Katie Keith runs 20 software products at the same time.
Not 20 landing pages. 20 real products with paying customers: 19 WordPress plugins and one Shopify app, pulling in $1.8 million a year.
Most founders would call that insane. The standard advice says focus on one product, go deep, ignore everything else.
Katie did the opposite, and her WordPress plugin business, Barn2 Plugins, has now sold $9.8 million worth of plugins over its lifetime.
She broke down the whole thing with Pat Walls on Starter Story: how the first plugin happened, why organic search still drives most of her sales, and the exact 5-step playbook she'd use to start over in 2026.
Every number below comes from that conversation.
The numbers behind 20 products
Katie pulled up her revenue dashboards on camera:
- $1.7 million in plugin revenue in 2025 (the gap to $1.8M is affiliate income and some development services)
- About $150K a month on average, higher in November, quieter in December
- $9.8 million in lifetime plugin sales
- 17,000 customers on an active subscription
- Premium plugins running on over 90,000 sites, plus free versions on top of that
Pricing is simple: every plugin comes in 1-site, 5-site, or 20-site plans, either as an annual subscription or a lifetime deal.
Lifetime deals are about 15% of revenue. Most SaaS people treat lifetime deals as a dirty word. For plugins, where support load is low and the product is narrow, the math works.
And the products themselves are deliberately small. Document Library Pro adds a document library to any WordPress site. Others add product tables to WooCommerce stores, product options, or protected areas. Small scope is the reason one team can run 20 of them.
She never had 20 ideas
This is the part most people get wrong about the portfolio approach.
Katie did not sit down one day and write a list of 19 plugin ideas. Her words: "We never had 19 ideas."
Barn2 started as a husband-and-wife web agency around 2009. Andy built client sites, Katie handled marketing and project management. The plugin pivot came in 2016, and the first idea was not even theirs.
There used to be a public board called the WooCommerce Ideas Forum, where store owners voted on features they wanted. Katie and Andy picked an idea lots of people were voting for and built WooCommerce Protected Categories, a dead-simple plugin that locks access to categories in an online store.
The second plugin, Posts Table Pro, came out of a client project. They kept adding features until it was worth selling on its own.
From there, the flywheel took over:
→ Ship a plugin.
→ Customers send feature requests.
→ Some requests are too big to be features. Those become the next plugin.
"Get a product out there and then keep your ears open," she says. The ideas come to you without asking, but only after you ship something. Idea number one came from a forum. Ideas two through twenty came from customers.
The growth engine: ranking on Google since day one
Where do most of the customers come from? Organic search. It has been the number one channel for 10 years.
When WooCommerce Protected Categories launched, it was the only plugin that did the job. So Katie, the marketer of the two, wrote blog posts and tutorials about how to password protect categories in WooCommerce.
Because nothing else existed, the posts went straight to the top of Google. First sales came within days.
She is honest that finding a true gap is harder 10 years later. But the playbook has not changed: pick a specific use case, write genuinely useful content about it, repeat across every use case your plugin touches.
There are no paid ads in this story and no viral launch. Just a decade of tutorials compounding in search.
This is the same pattern I keep seeing in boring niche software: the less glamorous the product, the better content plus search seems to work.
Cross-selling: why 20 products beat one
Every Barn2 plugin has one closely related plugin assigned as its upsell. Buy the product table plugin, and the system knows exactly which plugin to offer you next.
The machinery behind it:
- Three days after a purchase, you get an email with 50% off your next plugin
- On Black Friday, existing customers get a separate campaign from prospects, with copy like "discount off your next plugin"
- Banners inside each plugin's settings pages quietly remind you the complementary products exist
- Bundles package related plugins together at a better price
The trick, per Katie, is segmentation. You only pitch products that are directly relevant to the one someone already uses, which keeps the emails useful instead of spammy. It's textbook lead nurturing, applied to a plugin catalog.
