In this conversation, Brian Coords and Katie Keith discuss the WooCommerce community, its users, and the challenges of marketing plugins. They explore the differences between WooCommerce and Shopify, the importance of user experience, and the need for effective marketing strategies. Katie shares insights on how to gather feedback from customers and the significance of collaboration between developers and marketers. The discussion concludes with advice for developers looking to succeed in the plugin market.
Links
- Barn2 Plugins – https://barn2.com/
- Katie on X/Twitter – https://x.com/katiekeithbarn2
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to WooCommerce and the Community
02:46 Connecting with the WooCommerce Community
05:25 Understanding WooCommerce Users
08:30 The Complexity of WordPress vs. Simplicity of Other Platforms
11:13 Exploring the Shopify Market
14:08 Marketing Strategies for Plugins
17:02 Feedback and Content Creation
19:27 Twitter vs Other Communities
23:48 Customer Segments
25:56 Parting Wisdom for Developers
Brian Coords (00:00)
Hey, welcome to Webmasters FM. Today I have Katie Keith of Barn2 Plugins, who I’m really excited about. Katie, thank you for joining me today.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (00:07)
Yeah, hey Brian, thanks for having me.
Brian Coords (00:09)
I feel like, I think we’ve met in person at WordCamp, right? Yeah, I think we have.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (00:12)
Yeah, it was quite brief
though. You’re like one of these people on my radar that I know I’ll see more in the future but haven’t much yet. Do you get that with people in the WordPress community?
Brian Coords (00:23)
Yeah, mean, I think, I know for myself, I’m pretty like socially awkward. mean, I work at home, so I don’t, so I think when I, yeah, I think you get there and it’s a lot of people and you feel like you’re trying to say hi to everybody, but you’re also trying to be polite of people’s time. So I kind of struggle with that. I don’t know. Yeah, so I kind of want to talk to you today because I will, in my professional life, I recently joined the team at WooCommerce, which is,
Katie Keith | Barn2 (00:29)
It’s WordPress.
Mm.
Brian Coords (00:48)
Something that I actually didn’t have a lot of experience with, was a WordPress developer at a WordPress agency for years and years and years, and we did WordPress stuff, but didn’t really do a lot of WooCommerce stuff. now that I’ve seen sort of the inside of it, there’s like a few people in the community that kind of have sort of like outsized presence and you’re one of those people. And I just kind of wanted to hear your experience being like a WooCommerce person. So like, how long have you been in the WooCommerce community?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (01:13)
We built WooCommerce site since 2012 or something like that but I’d say I’ve only been in the WooCommerce community since 2016 probably when I started attending WordCamps and releasing plugins for WooCommerce.
Brian Coords (01:30)
And what, like, when you think of the WooCommerce community, like where is it? Where are these people? Or like, how do you connect with other WooCommerce people?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (01:41)
I’ve been around long enough that I have many different ways that I connect with WooCommerce people. It’s basically a subgroup of the wider WordPress community with a huge overlap, but there is a sub WooCommerce community. One place would be Twitter or X where there’s specific people who discuss.
WooCommerce and are kind of leading the discussions about its future direction. You’ve got, for example, James Kemp from Woo, who’s leading the discussions about the technical future of WooCore and people that really feed into that, like Rodolfo from Build Business Bloomer and plug-in company owners that focus on WooCommerce like myself. But there’s also discussions on other places like various Slack communities and people just getting to know each other and talking independently as well.
Brian Coords (02:28)
Do you, like there’s a lot of people that are say like in Elementor, but they don’t really identify as WordPress. They kind of just identify as Elementor. there like a WooCommerce mindset like that? That’s like, we don’t think about WordPress. Really? We just think about commerce. Or do you think like it’s very tied with WordPress?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (02:46)
think it’s very tied with WordPress community-wise and platform-wise. The only time I’ve seen people just focus on WooCommerce is when they’re positioning their business. We don’t do this at Bantu because we have a few non-WooCommerce plugins, but companies like Studio Wombat and Iconic just do WooCommerce. So if you go on their website, they’ll say, plugins for WooCommerce.
rather than necessarily WordPress plugins like a more generic company might do. So that’s the main way I’ve seen it, which allows them to focus on that niche.
Brian Coords (03:20)
So who, like, I’ve been very curious about this because there’s so many WooCommerce, like there’s so many WooCommerce extensions. They have like their marketplace, there’s like a thousand, I think, extensions in there now. But then there’s all these like plugin shops and stuff. And who is buying WooCommerce extensions? Like what is the target audience? Are these like developers? Are they agencies? Are they like actual merchants, like opening stores? Like who are your customers?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (03:46)
All of those. In terms of our customer base at Barn 2, it’s about 50-50 with actual merchants who have their own stores and are looking for plugins which they will install themselves and developers or agency who are buying those plugins on behalf of clients. In terms of value to us, we would value the agencies the most because they’re the most likely to be repeat customers. For example, they might buy our All Access Pass and…
look for Bantu’s plug-in first for all of their projects in WooCommerce, whereas the merchant, lower value, although still very important and similar numbers-wise. And it’s interesting because you often hear about WooCommerce as being more for people building sites on behalf of others, whereas they might turn to something like Shopify if they wanted to do it themselves. But I think that’s largely a myth because we see an awful lot of people building their own sites in WooCommerce.
And similarly, since getting more into the Shopify space, which I think we’ll talk about later, I’ve discovered that apparently the majority of Shopify stores are actually built by agencies or developers. So I think actually it’s quite a similar market in that particular sense.
Brian Coords (04:56)
Yeah, there’s, I, you had a tweet recently. I think it was you right about, is, is WordPress in general for people that, like, it for people that want something easy or is it for people that want something more technical and customizable? I, am I framing that question right? Or maybe you could frame it better. Do you know which tweet I’m talking about?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (05:15)
Yeah,
yeah, that’s right. So it came from a Do The Woo episode. Am I allowed to reference other podcasts?
