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Why WordPress Will Make Drupal Irrelevant

Vancouver’s big on Drupal. On almost every corner in Gastown you’ll find a passionate advocate who’ll talk your ear off about its flexibility, the benefits of leveraging its community of developers and the extent to which out of all the choices for Content Management platforms it sucks the least.

But surely the primary function of a CMS is to make content management simple and idiot proof for non-technical users. It’s here that Drupal fails so spectacularly that I’m astounded it is even referred to as a CMS. Developers often argue that it’s unfair to expect Drupal to be user friendly because then it would inevitably be inflexible. A classic logical fallacy if ever I heard one, sort of like saying “all developers work faster if they use a command line interface therefore everyone who wants to work faster should use the command line.”

My crash course in Drupal included being presented by a local Drupal shop with a content management interface that consisted of a seemingly randomly organized list of every piece of content on our site, some of which could sort of be edited, some of which required direct editing of the raw html rather than text and none of which offered even the most rudimentary workflow management, scheduled publishing or approval process. Oh, and if you want to deal with really advanced stuff such as, I don’t know, images, you better brush up on those programming skills. In about five minutes it would have been possible utterly and irreparably to decimate the website, with no hope of restoring it without programming expertise. Going back to that argument about flexibility, it’s interesting to note that it’s all theoretical. That is, in theory any beautifully intuitive content management interface can be created to manage your Drupal site, but here I’m reminded of a classic bit from Seinfeld:

JERRY: So, when do I get my dinner?

KRAMER: There’s no dinner. The bet’s off. I’m not gonna do it.

JERRY: Yes, I know you’re not gonna do it. That’s why I bet.

KRAMER: Ya well, there’s no bet if I’m not doing it.

JERRY: That’s the bet! That you’re not doing it!

KRAMER: Yeah, well, I could do it. I don’t wanna do it.

JERRY: We didn’t bet on if you wanted to. We bet on if it would be done.

KRAMER: And it could be done.

JERRY: Well, of course it could be done! Anything could be done! But it only is done if it’s done!

In other words, without substantial customization Drupal simply isn’t viable as a CMS. To paraphrase those irony-deficient Ronseal TV ads from the UK, Drupal doesn’t do what it says on the tin.

Start to venture into virtually any kind of basic functionality present on a moderately interactive website and you’ll quickly get to know and fear the words “that requires us to write a new module”. You’ll also discover various peculiarities that either force bizarre user interaction patterns on your audience, or again demand the creation of a new module. And because Drupal is primarily deployed by development shops rather than a guy you have sitting in your office, you’ll pay through the nose, again for the alleged benefits of flexibility.

Recently the Drupal community has seized on Chris Pirillo’s use of the platform as the basis for Gnomepal, which has the noble objective of making Drupal more of an out-of-the-box solution for real publishers. Perfect, except that (no disrespect to Pirillo intended) I’m not sure there’s anyone less connected to the real-world demands of normal, non-technical users than Chris and the army of geeks who follow him.

The belief in the Drupal community is clearly that it’s all about the… community. That is, the power of a disparate community will be harnessed to deliver the features and usability desired by end users. But the fatal flaw in the Drupal community model seems to be that its community consists entirely of developers and not publishers. Or worse still development shops who make money by customizing Drupal.

I stumbled upon Mike Stopforth’s excellent overview of Drupal vs. WordPress while writing this piece. I’m sure he’d disagree with my overall assessment of Drupal, but nevertheless I completely agree with his comment:

Drupal’s problem is that the community behind it - genius’s that they are - simply don’t get marketing - they need more people like the gang at Lullabot, and I daresay you and I to help them ‘humanise’ Drupal.

Saying that the Drupal community doesn’t get marketing is an epic understatement, but that is perhaps what it comes down to, and where the power of the WordPress community becomes particularly relevant.

WordPress doesn’t pretend to be a CMS (although for many websites’ needs it’s actually more than enough), but it’s become close to the de facto choice for anyone seeking to create anything from the simplest blog to the most sophisticated magazine-like content site. The guys at Automattic clearly were driven by exactly the right kind of singular purpose: take something very difficult (creating and managing a website) and make it spectacularly easy and idiot-proof.

