DrupalCon Los Angeles 2015: Making the Leap from a Drupal Shop to a Product Company
Channel: Drupal Association
Date: 2015-05-12

There are natural limits on how your business scales as a consultant selling your time by the hour. Whether you want recurring revenue from a support service, to launch a SaaS product, or sell physical goods, there are many compelling reasons to build a business outside of the professional services model.

But other business models come with their own unique set of challenges. Managing product development costs, marketing, or inventory is complex. During this session Zack will present on lessons learned making the leap from professional services at Chapter Three to retail Drupal Commerce at Mission Bicycle and SaaS recurring revenue at Pantheon. Ryan will present on his experience in ecommerce, Commerce Guys, Platform.sh, and Bellweather.

We will cover these topics at a strategic level, and dive into the nuts and bolts as they apply to your day-to-day business:

Product, marketing, positioning, and sales

Managing co-founder relationships

Managing towards cashflow and profitability

Spinning out companies from corporate parents

Balancing time across multiple simultaneous ventures

Raising  financing -- from friends and family and professional VCs

Building and scaling teams