Cape Town based Obox, developers of customizeble premium WordPress themes and plugins has recently launched their new project, Sales Genius.
Sales Genius tracks all the Envato market places, where people can sell their WordPress themes, so authors from all the different sites can benefit from available sales analytics on their products. Features include the ability for authors to track sales stats, view sales projections, overlay and compare sales, watch leaderboards, receive monthly sales summary emails and more.
Beginning as somewhat of an experimental operation for Obox, Sales Genius resulted in the most comprehensive and accurate sales tracking app available for the Envato network, taking author‘s sales data and turning it into a visual experience that is easy to understand and unmatched in the industry.
So, where did Sales Genius begin?
In January, after reading an inspiring book about the recovery of the Ford Motor Company through the use of data to make the right decisions, Obox CEO Dave Perel realised that the one thing his own company was severely lacking in was proper data analysis around their products. He began to think about what such data could do for Obox?
And so the Obox team began to make a serious change. The first step was compiling a spreadsheet, maintained by head of operations Gavin Elliot, of up-to-date sales data from its Themeforest account on Envato.
Tracking the Obox portfolio on Envato was hard work and definitely not scalable.
And so, Obox decided it was crucial to automate the process, taken on by developer Nic Malan. Over the next few months the team used Envato API, Twitter bootstrap and all they had learned over the last decade and tracked everything. It wasn’t an easy task and the dashboard had to be completely cleared, often.
As reports and calculations were refined the company began to make more informed decisions about their business and the net-result was close to a 30% increase in revenue. Not only on Themeforest but also on Obox itself.
“We could determine which categories to target, which themes to stop making and where our developers attention should be focused on. It was breakthrough for us and to this day we‘re still feeling the positive effects,” reveals Perel.
By April Obox decided to turn their private web app into a genuinely useful product for all Envato authors.
“We set about creating our own flexible CSS/HTML framework, which aligned with the Obox brand, and started migrating our rough data into a more user friendly layout and graphing system,” continues Perel.
The majority of development was done by Nic and Perel himself, while Obox Co-founder Marc Perel and Gavin contributed when necessary and provided a helpful second pair of eyes during the roadblocks along the way.
“This is a real proud moment for us”, says Perel, especially when in June 2012, Marc and Dave along with the corporate giant involved decided that they were “no longer needed” on a project they had worked 10 extremely hard months to co-found.
In light of such a tough experience, they decided to do things completely differently this time around and these fundamental differences helped them to launch a product that is “lean, genuinely useful and ready”.
“A huge thank you needs to go out to our entire Obox team Nic, Gavin, Vail and Peter who all made big contributions to this project as well as Fuad and Collis from Envato,” says Perel. “It‘s amazing how a close knit team like the one we have naturally sings from the same song-sheet. Marc and I are very lucky to have them.”
SalesGenius is now live and if you‘re an Envato author you can sign up immediately for free and get all the premium features right away.
