Two months ago I was Skyping with Cosmin late at night when an email arrived. Subject: “You sold an item!”. It was the first purchase of Ark Admin.

Cosmin and I decided in January that we need to find a new way of working. First it was the release of Ark Admin, next it was Startup Weekend Cluj and more will come. We both love coding so we spent the past few years bringing together an awesome team and finding pretty cool clients all over the world. Now we want to do more. For that we need to brainstorm on ideas, create MVPs, do research, make pitches, meet people and so on. So we’ve learned the value of time.

Ark Admin is Cosmin’s baby. He did not even tell me about it until it was half done. Building a theme was not on his todo list per say. Later he confessed that he felt like it was the best way to learn about Bootstrap 3. At the end of the day apart from Bootstrap we learned something even more important, that you don’t have to trade time for money on a daily basis. This theme will not change the world, but it might give us the peace of mind and the minimum constant income that we can think about something bigger. When you build something of your own, make the decisions, take your chances, spend your time and money, it really puts you in charge. You have everything you need to make it or brake it.

Before we released Ark Admin we put together a future release list to give potential buyers an idea of what they are going to get on the long run. Once we had the first few sales we received great feedback from our customers: please add this feature, how about if you also do that, is there going to be some thing in the next release and so on. On top of that we’ve been contacted by Dirk Brünsicke who wants to use Ark Admin in an open source project called Radium. We said yes, of course.

We also found out that Ark Admin had been used on some occasions without a license. We contacted the owners of the websites and explained the situation. They were all kind enough to reply to our email and either purchase a license (big thanks!) or take down the page. I’ll be very honest, it is also about the money. But more important is that we want to gain that one more customer. This way we can keep you updated on Ark Admin as well as the other themes that we are going to roll out soon.

Below are the analytics so far for the Ark Admin preview site. Now we have to convert more and more of those unique visitors into customers. And we’re trying to do just that by constantly improving the theme.

What’s next? Another theme. Why? Because each new customer brings a smile no matter how hard & long the day was.

Thanks for reading. Live long and prosper.