Talking WooCommerce Products and Community Growth

Marcus: Well, hey everyone, I’m Marcus and we are back with a bit of a different lineup again. I’m joined by a special guest, but going forward, you’ll know her as my Do the Woo Show co-host and we’ll be interviewing guests from the Woo community. But first let’s shine the spotlight on her to tell you a little bit about who she is. Welcome to the show, Katie, Katie.

Katie: Thanks a lot. Hi everyone. Yep, I’m Katie, CEO and co-founder at Barn2Plugins.

Marcus: Awesome. Yeah, we’ll definitely get into talking a little bit about that. We’ll also talk a little bit about the all important topic of how you do the woo. But I want to step back just a little bit further. Can you start by sharing how you got into WordPress?

Katie: I got into WordPress at the end of 2009, when my husband and I, we wanted to build our own business for ages and never come up with a good idea, endless discussions of business ideas. And in the end, we just started a web design business and we quickly discovered that of course, WordPress is the tool to use for any type of website. So immediately we started using it for all the websites we built.

And so we did that for a few years and built a reasonably successful client business with a team of freelancers to help us out with capacity. And, but we always wanted to sell products. So we switched to selling WordPress plugins in 2016 and never looked back.

Marcus: That’s awesome. S, you started with the agency and then, and then decided, well, I guess you didn’t then decide you wanted to do plugins. It sounds like that was sort of on the horizon the whole time. Just needed to figure out what that looked like.

Katie: Yeah, that’s right. It was always kind of the dream to make the business more scalable rather than selling our time. And we could do that to some extent with the client business because of having freelancers, but we kept reaching ceilings as to how far we could grow and while still maintaining the lifestyle we wanted and all that. Like I never managed to find good project managers to do the actual coordination of the project, even if other people were doing the implementation. So we kind of couldn’t grow any more than what I could manage myself.

And we thought, oh, products, that’s like the holy grail of many companies that sell their time rather than products. And in 2013, we actually tried to build a WordPress theme, but we were really slow. We didn’t ever launch it. And then the market moved on. And suddenly the themes were way bigger than when we’d started. And we were competing with the likes of Avada, massive, massive pieces of software. And we were like, no, the theme market isn’t where we want to go anymore.

Whereas plugins can be kind of bite size and easy to develop, or they can be huge. So we thought given that we were bootstrapped and on our own at the time, we didn’t want to stretch ourselves too far and plugins seemed a good way to be successful without having to get investment and do something too huge.

Marcus: Yeah, that makes sense. And with the onset of Gutenberg and blocks and all of that, theming has changed yet again, where plugins continue to be something that, they’ve evolved as well, but are still vital to building a WordPress site. So tell us a little bit more about barn2 plugins. You have some WordPress plugins. but have decidedly focused on the WooCommerce landscape. What made you all decide to go after the e-commerce space?

Katie: We always knew from common sense and our work with client projects that WooCommerce is where the money is. Because people are making money by selling things business-wise, we thought people are more likely to want to pay for products that are e-commerce because it literally increases their bottom line. And so therefore there is a direct return on investment. Whereas with more generic WordPress plugins, it’s often harder for customers to justify that spend. So we’ve got, I don’t even know, something like 24 plugins now. It keeps changing by the day.

It feels like anyway, and about 20 of them are WooCommerce. So while we can’t say we are a WooCommerce company, like some people, like Iconic or whoever, we are almost entirely WooCommerce.

Marcus: Do you find that to be a different level? So I came from, I came from a WooCommerce plugin company before GoDaddy, that was acquired by GoDaddy. And I was on the, on the support side. Do you find that the support part of that is different from, let’s say like the WordPress plugins versus the WooCommerce plugins? I mean, it makes sense from a bottom line perspective, but then there’s so much risk involved, right? Your plugin has to work or people are losing money on that bottom line. Do you find that that’s more work? Does it make sense? Do you like that part of it? How have you sort of, I guess, accounted for that, made sure that all the support and everything is in place there?

