When he told me about WordPress, he somehow made it sound like a blogging platform so I was very skeptical about whether it would be suitable for building small business websites. However, he convinced me to use it for our first project – a local joinery company – and I was quickly convinced that WordPress is the best way to build any type of website.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Devrims: What were your goals when you started off with Barn2 Plugins?<\/b><\/p>\n Katie: <\/b>Barn2 started life as a web design company called Barn2 Media (in fact, that is still its legal name). We started trading as Barn2 Plugins in 2016, when we launched our first plugins.<\/span><\/p>\n Our goal was to supplement or replace our previous income from building WordPress websites with product sales – specifically, plugins. We wanted to be able to spend less time working for clients, and build a more successful income stream that would give us more time and flexibility. Plugins seemed like an excellent way to do this because you build each one once and can sell it many times. In addition, plugins can be very simple or very complex. This means that you can build plugins at a scale which suits your capacity, even if you are just an individual developer.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Devrims: Would you like to share your experience with WooCommerce and WordPress plugins?<\/b><\/p>\n Katie: <\/b>When we started selling plugins, we already had experience of building WooCommerce websites for clients. This experience taught us that WooCommerce users are more willing to spend money on plugins. After all, the plugins are helping to increase their own revenue! As a result, our first plugin was a small plugin aimed at solving a specific problem in WooCommerce: <\/span>WooCommerce Password Protected Categories<\/span><\/a>. This functionality was previously available for pages and posts, but not entire categories. We had read in online forums that store owners wanted ways to create hidden sections of their store, for example to sell different products to different clients, or sell products at a discount to wholesale\/B2B users.<\/span><\/p>\n Our first plugin was unique when it was first launched (sadly, this is no longer the case) so it started getting sales very quickly. This inspired us to continue building more plugins, each aimed at solving a particular problem in WordPress or WooCommerce. Amazingly, we were making enough from the plugin sales to stop taking on new clients in under 6 months!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Over time, we continued releasing more plugins and listening to customers in order to keep improving our existing plugins. Our biggest seller was <\/span>WooCommerce Product Table<\/span><\/a>, which lists products in a quick one-page order form. This has now sold well over a million dollars and is still going strong.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n More recently, WooCommerce Product Table has been taken over by a newer plugin called <\/span>Document Library Pro<\/span><\/a>. This has proved incredibly useful to people wanting to add a searchable document or resource library to WordPress.<\/span><\/p>\n Our first few plugins were all very niche, as we had reduced development capacity and hadn\u2019t built a team yet. Also, I wasn\u2019t confident in marketing a mass market plugin and felt that going niche would be easier.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Over time, we have built a team of 17 people and become more confident in releasing bigger plugins. For example, our most recent major releases are a <\/span>WooCommerce product options<\/span><\/a> plugin and a <\/span>WooCommerce product filtering<\/span><\/a> plugin. While these still perform a specific task, they are much more complex than our earlier plugins and can benefit a big proportion of store owners.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Devrims: Have you encountered any significant challenges or difficult moments throughout your journey? If so, please describe how you managed to overcome them.<\/b><\/p>\n Katie: <\/b>My biggest challenge has been learning when to let go of a task that has previously been my responsibility. When we started selling plugins, Andy did all the development work and I did – well, everything else! So that includes customer support, marketing, business development, and so on.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n As the business grew, it wasn\u2019t realistic for me to continue doing all of these tasks on my own. While I was happy to outsource boring tasks like accounting, I really struggled to delegate support. After all, I knew our plugins inside out and couldn\u2019t imagine how anyone else could ever communicate with customers as effectively as me!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I kept holding onto the support for far too long, until it was taking up about half of my time. I was probably responding to 30-50 support messages per day!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Eventually, it became clear that this wasn\u2019t sustainable. There was a huge opportunity cost of spending half my time on support instead of growing the business.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I hired some part-time support engineers from a company called WPSaas which doesn\u2019t exist any more. They were ok but only handled simple tickets, and I still did all the complex ones. When they stopped trading, James Kemp from Iconic recommended <\/span>LevelUp<\/span><\/a> who specialize in supporting WordPress theme and plugin companies. I contacted them and read some previous responses from one of their support engineers called Edge, and was amazed by the quality – I could instantly tell that I would be proud for that person to be communicating with customers on behalf of Barn2.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Edge started working with us, and is still with us 4 years later. The support team now consists of 7 people and we constantly receive feedback from customers about the high standard of support we provide. It\u2019s hard to imagine how reluctant I was to let go of this part of my role!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Devrims: Among the various plugins listed on our website, namely WooCommerce Product Table, Posts Table Pro, and Password Protected Categories, the question arises regarding which holds the utmost importance for businesses today. What\u2019s your take on the matter?<\/b><\/p>\n Katie: <\/b>Out of the plugins you mentioned, <\/span>WooCommerce Product Table<\/span><\/a> is easily the most important for businesses today. It is still our second biggest selling plugin (after Document Library Pro) 6.5 years after its initial release, and for good reason.<\/span><\/p>\n WooCommerce Product Table is popular because it provides an optimized layout which is a much better way of selling certain types of products. Most WooCommerce stores have a fairly basic layout which displays each product with a big image, and you have to visit a separate product page to choose quantities or variations and add to the cart.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n With WooCommerce Product Table, this all takes place on one page. It lists products in a quick one-page order form where customers can quickly select multiple products, choose quantities and variations and add them all to the cart in a single click. Store owners get full control over their product tables, for example they can customize the colors and choose which columns of information to include in the table.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n One thing I love about WooCommerce Product Table is how it can increase the sales of many different types of products. For example:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Due to its popularity, we have continued to invest in WooCommerce Product Table over the years. This includes adding features, improving user experience, and generally making sure it\u2019s still the best product table plugin for WooCommerce. For example, we are currently working on a user-friendly table generator which will make it easier for people to create custom product tables and insert them anywhere on their website.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n
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