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Over the past few years, she's built a portfolio of 19 apps that collectively make $1.8 million a year. All our software products compound on each other. What she's done is really impressive. One platform, 19 apps, tens of thousands of paying customers. I'd recommend anyone to diversify their portfolio of apps. Most founders bet everything on one product, but Katie did the exact opposite. So I called her up to learn more about how she built and grew all these software products. And in this episode, we will dive into the list of 19 different apps that she built, what most people get wrong about the whole portfolio of software approach, and if you're trying to do the same thing, exactly how to find the right first app idea to start your portfolio. All right, guys, let's get into it. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. Okay, real quick before we dive in, one reason Katie is successful is because she finds ideas, builds them, and ships them fast. 19 successful apps in a few years is pretty amazing if you think about it. And I think this shipping muscle is one of the number one skills that separates successful people from everyone else. So after watching this episode and getting inspired, if you feel like you're ready to build your idea, just click the link in the description to get started on your first app. But for now, I want you to enjoy this one so get in. All right, guys, let's get into the episode. Welcome, Katie, to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story? My name is Katie Keith, and I built a remote team that created 20 apps that turn over $1.8 million a year. So today, I'm excited to share more about my journey, how I grew the company, and also how we balance having so many products. All right, well, 20 apps, you run 20 different apps. That's crazy. Can you explain how this even works? How do you run 20 apps? What kind of apps are these? And if you could pull up some of your revenue dashboards and show us would be awesome. 19 of our products are WordPress plugins, and the final one is our new Shopify app. Our plugins are fairly simple, which is how we can have so many. We've got one called Document Library Pro, which lets you add any kind of document library. And we've got lots for WooCommerce. They let you add product tables, product options, protect areas of your store. They're typically, I would say, small to medium apps that let you add specific functionality to your WordPress website or WooCommerce store. So we have a choice of plans. We've got one site, five sites, or 20, where you either have an annual subscription or lifetime. This is our 2025 revenue. You can see it's just over $1.7 million. I know I said $1.8 million earlier. That's because we have other revenue streams such as affiliate income and we offer some development services. In terms of stats, our average monthly revenue is about $150,000 across all of our plugins. It's higher than that in busy months like November and lower in quiet months like December. Over the entire lifetime of the business, we've sold $9.8 million worth of WordPress plugins. Overall, we think that our plugins are used on over 90,000 sites. That's the premium plugins. And also we have free versions of some of our plugins. So that is the total number. For paying customers, we have 17,000 on an active subscription. We do have more paying customers than that because that doesn't include people who bought a lifetime deal, which is about 15% of our revenue. We are going to talk about that a little bit more. I'm excited to talk about how you grew these apps. And I'm sure you're going to have a lot of cool stuff to share there. But before we do, let's talk about ideas. Before you had 19 different ideas, how did you find the first plugin idea to start? How did you find WordPress as this opportunity? How did this whole thing get started? How did you find the idea? Yeah, that's the thing. We never had 19 ideas. We did not sit down and think, let's build 19 WordPress plugins and then launch a Shopify app. It happened much more organic than that. Our first plugin idea actually came from online research. There used to be a website called the WooCommerce Ideas Forum, and we chose an idea that lots of people were voting for. So we built our first plugin, WooCommerce Protected Categories, that's dead simple. It just lets you protect access to categories in your online store. And then our second plugin was PostTablePro, which lists any type of content from a WordPress site in a searchable table. And we got that idea from a client project. We kept adding features and released it as a premium plugin. So once we've got those plugins out there, customers started sending us requests for new features in that plugin. And sometimes it was best to achieve that, not through a feature, but a completely different plugin. So I would say get a product out there and then keep your ears open to get those ideas from your users, because that's when you have that information coming into you without even needing to ask for it. And if you're smart and you think creatively, that can lead to more ideas. Okay, let's switch topics a little bit to growth. You have 20 different plugins that are all serving different types of use cases and 20 different software businesses, that's a lot. For someone that has this sort of portfolio of startups, it's definitely a different way of approaching growth. Can you explain what the biggest needle mover was when it comes to growth? Where do most of your customers come from? Most of our customers have always come from organic search. When we first launched our initial plugin, which was WooCommerce Protected Caste Grays, it was the only plugin that did that. That's why we built it, because we found on a forum that there was a gap in the market. So as a marketer, I started publishing blog posts and tutorials about