 So welcome to Music City. Hope you're enjoying the first day at Drupalcon. Just wanted to call out some famous musicians that are from Nashville and the surrounding areas. We have some of the Three Six Mafia. Miley Cyrus. There's also, has anyone heard of Lucky Number 7 band? Anyone? They're a lesser known band from the Nashville area. With lead guitarist Hanson Ben. You got the nickname Hanson because of how modest he was. And backup vocals was Chris Blueey's title. Which I have to admit I'm the better looking one of the two. But I'm better at Photoshop. So they experienced some great success early on in their careers. So they sold out the Grand Old Opry. Awesome music hall in the city. Seats thousands of people. However they also had small venues sometimes. So they had to play as small a venue as conference room 205C of the Music City Center. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But it just doesn't bring as much revenue into this band. And some weeks Chris couldn't even get paid by Ben because the overhead cost was the same. But they weren't bringing in as much money from some of these smaller shows. Some of that overhead I mentioned was a nightly whiskey bath. So this kept Hanson Ben's skin nice and rejuvenated. But he had an idea one night. Which was instead of emptying the whiskey bath and then drawing a new one every single night. He could bottle up said whiskey and sell it at the shows. A little this is lucky number seven bands whiskey that they sold at their concerts. And this created great success for them because they were able to provide a better experience for fans. They found that the more whiskey the fans drank the more they enjoyed the shows. And thus they were more likely to buy tickets to future concerts. So it actually made the fans happier and it also accelerated lead retention from their audience members. So you get where we're going with this. We're talking about productizing your agency. How many of you work at an agency. Nice. And how many of you are product owners or project managers. Few. How many of your agencies have products already. And how many of you are looking to create your first product or push something out. Awesome. Sweet. That is what I like to see. So I'm Ben. You can contact me at Pantheon. Just Ben at Pantheon. Tweet at me at the Ben SR. I worked there about three years. And I'm Chris Taitzel. CEO founder of Cellar Door Media and Locker. And yeah, you can reach me at Techner Taitzel and see how many times you can make my wrist vibrate during this session. So I've been at Pantheon three years and my first two years there I was a partner manager. So my job was to go across the nation and talk to developers and agency owners about their business. And so I'll be walking through some case studies of really successful products that I've seen in the WordPress and Drupal community from that experience. And then I'll give a little bit of background. I have an agency, Cellar Door Media, that we started in 2009. And we just released a product about two years ago called Locker. So for those of you that have products, we can commiserate. And those of you about to embark on that journey I can give you some tips and tricks on how to avoid some of the pitfalls. So Pantheon is a WordPress and Drupal platform for developers. So I have experience in both of those worlds. I've found that there's the adage that you're not to sell Drupal but sell to Drupal or sell from Drupal. And I totally understand that. But there's also something to be said of building an economy around Drupal. And I think that those who are more totalitarian about not selling Drupal are actually limiting the growth of Drupal and thus hurting Drupal. And my point here is that you shouldn't feel bad about making money off the hard work that you do. And some of the most successful agencies I've seen over the years, the ones who have doubled their team in size, are ones that have found creative ways to package up what they're doing in terms of either process or people and repeat that at scale. So one great way to do that is with a custom upstream, or custom distribution or custom theme. For example, a lot of agencies that work with universities have found great ways to use one single repository for code and use that for all of the university sites. So ASU has a custom distribution called WebSpark that they use for 2,000 sites. And it empowers the central IT managers to push out code and innovation to all of these projects really efficiently, but they can also customize on a per-site basis. In the Drupal community, Level 10 is an agency in Dallas, Texas. Tom McCracken is floating around the conference here. You can find him, but he created a custom distribution called Open Enterprise. And this is a free distribution, as it should be, but there were services added onto that that allowed him to really grow his business from the last three years to double in size by using the same set of marketing functionality in Open Enterprise for all of his clients. And one of the things to note on this is that there is a giant graveyard of companies who have tried to come in and just throw money and sales at Drupal and trying to commoditize Drupal itself. There have been floated ideas of app stores and all sorts of stuff, and that all just got very, very, very strong backlash from the community. Other communities such as WordPress and others have a very strong and robust ecosystem around them for paid themes, paid modules. Drupal doesn't. So if your agency is looking to build a paid module or a paid theme where somebody has to pay you money just in order to install it, you've got a rough road ahead and we'll want to talk through some of the ideas that you have. But one way that you can use this to your advantage and actually do make a product off of it is by creating something like a distro or a theme. I myself got my start in Drupal with the Omega theme. I helped out early on with the Omega theme and though I wasn't one of the core maintainers of it and though I wasn't one of, obviously Omega was free and everybody got to use it and a lot of people did on Drupal 7, the start of