 So let me ask who of you here are developers? Okay, a lot of developers business owners and Who of these business owners you can keep your hands in the air is working on a product or wants to build a product? Yeah, that's almost the same amount of hands. I think every agency has the dream of building a product And we actually had a really cool discussion with the trees about this yesterday is a big fan of products We're doing some cool stuff that I want to share with you today There's some theoretical information. There's some practical information about our open social project and afterwards love to have a discussion with you About this topic. So open social is the new triple a distribution We have a booth if you have any technical questions, please Do not ask me now because I'm not a technical person, but you can always come down to our booth later But I will be telling you a bit more about the product so there's a war being going on between open source and closed source and this war is being fought for for a very long time and Currently that war is being won by us the open source people, which is really great More than 78% of the enterprises now run Open source and some of them use it for a huge part of their business And there's only 3% of them that says they do not rely on open source in any way This is hugely changing and it's good. It's going like faster and faster and faster for these enterprises This was a survey by black dog software So hope you guys can see this On the left side, you can see the traditional enterprise stack based on these old school Software of Microsoft and IBM and Oracle and on the right you see how this is being redrawn On application level data management level storage and there's all these new services on the right side You know that does a lot of things like analytics and stuff like that. That wasn't able before So there's a huge shift going on all the products on the right side are all open source. So this is Hugely moving to the right side. I'm using some some models from SL. It's a venture capitalistic firm The slides are going to be up after the presentation. So you can have a deeper look and also I'm using some articles and There will be links to the articles as well on the on the page So check them out and the articles go deeper into the philosophy behind all this but today I'll talk a little bit more about the practical implications with this So, you know, we are open source community we love to talk about software developing But today I want to talk a little bit more about Okay, how can you go to the market as an open source company or as we say open software company? And how do you build your company around open source products? So we're not going to talk about, you know, working with open source. We know it's great But let's talk about how can we build a company's better and better than before? Again based on this models. So who am I to talk about this subject? My name is taco with a name like that. You don't need the last name. So just say taco It's a traditional Dutch name. It was popular in the early 80s before the food became known Eight years on Drupal. I'm co-founder of a Drupal agency with the Miaskos also in the room two founders were 25 30 people company right now and For years, I'm on the board of the Dutch Drupal Association Which is one of the best Drupal associations and I'm co-founder of the open social project And I'm also product owner. So I'm really Trying to get the most value out of the team as well and make sure we build the right things We're based in Amsterdam the Netherlands and we also have another office in the Netherlands And that's on the right side. It's called 20. There's 87 startups And we're both part of what we call the startup Delta in the Netherlands. It's very cool project It's trying to build Europeans largest ecosystem of startups. So there's 87 startups in Twente, which makes us very special there and there's over a thousand in Amsterdam Which makes us less known there You can see the screen is not doing well with the gray colors So just a quick recap. Why do we want to sell products? And I've been talking about this in the Drupal con New Orleans So if you want to know a little bit more about our philosophy why we think products are better than services And why the future of Drupal is in products not as not in services check out that talk But basically it's about we want to team to focus more So as an agency at one point you're doing e-commerce next moment You're doing communities then you're doing a portal business to business whatever So it's very difficult for the team to be switching throughout all these projects To know all about these projects like a e-commerce project or e-commerce philosophy is very different than Social community project for example, so we want the team to be more focused on a specific type of software or product We want to build better software I mean when you look at the apps on your phone whatsapp Facebook It just works really well and our clients for who were built on software They're expecting our stuff to work just as well and that's sometimes not Able we're not able to do that because you know Facebook has hundreds of engineers solving a tiny little light button And our clients expect things to work the same way And we just don't have the time and don't they don't have to budget to build the software, but still the expectations are getting there I'm sure you have these clients who say wow, I really want this to work. Why doesn't this work the dragon drop? It works in Facebook Why doesn't this work in Drupal and I think it's our task as Drupal guys to to build better software because our clients are Expecting better software we can do that with products We want recurring income so we don't want to do one-off projects with a one-off budget That's nice at that moment But then it's going to go away and you have to find a new client new projects anymore So sometimes you're super busy and sometimes you you know you're out of work So we want stability in income and Also we want to earn more we think the margins on products are healthier than on services Services companies run about on 10% margin. That's not so much products have a huge Margin so I think we can earn more we can pair developers more and that's cool In the end we want to make open-source sustainable as well So we've always been talking about how can we contribute more to the project? How can we contribute better software to the project? How can we have more core maintainers? We think with products we can do this So this is the reasons but my other talk is a bit more in depth on this So I'm not going to talk why we're going to do products today. I'm going to talk more how we're going to do products And why do we need to talk about this because free is not a business model We cannot build a product and give it away for free Sounds logical, but still we need to talk about this because just giving away a software for free It's still not a business model We cannot run on that so we need to talk about. Okay. What is a business model? And you know somebody