Brian Coords (05:23)
Yes, because I have a question
about Duluru. So, yes.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (05:26)
Okay,
so I I co-host Do the Woo product chat with James Kemp and we had guest Ben Ritner from Cadence on and we were talking about the balance between customizability and flexibility in WooCommerce and WordPress products. And we got onto a discussion which was a bit off topic about WordPress itself and should WordPress
be easy enough for the average user to just pick up who hasn’t used it before and just figure out and whether the interface should even aim to be that. And Ben and James sort of said they like the idea of that, but maybe that’s not its target audience and not the priority. And so I started tweeting about that and did a poll as well. And the majority of people said, actually, yes, WordPress should be for everybody. And if it’s not, then it needs to change.
I think WooCommerce, that applies to as well. Although it’s difficult for WooCommerce because it’s part of WordPress, so it doesn’t have full control over the user experience in a way that, for example, Shopify does, where everything is about that e-commerce store. With WordPress and WooCommerce, the Woo store is just a part of another site which might have other massive plugins like events plugins and learning management plugins all on the same site.
Brian Coords (06:44)
Yeah, the, go back and forth on this one a lot. And I was, so I was listening to that episode this morning while I was walking my dog. And I wanted to ask about this because you give the example of, I think it was your dad where you give him a WordPress website, but he liked the kind of simpler builder. That’s, know, a little bit easier. I’ve had the, I’ve had the thing of where a friend or family comes for a website and then I give them WordPress and it never works out. Like they never want that because they’re not.
technical at all. And then I, I’ve learned now I send them to Squarespace or something like that. If they just want like a simple, basic website, do you, do you, do you still see WordPress as like, I’m going to send it to like the average non-technical person and give it to them or should, or should we just like, let that, let that go and just say like, no, WordPress is powerful. It’s not, it’s not a user friendly tool. like a power friendly tool.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (07:34)
don’t think we should let it go because I think that should be its goal. If you think about the whole philosophy of democratizing publishing, that’s about publishing for all and the current complexity of things like the block editor for beginners isn’t achieving that goal. So therefore I would say it should be trying to do that. However, currently it’s not. And if I was going, actually I did recommend to my dad for his next website not to use WordPress.
I know what a pain it was for everybody, him and me, in supporting him when I tried to help him with WordPress and he just wants something template-based where you drag your content in, you can’t change the layout, nothing can go wrong, and that’s not WordPress unless you find some modified version of WordPress, maybe a hosted version of it or something where the host has done that to WordPress, which actually I think would be quite a good service to offer, but…
Unless it’s something like that, then I don’t think you should recommend it to true beginners who aren’t willing to learn.
Brian Coords (08:36)
Yeah. And you know, there’s, there’s definitely an argument that WordPress should be easier. I, know, I think of like sub stack had got really popular and it’s popular because it’s so easy. You can’t change your, I don’t even think you could change your font. I don’t know. You can maybe change your colors. can change your font a little bit, but like it does everything. You don’t have to think about it, but you can’t break it. You can control it. But I have to imagine that for someone like you.
You do want that complexity because that’s what your business is built on is the fact that it can be complex and customizable and stuff like that. And if WordPress were like dumbed down, I guess it would, there wouldn’t be room for maybe developers and stuff, but I don’t know. Do you like, do you think you can be powerful and simple at the same time?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (09:24)
Of course, and in the response to my tweet, I think it was Vikas Singhal from InstaWP gave about 10 examples of software that achieves that perfectly, where there is a really beginner friendly version, but the more advanced options are there if you look for them. So I don’t think anybody is suggesting taking away the flexibility of WordPress, which makes it the world’s leading content management system and
allows people to create any type of websites. As we’ve seen with things like the speed builds that you’ve been on, where you can just do anything very quickly if you know what you’re doing and you’ve been on that learning curve, but there should be a simpler version and then the options are there for people that need them.
Brian Coords (10:01)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. And for the people that are buying plugins that are supporting the plugin ecosystem, they’re definitely like power users, but there’s not like, I don’t know if I see them as like developers or there’s ever been a developer focus. Like when you look at like the agencies and stuff building, do you think of them as like developers, like software engineers, coders, they’re using build tools and all this kind of crazy stuff. Or do you see them as more like this kind of WordPress like
power user, extremely technical, maybe messes with code a little bit, but not entirely, not like a developer. don’t know, does that, do you see like the difference there in like people buying your plugins?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (10:48)
Yeah, I think of that as being what I would call an implementer. Somebody that can do everything with WordPress, myself included, actually. I know how to use WordPress and I’ve built all sorts of websites, but I can’t write a line of code. So I’d see that as an implementer, which is a different role to developer. And in terms of our customers, we get all of those and our plugins are designed to be easy for anybody.
Anybody who’s already used WordPress and knows how to install a plugin should be able to use our plugins. And we’ve got setup wizards and things like that so that you can easily get set up. But we’ve also got lots of developer hooks and filters for the people that do want to tinker around with them. So we would never assume that our users are developers.
Brian Coords (11:17)
Mm-hmm.
Okay, now you’ve been exploring Shopify. Do you feel like, how close is the Shopify market and those sort of people in the WooCommerce market? Do they feel very similar or do they feel different?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (11:47)
I’m very new to Shopify and we’re still building our first apps so I don’t have that direct experience but I have spent the last…
Brian Coords (11:51)
Okay.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (11:55)
almost six months now researching it in depth and getting to know Shopify app developers and that kind of thing. So I would say that from my research, the typical Shopify merchant has a larger volume. Apparently Shopify’s whole business model is built around churn. They want people to try out a Shopify store and they know that 90 plus percent will fail very quickly and they don’t care. They just want people to try it because they know that some of them will
and be really successful and they are the ones where the money is going to come from in Shopify. So that’s their business model and it’s targeted at larger merchants. And I think that Woo’s been flirting with that as well, maybe targeting larger merchants, but I think currently Shopify is probably doing a better job of attracting those larger stores. And that’s borne out when you look at data on things like WooCommerce’s market share.
