How to Sell Drupal Site Templates  ## Metadata - Author: [[YouTube]] - Full Title: How to Sell Drupal Site Templates - Category: #articles - Document Tags: [[business]] [[distribution]] [[product]] - Summary: How to sell Drupal site templates - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIlF3nelC80 Um, so, uh, I'm going to give you all the opportunity to walk out of the room, but first I'll introduce myself and then I'll explain. Um, so I'm Ryan Zama, CEO of Centuro. We're the company that maintains Drupal Commerce and that that's basically core module set and module ecosystem. And I set a uh a goal for myself after Drupalcon Atlanta to sell uh my first site template by Drupalcon Vienna. And in May, by the time I actually prepared this session and proposed it, we had uh a yes. And that that turned into a no. So I actually have not sold my first site template. And this session will be explaining about what what I did and how it didn't work. Uh so that as as you're thinking about whether or not to invest in developing site templates yourself uh whether you're thinking about how to sell them or how to enable others to sell them uh hopefully you can at least learn from my failure. Uh so that's the mia culpa. If the session is no longer interesting to you zero hard feelings if you want to find something else. Um but for those who remain what is a site template? Uh I'm I'm I'm guessing you're generally aware if you're sitting in this room. Uh but just to just to recap at Drupalcon Atlanta, Dre identif introduced the concept of site templates as a as a fast way to start using Drupal for a specific purpose. So it's Drupal CMS paired with a front-end theme, maybe a back-end theme, recipes that provide functionality, default content that shows exactly how it's meant to be used. And this is good, right? Because people don't buy flexible software. Nobody goes to the Lego store. My kids sure don't to buy the classic box of Legos. They go to buy the new Avengers set or the new Harry Potter set. That would be my wife, actually. If it's me, I don't even know. Probably some Hobbit or Lord of the Rings set. Um, and that's what the the template was supposed to be that, right? The packaged version of Drupal that uh that gets you up and running quickly. uh it received further definition through this RFC ticket if you're curious to see what uh the Drupal CMS team is thinking about how to define a site template. Uh because even even what constitutes a site template was still muddy after Drupal con Atlanta. We of course called Commerce Kickstart a site template because I thought it fit the bill. Uh but then it uh it kind of got loaded with the idea of canvas readiness or experience builder readiness which our theme is not. Um, and then of course you saw on Tuesday Dree introduced Bite, which is a site template that ships with Drupal CMS 2.0 and uh uses the Mercury theme system to let you build a SAS landing page out of the box. And that's pretty interesting and and we actually can begin to develop that further. You can imagine, for example, a step during installation where you literally just click a Stripe connect button and instead of having to build your price comparison chart in Drupal, it just pulls it right from your Stripe account and gets it right there on your front page of your website. And that site template can be then that accelerating tool for the company that needs that. Now, your guess is as good as mine. How many SAS companies are out there looking for a full-blown CMS to sell their software that don't know how to use the Stripe widget themselves? we'll find out. So, it's it's very speculative still, but uh we want the idea to succeed if this is the direction the community is headed. And so, we went all in for Drupalcon Atlanta. And we converted what was the largest oldest uh Drupal distribution commerce kickstart into a site template, which meant, you know, no more installation profile, uh no more custom modules loaded into the thing. um you know no for us no custom themes that were just proprietary to the dro we have the Bgrade theme but it's open source we use JAN on the back end and then all of the configuration all of the default content is coming from recipes uh which if you aren't aware recipes are a tool to apply configuration changes and install content into your site but you cannot remove it so just bear that in mind if you're playing around with recipes you don't want to apply a recipe to a production website. Uh, and that the the nature of recipes even gives us some pause for where it fits in the commerce ecosystem because it's actually kind of hard to uninstall Drupal Commerce and and various other like multiodule ecosystems within Drupal. And so, you know, it it it makes it hard for us to know who are we selling this to and how are we selling it. And hence the, you know, the the genesis of this talk. Uh, but we we uh converted this to a site template. All of our recipes are on drupal.org. The Belgrade theme is fantastic and Yvon, our maintainer, did a lot of work even in the run-up to Vienna that I'm sure I don't have a screenshot for, but the whole checkout experience now is basically looks like Shopify with a variety of color configuration, form element configuration options, stripping down the uh the page template