once said I want to build a million a billion dollar company That was trees. If you don't know this quote He's a very big believer in products and he's still pushing this forward and and we know aqua is doing well and Maybe it's a billion dollar company. We'll see So I've been I started with saying okay. There's a difference going on this fight between open and closed source It's been fought for a long time, but something changed and something is changing So we are winning this fight, but we need to understand why we're winning this fight And we we need to understand why we didn't do this in the past So the first generation of open source companies failed by the way, this is not my slides I didn't want to be funny with the fonts that this is doing them First generation failed so we need to look at that to understand why we failed and one of the reasons is that We gave more control in the hands of the clients we made it so easy for them to maintain their CMS content management software You can maintain you can do images whatever and that basically meant that we gave away market By saying to your clients here you have your project you can do it yourself from now on you don't need me as a company or as an agency That was it. So we gave them a lot of control, which is great But it also decreased our own market. We need to understand this in order to understand what's changing now Another thing that we didn't do well in the past Is that we charge only for support and services so services are development design consultancy And the support contracts most of the agencies have them and this doesn't give enough reason to innovate and Obviously you're gonna say well we do innovate we innovate a lot, but think about how many times you build a News content type or a blog content type, you know, we do this over and over and over why because the clients want it There are some hours for it. So fine. We'll do it again and These two causes made sure that the market for open source was not really big not really growing and the companies were not really successful So we need to understand that But somehow now a big change happens and there's some sort of liberation and the attention for open source is there Investors are there somehow. So what changed? And what's important to understand is there's three changes, but they're all customer driven So it's not that we as a community changed It's our clients changed and the markets changed and that's been great for us So it's not necessarily that we as a community changed that we had some sort of vision No, our clients did this and that's obviously much better to have a demand-driven change than to push it from ourselves So what changed? Think you can still read it. I don't know why it's doing this So speed and control of our clients has increased. They don't want to wait half a year for a feature They want it now. They want it next month. They also want to have more control over the systems I don't want Microsoft to be able to control my software. I want to be able to adapt it I want to do it now and the old platforms didn't give this to us to them open source software can You know, they can be more agile Everything is web-scale now. So that means usually in the traditional systems You had your local market You had some tool that worked for your company and maybe some clients in in-house and that completely changed our companies changed So they want to be operating on a global level. They want to be connected all the time not just from nine to five So this is a huge driving change and the third one which is really cool because there's a lot of developers in the house is that These companies are asking. Okay. I want my developers to give me advice, you know, we talk about multidisciplinary teams You know the developers are part of that and I want the technical guy to tell me what to do and not the CEO to tell me What to do and this change so if you ask a developer Hey, you like to work with the proprietary Microsoft software or you want to cool work with this very cool open source project What are they gonna say? Oh, let's work with the open source software Also the network effect, you know, we're here together. We all believe and see this network effect So the big guys the CIOs they're empowering the front line developers and they want to work with open source So these three things have been happening and that has been a huge driven for open software in the enterprise level And then the cloud came so we had this demand and what was the solution? Okay, web scale faster control developers The cloud really accelerated all of this and it leveled the playing field between proprietary software and open software Software is becoming a service, you know, the hardware doesn't really matter anymore and so far It's just become a service. This is going really fast. If we look at the data In 2014 from the entire software market sauce and pass was only 12.6% and in 2019, this will be 22.2% So we're still not there. I mean in terms of sauce and pass There's still a huge market to be gained But this is increasing super fast and and the traditional software market is growing 2.9% But the sauce of a market is growing 18% and I was at the Acura business summit and they said 19% So maybe it's going even faster So that means if you're gonna work with products if you're gonna work with sauce, you have a 19% growth market instead of 3% This is huge and this is very important for us So there's these two things the customer demand is changing and the technology is changing and That means that open software is becoming the dominant model. It wasn't before it is now This is very cool. I'm very happy about this because we invested a lot in Drupal over the last years So it's very cool that this is changing and that we are part of this moment so Did open source win? Yes, we won. So it's great news for those of you who didn't know this But you know who else did to? It's the commercial software vendors Because they have not been sitting still they see what's happening and we feel that they're looking at us as well So the new version of Microsoft it's completely open source. This is a big deal. I mean Microsoft We still see as this proprietary vendor, but actually When you look at github contributors the Microsoft contributors are the most Currently and that's very cool. So when you look at all their projects a lot of them are already open source Obviously, they see open source is winning. They see that it's faster. It's better. It's more agile It's more developer focused so they also want this. They're not crazy these guys. They're looking at us so Both the commercial and open software companies are moving to service-orientated business models in the cloud, you know It's the level. It's a level playing field. We're not winning. Yes. We're winning as a model doesn't mean The proprietary software vendors are going to go away now. They're changing as well so What we need to understand is that when we're going to move forward with products and open source We do not focus on building a cheaper alternative to proprietary