter in about 2006 I decided that everyone was having blogs, and I wanted to be part of that crowd. I set out to create a blog, and my very first blog was actually titled The Cool Crowd for that very fact. After looking at loads of kind of blogging solutions, platforms at the time, WordPress was the one that stuck. I taught myself a little bit of WordPress, both front and back end, little bit of PHP, and yeah, I mean that's how I got my start within WordPress at least. That just kind of grew into first freelancing, then consulting work for clients on WordPress. I remember the first job I ever took was creating a complete website for someone on getting a freelance writer. Whether they still exist, but I got paid a hundred bucks US. I thought "You know, this is so much beer money for the weekend." It was actually fantastic. I thought "Well, this is a start. Everything's going to happen from here." But yeah, so that's how I got the start, and via that I eventually got into products and into WooThemes. 

Jaime: That's amazing. I remember I started blogging in 2006 too, but I was a dork and didn't use WordPress. I started, and I was like I can hard code my own stuff, so I did that instead. I should have done what you did. I have no idea why. You're on that side of the camera, and I'm on this side right now. Tell me how you sort of saw that there might be a need. Because at the time, were people paying for themes? How did you know that this might work for you? 

Adii: The answer is no. At the time, people weren't paying for themes. What happened is most of the consulting gigs I got from my blog where I wrote about WordPress mostly, but also kind of personal stuff and my opinions about business and entrepreneurship. One of the things that got me loads of traffic on my blog was actually releasing free WordPress themes. What was evident from that was that there was definitely a need for people to kind of download WordPress themes that were of higher quality. Stuff that was really well coded, well designed, that got traction. Then at about the same time that another guy in the WordPress ecosystem, a guy by the name of Brian Gardner that runs Studio Press started selling themes. I had actually started selling themes as well. I think one day Brian and I will need to have beers to actually figure out who was first; who was the superior first one? 

Jaime: There will be a fight over it, no?

Adii: Right around the same time, we started selling themes, and my assumptions at the time were that I was doing so many things with clients, in a very kind of specific per client basis within WordPress. I felt well, there's definitely a way that I can do that in a more generic way and just try and sell that. My product strategy for day one was just to throw everything and the kitchen sink, into the product, which I now know is probably the worst decision I ever made. I think that it helped with the value proposition, and it helped differentiating a paid product from a free product. I think that the rest is relatively history. I mean once I released the first product on my blog, and there were pretty much, I think the first day I had three or four sales. I was essentially or effectively profitable from day one. 

Jaime: Nice. Tell us about sort of in a nutshell what the growth was, and what happened? Because like I said, I became a customer because you guys, you, not you guys, did amazing work at really having high quality stuff. That, especially when I first started, wasn't really abundant in many places. Now it's a little bit more, but in general tell us the evolution of WooThemes from three to four sales to where you guys are now. 

Adii: Yeah, so as I mentioned the first products I teased and announced by my own blog, and I sold them by a separate site called at the time Premium Use Themes which was also the name of the very first theme I released. A couple weeks after that, the official launch date, I will never forget this but the second of November 2007. A couple of weeks after that, I got an email from Magnus who's now one of the cofounders in WooThemes, and he said "Well, you know, you're doing cool stuff, can we collaborate?" What that essentially meant was we started working on a new theme, and we started working together doing some designs and sharing tasks. A couple of weeks after that I reached out to Mark, our third cofounder, who was at the time a very well-known South African designer. He was based in London; Magnus was in Norway. Mark and I started doing the same thing. A couple of months in, I had actually got committed to taking a corporate job because 2007 was my last year in university, and I started the new year with a corporate job. Within two months, we were earning the same from the side project we were releasing and selling themes than I was doing from my corporate job. I quit about seven weeks into that corporate job to pursue this full-time. There's a whole different story that I can tell about why and how I quit. Shortly thereafter I basically went to Mag and Mark, and I told them, "Well, we should consolidate things," because at that time whilst we were sharing the product related tasks, I was doing all the admin, all the support. I proposed to them that we formalize this thing, that we pick a new name that is more representative of kind of a broader strategy. We, I suggested us to be equal partners, equal shareholders, and we subsequently launched WooThemes as a brand in July of 2008.

