 Okay, we're gonna go ahead and get started. I'm Karen Borchardt and I'm with Phase 2 Technology and this is the Drupal Marketplace, how what we sell and how we sell it affects the community, our clients in Drupal. So I am gonna moderate this panel today with our wonderful guest. We have a panel of guests who are all pretty involved in the product space in Drupal. It's a small but growing group of people who are involved in this space, so we're gonna get to some questions and then certainly open it up for questions. So this is Moshe Weitzman from Aquia, Seth Brown from Lullabot, and Ryan Sarama, did I get it? Yes, from Commerce Guys. And again, I'm Karen and I'm from Phase 2 Technology. So I'm just gonna give us a little tiny bit of context and then we're gonna get to the panelists so that you can hear what you actually wanna hear about. So there's a lot of people talking about products in Drupal, a lot of people talking about it. In DrupalCon London, we had a, Moshe and I sat on a panel with Robert Douglas around the very volatile topic of apps and app stores. The Distribution Summit in San Diego brought a lot of people together talking about business models around distributions that they've built, distributions that they wanna build, distributions that don't exist that they wanna see, and how to make a living with those. And the Drupal Product Summit in Rome brought forth the idea of this, kind of should there be one marketplace that rules them all in Drupal and actually that turned into a really kind of a difficult discussion. There's a lot of issues that come up, a lot of issues that come up there and a lot of things that come up around open source in the community. It's just a really sticky problem, really, really tough one. So a lot of questions, how do we build products? How will monetized products ruin the community? Why is it okay to sell services but not products? Should there be a single Drupal app store? I promised I wasn't gonna say the word app store today. Can we make a living with products and does GPL prevent successful business model for open source products? So a lot, a lot of questions and very, very few answers to some of those things. So really what we've kind of come up with in terms of what we see the challenge being is basically everyone wants to make a good living in this space. That's why we're here. We're able to be at this conference today because partly because we make at least part of our living in Drupal and in this space. And products are attractive because they offer you a way to build once and sell many times or that's what you hope, right? So there's an interest and products are really attractive. But products can feel really proprietary and locked up and not so open sourced depending on how they're built and how they're released, how they're contributed to and how they're used. So nobody wants to harm and sacrifice the community because that's what allows us to make a living in Drupal in the first place. And so that's the question, is how do we solve this challenge? How do we solve this problem? And that's what these guys are gonna answer now. So it's gonna be great. I'm gonna let each of these guys introduce themselves and tell a little bit about, we're gonna start with just to ask you each to tell a little bit about what you do with products and what you're doing with products in this space and what you see as the big challenges. So we'll start there. And we'll start with Moshe. Hi everyone. My name is Moshe Weitzman and I work for Acquia. And we have quite a few Drupal products. You might have heard of Drupal Commons. That's a distribution that we primarily manage along with the rest of the community. For intranets and communities, some of the popular Drupal Commons sites are eBay and PayPal. They're developer communities run on Drupal Commons. We have the conference Organizing Distribution Cod and we also have a hosting platform and a support platform where we support our products and everyone else's products. Hi everybody. My name is Seth Brown. I am Lullabot's Director of Operations and Informally Development Manager and sort of Director of Professional Services. So I get new job titles all the time but no raises. And this was actually gonna be Matt Westgate up here but he delegated so here I am. It's good to be the king. So as far as Lullabot goes, we are predominantly a services company as probably most of you know. We started as a training and consulting business and then became primarily a development shop, a services shop. But throughout our existence, we've tried to sort of bootstrap and spin off products and sort of our most successful examples and there are definitely some unsuccessful examples that you probably haven't heard of. Our successful examples include Drupalize.me which is a learning site for Drupal videos and then a hosted video platform called Vidiola.tv which is actually the foundation for Drupalize.me that basically allows businesses to monetize video on the web. And Vidiola lets you sort of build a Netflix on-demand subscription based platform or an Amazon sort of rent or pay-per-view system or even a Hulu ad sponsored. And we offer that as a hosted service so that's kind of where we've ventured into products. I'm Ryan Zorama from Commerce Guys. My title belies how I might be a little removed from the discussion here because I'm the VP of Community Development which means I don't actually have to worry about how we make money with our products. I've been leading the development of Drupal Commerce which also includes the development of, I'll call it a pseudo distribution right now which is called Commerce Kickstart. And I say pseudo because it doesn't do much more than an installation profile. But of course the plans that I just blogged about right before the conference involved making this look and function much more like the lovely products that are produced by the guys that are on the stage with me. It's not to say that we are ignorant of the need to make money or to really like productize what we offer around the distributions. But thus far our primary focus has been on increasing adoption and really bringing in people from outside of the Drupal community and using the distributions of the products as maybe training templates or launch points to sort of draw people into using Drupal for the first time and then certainly using Drupal Commerce to build their next e-commerce projects. And then building up this pool of users that will then become ideally customers, paying customers in the future. Great and you're certainly not removed from this conversation because we're certainly gonna talk about community contribution to products. So and I'm just to round it out, I am the director of products with Face2 and Face2 maintains three main distributions open public which is a distribution building platform for the public sector and for government organizations and nonprofits. Open Publish which is a publishing platform for