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Sarah Gooding

Rescue Themes is For Sale

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After two years in business, Jami Gibbs is selling Rescue Themes. The niche theme shop specializes in products for nonprofits, politics, breweries, and e-commerce websites.

Gibbs did not publicly disclose how much revenue the shop is generating, but Rescue Themes has seven products available on Themeforest ranging in price from $16-$59. She also has several free plugins and two free themes (Gateway and Politics) listed on WordPress.org.

“This decision hasn’t come lightly and I’ve had many sleepless nights wrestling over it,” Gibbs said in her post announcing that the shop is for sale. “Rescue Themes has done quite well for me and I admit that I feel a little sad letting it go but I’ve come to a point where the time I have to dedicate to it has dwindled as new projects and opportunities take over my day. It would pain me infinitely more seeing it go adrift than it would to hand over the keys to someone else.”

After enlisting the help of the professional theme reviewers at the Themereview.co service, Gibbs began building all of her products with WordPress standards in place. With Themeforest as her primary distribution avenue, she was one of the few WordPress sellers making a difference by providing standards-compliant products.

Gibbs is looking for a buyer who will make positive contributions to the WordPress community, continue support for her current customers, and continue to distribute the current products under the GPL license.

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11 responses to “Rescue Themes is For Sale”

  2. What long-term support will be offered to the people who just purchased themes? There is probably no legal commitment ( certainly not for the users of the free releases ), but I imagine people invested based on reputation, now they have no control over who takes over, if anyone.

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  3. I’d really like to enter in a meaningful discussion about this, just trying to understand.

    Why would a business that generates $5k a month and has no real value without any heavy advertising be asking for…$150k to be bought on? The asking price is crazy, assuming the instability of the market and the shelf-life of a theme.

    Could someone lend in some logic? It’s just baffling.

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      • From here: http://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/6265-wordpress-theme-business-5k-net-mo

        The real value is in the themes collection and themeforest account. Do you know how hard is to get 75k worth (Elite Author) of sales on TF :) and how much time it takes to get there?

        I agree the valuation is a bit on the high side. Also, If you can develop great themes and already be an Elite Author, you can get that money back in a year or so…

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        • WordPress themes are being sold so cheap there is no real value in them except for some big players (if there was, there would have been no sale). You also need to calculate the time required to master them in order to be able to support and continue development.

          For getting the money back you need to calculate profit not revenue. I don’t believe the 5k figure is profit as it probably excludes time invested in development and support. Even 100hr/mo in a rate of 50$/hr will bring you to no profit at all. If you can find someone cheaper to do the same work for 30$/hr you get a 2k$/mo profit and you will return the 150k$ in 6 years.

          My impression of themeforest is that it is a place for designers of have a dream on a working wordpress themes business, but almost the only ones that make real money over there are evanto which explains the general low quality of themes and support there (ok, been a while since I was forced to buy a theme from there, maybe it had improved in the last two years).

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  6. I am not involved in the buying and selling of Internet properties, but many companies in “fast-turnover” businesses are evaluated on the basis of sales over somewhere between one and three years of sales (a rule of thumb) – having said that, there are, of course, many many more rules of thumb that various people use.

    If you use that as the measuring stick, $150’000 divided by $5’000 per month gives a value of 30 months – 2-1/2 years. It seems to me to be a little in the high side, but that also is the starting point for the negotiations. On the down side, you do not know (or at least I don’t) whether Jami has a large personal following, in which case, the sales can drop significantly when she is no longer personally involved with the operation.

    Good luck Jami, both on the sale and your future activities!

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    • I had the same reaction as you and Mark. That amount of money only makes sense if the profit is really the profit with deduction of salary. I was thinking to start a conversation but I was thinking of 45.000 instead of 150.000. In my case I’m looking at 75%-150% of the revenue. So in my case I was on the bottom.

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