About Making Fewer Products That Stand Out More

We’ve been selling Magento themes for a long time now. And a couple of months ago, we grew our collection to about 40 really awesome products.

But at the end of the day, these themes were all “more of the same”. What I mean by that is that they were more or less at the same level as the products from a couple of other quality Magento theme providers out there. Of course we innovated a bunch, and we were able to be successful by creating products that stand out from the competition and by providing great customer service.

But that type of business strategy is a never ending struggle. As we delivered better products and worked on producing more and more themes to diversify our catalog, we were faced with a growing number of competitors doing exactly the same thing. Often copying/stealing our work. Everyone in the Magento theme market is working on more and better products and are competing on delivering more value and offering a wider selection of themes.

So I decided to completely change our attitude towards developing new products. Keep reading to find find out how!

Developing Kick-ass products

I din’t want to worry too much about speedy development but really focus on quality. I wanted to try to create quality Ecommerce stores that can’t be found anywhere else. Themes that would be significantly different from the original Magento structure and than most themes out there. I thought it’d be a much better strategy for Magentist to have less products but to make sure each product is completely unique and truly awesome.

Investing in kick-ass marketing and promotion

As part of this new approach, I thought we should spend more time and invest more efforts in marketing each individual product. That means creating in-depth description of the product, with better screenshots, screencasts, and really spend time highlighting the particularity of each theme. Also investing more on the store live demo to really showcase the theme potential. Even if that means creating a new dummy catalog for each theme.

No more of the same

Really all theme providers out there (including us) stick to more or less the same structure. Some products are better than others but it’s all “more of the same”. We could stand up a lot by creating themes that are totally different and of a much higher quality and it’s fine if it takes us longer to develop and if we end up with much less products.

We’ll have more fun creating the products, we’ll have less products to support, maintain, update, etc. And we’ll stand out from the competition.

Next steps

So to free up some time usually spent on sales, support, etc, we retired most of our collection of Magento themes except our 4 latest themes and set to  work!

Magentist’s first truly kick-ass Magento theme is set to launch in just a few days and we’re really exited about it! I personally can’t wait to see if our new approach will pay off. Only time will tell…

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