[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case WooCommerce innovations, and trends selling online.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea featured, on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have James Kemp. James is the Core Product Lead for WooCommerce. After working with WooCommerce, running a plugin shop for 10 years, he joined the team at the end of 2023 to help shape the future of e-commerce.

James talks about his journey with WordPress and WooCommerce, and explains his role at Automattic, where he’s tasked with connecting the community’s feedback to the developments in WooCommerce, ensuring that the Woo platform continually evolves and improves.

He discusses the innovations within WooCommerce, the challenges of balancing the needs of small and large scale stores, and how the team navigates an environment filled with both competitors and opportunities.

He gets into the positive impact of WooCommerce’s recent rebranding, and how the system positions itself amidst the ever-growing competition from SaaS platforms like Shopify.

James shares his insights into the trends shaping e-commerce, like the seamless integration of newer technologies and consumer buying habits.

If you’re keen to understand the breadth of WooCommerce’s impact on e-commerce, or are curious about the direction of online shopping, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you James Kemp.

I am joined on the podcast by James Kemp. Hello James.

[00:02:50] James Kemp: Hello, how are you?

[00:02:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Nice to speak to you. James is on the podcast today to talk all things WooCommerce. And he really is a very, very credible person to talk about WooCommerce, because James is the Core Product Lead for WooCommerce over at Automattic.

However, when I say that title, James, I don’t really know what it means. Will you just enlighten us? And also, if you feel like throwing some other biographical information at us about your history with WordPress and things like that, feel free.

[00:03:17] James Kemp: Of course. Yeah, I mean, we’ve spoken a couple of times on a podcast like this. I don’t know if we’ve done the Tavern one before.

But yeah, as a quick introduction, I started using WordPress in 2009, and I started building with WooCommerce in 2011. And from that time I worked with customers and specifically like building websites for customers who needed websites.

And in that time I built up a collection of plugins, which I sold on a premium basis, which eventually turned into IconicWP, which was a WooCommerce plugin shop with 14 or 15 premium plugins. Sold that, well, that was acquired in 2021 by Liquid Web, Stellar. And I stayed there for a couple of years, carried on working. My whole team came over with the acquisition. We carried on just working as we were really, but under this kind of bigger brand of products and WordPress software, which was quite nice. It was nice to kind of get that experience from companies selling products like we were, but they were at a much bigger scale than we were at the time. That was a nice experience.

And then, yeah, towards the end of that, I reached out to Paul, who was the CEO, at the time, of WooCommerce, and just kind of said, I feel like I could have a good impact on WooCommerce itself, is there anything there for me? And I was kind of open to whatever that might look like. There was no job description that I applied for. I just kind of reached out and said, this is what I want to do, this is what, I like doing, this is what I’m good at. And then, yeah, here we are just over a year since I joined.

I joined as a product manager. And like you say, now I’m a Core Product Manager, which is a new role within WooCommerce. So a Product Manager would be, and for context, there’s eight or nine Product Managers within WooCommerce. When I joined, we each kind of had an area of focus. So my area was order management. So any project or improvement or just, my day to day would be looking at order management and, how can we make this better? It kind of shifted outside of that a bit as well into other areas. But each Product Manager has that kind of role where they’re focused on one kind of key area of WooCommerce.

But there was never really any product manager that had an overall vision of the whole product. And that’s what the Core Product Manager role is. So I’m less focused on one specific area, and more focused on just, how can we make the whole thing better? And part of that role is kind of connecting the dots a bit. One team’s working on this, another team’s working on that, how do they overlap? But also connecting the community dots to the stuff that we actually put out there. So, what are people asking for? What are the common kind of requests that people have, or the complaints that people have? Or even the positives that people have and, how can we make those things better?

[00:06:12] Nathan Wrigley: So is there just one of you? So there’s one Core Product Lead. There’s not multiple of those.

[00:06:18] James Kemp: Correct.

[00:06:18] Nathan Wrigley: Oh gosh, that’s really interesting. So you’ve got like the 10,000 mile high view of the entire project. And so you are kind of open to suggestions, innovations, improvements, tweaks, that all comes under the purview of your job.

[00:06:32] James Kemp: Correct, yeah. There’s different areas. There’s what we call product, which is kind of the user facing experience. And by user I mean merchant, and probably customer as well, so the visual aspects of the product that people interact with. And then there’s the platform side of things, which are backend architecture and performance and all those kinds of things.

So I’m primarily focused on the front end aspect, not front end but, you know, the core experience we call it. I am actually focused a lot on the platform side of things at the moment as well, because the person who usually does that is on sabbatical, so I’m kind of helping out a bit there. And it’s quite nice to have, you know, that understanding as well, for approaching core experience type things. And it also encompasses the WooCommerce app and many of our premium extensions, many of our marketplace extensions, premium or free.

[00:07:22] Nathan Wrigley: I’m guessing that if you ask anybody the question, is their inbox pretty full? You know, the to-do list that you have is pretty full, everybody would probably say, yeah, I’ve got plenty on my plate. But it sounds as if you may well have a lot on your plate.

Now, I don’t know if there’s a lot that you’ve got to deal with in there, and you’ve got a lot of ideas, and innovations that you’d like to push forward. But is it fair to say that there’s a ton of innovation still to be done inside of WooCommerce?

[00:07:46] James Kemp: Yeah, for sure. It’s something that I’m still trying to figure out. Like, how do you stay on top of all of these things and, where is my input within this most valuable? Because I’m still working alongside all the other product managers.

And actually that’s been really nice to kind of connect with a product manager that’s working on something specific, and work with them to make that the best it can be for WooCommerce.

But yeah, I’m still trying to figure out how to like organise all of these things so they’re not just in my head, but they’re out there in a manageable way.

[00:08:18] Nathan Wrigley: How do you get intelligence about what needs to be done? I mean, obviously there’s the team within Automattic that you deal directly with, I would’ve thought of, but do you keep your door of your office kind of half open a little bit? Are you prepared to listen to community suggestions?

And again, I’m not trying to get you to give out your email address or anything, but is there that element still? Do you still listen to people out in the community, users, and what have you? Do they come directly to you, or is there some kind of filtration process which people have to go through in order to get ideas in your head?

[00:08:46] James Kemp: There’s many ways. Yeah, I think one of the things that I love most is talking to the people that actually use it. And I do that primarily on X or Twitter. I talk to a lot of people over there.

The downside to that is the majority of them are agencies and developers. It’s not a downside, the downside being that I don’t get that kind of open communication necessarily with merchants directly. So if I want to talk to a merchant that’s more of a filtered, as you say, it’s an intentional, you know, I have to reach out to a merchant and schedule a call and all that kind of stuff. There is the occasional merchant on X, but it’s not their stomping ground.

So yeah, I’m also in the Slack, the WooCommerce community Slack. Some of what I’ve implemented is these kind of external channels within our own Slack. So one example of that is a project we’re working on for fulfillment statuses, where I got Becca from Kestrel WP and Patrick Garman from Minesize into one of our internal Slack rooms to discuss and kind of help shape this project. So they’re directly involved in that way in stuff that we’re working on.

And I think something that we really want to do is be really transparent with like, this is what we’re working on. You may well have seen over the course of the last year or so that that has been the case, via GitHub discussions, via the Developer Blog, via Slack, the community Slack. But yeah, I love getting feedback from people on Twitter. I still don’t know what to call it, Twitter or X.

[00:10:18] Nathan Wrigley: I often wonder if the sort of inside baseball of WordPress is a little bit hard to penetrate, because I’m imagining there’s a lot of people who use WordPress that in a million years have never opened up the WordPress Slack, GitHub is not a thing for them. And I’ve always wondered how people such as yourself, you know, in senior positions get that information. How does it get to you? And X, Bluesky, whatever the alternative is, that’s a really interesting way of kind of completely circumventing that process. I will make sure that your profile, your X profile is linked in here and then people can reach out on that basis. Yeah, that’s great. Thank you.

Let’s just paint the picture of Woo, and how big it is because we keep hearing the statistic. The one that everybody talks about is this 43%, which is the WordPress statistic. And I never quite know how to manage that in my head, what that exactly means. But a fairly sizable number is also the e-commerce side, the WooCommerce side of WordPress.

