Cape Town based company Obox, best known for its WordPress theme business, has just launched SalesGenius, a web app that allows you to track sales for anyone using Envato, the online platform that gives people a means to sell their digital goods via a family of online marketplaces
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Obox made its name after switching from creating full websites to WordPress themes in 2009. The company hit international headlines by building some of the official themes for the well-known, but now defunct, blogging platform Posterous.
According to Obox, SalesGenius can “predict, analyse and anticipate your sales on a daily, or even hourly basis”.
In an official blog post, company founder Dave Perel says that the work Obox put into SalesGenius means that it is “the most comprehensive and accurate sales tracking app available for the Envato network. It takes an Author’s sales data and turns it into a visual experience that is easy to understand and unmatched in the industry”.
Perel adds that there are a number of significant differences between the approach the company took with SalesGenius and the one it used with QikCommerce, the WordPress-based eCommerce tool that it built in partnership with Naspers.
The company managed to do this, he says, in a number of ways:
- We made sure we had a thorough proof of concept before investing more time into it.
- There were no definitive deadlines, no KPIs and most importantly no financial incentives to speed up the process.
- We built flexible design tools upfront to help development.
- At its core it was a two-man operation and with a small team we were forced to focus on features which mattered and shelved the pie-in-sky ideas for another time.
- We never promised, presented or shared a single link with anyone outside of Obox until the feature set had been locked down and we had a stable demo.
“These fundamental differences,” Perel says, “helped us launch a product which is lean, genuinely useful and ready”.
SalesGenius is now live and Envato authors can sign up immediately for a free 30-day trial.