Jaime: I love the name too. Woo. Okay, so what made you decide to get partners? Why couldn't you have done this on your own? 

Adii: I don't know. The interesting thing is at the time I think when I got the email from Magnus, it felt like well, this is going to be my momentum. It's going to add bandwidth, ad capacity, and it just kind of made sense. The interesting thing was that the three of us shared, mostly at that stage, shared similar skill sets, and we did similar stuff. It was literally like having three people instead of one was just literally three X-ing capacity. I think at the time that was the biggest consideration. The second consideration is I think that it's always more fun to do stuff with other people. Just not being alone. I definitely think that not being alone, well I could say from speaking myself personally that helped. I was a young back then. I was twenty-two, twenty-three, and having people going through the exact same things, both the trials and tribulations but also the kind of you know celebrations, you know made things easier I think. I think that's why, going back why I had, I decided to take on cofounders. 

Jaime: Even it's funny because I hear a lot of people who are like "I want to be able to chat with people locally," but you guys were all over the country, and it still felt like you really had this good, close connection even though you weren't anywhere near each other. 

Adii: Exactly, so we when it took us, for people that haven't read our story yet, it took us sixteen months of working together before the three of us met in person and actually sat down and had a beer. Yeah, it wasn't even for the closeness, or at least in physical closeness. 

Jaime: That's awesome. Tell me about where it is now.

Adii: Yeah, so we're about five years old now. Officially we've just celebrated our fifth birthday in terms of the rebrand. We've been working this for about five and a half years. We're up to, I think we're up to thirty-one on the team of which we only have one office, down in Cape Town, South Africa which houses nine of us. The rest of the team is scattered all over the world, mostly in the US and UK and Europe. Yeah, we've got in terms of broad numbers, we've got a little more than half a million users of which probably at this stage about a hundred and fifty thousand are paying customers of some kind. 

Jaime: Wow. So imagine, look what happens in five years. That's kind of insane. A little.

Adii: Well, the interesting thing is that I love sharing as well, that we never had that kind of hockey stick growth that all the mainstream tech media kind of advocates. All of our growth over the years has been very organic, very linear as well. If I show you a graph of revenue, it's just this linear graph that just keeps going up. Obviously which is great, but it's never had kind of a spike. There's never been that where we double up from one month to the next, or one quarter to the next. 

Jaime: I love that. Tell me a little bit about what's been your success then. How have you driven so many sales even though if it's on a linear path over five years? 

Adii: I think there's two answers. I think initially, and you touched on it, when we started out we had a superior product. We were definitely kind of pioneers, and we brought innovation and new kind of thinking to the WordPress space. That gave us a lot of traction because it made our selling proposition much easier, in terms of differentiating what was out there, and also justifying the fact that yes you can get something for free, but you will pay us seventy bucks or whatever for our product. That was what really helped us initially. I think since then roundabout year two loads of other people kind of caught on to the fact that there was this massive opportunity within the WordPress ecosystem. As with most tech industries, you know technology is cheap and it's relatively generic, and eventually you can't really out-feature your competitors. I think the thing that we did really well from the beginning, and some thing that I'm personally very passionate about is actually our branding. How that associates very closely, correlates very closely to the customer service that we've always given. Which meant that even though all these new competitors were popping up over the years, we had this fantastic loyal audience firstly that had bought into our culture, our brand, and our way of doing things. Which meant that we became, I wouldn't say the default option, but we were also always within the top three even though the kind of products started evening themselves out. Then the third note to that, in the last two years, our biggest growth sector has actually been in ecommerce. Since we brought out an ecommerce product called WooCommerce, that's driven most of our growth in the last two years. The interesting thing is because I actually think it touches on the both of those two things that we did initially, but the other way around. We had that fantastic brand and audience, so we could push a product of quality then, but then we also did push a really innovative quality product to them. It's interesting how those things kind of, almost kind of enter, the inception of I don't know how to explain it, but it's some kind of inception of how those two things have pulled us forward over in the last five years. 

