 Alright, good afternoon everyone. I think we'll go ahead and get started here. So, if you haven't already intuited this, we're talking today about making the leap, doing successful products as a web agency. And we're going to be talking about a few things specifically, and just sort of forewarning. If this is not what you were hoping to have be covered, then I will not be offended if you leave. So we're going to be talking about things like your motivators and your goals in building products. And MVP is in the role of marketing and things like that. We are not going to be talking about how to build a product, what kind of technical frameworks, sort of design considerations, AB testing, any of those sort of specific techniques on how to build a product. So this is a lot more about how to think about a product, how to plan for a product, and how to be able to deliver one successfully from a business perspective. So, I think furthermore, like the people who are going to get the most out of this talk are, this describes us. So I'm curious, actually, just show of hands, how many of us make things for clients? Yay! Okay, excellent. And have an idea of a prototype? Good, cool. All right, congrats. And then we're wondering what to do now. Really? Oh, all right. All right. Good. Okay, so this I think, well, we'll see. We've got the right audience in the room. So a little bit about myself. My name is Drew Gordon, and I have an interesting perspective in this. So I ran a web services firm called Gordon Studios for about 15 years. And we did full service, design, development, training, content strategy, et cetera, et cetera, for an array of clients. So it's this small team of programmers and UX people and such coming into a client and saying what do you need and helping plan that and build that and deliver it. As that agency, we also built something called Node Squirrel. And Node Squirrel is a backup service that plugs into Drupal, so it makes it easy to have off-site backups. So we were an agency that did that. And then since then, in 2015, actually just before DrupalCon, Los Angeles, Pantheon bought Node Squirrel. And the twist in that plot for me was when they said, Drew, you should go with and join Pantheon. And I was kind of surprised at that. But anyways, long story short, I did that. So I've got this breadth of experience. I understand what it's like to build things for clients. I was a team of seven, and now I'm up to a team of 80 at a products company. So it's very different world views. And I'm hoping that I can synthesize as much of that as possible so that you too can go off and be successful and make your own leap. The conventional wisdom of doing a product as a services company, how many people have heard something like this? Don't do it, right? Oh, come on, more of us have heard that, right? This is definitely, I don't know, I heard this a lot, yet all of us are still doing it. So good, good for us. You can do it. It's very doable. Unfortunately, it's hard. And so hopefully again, what we're talking about today will help you be able to have your hands raised and give this session next time at your local camp or the next Drupalcon. There are successful examples in our space. And in preparing for this talk, those of us who have been doing this kind of thing, we often have conversations, but we'll be looking at some of these very specific examples and advice from folks who have done this successfully. And so in the case of Pantheon, for example, was founded by some of the founders of both Four Kitchens and Chapter 3, who are web agencies doing the same things in the garden studios, Lullabot is just a fantastic agency that's been around for a very long time. They made something called Drupalize Me. And that's based off of the sort of like training expertise that they built. So it's a great service. And we actually have Addie. Hi, Addie. And we'll see some of her advice here in our session. Gorton Studios obviously made Node Scroll. I've already talked about that. Calamuna is an agency based in the San Francisco Bay Area. And they make something called Calabox, which is a local development environment that is more modern than, say, MAMP. So if you have local development environment sort of needs and are wondering how to solve those, you should take a look at Calabox. It's like pop it in and it's got, you know, best practices, container-based architecture, optimized, you know, things like varnish and a whole tool stack there for doing really good development. Phase 2 is another agency, about 150 people. They're based in the U.S., but they have people all around the world. And they maintain a number of distributions, including one that's called Open Publish, which is for publishers, basically, as a starting, it's a distribution, a triple distribution intended to be used by publishers and media people. And then Provenics. And we have Kristoff, I think, somewhere in the room as well. Another small firm that has gone off and made something called Walk Hub, which is for documenting websites and having, you know, guided tours and the ability to sort of click through and have a self-documenting interface. So we're going to see, you know, lessons from all of these folks and hopefully, again, synthesizing a lot of the conversations that many of us have had over the years about these things. And another resource, so we'll have all of those people helping guide these things. But one of the things I also want to point out is a lot of these ideas are from a kind of start-up called lean start-up. This is sort of like the notion. If you are not familiar with the idea of a lean start-up and you're sitting here, you should