I Make $150K/Month From 20 Apps | Starter Story

Katie Keith runs a remote team that has built 20 apps generating $1.8 million a year in revenue. Nineteen of those are WordPress plugins, and one is a Shopify app. Her average monthly revenue across all plugins is about $150,000, with over 17,000 active subscribers and an estimated 90,000 sites using her premium plugins. She did not set out to build a portfolio. The strategy emerged organically from listening to customers and building what they asked for.

How the portfolio started

Katie’s first plugin idea came from the WooCommerce Ideas Forum, where she found a feature that many users were requesting but no one had built. She launched WooCommerce Protected Categories, a simple plugin that password-protects store categories. Because it was the only plugin doing that job, it ranked at the top of Google immediately and generated sales within days. Her second plugin, Post Table Pro, came from a client project. She kept adding features and eventually released it as a premium product.

Once those two plugins were live, customers began sending feature requests. Katie realized that sometimes the best way to serve a request was not to add a feature to an existing plugin, but to build a new plugin entirely. That pattern repeated. The portfolio grew because she kept her ears open to what users were already asking for.

Cross-promotion as the core growth engine