Brian Coords (12:23)
Mm-hmm.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (12:48)
where on websites like Built With, I’m noticing that the growth is coming from smaller websites. So you can tell that by, it in the world’s top million sites or the world’s top 100,000 sites or whatever. And when I last checked, only a couple of months ago, WooCommerce was growing in the all internet category, but not in the world’s top sites, whereas Shopify was. So that also suggests that Shopify is attracting bigger stores.
Brian Coords (13:00)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Yeah, I mean, at end of the day, bigger store is bigger money, you know, for, for either any platform that, monetizes based on payments. So it’s understandable that anybody’s going to want to do that. If you had a, if you’re, know, if your dad or somebody said, I’m going to sell, you know, my whatever wood carvings or something on a store, where would you send them? WooCommerce or Shopify?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (13:41)
very difficult because I would want to send them to WooCommerce. I’ve been building my business on that for eight or nine years now and thus it would be a dilemma. I would make that as an individual assessment on whether I think they could cope with not just WooCommerce but the whole WordPress thing because like I said earlier WooCommerce is built on top of WordPress so they have to understand WordPress as a whole and the block editor unless you’ve installed something like Elementor.
and WooCommerce is just part of that decision. So I’d have to do it based on the person.
Brian Coords (14:14)
Yeah, that’s a tough one. And I don’t know if you have you tried out Shopify for some of the other stuff that’s maybe not the e-commerce stuff, but like, you know, like you said, we have the block editor page builders and like that. Have you been experimenting with what it’s like to actually set up a Shopify site and like just design your product page or something like that? Have you played with any of that stuff?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (14:37)
I’ve played with the product side. I haven’t used the blogs or built custom pages or anything like that, which I probably should. I need so much more experience in Shopify.
Brian Coords (14:48)
Mm-hmm.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (14:50)
because you need to understand what people’s needs are, don’t you? So I haven’t done that as much as I would like, but I have set up a basic store. actually some things were better than WooCommerce, other things not so good. For example, I thought the variations were disappointing in Shopify. I thought they’re called variants in Shopify. I’m trying to learn the new terminology. I thought actually it’s no better or more intuitive than Woo, which I know wants to improve the management of their variations.
Brian Coords (14:53)
Yeah.
Okay.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (15:18)
So things like that surprised me. Whereas some things like there’s a thing called Flow. I think it’s a free extension, but it’s just part of Shopify really, which adds really complex Zapier-like logic, like if this, then that, to your Shopify store. So you can use it to create really targeted email flows, for example, which you don’t see anything like that anywhere close to WordPress or WooCommerce core. So some of it was more impressive and others wasn’t really any better.
Brian Coords (15:31)
Hmm.
as like coming into really any marketplace, whether it’s, well, in WooCommerce, are you on like the official marketplace or do you sell privately?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (15:56)
We’re not, we only sell on our website.
Brian Coords (15:59)
Okay, what’s the difference? I should know this as I work there, like what, from your perspective, what makes you pick a decision on that?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (16:07)
We may well go on the marketplace at some point. Historically, we didn’t because they used to have very prohibitive terms and also they took 70 % commission, but that has changed. Their terms are now much more friendly and they only take 30 % commission, I think, which is what we pay our affiliates. So I’m very comfortable with giving somebody 30 % if they’ve got the sale for you. So I don’t have any principled reasons in that sense not to do it.
Brian Coords (16:30)
Mm-hmm.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (16:34)
but we’ve grown enough that I feel that we don’t need it. And I’ve spoken to several plugging companies who are on both, so on their own website and the Woo Marketplace. And if they’re good at marketing, as we are at BUN too, then they typically get a lot more sales from their own website. So I would say that we don’t need it. And the main thing putting me off is that we’d have to do a lot of development work to link its licensing system to ours. It’s just a…
Brian Coords (16:47)
Mm-hmm.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (17:02)
task that needs doing once but actually it would be like quite a lot of work for one of our developers and I would rather they were doing other projects at the moment.
Brian Coords (17:04)
Yeah.
And for Shopify, do they have a similar thing? Can you just sell stuff or do you have to go through some sort of marketplace?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (17:19)
You don’t have to use the Shopify App Store, but that is the thing in Shopify. It’s much, much more dominant than the Woo Marketplace. It is the place to go, a bit like the App Store with Apple. And so we are only considering going on there. I’ve been contacted by a few people that are setting up independent Shopify App Marketplaces, but I’ve seen no evidence that anybody would look for apps on there.
So we’re going to do our usual independent marketing, like we do a lot of content marketing for our WooCommerce plugins, and we’re going to do that for our Shopify apps too, but it will be on the app store, and we will also do lots of work to optimize and analyze those listings to try and get to the top and things like that. That’s the main marketing channel for Shopify.
Brian Coords (17:45)
Mm-hmm.
If for anybody that’s like building a, an extension or selling software, feels like marketing is much more important, honestly, than writing the code. Like it feels like marketing and market research is that’s the thing that makes you successful or not. you with, you know, everybody freaking out about AI and generative content and all this sort of stuff. have you adapted your like marketing strategy at all? Are you like, is content marketing kind of your big push and are you changing things?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (18:32)
We haven’t really changed things because AI is recommending our products. And it seems that if you follow common sense with your SEO and try to provide content that real users want as well as search engines, that seems to cover AIs as well. So if more guidance comes out on optimizing for AI in the future, then we might tweak our strategy, but so far we’re not.
It is a difficult time. We’ve lost a lot of traffic in Google over the last year or so. This is the first year that our new sales are the same as they were a year ago. Our business is growing because of renewals, but new sales are static. But I think that’s partly because of things like Google changes. I don’t know if it relates to AI. And it’s also partly because the WordPress industry itself isn’t growing as much as it used to.
Brian Coords (19:01)
Mm-hmm.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (19:20)
we’re not riding a of a rising tide like we used to be for most of our history.
