What's up, everyone?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense
of what it's like to be in their shoes.
How do they get to where they are today?
How do they make decisions both at their companies and in their personal lives?
And what makes their businesses tick?
Today, I'm talking to Katie Keith, one half of the husband and wife duo behind a company
called Barn 2 Media.
Katie, welcome to the show, and thanks for joining me.
Hi, everyone, and thanks for having me.
So today, I have the pleasure of having you on the podcast, but earlier this year, we
actually published a written interview about you and your company on the IndieHackers website.
I'm going to assume that most people listening have not read that interview, so can you
explain a little bit about what Barn 2 Media is and how exactly your company works?
We're a WordPress company founded by my husband and myself back in late 2009, and we started
off designing websites for clients, having previously quit our more traditional jobs
to start our own company together.
And then in 2016, we switched from designing WordPress websites for other people to building
WordPress plugins and selling them via our own website.
So we've had a big switch in the article earlier this year on IndieHackers was about how we
transitioned from one to the other.
Great.
And later on, we'll dive into a little bit about what WordPress is and about what WordPress
plugins are for people who don't know.
But first, let me say that yours is one of my favorite interviews on the site.
And the reason why is that you're almost a perfect example of an IndieHacker.
You guys didn't take any outside funding from investors.
You're a tiny team, and you want to keep it that way is that I'm aiming to grow to some
massive size just because.
And you're doing all this with the goal, I think of being financially independent.
So you have more time to live your life the way that you want to.
And of course, you're happy talking about all of this in public and sharing your revenue
numbers as well.
So you're pretty much the most IndieHacker person that I've talked to you on IndieHackers.
Okay, excellent.
Yeah, I've always got an issue with the traditional startup culture, which seems to assume that
you need outside funding and staff and all of that.
And if that's the lifestyle you want, then fine.
But it feels kind of stressful to me.
So I kind of we, my husband and I built our business in a way we were comfortable with
that fit with the lifestyles we wanted, which involved getting as successful as we could,
but within certain parameters, which is we wanted to work from home.
We don't want to be managers managing staff.
We didn't feel we'd enjoy that or be good managers, particularly.
And we wanted to sell the products that we want to and not be reliant on outside investment.
So we've kind of built all of our success within those parameters, which has been interesting.
Yeah, that's exactly it.
It's not necessarily that the other way of doing things is bad, but it's that it might
not be the fit for the kind of lifestyle that you want to live.
A lot of people don't realize that there's another way to build an online business that
is more of a fit with, you know, living a more relaxed lifestyle and not being stressed
and getting to do the things that you want to do.
Can I ask you how much revenue you guys are bringing in nowadays with Varn 2 Media?
On the plug inside of things, we're currently turning over $34,000, $35,000 a month.
So that's in plug in sales.
And then there's some amount, nothing like that amount for the previous projects that
we did.
So we also built, I don't know, 100 odd websites for clients in the past, which we continue
to host and support, but we don't build new websites anymore.
So that element of the revenue has dropped off.
Yeah, that's amazing.
Because when I interviewed you, I think four months ago, you were doing $24,000 a month
in revenue.
Now you're up to 35 already.
So that's pretty rapid growth.
Is it just you and your husband working on this still?
It is.
Yeah, we're the in house team.
We do bring in outsourced expertise for specific tasks, not on the plugins or the plugin support,
that's still entirely in house.
But we've hired a developer for 20 hours a month to help with our own website, keep it
running smoothly.
Because of course, if our website is not running smoothly, we don't get any sales, it being
an e-commerce site.
And also, when I hire some help with marketing and copywriting and things like that.
But the actual core work to develop and support our plugins is just Andy and myself.
Cool.
I want to get into exactly what it means to make plugins, how you're hiring all these
people, how you decide who to hire.
But first, I have to ask right off the bat, what's it like starting a business with your
husband, because pretty much everything that's ever been written on the subject says to you
avoid going into business with your close friends and family.
It works surprisingly well.
And we've always wanted to throughout our 20s, we talked about working together from
home instead of having our separate jobs.
And it's actually we haven't fallen out over it.
I guess we spend more time together as a result.
I think it's very helpful that we have different skills.
I'm not a developer, he is a developer.
So it means we're often working quite separately, I'll be focusing on marketing and things like
that.
And he might not even know what I'm doing.
I've launched a new scheme to help promote the plugins or something.
And similarly, I don't know the detail of the technical work that he's doing.
So I think having that space probably helps to make it less intense.
We're not actually in each other's pockets the whole time while we're working.
Yeah, I think that's also dividing a routine like that is one of the reasons why a lot
of times small businesses can be much more effective on a per person basis than large
ones because you've got your area of expertise, he's got his, you don't necessarily need to
meet all the time to discuss what you're doing.
One of you is not really blocking the other from getting your tasks done.
So it's almost like you have two separate startups going at the same time.
Whereas in a big company, it's a lot of meetings, a lot of people blocking each other and a
lot more friction.
Yeah, we've both learned from the organizations we used to work for, we're both from public
sector backgrounds, which had lots of meetings inefficiency, not using the latest technologies,
all of that kind of thing.
So we've largely quit and built a business that's the opposite of that.
We have an idea, we can just do it, we have that freedom, which is great.
Yeah, so let's dive into your background a little bit, because you have to be pretty
awesome to grill your business to $35,000 a month in revenue.
What kind of experience did you have working on internet based companies before you guys
started Barn 2 Media?
Well, Andy was a web developer, but he was a more sort of enterprise level developer
within the civil service.
And so he did like Java development and that kind of thing.
So much more large enterprise systems, although they were web based.
So his WordPress and web development knowledge, the way we do it now is self taught.
But the good thing about developers is that once they've got those skills in that background,
developers can reskill in that way, often self taught, particularly with something quite
accessible like WordPress.
My background's project management and marketing in terms of my previous jobs, but all of my
jobs had involved some sort of web design work, which might have been maintaining the
company website, writing help systems, that kind of thing.
So I'd always worked on websites, but not on the small scale individual websites that
we ended up doing when we started the business.
When did you first start to see yourself as someone who might eventually become an entrepreneur
rather than working for somebody else?
Well, we always talked about it probably within a few years of graduating from university.
And we came up with all these harebrained ideas, really small ideas that were never
going to go anywhere.
But when you've got the comfort blanket of a regular salary, it's easy to talk about
what you're going to do and not actually do it.
So we were guilty of that for a long time.
And I know that lots of people, and probably people listening today, are working in a salary
job while wanting to work for themselves.