how to password protect categories in WooCommerce. And because it was unique, we got to the top of Google straight away and we got our first sales within a few days. Now, I know it's not that easy to find a unique idea, particularly 10 years later, but that's what we did. And we've always been very good at producing genuinely helpful, unique content about a wide range of use cases relating to our plugins. Katie's story is incredible. $1.8 million a year from 19 different plugins. But here's what starts to happen when you're running a business at that kind of scale. You start landing bigger customers, start processing their data, and suddenly they're asking about compliance. Sock 2, ISO 27001. These compliance requirements can become blockers to closing enterprise deals, especially when all you want to do as a founder is ship products and sell them. Well, that's where Delve comes in, the sponsor for today's episode. Delve is an AI native compliance platform built for fast growing startups. Their AI agents handle the repetitive work like monitoring your tech stack and auto filling security questionnaires so you can stay focused on building and shipping. In unlike traditional compliance tools, Delve isn't just software. You get support in Slack with responses from their team in about five minutes when you need help. You'll get penetration testing and the audit all in one simple package. Thousands of fast growing companies trust Delve to get compliant quickly without slowing down. For starter story listeners, Delve is offering an exclusive $1,500 discount on any compliance framework. So if you're ready to get compliant without the headache, check out Delve at the link in the description or go to delve.co. Thank you to Delve for sponsoring today's video. Let's get back to the story. Okay, cool. So number one source of traffic. That's cool. You do run 20 different products though. I'm curious if there's any strategy there in terms of having all these different products. How does this help you grow? It's really helpful having so many products, especially ones that are very closely related because it means that we can cross promote them and get multiple sales from the same customer. And there are many ways that I would recommend doing that. We've got one plug-in and two plug-in bundles. And this is a key part of how we benefit from having so many products. For each of our products, we have selected a closely related plug-in that we try to upsell with it. We then do additional tasks such as after three days following the purchase, we send an email offering them 50% off their next plug-in. On Black Friday, we have separate email campaigns for potential customers and existing customers. And for the existing customers, we will use language like discount off your next plug-in. And I think the trick there is to target the customers and segment your list so that you are recommending very closely related products to the one that they're already using. And that maximizes the light you heard that they're going to buy. And then you can keep sending the message home, things like banners on your settings pages and constantly reminding them you have these complimentary products which are directly relevant to the one you're already using. Okay, cool. Well, I think what you're doing at Barn 2 is awesome. This idea of having like a portfolio of software products, I think it was a lot harder, maybe even 10 years ago to sort of have all these apps. You're at the age of AI where you can make, you can build stuff more easily. You don't have to have as big of an engineering team to do this sort of thing. And then you have all these opportunities of cross-selling where you build something else and it's useful for the same customer. There's a lot of advantages to having this portfolio of software products. If you watch our channel, you'll see we've interviewed a bunch of people that have sometimes five, sometimes 10, sometimes 20 like you. So I'm curious, if you were to start over today, obviously you started this business a long time ago, you built up all this customer equity and all this stuff. What would be your playbook to building multiple apps or plugins if you're a start over today in 2026? If I was starting over today, here's my playbook as to how I would approach building a software company with multiple products. For step one, I would focus on an area I'm already familiar with. If I'm building WordPress websites for clients, then I would look at creating WordPress products. I would look at thinking about where your experience is because that's where you have unique insights into the gaps and what the user is looking for. For step two, I would come up with several product ideas at the same time. That means start with a long list, research and validate every idea and choose a handful of ideas that have the most potential. And then prioritize the ideas that have overlapping markets so that you get that cross-promotion opportunity. Step three would be to start by building the product that has the most potential in terms of having the largest audience where you think you can carve out some market share for yourself marketing-wise and use that as your starting point. Build that and launch it as your only product. Don't build multiple products and launch them all at once because every time you build a product, you need to give it a decent amount of time to do the marketing and grow it without distractions and also to listen to your early users and continue improving that product. Don't spread yourself too thin by launching five at once. And then step four is that when you are ready to launch your second product, market it as a standalone product and develop advanced cross-promotion tactics. That might include linking between them on your website, emailing users of your existing product about the new one with discounts, asking if they want to beta test, adding pages