software. We're not going to make an open source cheap clone of things This is not the way we should move forward and we are not for focusing on this as we as I look around at this as well So when you look at the stack the entire stack that was changing. It's about creating new markets as well I mean docker is completely different from how things used to work. So we're opening up new markets new technology and It's very innovative and it is developer driven so We have to focus on that and if we do The real big thing that's going to happen The next wave of software adoption. It's going to be open source and a cell made a graph like this So you have your old school mainframe past IBM Client server Adobe Oracle, you know great error Then now we are they call it XS or SARS pass. Yes, whatever. You see the sales force Adobe They're all moving there now But the new wave the next wave is going to be what a cell calls open adoption software now We call it open source Open software and it's cool to see that you know elastic search Dutch company we're proud of that MongoDB aquia. It's not software. We know this But yeah guys of this article didn't understand this. We see this more often. They mean Drupal. They put aquia because that's a company Yeah, I have to forgive them for that And we also need to work a little bit on that and open social should be in there, of course We're not there yet But this is important because it means that the market size and the growth of these new Companies is much more than it was before and you see for example also sales force moving more into the open adoption software Why because it's going to be the big next wave of things. So we're not just beating the guys We're doing much better and we're probably not even realizing that So, okay, this is all great, right Let's do this. How do we build successful open companies and there's a difference between doing this than the traditional companies Especially when it comes to SAS so there's some models that I thought were great that we are using as open social Then I'll share with you today and let's have a discussion about that because you know, we're still pioneering So there's three phases Obviously there's much more phases, but three is easy to remember right so stick to three Phase one It's very easy. It's three peas. So it's easy to remember three and three peas phase one project How do we build a community around your product? So for example open social The question is how can we get people involved to contribute to do QA to do patches to use it for their clients? So we need to build a project around this Phase two is product. How are we going to sell the product to who are we going to sell the product? What is the product super important to find out and I'll tell a bit more about that later Phase three Okay, we have the product now. How do we go to market? How do we scale? How do we monetize on this? How do we get money? You know, so I'm gonna tell a little bit more about that later, but this is the 3p model project product profit And it's different because most companies focus first on profit or in product And now we all have a sudden say no phase one is focused on the project And it's it's important to understand this and we already have a project right Drupal, but it doesn't mean that that's enough We are launching open social. There's commerce. There's a lot of projects within the project with their own ecosystem and their own meetups and their own habits So How do we do the three phases with with open social for for Drupal? So a little bit of history about Open social for you don't know what the project is about. We built this community site for Greenpeace We started doing this five years ago We're currently in the third phase third version of the product. It's a voluntary community for worldwide For a global number of Greenpeace volunteers, so that's currently 60,000 Volunteers on the platform. It runs in 20 countries with more than 20 languages It's it's huge and we've been involved in a project for over five years That means we learned so much Greenpeace is a great client They really invest in how do we get the most out of the platform for our users? That means we have a lot of knowledge and the project was nominated for one of the most important awards in the Netherlands a Dutch interactive awards and we actually won last year So that was great. We were on stage all good and then We got a lot of requests coming in from other companies that said, okay, this project is great Can we can I have it for my organization? And we said no, we just build it for Greenpeace. It's tailored for them So yeah, we cannot just copy it and At that moment we started thinking okay, we should probably make us a lighter Project out of this that more organizations can use for their own needs Then Drupal 8 was coming so we felt okay. We have to do this project in Drupal 8 then we heard that Commons Drupal Commons for Drupal 7 was not being continued by Acquia So everything came together and we said to ourselves, okay, we should build a Drupal 8 distribution That focuses on social communities social internets and basically any type of projects that that want to collaborate Interact and communicate with people So we made a pitch deck As you do nice nice lights and we talked to investors. I was standing there Like this and they were very critical. Well, they were wearing suits and ties. So it was different So I gave them the pitch and I said, it's gonna be great. It's gonna be huge and and they said, yeah Sure, we'll invest but you have to make it close source Because this open source thing that sounds very stupid. You're gonna give your software away for free. I Mean, I'm not buying it And then we said well in that case This conversation is over because we want to make this open source because we believe in open source and I just showed you why open source and open adoption is going to be the next big thing and Some investors like a sell they are understanding this and Dries is for example also involved in a venture capitalist firm Who's only focused on open source? That's very cool to see this but there's a lot of people especially in the Netherlands to be honest, you know We're always lacking Behind the USA and people who are a bit further in this. So we said, no We're not gonna talk to VCs anymore. It was very annoying as well Irritating me that they liked us, but they didn't like open source and I'm very passionate about open source So we said, okay, we still want to do the project. What should we do? so we did a crowdfunding campaign and Gold Gorilla the agency sold 10% of their shares for 200,000 euros and Then a little bit more because some of our friends said I missed it because it was going so fast in six days We sold all the shares to hundred fifty investors and then four of our friends said I was too late So we moved it a little bit up for them to invest as well We call it Drupal social then you can see that we changed it later to open social so we raised this amount of money and then we Invested the same amount out of pocket so from ourselves and we started