So we were in that situation for ages.
We wanted to be entrepreneurs, but we weren't actually doing anything real to move in that
direction.
I talked to a lot of people who really want to start a business, and they talk about it
for years.
And it really is a serious dream of theirs, but they never actually get around to it for
the reasons that you just stated.
You guys actually did get around to it.
So I'm curious, what got you over that hump?
And why couldn't you have just done that immediately?
Lack of ideas, I think.
I certainly had the belief that you needed a big killer idea to make it a success.
And in the end, we sort of took the plunge because Andy particularly was getting very
frustrated with the job that he had in the civil service and feeling he couldn't really
thrive as a developer, he couldn't embrace the latest technologies.
It's a whole public sector background, certainly in the UK, and sometimes isn't the most inspirational
way to develop as a professional.
So he particularly more than me was getting really frustrated.
And so it got to a point where it was like, he at least needs to quit his job, and let's
just try and do something.
So we thought about what are the different skills that a developer can use.
And we decided that small scale web design was just a good way to start off working for
yourself.
So at that time, we decided, let's just start offering web design services for small local
businesses like plumbers and electricians and cafes, that sort of level.
And that's felt like an easy route to market, given that we had no experience of running
a business at that point.
It's funny, I hear similar stories often about people who want to start a business, but they
can't quite get there on motivation alone.
Instead, their hand ends up getting forced by the alternative being so bad that they
just can't bear it anymore.
They have to quit their job because they hate it.
When you guys got started, did you ever consider any alternatives to starting a design shop
or was that the only idea you had in mind?
Not that I remember strangely, it just sort of, I mean, I suppose the other idea was given
that he was a Java developer at the time, he thought about doing contract work.
We live in the southwest of England, which not near any major cities where there is a
lot of call for that sort of work.
So lifestyle wise, he felt that it wouldn't fit with his skill set, sorry, his desire
for the lifestyle he wanted.
For example, he probably would have had to drive at least two hours to the next city
that has that sort of job, the contract work available, and that wasn't what he wanted.
We also had always talked about starting a business together, and that idea didn't involve
my skills, whereas selling websites to local companies used my skills in quite a lot of
different ways, for example, the marketing side of things, and also copywriting and providing
the content side of the website, which was more of my skill set.
We considered the contract work, but it just didn't feel right at the time.
Let's talk about your contribution to the business.
Your husband quit his job.
Were you still working full time at your job, or did you quit at the same time as him?
I continued working full time for financial reasons.
We'd lost one salary we couldn't lose to, with nothing to take its place, because obviously
it takes a while for a new business to start bringing in income normally.
So I kept working in my job for probably two and a bit years.
Fortunately, it was a flexible job, so I was able to work around supporting the business,
and I did quite a lot of hours on the business during that period, as well as my job.
And then in 2011, I had a baby.
During maternity leave, I did a lot more hours on the business, and then subsequently didn't
return to my old job.
So that sort of was our transition, strangely, that in having a baby, it got us used to the
drop in income and allowed us to build up the business income more to make up for what
I was earning before.
There it is again.
It's the same pattern where your hand is sort of forced by this external reality that gets
you to start your business earlier than you had been comfortable doing it otherwise.
Yeah, there's a lot of people feel that having a child puts back any sort of business dreams
and things like that.
It certainly takes a lot of time and commitment, but for me, it helped my circumstance because
as much as anything, I'm not sure I would have had the confidence to quit my job.
But in being on maternity leave for all that time, it sort of forced me to get used to
working from home, and then it was like less of a reason to go back then.
So it worked out quite well business-wise.
You mentioned that your business had a very local focus, and that you're doing this web
design work for customers who live near value in the same town, which is interesting and
unique, I think, because people tend to see one of the chief advantages to doing business
on the internet to be that you could sell to any customer all over the world.
Why did you choose to limit yourself to local companies?
And what was your process like for finding these first customers?
Well, this was a long time ago that we had a local focus, which was when we first started.
And so that was, to be honest, it just felt easy.
We weren't thinking of ourselves as entrepreneurs.
We were just trying to build a business, and didn't have much of a vision beyond that, really.
So when we started doing web design work, we thought the easiest way to get work is local.
I'm not sure why we thought that, but that's what we did.
And then when we discovered WordPress, we didn't think of ourselves as WordPress specialists.
But the interesting thing was that after a few months, we got better and better at the
specific WordPress platform.
And after a while, I thought, well, why don't I just put a few adverts on Google AdWords
saying things like WordPress developers, WordPress web design, and just see if anyone is looking
specifically for WordPress people, not locally, but more generally.
And we had an amazing response.
I think that that was 2010.
And back then, the market, there was a lot more gaps in the market for WordPress experts.
So that catapulted the business outside of the local focus.
And so we were designing websites for people certainly all over the UK, and often other
countries as well.
And now we sell WordPress plugins that is definitely to a global market.
We've sold in more than 75 countries, and the majority of our customers are in the US,
even though we're in the UK.
So we're not local anymore.
I like what you said about choosing to start with local customers, because you felt it
would be easier to reach them.
I think having those kind of constraints that make your job easy early on, especially when
you're an inexperienced founder, is really smart.
And you can always expand and have bigger and better ambitions in the future.
Can you explain to listeners a little bit about what WordPress is and what it means
for you to be targeting the WordPress community?
WordPress is a platform that you can use to build websites.
It's a content management system, which means that anybody can edit the content on their
website, like adding pages and blog posts and editing content and things like that,
without needing to write any code.
So when we started, it wasn't so big, but now WordPress is the biggest web building
platform in the world, and it powers well over a quarter of all websites worldwide these
days.
So it's huge.
So I'm pleased that we fell into WordPress back in 2010, because it was the right horse
to back in that sense.
Yeah, that's great that you're building your design business at the same time that you're
writing the massive wave known as WordPress.
Tell me a little bit about your first customers.
I assume they're non-technical.
Are you designing websites for them from scratch?
Do they already have websites up?
Do they perhaps have WordPress sites?
Our very first clients were small local people who didn't have a website yet.
So it was a washing machine repair, sharpening electrician, a GP surgery, those kind of local
businesses or organizations.
And then once we started advertising ourselves as WordPress specialists, which was probably
about nine months after we launched the business, we were attracting small to medium companies
all over the UK.
And so they were naturally slightly bigger than the one man bands that we've done websites
for at the beginning.
So a lot of people listening in are developers, and they're confident in their skills with
programming.
They're confident they can build pretty much whatever they imagine, but they don't necessarily
have experience with sales and marketing and branding and in general, convincing people
to buy what it is that they're making.
