The last few months have been fun visiting, sponsoring and presenting at Camps. Achieve attended camps in Atlanta, Austin, Phoenix, Berkeley and LA. It's been expensive and hard work along with educational, inspiring and fun. So the lessons we've learned are:
- Drupal is growing rapidly beyond small sites and single developers.
- The community is expanding
- Drupal shops are taking a lead in the expansion
- Drupal is becoming a business
- The camps are getting bigger, more organized and larger attendance
- Developers & Dev shops are specializing and finding specific niches
(less generalists and more specialists)
With the advent of Drupal 7, 7000+ modules and thousands of new developers arriving, now is the time to stake out your territory and your market. While negative unemployment exists today in the marketplace, it won't forever. The Gold Rush was profitable for those early in the rush but the stragglers didn't fare nearly as well. Don't get left behind.
Some things you can do to grow WITH Drupal:
- Brand yourself
- Think about partnering
- Become active in the local ecosystem (SDDUG)
- Become active OUTSIDE the local ecosystem (Open Source)
- Figure out what you do best
- Figure out what you like best
- Learn how to run a business
- Learn how to manage people
- Learn about sales, sales pipelines
- Figure out your marketing strategy
Go forth to organize, strategize and code! Oh and the biggie, keep current in your industry: www.sandcamp.org