How to build products and influence industries with Drupal

This session shares the lessons learned in building roomify - a startup in the online reservations area - and the approach we developed to both gain maximum benefit from our Drupal-based origins and strengthen the Drupal project in return.

roomify provides online reservation tools for the travel industry and other areas where reservations/bookings are necessary. The tools we offer are built on Drupal and come in both SaaS and open-source download versions.

We will explain why we think that a Drupal-based product has something new and unique to offer in the already crowded field of online reservations for travel. We will also discuss how we take advantage of Drupal’s uniqueness to get ahead of the competition. Through our specific example, we will illustrate the essential win-win dynamic at work: Drupal products are strong because of Drupal, and Drupal will become stronger the more products we have.

We will share the lessons we learned along the way, including how we’ve learned to talk about the benefits and introduce clients to Drupal, and how we shaped our business model to take advantage of Drupal's strengths and overcome some of its weaknesses.

This session should be of interest to anyone looking to build a Drupal-based product and anyone looking to find out how Drupal can be introduced to new industries where it has not yet made significant inroads.