Can you walk me through the process of how you found your first customers?
I know you mentioned Google ads, but were you doing other things in addition to that,
like knocking on doors?
At the very beginning, I did very local advertising such as even I was just sort of stabbing around
in the dark, to be honest, trying to find ways to get customers that I had no experience.
So we printed off flyers and put them under the windscreen wipers of like, say you saw
a van of a local trades person and they had their phone number on the van, but no website
address.
Well, that's a clue that they need a website.
So even random things like that, that we did at the beginning.
And we did quite a lot of email marketing, which was I did all that did manually just
finding local companies that didn't have a website and emailing them.
And we did get work that way as well.
So that was a good springboard.
But once we found our niche, which was WordPress, then we didn't need to do any of that anymore.
We did it through SEO writing articles about particular web design questions on our blog
and Google app words and that kind of thing.
So it changed and I think became a more sophisticated digital marketing strategy.
Once we got into the WordPress arena.
I like this scattershot approach of just trying anything and everything to see what sticks.
It's so much better than I think a lot of people will just try one or two things and
get frustrated when it doesn't work and then give up and conclude that they can't grow
their business.
Yeah, yeah.
And then you find out what works if you monitor it properly, if you ask people where they
heard about you, then you can learn from that and put your resources into the things that
do work.
So I think the important thing is just trying things, anything.
And that's how you learn.
Did you ever get frustrated or worried that it wasn't going to work out and that you weren't
going to find a niche or a marketing channel that would make your business enjoyable to
run?
I don't think we did because we started getting work very early on.
So it was just a few websites in the first year, which we charged a fairly low budget
for.
I think the business turned over 10,000 pounds.
So that's British pounds, a bit more in dollars in the first year, which isn't enough to live
on, but I had my salary, but we always had a steady trickle of work.
And then it grew and grew gradually.
We never had a period where there was no work for several months.
And of course, with web design work, you can focus on ongoing revenue from each client
where possible.
So that's selling, hosting, selling email services, and also ongoing support and maintenance
for the websites that you've built.
So once you've got a few under your belt, your ongoing revenue is growing as well.
So let me ask you, you said that early on, you'd never really run a business before.
You weren't sure what you were doing.
What was your goal?
Why did you guys want to run a business in the first place?
I think to be honest, it was largely lifestyle reasons.
I'm sure there was some drive there to achieve kind of professionally and make a success
of something.
But it was largely that we wanted the flexibility of the lifestyle to be able to work from home,
choose our hours, that kind of thing.
We always had a desire to build a scalable business where each hour you work, you can
make more than your normal hourly rate would be.
So selling services isn't ideal in most ways because you're just charging for your time.
But if you can productise that in some way, then you can get more for the same amount
of work, if that makes sense.
So I know web design business isn't initially scalable in that way.
And it took us a while to find ways to do that.
But at least you get extra revenue from things like hosting.
So it starts to scale once you get a few projects under your belt.
And then of course, since then, we've gone in a product direction, which is our kind
of ultimate goal to sell products rather than services.
But we just didn't have an idea of product to build at the beginning.
Yeah, that's exactly what I wanted to get into.
Because most people who want to be indie hackers know right off the bat that they don't want
to be trading away their hours for dollars.
They don't want to have to do more work every time they get a new customer.
Instead, what they want is to build some sort of scalable online product that they can sell
to as many people as possible.
And so that's how most people get started.
Whereas you guys had this sort of two-faced approach where you first started off doing
agency work.
You're doing web design work.
Every time you have a new client, you have to do another website.
And you said that the reason you started that way is because you didn't have a good idea
for a product.
How did you guys eventually hit on a good idea?
Through our clients, so through providing services, you could say.
One client in particular had commissioned us to develop a plugin, which basically lists
his blog posts in a table.
And that's still online now.
So he had lots of blog posts on his website, and they were a bit disorganized.
And the standard ways of organizing posts in WordPress, such as tags and data archives
and things like that, weren't really cutting it.
He wanted people to be able to search by topic and keyword and that kind of thing and to
sort by different options.
So he wanted a table which lists all the blog posts with columns for things like name, date,
author, topics, whatever.
And so he commissioned us to write that plugin.
And we basically released a free version of that plugin with a few extra features on the
WordPress plugin repository, which is where you can find thousands of free plugins for
a WordPress size.
And from those free users, because we only did that to just get off, to dip a toe in
the water with the whole plugin thing, really, and see if we can launch a plugin and make
it successful.
And even though it's free, and people very quickly started asking for extra features.
So people, for example, said they don't want to display blog posts in a table, I want to
display other types of content from my website in a table, such as documents, I want to create
a document library listing documents, I want to create a member directory listing members,
or an events list of upcoming events.
So people, or an e-commerce product table which lists products from an e-commerce site
in that same table layout.
So people kept asking us, how can we list other types of information from a website
in a table, not just the blog post you could do with the free plugin.
So naturally, that was obviously an opportunity for us to build a paid plugin, which lists
WordPress content in a table.
So we launched our post table pro plugin.
So it's not an idea we ever had.
It was the evolution of an idea one of our clients gave us, coupled with feedback from
users of the free plugin.
There's so much good stuff there that I want to talk about.
I mean, you've got your customers who are giving you really the ideas of what to build.
You've got all of this WordPress knowledge that you built up pretty much from nothing
because of your agency business that told you where WordPress customers hang out that
told you that these marketplaces exist where you can put up a WordPress plugin and people
will be able to find it, etc.
But I want to go back to even before that, how much time during your agency work were
you searching for an idea?
And did you have any other products that you tried to build and tried to get out the door
that maybe didn't work out or was this the first one?
We spent a year building a WordPress theme and it didn't work.
So a theme is like a design or a skin for your website.
So we spent a year designing what we thought was the perfect theme, having seen how successful
a lot of other themes were.
This was between 2012 and 2013.
Because we were so slow in building our product, by the time we submitted it to the marketplace
that we wanted to sell it on, which was called Theme Forest, the theme market had moved on
and by then themes were not what they used to be.
Some themes on websites like Theme Forest have hundreds and hundreds of features that
they take years to develop if you're just a single developer.
And they're not the sort of thing that we could realistically compete with.
So the market had moved on, we couldn't compete and our theme was never launched.
So that was not a success.
Yeah, how did that not demoralize you guys or did it?
And were there any lessons you took away from that that helped you in the future?
I think it did demoralize us and we went back to the drawing board for quite a long time
because we hadn't had an idea of something else to do.
