Dropsolid has been around for 10 years. And I’m so proud of that! Together with Steven, on March 28th, 2013, we laid down the deed of our new company: Dropsolid. 10 years later, we’ve grown, we’ve conquered, and we’ve enjoyed every single part of the ride.
10 years ago, it all began as a startup. It taught us about running a business, funding, hiring, training talent, sales, marketing… Next came the scale-up stage. During this time, we improved a lot of things: our overall product development, our growth, our vision, mission and values, the corporate structure, our procedures, and our business units. The next step? Becoming profitable and laying the foundation of the Digital Experience Company. And that’s exactly what we did.
In this blog, I’d like to take a deep dive into the past years of Dropsolid, our current company, and our future plans:
1. The evolution of our vision
Back in the days, in 2019, we were already emphasizing the importance of ‘thé great customer experience’. Looking back, the experience for this customer is still our most important focus. But it goes even broader than this. We are building digital experiences for any stakeholder in an organization. Whether it’s a customer, an employee, a citizen, a member, a patient…
After 10 years, after a few years of growing, evolving, and challenging each other, the full potential of Dropsolid can now be unlocked as markets mature and the value of digital experiences starts to become apparent. We are where we want to be. And we’re just getting started.
2. Dropsolid Digital Company + Dropsolid Experience Cloud
Combining a service and a product is not the easiest road for a company. Every business school will advise you not to go down this path. But we did it anyways. Why? Since the beginning of Dropsolid, we had the vision to invest our profits into a product.
We started out as a Drupal company and Drupal cloud product. This product evolved into Dropsolid Experience Cloud, and our Drupal company evolved into the Digital Experience Compnay.
Since they evolved together symbiotically, the product and the company strengthened each other. The company brings the product to the customers, validates features according to business needs, and funds further development with its cashflows. Because of this natural evolution, the product became exactly what our company, our partners, and our customers need to be successful with their digital experiences.
Why is it the best way to build digital experiences?
SVG
Ownership
It allows our customers to learn how to fish instead of receiving fish. In other words, they have full ownership and the right knowledge to take their next steps.
We are not an IT company just focused on Drupal anymore. Nor are we a digital marcom company or a pure software company because we invest in our own DXP, Dropsolid Experience Cloud. And our team exists out of both technical and non-technical experts like: developers, functional analysts, strategists, UX designers… All of them needed to build and grow the best digital experiences.
To make this position in the market clear, we needed to rebrand Dropsolid. Our company was split up into two business parts: Dropsolid Digital Experience Company and Dropsolid Experience Cloud (DXP). This allowed us to communicate a different message to the market: our product and service vision around digital experiences. We may have split up our company into two business units, but we still go to market with a common vision which goes hand in hand.
And, an important side note, we have a deal not to compete against our partners on the implementation services. Instead, we choose to team up with them. All of our partners are outside the local Belgian market, where most of our company customers are anyways. The advantage? Our competitors turn into partners. It’s also a great opportunity to make sure we can scale our DXP with the future in mind.
Another big, maybe even our biggest advantage of offering a product and a service: we walk the talk! We really know what we are doing and thus perfectly understand what our partners are doing. We can guide our partners toward the best implementations. We know exactly what the needs, questions, and struggles of our customers are.
We don’t run the company persé for higher valuations. We run the company by balancing the needs of our investors, partners, customers, and employees.
3. The Digital Experience Company
We believe a great digital experience touches the entire company. And when done correctly, it can deliver ROI across all departments: marketing, communication, IT, sales, customer success, operations, HR... How? By reducing customer acquisition and operation costs and by increasing the customer lifetime value.
The difference between a digital experience company and a web agency? We build more than just websites. A digital experience spans more channels: web, email, app… It includes data capturing, personalization, multi-sites, headless/decoupling, integrations, marketing automation… To deliver the best digital experiences, you need to start with a solid digital experience strategy. And to do all that, you need the right people in a well-oiled multidisciplinary team. Therefore, our team doesn’t only consist of technical developers. We have strategically oriented experts who understand what problems our customers are trying to solve. We have people who can talk to any department and elaborate on improving their business with frictionless digital experiences. We have strategists, enterprise architects, solution architects, service delivery managers, designers, SEO experts, marketing specialists, analysts… And they all work closely together to build the best digital experiences.
