 to the presentation on taking Drupal commerce to market. I have three small children at home and we often do little piggies, you know, on the toes where it's this little piggy goes to market, this little piggy stay at home, this little piggy ate roast beef, this one had none, yada, yada, yada. Well, I never really understood, like, if the pig was going to market to be slaughtered or to buy groceries, do we? We'll pretend that's not a metaphor for anything. I'm Ryan Zarama, the CEO of Centaro and creator of Drupal commerce on Drupal 7. Before that, I was working on Uber cart at a restaurant equipment sales company in Louisville, Kentucky. And out of that grew, you know, what we have today as Centaro, formerly known as Commerce Guys, as Drupal commerce led by Boyan Javanovich, the new platform lead and maintainer of Drupal commerce on Drupal 8. And as we've matured as a company and as a project, one of the next things we've had to consider is what does it mean to give voice to our work in a very crowded, well-funded, competitive marketplace where we think that what the Drupal community has to offer is at least as good, if not better, than what the competition has to offer. So that's what this session will be focused on. It'll be equal parts road map, business strategy, and then just a little bit of forecasting where we think Drupal commerce has a future that will provide long-term sustainability for the project. One of the things that we can ask a lot at DrupalCon Amsterdam before this in Seattle is why did you change your name? What's the deal? Why was Commerce Guys bad? You know, it has really good name brand recognition in the marketplace and all these things that I'm very, very well familiar with because we do have to make money to live and all those contact form submissions, like they don't know who Centaro is whenever I email them back from a Commerce Guys contact. But we thought it was very important once we separated from platform.sh to reset our posture toward our project because if you think about going out and buying software, you don't go to a software vendor or a small team of freelancers or whatever and ask them to give you what they have to offer. They say, well, it's called something else and it's part of something else. And by the way, if you do business with us, we have a different legal entity and we have this, that and the other three websites that you should go to learn what it is that we have to offer you. Instead, everywhere else in the e-commerce ecosystem, you go to a vendor to learn about a project and find somebody to help you build it. And it's a very clear story. Somebody is giving an authoritative voice to a software project or application that they're then selling or implementing on behalf of a merchant. And so this shift from Commerce Guys to Centaur for us is mostly about resetting our relationship toward our project to be its open-source software vendor, which is very common in other areas, right? We've all maybe bought a GitLab license or a MongoDB license or whatever it is that you may be out there purchasing. It's a very familiar story. And what we're trying to do is basically bring support, planning, and elevating partners that merchants are actually looking for so that they give us, you know, a glance when they go to a big trade show or an analyst and try to find out what they should be using to drive their commerce strategy forward. And whenever I say, well, we want to take this project to market, you might respond, well, isn't it already there? Aren't there already people today building big, amazing sites, small, niche sites, all using Drupal Commerce? And the answer is undeniably yes. Almost 60,000 merchants are using Drupal Commerce. So that does prove that it is in the market. I think the question is just what do people in the market think of it? Is it just a project for hobbyists? Is it just a WooCommerce style thing that you add on to a Drupal if you already have a site like you would add a WooCommerce on to a WordPress? Like how do people think about us is important? And I will say that Commerce 2.x has been growing well. Boyan recently updated the stats for me because I think my last slide until last night said this was around 8,000 sites, but in the last month and a half since I've used these, we've added another 1,500 sites. So we're now up to 9,500 stores running Drupal Commerce on Drupal 8 for about 50,000 stores total according to Drupal.org, processing probably over at this point $2 billion annually through Drupal-powered online stores, which is really cool. There aren't that many projects in the world that achieve that kind of scale. So I think that what the Drupal community has done and what we've been able to accomplish just through this small piece of what makes Drupal Commerce, Drupal Commerce is really incredible. And other people think so as well. PayPal often will reiterate to us that they process a tremendous amount of transactions through Drupal Commerce-powered websites and they ask us what they can do to help us make the platform even better, which is why they exhibited with us at DrupalCon Seattle and have been really great partners to help us continue growing Drupal Commerce. And please don't read this slide. This is such a conference faux pas. I have half a book up on the screen, but this will be in the slides so you can review later on or use it yourself when you're trying to explain what is Drupal Commerce to prospects or merchants that it is a complete framework. And this is important because I was speaking to the CEO of another Drupal company recently who was fairly new to the community, had been brought in to help a company grow. And