Jaime: I know I agree. It's so funny because whenever I started, I remember people were recommending WooThemes. Then I went ahead and recommended WooThemes. You know what I mean? I was kind of surprised at how viral it was, even though you said it wasn't like hockey stick growth, but it was very referral based, at least from everybody that I had chatted with. 

Adii: That's an interesting thing, so in the first two years, our kind of affiliate program drove a lot of new sales. At one stage it topped out at generating about forty percent of our total revenue. We've since, I mean after that, that peaked about year two I think, and it started going down, and it died out completely. We actually killed it last year.

Jaime: Really? I was going to say "I need to sign up for that." I recommend it all the time. Shoot! But that's the funny thing, I never even signed up for the affiliate program before, even when I was recommending it to people. It was just something to be nice. 

Adii: Thank you for that. 

Jaime: You're welcome. You owe me money. No, I'm kidding. I think this is a perfect segue way then into talking a little bit more about what you're doing now. Because we're talking about branding, and it's sort of interesting to hear you say how important branding is. Because a lot of people are like "Oh, that's high level." You know I've had a couple guests on that talk about branding, but I think it's really key for so many things. To say the name of your website, like you had a specific look to your website. It's more than just that but there were so many pieces where I knew that if I sent someone there, they'd be taken care of. I think that to me made it easy to refer. Let's talk a little bit about branding. You actually have, I mean I don't want to jump the gun, but you have a book that should be out at the time of this interview. Can you tell us a little bit about that? 

Adii: Yeah, so by the time this interview, the book will be released. The book is titled Brandiing, with a double i which is actually from Adii as well. Which is already kind of or at least representative of my thinking about branding. I think in broad terms my opinion about branding, at least about myself, is if that's the one thing that I would probably pinpoint if I've done well both personally and professionally. I think the fact that I've spent so much time, as mentioned, as a collective unit we built a fantastic brand at WooThemes. Along with that I've taken all of the thinking, all of my opinions about branding, and I've also built a personal brand which means that as an example, I think that that's one of the main reasons why I'm able to start PublicBeta, my new business due to that personal brand I have which has led over the years to me meeting incredible people, developing more of an audience. For me the biggest kind of driver, my personal success has been all of my efforts and all of my investments in branding. 

Jaime: Tell us a little bit about PublicBeta then because what we can do is start talking about branding in terms of this. This is a new thing that you're starting, not that you're leaving WooThemes, but you still have that on the back. Right, and then you're starting this new thing. Tell us about the start-up of that. 

Adii: Yeah, so just as context I'm, I was originally CEO of WooThemes, so I've stepped down to more of a nonexemptive role. I'm definitely still involved there. It's definitely still my baby. It's something that I'm very sentimental about. Yeah, so I've stepped down. Officially I stepped down two months ago to pursue PublicBeta, and kind of my elevated pitch for PublicBeta is shortly an online learning community for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs. With the idea just being that successful experienced entrepreneurs can share actionable kind of techniques and processes that help them actually be successful. The idea that is interesting, and again this is what I think about branding, the reason I decided to pursue PublicBeta is because I realized something about myself which is I'm really passionate about helping other entrepreneurs. That's using that as a core passion kind of fields so much of the idea, so much of the business plan, you know the strategy I have going forward. The brand, the name I picked, that's also one of the things that I advocate with regards to any brand, where it's not just about a logo or a website or visually communicating something or messaging or copywriting. Yes, those are all kind of tactics but I think at the very core, any brand needs to know kind of who the founders and entrepreneurs behind it are. What they kind of think and how they think, you know, what they believe in, what their ideals are. Those are things that are more important than the starting point for any new brand. 

Jaime: How do we do that? How do we sort of distill that? Most of the time we get into tactics, going what do we name it, what does it look like, blah, blah, blah. Sometimes we do the background, the whys and stuff, but that doesn't usually come out. Or it gets put into your computer, and nobody ever looks at it again or something like that. Tell us how we can actually implement that. 