This kind of game changing innovation creates a very different kind of community — users who are passionate because they’re able to do something that was hitherto as close to impossible as makes no difference, and do so for free to boot. Putting this kind of control in the hands of non-technical publishers hasn’t stopped being a revolutionary thing, but what’s possibly more revolutionary is the way in which WordPress’s critical mass of users has created an entirely new ecosystem of innovation around plugins.

WordPress plugins are designed to make still more difficult / impossible / utterly alien tasks and features immediately accessible. Many of these are things that can help your website make money (the excellent AdSense Manager, for example), integrate with other popular services (such as Twitter and Flickr), or aid in the promotion and discovery of your site (All-In-One SEO and the Google XML Sitemap plugins). Imagine that, tools to make your life easier. Isn’t that a better kind of flexible?

So going back to Drupal… It’s really not for basic or moderately sophisticated content-based businesses, and it clearly doesn’t, can’t and won’t work for anyone who wants to publish not program, at least not anyone who hopes to do so without a huge investment of time and money. And yet it’s unlikely to be your platform of choice for building a large-scale website. It’s all-but impossible to find in-house Drupal experts, and while I’m in no way qualified to get into Rails vs. Django vs. doing it yourself vs. everything else debate, 99 per cent of the start-ups I know wouldn’t for a second consider Drupal to build a community site, a SaaS application or much else for which the website and the business are one and the same. They wouldn’t pick WordPress, either, but it makes no claim to be a powerful framework for building applications; instead it just does what it says on the tin.

But finally my biggest beef with Drupal is that it appears from my outsider’s perspective to be a platform always ensuring it has an excuse for its failings. It’s not user friendly because it’s flexible. Your project requires vast, expensive customization because Drupal provides oodles of functionality for free as long as you stay within its limits. We tried to please everyone and in the end kept no-one, including me, happy. The lesson, I think, is that great technology knows what problem it’s solving and relentlessly chases it down, and ultimately that’s why WordPress’s limitations pale in comparison to its brilliance.

Posted 04 May 2008 † Daniel Gibbons § Miscellaneous ‡ Comments (23) ° Tagged: , , , ,

Navel Gazing for Dummies

I’m all for the emancipatory power of the blogosphere and the various tools and services it idolizes. But occasionally don’t you want to have a Kingsley Amis moment and long for a more evolved and sophisticated level of discourse?

I realize it’s boring to play the disillusioned elitist card, but it all gets a little wearing when you’re bombarded by the minute with barely literate ramblings unpacking the minutiae of each new feed aggregator, groundbreaking use of the Twitter API and bombastic rubbish about the world changing in lock-step with the launch of each new navel gazing set of online tools. Particularly when you know that, deep down, none of the people writing about this stuff actually believe in it themselves.

Recently it’s been all about whether Twitter does or does not deserve a lofty valuation for the financing it may or may not have closed. And in turn whether normal people know about or, not to put too fine a point on it, give a flying f**k about Twitter. Here’s a hint: earnestly insisting they do won’t make it so.

I quite like Twitter and in many ways see it to be a fascinating social experiment gone almost wrong. But the spectacle of the kind of grown adults with whom I used to discuss, oh I don’t know, literature, art and politics, indulging the trivial, the mundane and the puerile to the nth degree is fantastically depressing.

What it comes down to is this: the promise of web 2.0 was in large part about utility, usability and elegant solutions to hitherto difficult problems. As is the case in any bubble in which the once truly passionate inflating’s almost done, first principles get forgotten.

Posted 28 April 2008 † Daniel Gibbons § Rants ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,

Why You Shouldn’t Build The Next Twitter

When a company like Twitter raises a large B round at a giant valuation for a pre-revenue company it tends to send ripples of scorn through the tech community. People were similarly bewildered and upset when Slide got their $550 million valuation and of course livid when Microsoft’s strategic investment in Facebook valued the social network at $15 billion.