about the other product to your documentation. Also, things like post-purchase emails are useful. And then step five is repeat the above process until you have a decent portfolio of products, each of which generate revenue, but that you haven't spread yourself so thin that you can't do any of them justice. Well, thanks for sharing that. I love the multiple product strategy. And the more I see people like you successful with it, the more I realize how many people are also successful. We did this awesome interview with someone called John Rush, who has a similar strategy. And he's cross-selling everything across each product. And I think it's something that clearly has worked for you and it's going to continue to get even bigger. So anybody who's watching this, I think there's a lot to learn from this. I want to switch topics a little bit, Katie, and ask you about how you run your business. What's the tech stack? What tools and software and stack and coding languages do you use to run this business that makes nearly $2 million a year? Yeah, we combine various tools to run the business. We are linking very heavily on ClickUp these days. We use it for project management, time tracking, company chat. We use GitHub, which is free to store the source code repositories for all of our products. We use Zapier a lot for automations. We use WordPress, obviously, for our company website. And we also use lots of WordPress plugins, but in particular, easy digital downloads, which is the e-commerce software that we use to sell our plugins and sort out all the licensing and the download delivery and so on, which costs us about $300 a year. Cool. Well, thanks for sharing that. One last question that we ask everyone who comes on the channel, Katie, if you could go back in time before you had started the first plugin, before you had started your business, what would be your advice to you young Katie starting out? Or to anyone watching this who wants to build useful software on the internet, maybe it's plugins, maybe it's SaaS, what would be your advice? My advice would be to just do it, which means get to work and launch a product. Because once you get something out into the world, then opportunities start coming your way. Even if your first product isn't a success, you'll learn a huge amount from the experience and you'll hopefully receive feedback and feature requests, which can lead to other successful products in the future. Whereas if you do nothing, then nothing will happen for you. Great advice. Thanks, Katie, for coming on. Super cool business you built. You can check out all the different plugins they built on their website. Super cool niche stuff. You might get some ideas. Thanks for coming on and sharing and inspiring. Thanks for having me. Okay. Gus, starter story producer. What do you think about this one? Yeah, I think I really like the multi product approach thing that she was talking about, not putting all your eggs in one basket. It feels like just a smart thing to do. I don't know. Those are my initial impressions. But yeah, what do you think? Yeah, there's something in the changing of the times where before you would be crazy to have multiple products. Why? Because building multiple products meant multiple engineering teams, typically when it came to software. So that when there's a bug in one software, if you're having a bug a day in your software, then you have 19 softwares and you have 19 bugs a day and then your life is a living hell. But with AI, you don't really need engineering teams to build stuff now. Actually software is becoming commoditized and you can spin up an app in one day in the audience and the customer is what's valuable. What she said and I will just reiterate it again is that when she didn't do it the right way, she built random apps for different customers. When she was doing it the right way in terms of the multi product strategy, she was building different apps for the same customer but selling it as a separate. Instead of adding it as a feature to this big monolith app, she was creating another app and then cross selling it, which is actually better for the customer because they don't need everything and it can be confusing with plugins. You can have all 19 installed and it just works. Yeah, totally. And yeah, you mentioned this during the interview, but we interviewed like John Rush a while back. That was a really good interview, but similar thing where he's building kind of all these different tools that like layer on each other. And that's just like a smart approach. For someone like me, I always kind of have the beginner mindset, how can I just get one out the door but kind of thinking about like, oh, if I get one project out the door, how can I build something on top of it? It also reminds me of that guy, he did the interview on the treadmill. I forget his name. He did all the like his was mobile apps, but they were all health apps related to each other and he did similar like cross promotion. So I know it's kind of an interesting strategy. I don't know. Yeah, I think the one thing to take away is, you know, we can get excited about the five different 20 different apps that you're going to build, but her biggest takeaway was find an idea, something that you know a little bit about and then build that first thing. She didn't say build five things in a row. She said build the first thing and then ideas will come to you like water. So for anyone watching this that wants to build their first thing, you know, I'm going to say starter story builds, click the link in the description. We will help you find a good idea, build it and get it in the hands of real customers within a couple days. If you want to do your first idea, I would click that link in the description and you can get started right now. All right. Thank you guys for watching. Hope you enjoyed this one. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.
