Drupal powered NowPublic.com acquired by the Clarity Digital Group

As you may have seen in the news, NowPublic.com, the first venture backed start-up to use Drupal, was acquired by the Clarity Digital Group which owns and operates Examiner.com a quantified top 100 web property for local news and information. Over the next ~6 months we'll be migrating Examiner.com to the NowPublic Drupal based platform, creating one of the largest public Drupal installs on the planet!

While we at NowPublic have been blessed with a loyal, dedicated, and amazing team that continues to impress me on a daily basis, and fortunate enough to have great advisers, the unsung hero of this story that I want to publicly thank is everyone who has contributed to Drupal, and the Drupal community - without you all this would not have been possible. Drupal the software, and the Drupal community have been critical to the success of NowPublic.com from the very beginning.

Something that I noticed early on that continues to ring true today is that almost everyone I've met from the Drupal community wants to see the software succeed and they go out of their way to help make it happen. Even before we got started – almost exactly 5 years to date - when we were in the evaluation stage looking at numerous frameworks and CMS systems, something was different about Drupal. Individuals from the community took the time to talk to us and encourage us to use the software. It was a lengthy conversation with Boris Mann, the founder of Bryght, at a coffee shop in Vancouver that finally convinced me Drupal was the best choice for our site. Boris and the others we spoke to had little or nothing to gain directly and truly wanted to see more people adopt and push the envelope of what Drupal could do.

Before we raised our angel financing, and even after – many individuals in the community were eager to step in and help us to solve our pain points and challenges – often at low or no cost - again because they wanted to see Drupal, and the people pushing the edge of Drupal development succeed. They helped us get our business off the ground. While 5 years have gone by, and there are now many Drupal backed startups (Acquia.com, buzzr.com, Popsugar.com, etc.), several Drupal based acquisitions (Mothersclick.com), and a thriving and robust commercial eco-system around Drupal, I bet there are still many who are willing to help a great idea get going in a similar fashion.

Drupal even helped secure our first round of funding! Unless you are an Internet rockstar with a major success story, like Ev Williams or Jimmy Wales, when raising money for an Internet based startup it's nearly impossible to do so without first having a live working website. We met with numerous angel investors who said, we love the concept of NowPublic– come back to us when you are live. So we set off to build the first iteration of NowPublic.com as quickly as possible – before our 'friends and family' money ran dry. About 4 months later we went back to the angel investors that we met with and they were blown away with how quickly we built a working system with such a broad range of features – and even more so by how cost effective and quickly we were able to do it. We secured our first round of financing in part because of the power of Drupal and the tons of contributed modules that are available.

The community has made hiring easier – I trust the references I get from the people I've met over the years, and can easily see what code and other contributions potential hires have made to the platform. It makes hiring a lot less risky and more likely to be successful. And then there is the on-boarding process – getting new hires up to speed. Given that we've adopted and follow much of the communities standards it's MUCH easier to get folks up and going then it would be otherwise. We save tons of time and have to do very little training. Everything from style guides, to coding standards seamlessly falls out of the Drupal project. When we raised our Series A financing for example, and had to hire and get many people up to speed quickly – this was a huge help. It made a potentially very painful growth spurt manageable. Again today, as we ramp up and attempt to double the size of our team to meet the needs of Examiner.com we've benefited greatly from the community. The forums have also been a good place to recruit when hiring :) same with the Groups.Drupal.org website which has made it so easy to meet and recruit local Drupal folks in specific geographic areas. To everyone who's recommended developers I can't thank you enough!

It is not just about technology - Drupal.org has been a great place for promotion and exposure. Over the years, there have been many posts about NowPubilc.com that always drove us a lot of traffic, with posts promoted to the Drupal home page often being our top referrer for a few days.

I could go on and on about the many ways the Drupal software and community have helped make us successful - I'm truly grateful. Drupal is more then just a brilliant OSCMS or framework, it's a thriving community of amazing individuals with a one common goal – to encourage and support the use of Drupal, and to make Drupal the best platform for building websites. So to everyone in the community I say a heartfelt thank you for all these amazing years and I look forward to many many more years together!

Sincerely,

Michael E. Meyers

CTO of the Clarity Digital Group, and Co-Founder of NowPublic.com