The thing about a theme is that it can be quite multi-purpose.
It wasn't a niche theme that we were building, it was a generic theme.
And I think that was its downfall really because multi-purpose themes became something very,
very big, offers all things to all people, all singing and dancing themes.
And we weren't able to build something that competed with those big ones.
And if we had had an idea for a specific plugin or maybe even a niche theme, we'd probably
have done it quicker, but we didn't.
Maybe we weren't listening to our clients hard enough or something like that.
So we did go back to the drawing board and just carried on building the client business
for a while.
Yeah, let's talk about niches for a little bit.
I was just in LA this past weekend and I was talking to a friend about his company.
And I asked him who his target customer was and he said, everybody.
And then I asked him how many people were paying for it.
He said, nobody.
I know that's not the case with you guys.
You guys picked a niche.
You're not trying to sell your product to everybody on earth.
And as a result, you now have lots of paying customers.
Can you explain how that's working for you and what the advantages of picking a niche
are?
Well, yeah, I think building a niche is really important if you're a small company trying
to build a successful product.
Because these days, nearly all big ideas have been taken.
I mean, good luck if you find one.
That would be brilliant.
But I certainly haven't found any big ideas that haven't already been done.
But with a niche, if you know your market, if you've got a specific industry that you're
already an expert in, as we were in WordPress through designing websites for clients, then
little ideas can come to you.
And small ideas can be successful, particularly I have found in the WordPress niche because
it has so many users.
So our first paid plugin was it wasn't the post table pro one I mentioned a minute ago.
It was another one called WooCommerce protected categories.
And that plugin, we found the idea for it on an ideas forum for WooCommerce sites.
So these are people who are using WooCommerce to sell products on their WordPress website.
And they were posting ideas on the forum saying I want this feature, WooCommerce doesn't have
it.
I want this feature.
So we just found the most popular feature that hadn't been developed and built it into
a plugin, which was WooCommerce password protected categories.
And as you can probably gather, that's quite a specific niche.
So WooCommerce is already a niche because that's just one plugin that allows you to
sell using ecommerce on a WordPress site.
And so not many, not a very big proportion of WooCommerce users want to password protect
product categories on their site.
But because WooCommerce is so huge, and it powers something like 42% of all ecommerce
stores worldwide.
Surprisingly, a lot of people actually want to password protect their product categories.
So we built the plugin, a very, very targeted niche, published a few articles about it just
on our own blog, and we started getting sales after about six days, I think it was.
Wow.
That's way faster than most people start getting their first sales.
So you're really targeting almost a niche within a niche.
It's not that you're making plugins for all websites.
It's for WordPress websites.
And it's not just WordPress websites, but it's WordPress websites using the WooCommerce
plugin.
And it's not just people with the WooCommerce plugin, but it's people who need a certain
part of their site to be password protected.
You just went down and down, found something super specific that a relatively small number
of people needed, but they really needed it and you didn't have very much competition
with other people building the same thing.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So it's a niche within a niche within a niche, but it's actually still quite a large market
surprisingly, because so many people use WordPress and WooCommerce.
So that was a really good opportunity.
And I think there's still quite a lot of ideas out there in WordPress and also WooCommerce.
So if you're in that industry, if you're, for example, building websites for clients,
or maybe you've got your own WordPress website where there's something that you just cannot
find a suitable plugin to do what you want to do, well, you found a niche that you can
exploit there.
And ideally, I would say if you want a fairly small self-contained plugin that you can develop
quite quickly, then you don't want something too huge.
You just want to find a specific feature that isn't available elsewhere.
And build that into your own plugin like we did.
Yeah.
And I think there's some other things that make your niche great in addition to that.
A lot of people hear this advice to pick a niche, pick a small target audience, but I
think there's a lot of variables that can go into that that can make your choice of
niche either good or bad.
So for example, I always say that it's important to pick a niche where people actually talk
to each other and hang out with each other.
If you pick a niche, let's say you pick productivity tools, and people who like productivity tools
aren't part of some online forum, they don't listen to the same podcast, they don't read
the same articles, they don't have any marketplace where they buy apps from, then it's going
to be very hard for you to find these people.
You're going to have to find them one-on-one individually.
And that's tough.
Whereas if you pick a niche like WordPress, and they do all of the aforementioned things,
it's easy to find them as a group.
And you can sort of eavesdrop on their conversations, find out what they like, build the right things.
You can easily market to them because you just go to one of these channels that they're
all paying attention to.
And it's easy to sort of blast out a message to them or get your app in front of them.
Most of our sales are from Google though.
So everybody uses that, even so you're right, there are additional forums that you can post
on related to our specific niche, but everybody just goes to Google first, don't they?
And types in, how do I do this?
And so whether it's productivity tools, or how do I password a WooCommerce category,
people go to Google.
Yeah, that's a great point.
If you can get to the top of Google for what you're doing, and the keywords get enough
searches, then that's sort of a permanent source of endbound traffic.
And it really doesn't matter what niche you're targeting at that point.
But for some niches, like indie hackers, for example, there's not that much search traffic,
and most of the people that we get have to come from other channels.
The other thing that I like about your choice of target audience is that you're targeting
people who use WooCommerce, and people who use WooCommerce are people who have online
stores.
So these people are buying your plugins because they see directly how your plugins are going
to help them save money, or make them money.
Which means you don't have to go through this sort of existential crisis that a lot of founders
go through where you're not sure if people will even find it valuable.
You know right off the bat that you're selling to businesses, and that therefore you could
charge money for what you're building.
Yeah, I think that's a really important point.
And it's illustrated by the fact that we have two password protected categories plugins.
We have the WooCommerce password protected categories plugin.
And we also have a general WordPress password protected categories plugin, which lets you
password protect other content types, such as blog posts, categories, event categories,
document categories, that kind of thing.
And our WooCommerce password protection plugin has had like 10 times more sales than the
generic WordPress one.
And I think it's more expensive as well.
And I think that is because people are willing to pay for something that earns them money,
which makes sense.
Whereas a lot of people wanting to password protect a category, just on their WordPress
blog or something, it might not even be monetized, so they're not willing to pay for a premium
product to do that.
Just an example of why it makes sense to sell to other businesses.
I want to rewind for a second and talk about something that you briefly mentioned earlier,
which is that the idea for one of your plugins came from what you called an ideas forum.
How did you find that?
What was that process like?
And how did that fit into your overall search for ideas to work on?
Well, that was on WooCommerce.com, they have their own forum where people can post ideas.