in his mind, the commerce modules were like maybe a shopping cart in a checkout form, not an actual holistic e-commerce framework that provides everything from product catalog management through to shopping cart and checkout management and fulfillment order management and on and on. So the fact that we do offer a complete framework is very important to point out because I think that we need at least out of the box to be as good as Shopify out of the box. And what makes Shopify really special is their massive app store and their million merchants and their $100 billion in transaction volume that drives continued investment in their platform. They're huge, but the core Shopify product is actually achievable with Drupal and Drupal modules out of the box, but we're not quite there yet. For example, our reporting system still needs to be improved. Or if you think about the shipping module, we're able to partner with the Danish Agency ADAPT to develop improved shipping module over commerce 1.x that included things like packages and multiple shipments per order and that kind of stuff. But we didn't actually have the bandwidth at the time to really drive it through to completion. And so we hang it around Boyan's neck like a badge of shame. Just kidding Boyan. So we have things like the shipping module, the recurring framework. We're there, we were able to invest a lot by partnering with Torchbox and we got a really great API for managing recurring subscriptions and maybe not a really great user interface. So it's obvious that there are things that need to be on a roadmap that we need to be planning for, collaborating with more partners and more agencies to produce. But the target in mind is just like base level out of the box, Drupal commerce ought to be able to provide the same base and core feature set as a Shopify. All right, fair enough. Now one of the ways that we get there is by also seeking out technology partners who will invest in the platform because that's happening on these other platforms. So for example, I'm not sure who is familiar with Shopify's business model. They're a traditional software as a service. They obviously charge a monthly fee for their core platform. Then they charge an exorbitant fee for every plugin you want to add to it. And then they keep whatever 30% just like Apple of whatever that app store sale is. And that's how they grow their app store revenue. But they also white label stripe and take a cut of every transaction. And if you don't use Shopify's payment gateway, well then you have to just give them an additional percent or something of every transaction that comes through your store. So it's complicated, right? Because you may not even know how much you're going to have to give or pay Shopify for the pleasure of using their service when you first start your company. And they want that amount to grow over time, even if the core value they provide the business doesn't actually increase. But what makes that happen is the help of their friends, right? If they didn't have the stripe partnership, that revenue opportunity wouldn't even be available to them. And so it's harder for us as an open source community to kind of get on their radar to start to help them understand how big we are, how distributed we are. In fact, one of the first things that PayPal asked me when we started talking about partnering to improve our European feature set, right? So think 3D secure 2 and strong customer authentication. They often say, well, can you give us a list of merchants and what country are they in? And I say, cool, well, there's about 50,000 online stores using Drupal commerce. And I think I know about 50 of them. Will that be enough? Because of course it's open source software and there is no email wall or paywall that you have to pass through to start building with Drupal commerce. You just compose or install and go. You're done. So reaching out to them and getting them involved and helping us grow and contribute to the success of Drupal commerce has been huge. If it weren't for that, if it weren't for PayPal and authorize.net and Avalara, like whenever we separated from platform.sh, it just wouldn't have worked. We needed their support. They gave it to us. And now we've been continuing to find new and more partners to expand our reach, expand our audience. And it's fun to see what happens there. Additionally, the pace of core development isn't slowing down. So thanks to those partners, thanks to our own professional services, Boyan is able to work full time on Drupal commerce and then the rest of the team contributes as well. Maybe about the equivalent of another full time person just working on the core commerce framework in major contributed modules. So if you think about recent changes in core, commerce 2.14 was released with a full address book feature set both on the checkout form and user account interface, but also on the admin interface. And this is something that we never even had before in commerce 1.x. So it's really cool and you should check it out. And the next thing to come to bear there will be the whole like profile copying. So my shipping is the same as my building or vice versa, which is complicated stuff. So it's, it's, it seems like a simple feature on a slide. Like, oh yeah, we added address book support. How long could that have possibly taken? Does anybody want to hazard a guess? No, no brave souls. How many weeks do we think it would take to add an address book to core? All right. One. I would love that. Yeah. No, it, it took us months because when you think about what does it mean to have a core address book feature, when you have to think about, well, what