my agency came from being a service provider with primarily two people implementing that theme or that distribution. And so if you're looking at building an open theme or an open distribution, it is a way that you can create a product like revenue inside your agency because you can then sell the services and the add-ons to that product while the core of it still remains free and open source which the Drupal community appreciates. And this is actually another, it's a good segue to another type of product that I've seen really successful both in the Drupal and WordPress communities but the best example I could think of is an agency called Valet that does mostly WordPress but a bit of Drupal. They've created Valet Matrix is basically just a free plugin that you can add to any of your sites and it creates useful information about how you could optimize speed and performance and usability of your website and then of course if you would like a Valet to improve that site in specified ways then they of course will bill you for that work and so I've seen this method super successful in both Drupal and WordPress. And then the last one, there's a lot of these is like internal or productivity sort of products. In fact the last speaker Chris was mentioning that they have some internal legal sort of tool that they've built but a lot of agencies are doing things for local development or for internal communication and processing and two examples are OutRigger is Phase 2's local development solution so that they can build the same way for all of their projects and then deploy to the end host wherever that may be and then a similar set of local development tooling by FourKitchens is called Aquifer but there's a lot of these out there. Local development solution seems to be something that is a bit amiss in the development communities and so there's been a need to build internal tooling that helps them standardize their processes and this is still a great use of productizing in an agency because it allows them to be more efficient and scale up their client base by developing the same way each time. So what's the secret sauce? What do many of these products and tools have in common? A few of them, I think at the core of it all of these agencies were trying to think about specialization. What are you good at? What are your clients consistently asking for? And acknowledging, like trying to think of what your agency is better at than anyone else will lead you to creating some sort of product that well serves your clients. All of these also solve a problem so obviously agencies were trying to think of better ways to do things for their clients and also like offloading menial chores so Chris will talk a bit more about this like scratching your own itch but if there's something that's taking up a lot of time in project cycles then trying to find a creative way to offload that is another way that agencies have thought about productizing. Yeah, so when I look at the special sauce and how do you specialize in something as an agency like Chris was talking about before you do kind of find that market fit of what you do best, right? And if you're looking to create a product my highest recommendation is scratch your own itch because not only are you going to make something that is valuable for you and your agency you're also going to make something that you know very well you're not going to go out and try to do something completely random. I don't cut hair, I'm not really good at it and so when I go to my hairstylist I sit down and they say what do you want? I go I don't care, you're the expert you do what you do best, I do what I do best and I think that as agencies if we can do that in our products and we come out with products that we know best and scratch our own itch it allows us to look at it from a product our product from a different light as well because we are also the consumers of our product and if you don't need your own product why would somebody else need it, right? And like I said you're benefiting your agency you're making yourself more productive you're standardizing your tool set a bit but then you also get to grow those internal skills and you might actually be finding yourself getting more work more sustainable work on your agency on your services side rather not just from the product sales for implementing and supporting your product so it can actually add additional revenue there as we mentioned earlier sell to Drupal? Don't, don't sell to Drupal instead sell from Drupal and I've walked a couple of companies through this not my own as they've come to me and asked like how do I get my product into Drupal and how do I get Drupal to consume my product and the first thing I tell them is don't sell to Drupal Drupal developers in the community in general are typically more advanced developers and they're more technology savvy they can sniff out BS really really fast and they'll call you on it and so unless you're good at talking tech with folks you're going to cut yourself flat footed but they value the tech and the code like I mentioned earlier with the app store idea and all that open source values are very very strong in the Drupal community and so if you try to somehow get creative and say I'm going to go around that a little bit or I'm going to try to do this or that you'll get called out on it, you'll get called out really hard and because of this and because of our closeness but also the way that we develop our technology we have a certain level of trust of the community and so if you want to gain that trust of a consumer the best way to do it is to be standing alongside them not in front of them or projecting yourself and saying you should use my product but I don't even use it and I don't even know how you would use it so how do you do this? Participate in the community, sponsor events, go to camps, talk be involved not just from a sales perspective most of the time that I talk at camps I'll be like yeah I have locker and then I'll go into something else because I don't want to make the talk about me or my company or my product I want to make it about how we as a community