#157 – Katie Keith on the Move From Agency Owner to WordPress Theme Development to Plugin Success

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast

which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the move from agency owner to WordPress theme development company, and finally to plugin success.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Katie Keith.

Katie is a founder and CEO of Barn2 plugins. With a background deeply rooted in WordPress, Katie’s journey presents an interesting narrative of transformation, from the early days of running a WordPress agency, to now managing a flourishing plugin business Barn2 plugins has a portfolio of 19 premium plugins, many of which extend functionalities inside WooCommerce

Today, Katie previews her upcoming lightning talk, which she’ll be giving at WordCamp Asia. She talks about the transition from agency work to plugin development, highlighting early challenges and choices that shaped the business’ path.

We get into the initial allure of client projects, and their subsequent realization of the benefits offered by productizing their skills for global reach. Katie describes the decisions that led them to WordPress plugins with products like WooCommerce Protected Categories and Document Library Pro, and explores how customer feedback and market needs drove their product diversification.

As Katie explains, the plugin world wasn’t without its hurdles. There was trial and error involved in launching new products. This underscores the importance of market research. Additionally, she touches on Barn2’s current pivot into Shopify apps, aiming for diversification to help ensure that the business has stability by being available across multiple platforms.

Katie investigates the current WordPress and WooCommerce landscape, discussing how she perceives the industry will change, potential growth areas, and the necessity of staying agile.

If you’re curious about the intricacies of building a plugin business, or are seeking inspiration from someone who has already navigated the WordPress ecosystem, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well. And so, without further delay, I bring you Katie Keith.

I am joined on the podcast by Katie Keith.

[00:03:29] Katie Keith: Hey, Nathan.

[00:03:30] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you on the podcast. Katie and I have met, actually many times in person over at a variety of different WordCamps. This conversation that we’re going to have today is inspired by a WordCamp, but a WordCamp which hasn’t taken place yet. Because Katie is heading off to Manila in a few days time to give a lightning talk at WordCamp Asia. Do you just want to, before we get a bio properly, do you want to tell us what you’re going to talk about and then we’ll learn more about you?

[00:03:52] Katie Keith: Yep. So my talk is going to be a lightning talk about my story, specifically the transition from being a WordPress agency into a WordPress plugin company.

[00:04:03] Nathan Wrigley: Now that’s the perfect opportunity to give us your little bio. So don’t reveal all the detail of everything that you want to talk about, but just tell us the one minute potted history of you, WordPress, technology, wherever you want to land with that.

[00:04:16] Katie Keith: Yeah, so I’m Katie Keith, founder and CEO at Barn2 plugins. We are a, as you probably guessed, a plugin shop. We currently have 19 premium plugins, a few free ones, and that’s about it.

But as we’ll talk about this more later, we started life as an agency building WordPress sites for clients, and then over the years we’ve switched into plugins.

We mostly specialise in WooCommerce plugins. So about 14 of our 19 are building extra functionality for WooCommerce. And we’ve also got a really popular document library plugin, which is not for WooCommerce.

[00:04:54] Nathan Wrigley: Haven’t you pivoted a little bit in the direction of Shopify as well?

[00:04:57] Katie Keith: Yeah, that is in progress. So the current growth strategy is to continue what we’re doing with the WordPress side of things, and also to diversify into selling Shopify apps so that we are across multiple platforms, and largely as a sort of stability thing, so that we spread any risks. Because we’re all dependent on WordPress at the moment, which is obviously a good horse to back and always has been. But it feels like it’s a good idea to be on multiple platforms as well.

[00:05:26] Nathan Wrigley: So I don’t know a single person, personally, who began their journey into web development intentionally. That is to say anybody of my era, anybody that wandered into web development when I did, the industry wasn’t really an industry. It was kind of just beginning. People just did it as a hobby. You know, some friend came along and said, I’d like a website, well, I can dabble with that. I’ve heard about websites and I know how to code a little bit of HTML and things like that.

But I’m wondering if you were more intentional when you began looking around post school, post college, whatever you did. Did you and your husband, I know he was a big part of the business. Did you jump into web development, and you said you were an agency for a while? Did you do that intentionally or was it more, oh, let’s try our hand at this for a bit?

[00:06:11] Katie Keith: It actually was intentional. So, Andy and I spent our twenties with normal jobs, both government type jobs, talking about how we wanted to start a business together, and how much more flexible that would be. How much more our finances could scale if we worked for ourselves. But we just didn’t have any ideas.

