From One Plugin to 20: How Katie Keith Built a $1.8M/Year App Portfolio Without Betting Everything on One Product

Katie Keith runs 20 apps—19 WordPress plugins and one Shopify app—that collectively generate about $150,000 per month in revenue, or roughly $1.8 million annually. Her plugins are used on over 90,000 sites, with 17,000 active subscribers and additional revenue from lifetime deals (about 15% of sales) and affiliate income. But she didn't set out to build a portfolio. The first plugin, WooCommerce Protected Categories, came from a simple observation: people on the WooCommerce Ideas Forum were asking for it, and no one had built it yet.

How Ideas Emerge From Shipping, Not Planning

Keith is explicit that she never sat down and decided to build 19 plugins. The portfolio grew organically. Her second plugin, Postable T Pro (a tool for listing content in searchable tables), came from a client project where she kept adding features until it made sense to release it as a standalone product. Once those two plugins were live, customers started sending feature requests—and sometimes the best way to fulfill a request wasn't to add a feature to an existing plugin, but to build a new one entirely.