As Mathew Ingram points out, Twitter is clearly worth something if only because of its feverishly passionate users. Most likely it will get bought well before the pressure to make money really begins. But I think all of the anxiety about these success stories (and they are truly successes, exits or not) is more than a little misguided. The problem isn’t Twitter so much as it is the legion of me-too start-ups trying to build something with the kind of viral appeal of Twitter so they too can get funded and have exits.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there’s anything remotely wrong with wanting to build something so great that it becomes an overnight viral success, but it only will be one if it emerges from a desire to create real value and utility for users.

The Twitter funding news reminded me of Paul Kedrosky’s excellent, although admittedly tongue-in-cheek piece on why business models get in the way of securing early stage venture funding. They bring the discussion down abruptly to earth, from “this thing is a wild success” to “your business model can never make money”. Irony or not, I think the point stands that for the current generation of web businesses it’s creating value for users that really matters in the beginning. But what’s also true is that no-one should be discouraged from building Twitter; instead they ought to be discouraged from trying to build “the next Twitter” rather than something of genuine and unique value.

Posted 27 April 2008 † Daniel Gibbons § Investment ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , ,

Debt is Your Friend

I attended a great talk by Rick Segal of JLA Ventures this evening, hosted by my friends at BootUp Labs. Sort of a primer on the process you go through to raise VC money. Outsiders often have the best insight, and as an American running a Canadian VC fund, Rick’s better placed than most to offer an objective perspective on our strengths and weaknesses.

The short version: don’t dig yourself a hole with poorly structured friends and family rounds; convertible debentures are your friend; don’t try and raise VC money for a lifestyle business; really know your numbers (trust me, almost no-one takes the time to understand how their business actually works; it’s a huge differentiator); and make sure you check your ego at the door and really have the stomach and drive to exceed your VC’s expectations. All self-evident once you’ve emerged from the process of pitching VCs without knowing this stuff, and all things it’s infinitely better to know before you get started.

As is always the case, the best part was the Q&A. And as is also always the case at events in Vancouver that even brush up against the topic of raising capital, talk turned to our level of risk tolerance. Or lack thereof. I’ve founded or co-founded four companies now, with varying degrees of success, and certainly no home runs yet. Along the way the greatest pressure has always seemed like it was financial (try sleeping at night when you’ve racked up $75k of credit card debt), but looking back that ought to have been the least of my worries. The pressure, as Rick points out, ought to be about beating the crap out of the milestones you’ve set for your business.

The rule of “someone else’s money” is a great one, but not in the sense that you have to find willing investors in the very early stages. Generally at the “idea” stage I think it’s a complete waste of time to chase institutional money and in the process burn valuable time that could be better spent on doing real work. The beauty of our credit rich, cash poor society is that at the earliest stage of a venture, the friendly Canadian banks can be your investors without even knowing it. Sounds insanely risky or irresponsible? Perhaps it is, but if you truly believe in your idea (you do really believe in it, right?), then think how much progress you can make on the tens of thousands you’re likely to find at your disposal.

If it doesn’t work out, what’s the worst that can happen? You won’t go to jail. Your loved ones will still love you. Chances are you don’t own a house that you can lose. Your credit rating might take a major hit, but putting it in perspective that’s about as traumatic as an ugly break up — that is, it gets exponentially better with time. Someone in the audience commented that they were scared at the prospect of personal debt, which, going back to Rick’s advice is not so bad a test for whether or not you’ve got the stomach just to get on with hitting that home run.

Posted 21 April 2008 † Daniel Gibbons § Investment ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: , , , , ,

Getting Funded in Canada

I just got around to reading Paul Graham’s post on the VC industry’s reluctance to change its investment approach, despite evidence that its model might be broken. It’s hard to argue with the point that it costs less than it used to to create many kinds of technology-based businesses, and by extension that a valid approach is to make a larger number of smaller bets. I also like the idea that things are essentially binary. That is, web startups either work or they don’t, but it takes far less than the typical $3-$5 million A round to determine if you’ve got a zero or a one. Graham’s own YCombinator is of course leading the charge in proving this point.