Adii: Well, read the book. That's a good summary.

Jaime: Ooh, nice one. 

Adii: Very simply for me it's about knowing yourself. I think, and obviously if you have cofounders, it's about all the cofounders knowing themselves individually and how what the collective makeup there is. That means you basically know what your personal values and characteristics are, and mostly what you're passionate about. I think it's so easy for us, especially these days where anybody can pretty much launch almost any business within industry. Entrepreneurs would spot opportunities where they believe that this is a big opportunity, and I can make loads of money for example, or I can build a fascinating business around it, but they're not necessarily passionate about it. I think that's kind of the surest way that you can just fail. Right there and then because it's not sustainable. I think you can probably put up a billion dollar business with a photo sharing app, but if you're not passionate about it, that's going to be it, you know. Money is going to be your end game. For some people that's fine. For me and the way I think about branding, that's what's important there. If you want to build a lasting sustainable profitable brand, you need to kind of make sure from the very first day those things, the stuff that you put into your brand actually aligns with who you are as a person. 

Jaime: Okay. I love that. Especially since you talked about it, and we saw it from you going WooThemes is my baby. You can tell that you're still passionate about it. Even after five years which is really good. Somebody that's sort of getting started, and I talk about this quite a bit, but it's not necessarily, you don't have to have your passion. Right, so you don't have to be, if you love crocheting, you don't have to be selling crochet, I mean doing crocheting things in order to have your passion. Your passion, you ended up not even coding anymore, but you love the business in general. How do we sort of distill that into our brand? Yes, we're passionate about it. That's good, and that's all I need to know at the beginning. How do we sort of actually do that?

Adii: The interesting thing is what I did for PublicBeta is a very simple exercise. I wrote down a list. My list had ten items on it. That list was kind of some of my characteristics which I believe I can't do anything about. I know by now they're part of my nature. Also some of the stuff I think defines me as an entrepreneur. For PublicBeta, you kind of do a little exercise where you rewrite those, and they become brand characteristics. For example, I'm trying to think one of the examples in the book. As a person I'm very impulsive. Taking that characteristic, personal characteristic, transferring it to the brand, I would say for example that PublicBeta is kind of a company where we're dynamic and proactive in doing things. I would say personally I don't believe that it's possible to be perfect, which would translate into a brand characteristic of as a company we're not trying to be perfect for you, but we're going to do our kind of utmost to make you happy. I think once you go through that exercise, you basically get something that's some kind of an external culture code, something like HubSpot's done recently. They've gotten a lot of traction for publishing their cultural code, which is kind of for internal, but also portrays the way they work with their customers. I think that's kind of the first step. I think if you have those things, and you can kind of say here's the three or five or ten or twenty things that defines us as a brand, then you can start looking at well, which colors would convey that messaging best, which words work best, and that's where the kind of tactics comes in. That's the very simple exercise that I would use initially. 

Jaime: That is in your book, so that way if we want more information on that, good. That's the thing. I could pull apart that a little too. You actually took that list, and you used it when you started creating all the rest the stuff. Where did the name come from then? PublicBeta?

Adii: The name has a, well, a step back, the idea initially came from, from well Dan Martell who's a friend, and you played a big role in that in terms of very specific interview that you had with him that kind of fueled the idea as well. A few things happened there, and it's kind of crazy, the internet world. Part of helping me distill the fact that my core passion is helping other entrepreneurs has been every single time I've taken a clarity call with other entrepreneurs in the last couple of months. I've just felt really invigorated and refreshed, regardless of what time of day it was, regardless of what kind of, how much work I'd done that day. It felt amazing. Then shortly thereafter I stumbled across a post that Dan wrote called Life in Permanent Beta. It basically, it references Reid Hoffman's book, The Start-Up of You. It says that you're always building soft assets as an individual, stuff like skills, experience, and those kinds of things that you eventually translate into hard assets; you know money, wealth, brand, audiences, those kind of things. Stuff that you can actually measure. That resonates with me because one of my biggest fears in life is that I would wake up one morning and realize that I'm not learning anymore. I've stopped learning. I kind of subscribe to the fact that I'm always improving, I'm always learning more. Those kinds of things fueled the idea of PublicBeta, and the name is a fusion of that concept of having your life in permanent beta which I think is very important specifically for entrepreneurs to evolve and stay with the times. The fact that if you're an entrepreneur you're venturing out there, and you're either succeeding or failing, but you're doing so very publicly. Regardless of whether you succeed or fail, it's very public, everyone can see. They're either celebrating with you and applauding, or they're thinking what the fuck did that guy do? Yeah, and so that's where the name came from. As I said, I definitely did that exercise where I spoke about before, the very first thing I did after I kind of had the name was actually sit down and kind of write my manifesto you know, for the business, to make sure I had my heart and my thoughts actually aligned with the name that I was going to pick. 