online news and media. And then Open Atrium which is a collaboration and project management tool for everyone. So those are the distributions that we run and we have various efforts around those products but we mainly sell services, we're mainly a services firm and do a lot of work on customizing and building sites upon those products for our customers. So, here we go. Okay, so we're gonna start actually with that question which is most of us here are from services backgrounds and so I guess we'll and I'm gonna ask these questions and ask one or two of these guys to answer each one and then we'll open it up at the end for your many questions. So get that whole huge list of questions ready so you can stand up there. So we'll start with this one and we'll start with Seth actually. So coming from a service background, what makes the alternatives attractive in terms of or why look beyond services at all? If you're in services and you're doing that, why look beyond that? Sure, great question, Karen. Thanks. So I come from a services background. I was actually with a company called BlueTent Marketing for six years that's well represented here in the audience and we were primarily a services firm and then I came to Lullabot and we're primarily a services firm. I would say that probably 85% of our revenues come from services and not from our products so our products are still not necessarily the lion's share but what are the cons of services? Well, basically it comes down to selling hours, right? If you sell an hour, you can never sell that hour again, there's no leverage. And as this marketplace is maturing, there's more and more firms doing Drupal services and it gets harder and harder to differentiate and I think the laws of supply and demand kick in and you sort of have this commoditization of services. There's a downward pressure on rate. It gets harder to do value billing. There's a story that I always love about value billing which is there's a guy with the Rolls Royce and he can't get it to run so he's kind of exhausted every mechanic in town and there's this specialist that's far away but apparently this guy's the best. So the guy gets his some friends and they roll the Rolls Royce or they tow it over to this mechanic and the mechanic comes out, takes a look, pulls out a rubber mallet, opens the hood, hits the engine, the thing starts up again and seems to be working fine and the mechanic comes and says, okay, that'll be $1,000. The guy's like, $1,000, you just hit it with a rubber mallet. And he says, well, it's $1 for the labor in 999 for knowing where to hit it. And I think that's the way to sort of make a services business go but it's difficult as there's more competition in the marketplace to continue to sustain those prices. So products let you leverage your work and sort of build once, sell multiple times. I think that's also a bit of a fable because there's all kinds of things that go with servicing a product and having an SLA and wearing a pager and all that fun stuff. But I think that's where sort of the intrigue of being a product business comes from instead of a services business. But we're definitely trying to not throw out the baby with the bathwater. All right. Motion's good. We'll chime in on that one. Yeah, why don't you chime in on that one? All right, I'll chime in best I can. So Acquia doesn't do a lot of professional services. That's definitely not a focus for our company. It's there for some customers who need it but we definitely are focused more on cloud hosting and on support. And we also have some SaaS products, Drupal Gardens. Anyone can go there and start up a Drupal 7 website and a new product we just announced called Enterprise Gardens for large enterprises who need to spin up dozens or hundreds of sites according to a templated Drupal distribution. And we will host that and support that. So there's kind of hybrid services and products. I would consider SaaS businesses to be somewhere in the middle of that. And it is also another sweet spot for Drupal. So maybe we can talk a little bit about SaaS. Yep, great. So this is what everybody wants to know, right? What are the ways that people have found to successfully monetize their products in this space? We're gonna, oh no, we're gonna start with Ryan on this one. I get to choose. But Acquia's the one that's doing it. The way that we've monetized is through training and through support. We actually have a support agreement with Acquia where we support Drupal commerce websites in partnership with their normal support team. And so that was an immediate way to monetize things without having to actually dive into SLAs and pagers. So I guess I'm not wearing one, but okay, somebody is. So that was the initial obvious way. And then it's not sustainable long-term, but there's also the fact that we've been building Drupal commerce thanks to client money. So we've monetized the build process in a sense. It's been self-funded and it's kept the rest of the team busy as well. So that's about where we are right now. Certainly not where we intend to stay. Should we also save the iPad? Good call. Thanks, guys. Depend on my teammates here. We should also define SAS. Like I don't know if we're throwing it around as buzzword and sort of taking it for granted, but it's everybody knows the software as a service. We wanna talk a little bit about SAS and that approach. Sure, let's try not to electrocute ourselves in the panel. Okay, so software as a service is all about you no longer have to do the hassle of installing your own Drupal. Someone does that for you and they give you a URL and you have a Drupal site and you're off to the races. And so I mentioned Drupal Gardens is our first attempt at that. It's free. Go ahead and check out Drupal if you don't know much about Drupal. And there are, it's very much a premium model there. Okay, so you upgrade to a paying version of Drupal Gardens and you get more features on your garden site. And the whole freemium SAS model, I think was innovative a few years ago. It's actually day reger now where you go to a website, you get something for free. You start paying 10 bucks a month. You get a little more, 20 bucks a month, you get a little more. It's a great model. It's a subscription model, which is all about recurring revenue, which is another problem with services is that it's often one-time revenue. So that's kind of how we're trying to monetize this thing with lots of subscription revenue. Okay, and like Ryan at phase two, that's that we do primarily a lot of our work through services work. So we use the distributions as the base to start building for clients. And I think actually Acquia uses the term accelerators for distributions. And that's, it's a good word for it. They help get us off the ground faster and help execute our projects faster. And then we are able to, we've kind of built a reputation in the verticals where we work with those products. So in some ways, we monetize almost