In theory this climate should be good for Canadian startups. Historically we’ve had to do more with less, and some of our best home-grown success stories (Flickr, StumbleUpon, iStockPhoto, among others) have had great exits with little or no institutional funding. But what I’ve noticed in my own back yard (Vancouver), and what it pains me to admit I’ve been guilty of, is an expectation that a requirement for less capital makes a startup somehow less serious or demanding an endeavour.

Brendon Wilson has been shaking the trees over at our local tech blog, Techvibes, making the point that we’re outright kidding ourselves if we want to become a real Silicon Valley North. I agree with much of what he says, particularly the “work smarter” ethos, and the reality check about what it takes to push a start up over the edge.

What gets lost in translation between the Techcrunch posts on YCombinator glory and our own start-up community, though, is the do more part of do more with less. The amount of money you raise ought to be defined by how much you need to execute on your plan, but all over town I hear the refrain of “all I need is $x and I’ll quit my job and do this full time”. The implicit message is that the investment capital is to be used to fund the transformation of a hobby into a paid gig. In other words, the money is intended to relieve risk and pressure rather than create it.

As far as I can tell, US VCs rarely invest in Canadian companies, and certainly not early stage web businesses. And as much as we might bitch and moan about our local VCs, they, too, are simply not the right customers for the investment opportunities we’re all selling. The only options are to write the cheques yourself or tap into our vibrant angel community, or both. But none of this means shrinking our ambition to match the dollars. Instead getting funded in Canada is both extremely difficult and extremely simple: create a business that can scale in direct proportion to the effort and passion you invest, and wildly out of proportion to the amount of capital you can raise.

Posted 16 April 2008 † Daniel Gibbons § Investment ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , ,

And now for something completely different

It really is so lame to start a blog and then promptly abandon it two months in. In my defence, I’ve been working on something new.

In ways both good and bad, I usually act on gut instinct rather than methodical research. About five days after meeting Carrie McCarthy and Danielle LaPorte I rather presumptuously suggested to them that I come on board as their CEO. They’re people who act on instinct and intuition, too, and to cut a long story short each of us embraced the risk that it couldn’t work by seeing if it would.

There’s a huge amount of depth to Carrie and Danielle’s story, but what sold me most of all was something fundamental to their brand: authenticity. It’s an overused word, one that’s often self-consciously deployed without meaning or integrity. The cynic in me thinks that if someone’s trying to be authentic then they’re most likely not. But Carrie and Danielle’s business is a rare thing, shaped by the founders’ conviction that style is multi-dimensional, an agent for change that is personal and shared, that conscious consumption matters, and that understanding oneself enough to act with intent is the thing that makes life rich and full. The good news is lots of credible people already believe in what they (we, now) are doing.

Where are we taking this? Well I can’t say too much yet, except that I feel privileged to be on board, and that there’s a book, a website that will soon be relaunched, a brand with traction, and a plan to create a social space with context and meaning. More soon.

PS: If you’re wondering what all of this has to do with marketing then you should probably read this.

Posted 14 April 2008 † Daniel Gibbons § Marketing § Miscellaneous ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , ,

Success Factors

Investors and entrepreneurs often pitch business models by describing them as a fresh or niche-focused take on a high profile success story. Angel investor Jeff Clavier allegedly described parenting social network, Maya’s Mom, as “Dogster for moms”, but this unfortunate example aside the point is simple: apply a business model that worked elsewhere to a different audience.

On the surface this kind of thinking makes sense, particularly if one considers how effective it can be to grow a business within a tightly defined demographic or vertical niche. But in other respects it makes no sense at all, because it discards so much of what actually ensures success.

Marc Andreesen, who should know a thing or two, has some fantastic insights into what makes a new venture successful, and he flies in the face of conventional VC wisdom by insisting the market is much more important than the team or product. His argument is that a great team can execute flawlessly on a perfectly engineered product which in the end fills no significant gap in the market, is too early for significant adoption or which users simply don’t want. By contrast, a company that identifies a pressing, unfilled need may succeed in spite of its team’s limitations, and users may gobble up a product that isn’t yet perfect because its fundamental value is so great. To make things more complicated, timing is everything, since the real genius of great start-ups is to deliver what the market wants neither too early when there will be too few buyers or too late when others will have already seized the opportunity.

