Patrick Posner built a portfolio of WordPress plugins and then cut it back to the products that paid off

Monthly Revenue of $12,000 from Several WordPress Plugins

Patrick Posner is a developer who became independent by building and selling the plugins a WordPress site needs to run. An interview published on March 15, 2023 introduced his plugins as having been downloaded about one million times in total and as bringing in $12,000 a month. That figure is the combined revenue of the products he had at the time, and because the download count includes free distribution, it has to be read separately from the number of paying customers.

Born in Germany, he met WordPress through a university course on content management systems. He then worked at agencies and as a freelancer building WordPress and WooCommerce sites, and went on to work as a senior developer at a German WordPress product company. While holding a job and developing plugins of his own, he moved the problems he kept running into in client work into products he could sell.

He also had the experience of growing an organization too fast and failing. At the agency he ran himself he tried to match the outward shape of other companies by adding employees and an office, but ran short of cash and closed the business. From then on, in his product business he chose to keep costs low, add people only when the need was clear, and operate without outside investment.

The portfolio introduced in 2023 consisted of six core products, covering demand that ranged from static site generation to content protection and QR code creation. Posner believed that if WordPress shipped a feature by default or a well-funded competitor appeared, the business case for a single small plugin could wobble. Running several products rested on that judgment of spreading the risk of any one product.

Selling a Site Operator's Specific Inconvenience

Passster, which he ran, was a product that password-protects a page or part of its content. Filr let a site upload files, organize them into a document library, and restrict access to downloads. The two products addressed, respectively, the demand from site operators to show certain content and files only to specific people.

Qyrr was a product for creating and managing QR codes inside WordPress. It could generate a code linked to a post or page, adjust colors and a logo, and insert it as a block or shortcode. Products like this can be explained in one short sentence, and it is easy for a user to judge before buying whether the product matches what they need.

Simply Static, which grew into the flagship product, has a history of inheriting an existing open source project. Posner used Simply Static on a client site that had to absorb a flood of visitors after a TV ad, and at the time the plugin had no one maintaining it. He contacted the original developer, took over the maintenance rights, and resumed development and support. He found the business opportunity in bringing a product that already had users and a purpose back to a state where it could be operated again.

Simply Static exports a site written in WordPress into static files such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Operators keep the WordPress editing environment they know, and visitors get a site that does not need to run PHP and a database on every request. It suits sites whose content is mostly public, such as company introductions, blogs, and documentation, while services whose screens change with login state, or complex shops, need a separate review.

Monetization used a split between a free and a paid edition. Simply Static's free edition provides basic static file generation, and the paid edition extends operational features such as deployment integrations and search and form handling. His other plugin shop sold both annual subscriptions and one-time lifetime licenses, and in a 2023 retrospective he explained that more customers were choosing the annual subscription. The structure presented the initial purchase burden and the long-term cost of use differently so that customers could choose.

Market Research Before Development, Explanation After

The new product development process Posner described began with a research stage on customers and the market. He would spend two or three months in communities in a field he cared about, watching the problems people had and the existing solutions, and then decide the scope of a minimum viable product. After that he recruited early testers from the community and, while taking in their feedback, prepared the website, documentation, and usage guidance before launch.

Search was the main customer acquisition channel. In a 2023 interview he explained that about 80% of growth came from search optimization and tutorials, and he went after search terms that addressed a specific problem, such as static sites or forms, rather than the crowded general WordPress keywords. Agencies that applied his products to client sites, and their recommendations, were an important channel as well.

This strategy was supported by a steady volume of output. According to a 2022 retrospective, he published 26 tutorials and 75 documentation entries that year, and began working with content specialist Gina Lucia. He accumulated both the writing that introduces a product and the documentation that resolves the places where installation and use get stuck.

On Black Friday 2022 he tied a product update to a sales event. He released Simply Static's Tiiny.host integration right before the event and won promotion from the partner, listed the product in community discount lists, and ran a 25% discount. According to his retrospective, that November's revenue reached about 2.5 times the usual level. It was a case of providing both a discount and the news of a new feature to give people a reason to look at the product again.

A Working Style That Made Running Several Products Possible

Running several products required controlling the cost of switching between tasks. Posner worked by choosing which product to focus on each week and putting feature development, testing, documentation, and promotion together into that week's work. He handled customer support every day but divided his time roughly half to development and half to marketing. Finishing code and delivering a feature to customers were bundled into a single job.

As the business grew he secured people to split development and support with. In 2022 he began working with developer Igor Benić, and in 2023 Scott joined customer support. The independent founder kept leading the business while delegating the expert work that was needed.

To reduce the support burden he also adjusted the scope of support itself. In 2023 he focused the products in his own plugin shop on the WordPress default block editor and cleaned up integrations with several page builders. After improving the admin screens and the documentation together, he reported that support tickets in that shop fell by almost 50%. He acknowledged the cost of supporting a wide range of compatibility and moved his resources toward improving the experience of the chosen user base.

Results and workload did not move evenly across products. In the same 2023 retrospective he stated that Simply Static's net revenue rose 45% from the previous year, but that its support tickets also doubled. Here net revenue should be distinguished from net profit after all costs, and its accounting scope also differs from the monthly revenue of the whole portfolio described earlier. The growth of the flagship product demanded more technical support and more operational capacity.

2024, Cutting the Portfolio and Focusing

In 2024 he revised the direction of the diversification sharply. Posner wound down his own plugin shop: he stopped selling the small WooCommerce extensions for which he could not find a suitable buyer, canceled the existing subscriptions, and handed Passster and Filr over to Cristian at WP Chill. Qyrr, he said, would reduce new feature expansion and shift to basic support and maintenance.

That did not mean he stopped investing in other products altogether. The same year he co-acquired Domain Mapping System with Maarten of Studio Wombat. Posner cited the fact that this product shares a similar customer base with Simply Static and fits well inside the product family. It was a shift toward valuing whether a product connects with the existing core business in customers and use, rather than toward increasing the number of products.

Another focus, Ollie, was a WordPress design product he pushed forward with Mike McAlister. Posner made the collaboration public in 2023, and developed a theme and pattern environment that uses WordPress's default block editing and full site editing features. Ollie Pro, a paid pattern library, was released in June 2024. This stage of the business includes co-founding and role division on top of his solo founder experience.

Simply Static also widened its scope, from selling a plugin to providing an operating service. In a March 2025 interview Posner introduced an early access program for Simply Static Studio, which bundles the WordPress working environment with static site hosting and a content delivery network. By bringing the deployment environment that customers used to set up for themselves into the product, the scope the business has to answer for expanded from providing software to running a site continuously.

What Remained After Running Several Products

Posner's business can be read as a case of turning several problems into products on the common technology and customer base of WordPress, and then reorganizing the product line according to results and operating burden. Running many products helped split revenue sources and explore demand, but the time needed to maintain and support each product also accumulated. The important choice in his path was confirming opportunities across several products and then concentrating resources on the product and the related businesses that showed growth.