Diversifying to break a $1.6M/yr plateau

In 2016, Katie Keith pivoted her services company to a portfolio of WordPress plugins. Over the past 10 years, revenue grew to $1.6M/year. But now, AI has changed the playing field, causing Barn2's growth to plateau.

Here's Katie on how she got here and how she's breaking through the plateau. 👇

10 years and $10M

I cofounded Barn2 with my husband in 2010 because I wanted to work for myself and have a flexible lifestyle, instead of a rigid 9-to-5 office routine.

Building websites for clients met that aim, but I still wanted more. I sought the even-better lifestyle that selling software products promised. We started as a WordPress-focused web design agency and transitioned to WordPress plugins in 2016.

While selling, maintaining, and supporting plugins is a lot of work, it is much more scalable than client services, and I have never looked back. I work hard, but I only work about 30 hours per week. Sometimes, I work evenings and weekends; other times, I take days off with my family or friends. It works both ways, and flexibility is key.

My husband stepped back from the business in 2024, and I'm now running it alone with a team of 15 people who work remotely from various countries worldwide. We now have a suite of 19 premium WordPress and WooCommerce plugins. We also have a Shopify app called Barn2 Bundles & Bulk Discounts, with more Shopify apps on the way.

In March 2026, we reached $10 million in lifetime plugin sales and celebrated the 10-year anniversary of our first plugin's launch. Our products currently bring in $1.6 million/year.

Building their first plugin

Our first WordPress plugin was WooCommerce Protected Categories, launched in 2016, and it is still going strong today.

We intentionally chose a simple, niche area for our first product. We saw it as an experiment and a learning experience. And WooCommerce has such a huge user base that even niche products can have a large audience.

This certainly proved true for most of our products. My husband, Andy, built the initial product, taking time away from client work to develop it, while I worked with freelancers, continuing the client-facing business. This allowed us to invest in product development without significantly impacting our day-to-day income.

We launched it, and I started writing blog posts and tutorials about it. At the time, it was unique in the market and had no competition — though that has changed since then! Consequently, we went straight to the top of Google and were amazed to see sales start within a few days.

Becoming future-proof

Our revenue grew steadily until mid-2024. Since then, revenue has been stable overall, but growth in annual renewals is driving that stability — new sales revenue is declining.

I believe the reason is two-fold:

• More people vibe coding their own solutions instead of using our simpler utility plugins.

• Changes in how people discover plugins.

We've always generated most of our sales through organic SEO and Google. This took a big hit after Google introduced AI overviews, and people started using AI chat for website solutions. Even when AI recommends our plugins, it generates far fewer sales than if they found us through Google — probably because they don't see us as the only solution, nor do they see our professional branding, calls to action, or newsletter signups.

If I started over, I would build much bigger products that provide essential solutions and become a fundamental part of our customers' workflow. A lot of our current products are simple utility plugins that add specific features to WordPress or WooCommerce. While this sort of plugin is useful, the category is threatened by AI.

I'm now planning Barn2's next steps, including branching into other marketing methods and considering which software product categories will be the most future-proof. I'm also perfecting and expanding our biggest and most successful WordPress products. And our diversification into Shopify is another key tactic.

For various reasons, Shopify apps appear less threatened by AI than WordPress plugins. This is particularly true because nearly everyone finds apps on Shopify's App Store rather than via Google, which completely changes discovery. I think Shopify is our best chance at breaking through our plateau.

Growth via SEO and video

Despite the huge reduction in traffic from Google Organic that I mentioned, it remains our biggest source of both traffic and revenue by far. Our YouTube channel is next, but it remains far behind Organic Search.

Beyond that, I have grown the business by releasing multiple products. This vastly expands our target user base and creates cross-selling opportunities between our related products. We use various systems to provide targeted recommendations for additional products that benefit our customers. We also have an All Access Pass that bundles all our WordPress plugins for a reduced price.

We use many other marketing channels, but they don't impact us as much as Google and video. Naturally, we are increasingly optimizing for AI search. We also do social media marketing, receive word-of-mouth recommendations, and attend events. I'm quite prominent within the WordPress community, particularly on Twitter, where people appreciate my transparent approach. I also speak regularly at events.

