I miss the good old days of Themeforest when all authors were either 1 or 2 people.

Not sure how Henry manages to keep it going considering the amount of employees he must have, the sales are pretty low on TF.

Here’s my story on Themeforest. Succesful start, not so much the end.

I was on TF since 2010, partnered up with a designer and we got to be an Elite author after about 5 themes. First themes on TF with a page builder system, was called “Content Composer”, before it became a thing, everyone was using widgetized homepages at the time.

But then things changed a bit, Visual Composer was released, amount of new themes released per week was increasing rapidly and in early 2013 we decided to stop releasing new themes because sales average dropped for new items and also because we failed to see the potential in releasing the page builder as a plugin.

Mid 2013 I started working full-time for one of the big authors at the time ( he was also just a regular person, not a business ). Few month later we we partnered up, decided to give it one more shot at page builders, but to change things up we decided to make it live ( front-end ), and Live Composer was released a few months later.

Got on the first row of top selling on CodeCanyon, until a few weeks later Visual Composer got front-end capability as well, then it started dropping. Two guys can’t compete with a multi-million dollar company.

We released a few more themes, but the situation on Themeforest changed, it’s gotten even harder to make it profitable, themes were gone from the first page at most 2 days after release. No time for exposure.

So that ended a couple years ago, since then I went back to client work, not really sure if I’ll be going back to Themeforest and commercial themes in general.

I recently noticed a decrease in the amount of new items that are getting released on TF so perhaps I’ll give it a try, but it’s not on my list of priorities.

Hi Sergey,

Thanks a lot for the great questions. Are you the author yourself? 🙂

Let’s go one by one:

1. Support. We actually have a team around 15 people that does support only. So we can manage even more themes, if need be. Or hire more people. 🙂
But in general, we try to concentrate on better theme quality, so there would be less tickets. So far we manage to do that.
2. Same thing with quantity. We’ve concentrated on quality lately and it has actually slowed us down very much. We release 13 themes per month in 2017 and number has decreased significantly in 2018 because we decided to make our themes bigger – thus more complicated.
3. We are not afraid of numbers. More themes – more revenue – more people to hire.
4. Yes, we follow all the latest Envato standards. Not only we want to do that, but we also have to. Envato is checking themes very thoroughly lately, so we are happy it keeps us in shape! 🙂