The TemplateMonster Calls: Interview with David Braun, CEO of a Famous Templates Provider

Big business involves big efforts. We often see only the facade of the company and little know about those people who work to make it great. It’s time to learn how such business as website template marketplace creates and develops.

Today we are to talk a bit with CEO of one of the largest and the most renowned template providers on the Internet – David Braun. He is an extraordinary personality that managed to take a small web studio to the new heights and create a huge marketplace with thousands of templates and a cool team behind it.

Hi, David! Tell our users a bit about yourself.

Hi, everyone. I’m David Braun. And besides that fact I’m a CEO of TemplateMonster.com, I’m a former web developer who still enjoys coding from time to time. I’m involved in a couple of social projects, some of them are of my own. But most of the time I like being a drummer, a traveler and a father of three coolest children in the whole world :)

Wow! Three children… It’s a huge responsibility. How do you find time for your business? By the way, tell us in a few words – how your pet project was born?

TemplateMonster is definitely my pet project, and I can’t imagine a day without it! It’s hard to believe now that such a big marketplace started over a decade ago from a small local web studio. With my friends, we created websites for rare customers. Customers wanted websites for lower prices, we wanted to ease our work a bit.

One day our designer showed me the process of a template making: he created his own library of the most needed elements for all occasions. Thus, he was able to build a website for a client much faster and easier. It pushed me to investigate a website templates market. This is how TemplateMonster.com appeared.

Inspiring story! Big projects are born from small ideas.

It wasn’t all roses, by the way. We survived a couple of DDOS-attacks and a few tries of fraud. But it inspired me to work even more. When someone tries so hard to ruin what you’ve created, it means you’ve created something useful and really meaningful.

And what TemplateMonster means to you today?

It means my work and my life. I see it growing and developing. Today we offer over 26,000 templates for almost all existing website platforms and CMSs. We create themes for WordPress, Magento, Prestashop, Opencart end others. We also run a side project MotoCMS – our own CMS with a huge variety of templates for all kinds of business or personal projects.

What can you name as TemplateMonster.com peculiarity? What makes people buy templates from you?

Templates are easier to tweak and turn into websites than getting the custom design from a web studio. Especially today, when everyone wants to have a website of their own. Today anyone can afford to have a website thanks to the availability of templates.

And templates can be turned into really unique and beautiful projects. If you feel uncertain you can create a website – we offer free lifetime support available 24/7. It’s our competitive advantage! No one of existing template providers offers you a lifetime support for free.

Those who have extra money and don’t want to tweak website by themselves can get an exclusive offer from our Service Center and get a website done fast and with no efforts.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=id-v4e8DhYw+

Guess, you have something more to offer to your customers. How are they, by the way?

We have various clients with different needs. I can say that today we focus on two main groups of customers: one-time buyers or end-users and developers.

End-users usually need one template for their business website or a personal project. They often use Service Center, mentioned above. They can also get various helpful info in our Help Center or Startup Hub. There a lot of eBooks, videos, and podcasts about SEO, web design, marketing, and PR.

Developers usually purchase our templates as a base for creating custom websites for their own clients. They can use our special offers, purchase White Label license. They often use our affiliate program to recommend our templates to others and earn commissions.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=b_T8XZcJ8lw+

I guess, our users get what they need in our marketplace. That’s why TemplateMonster.com can boast reaching Top-3 on TrustPilot among all other web design companies. And we appreciate such high praise!

Hope, you won’t be resting on laurels? What are your goals for this year?

We focus on creating flagship templates for the most popular platforms we have. Thus, we’ve already rolled new multi-purpose templates for Magento, Joomla (I personally like Jumerix template), OpenCart. Recently we launched Monstroid 2 – powerful multipurpose theme for WordPress.

These themes has tons of options that allow creating various kinds of websites – from personal pages and landings – to corporate websites and online stores. They include pre-design pages any website may need. Each have Home pages for different kinds of businesses. They are responsive, SEO-friendly and include the latest web design trends.

Seems like there was a lot of work made to create all these cool themes.

Huge work! And I wish to thank all the TemplateMonster team for making it happen! These guys, everyone – from developer and designer to marketing manager and copywriter – have made of TemplateMonster the successful project it is now. They are my friends, they support me in many projects outside the company – marathon, mountain hiking, volunteering. I hope we will conquer more tops in future!

That’s really inspiring! Thank you, David, for such energy you shared with us!