DrupalCon Session: Monetizing Drupal
Session notes: Monetizing Drupal
The general evolution is to begin as a consultancy and move more toward selling products, or remain as a consultancy/product hybrid.
Chris Shattuck recorded several videos to teach people how to build modules for Drupal. He sells access to these videos at BuildAModule.com. He has built in an automatic feedback loop, receiving an encouraging email every time someone purchases access to his videos.
Stephanie Pakrul started Top Notch Themes and now Fusion Drupal Themes too, selling premium Drupal themes. Again, build once, sell many. Her company offers several free themes, as well as an excellent, well supported base theme called Fusion. These help establish trust and a relationship, giving people confidence when purchasing other themes from her company.
Mike Anello co-leads Drupal Easy. Their emphasis is on providing in-person group training. This allows them to leverage their time effectively, delivering training to many people at once. Their chief goal is to help develop new Drupal developers. They also provide an informative and concise podcast.
Salim Lakhani represented WebEnabled which provides immediate on-demand development sites for Drupal developers. WebEnabled’s platform also supports the development, sharing, and selling of custom distributions or recipes for Drupal sites.
While the focus of this panel was primarily on providing services to Drupalistas, the principles can be applied to any market, such as medical, real estate and entertainment.
Question from the audience: What are some of the biggest mistakes you made, that almost killed your business, that you recovered and learned from? Answers:
- Saying “Yes” too much
- Thinking it’s going to be easy
- Setting a price point
Parting words of wisdom: Develop a relationship with your contractors. Discover and get comfortable with them in small steps. Do your work in a community oriented fashion.