Barn2 Media

Katie and her husband spent years talking about starting a business together after graduating from university, but kept the idea on hold while they had the safety of regular salaries. What finally pushed them was frustration. Andy, a developer in the UK civil service, felt he could not thrive or work with modern technology in that environment, and the couple decided he needed to quit. Lifestyle drove the decision: they wanted to work from home, avoid managing staff, and build something without outside funding.

They started with small-scale web design for local businesses such as plumbers, electricians, and cafes, since it was an easy route to market with no prior business experience. Katie kept her full-time job for about two and a bit years for financial reasons, and her maternity leave in 2011 let her shift to the business fully. Their first year brought in about 10,000 pounds from a few websites.

A later attempt to build a generic WordPress theme consumed a year of work and failed, because the theme market had moved toward large multi-purpose products they could not match. The lesson they took was to build smaller, niche products. Their plugin business started when a client commissioned a plugin to list blog posts in a table. They released a free version on the WordPress plugin repository, and users quickly asked for more content types, which led to a paid product.

Early on, the couple used flyers and manual email outreach to find local clients. Once they specialized in WordPress, they moved to SEO articles and Google Ads targeting WordPress keywords, which produced a strong response nationally.

For plugins, they found their first premium idea on the WooCommerce ideas forum: password protecting product categories. Their WooCommerce password protected categories plugin made its first sale about six days after launch, because it was the only solution targeting that specific search. Katie says most of their sales now come from Google.

What worked was narrowing the niche repeatedly, from WordPress to WooCommerce to a specific feature, and selling to store owners who could see a direct return on a plugin. Their WooCommerce-specific plugins sold many times more than the generic versions. Keeping development in-house and launching small plugins quickly also let them recover from the theme failure.

What did not work as well was the generic password protection plugin, which sells around 15 copies a month. Katie admits it was her idea and an instinct that more people would want it, and that instinct was wrong.

Barn2 Media now reports roughly $34,000 to $35,000 a month from plugin sales, with five premium plugins and several free ones. Client website work has dropped off, though they still host and support around 100 older sites. Katie still does about 45 minutes of plugin support daily and chooses to work more than required, especially on marketing, because she enjoys building the business.