Katie: I found it essentially the same and with similar challenges and the nature is similar, whatever the plugin, because everybody thinks that their website is absolutely business critical, whether they’re selling on it or not. So they may be less inclined to pay more for a non-e-commerce site, but when there’s a problem, it’s urgent and important to them, just the same. So our non-we-commerce plugins have very similar support demands. We started off with me doing all the support for way too long.

It was like my baby. I knew all the products so well. And while I’m not a developer, I know how to use them inside out. And as the person also in charge of marketing, I knew all the advanced use cases and workarounds I could suggest to people. And like, if our plugin didn’t have a particular feature, I could recommend something compatible to add that so that we didn’t have to lose the customer. And all these things, I thought, how could anybody else do that as well as me? So I kept going till I was doing like 50 tickets a day or something. And I tried very fast and I had a lot of systems in place, like big Google docs to copy and pasting common responses. And, you know, I had a lot of that to speed me up, but I also found I’ve, I was very quick because I was the boss. Nobody was. checking my work, no one was going to tell me off.

So I needed it to be the quality I was happy with, but I was kind of in charge so I could choose how long to spend on each thing in a way that hired support engineers can’t do. But eventually it was just ridiculous. And so I very reluctantly hired my first support person who was from Level Up. You know, then they do just support for theme and plugin companies and I was really skeptical, but people had recommended them to me, particularly since they were from the Philippines.

And I thought it might be like other bad experiences I’ve had of outsourced support with things like banks and broadband companies and whatever. But actually, it wasn’t anything like that. And they sent me some sample responses from the person they were proposing to allocate to me. And it was just amazing. There was this guy, this is four years ago, but he’s still with us. And he was just such a character. He really put personality and warmth into it and really went out of his way to help the customers. And he still does. And since then, we’ve grown to seven support engineers. And to get it right, now it’s that side, we’ve implemented three tiers of support.

So we’ve got tier one, which is the basic side of things and quick wins. Tier two is kind of my level really, which is complex advanced usage. And use cases and then tier three is developer level support, which is we’ve been doing for a year now. So that’s like a bridge to the development team where they can actually find the cause of bugs and either do a pull request or at least point the developer in the right direction, send CSS fixes for a theme and things like that, and really give that more advanced support because before we had them, we were quite defensive in our support like. We were very clear about what was included and what wasn’t. Because we didn’t have those skill sets available to do things like CSS customizations or minor things, we were saying no. And that didn’t feel like a good service to customers. So now we’ve expanded, we’re feeling that we can be more generous and customer focused in that way.

Marcus: Yeah, that’s awesome. And I 100% understand where you’re coming from there. And not only is it not sustainable for you to continue to do all the support on your own, but it just means that every, you know, every minute, every hour that you’re answering support tickets, you’re not doing other things that will help you grow the business as a CEO, your time as a CEO is better spent on different pieces than, than support level stuff.

So that totally makes sense. So you started with agency work, but pivoted to developing plugins. It’s been a number of years ago. Now, what was the first plugin that took off that made you realize that you could sustain enough business from developing extensions and is it still one of your top sellers?

Katie: Our first plugin was called WooCommerce password protected categories. So it was very niche and very specific. It was the most popular, there used to be a WooCommerce ideas forum, which you’ll probably remember that doesn’t exist anymore, or at least it’s been merged into hidden away places, which isn’t as accessible.

So we started by going through that and finding the most popular idea with the most votes. that was a realistic size for us to develop and didn’t feel like it would be put into core at any time soon. So we use those criteria and WooCommerce password protected categories was the result. So it’s like password protected pages, which are part of WordPress itself, but for categories. And people were wanting it for things like a photographer creating a product category for each client that nobody else could access or wholesale store or something like that. We launched that in March 2016, and I marketed it by writing tutorials about it on our blog.

And back then there were no plugins that did that. There are competitors now, but back then there was nothing. So we got right to the top of Google straight away and started getting sales within a few days. Because the amazing thing about WooCommerce, as you will well know, is just how huge the market is. that even something really niche can have a big market. So we were able to develop this relatively simple plugin, technically, that met a big need for lots of people. So that was really good. And we were so surprised when we had the first sale because we just stuck it on our client website, put a plugins link in the menu, and it didn’t spend that long with the branding or anything.