At first glance it reads as if Andreesen would advocate the kind of business model replication I described earlier. Surely success with one audience is a good indicator that the market will respond similarly if the same model is applied to a different audience? But what Andreesen is really saying, I think, is that the market simply doesn’t shape itself around these kind of contrivances. In turn, the assumption that the structural elements of a business are what ensured its success is likely to be just as flawed. The dramatic growth of MySpace and Facebook around communities of musicians and college students, for example, logically implies that social networks for other communities will be successful. In fact their initial explosions of growth indicated that musicians really needed better tools to publish information for their fans and college students desperately wanted to manage and expand their natural networks online. Unfortunately their success says virtually nothing about the prospects for the same model deployed for old people or celebrity-obsessed teens, among others.

So in the end the trouble with pitches that claim to be about creating the Digg for tweens or the LinkedIn for senior citizens is that in most cases they’re assuming that different segments of the market respond to products and services in essentially the same way. If that were so then oddly enough all that would matter would be execution rather than innovation.

Posted 20 February 2008 † Daniel Gibbons § Marketing § Social Media ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: , ,

Big Brand Free

Funny, I was looking through the kitchen cupboards today and realized that, except for some razor blades, I haven’t bought any mainstream consumer packaged goods for a long time. I’m sure I can’t be alone. Even though profits remain healthy at the big CPG companies, it’s developing markets that are primarily driving growth.

Actually, there were a couple of bars of Green and Black’s organic chocolate, which is owned by Cadbury Schweppes, but they’ve been smart enough to keep that connection completely off the packaging so that people like me continue to buy it. You see it’s not that there aren’t brand-conscious goods in my cupboards; if anything they reveal that I’m a sucker for aesthetically pleasing packaging. I’m also not self-consciously searching for “authenticity”, although that ends up being part of it, particularly when it comes to food. Instead it’s that I’ve simply become disillusioned with big brands. Partly it’s a set of non-specific concerns about the ethics of their production, but mostly it’s that I’m weary of being marketed to, and the more that’s spent on telling me I ought to buy something, the more inclined I am to believe all the effort was invested in marketing the product rather than making it great.

Vancouver, partly because it’s a degree or two removed from the global centres of finance and commerce, has long been home to very genuine innovation, and product design that’s driven by passion and function first, branding and marketing second. When Adidas Salomon (Salomon has since been sold to Finland’s Amer Sports) purchased outdoor gear maker, Arc-teryx, back in 2002, they did so because the brand was built around a truly genuine affinity with its customers. It’s not that Arc-teryx’s customers weren’t concerned with design and aesthetics, rather that these qualities were (and still are — the products remain great) wrapped up in the substance of the product, not tacked on after the fact. And since then there have been quite likely hundreds if not thousands of mergers and acquisitions in which high quality niche brands have been snapped up by more mainstream giants.

The giant brands may in the end be quite safe because they’ve got relatively untapped markets in the developing world and a limitless supply of passionate people there and here creating new, authentic brands that can be acquired once the hard work of building a community of passionate customers has been done. But it’s interesting to think about the structural changes that will surely accompany this shift. It strikes me that it’s not just media that are fragmenting across more specialized channels, and in turn stimulating less generic and more targeted forms of advertising. In turn the next generation of brands are building highly profitable businesses which may only amount to $50MM or so in annual sales but nevertheless appeal to an influential and desirable audience. It’s likely that a good part of marketing’s role will become preserving the independence of these brands.

Posted 10 February 2008 † Daniel Gibbons § Marketing § branding ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , ,

Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

Large, slow-moving and bureaucratic companies are an easy target for critics, but so what, it’s often fun and illuminating to pick on easy targets. Particularly when they descend to the pettiest behavior for the sake of cents today that will cost them dollars in customer loyalty tomorrow.

I returned a DVD to my local Rogers Video store yesterday evening (yes, yes, who rents DVDs in the real world any more?), and was confronted with a $36 bill for late charges. These charges were confusing on two counts: first, some were for a movie I hadn’t actually rented; second, and most perplexing, Rogers, like many other chains, prominently advertises that it no longer has late charges. Now the first count was cleared up easily enough, but the second strikes right at the heart at that easy target stuff I was talking about earlier.

