[ad_1] Earlier this month, TeslaThemes announced that it was rebranding to WPRealEstate. The company wanted to focus its efforts on a single niche in the theming market and cut back on the library of projects it was maintaining. In 2017, Imagely acquired TeslaThemes. The shop was created in 2013 and had grown its library to 68 themes. Last year, Imagely was acquired, and Nathan Singh was named CEO of the company. Eric Danzer, the founder and former CEO of Imagely, continued running TeslaThemes and its sister site ShowThemes since the acquisition. He is now ready to turn the page and jump into the next chapter of running a successful WordPress business. “I’ve decided that, as a business, we’ll do better focusing our energy on a specific niche rather than trying to be all things to all people,” he said. After several years of running a generic theme shop, the company ran into a brick wall that so many others in the industry I have talked to had hit. It is the realization that maintaining so many disparate projects puts an almost insurmountable burden on the development and support teams. “TeslaThemes has historically tried hard to serve a lot of small niches,” wrote Danzer in the announcement post. “We’ve had themes for real estate, recipes, musicians, eCommerce stores, photographers, event management, local business listings, and many other use cases. For each of those, we were embedding plugin-level functionality in each separate theme. That created a highly complicated product line that’s difficult to maintain and keep up to date.” The team had run into the Jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none problem. Tightening the focus would allow the company to focus on and become one of the best in a specific niche. Thus, the shift to real estate. “As I move on from Imagely, I wanted another big project to focus on,” Danzer added in a personal note. “I wanted it to be something I’m passionate about. I’m passionate about nearly every aspect of real estate. I own multiple rental properties, and I’m working toward a real estate license.” The company had already been doing well in the real estate market with its previous Realtor theme. It was one of its most popular options. “On the market side, the real estate market is large enough to sustain a great theme shop,” wrote Danzer. “Yet, it’s also a unique niche — real estate professionals have specific, challenging, hard-to-solve needs.” Existing TeslaThemes customers will continue receiving support and have access to any products purchased in the past. They will also be able to get the new real estate plugin and theme. The legacy themes, those created before the 2017 acquisition, are no longer under active development. The company replaced those in November 2020 with the Tesla Pro framework, which Danzer said his team plans to maintain and support for at least another year. WPRealEstate Plugin and Theme Map, search, and listings blocks in a theme demo. The team built the plugin on top of the block editor. They also created it alongside the RESO Web API, a modern standard for transporting data in the real estate world. While there is no public demo of the backend or even any editor screenshots, a peek under the hood reveals several custom blocks. The theme previews showcase map, search, and listings solutions. They also seem to blend the output with the Kadence Blocks plugin. Instead of launching multiple themes, the company will focus on building a single project with several design options out of the box. Users can import prebuilt content and data as part of the onboarding process. Danzer said that the new WPRealEstate theme is still a traditional, customizer-based theme. “We’ll start working on a new FSE theme almost immediately though. Between the work needed and waiting for FSE core functionality to mature, I don’t think we’d release that until sometime in 2022.” As far as I am aware, there are few, if any, robust block-based real estate solutions for WordPress at the moment. Custom post types and metadata serve as the foundation. However, a well-designed layer of blocks on top of that system could make it far easier for agents to build their sites. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
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Castos Picks Up $756K in Funding from Automattic and Joost de Valk to Expand Services in the Private Podcasting Market – WP Tavern
[ad_1] Castos, a WordPress-powered podcast hosting provider, announced a $756K pre-seed fundraising round today from Automattic, Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO, and other individuals. The company raised money from all the investors in this round via a SAFE note, which founder and CEO Craig Hewitt said is a fairly standard investment vehicle for companies at Castos’ stage of growth. “On both the individual and corporate investor side I think the investors see the vision that we have for what the Private Podcasting market can mean for Castos and want to help us achieve that potential,” Hewitt said. Private Podcasting is a growing trend where creators and organizations broadcast to supporters in a more intimate format that isn’t open to the public. Hewitt likens them to membership sites, except in audio format. It is often used by people who are running membership sites, courses, or online communities as a way to stay connected with members. “The other application is companies wanting a way to connect with their employees in audio format,” Hewitt said. “Podcasting is perfect for that because it’s mobile-first, on-demand, and can be consumed asynchronously. We call it the Step Away Experience. Companies that are adopting Private Podcasting internally are giving their team members a way to consume their internal content without being tied to their computer on a Zoom call or glued to Slack.” Castos is developing a mobile app specifically targeted at the private podcasting market. Hewitt’s team is aiming to have the app become a place where people can listen to all of the private podcasts for which they have a subscription. Listeners would simply use the app instead of going through the process of manually subscribing to all their private podcasts via RSS feed. New episodes will appear automatically in the app for subscribers. “For our corporate clients, the ability to white label our app with their own branding/style is a big win,” Hewitt said. “It’s also a much more secure way to distribute private podcast content. There’s no RSS feed to share around, no files to download (our app is streaming only to offer more security to those files).” The pandemic ramped up unprecedented interest in podcasting when lockdowns were in place across the globe. Even with vaccines more readily available now, Hewitt said Castos is still witnessing strong growth in the podcasting industry. “There are all the new podcasters in the market now since so many launched podcasts during the pandemic, but now that people are traveling again and commuting to work we’re seeing listenership going up quite a bit,” he said. “This is a trend we expect to continue into the future.” In the past 10 months, Castos has grown to serve nearly 3,500 customers and the team has grown from seven employees to 13. The company’s Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin is used on more than 30,000 WordPress sites. Castos is actively hiring for several roles right now, thanks to the new round of fundraising. “All of the funds will go towards growing our team,” Hewitt said. “This will be pretty evenly split between product (designers and developers) and Sales and Marketing roles – more people, more energy, more great minds working on ways that we can better serve our customers.” Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
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