be. So I would really recommend this site. LeanStack.com in particular has lots of great articles. This book recommendation actually came to me via Ryan Sramma, who gave a talk in some ways that's similar to this at DrupalCon Latin America. So again, if this topic interests you, I would encourage you to check out these resources as well. Again, I'm going to try and take all of that and present it in a way that I think makes sense for all of us with a sort of shared background of building things for clients. And these are the things I want to talk about. So before you start a product, you need to define some things. And all of us who didn't do some of these things have wished we had. So specifically, if you don't know what your goals are for the product, it's going to be really hard to figure out if you're doing the right thing and being very explicit about those goals. And likewise, once you've got those goals, from there saying, what is success going to be? What will we call success? We'll dive into each of these things. How are you going to fund it? How are you going to resource it? What are these methods going to be? MVP, the minimum viable product. What's the smallest version of that thing that you can build? This one, I think, for all of us, I mean, all of these are challenging, but as people who build things for others, understanding the MVP and actually getting to minimum viable product is very hard. I think we have a tendency, when we make things, when in the vacuum, what we're going to do is make more things. And that's actually not really good for a product. And then another thing that I think is a blank spot for many of us is marketing. We understand maybe that we understand that word, but the critical importance of marketing in a product is you just cannot underestimate how important that is for your long-term success. So let's dive into goals. So I think there's a number of motivators for why we attempt products. And if you understand your motivators, it will help you know how to make decisions. So this is pretty basic, but I think it's the right place to start. Know your goals. And I think there's really six goals, as I've talked with others, that influence us. So fun, obviously, fun is, if you're just doing this as yourself, you're just doing nights and weekends, you're having fun doing it, that's great. Organizationally, you might call fun something like, we have been working on this long project, and it's been a bit of a slog, and the team is not very motivated, we're going to give them something enjoyable to do. The product can help fill that space. Learning is, again, its own reward. We are in technology. We like to learn. By virtue, we probably self-selected this industry because we enjoy learning. But also, if we don't continue learning new things, we quickly go stale, and that is a very big problem for our professional careers. Sometimes products are a response to an internal need. So we wanted to build this thing because we were really tired of all the time and effort we were spending recreating it every time. That's an example. Actually, Calibox started like that, and essentially Pantheon did as well. It came out of a number of projects that were big early Drupal major sites. Lead generation is all about putting something out into the world and saying, it's by us, and then people seeing it and saying, oh, I like this thing. I'm going to contact those people because I want something similar. So getting out there, it's a sales tool, and closely related to that is something, thought leadership. So thought leadership being demonstrating that you are the people who deeply understand Drupal and something else, for example, or whatever your idea or prototype it is, you're putting your stamp on that and saying, we're the people who understand Drupal-Magento integration or something like that. That's thought leadership. If anybody wants to have the best Drupal-Magento integration, they're going to find you. And the last one is profit. We'll seek profit, but those that do have some important considerations. They all have downsides, however. So we kind of talked about the nice things. The cons here, like fun, if you're only, so essentially, if you are only doing a product for one or two of these reasons, I would say that you are in danger. If you can have a product that ticks like four of these, that's fantastic. Five and six, that would be mind blowing. If you could get all six of these into your idea, you should definitely do it. So I would say that the more of these that you have, the better, because it turns out, if you're doing it just for fun, as soon as it's not fun, you're going to be done. And it will be not fun. There will definitely be not fun in creating a product. Downside of learning is focus. The world is a big place. There are so many technologies, so many things that you can learn. Just wandering out and learning things, you can lose focus with that. And it's not the most efficient way to learn, frankly, building a product. But there can be something there. Internal need. Solving that problem that you just really want this great solution. You understand it really well. Again, a product with like a logo and branding and something that other people can use is a lot more overhead than just simply building it. I think we probably all know this. Building something for yourself is a lot easier than building it for someone else. Lead generation. The problem with lead generation is that the clients that you tend to get with a free or very low cost version are people who want free or very low cost things. And so to go out and offer something that is free and that will get widely distributed, most