Jaime: See I love that; that is so nontraditional in terms of what people are told. The first thing you do is this, this, and this. So what about verifying customers and all that other stuff? Do you feel like you already had that market set, so creating the manifesto made sense? Or you just really wanted to start it off on the, with the foundation?

Adii: So for me the foundation is the fact that I want to work on something that helps other entrepreneurs. Ultimately that translates into so many different things. I could for example have gone into ecommerce because ultimately if I create something ecommerce, I am building something that hopefully helps other entrepreneurs. I think the core passion is vague enough to allow me to actually pursue any kind of. The first iteration of PublicBeta is very much geared towards being online learning community. That idea might not even stick. It might not kind of, it might not kind of even see the light of day in the way I conceptualize it right now. Since then, I have obviously started doing my customer driven stuff which I'm not great at by the way, but for me that wasn't the most important thing. What I wanted to do was I wanted to pick a name and a core passion. The passion obviously relates to the vision. For something that I could foreseeably see myself working on for the next fifty years. That most probably means that PublicBeta will have loads of different products and services or whatever the case is over the years. If I were to work on it for fifty years, it won't just be an online learning community. I didn't want to pick something that for example is very specific like I want to create the best ecommerce platform. Ultimately once I've done that, then that would have been it. 

Jaime: This is a much, much bigger vision than just sort of solving a need or problem for a customer and making that a thing. That's sort of what you do with WooThemes, then you started building more, and you're sort of on to the next stage now. 

Adii: Exactly, and the interesting thing with WooThemes that I learned about myself was that I'm much more a creator than I'm a nurturer. WooThemes is at that stage now you know it's about nurturing; it's about growing what is there. It's about being on this very specific journey. Yes, there's leeway, and there's still innovation. I'm not saying that there's one thing, and that's the thing that we will do forever. It's more specific. Part of me wanting to explore new things within PublicBeta was just to be able to create again. As I mentioned I had this fascination with learning. I wanted to make new mistakes, and I wanted to learn new things. 

Jaime: I love that you wanted to make new mistakes. Most people are like "I'm not a real big fan of those." The fact that you want that is really different and interesting. What makes you want new mistakes?

Adii: I think that's the way I learn the most. I can remember ever since I've been a kid. My dad is very much Alpha male, and I think many of my kind of, I have a tendency to just try and lead even in really silly situations where I don't need to lead. It's just kind of a natural thing, and I think I learned that from my dad being this Alpha male taking control. I can remember especially when I hit my teenage years, I always, we always kind of clashed. When my dad wanted to through his experience kind of prevent me from making certain mistakes, and I always fought to have the opportunity to make my own mistakes. Because I always felt that that was the way I was going to learn. Either through being independent and succeeding, or from failing really badly, that's the way that I was going to learn. The emotion attached to those experiences was what was going to consolidate the learning. I feel the same way about that to this day. I think mistakes are the best way to learn. 

Jaime: How do you actually recover? PublicBeta's going to be launching really soon. We don't know whether it's going to be a huge success right out of the gate, or not so much, or whatever. You're not going to know that until you do it too. Let's say you start going through, and you realize there's a huge mistake. How do you recover from that and deal? Especially, we're talking about it right now, people are going to be watching, you know what I mean, and all that crazy stuff.

