Katie Keith co-founded Barn2 Media in late 2009 with her husband Andy, a software developer. For about seven years they ran it as a WordPress web design studio, building client sites with a distributed team of roughly ten freelancers. The work was steady, but both of them wanted to sell their own products instead of trading hours for client projects. They tried launching a few small products on the side over the years and none of them went anywhere.

In early 2016 they committed properly. Andy stopped taking design work and put all his time into building plugins, while Katie kept some client projects and spent half her time on marketing. Their first premium product, WooCommerce Password Protected Categories, came straight from a WooCommerce feature-request forum where store owners kept asking for something nobody had built yet. They paired it with free plugins published in the WordPress.org repository to pull in users who could then upgrade.

The signal came fast. Within three months they had shipped two free plugins and one paid one, and within six months they were confident enough to stop accepting new client work. Inside a year they had five premium plugins and income from products had overtaken the old agency. Katie's regret, in her own telling, was not making the move years earlier instead of staying comfortable on agency revenue.

By 2025 Barn2 sold 19 plugins through an all-access bundle and booked $1,786,586 in total revenue, with $1,710,312 of that from plugin sales across 18,783 transactions. The model had become predictable: 61% of revenue came from annual renewals, 38% from new sales, and the rest from license upgrades. Lifetime plugin sales passed $9.7 million, and Katie now works around 1,485 hours a year while homeschooling her daughter, the work-life balance she had been chasing all along.

The flip side showed up the same year. New plugin sales (excluding renewals) dropped 17.8%, part of a broader plateau across WordPress product companies. Barn2 responded by becoming a 50/50 partner in Setary, launching its first Shopify app, and adding development and customization services, early moves to find growth beyond a maturing core market.