Hi Reddit!
I'm Nicolas, a French developer, former baker, and the creator of OceanWP, one of the most popular free WordPress themes in the world with over 500,000 active installs.
My journey started in 2008 when I was 16 and decided school wasn't for me, so I dropped out and became a baker, the kind of job where you wake up at 4am, come home completely exhausted, and barely make enough to survive, well that was my life for 3 years.
But I was obsessed with the internet and every single day after work I would teach myself to code, no courses, no bootcamp, no mentor, just YouTube tutorials and reading other people's code until things started making sense, it took me several years to learn programming languages because yeah, in 2008 AI was only in movies so code was made by real people 😅
Eventually I started making websites for local businesses, nothing crazy, just $100 or $200 here and there, but I was happy someone would pay me for my work. What really frustrated me though was that every time I took a new client I had to learn a completely new WordPress theme with different settings, different options, different everything, I remember spending 2 hours just figuring out how to change a header color because the documentation was absolutely terrible.
So in 2016 I thought: why isn't there just ONE theme that does everything? And I built it myself.
Other developers told me I should sell it for $59 like other premium themes but I released it completely free on the WordPress repository instead, people thought I was insane and honestly in the first few months I started to believe they were right, just a few hundred downloads then silence, I kept refreshing the stats page like an idiot thinking something was broken.
But then it started spreading through word of mouth, forum recommendations, blog reviews, people telling other people who weren't even affiliated, just regular users who genuinely liked what I built.
By year three OceanWP was running on more than 500,000 websites worldwide. The freemium model brought in $15,000 to $20,000 a month, just me working alone with no team, no investors, no ads. Over 3 years the theme generated more than $1.5 million in total revenue.
Then I made every stupid financial mistake you can imagine, I had what we call in France a "poor mindset" where you grow up with nothing and suddenly have so much money it drives you crazy, business class flights, luxury cars in Los Angeles, casinos in Vegas, paying for everyone around me, burning through cash like it would never end.
Spoiler: it ended. I had to sell the business in 2019 just to pay my bills.
Since then life threw me even more challenges including my wife being diagnosed with cancer, but things are getting better now and I'm back doing what I love, building products that solve real problems. Right now I'm back to building things, working on LinkedGrow which is an AI tool for LinkedIn content, still early days but same approach as OceanWP where I'm just trying to solve my own problem.
I'm happy to answer questions about the freemium business model, self-teaching code with no formal education, building a WordPress business from scratch, the psychology of suddenly having money when you grew up with nothing, how to blow through a million dollars like an idiot, or anything else you're curious about.
Looking forward to some real conversations, no question is off limits!
Proof:
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