In Episode 9 of the WP Elevation podcast I spoke with Collis Ta’eed, CEO of Envato, home of ThemeForest, CodeCanyon, GraphicRiver and more recently, Microlancer. I was eager to hear how Collis and his wife have built such a behemoth of a company and I wanted to ask him how he responds to the criticism that his marketplace based business has devalued web design and web development. His answers are well worth listening out for.
We're giving away a $50 Envato marketplace credit to spend on ThemeForest, CodeCanyon, GraphicRiver or whatever digital assets your heart desires. Watch the interview to learn how you could win.
Congratulations Julie! Collis has chosen you as the lucky winner of the competition! Thanks for your contribution and keep elevating! (November 2013).
I interviewed Collis just after I had returned from Pressnomics and we had  a great chat off camera about the WordPress business space in general and where it’s headed. Collis is one of the true gentlemen of the WordPress business world and it was an absolute delight to spend some time chatting with him. Envato has grown so rapidly it makes the mind boggle.
You can reach out and thank Collis on his email at [email protected] or via his twitter @collis.
Collis suggested I interview the guys behind the smash hit theme Avada (around $150K in sales per month!!!). So ThemeFusion boys, I’m coming to get you.
Hint: to enter the competition, leave a comment below telling us the #1 tweak to a WordPress website that you’d like to palm off to Microlancer.
24 Responses
Excellent interview! Very enlightening and Collis is such a jolly character 😉 …. My #1 tweak to palm off to Microlancer is theme and plugin updates for all my sites… and researching optimum settings for each plugin for security and smooth functionality.
As unchallenging as it sounds, I think the worst “sounds simple but isn’t” request is “I’d like to change the site color scheme to …”. As you know, that not just changing a color setting or two but sometimes upwards of a hundred. It can often get worse from there when the client next says “You know, it might actually look better in …”
Does Collis ever stop giggling? Great to see someone so happy in their work. For Microlancer we have already used this service a couple of times and the tShirt is on route! The next Microlancer project is a WordPress plugin that will enable forms, survey and polls but give some funky animation submission options – using jQuery, CSS3 and HTML5.
An historian! I love it, but not the Elizabeth Kostova kind, right? And I just love the KPI comment :D. My number one tweak via Microlancer? Well that would be installing and configuring cache plugins so they don’t conflict but work optimally.
Great interview Collis and thanks for the shoutout! 😀
Fantastic interview Collis!
So my favorite way to handle the “little tweak” requests is to do a few of them gratis, and then on like #4, just be really candid in an email, and just say, “hey, I’m going to charge you my hourly rate for this change, and i just want you to see how much of my time & resources are given freely to keep you bastards happy”. So they’ll be more reluctant to ask for little stuff in the future, and when they do ask for stuff, they’ll have a list of things – that you can actually charge a decent hourly rate for. And if you lose them as a customer, screw ’em. Is that what you were looking for?
What an amazing man. Truly inspiring and extremely humble. I can openly say that my business would be nothing without Envato and it’s community of Marketplaces. I love that Envato is Australian based. It’s one of those things that has changed the design and freelance industry.
I would get a micro lancer to give their experience and advice on a few of my different sites and then… have them go ahead and tweak it all. Really want to develop my eye for colour, layout and design.
Great interview Collis.
Great interview.
I would palm off testing of WP updates and making sure that the website still works correctly.
Great Interview 🙂
Please provide an option for downloading podcast…I’m in a third world country where broadband is extremely expensive therefore cannot listen/watch entire interview online.
Hi Muzi – thanks for dropping by my friend. You can grab all the podcasts here: http://podgallery.org/wp-elevation-podcast/
I like this one.
I’ll be in touch soon to interview you guys 🙂
Nice approach Damian. Have you thought about a monthly retainer or block of hours?
Probably a good idea. What do you mean “block of hours”?
For me, ala carte tweaks require a minimum half hour fee. Even a small tweak requires that we change our current focus to revisit their project and re-orient ourselves to their unique needs so we do not introduce errors. Since my clients know this, they are less likely to waste time on small changes or they may save up several tasks that can be accomplished all at once. Some sign up for a VIP maintenance package where more tweaks are allowed and for them I will move heaven and earth to assist them asap. The #1 tweak I would consider using Microlancer for would be to use the talent there to tweak my own business and further turn my weaker areas into strengths. I love to code and customize (geeky strengths), so I would consider using Microlancers for raw design material (chicy strengths). It’s the same reason I purchase Themeforest templates as raw material. I don’t want to hand code a theme from scratch, but I can use well built ones as great raw material for a child theme and endless customizations via plugins, content and CSS.
Great Interview, thanks for share 🙂
Collis Ta’eed is great man, thanks to him my life is changed forever.
Great interview!
Great podcast. Interesting to see a bit behind the vail of Envato…
I do a block of hours… especially with clients I know are going to be the death of me with “small little tweaks”. I also do some changes for free here and there but like @damianpatrick:disqus said below, I send an invoice for the time, showing a credit for the work done so they know how long it took me and how much of the value they got from me for what they thought was a minor change.
Thank you very interesting interview! #1 tweak would be customizing plugins to work better with some themes of Themeforest.
My number 1 tweek for Mirolancer would be setting up the cache plugin and security settings correctly.
Hey Julie,
I’m proud to announce that Collis has awarded the prize to you!!!
Keep your eyes on your email inbox for further instructions and thank you all for participating.
Thank you Troy and Collis, and thanks for all the enlightenment! 🙂