And we talked for years about different ideas and never really saw anything through or had a killer idea. Andy particularly got quite fed up with his job in the civil service in England and we thought, we need to do something. And thought, okay, well, what would combine our skills, and he was a software developer, not really web but software, and I was a project management and marketing person. And so we thought, well, building websites for people actually combines those skills.

He didn’t want to go into like software consultancy or something because we are from the southwest of England, which is quite rural, and we would probably have had to move to a big city. Remote work wasn’t such a thing back then, and so we didn’t really want that lifestyle change.

So he thought, well, maybe he could scale down a bit and learn web development instead of enterprise level software. And then that allows us to run a kind of more small business that we can live where we want to work. And websites need marketing, SEO, copywriting, project management, communication with clients. So that fitted in my skills as well. So, yes, it was intentional having analysed our respective skills and what we could realistically get into.

[00:07:45] Nathan Wrigley: That’s really great actually. Looking back, you had the perfect blend of different things there. Maybe a bit of serendipity, but your marketing side, and Andy’s coding side, that is really the basis of a successful agency business, growing agency business. You need to have the capacity to code, but also to sell it into the marketplace. I mean, how many stories have you heard of people who can code but they can’t launch a business, because they don’t have the wherewithal to sell it and drum up business and things like that. So that’s fascinating.

In the show notes that we shared, one of the things that you said was that you didn’t quite go in the right direction at the beginning. Well, it turned out that you didn’t go in the right direction. You went with client websites, building one site, shipping it, launching another, and so on. But that didn’t turn out to be something that you wanted to maintain. Why was that?

[00:08:30] Katie Keith: Yeah, so we thought client websites are a really good way to get started because you don’t need to invest lots of money, and you just get paid by the project. So if you can get one client that brings in, back then it was like £500 or something, not very much. And then you just keep going and grow slowly. I’d never really been attracted to the kind of business that you need to put a lot of money into upfront.

I love the program Dragons Den, which is Shark Tank in the US. But I’ve never wanted that kind of business where you need a lot of investment. So web design, just stick out a few flyers or something in your local, actually, fish and chip shop got us one client. We just put some flyers on the counter and we actually got a website for a local cycling club. Things like that. So you could start small.

So it was a good way to get started. And it was really good because it got us into WordPress. So we didn’t initially think, let’s be WordPress specialists. We thought, let’s build websites. And then Andy started researching the right tools and discovered WordPress and told me about it. I thought it sounded like an awful idea, because he made it sound like a kind of a blogging thing and like, oh, you choose a template for your blog. And I was like, no, we want to build business websites for people. Why are you using this blogging software?

But that was about a year after custom post types came in, and it was becoming a proper platform. It was about 2010 back then. We started specialising in WordPress. And then, to answer your question, at this point, the client work was better than having jobs, but it wasn’t quite the lifestyle you wanted, in that we wanted more flexibility where we’re not like on call to clients all the time.

If someone’s website goes down when you’re on holiday, you’ve got to fix it. And we did try to get help, project managers and things. And we did do well getting freelance designers and developers, but we just couldn’t find anybody that we could trust to communicate with the clients for us. And that really put a limitation on the lifestyle benefits because we were on, mainly me, we’re on call to clients all the time. So we thought, actually maybe that’s not the right business model.

[00:10:38] Nathan Wrigley: You’re also selling your time for money, and going through that feast famine life cycle where one project is ongoing. And then at what point do you sort of cut that off and say, okay, we need to start looking for the next one, even though we haven’t quite finished this one. There’s inevitably going to be some overlap where that all just works out well. And obviously the agencies which grow and scale and become enterprise, they just have that figured somehow.

My experience with that was always that there was a period where you were quite uncertain as to where the next website was going to come from. And you were, like I said, just trading your time for money. And WordPress offers so much more than that. You’ve got yourself into a kind of global marketplace where you could build a thing and then sell that thing 1,000 times, 10,000 times over, which I guess, where we’re going next. But you didn’t go to plugins first. You actually went into themes, which was a bit of a, well, a bit of a dead end it turns out. But tell us about the theme building enterprise.