can get better and you can start building that trust amongst the community and then the other thing that we found and we've seen repeated over and over again is build your product to be extensible because again, Drupal are technical folks they're going to take your product, they're going to hack it and they're going to build on it FYI, it's open source, they can do that and so enable that, don't try to quash that or say I don't want you moving my product or anything like that and a great example of this is and this will be a very full group of hands here how many people have used backup and migrate? Everybody and did you know that there was also a product next to it called NodeSquirrel? Yes, and how did we know that product? Because we all loved the backup and migrate module and oh by the way, if you wanted this nice little add-on where you didn't know where to put your backup NodeSquirrel would keep that backup for you that's a great example of creating a product from the community and then having a way to monetize it with a separate product or a separate service we've used that and modeled that and how we did locker we've contributed a couple of modules that have absolutely nothing to do with locker but they provide some of the underpinnings but they also allow people to go use a competitor if they want because I want to be able to give them that extensibility and the other thing that's been really beneficial for us is learning from others, getting off the island one of the more impactful things I would say that we've done for our product in the last couple of years is that we've actually gone into the WordPress world and we've launched a WordPress version coding for WordPress completely different than coding for Drupal it's a completely different framework completely different set of skills and so it makes you look at your product in different ways and then also just the communities in general like I said, Drupal is a very technical very enterprise level and typically more advanced developers and more advanced users WordPress, everything they want is click click to install, click to configure, click to this everything's driven in the UI and that's not a bad thing at all and you can actually learn from other communities and learn from other products outside of our island and bring that into Drupal and we saw that today at the Dries note where more drag and drop and everything's starting to get more layout buildery that's great because that's expanding our island and allowing us to do more and by doing that you're taking your product and you're moving it just outside of the Drupal bubble exposing you to new markets, new opportunities that can then have a lot of cross sales because, believe it or not and most of you are agency owners so you know this not everyone does Drupal anymore, just Drupal people are doing Drupal and and if you can make your product for Drupal and then you can start capturing more of the business of the people that you're working with this is just kind of a tip from internally and I've heard this said over and over again by my board and my current investors is agency financing is the cheapest financing you'll ever find you're not deleting your company and you're able to bootstrap everything internally so my biggest recommendation is as you're building this product and you're trying to figure out how do I how do I start it, how do I bootstrap it how do I get the funds in order to make this happen I have to take a developer off of paid projects and turn them into just developing product well that's going to cost you money how do you do that you use the income that's coming in from your agency and you don't have to seek out external funds and that's going to be much much better down the road once you've built up the product you're going to be in a position for when you do have to go get financing or you do have to split off or you know lucky you you're starting to get acquired or somebody wants to merge you in you haven't diluted yourself along the way just trying to get the money to start the business up but hindsight is always 2020 and so these are some of the the things that I learned and I want to pass along as part of what I learned in creating locker first thing is code for scale but plan for realistic growth you may hit the home run and you may not but I will tell you and this has actually come up in the last week decisions that we made eight months ago a year ago and in the way that we were going to architect things and scale are helping us now and so even though you may want to get the MVP out I encourage that out as fast as you can plan for scale because at some point you're going to have that scale and you don't want to get caught flat footed a year from now and saying oh crap I got to go rebuild the entire underpinnings of my product because it doesn't scale in this fashion at the same time you know if people aren't dialing you the day one that you launch the product don't freak out it happens it's a slow growth and you'll get there the next one is document your docs to document to document document document your agency you're implementing it right you're building it and you are the expert on it not everyone else is right and so I'll get questions and be like oh yeah that's this crap it's not in the docs like I'm always having to go back and figure out like why isn't this in the docs or where is this in the docs and I wish I would have been more proactive early on in my product in building out those documentations to avoid some of the easy mistakes that folks were using when they're implementing it and this is the last one and this is the most important and I wish I could tell you the silver bullet or the answer I have and I don't I'm still working through it myself but as an agency owner you're kind of in this teeter totter you have your agency and you have your product and your agency will do really well and your product will suffer and your product will do really well and your agency will suffer and if you're the owner of the agency like I am you're having to split your time amongst both don't lose focus just because your agency is