Nate Wright provides WordPress themes and plugins to build better restaurant websites. After more than three years delivering products for restaurants, cafes and bars, he’s built up a suite of free and commercial products to help you take reservations online, manage your restaurant menus and boost local SEO.
What Your Favorite Motivation or Business Books?
I don’t read motivation or business books. As a developer, I’ve kind of learned the business side of things as I go. But for inspiration I love to look at what other products are doing, or find interesting ways to integrate new WordPress features into my products. For motivation, I like to diversify my work. Having such a broad range of products allows me to jump from one to the other when I see my motivation (and productivity) fall.
Can You List 2 to 5 Life Success or Leadership Principles?
One is just to keep going. It took a long time to build up Theme of the Crop, and it’s still only supporting me about half time. But a lot of my main sources of sales today just took time to develop. Going to market early with something and letting it develop is always better than sitting on something, I think.
Second, accept every bit of received wisdom critically. There’s a lot of advice in the WordPress ecosystem — about what you should be building, how you should be selling, which language you should be using, who you should be targeting, which markets you should (and shouldn’t) use, and so on for infinity. Most of it won’t be appropriate for your specific business. Thinking deeply about what lies behind the advice is the only way to find what works for you.
Lessons About Web Marketing for Restaurants
During our episode with Nate, we learned what what things a restaurant website really needs (and often fails to deliver). We discussed what is the most difficult part of serving the restaurant industry as a web consultant, and what’s on the horizon for Theme of the Crop.
Nate’s themes and plugins run counter to some of the fare you might see on ThemeForest or CodeCanyon — he puts in just what is necessary, and no more.
He opens up to us about the three markets that he targets with Theme of the Crop, and which one of them is best for business.
Speaking of Envato, how do you compete against a giant theme marketplace site? What sort of marketing do you need to do to run an independent WordPress business without being on the largest platform? Nate shares what is working for him right now.
In a world of all-in-one, Swiss-army-knife themes, Theme of the Crop really stands out as a shop with unique products for the restaurant industry. If you are building a restaurant website, you should check out ThemeoftheCrop.com.
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