There is a particular kind of story that does not get told enough.
Not the zero-to-one story. Not the viral launch or the overnight success. The longer one - where someone builds something real, grows it methodically over a decade, and then has to figure out how to keep growing when the conditions that made them successful begin to change.
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That is where Katie Keith is right now. She cofounded Barn2 in 2010, pivoted from web design to WordPress plugins in 2016, and has since built a suite of 19 products that now generates $1.6M per year. In March 2026, Barn2 crossed $10M in lifetime plugin sales.
And yet: growth has plateaued. Here is what happened, and what she is doing about it.
When the TikTok organic views slowed, revenue dropped. There was no second channel to fall back on. Louis-David made the call to sell, exiting for $150,000 - a fraction of what the business had generated, but a clear outcome once the growth engine stalled.
Four months after that exit, he is already generating $3,000 to $4,000 per month across a new portfolio of apps - including Archetype, a personality and identity app built on MBTI, astrology, and human design, and Tappy, a B2B digital loyalty card product for small businesses. The pace of his rebuild says something about how much he absorbed from the first round.
From Services to Software
Katie started Barn2 with her husband Andy because she wanted flexibility, not a rigid schedule. Client work gave her that, but product businesses promised something more: scalability.
Their first plugin, WooCommerce Protected Categories, launched in 2016. It was deliberately narrow in scope - a focused solution in a niche part of the WooCommerce ecosystem. The logic was simple: WooCommerce had a large enough user base that even a niche product could find an audience.
It worked immediately. The product had no competition at launch, ranked at the top of Google quickly, and started making sales within days. That early success set the template for the next decade: build niche plugins, rank organically, grow steadily.
Andy stepped back from the business in 2024. Katie now runs Barn2 with a remote team of 15. The portfolio has grown to 19 premium WordPress and WooCommerce plugins, plus a Shopify app.
Why Growth Stalled
From 2016 to mid-2024, revenue grew consistently. Since then, it has stabilized - but that stability is being carried by annual renewals, not new sales. New sales are declining.
Katie attributes this to two shifts happening simultaneously:
More people are using AI tools to code their own simple solutions, rather than buying utility plugins to handle specific features.
How people discover plugins has changed. Google organic search used to be Barn2's primary growth channel. Now, AI overviews intercept many of those queries - and even when AI recommends Barn2 products, the conversion rate is lower. Users do not see the branding, the website, the calls to action, or the newsletter signup.
It is a compounding problem. The same category of products most vulnerable to being replaced by AI - simple utility plugins - also happens to be the category that relied most heavily on Google search for discovery.
The Pivot to Shopify
Katie's response is not to fight the trend, but to navigate around it. The clearest move: expand into Shopify.
Her reasoning is specific, not general. Shopify apps are discovered primarily through the Shopify App Store, not Google. That changes the exposure problem entirely. It also changes the business model: Shopify apps are fully hosted on a SaaS basis, and they stop working if a customer cancels - which tends to improve retention compared to self-hosted WordPress plugins, which typically keep working even after payment stops.
Barn2 already has one Shopify app live. Two more are in development: a B2B app and a bulk editing tool.
"For various reasons, Shopify apps appear less threatened by AI than WordPress plugins. Nearly everyone finds apps on Shopify's App Store rather than via Google, which completely changes discovery."
Beyond Shopify, Katie is also focusing more resources on Barn2's most successful WordPress products - building clearer positioning and making them a more fundamental part of customers' workflows, rather than optional add-ons that are easy to replace.
How She Actually Runs the Business
After 15 years, the stack is lean and deliberate.
Katie uses ClickUp for project management and team communication. For writing and note-taking, she uses Wispr Flow to dictate at 160 words per minute instead of typing. Google Drive handles documentation. WordPress underpins the public websites, product demos, and an internal company wiki.
She is also a regular Claude user. A few months ago, she used Claude Code to build a custom reporting dashboard that combines sales data from Easy Digital Downloads and Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and search volume data via the DataForSEO API. The dashboard runs as a private WordPress plugin, keeping customer data separate from the analytics system.
She works around 30 hours a week. Some weeks that spills into evenings and weekends; others she takes days off entirely. That flexibility was the original goal in 2010, and it still holds.
What She Would Do Differently
If she were starting over today, Katie would build differently from the ground up.
She would build bigger products - ones that solve essential problems and become a core part of customers' workflows, not utility plugins that are easy to replicate or replace.
She would be AI-native from day one - using AI to keep operations lean, rather than layering it in on top of existing processes that were not designed for it.
She would hire as few people as possible and keep the business model as simple as it can be.
On that last point, she is direct: the opportunity for new businesses today is significant, precisely because AI tools allow a very small team to do what previously required many more people. But that only works if you build with it in mind from the start, not as an afterthought.
Where to Follow Along
Katie is active on X and LinkedIn, where she shares specifics about running a software business: pricing decisions, product strategy, and what is working or not. She is also a regular speaker at WordPress events.
To see the products and the business she has built, visit barn2.com.
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