You have touched the point that made this project more than just another curated list of themes website built on wordpress and required a full team of top engineers and designers.
From one side we have users that want to find the right theme for their new website or client, and are devastated by shear amount of new themes everyday so they tend to pick up from "the top 100 themes" all the time.
From the other point, we have theme authors that are, to our feeling, pushing their limits of getting new users onboard (e.g. TF channel saturation), and also struggle with giving users the impression of how great their themes are on these marketplaces. Discovery is a challenge.
The technical challenge of this project has been always how to manage 20000+ links, have their screenshot taken for different screen-sizes, understand what is inside, store the very large amount of image content on distributed systems, annotate the screenshots and themes, and make it damn easy to search for users. This we have achieved this through large amount of automation on our micro-services, machine-learning and supervision of our team. Today we can add up to 50 themes per day with our current resources (mind you TF adds 80 per day, so we are picky for now). Updating would be the extension of this process, so instead of adding new we reindex the old.
Overall, we are very happy that theme authors like this project as well and feel that it fills a new era of theme distribution. We will definitely empower them with their own content once our traction is enough for them to jump onboard. This is happening quite a bit faster than we thought. Top authors on TF are already contacting us to claim their themes and sending us suggestions how to improve the platform even further. This is a bit scary :)
Yes. When we were doing pre-project work we looked at the growth statistics of all the marketplaces, what kind of themes gets downloaded, if there is pattern, and which prices are they likely to succeed. There, of course, you see the number of new themes added, update frequency and popularity as a side-effect. Overall, in whole eco-system there are around up to 200 themes added daily for various platforms when we did the study, with TF pushing the most out for wordpress.
From one side we have users that want to find the right theme for their new website or client, and are devastated by shear amount of new themes everyday so they tend to pick up from "the top 100 themes" all the time.
From the other point, we have theme authors that are, to our feeling, pushing their limits of getting new users onboard (e.g. TF channel saturation), and also struggle with giving users the impression of how great their themes are on these marketplaces. Discovery is a challenge.
The technical challenge of this project has been always how to manage 20000+ links, have their screenshot taken for different screen-sizes, understand what is inside, store the very large amount of image content on distributed systems, annotate the screenshots and themes, and make it damn easy to search for users. This we have achieved this through large amount of automation on our micro-services, machine-learning and supervision of our team. Today we can add up to 50 themes per day with our current resources (mind you TF adds 80 per day, so we are picky for now). Updating would be the extension of this process, so instead of adding new we reindex the old.
Overall, we are very happy that theme authors like this project as well and feel that it fills a new era of theme distribution. We will definitely empower them with their own content once our traction is enough for them to jump onboard. This is happening quite a bit faster than we thought. Top authors on TF are already contacting us to claim their themes and sending us suggestions how to improve the platform even further. This is a bit scary :)