So because we were already in the industry, we were aware of that, which is useful.
So again, that underlines the importance of being part of the industry that you're trying
to get into already and do what you know, basically.
And so we found the idea there.
We just looked through them and you can see how many votes they've got and what's already
been built and that one hadn't been, so we went for that one.
So I expect that forum's still there if anyone wants to see what the ideas are now that haven't
been done yet.
So that's a good starting point.
And all of our other plugins have come from the two ideas I've mentioned.
So there's our table plugins, which come from that original client wanting a table of blog
posts.
And that led to our most successful product, which is called WooCommerce product table,
which is basically the table plugins I mentioned earlier, where you can list blog posts in
a table.
And this plugin is dedicated to WooCommerce and has sold many times more than the generic
table plugin.
So just like the other example I gave you a minute ago, the WooCommerce version has been
far, far more successful.
And we never had an idea for that.
The reason we built it is because client asked us to build a plugin to list their blog posts
in a table.
We released it, customers asked for other content types, and then they started asking
to list WooCommerce products in a table.
So it was never an idea that we had.
We didn't even do any research.
It was just people were demanding it because it wasn't available.
So we filled that gap.
So it's just by being in that, in there, getting things to market and listening, we found opportunities.
And I think a lot of people can find opportunities that way by getting into something and then
just listening and learning.
And our other plugins are all to do with password protection.
So they all came from that one forum that I mentioned, the WooCommerce ideas forum.
So we haven't even done any other plugins with other ideas because we haven't needed
to.
Katie, you're making a really strong case for why ND hackers might want to consider
starting with an agency or a design shop or doing consulting work rather than immediately
trying to launch some sort of scalable product.
And the reason is, as your story illustrates, inspiration is not going to strike if you
don't really have very many sources of inspiration.
If you're going to work every day and then coming home and hoping that an idea pops into
your head, chances are it won't.
But if you're dealing with clients who are actually running businesses and telling you
about their very real problems and complaints and annoyances and showing you what they value
and where they spend money, then you're going to have much better ideas occurring at a much
higher frequency.
And so oftentimes, I think it's better to just start with something that doesn't necessarily
look like your end goal.
Yeah.
So even though we ultimately wanted a scalable business selling product, we couldn't
have got there without doing the service business, even though that wasn't our ultimate goal.
And I think I suppose some people could find a shortcut and bypass the service phase of
a business because if they were already in a traditional job in a particular industry,
they might be able to find gaps because they're already in there, aren't they?
But in a salary job, so it might be that even as a side project, they could build something
and get that to market just on their own website.
And if it was a good enough niche, then you can write about it.
And hopefully people will find you on Google.
So if you want to start a business within the industry you're already in, then you're
already in there, aren't you?
You've already got that insider knowledge.
But because we were changing industries, we had to go through a different route.
So we've talked about how you found your first customers for your design shop.
But I want to dive into a little bit more detail about how you found these first customers
for your plugins.
Imagine that within six days, people were finding your plugin on Google and buying it.
How are you confident that people would find you via this channel?
And what was that process like?
We weren't confident.
We had no idea our plugins were set at the beginning.
It was a pleasant surprise.
I think it was on Andy's birthday we got our first sale.
We were like, ooh, someone bought our plugin, it's amazing.
It was just a gamble because we wanted to do products.
So I'm afraid I can't say that we had a very clear business plan and projections and market
research.
We built a plugin that wasn't going to be a huge amount of work and just got it out
there and it sold.
So I think it's just about just doing things.
If you do something, it can be successful.
If you don't do it, it can't be.
And if you do more than one thing, you can see what works best and then put more resources
into that and so on.
What kind of page would I have found if I did a Google search and I put in just the
right keywords to match up with your plugin?
With the first plugin, WooCommerce protected categories, you'd probably have found the
sales page because it was the only thing at that time targeted to that keyword and probably
some of our posts as well, like new plugin launch blog post or something like that.
But because that was such a specific keyword, we didn't really need to go any further than
that in many ways.
That very quickly filled up that niche because that was what people were searching for.
And so the real key here is you built something that there was already demand for.
People knew they had this problem, they were searching for it on Google, and you had the
only real solution.
So you don't have any competitors.
So of course, people would land on your landing page and buy your plugin.
Exactly.
Yeah, that's why it was such a fortunate niche to come across.
Whereas if you do something with more competition, then you're going to not struggle, but you
need to put a lot more resources in, maybe have more of a marketing team around you.
If you find something that people are actually searching for that doesn't exist yet, then
that's hopefully a goldmine if there's enough people searching.
And obviously, you can't just come across these ideas, you have to find them.
But that's why it's so important to stick within your industry and do what you know,
because that's the secret way to get to ideas.
If we zoom out and look at the entire timeline of your business, you and your husband quit
your jobs, you started a design shop and worked on that for five or six years.
And you started working on plugins at the same time.
And eventually, your plugins became your primary source of revenue.
How did you navigate that transition from one business to the next?
And how long did it take?
Because we chose small plugins, it was quick.
So I think we launched a couple of free plugins in January, including the table one I mentioned
earlier.
And then in March, we launched WooCommerce protected categories.
And that was the first premium plugin.
And so what we did was we took Andy off the development on client businesses, as we were
working with freelance developers as well for the client project.
So we were able to take him off that development wise, so that he could spend all his time
building plugins.
And we specifically chose small plugins that we were realistic for one developer to do.
So it didn't take very long.
And of course, we still had the client income coming in through the freelancers through
me project managing this and the ongoing income from hosting and support and maintenance and
stuff like that.
So we were able to put those resources into the plugins and get them going quite quickly,
which was partly learning from our previous mistake of where we built a theme.
And it took a year.
Yeah, you got to learn the hard way.
I did the same thing with any hackers where my previous project, I had worked on for I
think like a year, year and a half.
And I didn't want to release it.
It wasn't where I felt proud of it.
And so when I sat down to work on a new idea, I picked Ndhack because I knew I could get
something out the door in just a matter of weeks.
And you guys did the same thing.
I mean, within three months, you launched two free plugins and a paid one that was doing
fairly well.
And a lot of people that I've talked to have done the exact opposite route, they spent
months or years working on a product, they're not sure is going to work, and it's not ready
to be released yet.
So I think you guys learned from your mistakes pretty well and did it the right way the second
time around.
Yeah, I mean, I think if you were going to do something big, if you have a big idea,
it's fine.
But you need to do a lot more market research than we did before you launch it, because
for example, we didn't know that enough people would buy WooCommerce password protected categories
to justify the work.