the project We did a couple of other things before I'll talk about the three phases We shared 10% of the shares of the company with the employees So everyone people that are working on the project people that are not working on the project Very important for us that everybody is involved in this in this adventure. We created a dedicated team We've done before projects or products But you know when clients come in and they pay you you always move to the client project because it just pays the bills Right, so we created a dedicated open social team We even moved them to another office. So TQ is a Google Center for entrepreneurs in Amsterdam Techwater, there's about 100 startups in there Very cool place We set up a marketing team very important because For our agency We're very lucky that we have enough work and we don't have sales people and we do a little bit amount of marketing But very limited so we set up a marketing team that has their goals that thinks about KPIs conversion rates It's a completely different way of thinking and that's what we really wanted to think like a SAS startup So the agency is one thing our SAS or open SAS as we call it It's completely different. So this is the basis for what we did and then we started going into these three phases I'll be happy to tell you more about this in detail how we did this You know, especially the shares is something I've seen a lot of people think about and it's different for every country But we can tell you how we did and Then the open social project started so that's still crazy because in December we raised the money January we started the project and Last week we launched our beta. So, you know, we actually have a better product of open social ready This is one of the pages a group page We have a booth as I said before Downstairs, it's in the corner where there's coffee where we have time for you to give you a demo talk you through it So we're very happy that we could do the first phase and the first phase for us was really about You know building the project so you have to have the software has to be in Drupal But you know, the question is how can we build this community around the project because if we as Goal griller just do the project. It's not really open source, right? We don't have a community. So we invested in a lot of things For example, we set up a manifesto and we asked for feedback. So we said, okay what what should be the thought of this for who should we build this distribution and Who should be like what what should it be fast should it have a lot of features? What do we want to do with it? So let's start with a manifesto still not done you can contribute to it Then there's a lot of other things we did to get the community involved And this is always this takes a lot of effort and time But we feel that if you want to you know get people to the project you also need to invest in them You need to give them the tools you need to give them the right information. So that means share your roadmap What's gonna be done when and where? What are we gonna do this sprint? What did we do last sprint, you know, write release notes give people insight in what's in the in the development Work on GitHub like we have all the wiki setup. How you can install? How can you contribute? How can you reach out to us? How can we make the installation super easy for you using Docker using composer? And we also did a lot of alpha releases. So trying to get people involved in testing QA We even had some patches translations So you can see everything that's being done on project social I think we're the first company that actually bought a Drupal domain name It's not a domain name what we want to have the slash social there was another project And we paid the guy to rename his project and took over the project Not sure somebody did this before but you know, it might be some money to be made with really good project name But we did more we did a case study It's still featured on Drupal org on the home page to tell people what's the project about who's involved How are we thinking about design? Which modules are we using? So we invested in that the queue we have people dedicated on the issue queue on Drupal org So if you have a question within a day or two days, you should get an answer at least know if it's being picked up or not So we invest in that we have ISC support hours so two times a week We are online you can ask your questions and we'll help you out with that, you know, this is all time money Invested in the project phase. We're not thinking about the product or about making money We're just trying to get people involved in this project phase We have social media so people can talk to us newsletters Replying to emails Every day we get a couple of emails now about this we never had that as an agency Maybe once a week we got requests for a project, but now every day people are coming in and the questions range from Can you please tell me the difference between Facebook and open social? Thank you Okay, or I have this very complex business case of a hundred pages Can you please read through it and advise me on how this would work on open social? like, okay No We should though probably but it's crazy. It's really fun though, you know people responding and Because the project is coming alive and we love that but it's also Yeah, you get some some weird questions What we also set up yesterday is you can easily try now a 30-day free trial of open social on platform SH So you don't need a credit card. You can just go to our project page Go through the process and you have your installation up and running in a public cloud on platform So that's really easy. You don't need to work with composer or docker or whatever and still try it out Then there's much more we want to do. I mean there's a huge demand We are doing as much as we can but we need much more manuals. We want video tutorials Frequently asked questions about Facebook You know the developer onboarding we can do much more in this currently you just get the platform We're like, okay Now do your thing with it But obviously we should take people by the hand and tell them what they can do We want to have a demo like a nightly refreshed demo so you can just try it at once features I And some more features We even get questions like okay, I need to launch my project before Christmas Can you ensure me that these and these features will be in there? Okay, how about you build them and so, you know, it is It's that's interesting how the dynamics work and I understand Reese's frustrations of it now with core contributions But yeah more features will come we have a roadmap But obviously we need to work on MVP first go from there. We have agile team So we decide on priorities, but we are small team. So, you know, we're doing as much as we can This is very consuming and time of and money, but we believe it's It's bringing us a lot of value. So these three steps project product profit. We really believe in them That's why we're investing so much in the project and you know more eyes on the code It's always better. So people submit