Building a Drupal Product? Let's talk at DrupalCon Los Angeles

The overwhelming majority of businesses in the Drupal community are consulting agencies. Groups of experts that make their skills available to clients at any hourly or daily rate. A much smaller number of Drupal businesses are creating products using Drupal. The problems product companies face are quite different and we are hoping to meet other product companies and share experiences at DrupalCon LA. so if you are working on a product or thinking to do so come to share and hear what others have to say. Below are some of our initial thoughts and questions we are grappling with. After the BOF we will follow up with another blog post with some of the insights we gained.

The fundamental difference between the agency and product company business model, is that you are not selling the time of experts. You are not telling your client: "I will charge you X dollars for every minute I occupy myself with your issues". Instead, the offer goes something like this: "Look at this - I built it! It does X to solve problem Y (or it does X to improve Y)! If you need it, it will cost a certain amount - do you want it?". The client does not care how many hours you spent building it. They simply care about whether it is useful for them and whether the value at which it is being sold makes sense to them. At the same time you can sell 1, 10 or a 1000 of them and not have to worry about running out of time to sell. Time is, notoriously, the ultimate finite resource. If that is what you are selling, you run out of it rather quickly and the only way to scale is to add more people to your team in order to sell more time. A quote that stuck with me regarding consulting companies - the source of which I unfortunately forget - is this: "The reward of being a good consultant is simply getting more work to do!"

Products, as we conceive them, scale in a different way. Time is less of a concern. You still need to support your products and that is a time-dependent but far more scalable challenge. This does not mean all is wonderful on the product side of things. You need to deal with a large number of issues that consultancies don't necessarily face. You need to figure out just that right, magic, mix of features that will convince someone to part with their hard-earned cash. If you are moving from an agency to a product company it feels that you are moving from contracts worth 10s or 100s of thousands to selling items for $50 - $100. You lose that comfort of knowing that the contract is signed and as long as you keep your head straight and do the work the next $200,000 is going to come in. If your product does well you are no longer limiting the scalability of your business to the amount of time you can get people to charge for. Growth is very different.

Now, Drupal products bring with them another interesting dimension because of the nature of the Drupal project and the Drupal community. The software you are building is actually an amalgam of the work and effort that thousands of others put into it. There are community norms and legal requirements to respect about how you profit from that work. There are practical issues to deal with such as managing a product depended on modules that you cannot control. There are technical challenges to deal with if your product is a Drupal distribution - how do you ensure that what you provided the user is not changed by the user and can be supported? How do you manage thousands copies of your product if each is slightly different? Do you allow your users to modify as much as Drupal allows or do you build walls around what is possible? How can you best take advantage of the huge Drupal community to kickstart the use of your product? Are you building a product for for the Drupal community or one that uses Drupal but speak to a wider audience? How do you break out of the community and face the rest of the world? Our own background is that of working for an agency. As such, we need to learn (and are learning at a very fast pace!) a whole new set of skills and a different way of thinking. If you are facing the same or similar questions !