in lead generation and marketing, but then we also build with the services and customizations on top of that. So certainly, you know, that's certainly services revenue. It's not dedicated, you know, build once and monetize forever product revenue. But it is how we've monetized on the products and how we fund continuing to build them. All right. So this is a question that comes up a lot in this space. You know, when you're managing a product like this, it's open source. It's sometimes funded through your client's work. And it has, it's probably not the exact same model and road mapping process that you would use if you were just building a product straight out of the gates and, you know, building a little company around a product. Let's start with Seth on this one. How have you found that you manage the product roadmaps for something like Drupalize Me or Viola differently because of its open sourcedness? Well, it basically takes some options off the table. So Viola is a platform and we give it away for free on GitHub. Anybody that has the knowledge to leverage a complex Drupal distribution can go and download Viola and host it themselves. So we have to figure out another way to sort of make money in a sense. And the way that we've done that obviously is to create a hosted solution for Viola. And then to sort of, we call it the special sauce, but add components to that that you can't get with the free distribution such as iOS apps, Android apps, Roku apps, you know, a professionally implemented theme. CSS code is not covered under the GPL. So there's certain things that you can sort of legally, you know, the truth is you could sell anything to anybody under the GPL, but they have the right to then take the source code and give it to anyone else. So if you're trying to protect something as somewhat proprietary, you have to figure out, you know, things that you can create that you can sort of sell as a product without distributing. Getting a little sort of going all over the place here, but how do you manage your product roadmap differently? You know, I don't know. I think with, you can pretty much go with a classic SaaS model. The only thing that we wouldn't do, a lot of like Assembla, I think for instance, which is a project management system, will let you pay a lot to host the software on your own servers. You know, to basically have the enterprise version of Assembla and host it internally. And that's important for a lot of clients, like we have a client, Martha Stewart, and they can't have their code base on GitHub. They have to have it behind their firewall. And there's a lot of enterprise companies like that. So Assembla, which is basically software as a service, is able to offer yet another tier where they actually give you the software. So they've essentially distributed it at that point. But they're protected because they're not dealing with the GPL in the way that we are. And we don't do that with Videola. You know, we don't allow a company to basically host Videola on their own, at least not the enterprise version. The version that's a free distribution is certainly out there openly. But the one that has all of the sort of code that we've written to serve video and deliver video, we keep to the hosted option. Yeah. See if we can take out the picture. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that we do is we just don't put, well, I don't say we don't. It's a lot harder to put dates on releases. It's a lot harder to put dates on features. Because in a sense, we're dependent on Drupal. And Drupal's dates are, it's released when it's ready. And so that can make it a lot harder to have a dependable product lifecycle. And additionally, if you're trying to include and involve other people from the community in the development of the product, if we want to do, that brings its own challenges. If I was just paying somebody to write the shipping module, for example, I would write them a spec and they'd go and produce a shipping module that does exactly what we needed it to do. But instead, it wasn't in our initial one dot to a roadmap, but we wanted it to come quickly. And so some guys from Copenhagen took that and sort of ran with it. And that made it great for flat rate shipping. That's all you needed was some sort of European flat rate shipping that kind of solved their problems. But with e-commerce being so diverse and having such a wide, wide feature set, and even like every feature has this wide sub feature set, it wasn't abstract enough. And so then we had to sort of extend our shipping roadmap to include a rewrite. And then you have to do that along with the developer. And the last thing I want to do is demotivate somebody. That's just contributed a bunch of code to the project. So there's the timing and the sort of personnel or community management that you have to do to make sure that you still have good buy-in and you're not being hindered at the same time by the open source nature of your foundation. So in my mind, being an owner of a distribution is a pretty interesting spot to be in. You get to have final decision on product roadmap, which is great. And at the same time, you have lots of people giving input, giving code, and you get to give back to the community parts of your roadmap and parts of what you build. In a sense, each one of us who runs distributions is like a Dries, right? He's the Drupal Core distribution owner. And we're all doing similar kinds of things with our own projects. And we're really excited when someone else brings the voting API module up to the new features we need. And if that's not happening quick enough, maybe we can sponsor someone to do that or we do it ourselves and give it back. So there's lots of pluses for being part of an open source project and running a distro that uses all the contrived parts of Drupal. Yeah, there is, I think there's another side of that too. That's really that we find challenging. I think this is challenging to distributions is that the other part about being a distribution owner, which is an interesting word for it or distribution maintainer of something that is the community code. I've sometimes said that our distributions are actually one of the most closed things that we do. At phase two, we maintain a lot of modules. We maintain a lot of code out on Drupal.org. The distributions are actually the things that is the part that gets the least amount of contribution and the most amount of people asking, when's the next release coming? We need a day. We need to know what features are in it. We need to know, we need our free software and we need it now. And that's a challenging place to be in too. And distributions lend themselves to that way because they do often have a bit of a brand around them and they can have the feel of something a bit more proprietary. And so bridging that and finding the way to get people to really contribute into that and finding a way to be a leader and for the vision and the roadmap