Roadmap & rollout plan.

Why this needs to exist now.

Theme marketplaces solved discovery in 2009. Then they stopped iterating. Authors lost half their revenue to "exclusive" tiers, buyers paid fees on top of fees, and quality eroded as catalog size mattered more than catalog signal. Generative AI changes the unit economics: matching, customization, and support no longer require human-marginal-cost. A marketplace can be radically more useful to both sides — at the same time.

themeBASE is built on three bets. One: buyers prefer describing their project to filtering 12 facets. Two: AI-driven customization removes the post-purchase "now what" cliff that drives refunds. Three: authors will trade exclusive contracts for a higher transparent revenue share and infrastructure that does the marketing for them.

Five phases, each gated by data.

We don't graduate a phase on a date — we graduate when a small set of metrics says the previous phase is healthy. Hard dates below are guidance, not promises.

How the waitlist becomes access.

The closed beta caps active buyers so the concierge — and the humans behind it — can respond fast. We open in waves, not all at once.

• Wave A (~50 buyers): early signal, daily check-ins with us, founding-500 perks active.
• Wave B (~150 buyers): opens 2–3 weeks after Wave A if match satisfaction holds above target.
• Wave C (~300 buyers): completes the founding-500. Marks the end of "first 500" pricing.
• Wave D and beyond: 250–500 buyers per wave, gated by concierge quality and author capacity.

You'll get one email when your wave opens — no drip, no marketing sequence. Your founding-500 status is locked in by signup order, not by when you actually purchase.

Why only 20 founding authors, then a cap.

Founding authors get an 80–90% revenue share locked in for life, homepage feature rotation for their first three themes, co-marketing on launch, and a direct line to the product team. We cap it at 20 because share economics and homepage attention have to scale with the actual marketplace, not ahead of it.

After the founding cap fills, author applications continue — at a slightly lower share (~70%) that scales with marketplace maturity. Founding-author share is not adjusted downward, ever.

Application flow: 2 themes for review → 5-day decision → 1-hour onboarding for payouts and metadata → ship into next buyer wave. See the For Authors page for details.

What we publish, on what cadence.

Marketplaces lose buyer and author trust by going silent. We're not. Below is what we commit to publishing publicly, even when the numbers are uncomfortable.

The honest list of things that could break.

• Concierge match quality plateaus too early. Hedge: human-in-the-loop labeling on every Phase 1 match, model retraining cadence weekly, escalation path to manual concierge if confidence is low.
• Authors don't believe the 80–90% share is real. Hedge: transparent per-transaction statement, public payout standard, third-party audit before GA.
• Chat-to-customize over-promises. Hedge: feature-flag the top 10 fields first; only expand the surface once preview accuracy and customer-reported delta both clear a bar.
• WordToSite deploy fails post-purchase. Hedge: one-click rollback, automatic refund on deploy failure within first 24 hours, monitored as a top-3 metric.
• Marketplace fills with similar themes. Hedge: founding-author cohort cap on overlap categories, concierge boosts under-represented niches in match results.
• We move slower than the cycle requires. Hedge: six-day development cycles, weekly user interviews during beta, monthly public progress notes that force the team to keep pace.