Think about what that does to the economics. Acquiring a WordPress customer through SEO costs the same whether you have 1 product or 20. With 20, every customer can buy again. Same traffic, multiplied revenue.
Tibo runs the same play with his portfolio of 5 apps doing $700K a month. Different stack, same logic: separate products, one audience, aggressive cross-promotion.
Katie's 5-step playbook for starting over in 2026
Pat asked the question I would have asked: no customer base, no brand, starting from zero today. What's the plan?
She gave five steps.
Step 1: start where you already have experience. If you build WordPress sites for clients, build WordPress products. Your insight into the gaps is the advantage, not your code.
Step 2: come up with several ideas at once. Long list first, then research and validate each one. Keep the handful with the most potential, and prioritize ideas with overlapping markets so cross-promotion works later.
Step 3: launch ONE product, the one with the biggest audience. Not five at once. Each launch needs real marketing time and attention on early user feedback. Spread yourself across five launches and all five die.
Step 4: when product two ships, market it standalone AND wire up the cross-promotion. Links between the sites, discount emails to existing users, beta invites, docs pages that mention the other product, post-purchase sequences.
Step 5: repeat until you have a portfolio. Stop before you're spread so thin you can't do any product justice.
Notice the pacing. Nothing in there says build 20 apps fast. Every product gets launched alone, grown alone, then added to the cross-sell web.
The tech stack costs about $300 a year
For a company doing nearly $2M a year, the stack is almost embarrassing:
- ClickUp for project management, time tracking, and company chat
- GitHub (free) for all 20 code repositories
- Zapier for automations
- WordPress for the company site
- Easy Digital Downloads for checkout, licensing, and download delivery, at around $300 a year
Read that last one again. The checkout engine behind $1.7M a year of plugin sales costs $300 a year, with no platform percentage and no per-seat pricing creep.
Why this model works better now than ever
Pat made a point at the end that stuck with me.
Ten years ago, running 20 products was crazy. Twenty products meant 20 codebases to maintain, and a bug a day across 19 products is a living hell. You needed an engineering team per product.
With AI coding tools, you don't. One developer can maintain a fleet of small products. What's scarce now isn't engineering capacity, it's an audience that trusts you enough to buy twice.
Katie built her customer base over 10 years. You can build the products faster now, but the second half of her model, one audience buying again and again, still takes the same patience.
Her advice to anyone starting out is three words: just do it. Launch something. Even a failed product generates the feedback and feature requests that become the next one. Do nothing and nothing happens.
FAQ
How much money can you make from a WordPress plugin business?
Barn2 Plugins makes about $1.7M a year from 19 plugins, roughly $150K a month on average, with $9.8M in lifetime sales. That is the high end. The model scales down too: a single niche plugin that ranks for its use case can reach a few thousand dollars a month with one developer.
How do you find a plugin idea that sells?
Katie's first idea came from a public feature-request forum where WooCommerce users voted on what they wanted. Her next 19 came from customer feature requests on products she had already shipped. The lesson: ship one product, then let your users tell you what to build next.
Is the WordPress plugin market too saturated in 2026?
It is harder to find a completely empty niche than in 2016, when Barn2 ranked number one on Google within days. But WordPress still powers around 40% of the web, and narrow use cases keep appearing as the ecosystem changes. Katie's team launched a Shopify app as their 20th product, which is one way to apply the same playbook on a younger platform.
Are lifetime deals a mistake for plugins?
About 15% of Barn2's revenue comes from lifetime deals, and Katie still offers them on every product. For narrow plugins with low ongoing support costs they work as a cash-flow boost. For a heavy SaaS with real server costs, the math gets a lot worse.
Katie took 10 years to get here. The plugins were the easy part; the compounding audience was the work.
If you want more breakdowns like this from founders who show their real dashboards, I interview bootstrapped SaaS founders making $100K to $10M a year on the Profitable Founder Podcast every week.