bugs, which is fine You know, even if you submit a patch is really great. We already have the first patches in the beta Even feature requests are are nice, right? Because that means that this is a real need of people and it doesn't mean that every feature request is going to be in But if we get 10 times this feature requests or 20 times this feature requests, it means it must be a very high-demanding feature And then we will move it up in our backlog. So even that is, you know, it's a real-world issues where we're solving So that's also good Translations there's people working on French and Arabic at the moment And I spoke to somebody who will translate hopefully to Japanese So this is also very cool that the community is pitching in with all these types of things And the last thing is clients. So we actually had our first client through the Drupal community because it was a big client Went to this agency with this problem. The agency couldn't fix them in this short amount of time But they said hey, these guys are working on open social. Maybe they can help it and we actually won the project and Are launching it next month. So this is also very cool that the community is giving you leads and even clients So that's the project phase and we are in the middle of it Obviously, we slowly need to move to the product phase because we want to be a product company We want to sell products and free is not a business model So how are we gonna deal with the product and for us? We see three products So the distribution is for us a product We're not making money of it, but it's still something we see as a product Then we want to do a SAS version of open social so that tell you a bit more about that But that means you get hosting maintenance support and you pay a monthly fee. We've seen this market is growing You know software as a service. That's where it's going and three will be the enterprise clients who Have their specific needs that do not fit in the SAS product, but they want some extra modules or some extra integrations So that's the third product. We're thinking of Tell you a little bit more about that. So for each of these product things we're thinking about Okay, how can we give people what they need? So how can we do services for the distro? So that's why we have composer. That's why you can try it on platform How can we help the community with this? You know support requirements, but also marketing We are mark doing marketing for the distro because we see it as a product We want it to be successful. We want to have a lot of downloads installations Why because we want to grow the community? So we also invest in ads on Drupal.org We do social media campaigns. We even do adverts campaigns for the distribution not sure a lot of projects are doing this but We're doing is I think we're getting some real cool data about this We'll be sharing the data with you guys as well. Yes, I was doing the marketing So now I'm making a promise for him But he'll write a blog article about this to show you some insights for example the ads on Drupal.org very interesting repay X amount of money, but what do we get in return for that actually quite a lot? And the same thing is for the SAS business. So what will be the services around this product hosting support updates? We need to think about how are we going to give support to the people? It's going to be by email, you know, we cannot give support for the distro by email, but we can for SAS Requirements we need some tools again the marketing super important direct sales, maybe events Adwords so you see Still a lot of question marks here. Why we're focusing on the project base slowly moving to product But we're still figuring out a lot of things especially when it comes to SAS Will we have SAS only features? I'll tell a bit more about that later, but It seems we probably gonna have some SAS only features you can scream at me as open source people But we'll discuss that In due time and then we have our enterprise clients which kind of it's not really a product It's more services again that hourly business, but still very important To have as a revenue source especially in the beginning because SAS has to pick up and it's gonna be slow in the beginning So at first and at this moment we're doing some enterprise projects So we also need to think about okay. How do we get these enterprise clients? So that's a product phase So when we think about it you get these three types of you know with everybody knows these price pages So on the left side will have your free distribution You can get the code on triple org you can try it on platform as age And that's really for for the developers for the community for the agencies then in the middle we have the SAS product so people that do not have technical skills that don't want to think about hosting or maintenance They can work get the SAS version and and we do believe that this is the future of software So you get all that stuff currently you can sign up for a beta So if people are interested for that sign up to the site and then the right side will be the enterprise Yeah, your large specific project starting at amount X We're still discussing this and we also have a site for this cat open social calm and that will be more about the product So the project is also done on Drupal org product We have this Different side because it's the product has to appeal to more people than just the Drupal community Drupal communities are in niche But we want people to buy open social because they like it as a product not because it's run on Drupal or even it's open Why it's open source So in terms of years 2016 was all about the project next year We'll have to work on product. How do we sell the product? How we sell SAS? and only after 2018 we think about profitability and You know the profit phase is really about What is the roadmap to monetize the product so We were last week in Dublin at the SAS conference and we you see that this whole different community They have different terms different words and we can words and we can learn a lot from them So it's like monetizing Sustainable revenue streams. Basically, how do we earn money and how can we keep on investing in for example the distro? so We are thinking about this we have ideas about this But it's something that we are still have to work on after we've done the product and and the distro out and how can we scale into this you know bigger bigger phase and this is a big question that we still need to solve so and This is a question that a lot of products companies are having or are gonna have So, how do we go from a community of early adopters, which is people here and the engineers to go to a large amount of paying customers? So that's the third phase profit phase and to be honest It's people are really struggling with it. We had the product mastermind meeting. There's eight people that are really into products so trees and and Larry and Jeff and all this kind of people that work with for example open HM and Acquia And everybody's struggling. Okay. How do we expand? How do we grow this? But we still think that We