is my data model for customer profiles? What's an optimal user experience that will be rational for most users of the software? How do we roll out an upgrade path that doesn't suddenly completely change the checkout form for 9,500 people? What happens when you can no longer uninstall a module because of a Drupal core bug? Like you start to hit all these things. And I think when it was all said and done, I don't, I don't want to speak for, for boy, and he knows the real numbers, but it took us some months of development. And it's not that we regret it, but that means that while we were investing in retooling and rewriting certain parts of our core framework to add what seems like a simple feature, we also did a lot of, you know, housekeeping and refactoring that was essential to now continue to build on that success. And so that's, that's why like sometimes it doesn't seem like things are happening, but really a lot is going on under the hood. And you can just read the commit log and see all that's changing. Additionally, Commerce 2.15 will come out in the near future and include full core VAT number collection and validation against the EU's web service for validating VAT numbers. It's really cool. We already have full VAT support in the core framework thanks to our tax library, which is a standalone PHP component that we use in the tax module to calculate and assign VAT to orders. Now, you also can support the B2B requirements of tax exemptions. And this was thanks to the sponsorship of our friends at Factorial who sponsored that work along with the development of the Commerce Invoice module, which Jonathan has been working on for the last couple of months. So these features are continuing to make Drupal Commerce more capable in more markets, right? If you don't have robust invoice generation that are, immutable invoices with a tightly managed workflow and you're not duplicating them and the numbers are generated properly, all that stuff, then you actually can't even use it in Germany for B2B transactions. And so that's important to start to expand our reach into more markets, but also just to continue to improve the core feature set as well. Other things that are happening are all of our core maintained payment and gateways from technology partners like Authorize.net and Stripe and PayPal. They all had to be updated to support strong customer authentication, which I'm sure if you've been managing e-commerce sites in Europe, you're probably well aware of the pain of having to make sure everything is up to date for 3D Secure 2 and nothing goes down, whatever the switch flips and the site stays online. Finally, we're partnering with other agencies like New Media who want to kind of take on ownership of the Commerce Reports module so it's more capable out of the box. The best we were able to accomplish with the time that we had was introducing what we would call like a denormalization engine into the module that lets you take a transaction and create one big record of everything about that transaction so you can create better database queries to generate reports. Because our experience in the past was using views to do all of that on the site would just tank a site as soon as you had any sort of appreciable scale on the website. That was just an unusable solution. So we got Commerce Reports again to the API completion phase and now New Media is partnering with us to bring the user interface to bear. All right, so lots of things are still happening and I'm sure I'm missing things but you can come by the booth and Boyan can fill you in. So it's not slowing down and one of the things that's very exciting to us is that thanks to the Drupal 9 strategy which you've heard Dries talk about, you've read about on Drupal Planet, you've seen in the documentation Drupal 9 will just be Drupal 8 minus deprecated APIs and features. So the leap from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 is not significant. In fact Drupal Commerce is today Drupal 9 ready. We don't use deprecated functions. Boyan is very good about chasing updates to core to make sure that our framework is always getting rid of those deprecation notices as soon as possible and I think was it Mike Lutz who contributed a significant amount of his own time to also help make sure that the module package was ready for Drupal 9. What this means is that we don't have to pause everything we're doing for another three years to rewrite it all again. So from Ubercart to Drupal Commerce on Drupal 7 was a complete rewrite. It took years to accomplish and then Drupal 8 comes out and guess what? We had to put all of our forward progress on hold again for another three years to rewrite everything an object-oriented PHP for Drupal 8 and so we started that initiative I think it was in 2014 we had a sprint in our office in Paris and then it was at DrupalCon not Dublin at Dublin we had a beta and then at Vienna we finally had the full release so it took us a full three years where all of our competitors were continuing to actually expand their feature set grow their partnerships present a better marketing message to the market and so like for me that's like just super exciting that that as a company we actually can continue to think about forward progress and new development and new features and new partnerships and not have to go back and think okay well how would I rebuild all of this again with a different paradigm and that's I mean that's soul-crushing work Boyan used to be six feet tall he used to just get all right so yes Drupal commerce is in the market but it's complicated right so we are there we have a great story we have had great success but it's