The State of the New Kolakube (In One Brutally Honest Letter)

If you’re reading this, you’re probably interested in hearing what is going on with Kolakube. It looks drastically different than it did earlier this morning, and that’s because I’ve rolled out my new vision for the site…finally.

If you’ve been around since the first days of Kolakube (will be a year old, January 1st), you probably know I like to redesign a lot. This is the third major design refresh in a year, and I’m really happy with the new formatting of the site and my new mindset on how I want to run things.

From “Corporate” Back to “Me”

I felt like Kolakube was going in the wrong direction. By that, I mean it was going a little too…corporate. I felt like I was turning the site into something like WooThemes or Elegant Themes, and that’s not at all how I like to run my sites.

The truth is, Kolakube is not and was never a company run by a bunch of people in some snazzy office. It’s always been a one-man (or should I say, one-teen) show. That’s how I’ve always ran my sites, and I like to think I’ve been successful doing it.

With that identity crisis I had for so long, I felt like it interfered with how I operated this site, and actually took a lot away from the whole thing.

I think the lowest point of my entire time owning this site is when I tried selling Kolakube, and how badly that came to bite me in the ass.

In all honesty — I sort of lost perspective of what I always wanted to achieve with the site and got consumed by, and am truly ashamed to admit this — making money.

I forgot what I actually set out to achieve back on January 1st, 2010:

Continuously make kick-ass Thesis skins that make an impact in your life, and meet some awesome people doing it.

The old Kolakube wasn’t really doing that. Hell, there wasn’t even an about page to tell people who I was, or what Kolakube is about. Now, I feel like I’ve come up with a pretty sweet solution to that problem.

The bottom line is this:

The old Kolakube was completely broken. Today, I feel like I have come up with something that will fix it, and give a more unique approach to selling WordPress themes online.

You don’t have to be a big company to create themes that are awesome, just a person who is serious about making an impact in their customers lives.

PS: If you’ve ever seen the word “we” or “us” used on this site to describe something (ex: “we provide great Thesis skins”), it was really just me writing that. 😉

The Question of Consistency and Dedication

The old Kolakube, as I said was broken. My priorities were all wrong, and the two biggest things I failed at were:

1. Offering awesome support and documentation
2. Providing updates and new features to skins

These are things I am going to be focusing on in the very near future, and believe me — am going to kick-ass at. The heart and soul of Kolakube are the themes that I offer to you guys, so they should be the top priority. Not making a bunch of money.

I feel like one of the major reasons (apart from that identity crisis I was talking about earlier) is that I was so busy with other things on the side; I couldn’t find the time and just overlooked these things.

Where did most of my time go? To High School. Well, I’m proud to say that as of June 17th, 2011 — I graduated from High School, and no longer have to worry about that massive waste of time.

As a matter of fact, I don’t even go to college. This was a personal decision I made so I can work full-time online.

Mainly: to work at Kolakube! So, you will never hear me complaining about writing essays, but have a better chance of hearing me whine on Twitter about figuring out how certain code works.

So I am proud to announce that my full focus will be on Kolakube, and expanding it into something awesome that will have an impact in your life. Because that’s what I’m really all about.

So…Where Does That Leave Us?

So far, I’ve really just talked about me and how I plan to make Kolakube as awesome as it is in my head. I’ve told you how it was broken (maybe you didn’t even realize it), and how I am dying to fix it.

But I haven’t really gone too much into some of the things I want to do, and what some of my future plans are with this site. Here’s a few important things you should know:

• I will be doing a lot of blogging on the blog, Kubed³, about Thesis, business, marketing and anything WordPress related.
• Yes, I will be available for some freelance Thesis projects here and there.
• I want to expand my themes to the Genesis Framework.
• I will be hiring a few people to help around in the support forums with theme support (contact if interested)
• One of my goals is to offer an extensive user guide to using my skins, sort of like what DIYthemes has set up.
• Kolakube no longer sells the Blogussion Skin for Thesis.
• For now, I have removed the membership plans. But, current members will still receive everything they’ve paid for.
• The future is in Marketers Delight

I’ll Leave it to You

I want to know your thoughts on the future of Kolakube, including feedback, suggestions, angry letters/complaints, etc. Leave a few things for me in the comments, and I will get back to you as soon as I can.