We just put it up there as an experiment and it actually sold. But the plugins that really kind of launched us into realizing we could do it full time were our Table plugins, which we did very shortly after that. And it started off as a non-WooCommerce plugin that we built for a client who wanted to list blog posts in a table. So we released a pro version of that, Post Table Pro, which lets you list. any post type and custom fields and things that weren’t available in the free version or what we did for the client. So we launched that and there was a free version and a pro version and loads of people started saying can we list WooCommerce products? Well yes you could because it’s a custom post type but they wanted add to cart buttons, they wanted quantity pickers, they wanted it to function as a one-page WooCommerce order form. And again, at that time, there weren’t any plugins for that, even though there’s quite a lot now.

So we thought this is huge, the people are really asking for this specific feature. So instead of adding WooCommerce support to PostTable Pro, we’re going to release a new plugin, WooCommerce Product Table. So we did that and really PostTable Pro did great, Protracted Categories did. They’re actually both in our top six or seven best-selling plugins now, years later. but product table was absolutely huge and it was straight away. And people, the amazing thing about when you’ve launched something is people tell you how to make it better and how to get more sales.

So we had our feature request list and we kept adding the features that were the most popular, like listing variations on separate rows in the table and things like that, that we hadn’t done straight away and kept growing it. And that is, it’s now only our second best-selling plugin, of all time it’s the biggest and it’s done something like one and a half million dollars lifetime or something.

Marcus: That’s awesome. And actually the end of that answer leads me right into my next question. You’ve recently posted a number of articles on the Barn2 to site that were well more transparent than most folks generally are with their business details. Just like you just shared about sales, about the plugin. What made you decide and makes you continue to decide to be open and share these sorts of numbers?

Katie: I was always inspired by Pippin’s year in review post when he owned Easy Digital Downloads and Affiliate WP and that group of plugins. And they were always so interesting. And I’d read them every year and get a lot out of them. And without the revenue data that he shared, it would have kind of been meaningless because you don’t really know what you’re talking about in terms of scale or whatever. You don’t know how to compare it to your own business. And I know comparisons aren’t always helpful, but sometimes they are. Sometimes they make you feel better about yourself and you’re like, actually, I’m not that far behind.

Or sometimes they inspire you and show you what you could achieve if you follow the same path. So I always found that really useful and he went further than I ever have because he shared profit figures as well, whereas I only share revenue. And so about three years ago, maybe I started writing my own year in review posts where I included. various statistics such as number of sales, support tickets, revenue, that kind of thing. And people seem to really appreciate it. Like at WordCamp Europe this year, a lot of people came over to me and thanked me for being so open with these things.

But I also noticed, and this is probably not a nice thing, but I kind of liked it. People started taking it seriously within the industry when they saw what we were doing. And there’s loads of companies bigger than us, of course, but at the same time, we’re doing quite well. So people were like reaching out and wanting to partner and things. Immediately after I published those posts, and I suspect it was because they’d seen the revenue and thought, actually, they’re doing quite a lot of business. We need to get on their site or something like that, or they’ve got a lot of customers that they could get our product to, so let’s partner with them. And it helped to… I think bring opportunities really.

Marcus: Yeah, that’s, that’s fantastic. I feel, I feel it’s so hard to, I think, shove your own. Pride or ego aside, um, to do that sort of thing and be open and share those kinds of things. I’ve read all of those from Pippin too, and they’re always super, super interesting. And give you, like you said, without those numbers, the article is just kind of a generic year in review article. Um, but then you did not just the, the. year in review articles for barn to but also a EU sponsorship recap

How is that and then I don’t know I guess how Do you think about that before you hit the publish button? Is that an easy publish or do you know? Read back through and analyze and make sure you’ve shared what you wanted to share and not shared what you didn’t want to share and all of that

Katie: Yeah, I do read through them, particularly the more sensitive bits and think what could possible reactions be from general people reading it. Also, my husband and co-director that he doesn’t tend to read my stuff before it’s published, but I kind of know his views on things. And he’s a bit wanting to be less open than me. So I think about what he would say if he read it as well and use him as a mental filter, because obviously he owns half the company too. And it’s his right to. and be comfortable with what I share so I try to get the right balance.

