So you decide you want try your hand at running your own company, maybe even have a smidgen of a positive impact in the process. But there are lots of talented folks who have the same idea and you need a way to stand out a bit and differentiate yourself from your competitors. You also want to stay true to your values, the reason you started a company in the first place.

At ThinkShout, my business partner Sean Larkin and I decided to solve both problems by doubling down on what we were already passionate about, open source in general and Drupal in particular. To begin to make a name for ourselves, we dedicated ourselves to giving back as much as we could do the Drupal community that gave so much to us. As much as possible, we designed and wrote the code for our projects to be flexible and useful across a wide array of use cases. For example, a client needed a way to sign up for kayak tours so we wrote an abstract registration solution which now has nearly 4,700 installs. All told, there are currently 24,000 websites running on our contributed code.

Even more importantly, our clients benefit because their projects are based on a code base that has at least some adoption in the community. That transltes into more eyeballs for catching issues, free (as in kittens) updates, and a pool of developers familiar with the code. While we obviously prefer long term partnerships, we recognize that not all of our clients with always work with us and we feel better knowing they're on a solid platform.

It's not all altruism. Our open source contributions are the best source for marketing, lead generation, and references that we could ask for. In short, and apologies for the cliche, but it's an actual virtuous cycle.