The 12 WordPress Themes in 12 Months Challenge

Mike Stott the founder of Epic Themes and Epic Plugins has set himself an epic challenge. He’s developing 12 WordPress themes in 12 months.

In the 12 WordPress Themes in 12 Months project Mike plans to develop and launch a new WordPress theme each month. There will be a mixture of free and premium WordPress themes, and every theme will be top quality and follow WordPress standards.

You might be thinking to yourself what’s so epic about that? Many WordPress theme shops release at least one new premium WordPress theme every month and have been doing so regularly for years now.

While that’s true, what’s unique and interesting about Mike’s 12 themes in 12 months project is that he will be blogging about the whole process and sharing every step of his journey along the way.

From theme development to launch, marketing, insights and lessons learned. He will be writing about each step of the way with weekly round-up posts and a full debrief of the process each month. He will be sharing what works and what doesn’t when it comes to developing and selling WordPress themes.

And the main aspect I think that makes Mike’s challenge really epic is that he’ll be making all 12 themes himself. It’s just one person doing everything. He won’t be outsourcing any of the development or marketing outreach.

So why is Mike taking on this ambitious challenge?

He explains “I have three themes at the moment, and a heck of a lot of plugins. So through doing the 12 themes in 12 months challenge it’ll bolster the theme offering. But that’s not the only reason I’m doing this. I want to learn from each release. What works with marketing. What’s the best way to launch and sell premium themes. Through doing this I’ll learn more and at the end of it I’ll have a good blueprint about what works when it comes to launch. I’ll be building up useful resources along the way to help you if you also sell WordPress Themes (or want to). Where to get your theme reviewed? Who is a good affiliate to get to know? What launch sequence works, what channels work the best when advertising themes, plus much more!”

What type of themes can we expect to see from the 12 Themes in 12 Months project?

The first theme in development for month 1 (November 2016) is a simple free blogging WordPress theme. What’s coming after that remains to be seen, but Mike states there’s a couple of tick boxes he wants to complete along the way.

He explains “I want to do the following:

• Release a theme on WordPress.org (free theme)
• Have each theme build on the previous theme (i.e. re-use the code)
• Have a theme on themeforest.net
• Develop a WooCommerce theme
• Develop a BuddyPress theme
• Develop a bbPress (forum) theme

The 12 Themes

It looks like a fantastic project and if you’re a WordPress theme developer, or have ever thought about creating and selling WordPress themes you should definitely follow Mike’s journey over the next 12 months. You’re bound to learn some valuable insights, tips and information about what to do, and what not to do, when creating and selling WordPress themes.

Head over to the 12 Themes in 12 Months project homepage and signup for the newsletter to get all the updates.

You can also pre-order every theme to be created right now. There’s a Pre-Order special for only $29 that will give every single theme from the project. The price will increase after each new release.

12 WordPress Themes in 12 Months is going to be a very interesting project worth following and we wish Mike all the best with this epic challenge.

You can learn more about the 12 WordPress Themes in 12 Months project and follow every step of the process here.