Adii Pienaar is the founder of conversion. Any South African developer who has dabbled with WordPress is probably familiar with WooThemes or its spin-off product for e-commerce websites, WooCommerce, the companies Adii Pienaar co-founded with Magnus Jepson and Mark Forrester.

For Pienaar, life in a tech start-up started many years before WooThemes. His dad owned a computer shop in Brackenfell in Cape Town called Bits And PCs.

Pienaar, now 29, recalls having helped out at the shop when he was in his early teens. His dad was a programmer, which gave Pienaar exposure to software development from an early age.

“I used to do holiday work for my dad — for free, obviously — capturing financial data for his various companies,” he remembers. “What made that experience so great was that he did not expect me to just capture the data — he would explain the business principles behind it.” Seeing the internal cogs that drove business intrigued him.

Pienaar also has a rebellious nature and says that while he enjoys structure in his own life, he does not like it when structure is imposed on him.

During his high school years, he was exposed to the Internet and taught himself how to code HTML and began building websites for family and friends.

“It was an escape for me, being transported to a world where there were different possibilities.”

Pienaar matriculated in 2003 and went on to study accountancy at Stellenbosch, where he completed his BAcc degree. “I absolutely hated it. From the start, I realised that being an accountant puts you in a box and you have so many stakeholders that impose structure on what you are supposed to be doing, but it was a means to an end.”

He also built a website that offered a classifieds advertising system aimed at wine estates.

“These websites were more of an adventure and about learning than actual businesses.”

It wasn’t until his final year at university, when he had to figure out how he would pay for his student bills, that he got into WordPress development and consulting. “My consulting is what led me to build my first theme.”

At the end of 2007, Pienaar made the decision to commit fully to building a business out of it. He released his first theme, Premium News, which he sold to interested WordPress users for US$99 a pop.

It had five buyers on the first day and 20 in the first week, netting him about R10 000. At around the same time, Pienaar had already accepted a corporate job in Cape Town, but this was short-lived as the money he had made from selling his themes equalled the salary he was earning. After only two months, he quit his job to focus full time on theme development.