of the people who are really interested in it are going to want the free thing. And they might contact you and think, I want one of these, but the amount of people who can afford your services will be a very small percentage of that group. The problem with thought leadership or the thing that you'll have to solve for with thought leadership, the con, is the burden of maintenance. So if you go out and say that you are the best, you are the experts in Drupal-Manjanto integration, to use that example again, if that starts not being a very good, like you don't maintain the modules or the distributions or things like that, all of a sudden it's the opposite, right? You can charge higher rates perhaps because you have this thought leadership position, but if you don't stay on top of it, you don't release the Drupal 8 version, you don't fix the bugs, et cetera, all of a sudden you're negative, it's a double-edged sword, it's a negative, it's a double-edged sword on your firm. And for those of us who are interested in making money with these things, I guarantee you, you will make less money than if you were to do a service, right? All of us in this room are here as services companies, and we're successful enough to go to Barcelona, Spain, and come to a conference and spend time that we're not billing, we know how to do services really well. If your hourly rate is, let's say, you charge $100 an hour, and so if you were to spend 1,000 hours working for a client, you would get $100,000, just round numbers. If you spent that instead on a product, you spent that 1,000 hours on the product, you would have $0. $0, $100,000, you will get more money making a service, sorry, charging your clients for a service. The hopeful thing is that you can charge for it enough and enough and enough and enough way off in the future that you could get $1,000,000, but it is a long time between now and then, and you really need to understand that. There's no get-rich-quick scheme. You're already in it. All of us know how to do services, again. Now, I would say, in the NodeScroll example, we actually did a good job of this. It's one of the things that we really care about. Fun, learning, and profit. That was what we were up to. There's a little bit of internal need there, but again, it was sort of overkill. This is how we prioritize the world, but different projects have different sort of rankings here. Open Publish, which is a distribution, again for the publishers, it's about lead generation and thought leadership. It allows Phase 2 to stand out in the market and have a lot of those kinds of clients impact them, and then when they do, to be able to charge a premium, because they say, we understand the space so well. So, be clear about why you're doing something, and once you've got the why's, you need to also take some time to define success. Again, many of us who didn't do a really good job of this wish that we had. So, if you don't know where you're going, it's a good chance you're not going to arrive. You're going to spend time wandering around, making weird decisions, and eventually either, maybe you'll make it. I think there are many, many, many more examples. For all of the positive examples that we have there, there are a lot of non-examples of people who started down the path, had an idea, made it a little ways, and then, you know, they didn't have the goals, they didn't have the motivation, didn't know where they're going, whatever reason they make it through. One of the things that is easy to get lost on is if you don't have your success criteria mapped out, we're going to have, you know, this many users by this amount of time, or we're going to have, you know, we want, if it's lead generation, we want a thousand leads in the next year, or whatever it is, come up with something. You can change your mind later. That's okay. But know at least what you're judging yourself against. Because you're going to have hard decisions. There will be times where you think, is this worth it? All right. This is great. I've learned some things. We've tried some things. Do we keep doing it? And that's a constant question. And if you can't come back to this sort of like, what are our goals? How are we doing? Then it's a hard question to answer. So if, you know, the question, things like, should we actually, I'm just going to do everyone a favor, should we add a new feature? Could be a question you might ask yourself. Do not add a new feature. Don't do that. If you're in this room, you should, we're all still figuring this out. The answer is no, no new features. Sponsored Duplicon, that would be great. But figuring out all kinds of things. Your definition of success is going to be critical. And here, actually in the words of Addy, who is in the room. So this was, I won't read that out. I won't read that out. You can all read faster than I would say it out loud. There's a danger in not having this figured out. Not only for the product, but for your agency. So that having a limping half big product inside your company can really mess with people. So not only can it be a distraction of time and money, it can also, why are we doing this? So again, know where you're going. You're going to have a much better chance of getting there. How you get there, there's really only a few choices. And again, each of these are going to have downsides, you know, upsides and downsides. Nights and weekends, right? We all have those. We have times when we're not working. Being able to just work on a product during that time. Always an option. Free time inside of your firm is another thing. We have free time, right? Where we aren't always working every single second for