[00:11:35] Katie Keith: Yeah, so because of all those things you’ve mentioned, selling time for money and the lifestyle thing, we thought selling WordPress products would be a much better business model because it could scale more. You can build one product and then sell it an unlimited number of times in theory, instead of selling one hour for a certain amount of money.

So we thought products are good. And we looked at the products and thought, ah, themes are the way to go. Themes seemed to be a big growth area, well, they were a big growth area. This is 2013.

And when we started work in about 2012 on our first, our only theme, ThemeForest was just growing loads. Plugins existed, but you didn’t hear about super successful plugin companies particularly. Whereas you could go on ThemeForest and you could see the sales that the big themes were getting, and it was very tempting to be part of that. So we thought, let’s build a theme. So we did. And it took like a year because of all the demands of client work. So it was just a sideline, building this theme. And then in that year ThemeForest changed, which we didn’t see coming. ThemeForest changed in the year we were building our theme.

So we’d analysed the themes that were successful at the time, and they were quite simple. They were nice, designed, often quite bold, clear designs, a bit minimal, and didn’t have that many features. And then between 2012 and 2013, themes such as uDesign and Avada and that kind of thing became popular. And they were massive multipurpose themes with so many features. And that wasn’t what we wanted to do. We wanted a product that we could maintain and develop ourselves easily, and it wouldn’t be this massive headache or anything like that.

So it just wasn’t what we wanted. And of course, that meant they rejected our theme because it wasn’t the sort of theme they were looking for. I think they would’ve accepted it a year before, but they didn’t when we got actually ready to submit it. So we were like, ah, do we rewrite the theme and make it loads more complicated? Do we sell it independently? And I wasn’t confident in my ability to market a theme independently, because you’re competing with the giants. And I didn’t have experience of that. I wanted to be on a marketplace.

[00:13:51] Nathan Wrigley: I think back in the day, 2013, like you mentioned, ThemeForest was the place to go for things like that, wasn’t it? And although I wasn’t really in the WordPress space, I jumped in after that endeavor. When I got there, ThemeForest was already, basically saturated with themes that could, well, themes that claimed to do more or less everything. You just buy this one theme and it can do everything. Or there was also a dearth of themes which offered a specific kind of functionality, like a real estate, or you might say, realtor theme, or a portfolio theme or, I don’t know, I’m a gym owner, I need a theme for my gym.

Kind of felt like it went in that direction, but it seems like you were trying to build something which was more agnostic of industry. It was just a, here’s the bare bones of a theme, you now go and do the artistic work. But yeah, like you say, ThemeForest was going off in a different direction.

So what happened there? Was it a case of staring at each other and saying, okay, what do we do? Do we try to pivot this theme? Or did you just at some point say, no, abandon it.

[00:14:51] Katie Keith: We were fairly depressed and disappointed and just gave up for a few years. So we carried on with the client work, which was going fine. We had a successful business that was keeping us both going. We didn’t need to do products. So we just continued with the client work.

[00:15:08] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so steady away. And then what was the moment where you, kind of had the revelation about plugins? Because, again, coming into the WordPress space, 2015, something like that, plugins and themes were already selling like hotcakes. I don’t really know about the period in which plugins was a bit new, a bit maybe dangerous, a bit, putting your business on the line with plugins. Maybe that was a tough one back then, I don’t know.

[00:15:30] Katie Keith: By the time it got to 2016, I supppose frustrations accumulate over time. So we were again like, oh, the client works just kind of annoying. It’s not quite flexible enough, and it’s not scaling enough, it’s just going up a little bit. So we need to do products. What shall we do again?

And this time we thought, well, plugins could work because unlike these massive multipurpose themes, a plugin can be really tiny or it can be incredibly complex. A plugin can just be a line of code, you know, as an extreme minimum. So we thought, well, that way we can choose products that fit with the scale that we want to offer technically. I hated the idea of a big theme or a massive plugin because you kind of end up being responsible for basically the user’s whole website.

So imagine if somebody’s using a theme which takes over their whole site, and it affects every aspect of the visuals. They’re going to send you a support ticket for everything, even if it’s not the theme’s fault. And then you are going to have to prove it’s not the theme’s fault. And we just thought that’s not sustainable.

And I think the same would happen with really large plugins like, I don’t know, a membership plugin or an e-commerce plugin or something thing like that. So we thought, well, we are just the two of us, plus our freelancers, so let’s choose a more realistic plugin idea and build it and see what happens.