for the product without being so all-encompassing that you're the only ones that are doing anything with it is an interesting balance, I think, in this space. We've talked about this a little bit, but how does GPL affect what you sell and how you build your products? Anyone? Does it? I'll try to be a little more verbose than that. Okay, so, as Seth said, the GPL takes a few options off the table, but there are still a whole universe of ways to make money with your distribution. So I think that there are plenty of good options there, including the SAS one that I talked about before, the services-based model that Karen mentioned. So, yes, it affects positively and negatively, like I was saying. You get contributions from the community that you didn't have to fund yourself. Yeah, I think it's actually helpful in that it takes off of the table this idea that maybe we can package up code and sell it. It helps narrow your focus right off the bat because that problem, how do you package up GPL code and distribute it and support it in communities? It's already been solved. It's been solved by triple.org and by GitHub and these other things. So we don't have to worry about chasing money and actually facilitating the distribution of a module. So what we sell won't end up being that. That's not to say that there can't be a valuable service around key rating and rating, whatever else you're doing to repackage these features and sell them, but as a baseline, it's made us as a community better at collaborating and distributing. So we don't have to really worry about those types of things to sell. We can focus on the services and the training videos and the network subscriptions and all that kind of stuff. That's great. Great, thanks. Okay, so I'm actually gonna leave this one with Ryan for a minute because it sounds like you've had quite a lot of success with this. Have you had some success in getting community contributions to your product and how have you done that successfully? Moshe has contributed to Drupal commerce. Yes, I think you have one, but yeah, two maybe. Well, a few more coming down the pipe, I think. What's great is that we've solved a need and a lot of people have that need and a lot of those people are technically competent, people that want to give back when they can. And so Drupal commerce has attracted a lot of people that are either from Drupal shops that just had a need for e-commerce and then were able to contribute back to the project or they're now Drupal shops that are just basing themselves around building Drupal commerce sites. Those guys have become active contributors. And how do you encourage them to continue to continually actively contribute back and not just build with your product and then not contribute what they're doing back? So, well, some of these guys, they're trying to make a name for themselves for the first part. They want to be known as a company that contributes to Drupal commerce and has got their module featured in commerce kickstart. So just contributing in itself is attractive to them. So you don't really have to try. And then a lot of what we're doing is utility. Like, you're not gonna, you're not really gonna win any friends or business by keeping a payment gateway module closed. The only reason that they should consider not making it open is if like it's insecure. And then maybe they should just like not be writing their own code. But like there's no incentive right now in Drupal commerce world for people to keep their stuff private. In fact, the bigger challenge is just like once these guys start getting traction in their market is actually make sure they have the time to give back. And so personally, I try to make myself extremely available to guys. And a lot of commerce guys will help co-maintain these projects. So our contributors can put the address book module that they developed online and then we can then help them polish or I came in and help with the shipping module to abstract it and make it more generally useful. So it's been maybe in some sense a hyperactive engagement of the developer community to make sure that they know when they're giving back it's both appreciated and they're gonna get help. They're not just gonna be stuck with this module that they have to maintain and hate it. And so like this far even to Drupal commerce we've had over a hundred contributors and many of those have a dozen or more patches they've given back because they know like they can totally understand the success of this is going to compound not just for their next project but for everybody else that they're also benefiting from. So as with Drupal it's a really easy value proposition I think. Yeah, great. Yeah I mean for Lullabot I feel like again this is Ryan mentioned that this is sort of a problem that Drupal has already solved. You know how do we get open source contributions. So what we try to do with our products is make sure that we hew to a site building approach as much as possible. So as little custom code as we can ends up in the actual product and then whatever else is custom often will contribute back as a module like Lullabot for instance has done a lot of the work on the Uyalla module. Which is Uyalla is a video backend content provider and so we've actually done a lot of work on that module contributed back to the community and then of course we use that in Viola as a tool to plug into a particular content provider. So by getting that stuff all back out into Drupal.org we can leverage those contributions. And then the only other answer I'd have is GitHub definitely makes contribution a lot simpler. So if we want people to let's say come in and help us with actually upgrading the Viola code base. Let's say we want some nice Samaritan to come along and upgrade it from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. You know if we put it on GitHub that makes their lives a lot easier to sort of work with the distribution as a whole. Okay this is one of the, I sort of addressed this a little bit earlier and discussed it from our perspective and it goes into the roadmap question of a little bit of how do you handle the free software customers who are looking for upgrades or support or fixes on their timelines and on their needs. You know you certainly want to really encourage people to be building with your distributions. Obviously that's what you know or your products. That's why you have them and that's why you build them. But how do you face the challenges of the fact that you're sometimes funding them through your own projects. You have your own services work and you have your own timelines that you're facing. How do you guys deal with that? Let's see. We'll start with that. That's a good plan. Well there's different parts to the answer. I guess the really short one is you deal with it with thick skin. Yes. There is always going to be a class of open source enthusiasts who wants more for free faster. And you know they're just like