255: No one wants a website - Don't sell Drupal, move up the value chain!

The Acquia Podcast

Episode 255: Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire - keynote address, Drupal Camp London, 2017

See the conversation video at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/255-no-one-wants-website-dont-sell-drupal-move-value-chain

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Thank you, Drupal community - I want to express my sincere thanks to everyone who helped me prepare this presentation, sharing their insights into how Drupal fits into bigger and better ways of doing business. The fact that we can all talk about this so openly while competing for business is one more sign of how special the Drupal community is. I’m so glad you all choose to “open source” some of the ways you are succeeding and help the rest of us along the way! And thank you Drupal Camp London organizers for the invitation to give a keynote address at your conference, and thanks to the audience for your presence and warm reception despite the early hour on Sunday.

Drupal isn’t enough anymore

10 years ago, just having a website was transformational. But pretty much every business has one nowadays; they're a commodity. You need something especially good looking, functional, or powerful for it to be special. Your skillset--the ability to make functional, powerful websites--was also transformational, a good base for running a business. Now that is largely a commodity, too. Competitors like Wordpress.com, Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, and others offer solid, attractive, basic websites with lots of useful functionality. And they are only getting easier to use with every release.

So don’t sell Drupal!

What's the answer? How do you stay relevant and build a sales pipeline today? Don't sell Drupal. Move up the value chain. If you simply receive instructions to put a banner here and a slideshow there--to turn someone else's plan into code and nothing more--you're not where you need to be on that chain.

Placing yourself and your business higher up the value-creation chain means offering more than writing code, more than offering to build Drupal websites. You need to offer more: business value. You might have special insights or expertise. You might be able to solve the problems of a particular industry or vertical especially well it. You could deliver value through something you build with Drupal. Drupal might be one of your weapons of choice for facilitating digital transformation, or marketing, or what have you ... and you have a choice: specialize or diversify ...

Session Takeaways

• Why hanging out the Drupal slate isn't enough anymore.
• Questions and problems that businesses need help with today ... That you may be able to answer.
• Examples of Drupal-based businesses delivering more value than just Drupal code.

My Thanks ...

My thanks once again to all of the following people and everyone else whose ideas and actions helped inspire me and help our community:

• Florian Lorétan - Wunder
• Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg - Zivtech / Probo.ci
• Tim Deeson & Christiann Jansen - Deeson
• Megan Sanicki - Drupal Association
• Lukas Fischer - NetNode / OpenInbound
• Dave Ingram And Andrea Rosi - Acquia Lift
• Adrian Rollet & Ronald Ashri - Roomify
• Dominique de Cooman - Dropsolid / Cooldrops