Drupal, Lean Startup (and a bit of Rails!)
As a professional software development services company, we work with a lot of startups and our tool of choice has of course been Drupal.
Some of you may also know that I am a keen follower of the Lean Startup movement and I am passionate about this because for the first time in history, a rigorous scientific method of building and growing startups exists. We use a lot of Lean Startup principles when giving advise to our startup clients, where possible, I am using it in building our new dedicated Drupal career service Drupal Savvy.
A key principle of Lean Startup is to build, measure and learn build-measure-learn feedback loop and how to iterate through this quickly.
Naturally, we want the tools we use to help build our own and client startups to fit into the Lean Startup picture as best that they can, so it was exciting to come across this presentation by Lean Startup founder Eric Ries at RailsConf 2011 about why he thinks a lot of startups turn to Rails as their founding technology.
To quote Eric:
"What matters in a technology platform, for entrepreneurship specifically, is not how scalable it is... it's not how much fun it is to write code in (although I hear Ruby is very fun), it's not ... how many different people you can have concurrently working on it, it's not does it have a really beautiful syntax, it's not even is it very writable or readable. Actually all that matters is how flexible is the platform ... for our ability to learn from customers, learn what is working and what isn't"
"It's not just the technology itself. It's the technology and the community together that make a platform what it is. And if you have a community that embraces not just making cool technology, not just having the kind of libraries that allow you to test new ideas very quickly. Not just ideas from agile development that allow you to build your software with higher quality, organisation and better factoring, but that embraces the entire project of very quick prototyping, learning, testing, reacting, you can get through this feedback loop faster than anybody else..."
"... and I believe that startups are using Rails is not because it's better technically but because it's better at this".
So in our quest to hone Drupal into a technology of choice for startups, Eric's observation becomes an important guidepost. We want to look at ways Drupal can support startups to build, measure and learn quickly so that we can engineer platforms for startups that fit with Lean Startup principes.
An early blog on Drupal modules for split testing and site optimisation was an early foray into the Measure element of the Build-Measure-Learn trio. We will continue to investigate Drupal's fit for purpose in this exciting new movement.
What do you think? Do you think Drupal is a good platform for building a dynamic startup that runs on Lean Startup principles? Is it even a relevant question? What technology do you use for your startup? I'd like to know your thougts in the comment below.