But it felt like a small gamble because we had other income coming in.
And it wasn't a huge plugin to develop in that sense.
Whereas if we had a massive idea that took years and a whole team of developers and investments,
everything to build, then you need a lot more evidence that it's going to work first.
One of the things that you've said previously is that within a year of deciding to work
on plugins, you guys have launched five premium plugins.
And the revenue from your plugin business eclipsed the revenue from your design work.
What are some of the lessons you learned about which products to build, which products probably
wouldn't succeed?
And did you ever build any plugins that ended up not taking off?
Well, most four of our five plugins do really well.
The one that doesn't is the more generic password protection one that lets you protect any type
of content.
And you know, it gets 15 sales a month, something like that, but that's not enough to live on
whereas the others we could do.
And so that one hasn't taken off.
And I kind of, it's my fault, I asked Andy to build it kind of on a whim because the WooCommerce
one had done well.
And I thought, surely people want to password protect other types of content on their website.
And some do.
People use it to create password protected areas within their portfolio, for example,
so that only your potential clients that they've given a password to can view those portfolio
projects.
There's various use cases people use it for, but my instinct told me that more people would
use it and they haven't, but it's not a huge plugin and we keep it running and we keep
supporting it because it's not a lot of work.
It does make sales regularly.
And it's also very similar technically to our WooCommerce password protection plugin.
So that, which obviously brings in more revenue.
So it's not a big overhead for us to maintain the one that only brings in a trickle of sales.
Most of the people that I talked to have exactly one product and spend all of their time working
on that one product forever.
They're adding new features, they're trying to get to new users.
You guys, on the other hand, have at least five premium plugins now, multiple free plugins.
What's the thinking behind this approach?
And how do you balance your time between working on new plugins and going back to improve and
grow your older plugins?
Well, it's nice that you talk as though it's a lot because I kind of feel that we should
have more.
You see a lot of plugin shops that have a lot more plugins than us, but because we want
to keep it small and in-house and not employ other developers for the plugins and things
like that, we felt that maintaining and improving our five existing plugins, plus the three
ones is enough.
And at the moment, we're not actively building new plugins because that is sort of significantly
more work to build an additional one than to add new features to an existing one.
And when you add new features to an existing product, you can get more sales if it's things
people are looking for, just like if it was a new plugin.
So at the moment, we've decided it's good to have more than one because of what you
just said, it's good to have the risk spread across more than one.
By having more than one plugin, you can see which is successful and put more into that.
So for example, we put far more development time into WooCommerce product table than password
protected categories because it's got so many more users and we know that that's going to
be more profitable.
So we add more features to that more regularly than our less successful plugin, but I wouldn't
want to have dozens because I don't think we could keep that small in-house as we are
at the moment.
Yeah, that reminds me of this guy, Peter Lovells, who I had on the podcast, I think 10 or 20
episodes ago.
And he got his start by doing what he called 12 startups in 12 months, which was a promise
to him and the readers of his blog that every month he would launch a new startup.
I think it took five or six months for him to hit on his ultimate idea.
But without having done all those other products, he wouldn't have had as good of a perspective.
He wouldn't have really known what a promising response looked like.
He wouldn't have known which products were doubling down on and which products were not
going to be as successful.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
So let me ask you about how things have changed over time.
Earlier you talked about how your first customers came from Google searches and they landed
on the page for your plugin.
Is that still your primary way of getting traffic nowadays and finding customers or
have things changed?
And have you experimented with new approaches?
I think that probably is the number one way.
We've branched out since then and we do things like guest posting on other sites, such as
indie hackers.
And also we have an affiliate scheme, which isn't brilliant, but we have two very successful
affiliates and some up and coming affiliates who are growing their sales.
So we're hoping that that will help more obviously getting other people to promote our products
for us is a good thing if we can make it work.
How is your work-life balance nowadays?
The reason you got into business in the first place, the reason you quit your job, and especially
the reason that you stopped doing design work and switched over to a plugin business is
that you wanted more freedom.
You wanted more free time in your life.
Now that you have this successful, scalable plugin business, has that actually panned
out?
Yeah, it's a lot more flexible.
I like working and I like building a business and seeing how successful it can be.
So I choose to do more work than I strictly have to.
So I might spend a lot of time on marketing, and of course, marketing is optional.
If I stopped marketing, we could still pay the bills, but I want to keep doing it.
So I choose to work more than I'm forced to, because we keep plugin support in-house.
I have to do maybe 45 minutes of plugin support every day, even on holiday, because we keep
it in-house.
But that's not a lot of essential work, is it, 45 minutes a day, and the rest is kind
of optional.
But to give an example, on Monday morning, Andy and I went for a stand-up paddle boarding
lesson on a local river, because it's something we'd wanted to try.
And we sort of said to each other, I'm not sure this is something people are meant to
do on a Monday morning, aren't we meant to be working?
But we could, we have that flexibility.
So I choose to work quite a lot, but there's also times I choose not to.
And how does that differ from when you were a design shop, taking on new work for every
new client that you got?
That was really annoying, to be honest, because I felt that a lot more pressure to be there
for clients.
We used to take time off and go for, like hiking, so we'd often go walking in the national
park that we lived in at the time.
And when I get back, I just feel so stressed, because there was like 35 emails from clients
wanting stuff done immediately.
And when it's a website you've designed for somebody, you feel very responsible, particularly
if it's an e-commerce store or something that their revenue is dependent on.
If there's a problem with it, that's a lot of pressure on the web designer.
And because I, although we had freelancers, I was the point of contact for all of our
projects.
So that all went to me, and that was really hard.
Whereas in contrast, when supporting plugins, I like to reply to people very, very quickly
and provide good support, but the pressure is a lot smaller because it's just a small
standalone task.
So I found it a lot harder to have a good work-life balance with client projects.
The other thing with the plugins is that if you get a support request, and you end up
fixing a bug or improving something, you didn't just fix it for that one customer, you fixed
it for everybody, because it's the same product for everybody.
That's right, yeah.
Unfortunately, not the case when you're doing client work.
Yeah.
When we're fixing bugs, we keep a very long feature request list where we prioritize new
features.
So as well as that being an opportunity to keep improving our plugins, it's an opportunity
to reduce future support.
Because if people are asking for the same thing, then we can either write a tutorial
on how to do it, or add that feature, all based on the amount of demand.
So we've done a lot of work to reduce the need for customer support so that people can
either help themselves or they don't need it in the first place.