a client. So the ability to use some of that time to work on a product is great. Or you can spend money. You can buy either your own internal time, hire someone internally maybe to be devoted to it or hire someone externally as a contractor. These are the options. And the downsides though is that while you have time and you have money, you don't have enough because whatever it is, you are going to be super tempted to, you know, it's you don't have enough all by itself. And while nights and weekends line up for sort of like the fun and learning kinds of things, if your goals include business objectives like thought leadership and sales leads and things like that, doing it in nights and weekends is going to lose its charm very quickly. So Node Squirrel the way we did it, we did our free time and the downside of that is it took us forever. It was not good. We spent a little bit of money but mostly it was free time and it was a struggle. It was a really big struggle. So did someone have a question that they started there? All right. So Alec who's not here but again Calibox, the tool for local development if it's not directly symbiotic start treating it as a separate business immediately even if you haven't formed a new entity around it. Make sure you understand how you're going to get there and take it seriously. So once you kind of know these sort of intellectual questions what are my goals and what's my success criteria you need to focus on the minimum viable product and if the term MVP is not one you're familiar with go Google that, do a lot of reading again some of the lean stacks other resources and such but a minimum viable product that I really like this definition is the smallest thing that you can build that delivers customer value and bonus if you can capture some of that back even better and that's meaning can you charge for it and this one I think is really really hard to already mention this for all of us who build things for a living we know how to build things we maybe have interface sort of like we think we have well formed opinions about all kinds of things and building things the minimum viable product I guarantee you is smaller than you think it is the minimum viable product that we built for known squirrel was a lot bigger than it needed to be it was a medium viable product and probably every sense of the word and again everyone has ever attempted this has this wisdom to share make it smaller and I hope to challenge you actually with an idea of what's even smaller could be but Kristoff who's actually sitting in the back over there said it really quite well you're your own worst enemy I think this really applies to those of us again who are sitting in the context of Drupalcon where we build things for people we are our own worst enemies featureitis is not good adding a new feature to try and make the product is almost always to try and make the product more viable is almost always the wrong choice it might need more marketing it might need a lot of things but it probably doesn't need a new feature so getting to the MVP involves a number of things you need to know what the problem is that you're solving you should have an identity like it's a product it needs a name if you're fancy you can give it a logo a color scheme and a brand identity and all those kinds of things but even that can be thinner you need to understand your audience and have an idea of how you're going to reach that audience that one again for us and I think for many people again is a tricky one and then finally you're going to need to figure out what the pricing is going to be if you don't figure it you're going to have a lot of questions about it if it's free or not is there a free version if there is not free versions so again for Node Squirrel the problem was offsite backup and we came up we had a name we came up with a name Node Squirrel we had a brand and a logo and it still exists actually our audience was anyone using a Drupal site our path to market we were super fortunate backup and migrate is a module that's widely used already and that's a module that we maintain and we came up it's going to be $5 we had to just sort of pick numbers as sort of like a sidebar once Pantheon bought Node Squirrel it made Node Squirrel the base tier free so if you don't have a reliable offsite backup for your various sites just go create a free account it's free forever and you can back up your sites so we produced as part of that so getting to Node Squirrel we produced a website and a whole lot of work to get to this I would say doing a different if our motivators had been purely profit there's actually something that was the first time I heard about it I was actually really taken back by it the idea that actually what your MVP is looks maybe more like this and this is antithetical perhaps to again the way many of us approach a problem the idea that you're building Node Squirrel the right place to start is not engineering it and building it in the backup and doing all those things what you need is a landing page that says Node Squirrel back up yay and it has a button on it that says try now or buy now or whatever it is you build a page sort of talking about what this thing is you have a form it goes to on the other side something that's tracking how many times somebody clicked on this and clicked on that they click on sign up now at five dollars a month or whatever it is they get to the page it says thank you we're so glad you're interested in our product it'll be out soon and a nice email and you have their email address we'll send you an email as soon as it's ready to go and that's all and when I first heard about that I thought that