Where are we at in terms of the web, and in terms of WordPress, how much of WordPress is WooCommerce, and how much of the internet is Woo? And every time I hear this number, it changes a little bit. But every time I hear it, it’s still breathtakingly large.

[00:11:24] James Kemp: Yeah, that’s an interesting one actually. In terms of how much of WordPress is Woo, I’m not sure on that. I think we could probably calculate that based on the figures I do have, which is how much of e-commerce is WooCommerce, and that is 37%.

[00:11:41] Nathan Wrigley: 37%. Okay, so whatever the percentage is, be it the top million websites or the top 10,000 websites, whatever that metric is, let’s assume that that’s solid and safe. 37% is done on a WooCommerce platform. That is breathtaking.

[00:11:56] James Kemp: Which is a huge amount, for the listeners, and for you if you want to check it out later. If you go to woocommerce.com/newsroom, we update these numbers every month. We have some numbers there, like there’s 3.6 million live installations. 37% of e-commerce sites are powered by WooCommerce. There’s 1,000 plus official marketplace extensions. That’s actually going to grow, I think substantially this year.

And then, yeah, some other stats that are listed there, which I think are useful to keep an eye on. And there’s, I believe the team that updates those numbers kind of, they take the data primarily from Store Leads, which is a data gathering outfit. And I think they kind of dial them back a bit, rather than, you know, inflating them, I think they actually go the other way.

[00:12:41] Nathan Wrigley: In terms of the trend of that, so the 37%, I’m not looking at that chart at the moment, but is your impression that, has it stagnated, has it gone up broadly in the last, let’s say five years, something like that? Is WooCommerce basically growing, stagnating, declining?

[00:12:54] James Kemp: Over the five year, I would expect it’s gone up. There’s no graph to look at. There probably is somewhere, but I don’t have it in front of me now. But I do know that this was updated this week, I believe. And it was updated from 35% to 37. So there’s definite growth there. And I would expect, just the nature of e-commerce in general, that that number’s grown over the course.

[00:13:16] Nathan Wrigley: When you say that, what’s the thing in your head which is promoting you to say the nature of e-commerce? Because I really don’t follow e-commerce, but I have this impression that during the lockdown period, 2019 and on, it felt like everybody, for very credible reasons, had to move whatever they were selling to an online format. So I imagine there was a bump there.

But also it feels like the world is now inundated with pocket size technology, which means that I can buy anything 24/7, no matter where I am. And so it feels like high streets in the UK, the shutters are going up. Bricks and mortar shops seem to be closing. Certainly where I live, that is a broad trend. It’s not particularly rapid, but it’s definitely a trend.

And I’m imagining that the confluence of mobile technology, ubiquity of internet connection, computers available all over the place, certainly in the country where you and I both live. It feels like this inexorable rise, this trend towards purchasing things at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, sitting on a sofa, a bus, wherever you might be. It does feel like that’s the way the world is moving. Are those kind of the intuitions that you have when you say WooCommerce is rising for obvious reasons?

[00:14:23] James Kemp: Yeah, exactly. I think just the nature of the internet and the online world has kind of exponentially grown since its inception, right? And I would expect that e-commerce will grow with it.

I think one of the greatest things about the internet is that you can buy online. I should look into the history actually, but I can’t imagine what the thought process was back when the internet was invented. Did they imagine that e-commerce would be a thing? That people would buy stuff, even from the other side of the world, and have it shipped out to them in a matter of days or weeks.

And I just think as technology evolves, and we’ve seen the boom in AI, and just the boom in like generational development on computers, and coding and all of that is advancing, and I think e-commerce will follow suit as well.

[00:15:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it feels like there’s no place but an upward trend for e-commerce. Now, whether or not WooCommerce fits into that landscape perfectly in the next decade, we’ll see. But it feels like I, and I can really only rely on myself, I feel like I’m going to buy more things online in the decade to come than I am this year. It feels like each and every year, my desire to get on my bike and go into the town centre dwindles, and I’m far more likely to buy things online.

And now the merchants have pivoted their offerings so that, you know, if you don’t like it, you can freely return it and things like that. So even the impediments that were there have suddenly changed, and it’s just remarkable.

And also the mere fact, just capture in your head for a moment, the fact that you can get all of this for no money down. The WooCommerce platform, and I know, in order to get the best out of it, you will definitely want marketplace things, third party, but other places as well. But the thing is free. It’s completely free. And I find that utterly remarkable. I just think that’s breathtaking in all honesty, that that’s available.

[00:16:15] James Kemp: Yeah, I think it’s one of the key selling points about WooCommerce is that you can get started for free, as close to free as possible, when you account for hosting and transactional fees that naturally come with any platform.

But on top of that, with WooCommerce specifically, and with the age of AI now, you could make WooCommerce do what you want it to do for free. And every site could be tailored to specific needs, and like a specific execution of functionality without too much technical knowledge, which I think is really interesting.

And you’ve seen people are building apps, and I’ve built a few as well, specifically for needs that they want to solve. I saw one yesterday, I think it was Maddie on, Twitter, I can link to it. She built an app to automatically put an emoji over faces in photos. I don’t know if you’ve seen, when parents share photos of other people’s children and that kind of thing, they typically put an emoji over the face. She said she was getting annoyed at having to do that with every photo. But we’re in that era now where you can kind of roll these things with no technical knowledge, whether the output is good, I think is questionable, but it’s pretty good.

[00:17:24] Nathan Wrigley: Does the advent of AI, and what you’re suggesting, you can add your third party stuff, if you like, for want of a better word, to WooCommerce with the assistance of AI. Does that undermine the longevity of the free, open source WooCommerce project? Because I imagine that there’s a lot of underpinnings there, you know, the marketplace that WooCommerce, as I imagine those plugins that are sold to add different functionality and what have you, that must in some way pay for the freeness of it all.

Does AI, does that concern you? You know, that if we erode the need to purchase third party software in order to get out what you desire, yeah, does that erode the possibility of WooCommerce being free in the future?

[00:18:05] James Kemp: I don’t think so. I think it assists. I think it depends what you’re making. Like, I wouldn’t want to build out a full subscriptions platform just using an AI prompt. And maybe that will become more advanced in the future. I think as someone running a business, you don’t want to be dealing with this code yourself, maintaining it, making sure it stays up to date. And I think that’s the case for, or that has been the case since e-commerce software existed. There used to be a trend of rolling your own e-commerce solutions, and I think that’s less likely to happen these days.

[00:18:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s a good point. If you think about just a regular WordPress website, if it’s just a brochure site with no e-commerce attached, go with the AI, you know, it seems like there’s loads of scope there. But obviously if you’ve got the compliance, and the financial obligation, and all of the law that underpins an e-commerce shop, I imagine there are impediments in people’s heads which will say, wait, did an AI make that? Are we really going to trust that? So maybe it inoculates itself given the nature of the websites which are in question.

Okay, just moving on, tell us a little bit about the kind of people that are using WooCommerce. Now, I know this is a very, very broad question, but in my head, for some reason I have it, that a significant amount of people that are using WooCommerce will be small stores. But I’m guessing also maybe WooCommerce really does dig deep into the enterprise as well. Does it run the gamut of everything? Or is there a kind of focus for you, and teams within Automattic because there’s a certain type of clientele which largely consume WooCommerce?

[00:19:37] James Kemp: Yeah, it does kind of span everything. So people just starting out either want low cost, in which case WooCommerce is an obvious choice. You can start setting things up, especially for brand new e-commerce, whereas they’re just selling single products. There’s nothing too technical there that would require an expense of some kind. So it’s super easy to spin up a WooCommerce site and test it out pretty much free.

So yeah, we have that audience. It’s not necessarily our focus, our focus is primarily the higher revenue, higher traffic e-commerce stores, because that’s the aspiration for anyone selling, right? They want to become successful, they want that to be their business, is e-commerce. And those are the users that we’re focused on. And then naturally anything we do for them is going to trickle down to benefit the people who are just starting out with the platform.