Marcus: That makes sense. Actually, I’m curious about that as well. It’s not completely uncommon, but also not super common for husband and wife duo for like a plugin company. How is it working together with your significant other and how do you balance or do you balance, you know, the work talk versus not talking about work?

Katie: To get started, it was a real opportunity because he was a senior software developer and my background was project management and marketing. So bringing those two skillsets together was the perfect recipe for starting a software company. Because I know so many solo developers, some of whom have learned business and done an amazing job. Others are struggling to grow hate marketing. Often it’s not that they’re bad at it, they’re just they want to code.

And they feel it’s like this burden growing their company. So they spend more time perfecting the products and less time on growing it. And some of them outsource the marketing to companies like ellipsis or somebody like that, which is a good option for people on their own. But with Andy and I, we had those two skill sets together. So I was able to focus on the marketing. Like how I said earlier that as soon as we published our first plugin with commerce protected categories,

I was writing blog posts about it and that’s where the sales came from. So I couldn’t have done the plugin obviously, but I was able to get the sales. So together that was a really good combination. In terms of working together, it’s good that we have different skill sets because I’m kind of heading up the more business development, marketing, overseeing support, that kind of thing. whereas he’s more on the development side. So that helps because we’re not stepping on each other’s toes all the time. But usually there’s always something to talk about, whether it’s family or business.

And yeah, we do go on dates and talk about work things, but if, you know, we don’t have to, and if anyone gets fed up, we can stop. But sometimes it can be frustrating. Like the other day I was… working just in the dining room, because I can work anywhere. And he came down to make breakfast and was just talking about these house things. And I was like, I’m trying to concentrate on something really complicated. And he’s talking about really petty house things. So sometimes you have to say, look, I am working here. Yeah.

Marcus: That makes sense. That’s funny. Let’s zoom out just a little bit then. In your opinion, what sets WooCommerce apart from other e-commerce platforms? You obviously started in WordPress and continued on into WooCommerce stuff, but there are other e-commerce platforms. What, what do you think sets WooCommerce apart that made you go that direction?

Katie: I suppose the two key things are the fact that it’s open source, so you can do anything to it and extend it in any way. And then you’ve got the whole kind of tipping point argument where it is so popular now that it’s got this kind of established thing that it’s very hard for anybody else to beat. There is so many plugins available that people don’t even bother building for other platforms because the market’s smaller. And then that makes it grow even more.

And then there’s even more plugins available. And it’s created this snowball effect of growth, which is hard for other people to match. And similarly, the amount of plugin developed, WooCommerce specialist plugin developers and theme developers and implementers. And there’s this whole ecosystem around it. So that if you have a WooCommerce site, then you can find that expertise at all different price ranges for people to help you.

Now, in contrast, we actually don’t use WooCommerce to sell our own plugins. We use Easy Digital Downloads just because of a historical decision. Like I said, we stuck our first plugin on our client facing web design website. And we thought, what’s the easiest way to do this? Easy Digital Downloads, it’s specialists for selling digital products. And then we did it and started getting subscribers and it always got harder and harder to migrate, so we’re still with them. years later and it’s so limited compared to with commerce because while you can extend it and we have extended it to death, we have to do it ourselves because there aren’t just plugins available for everything and as the CEO of a plugin company I could launch any of our plugins for Easy Digital Downloads apart from the shipping ones maybe but everything else we could do an EDD version but I don’t because the market’s too small. We have one EDD plugin, which is an EU VAT plugin to take tax under European tax law, which we built because we needed it on our own site.