I believe personal branding like this adds credibility to the company — and it would certainly help us if we ever wanted to sell in the future — but it doesn't significantly impact day-to-day sales.

Diversifying the business model

Most of our customers purchase annual subscriptions, so that's fundamental to our revenue. In fact, 66% of our total revenue comes from annual renewals. This is common in the WordPress plugin space, unlike SaaS, which typically uses a monthly payment model.

We also sell lifetime licenses, which typically cost 3 to 4 times the cost of annual licenses. Many people think lifetime licenses are a bad idea, but I think they can benefit both the business and the customer, provided we price them carefully — at more than the typical customer lifetime value. That way, the business gets slightly more per customer and receives the revenue up front instead of over several years. Some customers prefer it.

As we expand into the Shopify app space, we are experimenting with a monthly revenue model. This is common in Shopify.

The Shopify business model brings several benefits compared to selling WordPress plugins. Shopify apps are fully hosted on a SaaS basis and stop working if customers cancel their subscriptions. In contrast, customers self-host WordPress plugins, and these generally continue working even if they stop paying (they just lose access to updates and support). As a result, I expect to see better customer retention in our Shopify apps.

A CEO's stack

In this role, my tech stack centers on ClickUp for project management, time tracking, and team chat. I'm also a heavy Claude user, and a few months ago, I started using it to develop internal tools, such as a tool for creating better sales reports. I've been amazed by the results, and we now have better reports than we've ever had!

I also use Wispr Flow instead of typing. I type incredibly fast, at 90 words per minute, but with Wispr Flow, I can dictate at 160 words per minute, vastly improving my productivity.

I'm a big fan of the Google Drive Suite, so I use Google Docs, Google Sheets, and other tools for company documents. As a WordPress company, WordPress is a core part of our tech stack, and we use it for all our public-facing websites and product demos. We also have an internal company wiki, which is a private WordPress site.

And our main site uses Easy Digital Downloads to sell our plugins.

Automating workflows with Claude Code

If you don't already use Claude Code extensively, you should — even if you're not a developer. Use it to automate and speed up every part of your role. It makes a huge difference.

We used to spend significant time trawling data exports due to limitations in our analytics tool, such as those in Easy Digital Downloads and Google Analytics. Claude built a custom reporting dashboard that combines our sales data with data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and even search volume data via the DataForSEO API.

Now, I can see at a glance exactly how different parts of the business are performing. It even built an Ask AI tab, where I can request any one-off reports in addition to the standard dashboards. The reports include data tables and a wide range of charts that visually represent different aspects of the business.

It built my reports as a custom WordPress plugin, which runs on a private website. This avoids adding load to our main site and allows me to analyze sales data without giving it access to any personally identifiable customer data.

The importance of being AI-native

Here's my advice to indie hackers just starting out — and it differs significantly from how I built Barn2!

First, be an AI-native company; hire as few people as possible. Deeply incorporate AI into all your workflows to keep operations lean and profitable. It's not about specific tasks. Indie hackers should consider every task their business will require and how to use AI for greater efficiency. This is a ground-up approach, not something to add in later.

If you have an established business, reaching that point is very difficult because AI may not be able to optimize your existing processes. However, if you are just starting out, this presents an incredible opportunity.

And second, when choosing products, look for the most future-proof ideas possible. I recommend identifying a major problem you can solve for a specific group of people. Don't think about what platform you'll build it on. Instead, approach it by providing a solution for these people; the rest will naturally evolve.

What's next?

From here, my goals for Barn2 are to reverse the sales reduction and achieve sustained growth. As I said, I will achieve this by:

1. Focusing more on our most successful WordPress products by deeply analyzing our current customers and adjusting product marketing and positioning to better serve their needs. In particular, I will focus on creating clear moats around each product, providing customers a genuine reason to consider them a fundamental, long-term part of their workflow.

2. Expanding into Shopify app sales.

We are currently building a Shopify B2B app and a Shopify Bulk Edit app.

You can find me on X or LinkedIn. I'm very active on X, where I regularly post and discuss different aspects of running a software business. To learn more about our products, visit barn2.com.