can do this and you know, we will keep on talking about this how we're gonna do this And actually this is one of our first projects. We're launching. It's a project for the United Nations So we're already working on the product phase. We're already thinking about okay. How can we make money in the future? So this site will be in production. I think next Month so that's very cool So are we there is this then the end Not really because as I said before We need to decide what will be open in a product and what's going to be closed and this is a difficult topic So maybe we can have a discussion about this later So some of the product will be open the distro some of the things will be closed So our scripts were maintaining and updating it in the cloud. We're not gonna open that Maybe some features like analytics are going to be extra incentive for clients to buy sauce Remember we need to have some income out of this We cannot just have the distribution and not get any money out of it Because that's not a business model and it's not sustainable and it's what many distros are doing wrong at this point is that they don't build a sustainable business model and Then the project ends and everybody's left with a debt project. We all know them So we don't want to do that So if we become too open, we're gonna have the same mistakes as the previous generations did, you know We're beginning to open. We're gonna give everything away either to the clients They can do it themselves and we cannot monetize So this is something that we need to balance out if we want to do products, right? Andries also does it so when you look at Acquia, which is quite successful They have this open part they have Drupal they invest heavily in Drupal all open source, but they also have closed source IP project. So the cloud infrastructure Acquia Lyft is all closed proprietary software that they invest in so it's it's a hybrid model that they believe in and that we We also believe in So Dries wrote a blog About these changes that are going on and he was very happy because he's been a big advocate of this model open SaaS open adoption software for 10 years and Finally now the world is opening up the enterprise are opening up to open source The VCs are opening up to open source and we are really moving from being this, you know Weird guys as in like whoa these guys are geniuses They have it right and they have an advantage over Microsoft who's just starting to do this and that's really cool to be in this moment So, you know, Dries said it's it's hard to build a company That's on this path because it's it's new But still it's the best path for our customers and community in the end of the world. So You know the vision that we had It's been there all along but finally we're being understood by other people and that's very nice. So to recap this presentation The next big wave in software is going to be open software. We are in a good place. It's going to be big It's going to be huge We can innovate together on a massive scale. That's not seen before ever Also, our software is much more open to extend with other applications. That's going to be huge and We do think that open is grown from a new business model to really the dominant and the only model for software development That is a huge shift. So we're very happy. You want to take a photo? You can Just too late So basically, that's my talk for today and I hope there are some questions about this Yeah, let's use the microphone. So it's being recorded Yeah, and the second question that in a way derives from that is if I understood the slides, right You've raised a right. I invested about 500k. Yeah, and that doesn't seem enough money To shift from where you where you are or to where you need to be So I was just wondering what the game plan is for getting more money in. Yeah So the first question was the team size so the team fluctuates a little bit But we have around eight to ten people working on it So that's fairly large team and that includes it's a agile team So that means we have scrum master product owner designers from Dennis back enders And the designers are interactions on visual designers. We try to make open social look really really good So we use material design atomic Design just to get everything really right. I hope you guys agree that it looks great So it's quite quite a large team indeed But you have to have a team like this to make this product work and it's still not enough so we're working with Lemberg the Ukrainian company and they also have two developers on the project now So we've been expanding the team and we'll probably split up the team later into product team enterprise team and the open source team The second question was that it doesn't seem enough. That's right So we are currently still using the agency and the profit from the agency that goes directly into open social So we are keeping funding the project currently at the agency Indeed we probably need to do a seed round in the future So we think that if we can show we have the product we can have the SA set up We can have the first happy clients that will probably talk again to investors to raise another round of money because yes Setting up marketing sales and and more features That's that's quite expensive. So yeah, I think we should do another round And that's also why the people of the crowdfunding invested I mean they didn't invest for nothing they invested to be bought out and in a later stage and make a good return on their investment So yeah, that's enough plans. So if you have some money left, we'd like love to talk Sure Oh Okay, well when you decided to go with platform.sh to host your SaaS version did you consider any alternatives like Amazon Marketplace where which hosts a lot of these same types of distributions Yeah, so we we looked into many alternatives. There's the obvious alternatives as Pantheon We also looked in things like Kubernetes to run it from Docker installations In the end we chose platform because we really want to focus now on the product and Not worry about any hosting issues or so, you know, the IaaS, Kubernetes and stuff like that It's probably cheaper, but it does mean you need a lot of knowledge and Investment in getting that up and running and keep that maintained. So that was not really an option for us And our relationship with platform.sh With Robert Douglas, I know for a very long time already And they're also very close by in Cologne So it's very easy for us to travel to Cologne and have a meeting with them from our office near the German border. So location You know, we've done a lot of demos look really good And that's actually running on Amazon cloud So far it's going really well. So we're really happy with the collaboration there Doesn't mean, you know, we cannot run it on other cloud platforms. So Yeah, I hope to see many more cloud Installations of OpenSocial so we can do some performance testing and you know see what's faster in different parts of the world. I would love to do that Yeah, sure So if I got the story right when you talk to the investors in the first place you said