mosquitoes. You sort of have to cope with them. And there's not much more to say about it. Now there's a whole other class of people who isn't quite so entitled but they do feel entitled to at least hear from you every so often. So I think communication is a large part of the challenge here. If you are an owner of a distribution, Drupal Commons, open publish and you want people to use it and be happy with it, you have to tell them what you're working on and when the next version might be coming out and what the current challenges are for this product. So you build a community there and you talk to them. I think the members of the panel here have been quite good at this but definitely frequent blogging is a big part of satisfying the free software customer. That nails it. All right, good job, Moshe. How do products overall affect your company's overall business plan? I mean, we have services, products in the mix there. How does the concept of products affect what you guys are doing in terms of where you spend your time, who you hire, what you do and what your strategy is as a company? We'll make sense of that. Sure, I can start with that one. I mean, the short answer is for us, products are a big kick in the nuts. It's, you know, we bootstrap them with our services team and so we're basically saying, you know, okay, we're not gonna work on this highly profitable services work. We're going to devote resources to this product and to its future promise. So it's really challenging to bootstrap products. It's funny because, you know, we have a culture of sort of bootstrapping and spinning off products. It's very much along the 37 signals philosophy of sort of selling your byproducts and creating things in-house and then making products out of them. And Jeff Robbins is sort of a brilliant visionary and is always coming up with ideas for products and why don't we do this and oh, that's shiny. You know, let's go over here. And meanwhile, it's like, we're trying to run the core services business and it can be very difficult. And there's moments where it feels sort of desirable to maybe take the route that I think both Commerce Guys and Acquia have taken, which is to get some funding, you know, to get funded as a startup and maybe spin off the product as its own entity. But so far we've been sort of, you know, just coping with the turbulence and the impacts and the disruptions. But it has a real effect on my developers morale and how much and how long they have to work. And it's tough. And so far we've done it based on the fact that there's a lot of belief in our products and in sort of making our own dog food at Lullabot to eat. And, you know, I don't know that there's a great answer if you're going to try to bootstrap. You know, there's really not a lot of ways to insulate. The only thing that we've tried to do is to sort of create structures within Lullabot to insulate those products as much as possible. And we've tried to narrow our focus because, you know, again, we have a visionary at the home so there's all kinds of ideas floating around. So we've created processes where we sort of have to prove the product's concept in business plan form, you know, before Lullabot is willing to take it on and throw resources at it. And, you know, that's helped a lot to sort of call the chaos a little bit. That's great. And I'd say that it helps them to have expertise because that's what you can charge a lot of money for and then you're freeing up developer time. So I know that, like, Lullabot, they're experts and so they actually have more money coming in that they can then set aside developers if they need to to develop the products like Drupalize Me or whatever else you have in the kitchen. And at Commerce Guys, we made the decision very early on that I wouldn't be a consultant. I wouldn't be doing billable client work. So very rarely am I actually pulled into actually generating revenue for the business. I'm just focused on Drupal Commerce and on Commerce Kickstart. And again, that affected the race strategy. The idea is that from my experience with UberCard, you can't build this stuff and then have the rest of your time taken up by clients because clients will always want more time and if they're the ones that are keeping your business going because you're the one servicing them, then you just won't be able to have time to work on your products. So we had to set me aside full-time and then we're looking to hire more people to set aside full-time to-do product development. One of the first things that we got going after we took the recent raise was set aside a product team in Paris that's working on, with me on the Commerce Kickstart sort of relaunch that we're looking at to actually make it more attractive to the outside community. So our business plan, why we've raised money and how we charge our clients is all revolving around what we hope to do with Drupal Commerce and how we hope this product to be central to everything else that we do and build around it, yeah. Well, I'm gonna make you stay on the, I'm gonna stay with Ryan for a minute just because you just discussed the kind of venture capital question and I think it's one that a lot of people ask us about in products. We have outside investment in a couple of these companies here. Commerce guys, I think it's probably pretty big news, it just did a raise. And we also do have some bootstrapping. Phase two has never taken investment for products so there's certainly different ways to do it. But one of the questions that I think we hear a lot is does outside investment create any pressure to be less open-sourced with your products or does it create any interesting dynamics in the open-source aspects of product development and product development in Drupal? I guess I should start by saying it certainly can but when you're seeking investors you're vetting them as much as they're vetting you. And so you're not going to take investment from a company that's going to put that negative pressure on you if they really understand and if you really understand how the open-source culture and the community really drives your business forward. And so with our recent raise it was a combination of three investors. One was our existing investor, ESIE, a French fund for entrepreneurs. Another was an e-commerce fund called Alvin Capital but the third was one that you may have heard of called OpenOcean which was founded by the guys that made a mint selling MySQL. So, you know, Monty was part of our vetting process. You know, these guys are in the room looking at how we're engaging our community and we were actually doing some, I don't know, I think it was our technical due diligence or something, how do we respond to bug reports and manage our issue queue and stuff. And he saw an issue that was like two years old and somebody had promoted it to critical without me knowing about it. And so he's like, why do you have a critical bug in your queue that you haven't dealt with