So it does span a wide range of users, but we do focus in on the higher revenue and high product volume, high traffic, those kind of things. Or at least that’s what we’re focusing on this year. That target evolves over time. But that’s been our focus for most of my time since I’ve been here. So it’s nice to have that vision of who’s using it and what we can do to make the platform as good as possible for them.

[00:20:52] Nathan Wrigley: We have this expression in the UK, Jack of all trades, master of none. I don’t know how that works outside of the boundaries of the UK, but it basically means if you try to be everything to everybody, you sort of succeed at nothing. It’s something akin to that basically.

And I’m wondering if there are bits of WooCommerce which you have to manage those sort of trade offs. Like, okay, if we build this thing, which feels like it’s a real enterprisey thing, how is that going to work with our more modest users, let’s say?

Or if we really focus on the more modest users, how are the enterprise going to feel like that? And it not being a niche, and it being the full spectrum of sites out there, yeah, at times that must be actually quite frustrating, I would’ve thought.

[00:21:29] James Kemp: It’s a challenge, yeah. It’s something that we’re working on at the moment, is making the base of WooCommerce have the majority of features for the majority of users, the features that you’d expect in an e-commerce platform, which I’ve touched on in other podcasts if you want to go and find them.

But it’s a process called More in Core, which is the kind of code name for it. Where we’re just trying to build out the base product to have the majority of things that merchants and builders need, without needing to go and find all these plugins and custom development and things like that.

But the challenge is which features. The features that people need are going to change depending on what type of store they’re running. So I’ve seen a lot of people want subscriptions in Core. And then I’ve also seen the complete opposite where people don’t want subscriptions in Core because they see it as bloat. There’s a challenge there for sure, to figure out what that kind of sweet spot is without being bloated, but also without nickel and dimming, and making the average number of plugins required too high or too low.

[00:22:28] Nathan Wrigley: I’ve often thought that if I worked at Microsoft on Windows, the software, the OS, it would be my constant annoyance that I had to think about every possible permutation of hardware that could ever be used. Whereas if I worked for Apple and was working on the Mac OS project, it’d be like, there’s just this one set of hardware, it’s just so much more straightforward, we build it.

And I imagine that commercial rivals, things like Shopify, and we can get into that in a moment, probably have it easier in that sense because there isn’t this, well, I know that they have an ecosystem of sort of third party apps, I believe they’re called. But there isn’t this whole backwards compatibility thing that 5,000 different plugins that bind into WooCommerce and what have you. And so I guess you’ve always got to be taking real careful steps when you develop a new feature or tweak anything, which maybe the other platforms don’t have to think about in quite the same way.

[00:23:16] James Kemp: Yeah, I actually posted about that exact thing on X or Twitter earlier. I’m just going to call it X. I want to call it Twitter, but I’m going to call it X. It’s a challenge because, and this touches on the 37% number, like any update we roll out is affecting over a third of all e-commerce stores online, which is a crazy number.

It has to be backwards compatible, it has to be rolled out in a way that isn’t going to break things. There’s a lot more consideration that needs to happen because of the multitude of environments that could exist. There could be bad hosting, there could be good hosting. There could be low performance, high performance, number of products, different plugins, different themes.

For a platform like ours, that is one of the greatest challenges, but also one of the greatest strengths as well, because of how flexible it is. In a platform like Shopify, like you say, they have an app marketplace, but it’s a lot more restricted. There’s only really a handful of ways to do something. Whereas with WooCommerce, you’ve kind of got full control because you are hosting it yourself. You can pretty much do anything. Which, like I say, is a challenge, but also a strength.

It requires navigation, and I touched on this in a, I do a monthly, Inside wooCommerce podcast. The last one that went out was with Julia, who is the lead for our release process. And it’s worth a listen, because it’s quite interesting to hear, now, how we roll out releases and how we’re able to test and watch for signals for issues that might arise. And be able to roll it back, fix that, and then roll out the updates. There’s quite a nice process there now, which we’ll obviously refine as time goes on, but yeah, it’s a challenge.

[00:24:59] Nathan Wrigley: More recently, and we don’t need to get into the story behind it, but there is a story behind it. But the Automatticians, so the people that work for Automattic, have in some cases been repurposed. So their work that they’ve been doing for many years in one direction has now been pivoted. And I think it’s probably fair to say that focusing on things which generate revenue is a crucial part of the decision behind that.

I’m wondering if that’s had an impact. So this whole thing is not really that old, it’s maybe only five, six weeks old, something like that, so maybe it hasn’t yet. But I’m wondering if it’s had actually a positive impact on the teams that you work with, or maybe there’s steady away, no change.

[00:25:38] James Kemp: I would say there’s no change actually. I mean, WooCommerce has always been, we’re building a free product, but we are also a business, and we’ve always been a business. We wouldn’t be able to afford to put out a product and not have any money coming in to continue developing it. There’s always been a business aspect to WooCommerce.

But yeah, the teams that have kind of moved off of the open source contributions that they were making previously, I haven’t seen any of them come over to WooCommerce. And maybe they have, if they come in as engineers, then I probably wouldn’t see that anyway. But yeah, in my day to day, I haven’t seen an impact. But, you know, Automattic has multiple products and experiments and things that exist outside of WooCommerce, and I honestly don’t dig into them too much. I’m very focused on the WooCommerce side of things.

[00:26:27] Nathan Wrigley: You’ve recently, I say you, WooCommerce recently had an entire upending of the branding. If you don’t follow it very closely, it may be that you haven’t seen this story, but maybe it was not that long ago in the last week or so. It feels like the message dropped that a lot of the branding has been redone, and I often look at rebranding and I think why all that effort?

What was really the point of that? What was the need to upend everything, and make people have to see something new? And I’m just wondering if you know what the point of that was? I mean, it’s nice. It looks lovely. Don’t get me wrong. I thoroughly love it. But I’m curious as to what the reasoning was. Did it feel stale previously? What was going on there? Do you know?

[00:27:06] James Kemp: All of the above, yeah. So I’ve known about the branding, in its current form of, what it’s gonna be like since maybe October last year. And it’s been really interesting to watch. If you compare what we had previously against this, it’s clear like why it had to happen. The branding that we had previously was the same branding that WooCommerce had when it was initially formed via WooThemes. If you compare it, it just looks out of date. The colors are flat and, not very inspiring. And the new branding now allows us to be a bit more modern, I think. It’s modernized the brand.

But it also opens us up to be able to go out and do more effective marketing and acquisition that we haven’t done prior. Branding isn’t just changing the logo and updating some colors. There’s a whole array of assets that come with it, and like a story behind the assets and what we’re trying to put out there into the world. Which we didn’t have before, we just had a logo and some colors.

[00:28:04] Nathan Wrigley: There’s this sort of nod to a shopping cart in the W of Woo, which is actually quite clever, I think. And you’re right, it does just smack of more modern.

Being a complete non-designer, I can never summon up the vocabulary to express why I think something looks good. But saw the new branding, and I saw the video that was associated with that, and I did think, yeah, that’s great. That looks really great, but I can’t for the life of me tell you why it looks great.

But interestingly though, was there a market push, not just because it was stale, and let’s move this conversation into the rise of the SaaS. Because over the last period, the Wixs, the Squarespaces, the Shopify and all of these other things, I’m sure there’s many more. They’ve brought to the market a fairly affordable alternative. There’s nothing free, as far as I’m aware, but it’s a fairly low monthly cost. And I imagine over time these companies are eating up some of the new people, maybe even taking people from WooCommerce. I imagine it’s a bit of ebb and flow and what have you.

But was it that, were they becoming more professional, more visible in the world? Super Bowl ads and all that kind of thing. Was there some of that in the rebranding as well?

[00:29:14] James Kemp: Yeah, I imagine so. I think if you look at our branding previously, I don’t think it was necessarily thought out as a brand as such. I think it evolved over time. Whereas this was, the rebrand was much more focused, who are we trying to connect with here? What type of customer are we trying to pull in? And how can we reach them? What do they want to see? And I don’t think we had that before.

And yeah, definitely it helps us compete with these SaaS solutions that are quite easy to pitch. You know, influencer can pitch this stuff, because they have cool branding and, it’s hard to say really.