Adii: Yeah, I think the best skill, personal skill that I kind of learned in the last few years. About two years ago I spent six months, a six months program with an executive coach. One of the skills that she taught me was reflection and the ability to get that learning from any situation. Just having, the key to it for me was just having that kind of consciousness around things, so knowing when, even in a split second before making a decision, reflecting about why I want to react to what's, in the way that I want, to something someone said. The thing about reflection and this is how it applies to PublicBeta, I'll be very, very honest about it. I am self-funding and bootstrapping PublicBeta which means that I have earmarked x amount of money from personal savings to invest in PublicBeta. If PublicBeta doesn't get the traction within that budget, my next step after that is to actually go work for someone else, to join another start-up. 

Jaime: Really?

Adii: Yeah. My idea with that, that might sound like such a cop out or at least me being a hypocrite, but the idea with that is it's very, very easy to get stuck down this journey where we're always trying to build things, and we're taking these massive risks because we tell ourselves we're entrepreneurs. But we never take the time to actually reflect, and I think stepping back, not being the one who that taking a hundred percent of the risk. Sure, if you're joining an early stage start-up as employee number three, and you're taking equity on a lower kind of salary, there's still risk. You, compared to the founders, you don't have the same kind of risk. I think the reason why I wanted to do that is, that's if that journey were to fail, I want to have space to reflect. Especially, I think I've published this before, many people don't know whilst running WooThemes three years ago, I actually lost about a hundred and fifty grand on a side project called Radiate. I made so many mistakes there. It's taken me about three years to get the courage back up to do something new again, on my own, and risk my own money, risk my own time. I think again that loads of reflection went into those three years. That's basically kind of the game plan for me personally, at least as an entrepreneur. 

Jaime: Amazing. Amazing that you take something as simple as reflection too and really sort of put that into you as a person. It sounds like you're doing that in every single thing that you do. Was that, you said you started working with a coach awhile ago, was that something that was hard to get in your life? I definitely want to get to talk about the start-up world that you talked about before. Getting that reflection to actually be a part of, so integrated in your life, was that a process? Or was that something that you were like "Oh my gosh, this is amazing, it changed my life instantly?" Tell me about that process.

Adii: It did happen pretty quickly where I could feel and see the effects of being more reflective. As I said, even in kind of a microdecision. It almost had that kind of manual nature where I needed to remind myself that this is a situation where I need to be reflective now. It took me a couple months. What happened was my coach at the time though she drilled that into me. In our kind of biweekly sessions she basically forced me to reflect. Towards the end of our six month engagement, it became second nature for me to be more reflective. I mean there's still times when I'm not as reflective as I want to be which basically means in that moment I'm not conscious enough of the broader context to what's happening there and then.    

Jaime: How can we do that? So I know someone that's listening that's not necessarily working with a coach that will remind them often, do you have any tips for us to actually be able to implement something like that? 

Adii: Not really. I think that the biggest thing is just getting that self-discipline. If you can remind yourself even, obviously reflecting is a kind of retrospective thing in terms of at least looking back, but it's a proactive decision. What I found was just dissecting, take big decisions or big controversial discussions you might have with cofounders, team members, even just taking that and afterwards dissecting that. That's being reflective, so having the self-discipline reactively to look at those things. You can try to teach yourself the skill to be reflective, look back, and take learning from that. Once you've done that, I think the key there is you'll find, you should find that valuable. Once you find valuable, it kind of becomes like a drug. It's something that you just want to do more of, more often.

Jaime: Okay. Because you see the results, and you're like "This makes perfect sense." Okay, then it can become integrated. That's awesome. Let's talk a little bit then about the whole start-up thing. Because to me, it sort of would make sense if you failed to go back to WooThemes. What would make you want to go into someone else's start-up to sort of learn that way? 