that was just like I didn't like it it feels a little bit like you're promising something I had problems with it but in the years sort of made Node Squirrel like I heard that maybe a year or two into the project I wish I'd heard it sooner because it is such it would have been such a short cut to a lot of learning that hopefully it's something the minimum viable product could be a lot smaller and it might not actually involve a lot of the amazing talents that we in this room have there's not a lot of programming here there's some design but this is a shockingly small thing and really anyone can do it and so I think for all of us having the discipline to try to be as small as possible is really the thing that we all have to focus on and that brings us to the next problem you need customers more than features and this is really, really true and we're going to I want to just try to demonstrate this we're going to see live demo time so how many of you alright so managed Drupal websites actually we already heard that but how many people managed Drupal websites great alright most everybody how many before now before I started yammering the sessions how many of you had heard of node squirrel okay cool this is going to go well alright how many of you knew what it was at least vaguely like I knew it was in you know like if you knew the word backup alright how many of you thought it was a good idea and I should be I'm sorry I should be like listing this out so at managed Drupal websites most everybody in the room heard of node squirrel is actually pretty good like I would say 80% of the room knew what it was 60% how many thought it was a great idea maybe said something nice about it so we're down to 20% how many of you tried it dropping quickly right good how many of you bought it 2 2 that's actually that's statistically that's what I was hoping for actually I thought 2 to 3 that's about right and here we are in the you know the place in the world right now with the deepest fullest concentration of our audience and we had some you know like we had a lot of you know nice press about us and such but the world's a big place there's a lot of messages and going the difference between specifically thought it was a great idea which was maybe 20% to bought it which is about 2 is really interesting if someone tells you that's a great idea I really want to use it they might not actually want to use it they might just be polite or they'll think they might actually think that they would come to it like other things to do today not going to happen and this is where marketing is so again many of us in small firms don't have a dedicated marketing person and maybe just don't have like a deep understanding for what it means to do marketing so you know the business session yesterday we had a conversation and I recognized one of the people exactly we were talking about this so is all the business summit yesterday and so a lot of people running businesses and such we were talking about how big a team before you actually need a full-time marketing person and the consensus we came to is about 25 to 30 people and that's the point at which full-time marketing makes sense and that's somebody that's just focusing on getting out messages and making sure you're visible and I think that ratio is about right it's like 130 you should not start marketing things at 30 people but that's the point at which it's enough for a full-time person's brain with the product I think that answer is closer to four Node Squirrel did not actually make it to a four-person team before we joined Pantheon but if we had made it to four and one of them wasn't in marketing I would have been an idiot I might not, who knows having gone to Pantheon it's really interesting for me so Pantheon is a team of about 80 people right now and there are three major disciplines the three biggest disciplines are engineering which is about 20 they're similar in size, it's about 20-ish people support people helping people use the platform answer tickets etc about 20-ish people and marketing about 20-ish people it's about a quarter of what we do by a number of human beings and the rest there's folks in sales there's folks in HR and other things and leadership and such but it's about a quarter of what we have to do in order to be viable and that is a huge that's a crazy difference and you might even want to consider starting off your first person as soon as you've got it built your first person might want to be doing almost all marketing again, putting it all together making sure you have your goals set out, be clear about those understand what is it that's motivating you why are you willing to take this on because when the path gets dark and scary and it's not fun anymore you're going to need to come back and check is this still worth it and make sure you've got that success criteria set out have those methods decided upon make it really small much smaller than you imagine and then just focus on marketing you get the word out and that is the way to make it through and actually have the sustainability for people to keep people using your product will make it more sustainable so you can keep building it but if you don't have that marketing piece in there if that's not already something you're thinking a lot about that's a big blind spot I did that way faster than I did I don't know I must have sped up my speaking by a fair amount that is actually what I wanted to cover today I knew I would have time for questions and answers there are a number of us I'm actually going to call you out again I see how many of you have a product that you have produced that is out in the market that someone could