yet? Oh my goodness. Wow. I'll go take care of it right now because they really, they really understand that the community drives our business and in a sense it's the community that made us attractive. If Drupal.org didn't have usage statistics that showed that 10,000 people were using Drupal Commerce, we wouldn't have received the valuation that we did. We wouldn't have received the interest from these investors that we did. But to them we were attracted because we not only had a good product in Drupal Commerce with Commerce Kickstart but we had a solid community of people that were enthusiastic about it and helping us to build it and that we're engaging with positively and really benefiting from and benefiting them in return. So it's really just about choosing who you're actually investing with. And I think the same is true for Acre that their investors get their strategy. They get that Dries retains sole ownership of the trademark and that Dries has a full engagement rights with the community to build this how he sees fit. So they're the same, it's true for us. It doesn't mean that they don't want to see return on their investment. So that's still going to drive the way that we move forward. But they actually challenge us to be more open about our product plans than we have been thus far. So I guess that's a good story. I don't know if there's a bad story up here honestly, but I'll let, do you know? I mean, yeah. Well ours is a good story also. Acre has had several rounds of funding and all of those rounds have been, the investors have understood and even promoted like Ryan was saying, us to do more with the community. There's a real understanding among our investors that Acre is just riding the Drupal wave and it is very, very, very important for Drupal to succeed in order for Acre to succeed. And that's the reason why Acre puts a lot of money into Drupal Core and Drupal Contrib. They pay Angie Byron full time to just manage community issues and move Drupal.org forward. And Rhys is time to fly around the world and talk about Drupal. And Alex Bronstein now is full time working on Drupal 8 and you may see more people working on Drupal 8 from Acre. And so all of that is done, not so much for our benefit, it's a little bit for our benefit, but more for everyone's benefit so that we can ride that raising tide. So yeah, I really don't see a conflict of interest there between the venture people and Drupal. Thanks, thanks. All right, so now we're gonna open it up for your questions. We have about 20 minutes, yep, about 20 minutes. So we'd love to hear your questions or if you'd like more clarification or explanation on something. We'd love to hear from you. There's a microphone right there in the middle. Don't go all at once. Slow down. Hold down. There you go. Yes, you sir in the back. So the question is one of product strategy. Have we considered monetizing through a hosted version of Drupal commerce? And what I would say is I was actually talking with the guy earlier on the way here about the fact that because we built our business around expertise, around consulting, we're really servicing the higher end of the market. So the people that we have on staff that we have to continue to afford to have on staff are servicing larger clients with their own set of needs. And it would be great to take Drupal commerce mass market, but it's a different trajectory from where we've been going. That's not to say it doesn't need to happen. I think that if we want to serve all those people that aren't doing a million dollars or more in business a year from their website, that there has to be some simple hosted solution because they just don't have the budget to pay us what makes sense for us as a business to stay alive. So considered it definitely. Considered all competing with Drupal gardens. I'd much rather partner with somebody like them. But I think it's a great idea, but it's also a very crowded space. I can name a half dozen off the top of my head of companies that are all doing that already and have already sent the bar at like $9.99, $15.99 a month for that kind of service. And so that would take a whole round of investment on its own to build something that could compete immediately, I think. I have a question for you guys. Thank you for, thank you for what I talk about. You mentioned about the more and more companies just going to the Drupal business. So it's more competition now. Like I have a question about the startup new company in the Drupal business. Do you guys have any good suggestion to the startup business like this one? Sure. That's a great question. So what would I advise somebody who's sort of coming into the Drupal ecosphere and wants to start a business as far as strategies? For one thing I would say don't sell Drupal necessarily. And what I mean by that is Drupal, the tool, the technology, it'd be sort of like your contractor selling you on the saw he was gonna use or the hammer he was gonna use. I would say find a business problem that you can solve, a vertical that you know very well. And then work to provide solutions for that particular business vertical and use Drupal as a tool to make that happen. But the idea of sort of putting up your shingle and saying hey we're a Drupal business, come to us if you need help with Drupal. I feel like to some degree that ship has already sailed. There are a lot of, it's a pretty competitive market and there are a lot of established brands in that space. So it's harder to get there. On the other hand, right now we're seeing an unbelievable sort of demand I think all of the companies and shops. And so everybody's hiring and acquiring and there is a lot of business for, there's a lot of small to medium sized websites that are not getting built because people can't find providers to do that type of work. So I do think there's some space there. It's probably a little bit more difficult if you wanna service large, large enterprise level clients to sort of come in that way. I guess one other suggestion for aspiring entrepreneurs out there is that one of the first things you need to do is establish yourself as an expert in the thing that you are trying to do with your business. And you know fortunately with the web now and Drupal Planet and Twitter you really just have to start writing and writing well and writing frequently and how many blog posts does it really take to become the world's foremost expert in Drupal for churches and Drupal for youth groups and all the sort of things. So definitely try to establish yourself or your company as an expert and the people who need that are starting to come to your website and you are starting to build a business right there. Actually executing the business is another step but becoming the expert is something that I think most of us in the room can do and it's a great first step. And to tag along on I guess on just because this is an audience of people interested in products generally I think when you