just so it's a very focused, you know, modern checkout experience. So, well worth checking out. But in our case, you know, all of all of this uh code is just open source projects on drupal.org. So there's no nothing proprietary about our site template. That's important, but I'll put a pin in it for now. So I did want to answer the why for selling site templates. I think it's um maybe obvious why we thought to create site templates. uh you know it is just a modernized uh version of the install profile that became the distribution and now is the template. Uh a nice thing about it too is that it actually kind of disclaims responsibility on the part of the site template maintainer to provide an upgrade path. Basically once you and once you install my template and you've applied these recipes, there is no upgrade path. you just have the product as it was at the time and all of the updates and upgrades from there on out are just a standard composer up and you get the code and hopefully nothing breaks. Uh in a in a perfect world, what you're shipping, you know, will will not be brittle to the point that that kind of a just standard Drupal upgrade process will matter. But it does change what you can do inside the template versus what we could do inside distributions. Uh so if you changed say the way a view works in your template from one version to the next well all of your existing users will not get that upgraded view. Whereas with the distribution I could have an in an update hook that swap that out and so on and so forth. So it's a bit of a different beast but it's a a different purpose to it's a starting point not a a sort of a on premises SAS product you're buying from me that I just happen to deliver through composer. Um, so we're selling site templates because solutions to specific problems sell better than abstract ideas. You don't go to a customer and offer them a flexibility. And I just I just want to sell you flexibility. And anytime that I've tried to sell flexibility, I've lost the opportunity to the person who said, I've got rails and you can see exactly where it's going to take you. Um, so, so in a sense, it's a it's a better sales strategy for a Drupal site if all I'm trying to sell is a site that does a thing. Um, and and not end up in that sales conversation saying, "What do you want to happen with this? What what do you think is important to you?" Now, they're coming to us for us to tell them what's important to them. And the second, of course, is that the target market expects support. If they're paying money for a product thing, they expect you as the vendor to support it, which means there must be some kind of a funding model. So that's why we should pursue some sort of a financial strategy behind the site template. Uh and lastly, you know, helping someone start uh makes you makes us the obvious choice for them to reach out to when they want to grow. And so that's that last, you know, why was the primary thing that motivated us as the company behind Drupal Commerce. We want to find people who maybe are just starting out today, but in two, three, four years are looking for a development partner to now take them to the next level. And our our longest running customer is Mattsmart in Sweden. Uh that's with one TT. So Mattsmart.Ssece or Motes in Germany and various other markets. And uh they started in 2012. using Commerce Kickstart to develop an online grocery store. They developed it themselves. They adapted it over time and eventually we became their development agency of record. Around 2016 was when we got involved and that their first engagement was just performance and scalability. They had a successful business for four years. They'd grown to some millions in revenue. Things were starting to slow down. We were the choice of course to make sure the lights stayed on. And then it was a question of well, what more can you do for us? and and that turned into wow can you help us fully decouple this expand the new markets convert to Drupal 9 10 11 blah blah blah like it was and it's been a fantastic relationship for nine on 10 years so that's what I'm thinking as the business owner yeah I'd love to reproduce that and it's worth me investing a lot of my team's time and effort today to make that future happen and I actually had a question before this session about like how much it costs us how much do we have to invest to get to the point where I could even present a proposal to somebody and I'd say we spent you know some months of developer effort to get there. Obviously Kickstart has existed for a while but just the recipeization of it you that was probably two to three weeks of development concept development testing the theme itself was another good couple of weeks along with the default content migration blah blah blah. So it's not cheap. You you must be prepared to invest thousands of dollars to make this happen. And if you have anything better to do with your time, you might consider doing something else. But if you want to do a side template, uh let me tell you how I could not. Um okay, so uh this this question of how of course can mean different things. It could mean um you know just how do I actually get this thing for sale on the internet, which the answer today is you must do it yourself. Go get dripyard.com for