complicated because if you go to an analyst if you go to a trade show that's just not in the Drupal community and start talking about Drupal commerce I think we've been asked before is that like is Drupal like a is that a medication are you are you are you building websites for for medicines and for other random things you're saying no no this is this is the e-commerce software well it's just not even part of the conversation or people think oh I used Drupal before for a blog or I had a horrible experience with Drupal before on Drupal 5 whatever and so so they don't even they don't even like they're compelled by Drupal commerce in the same way that a lifelong Drupal developer would be I think wow this is great I I have a complete framework to do build any kind of e-commerce site I want with Drupal because I already love Drupal and it's been my entire career but for people that aren't there with us it's not even a part of the conversation so providing e-commerce for Drupal users right if that's the goal that's that's still a niche that's that's a very small chunk of the market again I talked about the numbers that Shopify has recent or earlier over a million stores over $100 billion in annual transactions passing through their system and they actually know them all right because you have to give them a credit card and an email address and so they're able to continue to grow their platform solicit feedback from their users understand how to improve their features that provide great support all these things that were handicapped at additionally software strategies just how do you do e-commerce continue to multiply so Rich Jones's session yesterday from and Vika was all about evaluating the ways that just one company implements e-commerce and they had like five different strategies that they use whether it's just a full-stack Drupal or a full-stack Magento whether it's pairing up Drupal with Magento or Drupal plus big commerce whether it's using a different technology entirely I think they have one or two silliest projects in their portfolio like like these things like all the strategies are multiplying based on merchant requirements and so on and we we do want to understand and communicate where is Drupal best used and we want to actually get that message out to a market where proprietary vendors and big SaaS vendors dominate the press so we went to to IRCE the last couple of years this is the internet retailer convention and expo in Chicago Illinois and it's a massive massive trade show like like it's just it's hard to even communicate like just hundreds of vendors in this massive city block wide convention hall and we had like our 10 feet behind this really big pillar that completely obscured us from view I felt really good about that sponsorship but but being there it's just incredible to see just how well other companies are able to execute their marketing message because they have a single authoritative voice focused on pushing that forward so it's about it's about road map it's about use cases it's about strategies and that's something that that we know that we have to be able to provide better for Drupal commerce ideally so that then Drupal agencies have that kind of authoritative voice behind them that helps them go and convince merchants then to trust them not just with their e-commerce software but also with their digital strategy centered around that e-commerce software and everything else that you do to help make an e-commerce company a success finally I'll just point out that headless commerce which of course is a big part of our road map and and I think a lot of Drupal's strategy is a trending but still a far from settled market so some of these companies on the screen like they won't even be here in five years some of them just raised a hundred fifty million dollars to continue pursuing a headless commerce strategy you know so what we have to think about is what is it that privileges Drupal commerce over against an elastic path is it flexibility is it license and community what is it that privileges us over e-commerce tools is the fact that we are tied into a CMS and can warehouse both content and product data in the same back end what is it exactly that that gives us that that leg up on the competition we're thinking about these things and we have a plan to get where we want to be so of course we know that the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time or please don't eat elephants in real life if we want to get down a long road and reach a long destination then we have to just think one step at a time what is it that's going to get us where we want to be obviously we have to continue to close gaps with our nearest competitors I already mentioned that it's what I call like the Shopify baseline or you might consider if you're just working content editing initiatives we often refer back to the WordPress baseline we have to be able to offer at least a media library out of the box right if we want to compete with WordPress for the content editing experience well same again for the commerce experience we have to be at least do what they might be able to offer on the checkout form or on the product page or whatever so we're focused on closing gaps and the main way that we've been able to do that as a company is through customer funded development and so we actually put Matt Smart into the Splash Awards this year because they're a great case study of a company that not only adopted Drupal commerce in-house and built what they built themselves but then they grew it to a massive scale that we rarely hear of in Drupal commerce right over tens of millions of dollars in annual online sales