Drupal First

Marc Andreessen, an American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer who coauthored Mosaic famously wrote in The Wall Street Journal, "Software is eating the world." Traditional businesses are being disrupted and everyone has an idea for a new web-based business. Clearly, founders with prior software experience and technical skills have a clear advantage.

For nontechnical founders who are subject matter experts and understand the business problem intmatly, the big challenge is meeting the technical needs for creating a Web application.  It is extremely hard to find technical co-founders because skilled programmers can earn big bucks working for an established company, and those who would rather work as an unsalaried Web developer for a startup often have their own business ideas they'd like to pursue.

Drupal itself provides a sophisticated graphical interface that exposes a wide array of configuration options through the web browser.  Nontechnical founders can visually navigate through these settings to realize their ideas.  Iterative design and rapid prototyping are at Drupal's core, making it perfect for building not only your beta, but your application going forward.   This is true for dorm room start-ups and enterprise skunkworks. 

This session will introduce a methodology that nontechnical founders can use to create a Drupal-based minimal viable product.  Access to developers should not be a barrier to innovation.  

By the end of the session, you will be able to:

• unpack the problem, the business, the customer, the value proposition, and how success will be determined;
• sketch possible solutions on paper;
• turn your ideas into a testable hypothesis;
• create a high-fidelity prototype using Drupal 7; and
• test it with real live humans.