Like I think you could say about any product, like if Apple had a really badly designed, like 3D Apple from the nineties as their logo. In this modern era of what you expect from a brand, and a brand that’s powering 37% of all e-commerce or, I don’t what Apple’s market share on mobile devices is, but I imagine it’s pretty high.

It’s just something that needs to be considered, and there needs to be a thought process behind why we look like we do, and who we want to attract with that. And we didn’t have that before with the previous speech bubble thing.

[00:30:25] Nathan Wrigley: I remember listening to, I believe it was Bill Gates, this is many years ago, and Bill Gates was asked a question by an interviewer and it was, what keeps you awake at night, in terms of the longevity of Microsoft? And he said three things. Google, Google and Google. And basically he’s terrified of Google.

I’m gonna pitch the same sort of question to you. Of the SaaS things out there, are there any bits out there which make the Woo team think, oh gosh, that’s interesting. We need to copy that?

Does the sort of gouging out of the pricing, their very affordable pricing, those kind of things. How do you cope with that? How do you compete with that, with something which is basically free? I don’t know if that keeps you awake at night.

[00:31:06] James Kemp: Obviously like any business has its competitors. There’s nothing that’s come up that we’ve been like, oh, we’ve got to copy that and we’ve got to get that in. It’s more like comparatively are we offering an equal playing field to a potential customer?

And this ties back into the More in Core stuff that I was talking about. Is there stuff that not just Shopify, but other platforms have in their core offering, and this may be like low priced or free plans, or there’s other self-hosted versions as well that exist. They are comparatively free. Are we offering the same functionality? Do we have those essential features available? Yeah, we do, but do we charge for them? Probably, if there’s stuff that’s missing, there’s probably a premium extension for it. Or there’s a free extension for it, but it requires the merchant to go out and find it, rather than like us presenting it to them as a solution when they need it contextually.

Yeah, things like that are definitely considerations. We need to be innovating, and we need to be keeping up as well. That could be said about any platform versus another platform that there’s always, again, going back to Apple, Apple and Samsung have this kind of to and fro.

So yeah, it’s a consideration for sure. The target audience of someone going onto Shopify versus someone going onto WooCommerce is slightly different. The kind of core things that they are looking for are what we need to be offering.

[00:32:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s interesting because if I was a WooCommerce user, which as I explained I’m not, that would be the sentence I needed to hear, I think. The people working in the offices and the places where you are working is, okay, we are keeping an eye on what the competition are doing. And if something is a moving, shaking feature, which is upsetting the industry and everybody wants it, then you’ve at least got your beedy on it.

[00:32:55] James Kemp: That’s one part of it as well. What are the competitors doing, but also what are our marketplace sales saying? What are the trends saying in e-commerce, even TikTok, Amazon, like all those kind of things that aren’t directly related to what we do, that’s accounted for as well.

And also what are the customers saying? And we touched on it earlier, but we have a whole, what we call the feedback river, which is just a big database of feedback from everywhere. From within the plugin itself. From support. From reviews and from wordpress.org, and like all of these places combined into one database. So yeah, I think you have to keep an eye on all of it. And the challenge is figuring out is this essential? What percentage of users actually want this specific thing?

And actually that’s always been a challenge, like even working on much smaller scale products at Iconic, it was always hard if a customer reaches out and says, oh, I wish it did this, it was hard to say no to that, because you are excited that someone’s using it, and they want to adapt it to their own use case. But you have to take into account, is the effort to implement this going to be valuable for everyone? Is this the priority for the majority, or is it just going satisfy this one person? You have to do that at scale now, or I have to do that at scale.

[00:34:14] Nathan Wrigley: I know that time is short, so I’m just going to pivot just for one final question before we leave and it’s, it really has nothing to do with WooCommerce specifically, although it may? And that is, I’m just curious if you know of any interesting things which are happening around the periphery of e-commerce that you personally are finding interesting and engaging. Something that maybe our general audience won’t have come across, because they’re not deep in the weeds of it.

That could be inside WordPress. I dunno, the Interactivity API, or it could be something the browsers are thinking about doing, or third party vendors who’ve got some curious technology that we might not have heard of.

So, really just any interesting thing that James has spotted lately that you think we might want to look at?

[00:34:54] James Kemp: Yeah, I dunno whether I have anything that nobody’s ever heard of.

[00:34:57] Nathan Wrigley: That’s fine.

[00:34:58] James Kemp: There’s a definite rise in platforms offering their own e-commerce. So, TikTok, commerce and all that kind of stuff is growing. And you touched on, something before we started the call actually, which kind of relates to that, the ability to see something on a device and just purchase it there and then. And within TikTok you get that experience. Within a typical e-commerce platform, you have a flow that you go through. You’ve got the cart, and then the checkout. You’ve got to populate details. So yeah, I think there’s gonna be a, an evolution into how quickly can I buy something. And that’s what the merchants want. Whether it’s good for the population and spending habits, I’m not entirely sure.

I personally love the experience on, like Amazon, for example, and I don’t know how long they’ve had it, it’s been there a while now. But on product pages, you don’t need to go through the cart process, you can just click buy now. Although that has tripped me up a couple of times.

[00:35:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, me too.

[00:35:54] James Kemp: You press buy now, and it goes on some card that you never use.

So yeah, I think that is a definite kind of trend, that I’ve seen a lot of. And I think we touched on something earlier as well, which I haven’t seen much in the way of solutions to it. But one of the key things about people buying from a brick and mortar is that they can try on the product and they can physically see the color of a product, and touch the product. Which is possible. You can order now and it’s getting a lot easier to return stuff. But can you do that with a sofa, for example? So, I expect that we’ll see some innovations around that.

[00:36:33] Nathan Wrigley: Sort of augmented solution, where you can drop room and, yeah, size it up, and things like that.

[00:36:38] James Kemp: Yeah. I don’t know what that looks like.

[00:36:40] Nathan Wrigley: No, and it will be sort of a strange simulation of reality, but probably enough to get a proportion of the people over the wire, I would’ve thought.

[00:36:48] James Kemp: Yeah, for sure. There’s been AR stuff for a while now, right?

[00:36:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and things like, you want to put a logo on a t-shirt, here’s what that look like on the t-shirt. Those kind of things.

I think for me, one of the most, most interesting things is what the mobile wallets have done to my capacity to spend. I just that is remarkable. Especially out in the real world where you take the Tube in London, the underground, and you just don’t do anything anymore. You just walk by a thing, and your phone’s in your pocket, and it registers it, and you walk out and at the end of the day you get a bill, and so these kind of seamless solutions.

[00:37:21] James Kemp: I don’t feel like you have that so much on a computer though.

[00:37:24] Nathan Wrigley: No, but I wonder if that’s coming with, I don’t know, biometrics. Like purchase this, put your finger print in, your done.

[00:37:33] James Kemp: I think that would be nice. I still populate, I use 1Password, so it does it for me, but I still populate the card.

[00:37:39] Nathan Wrigley: An intermediary, a trusted intermediary getting in the way. Yeah, it’s interesting. Again, I wonder if those kind of things might be handled natively by browsers, and things like that.

Anyway, we’re sort of staring into the future, and we’ve no idea. But I know that you’ve got to go in about 30 seconds time, so I will just round it off by saying James Kemp, fascinating chat about all things WooCommerce. I appreciate it, and all the hard work you and your team are doing to democratize e-commerce. Is there anything you want to add just before we round it off? Maybe a Twitter handle or something like that?

[00:38:08] James Kemp: I’m jamesckemp on most things. C, the letter C. Yeah. The only thing I’ll add is just, if you have questions, ideas, theories, my dms are open there, so I’m happy to hear it.

[00:38:21] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you very much, James Kemp. Been a pleasure chatting to you today. Really appreciate it.

[00:38:25] James Kemp: Thank you very much.

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast

which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the move from agency owner to WordPress theme development company, and finally to plugin success.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Katie Keith.