small dollar value transactions right you don't you don't buy a thousand dollars of groceries at a time most people unless you're buying just a tremendous amount of bacon I suppose so they have they have thousands of orders an hour perhaps that are coming through this system Drupal commerce handles it all but the way that it handles by going fully headless and getting Drupal's rendering API and forms API and the bloated form cache out of the conversation right we started to create for them direct javascript components that plugged into Drupal commerce resources on the back end and now that they've they've arrived where they are and continue to think about opening in new markets increasing their sales volume in their existing markets one of the things that they're very happy to do is generously give back to the Drupal community because they know they've got so much from Drupal they want to be sharing back with the rest of us and with the rest of you their API resources or you know the rest resources that power their back end API their improvements to the clona checkout integration their improvements to bringing store overrides to the framework this is a recent feature where if you have a multi store site you can actually override individual product or product variation fields on a poor per store basis right so on my finished site versus my Swedish site maybe it's a different image or a different price or whatever that's that's that's a new feature that we've just developed all of this they're giving back and so that that lets us put multiple people from our core team on improving the feature set and closing those gaps so we really value people like Matt Smart were very appreciative of their contribution to Drupal and they were recognized by the splash awards you know as a model worth following and we want to see more Matt Smarts right so very very appreciative of them and then the next step was to bring you know close those feature gaps and then just help people find the answers they need when they have questions because one of the things that's that's almost distressing for us as core maintainers of the module is to hear that a large user has stopped using Drupal commerce because they couldn't make it scale they couldn't get a feature to work or whatever and we know that if they just talked to us we could have solved their problem in 15 minutes or less and that's not even an exaggeration I have specific use cases in mind where we came in after the decision was already made to re-platform I will go Drupal 8 and Magento because that's what you know a consultant told me to do and and we say well you know you didn't have to do that at all if you would have just changed one setting in your MySQL database all of your lock weight timeout errors would have gone away right so not to be too specific into not like it hangs over my head like the one that got away so we don't want that story to happen again right and we also don't want people to be afraid to touch Drupal commerce because they're concerned they may not be able to find support like we're there but sometimes a slack channel isn't enough also a slack channel disappears every week so there is no history there's no benefit from long-term you know question and answer generation and so that's of course the message at the booth for this show which was the launch of Centaur support but it's not just enough to talk about support we also have to be talking about roadmap if you're in the process of trying to convince somebody to use Drupal commerce you have to be able to tell them what's coming next or if they need a feature you have to be able to tell them when they can expect that to arrive if it's in development or if they're going to have to expect to invest in developing it if it doesn't exist yet and so we know that roadmap is not a dirty word but it's not something that's that's easy in an open source environment to develop and project and commit to and attain and so on and so forth so to date we've had an issue in the issue queue that Boyan keeps up to date with initiatives and with things that are coming down the pipe but but we have to do better than this because that's not something you can ever show to a potential customer you can't say oh yeah there's a great roadmap here look it's in this issue queue on drupal dot no that's d r u p okay and you know what let's not talk about um so we know we have to do better than this but in order to do that uh one we have to actually have time to step back and plan and then we have to have somebody whose job it is just to make sure that this is being coordinated so that when new media or drop solid or factorial or 1x internet or whomever it is comes to the table to join us in advance in the project they know how to get plugged in and so that's why we've been working closely with our friends at Circle Web Foundry over the course of the last year and I now arrived at a point will they be joining us into Centaur to help drive forward things like roadmaps so Minya from their team will become the product manager for Drupal Commerce helping Boyan prioritize and deliver various features according to a schedule in a way that we haven't been able to in the past Ivan from their team is a great front-end developer and is responsible for the Belgrade theme so we'll continue to improve the Belgrade theme that we use as our well I thought I had it that's uh not get too far ahead of myself that we use as the current Drupal Commerce demo so being able to produce things that make it easier for you to show off what Drupal can do just with a quick demo site or for merchants that want to start themselves and grow like a MatSmart to