Brian Coords (19:26)
Yeah, there was a growth to WordPress that I think we all benefited from. I think, you know, what are we like getting close to 50 %? there’s probably a natural plateau there somewhere that, you know, there’s really no cure for. We all have our opinions on what WordPress should be doing differently to grow. you know, I know we’ve both talked about it. The one thing that I’ve been kind of curious about is how you get…
how you kind of like get community feedback because you and I are both pretty active on X slash Twitter and there is a large group of people there, they’re very, it’s a very like select group. Like it’s not a good sample size. I would have to imagine that most of your customers, for example, aren’t on there. I feel like most of the people using WooCommerce day to day are probably not on Twitter. They’re probably in other places. And so sometimes I feel like,
the feedback that I see on Twitter is maybe not really widely representative of the larger, you know, like the user base. Do you think that’s true or how do you think about that?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (20:35)
I do think it’s true and it is a worry that the following I’ve built and the people I’m communicating with on a day-to-day basis about how to grow my business and helping them to grow their businesses are not the target audience. So I know a lot of other WordPress product people and WordPress people in general, not so much with commerce store owners. So…
In terms of discussions on X and things like that, I get a lot of value from consulting with people who have similar experience to me. So they might share what’s worked in their business. Maybe they’ve done some A B testing or something and increased conversions and I can implement that in my business and vice versa. But they’re not the target audience and it doesn’t tend to generate sales either, although it does occasionally. So the main way we get that kind of feedback.
is from our customers. So obviously our support team are talking to customers every day and we’ve got a good process for recording feature requests and just general complaints and like not everything’s a feature request that can be improved. So there’s a separate process that if a customer keeps getting stuck with something or there’s a gap in the documentation, then the support team are now feeding that back to me on a monthly basis.
We also send an email, think it’s about seven or 14 days after purchase, asking for feedback. And I really like it when people respond to those in detail, which they quite often do, because they describe their whole journey of how they found our plugin and what other ones they considered and what prompted their decision and then how they found it to use. So that’s really helpful.
And my favorite thing about that is when they tell me a keyword that they use to find our product that I’d never optimized for. So that’s an instant content opportunity, which is always fun.
Brian Coords (22:19)
Hmm
Do you, how do you get, how do you get content out? you, mean, I have to imagine you have a team or do you have like a agency that you work with or like a good system for that?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (22:36)
Yeah, it’s a bit of a weird hybrid system, but it seems to work. So we use the marketing agency Ellipsis who specialize in marketing WordPress products. So they are very, very specific to what we do. And they do our… So I just write my random ideas as they happen, which might be just an idea. It might be from a feedback email received from a customer to say, about we produce an article on this, which we’ve not done before.
Brian Coords (22:49)
Mm-hmm.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (23:05)
And then every three months, they analyze all my random ideas and look for additional opportunities. And they propose a long list of content that we can produce. And then I make decisions on that and feedback. They’ve got an AI called Falcon that they’ve built in-house, which basically maximizes the likelihood that a piece of content will rank and tries to reduce the randomness that a lot of bloggers have.
So they provide folk and titles and keywords and what the article should be about and an outline. And I then get that written by freelance writers, mainly to save money. I have experimented with in-house writers, but I haven’t found the right person yet. So that’s why I’m still using freelancers.
Brian Coords (23:31)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, that’s gonna make sense. Getting your ideas from support is such an interesting, like when I joined WooCommerce, when you join Automatic, they talk about this, you have to do two weeks of being a support person as you’re on, it’s like you’re kind of onboarding into the company. So I spent two weeks in the WooCommerce support, in one of their support teams and seeing just, I mean, nobody comes to support usually in a good mood, obviously.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (24:03)
Mm.
Brian Coords (24:18)
Something’s wrong and their website, you know, is important to them. And so you see a lot of stuff and you see a lot of interesting websites. And it really blew my mind just to see how many, how big of a ecosystem there is, how many different extensions and ways people set things up, like how unique every store is, all the crazy things. Do you ever look at like your customer sites and just see like, like all the things that they’re building with it and like their businesses and stuff. you ever, have you ever bought something from a customer? Cause you just saw their site and you were like, man, that’s pretty cool.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (24:48)
I’ve never bought anything from a customer, but I really like visiting their sites. And one of the questions in our feedback email is, can you share a link to your site where you’re using our plugin? And that’s really insightful. I always keep a record of the different use cases and industries, and we use that to inform our marketing. For example, our sales page will focus on the use cases that we know are the most common to get people’s attention, obviously.
Brian Coords (25:06)
Hmm.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (25:14)
And also if it’s a really impressive site, then we will ask them if we can feature them as a case study. And our YouTuber will then get in touch and try and interview them and produce a video and some written content about them. So you can get a lot from visiting your customer’s sites.
Brian Coords (25:31)
Yeah, that’s been one fun thing is seeing all the different sites and I think at WordCamp Asia, they used like Woo merchants to like make the swag and all this sort of stuff. And so you get to see all these cool things people make. yeah, well, if most of the people that I know that listen to this, not a lot of people, but they are mostly developers. so if you could give like parting words of wisdom to somebody who’s maybe a developer, maybe they have like a
extension or plug-in idea that they want to build a business, what would be the first thing you would tell them to go out and do in order to be successful?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (26:05)
think that the biggest thing that holds back developers success with this is not working with marketers. So a lot of developers do everything on their own and some developers have got really good at marketing and found success but the majority that I’ve seen have remained small because they didn’t know marketing and often you know you focus on what you enjoy and what you’re good at don’t you and you put the other things to the bottom of the list.
Brian Coords (26:31)
Mm-hmm.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (26:32)
and you convince yourself that they’re not important. So marketing is important and if you’re not someone that’s going to prioritise that, then either hire somebody like Ellipsis for example, we’ve been working with them since 2017, or go to word camps, tweet about it, whatever, be part of the community and find a business partner who is able to grow it.