find that expertise and you're finding those things you don't have to build this enormous huge product and distribution and SaaS offering in order to start offering products in your expertise. If you're providing services and you have a product that can be a theme or two or that's appropriate for that specific vertical or that specific group of people there can be a lot of, there's a lot of little products out there and one of the things that Lullabot does I think really beautifully with Drupalize Me is just they create a lot of content. They create a lot of awesome content and even just those little pieces of content that are available in a subscription form in their product doesn't have to be this enormous Drupal platform to rule them all. It can be these products can actually be very small things that are tools, pieces of content. There's a lot of different things that can be kind of productized in this space without having to build an entire system around it. Like I'll step back at the migration. Yes. Well, one second. Let's go to the mic. Good evening. Good afternoon. There has been a recent thing in the community about apps, Drupal apps and features and so on. I've seen it work in other communities like WordPress and Joomla. Why hasn't the whole idea of selling apps, not modules, but apps and features and so on caught on in Drupal community? Once it hopped, yeah. I would say I'll just answer part of the question. And I'll let Seth dig in. I'd say has it really worked for those other communities? Maybe it's worked for some people in those communities. But is it really useful for Joomla app or plugin developers, for example, to have to recreate views and rules inside of their e-commerce system just to have an e-commerce system that works on top of Joomla? In other words, it's this silo effect where if I have an app, why am I going to spend a lot of time being sure it works with everybody else's apps? So where's the interconnectedness coming from? Instead, you just be really self-focused making sure that your stuff works and that's really counter to the Drupal way of doing things. And so maybe it has worked by one metric. Maybe people are making money but would that same thing work inside the Drupal community? I don't think so because we're much more organic and much more interrelated. Just like Drupal commerce depends on rules and views and the Insta API and C tools. All this stuff that doesn't really make sense for me to try to package up something that I've done and sell it. And then again, as we discussed with the GPL, wouldn't somebody just go and redistribute it for free? Well yeah, I mean Ryan said it pretty well. If you look at sort of the data on CMS adoption out there, Drupal is sort of trending up and Joomla is really trending down pretty strongly. And I would attribute that in no small part to the sort of fractured nature of the Joomla module space. Concrete five is an interesting CMS in that it's sort of all the new sexiness out there and it's enjoying a quick rise. I think it's risen like 500% or something. But if you go to Concrete five to their website and you start to think about building a website, one of the things that's really dissatisfying is you go into their sort of marketplace for modules and there's like three different modules for having Google fonts on your site. And there's all these other modules for integrating maps. And I think in Drupal, when that happens, when there's three modules doing the same thing, the community gets together and says, hey guys, we're all trying to do the same thing. Let's just get together, choose which one we think is the most viable will all become maintainers on this module and then this will go forward as sort of the canonical module for this purpose. And that happens, I think, because modules are free and GPL. And I think when you move away from that, that doesn't happen anymore. You get the silo effect that Ryan's referring to. So I didn't add much to what Ryan had already said, but I think it's a, restating the point is worth it. Yep. I had a similar point I wanted to raise, Doug Van here. I wanted to draw upon the success that Tom McCracken has had at level10.com with their open enterprise distribution where apps play a central role when you go to install the Drupal 7 distribution of open enterprise, it asks you what apps you wanna install ahead of time. And then once you've installed it, it asks you if you wanna install more. And it's doing everything that features in the features store was hoping it might do when it grew up years ago, but failed miserably. And it's a phenomenal thing, but it incorporates the interoperability of modules and contacts and everything else going on so that we're not building our, we're not rebuilding views, rebuilding Ness or the other. A Drupal commerce store app would be awesome. It'd be among the larger of course, but there'd be simpler versions and more complex versions, you know, slideshows, et cetera. You can download the Drupal slideshow module with views, et cetera, but you gotta configure it, which is great and we will. But as an introductory, you know, having a slideshow app that pre-configures things and sets things up for you, but also has a custom GUI around it that you can configure at the point of installing the app. And then it has, you can go in and edit the view if you want to. You can get a Drupal after the custom GUI. I think it's awesome and I'm really hoping and I'm asking, do you intend on integrating apps into some of your distros, your products? Sorry, can I say one thing real quick? But as we start, I think one thing to distinguish here is that, you know, the concept, the general concept in the last question of add-ons or plugins or apps, whatever you want to call them and monetizing them and building a, you know, monetizing products through that is one concept and the apps module, perhaps not the best-named module, is another concept and it's really, what this gentleman was just talking about was the ability to put functionality into distributions in a way that makes it very, very simple to install and uninstall and configure and that's a useful tool for site builders. I want to be crystal clear that those are kind of two different questions and two different discussions just because somebody is using the apps module and yes, I'm a little defensive about this because we maintain the apps module and we like it quite a lot and we use it in our distributions but it does not mean that they are trying to create a large and evil app store. So I just want to make that distinction because I do think it's an important one to know that that module is, I do think it is a useful thing for products and I'm certainly happy to turn it over to these guys but it doesn't mean that if they're using it or not using it, it doesn't mean that they're creating or not creating a monetized app store. Okay, anyone else? No plans right now? Okay. I mean, I don't think we can consider