[00:16:54] Nathan Wrigley: So you always had the agency, the client based websites. That was the backup plan. Always something to fall back on if the plugin business didn’t work out. You took the plunge. What was the first plugin that you came up with?

[00:17:07] Katie Keith: So the first plugin, we found by going on a website, which used to exist, which was the WooCommerce Ideas Forum. They used to have a whole website where people just gave ideas and, basically feature request board. But they have that now if people want to look, but I think it’s per extension instead of a whole thing for WooCommerce. So you access it differently and it’s hard to find. But there was this whole website.

So we went on this and you can sort it by the number of votes for each suggestion. And we chose an idea which had the highest number of votes that wasn’t that complex to build, which was WooCommerce password protected categories, which is very specific.

[00:17:47] Nathan Wrigley: That’s a great title, I like that.

[00:17:48] Katie Keith: Yeah, nice and snappy. WordPress itself already has password protection for its posts and pages, but not categories, and therefore WooCommerce doesn’t have it for its categories either. And people were saying that they wanted it for things like building a wholesale site, or selling different products to different clients.

If you imagine that you sell products to sports teams and they each have a logo, so the product’s different for each team, you might create a protected category for that team to log in and order their branded sportswear. Those sorts of use cases. And we thought, well, that’s quite simple. You just add a category field to the page and a few other features like login and things.

So we built the plugin. It wasn’t that difficult, and we launched it. And because it was unique and I was a marketer, I wrote a few blog posts about it, like how to password protect categories in WooCommerce, really niche posts. They went right to the top of Google because you could then, and there was nobody else offering that. And we actually started getting sales after about three days. And we were like, we are getting sales for our plugin and we couldn’t believe it.

[00:18:57] Nathan Wrigley: That is quite remarkable because I know the story is harder now than ever. That story is very hard to replicate because, you know, the market is saturated.

But just going back to your actual plugin, realistically, when you built that and you saw that idea, okay, we’re going to password protect a category, and it will impact WooCommerce, so I don’t know, we could send it to company A and the category will be A, and they can access it with a password, and we’ll send it to company B, and the category will be B and they can access it and so on.

Honestly, what was your expectation at that point? Because coming into the community, it’s hard to understand, how big is WordPress? And then the layer underneath that, how big is the plugin which sits inside of WordPress, WooCommerce, how big is that? And then we’ve got this niche little one, just does one tiny thing. Honestly, what were your expectations?

[00:19:44] Katie Keith: Very low. It was an experiment. It wasn’t a huge amount of work. Basically, Andy stopped doing some agency work for a while, and I relied on the freelance developers a bit more while he coded it. It wasn’t a big sacrifice for us to build it, and we didn’t have any kind of a business plan or projections or anything. It was just, let’s launch a small plugin and see what happens.

And we were amazed. And it still exists now. It’s now called WooCommerce Protected Categories because it has different ways of protecting the category, not just passwords, like user role and that kind of thing. And it actually, a few months ago it met half a million dollars in revenue lifetime. So that tiny idea has done half a million dollars in 8 years.

[00:20:30] Nathan Wrigley: So how quickly did that money start to roll in? And so it doesn’t have to be about money, the amount of, I don’t know, plugin licenses that you sold or whatever it may be. But how quickly did your intuition turn to, oh, there is really something in this? Like you mentioned you got a sale or two within two or three days, which is exciting. But obviously if it then just sort of trickled along one or two a week, it is exciting, but it’s not that exciting.

And what was the point where you and Andy started to look at each other and think, woah, we could potentially forget all the agency work if we now pivot into this? How long did it take you to make those decisions?

[00:21:03] Katie Keith: Yeah, because that was just pocket money, the first sales. It was just nice because it’s an indication that it could work. So that kept growing. And we also launched other plugins as well. Like our second one came from a client project.

The client paid us to build a custom plugin, which was a searchable, sortable table of blog posts for their blog. So they had hundreds of blog posts and they wanted a more easy way for people to find them. So we built this table plugin, and we launched it on wordpress.org as a free plugin called Post Table with Search and Sort. So that’s just as good a name as WooCommerce Password Protected Category.

[00:21:40] Nathan Wrigley: Got the SEO juice going there, definitely.

[00:21:43] Katie Keith: Oh yeah, it does what it says. So that was a free plugin, but that led to a lot of sales because people started sending us feature requests once it was on wordpress.org.