Brian Coords (26:56)
Thank you so much, Katie, for talking to me today and going over all of this. I’m pretty optimistic. Seeing the inside of WooCommerce has really changed my perception. Seeing the inside of WordPress, I do feel very optimistic. We’ll have to talk some day about sort of a lot of your opinions on some of the direction and sort of stuff like that. But in the meantime, where do you recommend people go to follow you, follow Barn2, that sort of stuff?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (27:24)
For the company, go to barn2.com and to see what I’m doing, go to my Twitter at Katie Keith Barn 2.
Brian Coords (27:34)
Cool, thank you, Katie.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (27:36)
Thanks very much.
Hey, welcome to Webmasters FM. Today I have Katie Keith of Barn2 Plugins, who I’m really excited about. Katie, thank you for joining me today.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (00:07)
Yeah, hey Brian, thanks for having me.
Brian Coords (00:09)
I feel like, I think we’ve met in person at WordCamp, right? Yeah, I think we have.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (00:12)
Yeah, it was quite brief
though. You’re like one of these people on my radar that I know I’ll see more in the future but haven’t much yet. Do you get that with people in the WordPress community?
Brian Coords (00:23)
Yeah, mean, I think, I know for myself, I’m pretty like socially awkward. mean, I work at home, so I don’t, so I think when I, yeah, I think you get there and it’s a lot of people and you feel like you’re trying to say hi to everybody, but you’re also trying to be polite of people’s time. So I kind of struggle with that. I don’t know. Yeah, so I kind of want to talk to you today because I will, in my professional life, I recently joined the team at WooCommerce, which is,
Katie Keith | Barn2 (00:29)
It’s WordPress.
Mm.
Brian Coords (00:48)
Something that I actually didn’t have a lot of experience with, was a WordPress developer at a WordPress agency for years and years and years, and we did WordPress stuff, but didn’t really do a lot of WooCommerce stuff. now that I’ve seen sort of the inside of it, there’s like a few people in the community that kind of have sort of like outsized presence and you’re one of those people. And I just kind of wanted to hear your experience being like a WooCommerce person. So like, how long have you been in the WooCommerce community?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (01:13)
We built WooCommerce site since 2012 or something like that but I’d say I’ve only been in the WooCommerce community since 2016 probably when I started attending WordCamps and releasing plugins for WooCommerce.
Brian Coords (01:30)
And what, like, when you think of the WooCommerce community, like where is it? Where are these people? Or like, how do you connect with other WooCommerce people?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (01:41)
I’ve been around long enough that I have many different ways that I connect with WooCommerce people. It’s basically a subgroup of the wider WordPress community with a huge overlap, but there is a sub WooCommerce community. One place would be Twitter or X where there’s specific people who discuss.
WooCommerce and are kind of leading the discussions about its future direction. You’ve got, for example, James Kemp from Woo, who’s leading the discussions about the technical future of WooCore and people that really feed into that, like Rodolfo from Build Business Bloomer and plug-in company owners that focus on WooCommerce like myself. But there’s also discussions on other places like various Slack communities and people just getting to know each other and talking independently as well.
Brian Coords (02:28)
Do you, like there’s a lot of people that are say like in Elementor, but they don’t really identify as WordPress. They kind of just identify as Elementor. there like a WooCommerce mindset like that? That’s like, we don’t think about WordPress. Really? We just think about commerce. Or do you think like it’s very tied with WordPress?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (02:46)
think it’s very tied with WordPress community-wise and platform-wise. The only time I’ve seen people just focus on WooCommerce is when they’re positioning their business. We don’t do this at Bantu because we have a few non-WooCommerce plugins, but companies like Studio Wombat and Iconic just do WooCommerce. So if you go on their website, they’ll say, plugins for WooCommerce.
rather than necessarily WordPress plugins like a more generic company might do. So that’s the main way I’ve seen it, which allows them to focus on that niche.
Brian Coords (03:20)
So who, like, I’ve been very curious about this because there’s so many WooCommerce, like there’s so many WooCommerce extensions. They have like their marketplace, there’s like a thousand, I think, extensions in there now. But then there’s all these like plugin shops and stuff. And who is buying WooCommerce extensions? Like what is the target audience? Are these like developers? Are they agencies? Are they like actual merchants, like opening stores? Like who are your customers?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (03:46)
All of those. In terms of our customer base at Barn 2, it’s about 50-50 with actual merchants who have their own stores and are looking for plugins which they will install themselves and developers or agency who are buying those plugins on behalf of clients. In terms of value to us, we would value the agencies the most because they’re the most likely to be repeat customers. For example, they might buy our All Access Pass and…
look for Bantu’s plug-in first for all of their projects in WooCommerce, whereas the merchant, lower value, although still very important and similar numbers-wise. And it’s interesting because you often hear about WooCommerce as being more for people building sites on behalf of others, whereas they might turn to something like Shopify if they wanted to do it themselves. But I think that’s largely a myth because we see an awful lot of people building their own sites in WooCommerce.
And similarly, since getting more into the Shopify space, which I think we’ll talk about later, I’ve discovered that apparently the majority of Shopify stores are actually built by agencies or developers. So I think actually it’s quite a similar market in that particular sense.
Brian Coords (04:56)
Yeah, there’s, I, you had a tweet recently. I think it was you right about, is, is WordPress in general for people that, like, it for people that want something easy or is it for people that want something more technical and customizable? I, am I framing that question right? Or maybe you could frame it better. Do you know which tweet I’m talking about?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (05:15)
Yeah,
yeah, that’s right. So it came from a Do The Woo episode. Am I allowed to reference other podcasts?
Brian Coords (05:23)
Yes, because I have a question
about Duluru. So, yes.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (05:26)
Okay,
so I I co-host Do the Woo product chat with James Kemp and we had guest Ben Ritner from Cadence on and we were talking about the balance between customizability and flexibility in WooCommerce and WordPress products. And we got onto a discussion which was a bit off topic about WordPress itself and should WordPress
be easy enough for the average user to just pick up who hasn’t used it before and just figure out and whether the interface should even aim to be that. And Ben and James sort of said they like the idea of that, but maybe that’s not its target audience and not the priority. And so I started tweeting about that and did a poll as well. And the majority of people said, actually, yes, WordPress should be for everybody. And if it’s not, then it needs to change.