we're not gonna close anything And later on in the story you close it partially Yeah, if you would have another talk with the investors now, would you drive the discussion a bit differently like okay, we're not gonna close it completely but We see that we have to close it so that there's some cash flow Maybe So I do think there's investors who understand that there's a hybrid way between open source and some IP or some copyright But the problem is what I saw is that if you do not understand anything of open source and you do Like are the distribution for us is key. It's super important And we hope I've seen shown you that we really invest in this and we getting feedback Responding to all your questions. So it's key for us. And if you go with an investor that You know tolerates this it's not good. It needs to be somebody who's passionate about this as well And we didn't find that but I'm sure they are there and also that Partly understand that it needs to be a hybrid. So You know, we the pre-seed phase. So the pre-seed phase is like when you raise between 50 and 300,000 Eurals or dollars. That's like preceding phase. It's hard to find people that have a really in that knowledge Now we're moving a little bit to the more like seed phase where you can talk to people on a higher level Maybe in the States and they probably understand this model better. So but I mean if there's somebody that understands this Yeah, you can go ahead with them, but we didn't find them Yeah, so there is some inherent compromise. They're waiting to say that May have to close down some parts You know, they love these people love closed things. So if you know, we make some analytic solutions That's only available for the SAS version. I'm sure they will love it But this for us is not like key to the to the success of the project So it is a way of doing it and we try to make it a bit better But for me that the key customers, they will go for we like its open source We like the hosting maintenance and support and they will not buy it just because of the IPO intellectual at this moment. So But yeah, what to see how that goes and we not talking to investors yet, but if we do We'll share as much as we can with the community to learn from Mr. Black, thank you Just a little bit related to that. I was just wondering if you used any sort of lean startup type techniques to kind of develop your initial business model and then kind of keep Adapting all that, you know and with the canvas and things like that Yeah, if you if so did you run any sort of experiments and how if so, you know How did you employ that if you did use any of those techniques just curious? Yeah, so We didn't do experiments. I know some really smart guys. They set up landing pages They drive a lot of adverse traffic also from the Drupal community They drive adverse traffic to that see how much people sign up for the product and then they start building the product That's pretty smart. We didn't do that Partially because you know, there is a there is already huge market for social community software. We already have clients for that. So You know the market is there, but it's just about finding our place in the market Yeah, I think the idea is to find the right business model So it sounds like you're still trying to nail that definitely. So that's lean, right? I mean, yeah Yes, we even even the amount of money we charge per month We still need to validate that and it might be that we change that over time So that's definitely a lean approach to things. We love to experiment. We love to test things and go from there We are agile and flexible But we didn't do like experiments before the project But we are doing a lot of experimenting and testing at this point. So yeah Yes, but obviously first we needed the project and it's in battle last week So, you know, we are still kind of in an early stage still You see the relation between a project owner and a product for Drupal There is Drupal is the project which is for many companies and Equia is the one company. Yeah Are you planning to work together with other companies who also promote open social and Bring that to their own company of her clients. Yeah, I to be honest I think it's crucial to success of open social as a project that we are working with other agencies because if it's just us Then it's not gonna be picked up by the community. So You know, I think we need to talk all to a lot of people to understand if they want to contribute How they will contribute and also what their fear is because I think and it's probably reasonable to say well I'm not gonna contribute because my clients are gonna go to go gorilla who's the agency and I'm gonna invest in the project and the clients are all gonna go to go gorilla or go on the SAS version so I Understand that there's a fear and I think it should be very clear that says, okay We are doing enterprise clients that are huge and very complex We're doing SAS, but if there's any type of projects In certain regions or certain languages then then, you know, that's we should talk about those projects but So I definitely want to talk to the community and our goal will be to Get other companies involved as soon as possible and not just because of Like we don't want to be a dominant Company doing that. So yeah, I'd love to hear from you Yeah, actually like three people came to me yesterday talking about can we have open social for our market and Was very interesting, but we we discussed it last night over beer me and my business partner It's a nice idea, but we need to think about what does that mean? And it means also closing things and we don't like to close things. So we need to think about this, but also Definitely, it's not our idea that we as go really we want you guys to use it for your clients Because everybody I'm talking to says I have this project or I have this volunteer Association I can use it. So yeah, we need people to start using it and and hope they do and if you have any ideas on this Please let us know as well. We're open open to any ideas Hi Yeah, so I think the success of our crowdfunding and it was a huge success because we've in one week We we thought we had needed two months because a normal Kickstarter campaign like two months So we had two months whole December whole January We had all this Christmas things and New Year's things and you know set up these campaigns and then within one week everything was gone So the success is I think in a couple of things first go grill is quite well known As a company in the Netherlands we do a lot of marketing on Facebook like not like posts So everybody knows us quite well. They think we're a cool company. We're doing really well We're growing every time winning these awards. So the brand and name is really good We did target the initial campaign very well So we made sure that all our networks like our friends and families But also our staff friends and families that everybody knew about it and even parents of staff members bought into the project So that's you know, it's a lot of responsibility there and So so it was going really fast and also the