You see, had I only read the smallprint (presumably crammed into the margins of the posters and banners?), I would have known that only some movies are exempt from late charges. Oh, and for all movies it’s possible to buy extra time for your rental, even for the ones that don’t have late charges. That’s right, insurance against late charges that don’t exist any more. The clerk explained that the fee was really a way of stopping the automated reminder phone calls that occur if you don’t return your movies on time. Even though you can (in some cases, sort of) keep them as long as you like. You just can’t make this stuff up.

Something I really like about the innovations and companies eating away at legacy markets is that there’s no choice but to build brands around what makes sense for the customer. Good customer service, policies that make sense, and, simply, common sense, are par for the course, while the incumbents struggle to leave behind the bad habits that once kept them rich.

Posted 10 February 2008 † Daniel Gibbons § Marketing ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,

Mobile Advertising’s Unknown Unknowns

A friend in the investment banking industry once cautioned me about working for a public company traded on a junior exchange. In his words, “the value never catches up with the promote.” By which he meant that a story that’s been sold simply to drive up the share price isn’t sustainable in the real world, and at some point there will be a day of reckoning when the promoters have made their money and moved on. Average Joe shareholder is inevitably left holding the bag, as are most of the employees.

Gphone or not, at first glance a similar story looks to be unfolding in the mobile advertising space. This week the New York Times reported on CBS’s mobile advertising initiative, which in partnership with Loopt enables targeting of consumers by location when they visit CBS’s mobile news and sports websites.

Location-based ads have long been viewed as critical to accelerating the disappointing growth of the mobile ad market, and the Times isn’t alone in seeing the CBS / Loopt experiment as a sign that the market might finally be progressing in line with expectations. Others, however, point out that it’s not a good sign that after all of these years we’re still talking about what are effectively science projects, not a real market.

The divergent growth projections themselves tell part of the story. If Gartner is projecting worldwide mobile ad revenues at $14.6 Billion by 2012 and Forrester thinks the number will be under $1 Billion then regardless of your affinity to one group of analysts over another, we’re talking about an industry in its infancy, and certainly one in which it’s possible to imagine countless new players and models emerging. In turn it’s also likely that many of the mobile advertising venture investments made in the last three years will stumble, potentially making the space less attractive.

I’m not so sure that a bit of bubble bursting would be a bad thing. What strikes me about the mobile ad space is that because the platform is itself in a massive state of flux, it’s difficult to predict how consumer behavior with respect to mobile devices will evolve, and by extension what are the appropriate and effective methods of delivering advertising. The perception of the mobile environment as a place for collaborative, open development is relatively new (and it’s a vision that is still very much constrained by the carriers who continue to control access to mobile subscribers). In turn the mobile space has seen lots of innovation but nothing close to the overwhelming onslaught of activity around the early days of the consumer Internet. Rich content on a mobile device, video, micro-blogging, mobile instant messaging, mobile browsing, all of these things are commonplace if you’re even peripherally connected to the technology world, but for the mainstream cellphone user they’re still quite alien.

I’m all for embracing new marketing channels, but in many respects the community around mobile content and devices needs to evolve before the channel will truly be understood and widely leveraged by marketers, and it’s here that I’d recommend mobile innovation be focused. In the first dot-com boom, IPOs soared and fell on overblown and misguided expectations of online advertising. In the background, Google, which existed long before the first bubble burst, was working on the utility of its offering, anticipating better search as the cornerstone of the web. Their category-defining revenue model came much later, seemingly from nowhere but in reality simply reaping the rewards of more than five years of building a genuinely groundbreaking utility.

So when it comes to mobile advertising, my prediction is a few more years of uncertainty and disappointment, before it all comes together, seemingly from nowhere but in reality built on the back of innovation that’s underway right now. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, the space will be defined by what we don’t know we don’t know.

Posted 07 February 2008 † Daniel Gibbons § Advertising ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , ,