Thorny road to sales on Themeforest.net - Part 2

Last September, the Sketch Templates section appeared on Themeforest.net marketplace . Initially, this category is experimental and closed to most authors, since Envato themselves were not sure of the need for sketch templates. They sent worthy in their opinion to the authors of the letter with a proposal to develop templates for this category. Thus, the catalog was filled with high quality products. Although the graphic editor Sketch.app itself is relatively young, however, the ever-growing multi-million army of users, the bulk of whom are UI / UX designers, formed the demand for this type of product.

No reason not to be among the first

At the time of the emergence of the Sketch Templates category in our Temforesotovsky account, there were no registered templates, we were actively working on the first HTML template. I decided that creating a Sketch template is a good opportunity to finally light up the account, since there is little competition, and there is a need for templates. I even wrote a letter in support asking to fill the template in this category. However, the answer was unequivocal: unfortunately, the category Sketch Templates is in beta testing, which means that you can add templates to the category by invitation only.

It saddened us a bit, but in early January we received a long-awaited Approval on our first HTML template , I wrote about it in the article “ The Thorny Way to Sales on Themeforest.net - Part 1 ”. After a start, everything became a little easier: we re-filled the form for adding a product to the beta category (http://envato.formstack.com/forms/beta_categories) and almost immediately received a Soft Reject, which meant the development of the Sketch template in the direction of increasing layouts.

Content of the first Soft Reject

Three more followed the first software: from the criticism only “more screens”. As a result, a file of several artboards has grown to this state:

This leads to the conclusion that this category exists directly in order to purchase extensive UI whales, and only then in order to acquire well-developed layouts. We didn’t count on special sales of the template in this category, but considered the sketch template solely as an opportunity to design the design of the future WordPress template. This is almost a third of the way, because the entire review process is quite extensive. An algorithm for reviewing templates by Themeforest moderators is shown below:

A small thematic digression about redgets, their types and causes

What is Soft Rejection?

When you receive a Soft Rejected, this means that your product is almost ready for sale on the marketplace, but minor improvements are required. And the list of these improvements is described by paragraph in the letter or in the user’s panel in the Hidden Items section in the History section.
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You just need to carefully read them and correct or modify your theme.

Soft Rejection Letter

What is Hard Rejection?

Hard Rejected is the rejection of your template without a description of the reason for that. But do not give up and keep improving. We received Hard Rejection dozens of times. And every time without explanation. Every time they thought “maybe, well, its this Themeforest,” but they took themselves in hand and continued to work.

Hard Rejection Letter

But in no case do not despair, everyone writes about it. Yes, of course, it is difficult to continue working on the template, if you have no idea what the problem may be.

Where can I get “tasty” pictures?

We in our company have long understood that a beautiful picture is selling. Most people are visuals and purchases are made, to a greater extent, under the influence of emotions. But here's where to get these “tasty” pictures to fill the site, also in a narrow subject? This is always a huge challenge for any designer and content manager. I think the selection of free photo stocks will have to stat:

• unsplash.com
• stocksnap.io
• littlevisuals.co
• deathtothestockphoto.com
• lifeofpix.com
• imcreator.com
• nos.twnsnd.co
• tumblr.com
• jaymantri.com
• freestocks.org
• mmtstock.com
• flickr.com

Plug-ins for Sketch.app, without which it can not do. We recommend using Invision Craft and Content Generator to generate text and images using the specified parameters. It is not possible to decide which one is better and choose one, since they work in different ways. For example, one pulls content from unsplash.com, the other from flickr.com. Therefore, it is better to use them in conjunction.

Several useful resources on the selection of the palette for the site:

• color.adobe.com
• colordrop.io
• uigradients.com

As for the icons, in the end, it always turns out that the output is going to an individual pack. And this is probably the best situation. However, fontawesome.io is quite suitable for quick fixes . And managing large libraries of icons is most convenient with the Icon Jar plugin.

As for fonts, it is better to use solutions from Google. The best utility to work with them is skyfonts.com
Some more resources with lots of useful features:

• sketchappsources.com
• graphicburger.com
• uiuxassets.com

How we chose the theme for our second template

After our first Profi Theme template fell into the Corporate category, we decided that the next template would be narrowly targeted. We made a small survey on categories and decided that the category of Real Estate is quite suitable: up to 100 wordpress templates, and sales of the most successful exceed thousands. As I wrote earlier, they decided to start with the new category Sketch Templates. We already had some ideas on the subject of renting the premises, it remained to promote the topic and prepare the Sketch-file for release. After processing the software, which rested solely on increasing the volume of the template, we finally uploaded our template to the market.

Based on previous experience, we did not bother to develop the HTML version, but immediately began to develop a WordPress template. After a month of productive work, the first build for the review was ready. We realized that it was not perfect, but we still decided to try it in the hope of getting the software rezh. And during the test, which at that time was about two weeks, the remaining nuances were finalized.

And we already thought that it was practically at the goal, however Themeforest.net reviewers did not think so. Check our template lasted more than two months, or rather 63 days. Fortunately, this is not a subjective attitude towards us, but a general trend on the market. This topic was actively discussed and discussed at the forum, since the time given for checking the WordPress template already did not go down for less than 35 days .

63 days to review! What to do?

During the test of our template, we almost completely rethought its direction and increased it three times in terms of volume and functionality. For a start, we decided that it would be nice to make an online store based on Brooks Theme, using the WooCommerce plugin.

After that, we remembered that initially WordPress sites are used as blogs, and it would be foolish to make a template without sharpening all the pages and widgets of the blog.

You have to agree that 63 days is quite a long time, during this time we managed to work out even a portfolio for an architectural bureau and an interior design studio. Also, this folio can easily be sharpened by photographers, artists, web designers, graphic designers and other representatives of creative professions.

After all the improvements, it has come to us that with such an extensive label there is no place in the Real Estate section. It was necessary to change the category and again climb into the highly competitive Creative niche. It remained to wait for a review of themforest and re-fill the template with a request to transfer it to another category.

And now our plan starts to come into effect and on June 29th we get a Soft Reject. But time teaches us nothing, we didn’t even think that it would take another 2 months and 5 software before our template finally got to the market.

5 of our Soft Rejects

In each letter, when fixing bugs, we asked the reviewer to transfer our template to another category. The reviewers were changing, but there was no answer. Just another list of bugs and improvements. Sometimes they were ridiculous in the type of “double check everything again” or “WordPress is written with capital W and P”. But often in essence, but each time is different. Is it really impossible to view and write all the notes at once, why stretch the pleasure. Sometimes it seemed that the reviewers were paid for delaying the verification process. Although what is the point I still do not understand. However, our fears that the template would remain in the originally declared category turned out to be in vain. After the long-awaited epherv, our WordPress “Brooks WP - Creative Multi-Purpose WordPress Theme ” template was automatically transferred to the required category.