Productizing your agency: creating self-sustaining revenue streams

As Drupal continues to grow, we encounter an increasing amount of adjacent technologies with which we must assimilate. This ever-evolving technology landscape provides us web creators the opportunity to become niche specialists, and even build and sell solutions around our expertise and interests.

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. The result was Lockr, the first hosted API & encryption key management for modern CMS’s like Drupal and WordPress. We will use Chris’s experience as a case study for building a product at an agency.

As a Partner Manager at Pantheon, Ben has worked with many agencies who have built and sold Drupal distributions and paid plug-ins to create a steady streams of revenue that adds to their business goals.

We will use our collective experience 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)