Adii: Yeah, I mean I wouldn't say this is confidential, but it's not something that I'd even discussed with my cofounders is I would feel awkward going back to WooThemes full-time. Purely because I feel that my transition out of WooThemes in terms of operations has opened an opportunity for the management team to step into place. For me to go back there, I just wouldn't feel as relevant as I am at the moment. As an example, my role, a big part of my role at the moment with WooThemes is just being a mentor and a coach to the management team. I would feel kind of bad just kind of reversing that transition.

Jaime: Yeah, like I don't trust you. I'm just going to jump in. That's, thank you for sharing that. I really appreciate that. That makes perfect sense. Starting a start-up gives you the learning that you want, and lets them be on their own without the risk that you necessarily want. How do you know though? Say you launch, and I know this is all theoretical, so we don't really know for certain. I hope it will be a big success; we're just talking theory right now. Say you launch PublicBeta, how do you know whether it's a success or failure? How do you sort of go through that, because like you said, it might be pivoting, it might be changing, it might be all that stuff? You don't really know necessarily how long it's going to take to really work. Tell us about that.

Adii: Firstly because I'm very much in the bootstrapping mindset, you know it needs to make money. There's no business where I would ever be involved with that I would just acquire users for years and years without making, without actually making money

Jaime: Passion is good, but money is good with passion.

Adii: Exactly. The money needs to be there. I think in terms of being very concrete about that if I manage to draw any kind of market rate of salary and after that I can get to pay the team and all the other expenses, and we just break even, that's perfectly fine in my opinion. Attached to that I have a good friend Dave Greiner, who's one of the cofounders of Campaign Monitor, and he wrote this absolutely fantastic piece in an interview in Offscreen Magazine a while back about how happiness equals success. I think that's where it kind of relates back to the passion. I mean, at a kind of, the bottom line is the finance needs to make sense, but the thing that will make me feel really successful if I after getting to the bottom line is being happy about being able to execute in the stuff I'm passionate about which ultimately means that I get to help other entrepreneurs. I get to do good. You know that's kind of what and how I would measure PublicBeta's success going forward. 

Jaime: I love that. Even if you're completely breaking even, you're changing the world in terms of helping everybody else. Hopefully not break even, therefore it will be a lot better for the whole country and the world and all. Awesome. Thank you for that. I really appreciate it. Tell us about PublicBeta and what we can expect for the launch. I know it's coming up pretty soon. 

Adii: Yeah, so I've got about forty entrepreneurs at this stage committed to contributing courses and if I say course, a course is basically anywhere from twenty minutes of video content, video's our medium of choice in YouTube, to sixty minutes. The idea is to do a real deep dive into sharing or teaching a very specific process or skill or tip or trick. I've found that there's loads of content about loads of things online, where entrepreneurs share stuff. There's never that deep dive where you can really pick something up. That's one of the aims. The second kind of thing related to that is I wanted to be the same kind of way that we can teach the same thing by ten different entrepreneurs that have done it slightly differently. There's more than one way to skin a cat. If you take something like as a broad topic like how do you acquire your first one hundred paying customers, right? There's loads of ways that you can achieve that goal. I think that's what I would want PublicBeta to be, to be that vehicle for people to learn all those ways, and then pick something that kind of makes sense for them. Attached to all of that, and this has been interesting in my early feedback from early interested prospective customers, hopefully who all turn into paying customers, but the interesting thing is around the community. I've personally found, I'm part of EO, Entrepreneurs Organization; it's a, well you know.

Jaime: We know. Most of the people on the show come from recommendations from EO members. Definitely. 

Adii: Fantastic. So for those people that don't know, EO is global community organization for entrepreneurs. The core idea of it is that you get to associate with like-minded people, and you get people that can basically support you on that roller coaster ride we call entrepreneurship and start-ups. What's fascinating about that, because obviously EO is very exclusive. You need to adhere to certain kind of profit and earnings levels and stuff like that. Every entrepreneur has that need. That's come up so often in the conversations that I've had with entrepreneurs. Which is why I'm really passionate about the community that I hope to build around PublicBeta where the learning content is just initially that shared interest that the community gathers around. Hopefully the community kind of evolves into its own thing. You know, subsequently. 

