Dries Buytaert

Things are heating up in the Drupal world as both CommerceGuys and SubHub raised venture capital money. We're still waiting for an official announcement, but word on the street is that CommerceGuys raised around 1 million euros to develop a number of e-commerce products and services for Drupal. SubHub raised more than 1.2 million euros to date to develop SubHubLite, a hosted service for Drupal 7 comparable to Drupal Gardens and Buzzr. In addition to CommerceGuys and SubHub, I know of at least two other Drupal companies that are in the process of raising money from investors ...

Selling a product has more upside potential than selling consulting and professional services which you can only bill by the hour. However, it is difficult to bootstrap a product based business without a major investment of funds — usually from outside investors. I've seen many try and fail. In almost all cases, it failed because the company was under-capitalized. It takes a lot of resources to create a successful and defensible product. Furthermore, people tend to forget about sales and marketing. It's not enough to build your product — you have to bring it to market as well. That is not trivial either.

I know bootstrapping is hard because I'm bootstrapping Mollom. I know building a product is hard because every day at Acquia, I see how much time and effort goes into our different products.

I don't have a rich uncle, so I would not have been able to co-found Acquia without venture capital financing. We decided that we wanted to focus on being a support and software product company with a strong partner eco-system. Starting Acquia wasn't the easiest route for me, but looking back at the past three years of Acquia, I believe that I made the right decision. Based on how much Acquia has contributed to Drupal and what it has enabled me to do, I like to believe it would have been a loss if I had taken a more conventional route — or had I decided to continue to work on Drupal as a hobby project.

It's refreshing to see that more and more Drupal companies aspire to become successful product companies and that they are seeking venture capital. I always admired the Ruby on Rails community for its seemingly entrepreneurial attitude. I'm glad to see more of it in the Drupal community as well. There is a good deal of fear surrounding venture capitalists but if Drupal is going to grow, we should expect to see more venture-backed companies building Drupal products. Venture capital financing can be good, especially if these companies give back to Drupal and if they build products and services that make our life easier. We all benefit from that.