DrupalCon Austin 2014: FROM DRUPAL CONSULTANT TO PRODUCT COMPANY: THE SCENIC ROUTE TO FREEDOM
Channel: Drupal Association
Date: 04/06/2014

Speakers: kvantomme
If you are paid an hourly rate for your work, there are only 2 ways to grow your business:

Hire (more) consultants
Increase the difference between what you charge your customers and what you pay to your consultants.
If you don't want to be limited to these options, and instead would like to walk in the footsteps of consulting companies like 37Signals and Development Seed (now Mapbox) and become a product company, this session is for you.

I will share with you the things I've learned building products inside our Drupal consultancy company. I will talk about concepts like:

Bootstrapping
Infinite runway
And product/service synergy.
I will explain

Why you don't want money from investors
Why the Drupal community is a great incubator but not a good end-market
How you can balance your customer work and product development
And why it's sometimes not always such a bad thing to go a bit slower.
At Pronovix we've been working on our product strategy for almost 5 years now. Our latest product: WalkHub is finally getting lots of people really excited: We did a successful crowdfunding campaign and we are integrating WalkHub in the devops infrastructure of several enterprise scale projects.

In this session I will share what I've learned along the way so that you don't have to repeat the mistakes I've made.