Building from Within: How to Build a Company Based Off Community Needs

As Drupal moves up-market, we encounter an increasing amount of adjacent technologies with which we must assimilate. With this growing complexity of integrated services, security and scalability are of paramount importance, now more than ever.

In this talk, we explore how the Drupal community consumes products, how to grow an agency from within it, and how to build strategic partnerships to create a differentiated, and profitable, product and service.

As the CEO of Cellar Door Media, Chris saw a need for API and encryption key management as a service. So he leveraged Townsend Security’s enterprise key manager and Pantheon’s hosted infrastructure and baked-in authentication protocols to create a new company. The result was Lockr, the first hosted API & encryption key management for modern CMS’s like Drupal and WordPress.

We will use our collective experience building Lockr to convey the following lessons:

• How Drupal’s maturation lead to the opportunity to build a new product

• How to identify and attract new clients

• How to create mutually beneficial relationships with technology partners

• How expanding into new products, services, and industries has affected our businesses

• Mistakes we made and how we would have done things differently

• How will we make this profitable?

• How do you sell TO Drupal? (instead of selling Drupal to others)