AI Summary
5 min readKatie Keith runs a remote team that has built 20 software products—19 WordPress plugins and one Shopify app—that collectively generate about $150,000 a month, or $1.8 million a year. Over the lifetime of the business, they have sold $9.8 million worth of plugins, and their premium plugins are used on over 90,000 sites. She has 17,000 active subscribers, not counting the roughly 15% of revenue that comes from lifetime deals. Her approach is the opposite of the typical startup bet-everything-on-one-product strategy: she built a portfolio of small, focused tools that cross-sell to the same customer base.
How the portfolio emerged organically
Katie did not sit down with a plan to build 19 plugins. The first idea came from the WooCommerce Ideas Forum, where she spotted a gap: there was no plugin that let store owners password-protect categories. She built it, published blog posts and tutorials about the use case, and because the plugin was unique at the time, it ranked at the top of Google immediately. Sales came within days. The second plugin, Post Table Pro, came from a client project—she kept adding features and eventually released it as a premium product.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Episode Introduction & Host Framing** - The host introduces the concept of a multi-product software portfolio and sets up the interview with Katie.
- 2 (03:00) **Guest Introduction: The 20-App Portfolio** - Katie Keith introduces herself and explains the core business model of running 20 different software products.
- 3 (03:27) **Defining the Product: What Kind of Apps Are These?** - Katie details the nature of her plugins, describing them as small-to-medium tools that add specific functionality to websites.
- 4 (04:12) **Revenue Breakdown: The $1.7M Business** - Katie provides specific financial metrics for the business.
- 5 (05:19) **Finding the First Idea: The Organic Method** - Katie explains that the portfolio wasn't planned; the first idea came from a public forum for feature requests.
- 6 (06:12) **The Idea Engine: Listening to Customers** - Katie describes how customer feedback and feature requests naturally generate new product ideas.
- 7 (07:04) **Growth Channel: The Power of Organic Search** - Katie identifies organic search as the primary driver of customer acquisition.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
I Make $150K/Month From 20 Apps
Sharing ideas that make money!
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------ Keywords: business ideas, startup stories, app store success, startup success, tech entrepreneur, startup founder, saas business, app flipping
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