a good example. There is no marketplace on drupal.org or where you can list a template for sale and expect someone to handle the transaction, take their cuts, distribute the files for you, etc. How do you protect your intellectual property when you're distributing this entire product to your customers code? And of course, you know, the answer there is, well, good luck. If you're worried about that, this may not be the paradigm for you. Um, but I actually discovered last night having a drink with Neil's from private packages that private packages actually has an API for granting people as a vendor access to a package in a private repository that um you can you know remove revoke access from in the future. So to the extent your site template has um custom modules or custom themes that you don't want to distribute in the wild, that's a really compelling option and their price point is so low that I'm going to be converting my client projects over to private packages when I get home. So highly recommend looking into that as well. Um but the idea there would be people can still, you know, bootleg your product from the point they bought it. They just would be cut off from future improvements. Um, but definitely worth looking into because then you don't have to build all of that, you know, management and distribution stuff yourself. The only thing you're responsible for is how do I get somebody's name, email address, and then plug them into my private packages, which could be manual to start or could be, I'm I'm sure fairly easily scripted. And then finally, this is what I actually meant by the session title. How do you convince somebody to buy it? Um, and our bet was that we could basically sidestep the first two questions uh by choosing a model that didn't depend on that. So, like I said, everything about our site template is on drupal.org. So, I'm not worried about protecting my intellectual property. Additionally, I'm not really worried about the sale. I I mean, I just was going to do the sale manually with a just a simple docu sign. When you're ready, click here, sign the dotted line. Um, and then I wanted to just offer ridiculous value because of course, uh, I mean, I guess by show of hands, are we all like Drupal agency more or less? You know, site developers, service providers, like um, we intuitively understand that a good site template may save you, your development team, days of effort, probably not weeks, but at least days setting up a new project. And so if you could shortcut that so I'm not having to add five days to my proposal. I just add one line item for the site template I'm going to build their site on. Well, suddenly maybe a a $10,000 project becomes a $5,000 project or a $30,000 project becomes a $20,000 project. Obviously, this isn't nec necessarily the tool for the, you know, six figure project is going to be blazing fast now to implement, but um to to me, I'm I'm saving somebody days of effort and research. And so, my price point was $1,000. And I and I bundled it with launch support, with the ability to opt into uh escalated support tiers, L2, L3, production support, etc. Um, for my first case, and this is where I began to go wrong, there became a consultative sale about how could we offer customization from the out of the box experience to meet some specific business requirements of that customer. And I probably should have said from the get-go, that's all on you. What you see is what you get, and it's $1,000, but I promise you will get to launch. That's that's probably what I should have done. And and really, you know, this whole document, which I'm more than happy to share, it can probably be improved. It can probably be made a little more turnkey. So, I'm just ask me and I'll I'll share the Google doc with you. Was that the the the pitch was for $1,000, we'll install the site template for you in the hosting environment of your choice. I was even going to do it on his weird little VPS, but we said no. You know, look, platform.sh time is going to be a fairly affordable option for you to get started. I'm happy to tell you how that works. two months of launch support. So, while he is building the site, I'll be on call. Anybody from my team will be on call. Yeah, here's here's where you need to go look to find the answer to that. Here's how to use layout builder. It's great. You know what, whatever. Um customized site maintenance manual. So, literally an ebook that was, you know, proprietary, accustomed to his um environment to how to, you know, care and feed your Drupal site, the the update processes and and and things that you have to be thinking about when you're operating. It's basically just our best practices distilled into a simple how-to manual. And really, again, this was a loss leader for us, but I wanted to try it. I just wanted to get some points on the board. And so, like one month after we began talking to this prospect, he said, "Yes, I'm ready to move forward. This sounds amazing. I totally get it. And I said, "All right, I'm proposing a session for Vienna." And then like the next week, he's like, "Wait, what what am I buying exactly?" And then the question started and the long phone call started. And I and I probably spent I think around 20 hours or so on the phone and in email conversations trying