go use today has a logo etc awesome that's fantastic so I hope you look around I'm happy to answer questions I might ask for insights from the room as well so I'm going to call that done thank you great talk so one thing it's not so much a question it's more kind of a reframing one thing that I've been thinking a lot more about lately is that there's something called productized services and if you want to productize and you want to ultimately if you do it for the money if you build a product for the money it's all about getting more leverage on your time so like making more money for the same amount of time that you spend that's the end goal there's a short cut for that you don't have to go to the Batcave and start building products and as engineers this is a very difficult thing to do or we just start building but maybe what you really should be doing is defining a process figuring out what are your ideal customers what has been working really well and then processify that service and figuring out what is going to be your process that you're going to be doing over and over and over again and that way increase your margin you can charge a fixed fee which is much higher than your hourly rate and specialize be more referable get people to know you for that service and actually make more money that way this is a really hard lesson that I think is important to know about yeah absolutely turns out we know how to do one thing really really well getting better at that is an incremental step that's a lot closer to achievable than it is building a whole product it's a fun journey yay us for doing it everybody here is doing it I'm very happy I sat down on the path but it's also got hard spots yeah so the question is how do you see open source in the community what are the pros and cons so obviously I think I can speak for a number of people who answered similar kinds of questions as I was preparing for this the wonderful thing about open source is it allows you to iterate and prototype really rapidly on a pretty robust framework and Drupal in particular is a great tool to build with the problem is intellectual property so if you for example are phase 2 and you have open publish and you have this distribution you also have what Drees called I think famously the most expensive lead generation tool ever invented it took a lot of time and money for them to produce that and there is zero chance for them they could charge some money for it it was completely open intellectual property and so they couldn't really it would be highly unlikely that anyone would buy it more than say 5 times and without angering enough people so it just doesn't make a lot of sense the places where people have been successful I think is when they have something there is like a recurring fee for something so for example Drupalize me or Pantheon for that matter we all kind of are used to the world is sort of used to paying for those kinds of services so hosting we sort of get that there is servers running somewhere so anything you can do that sort of ties in or Drupalize me you sort of get that you are tying into this library of learning anything you can do that sort of ties into something that the mindset is already there for I am willing to pay for this I understand that there is something here is way more viable and that can be a tricky the Venn diagram of that and open source is not a huge overlap but there are definitely places there open sass do you have an example in mind or are you thinking of something in particular okay alright good luck session man I suppose most of us sell services like you said so we are more used to doing marketing through thought leadership blogging and coming to conferences so we are pretty good at that I think we want to be good at that in terms of a product do you think there is like a formula that we can use to create marketing without putting money into this I mean you talked about that word so you know you create your landing page like you said you put your call to action you make people register they are going to curse at you because the product is not ready like you said but then you have to take people to your site how do you do that how do you do that for B2B do you guys have any experience I mean you can share from Pantheon on that yeah absolutely so I'll give an answer and I think Kristoff has got an answer he wants to give too so for to do it like one of the things you said that jumped out at me was to do it for free no if I had a magic wand that'd be great but I know of no way to do that for free that doesn't involve that doesn't correspondingly involve a huge trade off of time right there's no it's one or the other and you're paying with something I don't know I can expound so what we did with Walkup so Walkup is basically an alternative for Walkme which is a really expensive enterprise service so we built we made a blog post titled free and open source alternatives for Walkme and we did a review of a bunch of other tools and then there was also Walkup and we are until today without doing any effort at all at all we get weekly 2-3 signups for Walkme for Walkup because of that so you can just do marketing with your open source tool this is if you do an open source tool or if you do a cheaper tool although that I wouldn't go for cheaper version of something don't do that it's a bad idea but if you go to open source routes and have another business model around that then you can do it that way with very little effort and very little money and just get a steady stream of leads actually alright so that is alright thank you a better answer in some ways so using a really smart analysis of your market and then