In 2008, Nicolas Lecocq was 16, living in France, and working as a baker after dropping out of school. He was pulling minimum wage, waking up at 4 a.m., and coming home exhausted. But every night, he sat down in front of his computer and taught himself how to code using free YouTube tutorials and by dissecting other people’s projects.
As his coding skills improved, he started building websites for local businesses, making a couple hundred dollars per project. But one thing drove him crazy: WordPress themes—the design and layout options for websites made with WordPress. “Every time I took a new client, I had to learn a completely new WordPress theme,” he said in a recent post on Reddit’s r/passive_income. “I remember spending an entire weekend just figuring out how to change a header color.”
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So, in 2016, Lecocq built his own theme. He named it OceanWP. Instead of charging $59 like everyone advised, he offered it for free. “People thought I was insane,” he said.
For the first few months, almost nothing happened. Downloads trickled in. Lecocq said he kept refreshing his stats page, thinking it must be broken. But slowly, forum chatter and blog reviews picked up steam. Developers started recommending the theme. By the third year, OceanWP had over 500,000 active installations.
“The free version was genuinely good,” he said. “Not crippled, not annoying upsells everywhere. Just a solid theme. But if you wanted premium extensions like more templates, more features, priority support, you paid.”
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By the second year, Lecocq said he was making $15,000 to $20,000 per month. He never ran ads or took investor money. It was just him, offering support tickets and refining the product. And according to him, OceanWP pulled in over $1.5 million in revenue over three years.
“I think it was just solving my own problem,” he said. “Turns out thousands of other developers had the same frustration. The free model helped too. Free users became paying customers, and more importantly, they told their friends.”