I think WooCommerce, that applies to as well. Although it’s difficult for WooCommerce because it’s part of WordPress, so it doesn’t have full control over the user experience in a way that, for example, Shopify does, where everything is about that e-commerce store. With WordPress and WooCommerce, the Woo store is just a part of another site which might have other massive plugins like events plugins and learning management plugins all on the same site.
Brian Coords (06:44)
Yeah, the, go back and forth on this one a lot. And I was, so I was listening to that episode this morning while I was walking my dog. And I wanted to ask about this because you give the example of, I think it was your dad where you give him a WordPress website, but he liked the kind of simpler builder. That’s, know, a little bit easier. I’ve had the, I’ve had the thing of where a friend or family comes for a website and then I give them WordPress and it never works out. Like they never want that because they’re not.
technical at all. And then I, I’ve learned now I send them to Squarespace or something like that. If they just want like a simple, basic website, do you, do you, do you still see WordPress as like, I’m going to send it to like the average non-technical person and give it to them or should, or should we just like, let that, let that go and just say like, no, WordPress is powerful. It’s not, it’s not a user friendly tool. like a power friendly tool.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (07:34)
don’t think we should let it go because I think that should be its goal. If you think about the whole philosophy of democratizing publishing, that’s about publishing for all and the current complexity of things like the block editor for beginners isn’t achieving that goal. So therefore I would say it should be trying to do that. However, currently it’s not. And if I was going, actually I did recommend to my dad for his next website not to use WordPress.
I know what a pain it was for everybody, him and me, in supporting him when I tried to help him with WordPress and he just wants something template-based where you drag your content in, you can’t change the layout, nothing can go wrong, and that’s not WordPress unless you find some modified version of WordPress, maybe a hosted version of it or something where the host has done that to WordPress, which actually I think would be quite a good service to offer, but…
Unless it’s something like that, then I don’t think you should recommend it to true beginners who aren’t willing to learn.
Brian Coords (08:36)
Yeah. And you know, there’s, there’s definitely an argument that WordPress should be easier. I, know, I think of like sub stack had got really popular and it’s popular because it’s so easy. You can’t change your, I don’t even think you could change your font. I don’t know. You can maybe change your colors. can change your font a little bit, but like it does everything. You don’t have to think about it, but you can’t break it. You can control it. But I have to imagine that for someone like you.
You do want that complexity because that’s what your business is built on is the fact that it can be complex and customizable and stuff like that. And if WordPress were like dumbed down, I guess it would, there wouldn’t be room for maybe developers and stuff, but I don’t know. Do you like, do you think you can be powerful and simple at the same time?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (09:24)
Of course, and in the response to my tweet, I think it was Vikas Singhal from InstaWP gave about 10 examples of software that achieves that perfectly, where there is a really beginner friendly version, but the more advanced options are there if you look for them. So I don’t think anybody is suggesting taking away the flexibility of WordPress, which makes it the world’s leading content management system and
allows people to create any type of websites. As we’ve seen with things like the speed builds that you’ve been on, where you can just do anything very quickly if you know what you’re doing and you’ve been on that learning curve, but there should be a simpler version and then the options are there for people that need them.
Brian Coords (10:01)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. And for the people that are buying plugins that are supporting the plugin ecosystem, they’re definitely like power users, but there’s not like, I don’t know if I see them as like developers or there’s ever been a developer focus. Like when you look at like the agencies and stuff building, do you think of them as like developers, like software engineers, coders, they’re using build tools and all this kind of crazy stuff. Or do you see them as more like this kind of WordPress like
power user, extremely technical, maybe messes with code a little bit, but not entirely, not like a developer. don’t know, does that, do you see like the difference there in like people buying your plugins?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (10:48)
Yeah, I think of that as being what I would call an implementer. Somebody that can do everything with WordPress, myself included, actually. I know how to use WordPress and I’ve built all sorts of websites, but I can’t write a line of code. So I’d see that as an implementer, which is a different role to developer. And in terms of our customers, we get all of those and our plugins are designed to be easy for anybody.
Anybody who’s already used WordPress and knows how to install a plugin should be able to use our plugins. And we’ve got setup wizards and things like that so that you can easily get set up. But we’ve also got lots of developer hooks and filters for the people that do want to tinker around with them. So we would never assume that our users are developers.
Brian Coords (11:17)
Mm-hmm.
Okay, now you’ve been exploring Shopify. Do you feel like, how close is the Shopify market and those sort of people in the WooCommerce market? Do they feel very similar or do they feel different?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (11:47)
I’m very new to Shopify and we’re still building our first apps so I don’t have that direct experience but I have spent the last…
Brian Coords (11:51)
Okay.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (11:55)
almost six months now researching it in depth and getting to know Shopify app developers and that kind of thing. So I would say that from my research, the typical Shopify merchant has a larger volume. Apparently Shopify’s whole business model is built around churn. They want people to try out a Shopify store and they know that 90 plus percent will fail very quickly and they don’t care. They just want people to try it because they know that some of them will
and be really successful and they are the ones where the money is going to come from in Shopify. So that’s their business model and it’s targeted at larger merchants. And I think that Woo’s been flirting with that as well, maybe targeting larger merchants, but I think currently Shopify is probably doing a better job of attracting those larger stores. And that’s borne out when you look at data on things like WooCommerce’s market share.
Brian Coords (12:23)
Mm-hmm.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (12:48)
where on websites like Built With, I’m noticing that the growth is coming from smaller websites. So you can tell that by, it in the world’s top million sites or the world’s top 100,000 sites or whatever. And when I last checked, only a couple of months ago, WooCommerce was growing in the all internet category, but not in the world’s top sites, whereas Shopify was. So that also suggests that Shopify is attracting bigger stores.
