Tell us about ThemeHouse, the ThemeHouse site, and the changes you've been making to your business model lately.
ThemeHouse was such a fun project. The reason we rebranded to ThemeHouse was because we had clients asking us for non-theme/add-on related projects. We were asked to help advertise, build apps, you name it. So we needed a brand to do that. And since I love the name Audentio, I figured let’s just come up with something new to serve as the face for all our digital products and keep Audentio as the parent company.
I wanted something that was fun and playful, and after much deliberation came up with the treehouse concept. Your tree is your connection or root in the world, your forum is the house itself, the add-ons are the features, the extra things you have like telescopes, tire swings etc, and of course your theme is your architectural style, your paint, everything you see.
The old Audentio website was built 6 years ago, rarely touched. It needed a huge facelift so we went all the way and built ThemeHouse completely componentized and modern. Built in React from Facebook, Redux, Ruby API backend, CSS modules, custom web components, everything. It has an integrated subscription manager, digital (and physical) product manager, invoicing system, license manager, CMS manager, user system, you name it. Still more to build, but it was a huge project and I think our team did a great job, the feedback has been awesome and the reviews stellar.
We decided to move to a subscription model as well, simply because some of our clients own like 40 products and it wasn’t very cost effective. So we figured why not just get all products, cancel when you want, reup when you need support or updates. Nice and simple. Its been great, people love the price point as it was kept as low as we could, and they have found great value in it. We will do the same thing for 2.0 and Wordpress products. Naturally you can still buy one-off products for 1.X, most likely for 2.X as well, but Wordpress will be entirely subscription-based.