figuring out what content you can produce is something you definitely should be doing that is a great stat though like one article producing 2-3 signups a week that's excellent other questions yeah so the question is would NodeScroll have been a successful product if we sort of quit set everything aside and just focused on that yeah so one of the things as I did the timeline so we started working on NodeScroll in 2011 and here in 2015 Pantheon purchased it and it had grown like all of the numbers were nice but it hadn't it was still below a single full time person's salary so if we had just said right we're going to set aside $300,000 we're going to turn off everything else we're going to focus down on this what we've done we would have gotten a lot faster I don't know if it would have been a success though because the long time horizon actually probably helped us survive more mistakes right so we were slow and learning slowly I don't know if we would have learned as fast probably we would have I don't know that's a hard I don't know I honestly don't know I'd like to think so it's a risky one though burning this again you know how to do something pretty well to be able to make it to these chairs it's always there and you can go back to it but it's a pretty bold move yep sorry actually I knowing you can you take the mic please oh no come on what's the product as well traveling in Italy almost oh I'm one of the people who said I thought it was great and didn't buy it sorry about that sorry a little musical interlude right so we're rumified and we do booking solutions so the travel connection is for vacation rentals hotels and so on so we left the agency side of things and it was six months we left six months ago and launched SAS service two weeks ago or yeah almost two weeks ago congratulations I hope but we're kind of doing the range of things SAS service which is 30 dollars a month and you get your vacation rental website and then on the other side of things we have what Christo was talking about which is kind of a productized service in that as you are talking to bigger companies that need customizations you have a base product which is a distro and you customize it for them now the choice that we made was to make all of this open sales because we don't want people on github somewhere that people can download customers don't actually our customers like the people that actually want to give us money don't care about that because they don't know Drupal at all they don't know open source at all so it's like can you give me what I need and that was a really good lesson and the other one was it's good to go for minimum viable product absolutely but be very careful about things it's like customers will take the competitors page and just go through it and say so do you have this do you have this do you have this and if you don't you need a good answer to how are they going to solve the problem so it's minimum yes but it has to be viable and that is just as important and that's pretty much where we are right now awesome so six months so I'm curious so like if you were answering the question about like is it okay to ditch the agency life focus it down on it how are you feeling how would you answer that so I think my view right now is that it can be I agree with you it can be done within an agency but it's really really hard and it's probably easier because you're going to fail faster you ditch the agency life and just do it yourself and if you're going to do it within an agency create a separate company with a separate team and all of that that's what we got wrong I think and we were kind of messing around with rooms for two years or something and it was just not getting anywhere we had nice things we could show people landing pages and so on but now it's an actual product and it's only been six months and in terms of the marketing question our marketing is thought leadership I mean look very carefully at what the what the domain is any domain requires people that think about it create content and in our case it's vacation rentals and hotels and so on and there's a lot to be said about you know how they should be building their websites and what they should be doing and with through full we have a huge advantage because while our competitors are focusing kind of building everything themselves like they're building a CMS and then they're building a booking engine and then they have to keep up with the rest of the web in terms of things happening we just do the booking engine and we get commerce from through for commerce and all the I don't know latest widgets that you could add to your website from all the people that immediately create a module as soon as some service pops up so we have a huge advantage in terms of how quickly we can iterate there's lots of problems with that as well but it's all good awesome congratulations thank you additional questions a quick comment essentially one of the points which you mentioned about profit has last in your table I think people who are going to fund it would put right up in the right up on the top essentially up the table a question related to that is well you did mention the hourly rate and the return of that is there a time period which we should look at how much should we burn before we call it quits or being successful yeah so I think I unfortunately I don't think there's an easy answer but I think the way in which you answer that oh that was recorded right so the way in which you have to answer that really goes back to those motivators so the more boxes you can tick in that is it learning is it fun are you solving your internal needs thought leadership the more of those