Brian Coords (13:00)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Yeah, I mean, at end of the day, bigger store is bigger money, you know, for, for either any platform that, monetizes based on payments. So it’s understandable that anybody’s going to want to do that. If you had a, if you’re, know, if your dad or somebody said, I’m going to sell, you know, my whatever wood carvings or something on a store, where would you send them? WooCommerce or Shopify?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (13:41)
very difficult because I would want to send them to WooCommerce. I’ve been building my business on that for eight or nine years now and thus it would be a dilemma. I would make that as an individual assessment on whether I think they could cope with not just WooCommerce but the whole WordPress thing because like I said earlier WooCommerce is built on top of WordPress so they have to understand WordPress as a whole and the block editor unless you’ve installed something like Elementor.
and WooCommerce is just part of that decision. So I’d have to do it based on the person.
Brian Coords (14:14)
Yeah, that’s a tough one. And I don’t know if you have you tried out Shopify for some of the other stuff that’s maybe not the e-commerce stuff, but like, you know, like you said, we have the block editor page builders and like that. Have you been experimenting with what it’s like to actually set up a Shopify site and like just design your product page or something like that? Have you played with any of that stuff?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (14:37)
I’ve played with the product side. I haven’t used the blogs or built custom pages or anything like that, which I probably should. I need so much more experience in Shopify.
Brian Coords (14:48)
Mm-hmm.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (14:50)
because you need to understand what people’s needs are, don’t you? So I haven’t done that as much as I would like, but I have set up a basic store. actually some things were better than WooCommerce, other things not so good. For example, I thought the variations were disappointing in Shopify. I thought they’re called variants in Shopify. I’m trying to learn the new terminology. I thought actually it’s no better or more intuitive than Woo, which I know wants to improve the management of their variations.
Brian Coords (14:53)
Yeah.
Okay.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (15:18)
So things like that surprised me. Whereas some things like there’s a thing called Flow. I think it’s a free extension, but it’s just part of Shopify really, which adds really complex Zapier-like logic, like if this, then that, to your Shopify store. So you can use it to create really targeted email flows, for example, which you don’t see anything like that anywhere close to WordPress or WooCommerce core. So some of it was more impressive and others wasn’t really any better.
Brian Coords (15:31)
Hmm.
as like coming into really any marketplace, whether it’s, well, in WooCommerce, are you on like the official marketplace or do you sell privately?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (15:56)
We’re not, we only sell on our website.
Brian Coords (15:59)
Okay, what’s the difference? I should know this as I work there, like what, from your perspective, what makes you pick a decision on that?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (16:07)
We may well go on the marketplace at some point. Historically, we didn’t because they used to have very prohibitive terms and also they took 70 % commission, but that has changed. Their terms are now much more friendly and they only take 30 % commission, I think, which is what we pay our affiliates. So I’m very comfortable with giving somebody 30 % if they’ve got the sale for you. So I don’t have any principled reasons in that sense not to do it.
Brian Coords (16:30)
Mm-hmm.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (16:34)
but we’ve grown enough that I feel that we don’t need it. And I’ve spoken to several plugging companies who are on both, so on their own website and the Woo Marketplace. And if they’re good at marketing, as we are at BUN too, then they typically get a lot more sales from their own website. So I would say that we don’t need it. And the main thing putting me off is that we’d have to do a lot of development work to link its licensing system to ours. It’s just a…
Brian Coords (16:47)
Mm-hmm.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (17:02)
task that needs doing once but actually it would be like quite a lot of work for one of our developers and I would rather they were doing other projects at the moment.
Brian Coords (17:04)
Yeah.
And for Shopify, do they have a similar thing? Can you just sell stuff or do you have to go through some sort of marketplace?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (17:19)
You don’t have to use the Shopify App Store, but that is the thing in Shopify. It’s much, much more dominant than the Woo Marketplace. It is the place to go, a bit like the App Store with Apple. And so we are only considering going on there. I’ve been contacted by a few people that are setting up independent Shopify App Marketplaces, but I’ve seen no evidence that anybody would look for apps on there.
So we’re going to do our usual independent marketing, like we do a lot of content marketing for our WooCommerce plugins, and we’re going to do that for our Shopify apps too, but it will be on the app store, and we will also do lots of work to optimize and analyze those listings to try and get to the top and things like that. That’s the main marketing channel for Shopify.
Brian Coords (17:45)
Mm-hmm.
If for anybody that’s like building a, an extension or selling software, feels like marketing is much more important, honestly, than writing the code. Like it feels like marketing and market research is that’s the thing that makes you successful or not. you with, you know, everybody freaking out about AI and generative content and all this sort of stuff. have you adapted your like marketing strategy at all? Are you like, is content marketing kind of your big push and are you changing things?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (18:32)
We haven’t really changed things because AI is recommending our products. And it seems that if you follow common sense with your SEO and try to provide content that real users want as well as search engines, that seems to cover AIs as well. So if more guidance comes out on optimizing for AI in the future, then we might tweak our strategy, but so far we’re not.
It is a difficult time. We’ve lost a lot of traffic in Google over the last year or so. This is the first year that our new sales are the same as they were a year ago. Our business is growing because of renewals, but new sales are static. But I think that’s partly because of things like Google changes. I don’t know if it relates to AI. And it’s also partly because the WordPress industry itself isn’t growing as much as it used to.
Brian Coords (19:01)
Mm-hmm.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (19:20)
we’re not riding a of a rising tide like we used to be for most of our history.