to help this um customer who was a small merchant, a representative really of a small merchant comprehend what it was that I was selling to him. And it just kind of devolved from there. And there were a few issues here that were on me as well because part of the problem is to me this is an experiment. It would be the least the least lucrative project I'd ever sold in my life. And so of course if I had any opportunity to chase a a real project for us, this took the back burner. So the emails started to drag out and so on. But but it really was like a lot of questions I did not anticipate and a lot of missed expectations like thinking that I was going to provide a custom theme for $1,000. It's like no, no, let me show you how layout builder works and how color selections work. That's that's what I'm selling you. And so what what I realized was that one um and I have this phrase later on in the slides. It's like I I had I had I had sold him too much more than he needed, more than he knew even existed as something he had to think about to launch a e-commerce site even if he knew he didn't want SAS. Um but it also wasn't enough because for him this this price point of $1,000 plus a modest, you know, customization budget was substantial. uh you know because this is somebody who's comparing even a $6,000 awesome Drupal Commerce website that's exactly what you need built for you by the guys that wrote it. He's comparing that against the cost of his free time. So 0. And so it just like it was it was a weird mismatch that I didn't expect because of course I'm a Drupal guy and an agency owner and I'm just looking at it from a very different perspective. I I should have anticipated that. It took far too long to get to know. In the end, we got to know very recently. Mercifully, I wish him well and we'll see what happens next. His his approach now is to to basically let AI help him build the site and all right, good luck. Um, and and you know, maybe there's still an opportunity for us in the future. I I would love it if Drupal Commerce and Commerce Kickstart were so simple that even chat and GPT couldn't screw that, but we're just not there. And part of that would be lack of public documentation specific to the solution itself. Of course, layout builder isn't even the thing anymore. Eventually, it's going to be canvas. So, all the past documentation and tutorials will be irrelevant anyways, which if you've seen Drupal 7 hook suggestions in your AI, you know, proposals, then you understand what what Drupal means. in an AI context. But, you know, I I think that a better approach for us next will will be to go fully hands-off. No, no consultation. Here's the price and what you see is exactly what you're buying, which will demand more of me explaining things up front, but just cut I'm going to cut customization as an option out of it. and just say look on once you're up and running uh if if you're looking for a service provider we'd be more than happy to support you and hey our customers get you know the first hour free you know whatever it is we'll still do the launch support because I think the support is important for people actually being successful because if you buy a template from Shopify you don't really have to think about how to set it up if you buy a template on web flow or whatever else you're using is you're not it it is a lot easier to get started than it is on Drupal even with a site templates, quad site templates. So, I still think there needs to be support. But everything else, I think we're just going to have to be very hands-off and I will clarify the difference, you know, between me selling you a starting point for a customized solution that, oh yeah, I'm also going to help you build if you want uh to say, "No, I'm just selling a product off the shelf." Uh I I will be watching how this goes for Dripyard. I mentioned them earlier. Um, they aren't selling full-sight templates yet, although I don't think it's it's a a long uh lead time for them. What they are selling though are very advanced Drupal themes. So, it's a design first sale at about a $500 price point. But there again, they're they're kind of doing what I thought, which is I I want to sell something that what you see is what you get. And that's what you're getting from Driftyard right now. It is a theme that might be built with a specific industry or purpose in mind. Um but uh but it's just it just is what it is and and they aren't trying to sell more beyond that. And as I mentioned before, we'll begin exploring private packages as a means of distribution. Um because again, like I want it to be turnkey where you click buy, you have access to it, maybe it's even set up for you in one of the various passes with an API and it's off to the races. Um so I I want us to avoid that too much and not enough trap, if that even makes sense. It's like kind of how I try to think of the paradox in my mind of trying to oversell somebody something, but then because it was so substantial, they needed a hundred more questions answered. Um hopefully by the next time we'll actually have that sale under our belts and uh we'll have a success story to share, not a caution. So, thank you for your time everybody. [Applause], How to Sell Drupal Site Templates, YouTube, 01k9yv0g2wqhn35bk3jw3rng1w.