Katie is a founder and CEO of Barn2 plugins. With a background deeply rooted in WordPress, Katie’s journey presents an interesting narrative of transformation, from the early days of running a WordPress agency, to now managing a flourishing plugin business Barn2 plugins has a portfolio of 19 premium plugins, many of which extend functionalities inside WooCommerce

Today, Katie previews her upcoming lightning talk, which she’ll be giving at WordCamp Asia. She talks about the transition from agency work to plugin development, highlighting early challenges and choices that shaped the business’ path.

We get into the initial allure of client projects, and their subsequent realization of the benefits offered by productizing their skills for global reach. Katie describes the decisions that led them to WordPress plugins with products like WooCommerce Protected Categories and Document Library Pro, and explores how customer feedback and market needs drove their product diversification.

As Katie explains, the plugin world wasn’t without its hurdles. There was trial and error involved in launching new products. This underscores the importance of market research. Additionally, she touches on Barn2’s current pivot into Shopify apps, aiming for diversification to help ensure that the business has stability by being available across multiple platforms.

Katie investigates the current WordPress and WooCommerce landscape, discussing how she perceives the industry will change, potential growth areas, and the necessity of staying agile.

If you’re curious about the intricacies of building a plugin business, or are seeking inspiration from someone who has already navigated the WordPress ecosystem, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well. And so, without further delay, I bring you Katie Keith.

I am joined on the podcast by Katie Keith.

[00:03:29] Katie Keith: Hey, Nathan.

[00:03:30] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you on the podcast. Katie and I have met, actually many times in person over at a variety of different WordCamps. This conversation that we’re going to have today is inspired by a WordCamp, but a WordCamp which hasn’t taken place yet. Because Katie is heading off to Manila in a few days time to give a lightning talk at WordCamp Asia. Do you just want to, before we get a bio properly, do you want to tell us what you’re going to talk about and then we’ll learn more about you?

[00:03:52] Katie Keith: Yep. So my talk is going to be a lightning talk about my story, specifically the transition from being a WordPress agency into a WordPress plugin company.

[00:04:03] Nathan Wrigley: Now that’s the perfect opportunity to give us your little bio. So don’t reveal all the detail of everything that you want to talk about, but just tell us the one minute potted history of you, WordPress, technology, wherever you want to land with that.

[00:04:16] Katie Keith: Yeah, so I’m Katie Keith, founder and CEO at Barn2 plugins. We are a, as you probably guessed, a plugin shop. We currently have 19 premium plugins, a few free ones, and that’s about it.

But as we’ll talk about this more later, we started life as an agency building WordPress sites for clients, and then over the years we’ve switched into plugins.

We mostly specialise in WooCommerce plugins. So about 14 of our 19 are building extra functionality for WooCommerce. And we’ve also got a really popular document library plugin, which is not for WooCommerce.

[00:04:54] Nathan Wrigley: Haven’t you pivoted a little bit in the direction of Shopify as well?

[00:04:57] Katie Keith: Yeah, that is in progress. So the current growth strategy is to continue what we’re doing with the WordPress side of things, and also to diversify into selling Shopify apps so that we are across multiple platforms, and largely as a sort of stability thing, so that we spread any risks. Because we’re all dependent on WordPress at the moment, which is obviously a good horse to back and always has been. But it feels like it’s a good idea to be on multiple platforms as well.

[00:05:26] Nathan Wrigley: So I don’t know a single person, personally, who began their journey into web development intentionally. That is to say anybody of my era, anybody that wandered into web development when I did, the industry wasn’t really an industry. It was kind of just beginning. People just did it as a hobby. You know, some friend came along and said, I’d like a website, well, I can dabble with that. I’ve heard about websites and I know how to code a little bit of HTML and things like that.

But I’m wondering if you were more intentional when you began looking around post school, post college, whatever you did. Did you and your husband, I know he was a big part of the business. Did you jump into web development, and you said you were an agency for a while? Did you do that intentionally or was it more, oh, let’s try our hand at this for a bit?

[00:06:11] Katie Keith: It actually was intentional. So, Andy and I spent our twenties with normal jobs, both government type jobs, talking about how we wanted to start a business together, and how much more flexible that would be. How much more our finances could scale if we worked for ourselves. But we just didn’t have any ideas.

And we talked for years about different ideas and never really saw anything through or had a killer idea. Andy particularly got quite fed up with his job in the civil service in England and we thought, we need to do something. And thought, okay, well, what would combine our skills, and he was a software developer, not really web but software, and I was a project management and marketing person. And so we thought, well, building websites for people actually combines those skills.

He didn’t want to go into like software consultancy or something because we are from the southwest of England, which is quite rural, and we would probably have had to move to a big city. Remote work wasn’t such a thing back then, and so we didn’t really want that lifestyle change.

So he thought, well, maybe he could scale down a bit and learn web development instead of enterprise level software. And then that allows us to run a kind of more small business that we can live where we want to work. And websites need marketing, SEO, copywriting, project management, communication with clients. So that fitted in my skills as well. So, yes, it was intentional having analysed our respective skills and what we could realistically get into.

[00:07:45] Nathan Wrigley: That’s really great actually. Looking back, you had the perfect blend of different things there. Maybe a bit of serendipity, but your marketing side, and Andy’s coding side, that is really the basis of a successful agency business, growing agency business. You need to have the capacity to code, but also to sell it into the marketplace. I mean, how many stories have you heard of people who can code but they can’t launch a business, because they don’t have the wherewithal to sell it and drum up business and things like that. So that’s fascinating.

In the show notes that we shared, one of the things that you said was that you didn’t quite go in the right direction at the beginning. Well, it turned out that you didn’t go in the right direction. You went with client websites, building one site, shipping it, launching another, and so on. But that didn’t turn out to be something that you wanted to maintain. Why was that?

[00:08:30] Katie Keith: Yeah, so we thought client websites are a really good way to get started because you don’t need to invest lots of money, and you just get paid by the project. So if you can get one client that brings in, back then it was like £500 or something, not very much. And then you just keep going and grow slowly. I’d never really been attracted to the kind of business that you need to put a lot of money into upfront.

I love the program Dragons Den, which is Shark Tank in the US. But I’ve never wanted that kind of business where you need a lot of investment. So web design, just stick out a few flyers or something in your local, actually, fish and chip shop got us one client. We just put some flyers on the counter and we actually got a website for a local cycling club. Things like that. So you could start small.

So it was a good way to get started. And it was really good because it got us into WordPress. So we didn’t initially think, let’s be WordPress specialists. We thought, let’s build websites. And then Andy started researching the right tools and discovered WordPress and told me about it. I thought it sounded like an awful idea, because he made it sound like a kind of a blogging thing and like, oh, you choose a template for your blog. And I was like, no, we want to build business websites for people. Why are you using this blogging software?

But that was about a year after custom post types came in, and it was becoming a proper platform. It was about 2010 back then. We started specialising in WordPress. And then, to answer your question, at this point, the client work was better than having jobs, but it wasn’t quite the lifestyle you wanted, in that we wanted more flexibility where we’re not like on call to clients all the time.

If someone’s website goes down when you’re on holiday, you’ve got to fix it. And we did try to get help, project managers and things. And we did do well getting freelance designers and developers, but we just couldn’t find anybody that we could trust to communicate with the clients for us. And that really put a limitation on the lifestyle benefits because we were on, mainly me, we’re on call to clients all the time. So we thought, actually maybe that’s not the right business model.

[00:10:38] Nathan Wrigley: You’re also selling your time for money, and going through that feast famine life cycle where one project is ongoing. And then at what point do you sort of cut that off and say, okay, we need to start looking for the next one, even though we haven’t quite finished this one. There’s inevitably going to be some overlap where that all just works out well. And obviously the agencies which grow and scale and become enterprise, they just have that figured somehow.

My experience with that was always that there was a period where you were quite uncertain as to where the next website was going to come from. And you were, like I said, just trading your time for money. And WordPress offers so much more than that. You’ve got yourself into a kind of global marketplace where you could build a thing and then sell that thing 1,000 times, 10,000 times over, which I guess, where we’re going next. But you didn’t go to plugins first. You actually went into themes, which was a bit of a, well, a bit of a dead end it turns out. But tell us about the theme building enterprise.

