happytables, formerly known as Theme Force, has exited public beta and relaunched with new branding
Noel Tock and his partners, Tom and Joe of Human Made Limited, decided the Theme Force name was more appropriate for selling WordPress themes, and as they’re not doing that any more, the change was due.
I’ve had an opportunity to discuss many of the changes with Tock as they’ve transitioned the new site and I’ve even beta tested the new interface of happytables. Having used both the beta interface and the new one, it’s obvious the guys have been busy improving much more than the name and public facing website.
Lessons learned from beta and changes made
What they’ve realized with their early adopters is that not many customers (as in almost no customers) read the documentation. They just start playing around, which is exactly what I did when I tested as well. In the previous version, you could get around pretty well if you are already familiar with WordPress, but they quickly realized that wasn’t good enough. The average happytables customer is hardly familiar with computers, much less the WordPress backend.
Much of the new happytables interface looks much like the front end of the website. Pretty much anywhere you go there are visual guides to tell you what to do and how to do it. The traditional WordPress dashboard and post editor interface are almost unrecognizable in the happytables interface for menus and events. In fact, you never even leave what we call the “quick edit” screen, and why should you? They’ve forced themselves to view the experience from a total beginner’s point of view, and I think it has paid off for them in the experience.
Front end editing experience
The front end editing experience has changed as well. Formerly, changing things was very similar to many commercial WordPress themes – extensive backend options panels. But they noticed customers just weren’t changing anything. They were still overwhelmed. So happytables has moved nearly all of the front end editing options to the front end itself. You can select custom background patterns, link, background, and text colors, all from the front facing website and see instant updates via jQuery and ajax. You can also choose from available presets and customize from there.
You can see the site I created in about 15 minutes here as an example of what can be done with just the default theme. They still have three base themes to choose from – the default, a fine dining theme, and a theme for pubs and taverns. They’re the same themes they offered from Theme Force, and Tock tells me that more are on the way.
Indirect marketing
One thing I’ve found interesting about how happytables is reaching out is in their indirect marketing. Tock created better-restaurant-websites.com as an informational tool to help restaurant owners understand why pdf menus and flash animations, etc., are such a bad idea. The site has received a good bit of attention from the likes of well-known front end developers Chris Coyier and Lea Verou, Mozilla’s Christian Helimann and Mailchimp’s Aarron Walter.
Their goal with the site is for it to be informative to restaurant owners that just don’t know better, with only a slight nudge toward their solution to help those owners not have such terrible websites for an affordable price.
Pricing
The kicker in most services is the age old one – price. happytables can be the best idea ever, and restaurant owners can agree, but they’ll never do it unless it’s in their budget. And I can help assure you, too many restaurant owners are nickel pinchers and have a hard time seeing the value of a decent website.
happytables is offering an introductory rate of $29 per month with a promise that those who take the deal will always keep that price. But even those that don’t get in on the deal will be able to use happytables for (in my opinion) a very affordable $39 per month. Considering the flexibility in design choices, it’s a great deal for restaurant owners.
Having 10 customers at $39 per month isn’t going to make anyone rich, or allow happytables to keep a sustainable business. However, as they grow to a hundred, a thousand, and even ten thousand customers they’ll have quite the little business on their hands. And this is why they were looking to get out of theme sales – to leave the business of one-time transactions for the opportunities that exist with recurring revenue.
WordPress and SaaS
I’m excited to see happytables grow. Not just because I consider myself “internet friends” (insert your jokes here) with Noel Tock, but also because I think happytables is forging a path that many, many others will follow. As much as Tock hates when I call happytables a “hosted WordPress” solution – as he sees WordPress as the tool for his, simply, “hosted” solution – it isbuilt on top of WordPress. And that’s great, because WordPress offers a hell of a starting point. But it’s just that – a starting point.
If I were in the business of predictions – which I am, so here goes – I would predict that we’ll see quite a few hosted WordPress services pop up in 2012. Of course, WordPress.com is currently the best example. And there are other sites that do essentially what WordPress.com does for blogging, but that’s not what I think we’ll see more of. I think we’ll see people using the power of WordPress to build highly niche networks for all sorts of industries.
Interestingly, happytables already has competition of sorts. Brian Casel, whom you may know as co-host of the Freelance Jam podcast or owner of CasJam themes, has also started a service for hosted restaurant websites called RestaurantEngine. However, they are in early beta and not yet as far along as happytables. They are also marketing themselves more as a WordPress centric solution and not doing as significant of changes to the native publishing experience as happytables. I joked with Brian and Noel via Twitter about entering the same market when there are so many wide open ones, and they (and I) agree that the sea is big enough for many fish. Also, Brian wasn’t aware of happytables until RestaurantEngine was well along in development.
What are your thoughts?
I took this opportunity of happytables’ launch to talk about using WordPress to create software as a service (Saas). happytables and the inevitable companies to follow are falling into a niche not quite defined yet. There are more generic solutions like WordPress.com and managed hosting options like Page.ly, Zippy Kid, and WPEngine. But this is somewhere in-between generic managed hosting and selling niche themes, and I’m excited to see how it matures.
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