that this is solving the larger your budget can be so if it's just profit for example it's almost like a VC model or something but well so again that's something you'll understand the market and the size of the opportunity for whatever your idea is one other thing that actually I just want to reiterate that whether or not you quit the agency life or not is an open question the sooner you can put dedicated people on the idea that's the spot where a lot of successful people have said like that's that was it like that was the thing when we got somebody who wasn't just being squeezed in around the edges you know every Tuesday they got to work for two hours or something whatever it was having a dedicated person was key a critical path to success and treating them and respecting that not like you get to do this occasionally it's like that is your job I saw a couple of heads nodding like there were other did you have something go ahead I have a comment and a question I'm Peranere from Frontcom Norway we have a couple of products so just quickly want to mention that there's another way to think about products as well what we did with our newspaper distribution which is now sort of like a cloud solution for a decoupled cloud solutions and then we have newspaper clients coming to us wanting that solution but it's not self service or anything there's no you know place to log in or pay or anything like that but it's like a place you can go you get a full blown newspaper solution and we have tons of design elements and things like that but then the price is very low they pay a monthly fee but of course they always want more so it's like a perfect mix of just off the shelf stuff and then we get all the integrations and custom designs and new functionality stuff like that and we have a very special contract new features from other clients we share with new clients basically so it doesn't really mean more work for us it does mean that we have to think a bit different and plan better when we start working with new clients but now we have like 10 newspapers built off the same actually it's the same GitHub repository but I also have a question in lifeguard we have some stuff around that distribution that we would like to open source but at the same time some of them we've invested heavily in them so we've experimented with the idea of maybe we could you know monetize these things somehow but I haven't really seen many successes in the coming to monetize products in the Drupal community in that sense except for the hosting stuff I think I do think that's going to be very hard unfortunately paying a subscription fee is something that I think again like that's an understood sort of mental model for the world people are willing to pay like 10 newspapers that's a great model I would go back to goals like how much do you realistically think you could you know what I'm intuiting is like you made some modules for example that do some functionality like you'd like to have that be out there but you'd also like to charge for it is that kind of true did I understand that right yeah so well GPL will you know you're going to have intellectual property concerns there so you would be integrated via like a REST API basically okay oh interesting alright well you might have something there again like you charge a subscription for something like that and open it up so that others can use it and such yeah something like a subscription for functionality is doable something like charging straight for the modules functionality the closer you are to that the less likely it is the more likely I think that you'll anger make people unhappy and frankly not make as much as if you had some other solution to be honest I don't think it would work but it would be awesome to hear if someone had succeeded in monetizing of you know kind of what they do in not always such a good way in the WordPress community yeah right right do you have a comment yeah interesting awesome thank you Hi, Tako from Golgorilla we're talking about WordPress plugins that are paid so what we did is we took the most popular WordPress module which is the Yoast SEO module 22 million installs and we're launching it tomorrow for Drupal so I think we'll see some more discussion about it will be a free module with all the features and then we will launch a premium module which is 24-7 support and so we really like to have a discussion about this because we feel that we invested 20k in this project we can only do this like make a really good SEO module helping Drupal helping everybody here and all your clients if we also get some money back from this so what I fear sometimes for open source is that we don't have enough money to really do innovations or really build cool products so I'd really love to have a discussion about a premium module which is not limiting you in your features but it will give you support so you know if there's a bug or something you just can call Yoast or us and we'll fix it for you so we would like to re-experiment with paid modules in order to build better stuff for Drupal in the end and we're Golgorilla if you have any feedback or discussions about this, yeah we'd love to share ideas because I think so there's been a lot of conversations in that space obviously and that's a tricky one I think to the extent that you are having people pay for support that's again something that people are used to that's a common model calling it a premium module would start I mean I think it gets a little bit to the slippery slope of I don't know it's a service that you make available to people who subscribe or something like that yeah yeah any other questions? alright well thank you all