[00:11:35] Katie Keith: Yeah, so because of all those things you’ve mentioned, selling time for money and the lifestyle thing, we thought selling WordPress products would be a much better business model because it could scale more. You can build one product and then sell it an unlimited number of times in theory, instead of selling one hour for a certain amount of money.

So we thought products are good. And we looked at the products and thought, ah, themes are the way to go. Themes seemed to be a big growth area, well, they were a big growth area. This is 2013.

And when we started work in about 2012 on our first, our only theme, ThemeForest was just growing loads. Plugins existed, but you didn’t hear about super successful plugin companies particularly. Whereas you could go on ThemeForest and you could see the sales that the big themes were getting, and it was very tempting to be part of that. So we thought, let’s build a theme. So we did. And it took like a year because of all the demands of client work. So it was just a sideline, building this theme. And then in that year ThemeForest changed, which we didn’t see coming. ThemeForest changed in the year we were building our theme.

So we’d analysed the themes that were successful at the time, and they were quite simple. They were nice, designed, often quite bold, clear designs, a bit minimal, and didn’t have that many features. And then between 2012 and 2013, themes such as uDesign and Avada and that kind of thing became popular. And they were massive multipurpose themes with so many features. And that wasn’t what we wanted to do. We wanted a product that we could maintain and develop ourselves easily, and it wouldn’t be this massive headache or anything like that.

So it just wasn’t what we wanted. And of course, that meant they rejected our theme because it wasn’t the sort of theme they were looking for. I think they would’ve accepted it a year before, but they didn’t when we got actually ready to submit it. So we were like, ah, do we rewrite the theme and make it loads more complicated? Do we sell it independently? And I wasn’t confident in my ability to market a theme independently, because you’re competing with the giants. And I didn’t have experience of that. I wanted to be on a marketplace.

[00:13:51] Nathan Wrigley: I think back in the day, 2013, like you mentioned, ThemeForest was the place to go for things like that, wasn’t it? And although I wasn’t really in the WordPress space, I jumped in after that endeavor. When I got there, ThemeForest was already, basically saturated with themes that could, well, themes that claimed to do more or less everything. You just buy this one theme and it can do everything. Or there was also a dearth of themes which offered a specific kind of functionality, like a real estate, or you might say, realtor theme, or a portfolio theme or, I don’t know, I’m a gym owner, I need a theme for my gym.

Kind of felt like it went in that direction, but it seems like you were trying to build something which was more agnostic of industry. It was just a, here’s the bare bones of a theme, you now go and do the artistic work. But yeah, like you say, ThemeForest was going off in a different direction.

So what happened there? Was it a case of staring at each other and saying, okay, what do we do? Do we try to pivot this theme? Or did you just at some point say, no, abandon it.

[00:14:51] Katie Keith: We were fairly depressed and disappointed and just gave up for a few years. So we carried on with the client work, which was going fine. We had a successful business that was keeping us both going. We didn’t need to do products. So we just continued with the client work.

[00:15:08] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so steady away. And then what was the moment where you, kind of had the revelation about plugins? Because, again, coming into the WordPress space, 2015, something like that, plugins and themes were already selling like hotcakes. I don’t really know about the period in which plugins was a bit new, a bit maybe dangerous, a bit, putting your business on the line with plugins. Maybe that was a tough one back then, I don’t know.

[00:15:30] Katie Keith: By the time it got to 2016, I supppose frustrations accumulate over time. So we were again like, oh, the client works just kind of annoying. It’s not quite flexible enough, and it’s not scaling enough, it’s just going up a little bit. So we need to do products. What shall we do again?

And this time we thought, well, plugins could work because unlike these massive multipurpose themes, a plugin can be really tiny or it can be incredibly complex. A plugin can just be a line of code, you know, as an extreme minimum. So we thought, well, that way we can choose products that fit with the scale that we want to offer technically. I hated the idea of a big theme or a massive plugin because you kind of end up being responsible for basically the user’s whole website.

So imagine if somebody’s using a theme which takes over their whole site, and it affects every aspect of the visuals. They’re going to send you a support ticket for everything, even if it’s not the theme’s fault. And then you are going to have to prove it’s not the theme’s fault. And we just thought that’s not sustainable.

And I think the same would happen with really large plugins like, I don’t know, a membership plugin or an e-commerce plugin or something thing like that. So we thought, well, we are just the two of us, plus our freelancers, so let’s choose a more realistic plugin idea and build it and see what happens.

[00:16:54] Nathan Wrigley: So you always had the agency, the client based websites. That was the backup plan. Always something to fall back on if the plugin business didn’t work out. You took the plunge. What was the first plugin that you came up with?

[00:17:07] Katie Keith: So the first plugin, we found by going on a website, which used to exist, which was the WooCommerce Ideas Forum. They used to have a whole website where people just gave ideas and, basically feature request board. But they have that now if people want to look, but I think it’s per extension instead of a whole thing for WooCommerce. So you access it differently and it’s hard to find. But there was this whole website.

So we went on this and you can sort it by the number of votes for each suggestion. And we chose an idea which had the highest number of votes that wasn’t that complex to build, which was WooCommerce password protected categories, which is very specific.

[00:17:47] Nathan Wrigley: That’s a great title, I like that.

[00:17:48] Katie Keith: Yeah, nice and snappy. WordPress itself already has password protection for its posts and pages, but not categories, and therefore WooCommerce doesn’t have it for its categories either. And people were saying that they wanted it for things like building a wholesale site, or selling different products to different clients.

If you imagine that you sell products to sports teams and they each have a logo, so the product’s different for each team, you might create a protected category for that team to log in and order their branded sportswear. Those sorts of use cases. And we thought, well, that’s quite simple. You just add a category field to the page and a few other features like login and things.

So we built the plugin. It wasn’t that difficult, and we launched it. And because it was unique and I was a marketer, I wrote a few blog posts about it, like how to password protect categories in WooCommerce, really niche posts. They went right to the top of Google because you could then, and there was nobody else offering that. And we actually started getting sales after about three days. And we were like, we are getting sales for our plugin and we couldn’t believe it.

[00:18:57] Nathan Wrigley: That is quite remarkable because I know the story is harder now than ever. That story is very hard to replicate because, you know, the market is saturated.

But just going back to your actual plugin, realistically, when you built that and you saw that idea, okay, we’re going to password protect a category, and it will impact WooCommerce, so I don’t know, we could send it to company A and the category will be A, and they can access it with a password, and we’ll send it to company B, and the category will be B and they can access it and so on.

Honestly, what was your expectation at that point? Because coming into the community, it’s hard to understand, how big is WordPress? And then the layer underneath that, how big is the plugin which sits inside of WordPress, WooCommerce, how big is that? And then we’ve got this niche little one, just does one tiny thing. Honestly, what were your expectations?

[00:19:44] Katie Keith: Very low. It was an experiment. It wasn’t a huge amount of work. Basically, Andy stopped doing some agency work for a while, and I relied on the freelance developers a bit more while he coded it. It wasn’t a big sacrifice for us to build it, and we didn’t have any kind of a business plan or projections or anything. It was just, let’s launch a small plugin and see what happens.

And we were amazed. And it still exists now. It’s now called WooCommerce Protected Categories because it has different ways of protecting the category, not just passwords, like user role and that kind of thing. And it actually, a few months ago it met half a million dollars in revenue lifetime. So that tiny idea has done half a million dollars in 8 years.

[00:20:30] Nathan Wrigley: So how quickly did that money start to roll in? And so it doesn’t have to be about money, the amount of, I don’t know, plugin licenses that you sold or whatever it may be. But how quickly did your intuition turn to, oh, there is really something in this? Like you mentioned you got a sale or two within two or three days, which is exciting. But obviously if it then just sort of trickled along one or two a week, it is exciting, but it’s not that exciting.

And what was the point where you and Andy started to look at each other and think, woah, we could potentially forget all the agency work if we now pivot into this? How long did it take you to make those decisions?

[00:21:03] Katie Keith: Yeah, because that was just pocket money, the first sales. It was just nice because it’s an indication that it could work. So that kept growing. And we also launched other plugins as well. Like our second one came from a client project.