Jaime: I love that. It's funny because I was reading your personal blog and loved some of the stuff that you had to say. I can only imagine all the other people that are reading the same thing and loving it and not being able to really connect. Besides comments and stuff like that on blogs, it's really tough to start a community and really connect with people. But EO has been amazing, just chatting with the people. So many people are my friends that are in EO, and they're like "Well, so-and-so." They all know each other; they all go on trips together. It's sort of insane. Being able to bring that to someone that doesn't have a million dollar plus business would be really, really beneficial.

Adii: And the personal context there is I live in Cape Town, South Africa. That's as far removed from any kind of tech hub as you can get.

Jaime: I'm in Maine, right. That's close. 

Adii: Well, yes, it takes you six hours to hop over and go to SF. It's a couple hours down to New York. For me it takes like, I think it's a thirty hour transit, so that's the idea. There's so many entrepreneurs in these smaller places, not smaller necessarily, but non-tech hubs in the world that don't get, they don't have the ability to just go down to the coffee shop on the corner and connect to like-minded people. I certainly had that problem back in the day, and I had to find ways to kind of bridge that gap. I hope PublicBeta's kind of that for some other entrepreneurs as well. 

Jaime: Thank you for doing that too. I mean you're completely right. I had, number one, no idea that WooThemes was based out of South Africa, to begin with when I first started working, because it doesn't really matter nowadays, but there is that isolation factor. I hear from so many people. "I love you because you're from Maine, out in the woods and all that stuff, and you can still meet amazing people." I think that's what we're really lucky online to be able to. If we didn't have the internet, I would not have nearly as many friends as I do. Thank goodness. We have some way of connect online. Especially like this, I feel like I know you even though we're thirty hours away. Plus. I love this. I know we have to start wrapping up, but I could chat with you for a long time. Maybe we'll have you, you know, six months down the road you can tell us how PublicBeta went, and how things are going. I'll probably become a customer too.

Adii: Yeah. 

Jaime: So I really appreciate it. I'm going to ask the same last question that I always do, and now you've listened to my show, so you hopefully know what's coming. It's what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of a million? 

Adii: Figure out your passion. I think once you figure out your passion that becomes a life force to just drive ideas, to drive execution thereof. Figure out what your core passion is. 

Jaime: Do you have any tips on that? I mean I know we touched on it a little bit, but do you have any action? Can they write it down? How can they figure that out? 

Adii: I would probably, as I said for me figuring out my core passion of the moment is something that's helping other entrepreneurs was realizing the good feelings that I get from doing clarity calls. Just reflecting about why I'm actually getting the good feelings, and trying to put that into words. I think that's the only key skill; putting into words is the hard bit. Knowing what makes you feel good is actually relatively easy. I mean that's a natural emotion that most of us feel on a daily basis about various things. 

Jaime: But we never reflect. It's so funny that's actually how I found my thing too. I was like "I love doing this, huh. Could I get paid to do? Yes! I totally can. That's awesome." So that's really funny because if I didn't take the time to reflect and really pay attention to what made me happy and didn't. That awareness and that reflection, now people have got to work on that too. Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on. Where can we? I'm going to definitely link to the book Brandiing. Where can we find more about PublicBeta and when the launch comes up? 

Adii: The best thing is to sign up. PublicBeta's got a vague, very short and sweet hopefully landing page at this stage. The best thing is just to sign up there just because email address and I can notify you about the eventual launch. Otherwise my blog Adii dot M-E and at Adii on Twitter. I mostly share business related stuff, but obviously PublicBeta related stuff on there as well.

Jaime: Perfect. We'll definitely link up to all that stuff too, and I can't wait to see what happens. I'm all excited. I can't wait to have you back on the show so we can find out all the ins and outs of what's been going on. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Adii. I really appreciate it. 

Adii: Awesome. Thanks for having me, Jaime.

Tags: Adii Pienaar, Beta Testing, branding, Business Growth, business startup, Idea Validation, millionaire interview, Startup, woothemes

Categories: All, Business, Entrepreneurship, Fear, Finances, Millionaire Interviews, Personal Finance/Wealth

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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