Why are we glad that we did not get to themeforest

Our team started working on the Admin Dashboard Template (we call it just the admin panel) for themeforest 9 months ago. Looking ahead, we did not get to this marketplace, but we were not very upset and today we are happy to share with the community the results of our hard work and, we hope, an interesting and useful history.

Links for the impatient:

angular version 1: https://github.com/akveo/blur-admin (demo: blur , mint )
angular 2 version: https://github.com/akveo/ng2-admin ( demo )
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We welcome any comments, comments and suggestions.
We hope that you will like BlurAdmin, and if the community finds this project useful, we will continue to support it and fasten new features with pleasure.

Go

Let's start from the beginning. In July 2015, we decided to create our own just incredible, delightful (and the like) admin panel. Despite the fact that our team was just being formed, we already had quite a lot of experience in development, so we wanted to make a statement somehow. And the best way to do this, in our general opinion, is the creation of a personal product that people would enjoy with pleasure.

The plan was as simple as ever:

Of course, we did not expect a lot of sales on the marketplace itself, since It is very difficult to get into the top because of the big competition. Therefore, the main goal was to attract with the help of our product new customers and at the same time pump the team's portfolio.

Version 1.0

The first version took 3 months instead of the planned one. We did not think that it would take so much time to research, correct and bring all the components to mind. At first, we looked at similar patterns and thought: “Okay, we need a week to make a similar dashboard”. Yes, you have enough weeks to steal someone's dashboard or do exactly the same. But if you are aiming at something more or less original, you will try many solutions before you reach the final result. And each alteration takes time.

Today, this version makes us smile. But at that time we hoped that the marketplace would warmly accept our attempt, and if it did not, then at least it would show us the direction in which to move. Yes, we understood that they didn’t owe us anything, just hoped that on the other side we would meet people who would be happy to help. As a result, our template was rejected at themeforest without any comments after two weeks of waiting.
Then we tried other options: bootstrapbay and wrapbootstrap . Bootstrapbay rejected us immediately, and we finally received a letter from wrapbootstrap saying that our template was adopted for further consideration:

We were happy! We waited for “further consideration” for the next 3 weeks, but there was no progress (by the way, the status of consideration has not changed since then). We began to write to the support service, the owner of the marketplace on Twitter - there is still no answer. It became clear that the admin panel needs to be finalized ...

Next try

When developing a new version, we were based on 2 assumptions:

• In order for the client to decide to buy our product, he should exclaim: “Wow!” As soon as the first page opens.
• And if the first goal is reached, it will be absolutely indifferent to how others are made.

Perhaps this is not entirely true, but we still decided to redo only the first page of the dashboard.
We did the design of the first version on our own, so we had no confidence in anything, decisions were made at the level: “Well, it looks fine, it will come down ...”. We realized that we needed a high-quality design, and we decided to take on the team of a young but very promising designer.

In the end, after a month of work, a new version was ready:

We again tried to add our template to the marketplace, but it all happened again: it was rejected everywhere without any comments. We were very upset and had already begun to think about stopping further development, but we came to our senses in time and made the decision to try again.

Final version

This time we took the matter more responsibly. It was necessary to hook on a potential client - innovations were necessary:

• First, we thought about the developers who will use our admin area, and tried to make it easily customizable. To do this, we completely redesigned the project structure and refactored all the code.
• Secondly, we have focused on design: in addition to simplicity and convenience, the client should receive aesthetic pleasure from working with the product. We completely untied the hands of our designer, which resulted in significant changes in the appearance of the admin panel. One of the main features was the iOS-like frosting glass (or blur) effect for panels.

We also added about 15 new pages, tested and fixed a lot of minor bugs and glitches.
It took us about 9 man-months for everything, and here it is the result:

Sweetie!
All the guys in the team were inspired by the result, one of us even said that the marketplace should fight for our admin area. Fight? Yeah ... Added ... Two weeks ...

• themeforest and bootstrapbay - rejected without comment
• 3rd week ... wrapbootstrap - still no answer

Conclusion

After our last failure, we found an interesting post on Habré about a team that also wanted to start selling their work on themeforest. In short: 1.5 years, 2-3 developers, 15-20 hard-rejects, 25-30 soft-rejects, 2 accepted themes and about 150 sales at that time. It made us think: is it worth it?

On the one hand, we understand the distrust of marketplaces to new authors. Surely they have to check a lot of rubbish every day, so they have the impression that all the work of newcomers is of poor quality, because it is much easier to work with trusted teams. But on the other hand, they miss talented authors who can bring them good income.

As a result, we no longer have the desire to achieve getting our admin panel on the marketplace. At the same time, it was stupid to leave a good product gathering dust on the shelf, so we decided to share it with the community, putting it on github .

We will be happy if you take our admin panel as a basis and create your own web applications, templates or whatever you want. And we hope that it will be good enough so that you do not have to spend money on these soulless market places!

On the first day we got into trending repositories, for 5 days over 8 thousand unique users watched our admin panel. And it gives us the right to say that people like our admin panel. And it's damn nice!