So the first ones wanted custom fields, custom taxonomies, and custom post types, rather than just blog posts in their table. So they might want to create like a table of documents or members for a directory of consultants or something like that, like custom post types and data. So we built Post Table Pro, which was the premium version, and that’s done really well.

And then people started asking for even more features, which we used to develop different plugins. So we built WooCommerce Product Table, which is a WooCommerce version of that table, which has things like add to cart buttons and variation dropdowns.

And so that cluster of plugins that came from this free table plugin is what really kind of catapulted the success. So that within about six months of launching our first plugin we were making, I don’t know, several thousand dollars a month. And we thought, given that we have some revenue from clients like maintenance and hosting, so our existing clients were paying us for certain things, we can afford to stop taking new projects, and therefore put more resources into building more plugins, and improving our existing ones, and marketing them, of course. So it was about six months that we decided, let’s stop accepting new client projects.

[00:23:13] Nathan Wrigley: So the plugin that you just mentioned there, the sorting of the tables, it sounds like you got that out of a client project. So it was actually a client that came to you. We need this idea and, okay, we’ll build that. But then the back of that is, can we then take that code and run with it? Which you did. And then you’ve got the pro version, which adds in a bunch of different features. And now you’ve got two plugins and a third one came on quite quickly. We’re six months in, and the dollar signs are starting to make sense.

You can see that, okay, there’s a living in this. We’ll take our foot off the client websites, but we’ll keep it going just in case something goes wrong. So I’m presuming though, at this point you are all guns aimed at, we need more plugins, more and more and more plugins. And so when did it become, okay, let’s just go in on Woo? How did you end up as Woo as opposed to just WordPress?

[00:23:59] Katie Keith: We never did. Our biggest plugin now is Document Library Pro, which is not Woo, and that came from Post Table Pro as well. The biggest use case of Post Table Pro ended up being documents. So we built a document plugin that had download buttons and previews and stuff that’s specific to documents. Again, it’s just a table plugin, and that has been our biggest seller for the last three or four years since we launched it.

So because of the success of that and Post Table Pro, we never could actually just be WooCommerce. So we are not like, say Iconic, who specialise in WooCommerce, that’s all they do.

So we have this reputation of being WooCommerce. And I wish we were actually. Obviously I like having a successful plugin, but I wish that we had that clear identity because it’s, like I explained the business at the beginning in the introduction, I’m like, oh, we have these plugins, they’re mostly WooCommerce. It is not as clean as it could be.

[00:24:56] Nathan Wrigley: Sitting where you are now, and we can get into the numbers of how many plugins and all of that that you’ve got. Have you made any missteps with, like has any plugin that you’ve built misfired completely? You thought this would be a great idea, let’s build it, let’s market it. But then you build it and the customers do not come. Or has every single one had a fair degree of, they don’t all have to be super successful, but has everything stood on its own two feet and been worth doing?

[00:25:20] Katie Keith: It depends how you define success. But it’s largely relative. So if you’re doing one plugin that’s doing X a month, then if you have one that’s much smaller, that’s not necessarily worth it.

I would say my biggest mistake, repeatedly, has been thinking too small. So I have a very bad track record of building plugins that are too small and too niche to be worth bothering with. Lots of examples.

One example was WooCommerce Discontinued Products. So that adds a discontinued stock status to your store. We built it because we were hiring some new senior developers and we were doing a project for these developers. Before we hired them, we were paying them to build a small plugin to check how good they were. And we thought, well, the ones we hired, we may as well release their plugin. So we did.

We did WooCommerce Variation Prices, Discontinued Products. We had multiple plugins that were just trial projects for the developer, but they were good. And their first project after they joined properly was to complete the plugin, and make it sellable. But that’s a lot of work. You’ve got to create all the marketing images, the marketing content, the sales page, market it.

Each plugin has an overhead as well as maintaining it. And so with hindsight, I shouldn’t have released all of those small plugins. And we actually sold five of our plugins last year to a WooCommerce company called Kestrel, because we had 24 at the time, and it was just too many. And I did an 80 20 rule analysis of the business and how much revenue was coming from each plugin. And that cluster of five were all doing, they were all doing at least several hundreds a month, but generally less than a thousand a month.

And compared to our other plugins, that was a small proportion. So I thought, let’s group these plugins and sell them to a company who would appreciate and grow them more, where that fits better with their business plan.

