3.5 KiB
Drutopia: Building a Drupal SaaS Platform to Make Doing Client Work More Fun
Speakers
- mlncn
- cedewey
Skill level: All/Intermediate
Presentation topics: business / big idea
You will learn:
- Why a small Drupal shop would consider taking on building a big platform
Scale can abstract away some inefficiencies (if a thing is only done once to serve a million sites, does it matter that it's not the most efficient way to do it?) and enable a concentration of resources to reduce other inefficiencies (if a thing is inefficient on a million sites, there's a lot more justification for expending a lot of time and effort to improve it than if it's just affecting
What
The landscape is changing for web services. More and more organizations are moving to SaaS solutions such as NationBuilder, SquareSpace and Wix. Others are turning to Wordpress. Those with larger budgets and more specialized needs still turn to Drupal to build their customized tools. However, the gap between those who can afford and not afford a Drupal site widens.
At Agaric we can do any of the following:
- Focus our efforts on being more competitive in the larger budget space for custom Drupal builds
- Support an initiative like Drutopia, which provides a similar SaaS experience, but through Drupal
- Expand our skillset to other free software solutions.
I believe we could do any or all three. However, I believe pursuing the second best matches our expertise, market and values.
Currently our clients are nonprofits (MASS Design, Portside), health institutions (NICHQ), and education (TWiG, Patient HM).
Why
So far we have relied on larger budget clients in these spaces to generate revenue. This is less than ideal for a few reasons: depending too much on any single client is risky, being a smaller team scattered across different codebases brings down our efficiency, a geographically dispersed team working on separate projects breeds isolation and providing custom solutions to those with smaller budgets is challenging.
If, however, we shift our business model to supporting a single (or series of related) platforms, we deepen our expertise with a single codebase, bring higher value to smaller budget clients and foster connections between one another since we are working on the same project. Finally, it means we can better generalize and share the solutions we build with the broader free software world.
How
Our ideal situation would be to have several clients with mid-sized budgets, all on Drutopia, funding enhancements to the platform.
These are organizations that need a more customized solution, but benefit from being part of a more generalized platform like Drutopia. When possible funded development is contributed back to the platform, but there will be times that customizations happen only on their site.
The challenge in making that transition is that we do not have any of those ideal clients right now. So, as a transitional step, I propose we support a crowdfunding initiative that will build up a reserve of funds for us to use to fund our time improving Drutopia while also serving as a marketing campaign for us to find those ideal mid-sized clients.
This is a companion to the following talks:
- How Drupal as a Service Can Save us All
- Scaling Community Decision-Making
- The Future is Here: What's Drupal Got to Do With It?
- Platform Cooperatives and Free Software
- Funding Free Software and Freeing Humanity^
- Seizing Power: A Community Guide^
^ doesn't yet exist as a talk or anything else