it. Yeah, okay, true. So as service companies, how do you, like do you have practical strategies for defending your product development time? Yeah. Prioritizing it, balancing it because need income but you can just talk about those kinds of things. Sure, part of it is size. We had to get to a certain size before we could create a silo for product development and we did get there, you know, we got to, we're about 35-ish people and we have like a five-person videola team that sort of protected from our services business. The big work that happened up front was creating the revenue models around videola and sort of exploring how it was ultimately gonna be profitable for us and then proving that it was a worthwhile investment because it's very easy to quantify the cost of a certain group of people in a silo working on something per year. So that's the easy part. Then you've gotta say, well, how are we gonna be profitable enough so that this can be as profitable or more profitable than our services work? That's the tricky bit, right? That's the business plan. So at Lullabot, you know, we've started becoming more disciplined in entertaining product ideas and part of that is coming up with, you know, revenue models and spreadsheet form for how we're going to ultimately pay for the resources that we're committing to this effort. I think that people have to be siloed. I think that it's really difficult to ask your people to sort of do products work in their own time because the truth is, it's like, you know, at Lullabot, we had this concept of 20% time, you know, where we only scheduled people for 30 hours of billable work and the other 10 hours is their time to give back to the community and it's really tough to go ask them to instead of working on web form, the module we need you to work on videola, the product, you know, it's not going to make Nate very happy. The only other thing I could say is continuing to push the ceiling with your rates. So, you know, keep raising them until there's a lot of complaining. You know, I think there's a race to the bottom sometimes to sort of get business, you know, to grow top line revenue and overall sales by making sales easier to make, which you know, you can do by dropping your rates. But at the end of the day, that's going to eat more and more and more of your time. There's a very real cost to that. So keeping your rates high allows you to be, you know, do fewer projects, work less time and hence maybe have something in the margins to devote to your products. But I think you need to make the case for a product in a services business that it is going to outperform the services that you're doing. Otherwise, stick with the services, you know, because it's more profitable and at the end of the day, you know, most of us are here to make money, I think, you know, in some form or another, or we wouldn't be here. Okay, question? Yeah, I mean, the revenue model and forecasting is a hugely important part of it. I also want to put a plug in for the other model which is let the clients pay for it and build it as you go. There's nothing wrong with that model. There's lots right with that model. And to the extent you can pick your clients and pick your jobs so that they push your product forward, I think that's really, you know, a really excellent way to go about it. Yeah, you also get a real, like real time market testing of your product that way. You know, when you're not siloed and you're testing it in real time all the time with the things that you're building with it that are building into, you know, if your actual clients are saying, yes, I will pay you money so that your product has this feature, you can have a pretty good idea that that's a feature that people will pay for. So it makes, there's a compel, but there are compelling cases both sides. Let's take the next question. Folks, I'm loving the discussion on productizing stuff. If I may, I'd just like to highlight that there's a birds of a feather session this afternoon on entrepreneurship within the Drupal community. It's called Doing Well by Doing Good. If you're interested in entrepreneurship and ideas for doing well by doing good, I'd invite you to come and join us. That's this afternoon at 345 Room 210. Again, thank you for letting me do the plug. Great. Just a couple more questions here. People need to go, we understand. What's the panel's assessment of the market size and potential for migration consulting products and services? I know, Mo, she built a business around that, but just how big of a market is that? Yeah, so I had a small business before I joined Aquia called Curve that was focused on this very problem of migrating data from other systems into Drupal. I never did a market size analysis, so I really can't comment on that part of the question. We were busy and within Aquia, the same team is still busy doing migration, so yes, I think that there's a pretty healthy market there. It's another one of those things where it's riding the Drupal wave, so to the extent that people are moving onto Drupal, they need migration experts. I'd say it's a pretty strong place if you're thinking about entering that part of Drupal. I think, yeah, I think it's a great place to be. Yeah, I would agree. It's the thing that always takes 10 times longer than anybody expects. We did with Curve's help, the Martha Stewart migration, and it's still going. The effort to take all of their content, all of their recipes, books, magazine articles, and put them into one canonical source, and then be able to serve that content downstream to their various front-facing web properties was by far in the end the largest part of the project. And yeah, migration demand is very high. That's something that we get a lot of requests to do, and there's very few people that specialize in it, so. We'll take one last question. Sure, it's a softball question for Seth. Can you just tell us about webforums.com, or webforum.com? Yes, totally, so I meant to mention webforum, but that's another. That's a great softball, thanks Greg. So webforum.com is a new product that Lullabot has launched, and it basically is a survey tool to build surveys. Webforum is a module that Nate Haug has contributed to Drupal, or contributed the majority of the commits to Drupal. It's used on most Drupal sites to build forms for those sites, and webforum.com is a pretty neat GUI that Nate's created around the module, and it's a hosted service, so you can go on there just like a survey monkey or something, and you can create your own surveys or web forms and host them there. And at the moment, we're not monetizing it. Right now it's just a free service out there in the world, but ultimately I think we'll probably pursue a freemium model, which Moshe already eloquently described. So yeah, thanks Greg. Webforum.com. Any other questions out there? You don't wanna know. I wanna thank our panelists today, Ryan and Seth and Moshe, and thanks for all your great questions. Thanks.