Following the Lean Startup methodology has been compared to jumping off a cliff and building your airplane on the way down. You don’t quite know what it’s going to take to succeed, but you had better figure it out before you bottom out. Imagine that during your freefall you’re given raw materials to assemble your plane from. Sheet metal, rivets, bolts—all of it has to come together before you hit the bottom. Now imagine the same task but this time you can use prefabricated components rather than raw materials. There’s no question which scenario puts the odds in your favor.
Like the prefabrication in our hypothetical freefall, Drupal accelerates the lean principles used to bootstrap a business. At RecordCollect, Drupal allows us to efficiently test the product and market hypotheses supporting our Software-as-a-Service. We validate and (more often) invalidate our key assumptions in a matter of days or weeks, not months or years. Once we find a market fit, we're able to build on top of the pieces Drupal provides to create a strong value proposition for potential customers. The result is a profitable web product in 6 months without taking a single dime in external funding.
In this session we’ll draw direct connections between different aspects of the Drupal framework and the various lean methodologies that they’ve enabled. We will discuss how we quickly moved through different iterations of our product by leveraging the Form API and popular contrib modules. This case study will help attendees connect the dots between Drupal and business strategy to make their own startup a reality. Intermediate attendees will get the most out of the technical aspects discussed, but the discussion as a whole is appropriate for beginners.
Gus Childs, Co-Founder – RecordCollect, Developer – CHROMATIC
Gus has been working professionally with Drupal since 2011 and has strengths in both front and back-end development. He wears many additional hats at RecordCollect, from napkin sketching to system administration. Gus is also fortunate to have worked with some of the brightest minds in the community on some of the biggest projects powered by Drupal.
Austin Brandt, Co-Founder – RecordCollect
Austin was majoring in Entrepreneurship in 2008 when he started working with Drupal to build startup prototypes. Pushing the limits of site building gave him the ability to test an endless number of ideas without writing a line of code. Before going full time starting RecordCollect, Austin worked as a Project Manager implementing medical software systems in hundreds of physician practices as well as in some of the largest hospitals in the US.