Yeah, let's dive into that, because a lot of people end up launching these scalable
product-based businesses where they can theoretically get away from trading away their hours for
money.
But they end up with a nightmare situation where there's customer support emails at all
times of day and night, and where they're always putting out fires, and they're working
longer hours than they were beforehand.
How did you guys avoid that?
What are some of the techniques that you guys use?
I know you've hired a little bit.
You mentioned some unique customer support strategies.
How do you ensure that your business is always something that you want to run, and that lets
you live your life the way that you want to live it?
I think we plan every aspect of the business with that in mind, which in some ways is a
little bit cynical.
Like, oh, we're not going to develop that product because it doesn't bring the lifestyle
benefits we want.
But nonetheless, that is how we have approached it.
So one reason for choosing small self-contained plugins is because it makes the support less
pressured in that way and smaller and easier to handle.
I know we tried to launch a theme, but looking back, I think launching a multi-purpose theme
is a really bad idea if you want to keep small because that basically affects every part
of somebody's website.
You could have anything go wrong with your site and blame the theme, even if it's actually
not the theme's fault at all.
So as a theme author, I would expect that you get a lot of support requests that are
not even anything to do with you and are very difficult to narrow down the problem and all
of that.
Because if you offer a plugin that does a very specific task, then you can very easily
keep the support within that remit.
So I think it's important to choose the right products initially, and then that is a way
to reduce support.
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.
How much do you charge for your plugins?
Because I know pricing is another thing that affects pretty much every part of your business.
If you charge too little, then you're probably going to need tens of thousands of customers
to support your lifestyle, which means tens of thousands of support requests.
How much do you guys think about pricing and what sort of things influence your decision
making there?
In the past, a lot of WordPress businesses have not been sustainable because of pricing.
Marketplaces such as Coke Canyon and Themeforest have really not helped because they would
set the price very low for a theme or a plugin.
And they would sell that for a one-off price with no recurring revenue, even though the
developer was expected to support and continue developing it forever after that small purchase
of $30 or something like that.
So I like to consider myself as part of the growing movement of WordPress businesses that
are trying to charge fairly for their products and become more sustainable, which ultimately
is going to be better for the customers in the long term because you're not just going
to give up on your products and disappear, which happened a lot in the past because there
was just no incentive to keep supporting a product once the initial sales had dropped.
So we do quite a lot of trial and error pricing to get the right balance with our new plugins
and to find the right sort of point between the amount of support required and the revenue
that it would generate.
So I'm a firm believer that it's okay to lose customers because the price is too high.
You are better off having, let's say, 100 customers for a $100 plugin than 200 customers
for a $50 plugin.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, I totally agree.
Yeah.
So revenue is the same in that example, but you're providing support for half the number
of customers.
That obviously either makes your lifestyle better or your business more profitable because
you're supporting half the number of customers.
So we have experimented with pricing and we know we've lost customers as a result.
And it is the number one comment that people make in our feedback emails that they feel
that the price is a bit high, but we think it's worth it because we do provide really
good support and we also continue developing our plugins and adding features and we need
to be able to afford to do that, otherwise it's not sustainable.
So we've worked quite hard on that.
And in addition to that, like a lot of plugin companies now, but not in the past, we charge
every year for the plugin and so that your license key will renew.
So in order to continue receiving that support and plugin updates to new versions, you have
to pay each year.
And again, that's about keeping it sustainable so that we don't have to let people down if
new sales drop off.
That's all good stuff.
And I hope people listening really take that to heart, especially people who are starting
businesses and especially the stuff about raising your prices.
It's almost never a bad decision.
And not only can it make your life better by easing your customer support load, but
I think it also makes it easier to find your initial customers.
I see a lot of indie hackers on the forum and they're starting these companies that
are building products that they charge crazy amounts for.
They charge like two or three dollars a month for something.
And then they come back and say, hey, nobody really cares about what I'm building.
Nobody will talk to me about it.
No one wants to use it.
Well, if you're only charging $2 a month for what you've built, even you don't think it's
that valuable.
I mean, you're announcing to the world that it's not that important.
I think if you charge $500 a month or $5,000 a month, if you have that kind of price range
in your head, then you're forced to build a business that tackles a valuable problem.
Otherwise, no one's going to pay that much.
And I think in turn, you end up talking to customers who are a lot more serious and care
a lot more about what you're doing.
Yeah, and you can get the evidence to support that through trial and error.
We started off without very much confidence in our plugins for $29, I think, when we started.
And then we experimented with raising them.
And our WooCommerce product table plugin now does have a premium price tag of $99.
But I feel that we justify that because it is the most advanced plugin in that space
on the market.
And it has more features than anything else.
And we're continually improving it so we get the sales that we need at that price point.
But it is obviously a lot more expensive than the where we started.
It's crazy that you can have the most advanced product in your market with the most features,
even though you only have one developer, because you chose a sufficiently small niche, so you
don't really have much competition.
Let's talk about hiring for a little bit.
You've said that you've hired some people to help you guys run your business.
Is that motivated primarily because you guys want to grow faster?
Or is that to help take some responsibility off of your shoulders so you have more free
time?
I think it's all with the lifestyle in mind, like I said, but it's to bring in extra skills
and ultimately increase sales.
We don't hire staff, we don't have any employees at all, we just hire freelancers.
And so that is for specific tasks.
So for example, a month or two ago, we identified that Andy in particular spending a lot of
time maintaining our own website, where we sell our plugins, and that that wasn't the
best use of his time because he wants to be building our plugins and adding new features.
And he doesn't want to involve another developer in that at the moment.
He wants that to still be his project and is happy with that.
And so we decided, well, let's hire a developer to help maintain our own website then.
So it's about bringing in extra skills and finding people that way.
And similarly, there are some gaps in my marketing expertise.
And so I've hired a marketing expert to help with those things like I'm not very good at
networking, for example, and that kind of marketing.
Well, you know what, you're great at coming on podcasts and answering questions.
Thank you.
What are some lessons that you've learned about hiring well for your business?
I like to try people without committing too deeply.
Most of my experience of hiring has come from when we did the web design business a few
years ago, because we built a virtual team of freelancers with different experts.
So we had WordPress developers, graphic designers, SEO experts, that kind of thing.
So we had about 10 different people all working together on a freelance basis to build websites
for our clients.
And so I've learned a lot about trying different people.
And we did things like creating development standards that people had to follow and agree
to in order to work with us and things like that to standardize the content.
We always had Andy check over people's code before we would work for them.
And we actually did that recently with our new developer as well.