[00:27:17] Nathan Wrigley: Are you still on the lookout for new ideas? Or do you want to just hunker down on the ones that you’ve got? In other words, do you constantly ideate and think, let’s find a new thing or is it more serendipity? You accidentally stumble across an idea, we should build that, and so we do. Or do you deliberately try, in the same way that you did previously going to the WooCommerce forum, do you try to find new products to build and see how they work?

[00:27:41] Katie Keith: I suppose a bit of both depending on our current priorities. So for example, in 2024 last year, that’s when we sold the five plugins. And I thought, we’ve got a handful of really successful plugins, we need to put our resources into making them as good as they can be to maximise their potential sales.

So for example, instead we did launch one plugin last year, our WooCommerce Discount Plugin, but we were already building that when I made this decision. So once I made that decision, I put all our developers on adding features to our existing plugins, including some really big features.

For example, we have a WooCommerce Product Options plugin, which adds extra options to your product pages. And dozens and dozens and dozens of people were saying to us, we want live image previews. So when you use our plugin to upload an image to the product page, we want that to appear superimposed on a picture of the T-shirt, for example. So if you upload your picture of your child, that will appear on the T-shirt.

And that was a big project. So we could have built a completely different plugin, but instead we added live preview. We actually did it as an add-on, so it’s sort of an extra plugin, but it’s dependent on the main plugin, and things like that. So we thought, what’s working and how could we make what’s working even more successful? But I do have a list of plugin ideas for the future.

[00:29:06] Nathan Wrigley: So there’s a laundry list of things that you might build, but the priorities are not to build them all right away? Just see how the market goes. Speaking of that, speaking of the market, you’re obviously heavily embedded in WordPress, heavily embedded in WooCommerce. What do you make of the landscape at the moment?

You’re obviously beginning to pitch into Shopify a little bit as well, and I imagine you’re at pains to say we’re not taking our foot off the WordPress pedal. How do you feel the landscape is shaping up in 2025? It does seem like things are plateauing a little bit in terms of market share for WordPress, whether or not they’ll go up or down. How confident are you in the future? Is it still WordPress all the way down?

[00:29:42] Katie Keith: I certainly don’t think WordPress is going anywhere, and it probably won’t shrink a lot, if at all. But I also don’t feel that we are having a rising tide that we can all ride the journey upwards like we used to. For example, in 2020 when everybody was locked down, there was huge growth for nearly all WordPress companies, because the world was going online so rapidly and we had a huge, huge growth very quickly.

And then since then it has slowed down. The growth has slowed down and now seems fairly stable. Stable is a good word, but it’s not really growing in a particularly measurable way. And you could argue that that is just a correction because it went up so much, so quickly during the pandemic that maybe it just took a few years to get back to where it would’ve done if there was no pandemic.

So if you imagine a steep line rather than a big bump followed by a plateau. So you could argue that. But it feels like we have to work harder than we used to to see growth, and make that happen through our own efforts, rather than just relying on a growing market.

[00:30:48] Nathan Wrigley: So obviously that would be nice if WordPress could keep going in that same way. What about Woo? Obviously we were just talking about WordPress. I don’t really involve myself with Woo so much, so I don’t really know what the statistics are. I know that in terms of e-commerce platforms, it’s the leader, but I don’t know if that’s sort of going up or going down. You got any insight in that?

[00:31:07] Katie Keith: It is very confusing because it depends where you look. So there’s two main websites that publish data about e-commerce usage, and one of them says WooCommerce is the leader and the other says Shopify is. And they use slightly different data sets. For example, the top X websites in the world, versus the whole internet, versus a sample of a million, which they use to extrapolate upwards.

So there are different ways of looking at the data. So I genuinely don’t know, there probably is no correct answer, which is the biggest e-commerce platform, but they’re both doing really well and neither are going anywhere. So that’s why it felt that it made sense for us to be building products for both.

I think WooCommerce is really interesting because it has a good reputation. It has, I think the best leadership team around it that I’ve seen in the 8 years I’ve been building plugins on top of it right now. But I wish they would do more marketing. They’re not promoting their platform in the way that say Shopify is, and that scares me. I would like to see them doing more centralised marketing.