And then we thought we may as well launch it. But the sales are just tiny and we only keep it going because we use it ourselves really. And a lot of people in particularly the WordPress community use it to sell their own products and say how much they like it. But there’s no market. And that’s really put me off. are doing other products. I might consider something like Shopify, which I think is the second market leader or something in the future, if there’s a business case for it. And I know that some predominantly WordPress companies have extended out beyond WordPress now, such as Yoast, I think recently, and Weglot working on any platform and they’re doing well with that. But for now, WooCommerce is serving us very well and we know it really well, so we can continue to. find the gaps that people are wanting solutions for.

Marcus: Yeah, and that’s so that those are a lot of really great benefits and including the community and all of that as well. As we continue in our podcast series as co-hosts, we’ll be talking to folks that are focused on the business side of using WooCommerce building or using WooCommerce building with WooCommerce building for WooCommerce. Setting those benefits and all of that of WooCommerce aside, what do you think are some of the most pressing challenges for WooCommerce store owners? plugin developers or anyone that’s in the business of WooCommerce.

Katie: Well, the market share of WooCommerce hasn’t grown for a while. It’s been very kind of stable, which you could say is a good thing, but it’s kind of worrying as to why it isn’t. So I think we should all be working together to think about how to get more people onto the platform because everybody wins from that. I was recently watching the Freemius podcast with Becca Rice, who I assume you know from Sky Verge, and she was talking about how a big part of Skyverge’s marketing was to actually increase the user base of WooCommerce because that in turn would sell more of their products. And I thought that’s a really great idea that I’ve never thought of because we all win from that. So I think as a community, we can be meeting that challenge and thinking about how we can bring more people into WooCommerce. And of course, WordPress more generally would have the same impact.

But another one is more technical, which is the rise of the block editor and full site editing. And I think they’ve been a bit slow with the WooCommerce side of things. For example, I think the product page still doesn’t use blocks by default. And you have to use a plugin from someone like Pootlepress to, I’m a bit behind on blocks, but I think it’s not quite there yet and that will be coming.

And as a plugin company, we’re always sort of debating should we build block versions of our functionality? We’re very shortcode based because shortcodes work in Gutenberg, they work in Divi, Elementor, whatever. Whereas if you start doing blocks, then you’ve got to do something for each platform. So that’s quite difficult for companies because that would require a lot of resources, wouldn’t it? Duplicating work to create a module for Divi and Elementor. all of those. So that’s a challenge for wood commerce companies.

Marcus: Yeah, looking forward and you’ve sort of touched on it a little bit with talking about blocks and having to think about how does building Gutenberg block type stuff into our plugins factor into the future. But just looking ahead a little bit, what trends or technologies do you think people need to think about going forward? And are there some that you guys have thought about too? Of course, AI is the first thing that jumps to my mind as something that everyone is talking about now, but also going to have to contend with. But have you thought about implementing? What are some of the things that you think are coming down the line? And have you guys thought about implementing any of those things into the plugins that you currently have?

Katie: I’m trying to find a business case and demand for each thing rather than do it because it’s the latest thing and I think a lot of companies are getting quite excited about AI and trying desperately to find excuses to do it but something’s not just going to sell because it’s AI or at least not for very long and I’m quite worried about how fast it’s going to change. You’ve seen lots of analogies like the AI now is like those massive mobile phones we used to have in the 80s or whatever and it’s just going to keep improving so rapidly.

So I feel like if I jump on that bandwagon without a very clearly defined product idea with demand to back it up then it’s just going to become obsolete very quickly. So I’m kind of watching with interest and seeing the opportunities. But right now we’re not doing anything in that field. And of course the trend, as I said, is the full site editing and all of that. And we’re all gonna have to change in that direction at some point, but that’s kind of, again, if you do it now, it’s quite difficult because for example, a lot of the WordPress blocks are experimental still and in beta and things.

So when we’ve tried to integrate our plugins with blocks, then we just find lots of, barriers and things that don’t work as they should. And it’s labeled as experimental. And we’re like, we’re just too soon here. We need to wait until it’s finalized, which is frustrating when customers might be asking for it. And more generally, we just need to keep an eye on how things are going, things like apps. A lot more WooCommerce stores are going to expect apps because their customers will want to be doing things in apps rather than on a website. So… There’s lots of opportunities there as well, while still headless or something like that, of all things to be aware of.

