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Why I'm launching Kruza Themes

Notes from shipping a WordPress theme business as a freelance full-stack developer — what's working, what isn't, and why design systems beat templates.

#product#wordpress#design-systems

I spent the last year building WordPress themes for clients. Each one started the same way: open up a starter, throw it out, rebuild the typography scale, redo the color tokens, sit down with the spacing system. Halfway through every project I'd realize I was rebuilding the same scaffold.

So I stopped. Pulled the scaffold out into a library. Then I noticed something — the scaffold itself was 80% of what people were paying me to build. The rest was content and a custom homepage.

That's how Kruza Themes started.

A theme should be a design system

Most premium WordPress themes are templates: pre-baked pages that look great in a demo and start to crack the moment you remove the lorem ipsum. A design system is different — it gives you the rules, not the result.

Specifically, each Kruza theme ships with:

  • A typography scale (heading, body, caption, mono) with sensible defaults
  • A color palette built around 4 tokens, not 47
  • A spacing grid (4 / 8 / 16 / 24 / 32 / 48) used everywhere consistently
  • Components, not pages: hero, card, pricing tier, FAQ, testimonial
  • A documentation site explaining the rules so you don't fight them

The promise: install a Kruza theme on Friday, ship a real site Monday morning. Not a "demo-content-replaced" site — a real one.

Why WordPress and not Next.js

I get this question a lot. The answer is boring: most of my clients don't want to manage code. They want a CMS, a media library, and a person they can call when something breaks. WordPress is unbeatable for that audience.

Next.js is what I use for product work — Reviewer, Urbannex, my own site. Different tools for different jobs.

What I'm watching

A few metrics I care about over the next 90 days:

  1. Time-to-first-purchase for new visitors (gut: under 4 minutes is healthy)
  2. Refund rate under 5% — a higher number tells me the demos aren't honest enough
  3. Bundle vs Single split — if Bundle wins, the catalog has good breadth; if Single dominates, themes are too generic
  4. Inbound customization requests from theme buyers — bonus revenue + signal that the themes are landing on real projects

I'll write up the numbers in 90 days. If they're embarrassing, I'll write that up too.

If you build with WordPress and want to follow along, subscribe to the newsletter — I'll send out new theme launches and the occasional discount.