Katie Keith: entrepreneur, generates $1.8 m in annual revenue

Let’s be honest, building massive, do-it-all software is a trap. I run a remote team that makes about $1.8 million a year by doing the exact opposite. We build tiny, highly specific apps. 20 of them, to be exact.

If you have a website built on WordPress or Shopify, you don’t always need a whole new system. You just need it to do one specific thing, like adding a searchable document library or password-protecting a handful of products. So, instead of building a giant monolith app that confuses everyone, we built 19 individual WordPress plugins and one Shopify app. People buy exactly the tools they need. They pay us through annual subscriptions or one-time lifetime deals.

Getting from 0 to 1,000 Users (And Keeping Them)

Getting those first users is where most people fail. They guess what people want. The reality is, you should never guess. We got our first users by finding a gap people were already complaining about online. We dug into the WooCommerce ideas forum, saw what users were constantly voting for, and built a dead-simple plugin to protect store categories.

And then, we just wrote about it. Organic search was our engine. We published genuinely helpful tutorials explaining exactly how to solve that one specific problem. Because nobody else was doing it, we hit the top of Google immediately and landed sales in days. But how do you really scale once you have some traction? You sell more to the same people.

Here is the kicker: because we target the exact same type of customer with different apps, cross-promotion is our secret weapon. We offer one- and two-plugin bundles. Three days after someone buys an app, an automated email hits their inbox offering 50% off their next purchase. We run segmented Black Friday emails just for existing users to grab another tool. We even stick reminder banners right inside the settings pages of the apps they are already using.

Keep the products related, and the customers will keep buying.

The Tech Stack used by Katie Keith

You don’t need a bloated, expensive tech stack to make nearly two million dollars a year. We lean heavy on ClickUp for managing projects, tracking time, and running our company chat.

So, where does the code live? GitHub. It stores all 20 of our product repositories, and it is completely free. For connecting things together and running our automations, we rely on Zapier. Our own company website is naturally built on WordPress.

And to actually make the money? We use an e-commerce plugin called Easy Digital Downloads to manage the storefront, handle software licensing, and deliver the downloads to our customers. That costs us about $300 a year.