have a better starting point is very important to the success and growth of the project additionally um as a company we're not stepping back from any sort of free support channel we still are very active in Drupal Slack but again very sad to see that every time a question gets answered as soon as Drupal Slack hits its 10,000 message limit that knowledge goes away forever um so we've been we've begun working with Stack Overflow to create a private Stack Overflow team where we can start to collect all of the Drupal Commerce related questions and put a financial model behind it so that we can afford to put people dedicated on answering questions in a guaranteed fashion right and you have to be able to take that to a merchant and say look if you do adopt this piece of software not only can I just go hop into an IRC room and find an answer maybe but I also can trust that the vendor if I'm unable to find the answer myself will directly give me that answer so this is the message we're trying to help people bring to the market and I'm hearing even from uh from agency owners here at DrupalCon that that's actually important to winning new business and the lack of that kind of uh infrastructure behind the project has been a liability so we're closing that gap as much as we are closing feature gaps finally we're focused on easing new user evaluation and onboarding excuse me has anybody tried to install Drupal Commerce for Drupal 8 has anybody failed at doing that yeah I have and you know I shouldn't but it's it's not uh it's uh it requires a different mindset right you have to start to learn a new set of tools you have to understand what it means to use composer and then you have to understand what it means to deploy a composer developed project into a web environment and manage it there it's a different paradigm there's a lot to learn and a lot of different moving pieces that sometimes I don't actually know what composers are doing on the command line and then I just get spit out an error message and I think oh that's that's cute um and so the the question is what can we do to ease new user evaluation in a new environment where the classic distribution model no longer applies people are building Drupal 8 distributions but our model for commerce kickstart 2.x isn't the right model for Drupal 8 a demo store that's somewhat inflexible and hard to work with in production that that's kind of a a waste of our resources and in fact I mean it took us at the time I mean almost a million dollars of investments in 2012 through 2014 to develop what became commerce kickstart and that was just a commerce guys project done to elevate the the presence of Drupal commerce in the market because it looks like an e-commerce application but at the end of the day it created liabilities it created technical debt and things that that didn't make it ideal but we've learned from and now used to improve the core of Drupal commerce itself on Drupal 8 and so with the new model we will actually to create a project template and composer so with one command line you can do composer create project and it's a Drupal commerce demo and it just installs and I mean if using something like ddev on your local in machine for development environments it's literally like two command line commands and you suddenly have your local machine turned into a full Drupal commerce demo that looks like Belgrade this is online at demo.commercekickstart.com right now but also if you just want to give it a whirl and have an actual admin login we've partnered with simply test.me the testing web interface for Drupal modules to get a little Drupal commerce demo button down there in the corner and with one click that will also install the entire Belgrade-based demo and give you a full admin login so you can actually go into a pitch and say hey let's you want to see what's behind the scenes in Drupal commerce cool let's let's check it out you click the button a minute later you have an environment that's hosted on tugboat thanks to lullabot that lets you log into it as an administrator and show them everything that Drupal commerce has to offer out of the box it's really cool and it really changes the game for for what it looks like to to begin to help people understand and evaluate Drupal commerce additionally we know that that not everybody out there wants to adopt Drupal commerce themselves right there's still plenty of people a whole unaddressed segment of the e-commerce industry that just want to pay somebody money to get the thing this is why people pay Shopify plus two thousand dollars a month just to get their foot in the door and then thousands of dollars more a month to load it down with apps that will make it do what they want it to do sorry and so our vision for where we see Centaur growing with Drupal commerce and bringing sustainable long-term revenues to the project so we continue to develop it and promote it and grow the project is to pursue this sort of idea of a managed headless commerce instance right so Drupal commerce as a service there's a few steps we have to take to get there first but the idea is that by starting with just continuing to develop Drupal commerce and adding a small support model around it we're able to monetize our expertise as module developers and our experience and to take that money to then just continue to reinvest in growing the platform for everybody that's great i mean just a small percentage of Drupal commerce users coming to us for commercial support completely changes the nature of our company it adds multiple boyans to the project and and what he's been able to accomplish alone is amazing but if we had five people like him