in the Netherlands crowdfunding is really popular now So I think in the States what we did is not even possible yet, but in the Netherlands it is And it's very popular. So yeah, it's like a bit of bit of a hype as well So people just grabbing for it and another tricky thing Don't start at zero. So we started at 30 percent Because if you start at zero people are gonna buy into a project that says zero So we need like a week of closed project We had all our friends and family put in money started at 30 percent and then people like oh, this is going well It's open for one day and it always 30 percent You know, and then when you go past the 50 and the 60 percent and basically people a bit like sheep, right? So I'm like, okay, let's go. Let's go. So the end was like refresh I'd like at five the whole day and then it was full at night. It was crazy. So yeah, that was some suggestions To do that. Well, one more follow up question So in terms of because you're sharing this idea right for investors to buy into how much of these did you Share to people because what stops? Say you have this cool open idea. You're trying to start. So what stops, you know, someone I say, okay It's a good idea. Let's just pick this up and also start something on the side So how much of this did you actually share? We share as much as we can You know, this is the always that the thing with opens open source, right? People are gonna steal your idea and run with it and it almost never happens I mean, how many types is time is Drupal fourth? It doesn't really happen that much Why because you you have the knowledge you have the vision you have the roadmap and the funding so You know, if you have and you see the same thing with modules anybody can fork a module and Start our own module. But why would you do that if the module initially is really good and it's being maintained and people have a vision on this so It would be fun to see people fork it and we know people are gonna sell it, you know, they're gonna sell the distribution To other clients. That's cool. I think it's very nice to see Obviously, we hope they will contribute somehow if they think that we're doing a really horrible job And our vision is really bad. Then yeah, obviously, they have the right to fork it and go their own way But even then we we should learn from that because probably they have a reason to do that So even that would be a good thing. I think We're not afraid of that. Well, we invested a half a million dollar now, so it's really difficult to catch up Any other questions? Yeah, sure. I'm with an agency in in Sacramento, California And we started bootstrapping a product in our agency. Cool. So similar Similar situation welcome to the club and we're finding that Selling a SAS model to businesses is a little bit hard because it's not a traditional model for a website Yeah, because people want to control and the things and it seems like SAS is opposite to having control Yeah, how do you plan on doing that in your SAS model exactly? So First of all, we need to think about how can we give them as much as control as possible without breaking the update process? So so our difficulty will be how can we update ten hundred thousand sites at this Moment without breaking them. So for us, it's still a balance For example blocks, how can how can we work with blocks? We want our clients to place blocks everywhere basically any type of triple project as this issue We want to give them all the flexibility but still make sure that they don't break core things so this is a balance and The the nice thing for us is now that we're working with real clients since a couple of weeks we understand their needs and It's mostly in the what you see what you get editor and blocks placement and that kind of thing So yeah, we need to work really hard on solving that the initiatives that are coming up for media and blocks are really important for us But I there's no final answer to this. I think it's going to be a challenge Are you planning on allowing people to install custom modules or is it gonna? No, it's gonna come as is yes Yes, yes, if you want to do that You need either need to do it yourself or you can go to us as an enterprise and we can do it for you I mean, but there's like a ton of You know you know Sorry for cursing They have two hundred thousand Communities running on Yom social we had two thousand comments installations in Drupal. They have two hundred thousand So this is crazy, but it works. They're doing really well people are really happy So if they can do why couldn't we do it with a much better CM? So I think we can do it and I mean if you look at all these project eighty percent of the demand is the same people want notifications and a good stream and event So we really need to focus on getting that eighty percent, right and people need to Understand that if they buy a product that is a more a fraction of what they would normally pay to have a custom built Social community project. They've only pay a fraction that this last 20 percent That they're probably not going to use that much anyway and that they're not going to get it So is it for everybody? No, but the large volume of people that just want to have the community is running With notifications and stuff like that Yeah, we can we can give it to them as sauce Yeah, and then I have a second question. Are you Planning on doing the third phase the enterprise phase Because you think it'll be necessary to be casual positive or is it because you want to extract a bigger market at this moment? It's It's mainly to learn real-world issues and to test the product So it's great to just have a real-world problem that we can solve And and the feedback is really nice because we have been working on it for 10 months now And then you just get this tunnel vision right on the product So it's really nice that people start actually using it in real communities So that's the main reason why we took on the enterprise project at this moment. Some money is nice But there's a huge danger in focusing on enterprise if you do that too much you will go away from the product and the project So we have to control ourselves not to focus too much on enterprise even though they have some money And therefore the the seed phase to do another round of funding will be will be crucial Are you planning on having the SAS business model support the whole thing How do you mean like is the SAS income revenue gonna cover all your expenses for the long term it should yes Yes, but this is a long long-term game. So, you know building your SAS business is gonna take time So we're gonna start early next month. It will take time So we either need to get funding To support this period of time or we need to start doing large enterprise projects But that's gonna take away the focus of the product. So, you know, yeah, I know keep keep track of us And we will let you know what's happening. Thanks. All right. Thank you guys Don't forget the screens on Friday and don't forget to evaluate the the session Last time I get no evaluation. So please evaluate because I'd love to hear your feedback