With so many WordPress themes available on the market, it might sound crazy to even try and start a business selling your own. There are super-huge, multi-purpose themes selling $100k worth a week with option panels the size of their revenue charts, others with big passionate communities supporting them, and countless other shops just as successful in their own right. How can you compete?

What would make someone choose you over anyone else?

And that’s the rub, isn’t it? What makes you different? As you will find out in this episode with Mike McAlister of Array.is, that’s the key ingredient in today’s theme market. It’s not just your theme’s code, your support, or even your price point — give your customer a new reason to choose you over their never ending suite of choices.

If I haven’t scared you off by now, let’s dive into how to start a theme business.

Interview with Mike McAlister of Array.is

Subscribe and rate us 5-stars on iTunes!

Mike McAlister of Array.is

I’ve been a big fan of Mike’s work for a long time. In fact, I’m using one of his themes for my new podcast, PluggedIn Radio — but more on that later.

There’s a short list of theme companies I recommend, given that I own one myself, and Array.is is in the top of that list. When it comes to someone that cares about every pixel, I let his portfolio speak for itself.

Mike and I chat about his experience building the Array.is business and how it’s taken shape over the years. If you’re thinking of launching your own theme shop, this interview and my guide below should be a great kickstarter.

If you enjoyed this episode and the launch of Season 3, “Getting back to the roots,” I’d love a review on iTunes. I’ll read new reviews on the next episode.

How to start a WordPress theme busines

I’ve created the following guide as an overview of sorts to starting your WordPress theme business. I’m sure there are some finer details that you might consider, but consider this your bootcamp style guide to launching.

Step 1: Decide on your theme type

Multi-purpose. Food blog. Photography focused. E-commerce. The daily blogger.

Decide on what vertical you plan on tackling with your new theme. Once you define that, you set yourself up to build a workflow or blueprint taking you from concept to promotion. Knowing what kind of theme you want to produce helps you answer the following:

These questions may be the tip of the iceberg, but they are certainly questions I would ask myself if I were to develop a new theme.

A multi-purpose theme may have a larger audience than the photography theme, but it’s much harder to support and go to market. Similarly, the photography theme would face said challenges compared to a theme made for food trucks selling tacos — but way easier to find a direct audience.

What type of theme will you build?

Step 2: Define your development skill

I am not a developer, but I play one on TV.

Many of you starting WordPress product companies are developers and designers by trade, so finding a developer isn’t necessarily a challenge, until you want to start offloading some of the work. One issue that might crop up for you, if you answered some of the questions above, is the amount of options your theme might support. It’s at this point you might realize you do need an extra pair of hands or that your goals are more lofty than your strengths.

Other technical challenges might be supporting a plugin like WooCommerce or GravityForms. Sure there’s accounting for basic styling, but are you comfortable extending them into new aspects of your theme or generally supporting the future revisions plugin developers release? Do you really have the developer chops to handle third party code?

Think big picture when it comes to accounting for your developer skills. Remember, there’s a lot more to running a theme shop than shipping the code, I hope you’re ready for it.

Find a good developer to help. There’s a bunch of places one could start with:

These will all come with their varying degrees of success, but you need a place to start, so why not give them a go?

Step 3: Define your design skills

Designer: Another thing I am not.

I’ve seen a lot of developers pretend to be one too — it’s not pretty. Based on the the type of theme you’re producing, ask yourself, how important is the design? Very important — let me just answer that for you right now.