The client paid us to build a custom plugin, which was a searchable, sortable table of blog posts for their blog. So they had hundreds of blog posts and they wanted a more easy way for people to find them. So we built this table plugin, and we launched it on wordpress.org as a free plugin called Post Table with Search and Sort. So that’s just as good a name as WooCommerce Password Protected Category.

[00:21:40] Nathan Wrigley: Got the SEO juice going there, definitely.

[00:21:43] Katie Keith: Oh yeah, it does what it says. So that was a free plugin, but that led to a lot of sales because people started sending us feature requests once it was on wordpress.org.

So the first ones wanted custom fields, custom taxonomies, and custom post types, rather than just blog posts in their table. So they might want to create like a table of documents or members for a directory of consultants or something like that, like custom post types and data. So we built Post Table Pro, which was the premium version, and that’s done really well.

And then people started asking for even more features, which we used to develop different plugins. So we built WooCommerce Product Table, which is a WooCommerce version of that table, which has things like add to cart buttons and variation dropdowns.

And so that cluster of plugins that came from this free table plugin is what really kind of catapulted the success. So that within about six months of launching our first plugin we were making, I don’t know, several thousand dollars a month. And we thought, given that we have some revenue from clients like maintenance and hosting, so our existing clients were paying us for certain things, we can afford to stop taking new projects, and therefore put more resources into building more plugins, and improving our existing ones, and marketing them, of course. So it was about six months that we decided, let’s stop accepting new client projects.

[00:23:13] Nathan Wrigley: So the plugin that you just mentioned there, the sorting of the tables, it sounds like you got that out of a client project. So it was actually a client that came to you. We need this idea and, okay, we’ll build that. But then the back of that is, can we then take that code and run with it? Which you did. And then you’ve got the pro version, which adds in a bunch of different features. And now you’ve got two plugins and a third one came on quite quickly. We’re six months in, and the dollar signs are starting to make sense.

You can see that, okay, there’s a living in this. We’ll take our foot off the client websites, but we’ll keep it going just in case something goes wrong. So I’m presuming though, at this point you are all guns aimed at, we need more plugins, more and more and more plugins. And so when did it become, okay, let’s just go in on Woo? How did you end up as Woo as opposed to just WordPress?

[00:23:59] Katie Keith: We never did. Our biggest plugin now is Document Library Pro, which is not Woo, and that came from Post Table Pro as well. The biggest use case of Post Table Pro ended up being documents. So we built a document plugin that had download buttons and previews and stuff that’s specific to documents. Again, it’s just a table plugin, and that has been our biggest seller for the last three or four years since we launched it.

So because of the success of that and Post Table Pro, we never could actually just be WooCommerce. So we are not like, say Iconic, who specialise in WooCommerce, that’s all they do.

So we have this reputation of being WooCommerce. And I wish we were actually. Obviously I like having a successful plugin, but I wish that we had that clear identity because it’s, like I explained the business at the beginning in the introduction, I’m like, oh, we have these plugins, they’re mostly WooCommerce. It is not as clean as it could be.

[00:24:56] Nathan Wrigley: Sitting where you are now, and we can get into the numbers of how many plugins and all of that that you’ve got. Have you made any missteps with, like has any plugin that you’ve built misfired completely? You thought this would be a great idea, let’s build it, let’s market it. But then you build it and the customers do not come. Or has every single one had a fair degree of, they don’t all have to be super successful, but has everything stood on its own two feet and been worth doing?

[00:25:20] Katie Keith: It depends how you define success. But it’s largely relative. So if you’re doing one plugin that’s doing X a month, then if you have one that’s much smaller, that’s not necessarily worth it.

I would say my biggest mistake, repeatedly, has been thinking too small. So I have a very bad track record of building plugins that are too small and too niche to be worth bothering with. Lots of examples.

One example was WooCommerce Discontinued Products. So that adds a discontinued stock status to your store. We built it because we were hiring some new senior developers and we were doing a project for these developers. Before we hired them, we were paying them to build a small plugin to check how good they were. And we thought, well, the ones we hired, we may as well release their plugin. So we did.

We did WooCommerce Variation Prices, Discontinued Products. We had multiple plugins that were just trial projects for the developer, but they were good. And their first project after they joined properly was to complete the plugin, and make it sellable. But that’s a lot of work. You’ve got to create all the marketing images, the marketing content, the sales page, market it.

Each plugin has an overhead as well as maintaining it. And so with hindsight, I shouldn’t have released all of those small plugins. And we actually sold five of our plugins last year to a WooCommerce company called Kestrel, because we had 24 at the time, and it was just too many. And I did an 80 20 rule analysis of the business and how much revenue was coming from each plugin. And that cluster of five were all doing, they were all doing at least several hundreds a month, but generally less than a thousand a month.

And compared to our other plugins, that was a small proportion. So I thought, let’s group these plugins and sell them to a company who would appreciate and grow them more, where that fits better with their business plan.

[00:27:17] Nathan Wrigley: Are you still on the lookout for new ideas? Or do you want to just hunker down on the ones that you’ve got? In other words, do you constantly ideate and think, let’s find a new thing or is it more serendipity? You accidentally stumble across an idea, we should build that, and so we do. Or do you deliberately try, in the same way that you did previously going to the WooCommerce forum, do you try to find new products to build and see how they work?

[00:27:41] Katie Keith: I suppose a bit of both depending on our current priorities. So for example, in 2024 last year, that’s when we sold the five plugins. And I thought, we’ve got a handful of really successful plugins, we need to put our resources into making them as good as they can be to maximise their potential sales.

So for example, instead we did launch one plugin last year, our WooCommerce Discount Plugin, but we were already building that when I made this decision. So once I made that decision, I put all our developers on adding features to our existing plugins, including some really big features.

For example, we have a WooCommerce Product Options plugin, which adds extra options to your product pages. And dozens and dozens and dozens of people were saying to us, we want live image previews. So when you use our plugin to upload an image to the product page, we want that to appear superimposed on a picture of the T-shirt, for example. So if you upload your picture of your child, that will appear on the T-shirt.

And that was a big project. So we could have built a completely different plugin, but instead we added live preview. We actually did it as an add-on, so it’s sort of an extra plugin, but it’s dependent on the main plugin, and things like that. So we thought, what’s working and how could we make what’s working even more successful? But I do have a list of plugin ideas for the future.

[00:29:06] Nathan Wrigley: So there’s a laundry list of things that you might build, but the priorities are not to build them all right away? Just see how the market goes. Speaking of that, speaking of the market, you’re obviously heavily embedded in WordPress, heavily embedded in WooCommerce. What do you make of the landscape at the moment?

You’re obviously beginning to pitch into Shopify a little bit as well, and I imagine you’re at pains to say we’re not taking our foot off the WordPress pedal. How do you feel the landscape is shaping up in 2025? It does seem like things are plateauing a little bit in terms of market share for WordPress, whether or not they’ll go up or down. How confident are you in the future? Is it still WordPress all the way down?

[00:29:42] Katie Keith: I certainly don’t think WordPress is going anywhere, and it probably won’t shrink a lot, if at all. But I also don’t feel that we are having a rising tide that we can all ride the journey upwards like we used to. For example, in 2020 when everybody was locked down, there was huge growth for nearly all WordPress companies, because the world was going online so rapidly and we had a huge, huge growth very quickly.

And then since then it has slowed down. The growth has slowed down and now seems fairly stable. Stable is a good word, but it’s not really growing in a particularly measurable way. And you could argue that that is just a correction because it went up so much, so quickly during the pandemic that maybe it just took a few years to get back to where it would’ve done if there was no pandemic.

So if you imagine a steep line rather than a big bump followed by a plateau. So you could argue that. But it feels like we have to work harder than we used to to see growth, and make that happen through our own efforts, rather than just relying on a growing market.

[00:30:48] Nathan Wrigley: So obviously that would be nice if WordPress could keep going in that same way. What about Woo? Obviously we were just talking about WordPress. I don’t really involve myself with Woo so much, so I don’t really know what the statistics are. I know that in terms of e-commerce platforms, it’s the leader, but I don’t know if that’s sort of going up or going down. You got any insight in that?