Brian Coords (19:26)
Yeah, there was a growth to WordPress that I think we all benefited from. I think, you know, what are we like getting close to 50 %? there’s probably a natural plateau there somewhere that, you know, there’s really no cure for. We all have our opinions on what WordPress should be doing differently to grow. you know, I know we’ve both talked about it. The one thing that I’ve been kind of curious about is how you get…
how you kind of like get community feedback because you and I are both pretty active on X slash Twitter and there is a large group of people there, they’re very, it’s a very like select group. Like it’s not a good sample size. I would have to imagine that most of your customers, for example, aren’t on there. I feel like most of the people using WooCommerce day to day are probably not on Twitter. They’re probably in other places. And so sometimes I feel like,
the feedback that I see on Twitter is maybe not really widely representative of the larger, you know, like the user base. Do you think that’s true or how do you think about that?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (20:35)
I do think it’s true and it is a worry that the following I’ve built and the people I’m communicating with on a day-to-day basis about how to grow my business and helping them to grow their businesses are not the target audience. So I know a lot of other WordPress product people and WordPress people in general, not so much with commerce store owners. So…
In terms of discussions on X and things like that, I get a lot of value from consulting with people who have similar experience to me. So they might share what’s worked in their business. Maybe they’ve done some A B testing or something and increased conversions and I can implement that in my business and vice versa. But they’re not the target audience and it doesn’t tend to generate sales either, although it does occasionally. So the main way we get that kind of feedback.
is from our customers. So obviously our support team are talking to customers every day and we’ve got a good process for recording feature requests and just general complaints and like not everything’s a feature request that can be improved. So there’s a separate process that if a customer keeps getting stuck with something or there’s a gap in the documentation, then the support team are now feeding that back to me on a monthly basis.
We also send an email, think it’s about seven or 14 days after purchase, asking for feedback. And I really like it when people respond to those in detail, which they quite often do, because they describe their whole journey of how they found our plugin and what other ones they considered and what prompted their decision and then how they found it to use. So that’s really helpful.
And my favorite thing about that is when they tell me a keyword that they use to find our product that I’d never optimized for. So that’s an instant content opportunity, which is always fun.
Brian Coords (22:19)
Hmm
Do you, how do you get, how do you get content out? you, mean, I have to imagine you have a team or do you have like a agency that you work with or like a good system for that?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (22:36)
Yeah, it’s a bit of a weird hybrid system, but it seems to work. So we use the marketing agency Ellipsis who specialize in marketing WordPress products. So they are very, very specific to what we do. And they do our… So I just write my random ideas as they happen, which might be just an idea. It might be from a feedback email received from a customer to say, about we produce an article on this, which we’ve not done before.
Brian Coords (22:49)
Mm-hmm.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (23:05)
And then every three months, they analyze all my random ideas and look for additional opportunities. And they propose a long list of content that we can produce. And then I make decisions on that and feedback. They’ve got an AI called Falcon that they’ve built in-house, which basically maximizes the likelihood that a piece of content will rank and tries to reduce the randomness that a lot of bloggers have.
So they provide folk and titles and keywords and what the article should be about and an outline. And I then get that written by freelance writers, mainly to save money. I have experimented with in-house writers, but I haven’t found the right person yet. So that’s why I’m still using freelancers.
Brian Coords (23:31)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, that’s gonna make sense. Getting your ideas from support is such an interesting, like when I joined WooCommerce, when you join Automatic, they talk about this, you have to do two weeks of being a support person as you’re on, it’s like you’re kind of onboarding into the company. So I spent two weeks in the WooCommerce support, in one of their support teams and seeing just, I mean, nobody comes to support usually in a good mood, obviously.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (24:03)
Mm.
Brian Coords (24:18)
Something’s wrong and their website, you know, is important to them. And so you see a lot of stuff and you see a lot of interesting websites. And it really blew my mind just to see how many, how big of a ecosystem there is, how many different extensions and ways people set things up, like how unique every store is, all the crazy things. Do you ever look at like your customer sites and just see like, like all the things that they’re building with it and like their businesses and stuff. you ever, have you ever bought something from a customer? Cause you just saw their site and you were like, man, that’s pretty cool.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (24:48)
I’ve never bought anything from a customer, but I really like visiting their sites. And one of the questions in our feedback email is, can you share a link to your site where you’re using our plugin? And that’s really insightful. I always keep a record of the different use cases and industries, and we use that to inform our marketing. For example, our sales page will focus on the use cases that we know are the most common to get people’s attention, obviously.
Brian Coords (25:06)
Hmm.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (25:14)
And also if it’s a really impressive site, then we will ask them if we can feature them as a case study. And our YouTuber will then get in touch and try and interview them and produce a video and some written content about them. So you can get a lot from visiting your customer’s sites.
Brian Coords (25:31)
Yeah, that’s been one fun thing is seeing all the different sites and I think at WordCamp Asia, they used like Woo merchants to like make the swag and all this sort of stuff. And so you get to see all these cool things people make. yeah, well, if most of the people that I know that listen to this, not a lot of people, but they are mostly developers. so if you could give like parting words of wisdom to somebody who’s maybe a developer, maybe they have like a
extension or plug-in idea that they want to build a business, what would be the first thing you would tell them to go out and do in order to be successful?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (26:05)
think that the biggest thing that holds back developers success with this is not working with marketers. So a lot of developers do everything on their own and some developers have got really good at marketing and found success but the majority that I’ve seen have remained small because they didn’t know marketing and often you know you focus on what you enjoy and what you’re good at don’t you and you put the other things to the bottom of the list.
Brian Coords (26:31)
Mm-hmm.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (26:32)
and you convince yourself that they’re not important. So marketing is important and if you’re not someone that’s going to prioritise that, then either hire somebody like Ellipsis for example, we’ve been working with them since 2017, or go to word camps, tweet about it, whatever, be part of the community and find a business partner who is able to grow it.
Brian Coords (26:56)
Thank you so much, Katie, for talking to me today and going over all of this. I’m pretty optimistic. Seeing the inside of WooCommerce has really changed my perception. Seeing the inside of WordPress, I do feel very optimistic. We’ll have to talk some day about sort of a lot of your opinions on some of the direction and sort of stuff like that. But in the meantime, where do you recommend people go to follow you, follow Barn2, that sort of stuff?
Katie Keith | Barn2 (27:24)
For the company, go to barn2.com and to see what I’m doing, go to my Twitter at Katie Keith Barn 2.
Brian Coords (27:34)
Cool, thank you, Katie.
Katie Keith | Barn2 (27:36)
Thanks very much.