So in terms of hiring freelancers, I'd say to get as much actual examples of people's
work, whether that's the code they've done if they're a developer, or copy they've written
if they're a copywriter, or something like that, and so that you can actually see their
work.
So I think interviews, as everybody knows, aren't necessarily the best way to gauge somebody's
abilities and references are not as balanced as they may seem as well.
So if you can actually see someone's work, and then try them out, maybe just on one project
before you commit any further, then that all helps to minimize the risk.
There's this book that I read called The E-Myth Revisited.
And it was written by this consultant who worked with thousands of small business owners
over the years and came to the conclusion that the biggest problem they had was that
they treated their companies like they were jobs.
So instead of working on their business and making the business itself more efficient,
they're working in their business and spending their time doing things like customer support
and working on the product and filling out paperwork and things that didn't really push
the business forward, they just kept it running.
What he advised doing instead was to imagine that your business is McDonald's and you need
to franchise it.
And in that situation, you need to turn your business into this finely tuned, repeatable
process, the system that you can hand off to anybody.
And as long as they're mildly competent, they can run your business and it would work.
And the goal here isn't so that you actually franchise your business.
Even if you don't franchise your business, turning it into this kind of system makes
it much more efficient to run, much less time consuming, and you could potentially hand
it off to somebody else.
Have you guys ever thought about doing the same thing with your plugin business and getting
it to a point where you don't have to run it yourselves anymore?
I don't know.
It's the dream, but it's hard to imagine.
There are some areas where we've automated an outsource such as accounting, copy, I'm
doing less and less copywriting myself now, maintaining our own website, whereas there
is other elements like supporting our plugins and developing and maintaining them that at
the moment it's hard to imagine getting somebody to do.
But I feel as a business owner that we shouldn't be keeping all those things.
So that's definitely something that we would think about the best way to do in the future.
But of course, without sacrificing the quality and undermining the integrity that we've built
up as a quality plugin company that stands behind our plugins, when people get customer
support from us, they often comment about the quality of that support and the knowledge
that we bring and the passion about the plugins.
And that's because there are plugins.
So it's hard to think about how I would outsource that in a way that would maintain that.
So let me ask what your goal is with Barn 2 Media.
You guys are generating $35,000 a month in recurring revenue.
Is there a magic number that you want to hit and things might change?
Or do you think things should always be bigger and always be better?
Not really.
I think the whole thing in life, have you heard of hedonistic adaptation where as soon
as you're happy with something, you want more?
So I see the monthly figures and I think that's good.
And then the next month, I'm disappointed that it's the same.
Of course.
Which is a shame, isn't it?
You can't just think, oh, great, it's successful.
You keep wanting more.
We've talked a lot about the concept of financial independence and both Andy and I have been
fans of blogs such as Mr. Money Mustache that talk about sort of early retirement, but where
you can choose what you work on and when.
And just having the financial situation where that is a choice for you.
We've talked a lot about that and although we're nowhere near that, it's a sort of long-term
goal really.
Do you think your confidence as a founder has improved since the beginning?
And if so, do you think having more confidence has made you better at running your business?
I think so because I can make the decisions myself that I don't have to refer to anybody
else.
So for example, in a previous job, if there had been a customer that wasn't happy with
something, then I didn't have that authority to make a final decision.
You always have to refer to somebody else.
When it's my plug-in, my product, I can make a decision.
I can say, we'll fix that for you or we won't and that kind of thing.
And so it does give you the confidence to take ownership.
And similarly, to go the extra mile when somebody wants something because you know you can.
It's your choice.
You're not wasting somebody else's money if you spend a long time supporting one person.
So it allows me to make decisions and having the confidence to stand behind them.
Yeah, it's great for your motivation to actually be the owner of what you're working on.
And that's not to say that if you work for somebody else, you won't be motivated.
But when you know that the buck stops with you, that every decision ends on your desk
and that you can generate more revenue by being better at your job, I think it makes
it a lot easier to justify working harder and caring more.
Yeah, I honestly cannot imagine being able to work for anybody else now.
I hope I never have to.
Because in the past, you get paid a set salary, you expected to do the hours that you do.
And you might get promoted at some time in the future, but you don't know that the harder
you work, the more successful you'll be.
So some jobs have intrinsic rewards, such as helping others or the environment or something
like that.
And I see why a job like that would, you would be motivated to do as well as you could.
But any other sort of job where it's not making the world a better place, I don't know how
I would motivate myself if I wasn't getting the rewards directly and building something
for myself.
Yeah, I think with a small handful of exceptions, if you work at a company, there's almost no
way you're going to be rewarded in a way that's commensurate with what you're contributing.
There's going to be some inefficiency there.
If you're a developer, for example, when you spend two weeks building this widget that
your company uses forever, and that makes them millions of dollars in revenue, your
compensation for that is going to be two weeks worth of salary.
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah.
And of course, you may end up making less per hour with your own business, and certainly
in the early days, and you may never make as much as when you had a salary.
So it's about risk versus potential, isn't it?
The potential is limitless in some ways, but the risk is greater, and you might end up
doing worse for more hours.
So that's the gamble.
What lessons do you think aspiring founders and entrepreneurs should take away from the
journey that you've had with your company, Bar and Tune Media?
I think my journey shows that you don't need to have a killer idea.
And in some ways, it doesn't matter what the idea is, so long as what matters is that you
do something based on what you know, keep your eyes and ears open and just get something
out there, whether it's a service that you're offering, or a product that you're selling.
If you don't do anything, then nothing's ever going to happen.
If you do something, that may not be the ultimate goal that you're going to get to, but it will
evolve into other things.
By getting yourself out there, other ideas and opportunities come to you, like customers
will ask about something, and then that becomes the new big thing that you'd never have thought
off on your own.
So just in doing something and getting something out there, that is the path to success, I
would say.
I love that advice.
Get out there and start something, and don't be deterred by the possibility that you're
going to start off on the wrong foot, because the chances are that you're going to learn
as you go, and your path will be a winding one.
Thanks so much, Katie, for coming on the show, for taking the time to share your story and
your wisdom with us.
Can you tell listeners where they can go to learn more about you and what's going on with
your company, Barn 2 Media?
You can find us on our website, barn2.co.uk, so that's B-A-R-N and the number2.co.uk.
Really go on to Indie Hackers and look up my interview from a few months ago to learn
more about our journey, because that's got more information about the transition to selling
plug-ins than you'll find on our own website, so those are two sources of further information.
Awesome.
Thanks so much, Katie.
Okay.
Well, thank you for having me.
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