[00:31:07] Katie Keith: It is very confusing because it depends where you look. So there’s two main websites that publish data about e-commerce usage, and one of them says WooCommerce is the leader and the other says Shopify is. And they use slightly different data sets. For example, the top X websites in the world, versus the whole internet, versus a sample of a million, which they use to extrapolate upwards.

So there are different ways of looking at the data. So I genuinely don’t know, there probably is no correct answer, which is the biggest e-commerce platform, but they’re both doing really well and neither are going anywhere. So that’s why it felt that it made sense for us to be building products for both.

I think WooCommerce is really interesting because it has a good reputation. It has, I think the best leadership team around it that I’ve seen in the 8 years I’ve been building plugins on top of it right now. But I wish they would do more marketing. They’re not promoting their platform in the way that say Shopify is, and that scares me. I would like to see them doing more centralised marketing.

They’re a company, they make money from WooCommerce, even though it’s free. They have extensions, they have revenue sharing from their Stripe and they have lots of ways of making money, which they’ve recently talked about publicly. And so I’d like them to be doing some proper marketing like Shopify does.

[00:32:29] Nathan Wrigley: It is interesting, I know you no longer live in the UK. I do, and it doesn’t take many trips down high streets to realise that the high street is really in decline. You only have to walk down one street in more or less any town to realise that the shutters are going up, the wood is going over the doors, bricks and mortar shops are really struggling.

And it’s this inexorable rise. I can only imagine that, well, people are still buying things, but they’re buying things increasingly on the internet. My age group, I imagine has been fairly straightforward, because we grew up when the internet was coming around. Children that are growing up now, I think they’re really just not interested in doing things like going into town in a sort of social way like I did. So I imagine that eCommerce’s future, just generally e-commerce, platform agnostic, you’ve got to imagine its got everything going for it, I would’ve thought.

[00:33:24] Katie Keith: Yeah, that makes sense. And we often look at things like market share data, but that’s just a percentage. So even if WordPress’ market, or let’s say WooCommerce’s market share did go down at some point, if the whole of e-commerce was growing, then WooCommerce could still be growing. And it doesn’t really matter so much if it’s smaller percentage, if the whole cake is bigger.

So I think that’s the case. And you do see quite regularly published e-commerce data about, particularly after Black Friday, like the most revenue ever went through e-commerce sites this Black Friday. And it does seem to be constantly growing. And I think that is primarily through websites. A lot of people are buying through apps, of course, instead of websites, particularly something like Amazon or even Temu or something these days. But I think e-commerce websites are still huge and I can’t see that changing.

[00:34:15] Nathan Wrigley: No, because in most of the towns that I’ve visited where I can see this, the big, we call them department stores in the UK. An example might be something like Marks & Spencer. They’ve got a branch in more or less every town. You kind of feel that they’re immune. They’ve got their online bit as well, so they’ve probably inoculated themselves in that way. They’ve just got so much kudos, and so much loyalty built in that you feel they might be immune for a period of time.

But all of the little shops, the little jeweler, the little corner shop selling a thing that they build, whatever it may be, you kind of feel they are going to struggle because the footfall is less. They really do fit into what you sell. I’m reasonably technical, but I can’t build, I can’t code, I can’t do any of that, so I need a solution.

I think the future for WooCommerce and the kind of things that you create and sell, I think the future’s really bright because I see that market just going up and up. The younger people are going to be wanting to use their devices because they’re all really fascinated by them, everybody’s got a mobile phone nowadays. The footfall is sort of falling away, and it all seems like a perfect storm for e-commerce to grow. I could be being overly optimistic there, but it feels like it’s fair weather for the next decade or so.

[00:35:26] Katie Keith: Yeah, I know what you mean. And it’s a good example to use those small shops because even if they keep their storefront, which probably isn’t profitable, they should be selling online. And small shops, they’ve got a few choices, that could be WooCommerce. That might be harder to set up in the first place, they might need to hire someone. But then their costs are super, super low compared to most platforms.

They could go for Shopify, which is slightly reversed in that sense. Or they could use something like Etsy if they’re a jeweller, to use your example. So there’s lots of ways for them to sell online, but they do need to be thinking of it for their survival because of the decline of things like the high street, as you say.

[00:36:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think so. Looking back, again, just casting your mind back to 2013 when you began all of this. Do you think that you were lucky when you decided to pivot into making plugins? What I’m really saying is, if you were beginning now in 2025, everything was the same, it was just 12 years later, 2013 to 2025. Do you think you’d have the same degree of success with the exact same kind of approach to it?

Basically, has the market got harder, more saturated, more difficult to sell into, more savvy? Anything around there. Do you feel, basically, you were lucky in terms of timing?

[00:36:38] Katie Keith: I think to an extent. I don’t believe it’s fully saturated yet, but it is more full than it was when we started. So when we started, there were no WooCommerce protected category plugins, there were no WordPress dynamic table plugins, there were no document library plugins, there were no product table plugins for WooCommerce.

So we managed to do that because those were gaps. Now they’re not. And now we’ve done successful plugins in those categories people have copied. So we have competition now, which came along after we launched. So those are no longer gaps. But I do firmly believe that there are still gaps that you can fill.

And the way to find them is through already being in WordPress in some way, which most typically is through building sites for clients, or doing some kind of client work. Because they will always find a gap and ask you to fill it through a custom plugin or something like that. So if you concentrate hard enough on the client work that you’re getting, you probably will find gaps.

And if you find something that doesn’t already exist, then yes, you could get to the top of Google quickly for a very specific keyword. Of course, WordPress and WooCommerce are much bigger now than they were in 2016 when we launched our first plugin. So even if it’s slightly more diluted with competition, the market is bigger. So there is potential now you’re a part of a bigger market.

[00:38:03] Nathan Wrigley: So last question really, Katie. Do you see WordPress being the thing for you and your husband, the business you are going to pursue for the next decade or so, or do you think you will be scrambling around for more opportunities in the Shopify space? I don’t know, other CMSs, pivot completely, who knows? What does the future hold? What’s the next decade looking like from where you sit right now?

[00:38:24] Katie Keith: I must admit, I’m not very good at long-term planning. I just do what feels right for the short and medium term.

[00:38:31] Nathan Wrigley: It’s worked.

[00:38:32] Katie Keith: Well, yeah, exactly. Does it matter? You do something and then you focus on what works and learn and keep iterating. I think that’s why I haven’t created, I don’t know, hundreds of million dollar worth business because I’m not a visionary that has this long-term view that I’ll do anything to make it happen.

Instead, I try something and keep learning, which has created a successful business, but in a more steady growth kind of way. So I’d rather be that visionary, but I’m not. It’s hard to know personally. I think you wanted to talk about the fact that my husband left the business about 8 months ago now. He’d lost his passion for it and wanted to reflect on other things he could do for the rest of his career, which he’s still doing.

So I’m now running it on my own and he owns half of it, so that might affect the future. We talked about whether he should sell his share, for example, at the time, and he decided, oh, WordPress is growing so nicely, it’s so stable, he’ll leave his money in the business.

Well, since then there’s been all this drama, so we are thinking, was that the right call? Should we get some money out?

But I love what I do and want to stay doing what I’m doing for the foreseeable future. But we could do something like take on a partner or investment or something if Andy wants to, say, invest his half elsewhere. So there’s that, which might affect our future.

[00:39:54] Nathan Wrigley: Oh gosh, that’s interesting. So, you heard here first. If people wanted to get in touch with you, Katie, not necessarily about taking on half the business or anything like that, but they’re just curious about what we’ve talked about today, or anything else related to WooCommerce plugins, et cetera, where would you be hanging out online? Is that a social network or an email? What’s the best thing?

[00:40:15] Katie Keith: So for company stuff, it’s Barn2.com to check out our plugins and so on. And for me, the most active place that I am would be Twitter, which is katiekeithbarn2.

[00:40:27] Nathan Wrigley: So Katie Keith, I appreciate you chatting to me today. Thank you so much and every success for 2025 and beyond. Thank you.

[00:40:34] Katie Keith: Thanks for having me.