screaming for your help don't forget your product and vice versa our agency was lucky enough to see a 3x growth last year which is awesome but in doing that it took away from my ability to focus on the product because I had to then scale and grow a company that was just going crazy right and so that's a thing that I just want to highlight that this is going to be necessary for you to take a look at and so you know as you're going through this as you're looking at it you know keep your focus make sure that you take your mental breaks that's another thing that I would highly recommend but make sure you at least visualize that teeter totter and every time you're spending time with your agency you're not spending on your product and vice versa and at some point those two are going to hit a point where they can no longer exist and that's when you break them apart and you've got two separate companies so with that I believe we've got maybe a couple of minutes for Q&A or Twitter as well or just find us around the conference we'd be happy to answer any questions there's a microphone up here if you want to use it this is being recorded if you don't want to use the microphone I can repeat as well Hey Chris, how's it going man? Good, good So I was really interested to hear about your experience working with Omega and how business developed from there was it organic or did you kind of push for it? No it was very organic and it was very long long story of how that all went about but basically I started I started my agency and like Chris said earlier it was very slow at the beginning if you will as most agency owners know so I had a lot of time on my hands I got involved in the documentation and support around Omega and then one day they said hey we're going to put your name on the project page because you've contributed so much thank you, awesome now you're on the project page of the number one theme in Drupal email started coming in people were like oh my gosh I need Omega help and we went from working with small startups and universities to Fortune 50 sites in like a couple of weeks because people were all of a sudden needing a lot of help so again that's where contributing to Drupal for not the sake of your product or whatever you want to do can reap tons of rewards in the future and you're kind of you're betting on yourself in that sense That's awesome, thank you I know like Chapter 3-2 experienced a surge of business after they contributed so much to D8 they were then referred to for any big D8 projects they were kind of the go-to shop for that so I think investing in the open source community is likely to pay off yeah, yeah I don't know about this what about building a product that doesn't cater to development for the Drupal community or building a product in Drupal but not for the community so Drupal is a service so the question is how do you build something that isn't necessarily for Drupal but it's built on Drupal, right? that's a great question that comes up a lot of the times there are a lot of great SaaS companies that you may not know running Drupal underneath and there are a lot of Drupal companies that are actually using things like Drupal commerce to run all of the e-commerce stuff behind them you can sit there and like read the error messages coming out and you're like, I know where that error message comes from totally fine, totally legal do it, because you're building it on a product that you know you can extend and you can work with so the licensing and everything behind Drupal allows you to build a product off of it you don't necessarily have to if you're selling it as a service to somebody somebody is using that, you don't have to obviously give them the code for it but if you are wrapping it up into a product and selling it then under the open source agreement you would have to give them the source code for it that being said there's a great example of like roomify in the rooms module to manage hotels and kind of like an Airbnb if you wanted to run your own little Airbnb off of a property they've done that, they've basically taken Drupal and they can host your Airbnb site for you vacation rental for you so yeah, I would say go for it, do it but at the same time one of my other cautions is go test other technologies because when you have a hammer everything's a nail and so just because you know Drupal doesn't mean Drupal's the best solution for it and so that's one thing I would caution is again like I said build for scale you may find yourself 10 months from now cursing the decision to use Drupal even though it's called Drupal and your smile actually feel like I'm hitting a heart string here you're just so hitting the nail on it yeah correct yeah and I'm a big fan of WordPress now after the last couple of years being in there and I'll be honest there are times when I tell people don't use Drupal just don't and it takes a little you have to kind of swallow your throw up when you say that the first couple of times but yeah no it really is and I think that's part of being on the island of Drupal is that we just think everything can be Drupalized and it's not really that way like we should actually encourage other technologies and encourage other things so if you are building on Drupal and you're building a product on Drupal make sure you don't let Drupal's how do I say it quirks get out to the users at times you're gonna have to do some fine tuning in places but yeah definitely make sure you take a look at the right technology decision not just for what you know but where you're going yeah I believe we're out of time right now but if you guys have any more questions please let us know again hit us up on twitter or come find us at the conference thank you who's this one? it's the AV it's the one? the AV whoever runs it oh it's sweet yeah of course we know Penn State nice to meet you I know that we do a lot of people are working on spacing out but I know that's a plenty on account so are you a developer? yeah gotcha you built yourself out of a business yeah yeah okay um yeah so in that case you're using the module as a lead gen for your services and I would say