They’re a company, they make money from WooCommerce, even though it’s free. They have extensions, they have revenue sharing from their Stripe and they have lots of ways of making money, which they’ve recently talked about publicly. And so I’d like them to be doing some proper marketing like Shopify does.

[00:32:29] Nathan Wrigley: It is interesting, I know you no longer live in the UK. I do, and it doesn’t take many trips down high streets to realise that the high street is really in decline. You only have to walk down one street in more or less any town to realise that the shutters are going up, the wood is going over the doors, bricks and mortar shops are really struggling.

And it’s this inexorable rise. I can only imagine that, well, people are still buying things, but they’re buying things increasingly on the internet. My age group, I imagine has been fairly straightforward, because we grew up when the internet was coming around. Children that are growing up now, I think they’re really just not interested in doing things like going into town in a sort of social way like I did. So I imagine that eCommerce’s future, just generally e-commerce, platform agnostic, you’ve got to imagine its got everything going for it, I would’ve thought.

[00:33:24] Katie Keith: Yeah, that makes sense. And we often look at things like market share data, but that’s just a percentage. So even if WordPress’ market, or let’s say WooCommerce’s market share did go down at some point, if the whole of e-commerce was growing, then WooCommerce could still be growing. And it doesn’t really matter so much if it’s smaller percentage, if the whole cake is bigger.

So I think that’s the case. And you do see quite regularly published e-commerce data about, particularly after Black Friday, like the most revenue ever went through e-commerce sites this Black Friday. And it does seem to be constantly growing. And I think that is primarily through websites. A lot of people are buying through apps, of course, instead of websites, particularly something like Amazon or even Temu or something these days. But I think e-commerce websites are still huge and I can’t see that changing.

[00:34:15] Nathan Wrigley: No, because in most of the towns that I’ve visited where I can see this, the big, we call them department stores in the UK. An example might be something like Marks & Spencer. They’ve got a branch in more or less every town. You kind of feel that they’re immune. They’ve got their online bit as well, so they’ve probably inoculated themselves in that way. They’ve just got so much kudos, and so much loyalty built in that you feel they might be immune for a period of time.

But all of the little shops, the little jeweler, the little corner shop selling a thing that they build, whatever it may be, you kind of feel they are going to struggle because the footfall is less. They really do fit into what you sell. I’m reasonably technical, but I can’t build, I can’t code, I can’t do any of that, so I need a solution.

I think the future for WooCommerce and the kind of things that you create and sell, I think the future’s really bright because I see that market just going up and up. The younger people are going to be wanting to use their devices because they’re all really fascinated by them, everybody’s got a mobile phone nowadays. The footfall is sort of falling away, and it all seems like a perfect storm for e-commerce to grow. I could be being overly optimistic there, but it feels like it’s fair weather for the next decade or so.

[00:35:26] Katie Keith: Yeah, I know what you mean. And it’s a good example to use those small shops because even if they keep their storefront, which probably isn’t profitable, they should be selling online. And small shops, they’ve got a few choices, that could be WooCommerce. That might be harder to set up in the first place, they might need to hire someone. But then their costs are super, super low compared to most platforms.

They could go for Shopify, which is slightly reversed in that sense. Or they could use something like Etsy if they’re a jeweller, to use your example. So there’s lots of ways for them to sell online, but they do need to be thinking of it for their survival because of the decline of things like the high street, as you say.

[00:36:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think so. Looking back, again, just casting your mind back to 2013 when you began all of this. Do you think that you were lucky when you decided to pivot into making plugins? What I’m really saying is, if you were beginning now in 2025, everything was the same, it was just 12 years later, 2013 to 2025. Do you think you’d have the same degree of success with the exact same kind of approach to it?

Basically, has the market got harder, more saturated, more difficult to sell into, more savvy? Anything around there. Do you feel, basically, you were lucky in terms of timing?

[00:36:38] Katie Keith: I think to an extent. I don’t believe it’s fully saturated yet, but it is more full than it was when we started. So when we started, there were no WooCommerce protected category plugins, there were no WordPress dynamic table plugins, there were no document library plugins, there were no product table plugins for WooCommerce.

So we managed to do that because those were gaps. Now they’re not. And now we’ve done successful plugins in those categories people have copied. So we have competition now, which came along after we launched. So those are no longer gaps. But I do firmly believe that there are still gaps that you can fill.

