Case Study With Seth Kravitz: Hitting the Next Level

Does this sound like you?

You’re getting by with the development team you’ve got, but you’re bursting at the seams. You want to take risks and move your company to the next level, but you’re not sure your team can really handle everything that needs to be done.

Well, that’s the very issue one of our clients faced when we first started working together.

Meet Seth Kravitz, CEO of Phlearn.com. Phlearn is the #1 Photoshop and photography tutorial website in the world, with 1,000,000 YouTube subscribers and customers in 140 countries, they have built a trustworthy, engaging and supportive community available to anyone with a passion to learn.

Seth spends his time making sure that Phlearn is equally affordable and accessible (without the ego, of course), but he’s most interested in pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with Photoshop, and taking risks to move the company into new territory.

We recently caught up with him for an interview discussing the unique challenges he faces moving his business to the next level, and how we’ve been able to help him maintain steady growth during the process.

Seth has only taken over as CEO in the last few months. His goal is to take the company from where it’s been – holding steady for the last five years – to being a much bigger and better platform.

“It’s nice and all,” he quips, “But I think it could be a larger and much more amazing company.”

His main challenge in accomplishing that goal was getting the most out of their current platform.

Because Phlearn was already utilizing WooCommerce to power their transactions, Seth needed a way to really get the most out of the platform without sacrificing a lot of his personal time digging through code and reconfiguring the system.

After all, he’s busy trying to revolutionize the Photoshop game. He shouldn’t have to spend hours doing all the dev work.

“I honestly would have started over from scratch, but everything about Phlearn is so heavily built into WordPress that I needed to find an agency that does nothing but WordPress, and more specifically WooCommerce. You really don’t want to mess around when it comes to WooCommerce” (we agree, Seth!).

After a few online searches for agencies in North America that do WordPress/WooCommerce, he decided to ask some engineers over at WP Engine for recommendations. They graciously pointed him our way.

That’s when we had the privilege to meet with him and get more details about his vision and where he wanted to take Phlearn over the next few years.

Phlearn is slowly becoming one of the bigger players in the creative education space, and Seth’s goal is to see that influence reach farther. Security and speed are priorities for his site because he’s looking to transition from their current system to streaming tutorials online.

As of now, users are able to purchase and download tutorials through the WooCommerce platform, but Seth would like to see that grow to something more user-friendly, like a subscription-based model.

That’s part of the reason we’ve been working with Seth: to get his site moving in the right direction.

“On top of getting WordPress sites to be lightning fast, stable, and secure, Saucal has a lot of experience with people switching over to subscriptions. Helping power that transition seamlessly will provide a better experience for the user.”

“I just want people to have a really great experience on our site,” he adds.

But we know that transitioning into subscriptions isn’t always easy, and our goal was to make sure that Seth wasn’t bogged down with the little things so that he could keep kicking ass at the big things.

“There are tons and tons of little projects we’ve been working on as well. Saucal has been very responsive. They allow me to hop on a Slack channel and go back and forth with them at any time, which is wonderful from a customer standpoint. You can tell they’re not just two kids in a basement.” (That’s true).

[Tweet ““It’s like having my own private dev team.””]

We love working with Seth and his team, and we’re dedicated to helping Phlearn hit the next level so he can take over the Photoshop world (and possibly the rest of the world, too).

If you want to learn more about Seth or get started brushing up on your Photoshop skills from his sweet tutorials, check out Phlearn.com. You won’t be disappointed!