The 2016 year is closing to the end, and we have finally shipped the first version Nitro Universal WooCommerce theme. It was a long journey with about approximately 14+ months development and refinement plus almost two months of review from Envato Reviewer Team.
Quick intro
I’m Tony Bui (aka Tuan is the native name), the guy behind Project Nitro Theme with the team about ten awesome guys. We’re a quite new in WordPress market, but learn fast to deliver the right product to the customers. I personally participated in the local and regional WordPress and WordCamp meetups. My recent speech at WordCamp Singapore 2016 in September was about using Google Tag Manager on WordPress landing page of Nitro WooCommerce theme.
Let’s start with some Nitro theme stats.
The Nitro core team: 01 Tester, 03 Developers, 04 web designers, 03 Customer Support assistance. We work closely with each other and every day keep “stand up meetings” to keep information clear across the team.
Over 1,000 code commits. Code commits coming every day, and every week we ship the brand new version of Nitro theme with those changes after careful testing.
WordPress plugins Compatibility: 33. Since the first release of Nitro, we have made it compatible with 33 most popular and customers frequently used WordPress / WooCommerce plugins.
Over 1,000 conversations with customers. The stats coming from 90 last days and we were really happy to have an opportunity to talk with customers.
The median first response time is 44 minutes. Our time zone is GMT+7, but we keep the best to respond you on time. For usage requests, we can handle a quite fast, but if there is customization or bug fixes, it takes a little bit to solve it.
24 eCommerce focused demos. We’d rather call it 24 WordPress eCommerce themes because it’s not just the one homepage demo, but a demo with other eCommerce pages such as Shop, Product Page, Checkout, Cart and exceptional Sales landing pages.
Over 200+ PSD files included. We’ve included all design elements of 24 eCommerce niches, so you can get it and customise for the client’s project.
And 2 bulk sales from US agencies Pelican Commerce and &Pixels specializing in web development and great on boarding support assistance. Thanks a lot for your great support and trust in us!
Back to 2015 and the whole 2016.
The story began actually in the summer of 2015 when me and other co – founders decided with choosing the strategy to grow WordPress business. The decision was made for WooCommerce with its real growth rate. WooCommerce was the first step, but the coverage is huge going with eCommerce industry in general. Our mission is to make the WordPress theme that matches the needs of shop owners. High focus and direction in eCommerce. You might ask why is that? Well, we have been in web development business since 2007 with making Joomla! Templates and selling it on own site at www.JoomlaShine.com
We call Nitro as Universal WooCommerce theme from eCommerce experts for the reason that we have got first customers in 2007 and since that time were in eCommerce industry. We were selling functional web templates and understood what customers wanted. The lessons learned we want to share with more shop owners whether selling digital or non digital goods. Nitro combines eCommerce features that have been proven in practice with our Joomla! and other projects.
Nitro Beta User group on Facebook
On the hot summer, we were close to releasing the first version still on beta Nitro WooCommerce theme. So we quickly decided that it’s right time to give to first shop owners a try and Nitro beta user group on Facebook was born on 22 January. It was the first experience working with shop owners before the product’s official release. We’ve got a lot of useful and valuable insights to make Nitro theme better for you – shop owners. Huge thanks to your feedback!
At the first day, it was hard to get insight, but days passed and feedback came more and more. There is mostly two kinds of feedback: bugs reports and product improvement. We have counted every suggestion to the close consideration. Some of them easy to implement, other ones took the time from both designers and developers to execute.
August 19. Nitro submission to ThemeForest. First try
It was the long and hard working day. The day began with clear outlines of tasks to do for reaching the main goal – Submission Nitro WooCommerce theme to the ThemeForest marketplace. All bugs reported from Nitro beta user group have been fixed and there was the final touch with checking on the laptop and mobile devices. The latest piece of content describing Nitro theme features have passed proofreading. Thus, around 11 PM at the local time, we pushed the button “submit item”. We understood clearly that the story for us just began and prepared well for coming feedbacks from Envato Review Team in both areas: design and code quality. Thanks to them for that!
Delay in the review WordPress theme. Keep calm and wait.
In these days to submit WordPress theme for the first round of review and get the result takes about seven full days. In the days that we decided to submit was up to 44 days! By that time it was high demand for reviewing WordPress themes and Review Team was small. This experience taught all of our members the “patience” and kept calm with next move. Thanks to Envato for having the website with review status updates. It helps author a lot with knowing when to expect the result of the review.
September 4. Nitro WooCommerce theme approved. Yaya!!!
Finally, after almost one month of working on bugs fixes and improvement, Nitro WooCommerce theme was officially approved on ThemeForest. We wanted it to be approved by September 2, but heh, just missed two days from that date. You might be asking why exactly September 2 or any other date? We wanted to release the product on the memorable day and wished to connect it with National Independence day. It has a lot of meaning for our team because of the product including design and code part from the local community.
Best selling Item for September
Nitro launched in September, and it was a good start. We got the “trending” badge and were placed #1 as the Top Best Selling WooCommerce theme in September. By that time we had a pink thumbnail with cart icon and “Nitro” name.
It was a little bit surprise for us when Nitro theme had been featured in Monthly WordPress items newsletter. Thanks, Envato a lot for featuring Nitro!
3 new demo niches every month
When Nitro WooCommerce came to the public, it has 12 ready to use WooCommerce demos. It’s well refined with pixel perfection and paying attention to small details. Less eCommerce features comparing to the latest version 1.2.5 However, customers started asking about new niche demos, and we wanted to support their business by pushing to the new KPI with releasing three new eCommerce niche demos per month until January 2017. With great pride, we can say that Nitro now comes with 24 design demos for different industries such as Fashion, electronics, beauty and cosmetic, sports equipment, lingerie, single product lines, kids and other. Since January 1 we’ll be keeping the release one new niche demo per month. The time that we save on that will be invested in making existing demos close to the real shop and features improvement.
Nitro stability with weekly release
From the first days, we were aware that Nitro still need to go with more hosting and WordPress environment to make sure about its stability. Our developers worked day and night to push with a new release every week. It’s the first phase of making Nitro theme, and we just want to say to customers for their feedback and patience with updating new version. The image below has been captured from Bitbucket.org account.
Black Friday & Cyber Monday deal bumped Nitro to the middle of table Top best selling WordPress themes!
By November 27 after the Black Friday & Cyber Monday deals Nitro WooCommerce theme climbed to the middle of the table of best selling WordPress themes for the week. Thanks for awesome customers who decided give a try with Nitro theme. We believe that Nitro deserve the attention of shop owners and chance to get a try and execute on more online stores. That’s the reason why we have limit it by the pricing factor. It was a great 69% OFF WordPress themes Black Friday deal spreading Nitro to more users.
Final words
There is a lot of work await us ahead and especially with 2017. We’ll follow our ultimate goal to make Nitro as #1 eCommerce WordPress theme on the market and improve its performance and shipping new eCommerce features. The last words, we’ve finally joined Envato Elite Club! Yayay…
Cheers everyone,
Tony