Marcus: Yeah, one of the things that I learned early on from doing support for WooCommerce plugins is anything that you add to a plugin, you then have to kind of support forever. So when you’re adding things at a stage where everything’s new and everything’s always changing, you have to consider how much effort that is required to continue to maintain that and you know, supported from an engineering side, supported from a product side, supported from a, you know, care and customer help side and all of that.

And just jumping into those, I don’t think sometimes people understand that you can’t just add something and then a month down the road, just rip it out. You know, people start to rely on the things that you’ve added, whatever stage they’re in, um, of, of experimentation. And it’s kind of technical and product debt that you have to deal with forever. So, uh, I like, I like that you spend some time thinking about like the business case, the necessity for, for folks, um, having that feature and thinking through, is this something that we want to support ongoing?

Katie: Yeah, we have a feature request list, which is still a Google Sheet, much to the hatred of our support team who don’t like having a Google Sheet. But I love it. And I’ve pulled rank on this. I don’t do it very often. But it’s so useful because we have columns that impact difficulty and demand and a formula, a weighted formula to tell us basically what features to develop. It’s so useful.

It’s not just about those like you might get if you installed, say, a feature request plugin or used to SAS for your feature requests or something. It’s more complex than that. And I like that flexibility to add sort of secret notes for the support team. So they might see a cell that has a note on it. And when they’re adding it for a customer for another vote, they’ll see I might have added some advice, for example, like. We’re very unlikely to do this here as a workaround or something like that. So they were tracking the demand still, but I can signpost the support team.

And I haven’t seen a platform that’s as flexible as a Google Sheet. But that allows me to go in and see exactly what people are asking for and how many and that kind of thing. Because, as you say, there’s all this. There’s consequences of everything you change or add to your product. You can’t just change. Take it out later. And so there needs to be a real business case for each thing. And we have products with hundreds and hundreds of support requests. But most of them, only one or two people have asked for. So that’s unlikely to happen. Others, we might have 40 people asking for. So that’s a priority.

Marcus: Yep, absolutely. And no doubt as we dive into more of these, you know, business related shows and have guests on, we’ll talk more and more about your process and some of their processes on deciding features, new features, what goes in, what doesn’t go in and all of that. So I’m excited to hear how other people are doing that as well. All right. Finally, as we Wrap up this introduction. Could you share maybe a piece of advice or a tip for our audience, especially for those who are just starting their journey with WooCommerce?

Katie: Make sure you know it. You can’t just come in and start a WooCommerce product company. You need to be in there whether it’s just doing a hobby site for yourself, doing websites for friends and families, previous freelance work but you need to really immerse yourself in it and discover the problems and gaps for yourself. Find out what you’re interested in and you might be particularly interested in I don’t know WooCommerce. events, websites or something, so start setting them up.

And that’s when you will find the opportunities because there are still gaps, even though there’s loads of people building products for commerce, there’s plenty of gaps and opportunities to fill them with products, but you will only find them if you’re truly immersed in it. And also, when you find those gaps, think about what is a realistic product for you. If you’re going to get venture capital funding or something, then you can aim. high and go for something complex, whereas if you’re bootstrapped and doing it as a side project alongside other work or job, then maybe go small and think what can you realistically do that there’ll be some demand for.

Marcus: What a great answer that actually has me thinking about a dozen more questions that we’ll just have to wait for another show to tackle. I appreciate you joining me and sharing a bit about yourself for our audience. I’m really excited to be able to talk business with you and our upcoming guests. You’ll be at WordCamp US this year, right, Katie? Yeah, I’ll be there as well. I believe we’ll have some opportunities to do some on the spot podcast recording. So Those of you listening to this before WordCamp US, make sure that you come and find us at WordCamp US and we’ll talk Woo there as well. This was great, Katie, thank you so much.

Katie: Yeah, thank you. We’re looking forward to the future episodes.