working with a product manager like Minya behind them all uh the the scale of our development would be incredible and you've seen that happen in core initiatives like layout builder media library what it looks like when you get multiple people working on the same thing with some sort of sustainable financial model behind it bigger things can happen and that's what we wanted to do when we think about our technology partnerships and adding like a Centaur cloud for hosting Drupal commerce in a managed environment then we're talking about monetizing what merchants are already buying to build the product so in other words nobody has to pay paypal more to use the to use paypal on Drupal commerce but because those people are using paypal pay pals happy to invest in the continued growth of Drupal commerce so it doesn't cost the end user anymore it actually doesn't cost you as an agency anything to include something like that into a pitch but by virtue of using those tools or if we're able to create like a Centaur cloud with a hosting partner by virtue of using those things you pay no more but you are contributing financially to the continued development of the project and then finally our sort of holy grail when we think about reproducing mat smart case studies and having more managed headless commerce instances that drive development to the product that's kind of monetizing our vision which is thinking about what it looks like to have an actual open source software as a service headless commerce server in the market something that's still purchasable but also customizable something that's usable just as a REST API but also still Drupal behind the scenes if you need to add an additional repository to your instance one of the things that that that's uh oh shoot lost the thought never mind or say oh man it's gone oh I got it back one of the things that I often think about when we look at Drupal usage statistics is it's easy to look at the usage statistics and think wow there's still like 700,000 Drupal 7 sites and despite Drupal 8 being out for years now there's only half as many Drupal 8 sites and that causes some people concerned because they think that that Drupal whatever that is is shrinking when in reality what's happening is people that are on Drupal 7 and they're just running small sites blogs brochures whatever they don't have a reason to upgrade to Drupal 8 and if they do upgrade they're looking at it as a complete replatforming because Drupal 8 is completely different from Drupal 7 and at that point considering well should I just be on a hosted service should I be going to Squarespace or Wix or WordPress.com or whatever it is right so so those users probably aren't coming back okay we have to we have to acknowledge that and think about what it means to have higher value projects but fewer of them it's a different kind of community but one thing that I see happening is that future Drupal users will never touch Drupal at all right future Drupal users will interact with Drupal as an API server but there'll be JavaScript developers in front and developers who are used to just consuming REST APIs and don't really care what's under the hood but they'll be benefiting from what we're all doing as Drupal developers and the Drupal community and so that's who we're thinking of when we think about who's the person that's going to buy a fully managed headless commerce server well it's it's it's an organization that manages hundreds of websites and wants to put direct consumer e-commerce on each one of them but thinks it would be crazy to take a hundred Drupal sites and suddenly add an additional like highest security conscious set of modules to them and try to manage a hundred individual e-commerce websites instead they could have one headless centaur commerce server if you will and then connect each one of their existing Drupal sites or non-Drupal sites to it over an API and again this is the exact same model that MatSmart uses they use React on the front end it's a completely standalone React application powering MatSmart.se and MatSmart.fi and a React native app powering their mobile like that that's the model that we see really finding purchase you know in the market in the future and that's what we're pursuing and that we think will drive the you know the long-term sustainable development of the project forward so if you're interested in that vision contributing to it learning more about it please stop by the booth we'd love to talk to you about it or anything that we've talked about in this presentation and last but not least we'll just say but why why even talk about monetization because we're here to think about open source and code and so on and the simple answer is just that getting to market takes money and and we want the project to last for the long haul we want to be able to keep doing what we're doing because we enjoy our jobs and we enjoy one another and we enjoy the community but in order to keep doing that we do have to be thinking about this at least and it's not your job to solve that for us as a company there's a project but this is what we're thinking and we do think that there's opportunities in here to partner with all of you to make it happen and for all of us to benefit from the result and that's all I have to say about taking Drupal Commerce to Market thank you for joining us and I'm told by this monitor that we have a minute and a half I'm happy to field questions but they must be questions that are answerable in less than a minute and a half a little hot potato that's fine I've probably talked to a lot of you already in the booth we'll be happy to see you there thanks again for your time