To build these experiences, we leverage our own DXP: Dropsolid Experience Cloud. The combination of our Digital Experience Company and our DXP forms the perfect combination: Dropsolid Digital Experience Company.
Dropsolid is a special type of company: a Digital Experience Company that brings to market a DXP and a service company to build the best digital experiences in an open way.
4. The future of Dropsolid Experience Cloud
Drupal + Mautic = basically an open DXP
The core of a Digital Experience is the content combined with contact data. The combination of Drupal and Mautic is exactly that. It's fundamentally a DXP. With just those two tools, marketers can deliver relevant content across the website and email marketing campaigns. We believe Drupal and Mautic are the perfect starting point for making the best digital experience accessible for smaller and midsized enterprises: a truly open and low entry barrier DXP.
The value of Dropsolid Experience Cloud lies in its cloud platform, which packages all the best practices around Drupal. All while having all the security, scalability, and robustness you need to run Drupal (headless CMS), Mautic (marketing automation), and Apache Unomi (Customer Data Platform) on an enterprise level. Our platform even allows you to run every core component on your own premises or in your own private cloud.
Dropsolid has committed itself to keep its DXP fully open and is also contributing all its patches to the Mautic and Unomi communities as well. Stay tuned for the DXP project on Drupal.org. Here we’ll bring together the glue to build an open source Drupal and Mautic-based DXP. And, of course, you can run a trial on our website and get professional support to help you build your best digital experience for yourself or your customers.
We believe to stay free, sovereignty is key.
As a European (Belgian) company, we’re pioneers in data sovereignty. Unlike American companies, which have been criticized for their data collection & usage practices and cloud lock-ins, Dropsolid prioritizes data privacy, security, and cloud freedom. European governments have taken steps to regulate this, with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) being a prime example. Dropsolid has been at the forefront of implementing GDPR compliance measures, demonstrating its commitment to data sovereignty.
An open DXP allows organizations to stay sovereign and thus free. Most commercial offerings are just offering the CMS part but the data, and in a more advanced stage ML/AI, is all proprietary. Customers are forced into virtual cloud lock-ins. Dropsolid is working on making the data and machine learning sovereign. It will be key to staying free and controlling everything. This also means controlling the price you're being charged, the terms and conditions you must accept and the choice of cloud hosting.
Our ambitions with Dropsolid Experience Cloud
We believe an open DXP like ours will make better and souvereign digital experiences accessible to every midsized organization in Europe. Our growth ambitions are therefore exponential. Open source gives us the right leverage to do this the right way. Dropsolid started with an open vision, and that will remain the driver of our growth. We aim to spread the use of open source-based digital experiences and by doing that, make a positive impact on the world.
By doing it in such a freedom-based way, we’ll help to maintain the broader open web by making it easier for any organization to engage with their audiences on their own terms. Our most open and low entry barrier way will give organizations an opportunity to stay sovereign while still able to access the advanced capabilities required at a reasonable effort.
To realize these great ambitions, we will need an extensive partner network of digital agencies. Every company needs a digital agency to help them build their digital experiences. Be it to assist them with strategic advice, via consultant support, or by tailoring the entire digital ecosystem for them. By using open technologies like Drupal and Mautic, the possible partner ecosystem in Europe is huge. Certainly Drupal has a really high adoption rate in existing digital agencies.
That’s exactly why we believe our DXP can grow and scale faster than any other DXP: we are building on an existing ecosystem with the same open vision in mind.
5. Maximize your ROI with a Digital Experience Platform
Seems like the above are a lot of words, but no actual deeds? Not at all. If done well, the vision translates into actual ROI. We've developed a calculator to measure it. In today's dynamic business landscape, optimizing your Return on Investment (ROI) is crucial for sustainable growth. Unleash the power of a DXP to revolutionize your online presence, enhance customer experiences, and drive substantial ROI. With this calculator, we delve into the transformative capabilities of a DXP and explore how it can propel your business toward success. Get ready to unlock the hidden value of your digital journey and witness a remarkable return on your investment.