And the way to find them is through already being in WordPress in some way, which most typically is through building sites for clients, or doing some kind of client work. Because they will always find a gap and ask you to fill it through a custom plugin or something like that. So if you concentrate hard enough on the client work that you’re getting, you probably will find gaps.

And if you find something that doesn’t already exist, then yes, you could get to the top of Google quickly for a very specific keyword. Of course, WordPress and WooCommerce are much bigger now than they were in 2016 when we launched our first plugin. So even if it’s slightly more diluted with competition, the market is bigger. So there is potential now you’re a part of a bigger market.

[00:38:03] Nathan Wrigley: So last question really, Katie. Do you see WordPress being the thing for you and your husband, the business you are going to pursue for the next decade or so, or do you think you will be scrambling around for more opportunities in the Shopify space? I don’t know, other CMSs, pivot completely, who knows? What does the future hold? What’s the next decade looking like from where you sit right now?

[00:38:24] Katie Keith: I must admit, I’m not very good at long-term planning. I just do what feels right for the short and medium term.

[00:38:31] Nathan Wrigley: It’s worked.

[00:38:32] Katie Keith: Well, yeah, exactly. Does it matter? You do something and then you focus on what works and learn and keep iterating. I think that’s why I haven’t created, I don’t know, hundreds of million dollar worth business because I’m not a visionary that has this long-term view that I’ll do anything to make it happen.

Instead, I try something and keep learning, which has created a successful business, but in a more steady growth kind of way. So I’d rather be that visionary, but I’m not. It’s hard to know personally. I think you wanted to talk about the fact that my husband left the business about 8 months ago now. He’d lost his passion for it and wanted to reflect on other things he could do for the rest of his career, which he’s still doing.

So I’m now running it on my own and he owns half of it, so that might affect the future. We talked about whether he should sell his share, for example, at the time, and he decided, oh, WordPress is growing so nicely, it’s so stable, he’ll leave his money in the business.

Well, since then there’s been all this drama, so we are thinking, was that the right call? Should we get some money out?

But I love what I do and want to stay doing what I’m doing for the foreseeable future. But we could do something like take on a partner or investment or something if Andy wants to, say, invest his half elsewhere. So there’s that, which might affect our future.

[00:39:54] Nathan Wrigley: Oh gosh, that’s interesting. So, you heard here first. If people wanted to get in touch with you, Katie, not necessarily about taking on half the business or anything like that, but they’re just curious about what we’ve talked about today, or anything else related to WooCommerce plugins, et cetera, where would you be hanging out online? Is that a social network or an email? What’s the best thing?

[00:40:15] Katie Keith: So for company stuff, it’s Barn2.com to check out our plugins and so on. And for me, the most active place that I am would be Twitter, which is katiekeithbarn2.

[00:40:27] Nathan Wrigley: So Katie Keith, I appreciate you chatting to me today. Thank you so much and every success for 2025 and beyond. Thank you.

[00:40:34] Katie Keith: Thanks for having me.

On the podcast today we have Katie Keith.

Katie is a founder and CEO of Barn2 Plugins. With a background deeply rooted in WordPress, Katie’s journey presents an interesting narrative of transformation, from the early days of running a WordPress agency, to now managing a flourishing plugin business. Barn2 plugins has a portfolio of 19 premium plugins, many of which extend functionalities in WooCommerce.

Today, Katie previews her upcoming lightning talk which she’ll be giving at WordCamp Asia. She talks about the transition from agency work to plugin development, highlighting early challenges and choices that shaped the business’ path.

We get into the initial allure of client projects and their subsequent realisation of the benefits offered by productising their skills for global reach. Katie describes the decisions that led them to WordPress plugins, with products like WooCommerce Protected Categories and Document Library Pro, and explores how customer feedback and market needs drove their product diversification.

As Katie explains, the plugin world wasn’t without its hurdles. There was trial and error involved in launching new products. This underscored the importance of market research. Additionally, she touches on Barn2’s current pivot into Shopify apps, aiming for diversification to help ensure that the business has stability by being available across multiple platforms.

Katie investigates the current WordPress and WooCommerce landscape, discussing how she perceives the industry will change, potential growth areas, and the necessity of staying agile.

If you’re curious about the intricacies of building a plugin business, or are seeking inspiration from someone who has already navigated the WordPress ecosystem, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Barn2 website

Shopify

Themeforest

Iconic website

Katie’s X profile