Barn2 Plugins Update: We Just Passed $4.5M Mark In Lifetime Sales

Katie Keith

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Published: December 28th, 2022

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Katie Keith

Founder, Barn2 Plugins

$120K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Barn2 Plugins

barn2.com

from Plymouth, UK

started March 2016

$120,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Katie recommends to grow your business!

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join ... Timothy Ferriss

Want more updates on Barn2 Plugins? Check out these stories:

1. We Now Sell Over $1.2M/Year Of Plugins (2021) ➜

This is a follow up story for Barn2 Plugins. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published almost 3 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

Hello again! I’m Katie Keith, Co-Founder, and Director at Barn2 Plugins. We’re a software company specializing in WordPress and WooCommerce. We sell plugins (which are basically “apps” which people install on their websites) designed to make the web a better place.

Our flagship products are still WooCommerce Product Table and Document Library Pro. WooCommerce Product Table improves conversions for e-commerce store owners by displaying their products in a quick one-page order form. Our Document Library Pro plugin makes it easier for organizations to publish resources in a sharable online database.

We’re now turning over about $120,000 per month and have grown the team to 16 people.

As a distributed team based all over the world, we rarely meet in person. It was exciting to meet several team members at the WordCamp EU conference in Porto in June 2022

Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?

Our lifetime plugin sales (since we started in 2016) have passed the $4,500,000 mark.

2022 has been a very exciting year at Barn2. Many companies in our industry saw growth during the Covid-19 pandemic and have seen a slowdown in 2022. Barn2 has been lucky and has gone against the trend, as we continue to grow. I think this is because we have continued moving forwards and investing - both in marketing, building the team, and releasing new products.

We’ve reached several exciting milestones since we last talked. The thing I’m most excited about is growing the team, as I’m now working with some incredible people on a daily basis. As well as hiring more developers and support engineers, this year I have hired an in-house marketing team for the first time. This means that we can work together to help take the business to the next level.

I’m also excited to have launched several new products in 2022. The most exciting is WooCommerce Product Filters and WooCommerce Product Options. Our filter plugin makes it quicker and easier for customers visiting an e-commerce store to find products. Our product options plugin lets store owners add extra customization options for their products. I believe that they will both be game changers, both for our customers’ businesses and ourselves.

In terms of numbers, in 2022 our lifetime plugin sales (since we started in 2016) have passed the $4,500,000 mark. One of our products has sold over $1,000,000. We have more than 27,000 paying customers, plus tens of thousands more people using our free plugins.

And on a personal note, in the second half of 2021, my husband Andy (Barn2’s other Director) and I moved from the UK to the sunny island of Spain, Mallorca. We did this because having built work for ourselves that we can do from anywhere, we wanted to take advantage of this freedom! Moving abroad has had its challenges, but it has been an amazing experience and brings a much better quality of life.

What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?

My biggest challenge this year has been to continue growing in a market that is declining slightly. For example, I identified that sales of some of our most popular products - such as WooCommerce Wholesale Pro and WooCommerce Quick View Pro - had reduced this year.

To tackle this, we spent some extra time analyzing our search engine position for these products and working to improve it, instead of becoming complacent about our older SEO content.

Whatever the gap in the skill base of your business, filling it will make a huge difference to your growth.

The other big challenge for me has been to build an effective marketing team. For some reason, I’ve found it harder to recruit good marketers than it is to hire good software developers or support engineers.

I suppose that marketing is quite a wide and general discipline, and it’s not obvious whether I should hire people who have highly developed skills and little industry knowledge, or less experienced marketers who are very experienced in my industry (it’s almost impossible to find both!).

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

As the team has grown, this year I have learned a lot about managing staff. I have always had a very laid-back approach to management, and prefer to hire self-motivated people who don’t need to be micromanaged. This causes difficulties if I hire people who need more input to become productive. As a result, I have had to learn about goal-setting and performance monitoring.

As a founder, I have always been extremely motivated to push the business forward. After all, I benefit personally from the results! I struggle if a team member doesn’t match my level of motivation because I’m unsure whether my expectations of them are fair or realistic. This is even worse when I have hired people to do tasks that I used to do myself, as I can make a direct comparison. I believe that lots of founders struggle with this.

To improve my skills in this area, I regularly consult with fellow business owners who have been in the same situation. Together, we can discuss what’s reasonable and I can then implement this with my team.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

Since things are going great, my plans for the upcoming year - and longer-term - are to continue doing more of the same.

In particular, I want to stop building small single-feature products and spend more time building game-changing products that will transform people’s websites. This will help to make Barn2 a one-stop shop for people wanting to build a successful WooCommerce online store.

I also plan to continue expanding the team to ensure that we always can maintain our products and give our customers the best possible service, while also continuing to grow the business.

What’s the best thing you read in the last year?

Interviewers often ask me this, and I normally end up mentioning something I read years ago - not wanting to admit that I don’t read inspirational books about business.

However, I recently saw an interesting tweet by someone who bought and sold a hugely successful WordPress business:

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This made me feel that it’s ok to admit that I don’t get anything out of reading inspirational books.

Instead, I learn the most from other people who learn about WordPress companies. This might be people I know personally, reading people’s stories online, people I meet at conferences, hearing on podcasts, social media, etc. I learn a huge amount from the practical experiences of people who work in the same industry as me.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

My advice for entrepreneurs who are struggling to grow their business is to think critically about why it isn’t growing. For example, I have noticed that a lot of solopreneurs fail to grow because of a skills gap in their business.

In the WordPress industry, it’s common for a software developer to build and launch a product, and expect the sales to come without investing time or resources in marketing. They need to identify this gap in their business and plan how to fill it - whether it’s to learn marketing themselves, pay to hire a marketer or partner with someone with this skill.

Whatever the gap in the skill base of your business, filling it will make a huge difference to your growth.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

I am still experimenting with the right structure and roles for my marketing team, and this is a big area of growth for us right now. For example, we have recently decided to expand the Barn2 blog into a more general resource for WordPress website owners (it currently mostly focuses on our products). This means that we need extra Content Writers who can write authoritatively about WordPress.

We might also create new roles in the future, such as an in-house designer.