One of the unexpected challenges in raising money to grow your business is keeping mum about the deal until it's time. Time is likely among the many terms you'll find defined in your contract, and between the day you sign the papers and the day that time actually arrives, you're glowing inside because your investors believe in the potential of your business and want to see you do more.

Investors don't magically make a business plan succeed, nor do they single out the sole source of success behind a business or an idea. This is certainly the case with Commerce Guys' raise announced last week. We know for a fact that our investors get open source as much as they do eCommerce. Even as they evaluated us on our ability to execute our business plan, they evaluated us on how well we work within and alongside the larger Drupal community. When they took a close look, they saw the strengths of the community and the caliber of developers collaborating with us to build Drupal Commerce.

That's what makes it so exciting to share the news - investors and developers who have grown their own businesses and, in the case of the team at Open Ocean with MySQL, their own open source projects have looked closely into both Commerce Guys and Drupal Commerce and felt confident enough to front some serious cash for us to kick our efforts up a notch. Many of these guys have built their own eCommerce systems and understand the challenges we're in a unique position to solve through Drupal 7, Views, Rules, and Commerce, and they're guys who understand the importance of the community in the success of any open source project.

So, we're not crazy after all, and what we've been trying to build with our friends at Commerce Guys and in the Drupal community isn't crazy. Ambitious, sure, but achievable. Our vision for Drupal Commerce remains the same - to see Drupal Commerce become the world's leading open source eCommerce framework. For the last two and a half years, my time has been set aside by Commerce Guys to develop the code (with plenty of help from other brilliant Commerce Guys and community contributors) and grow the community needed to make it happen. Now we've sold the vision to some very smart people with deep pockets outside our normal circles and are eager to see what happens next.

Their affirmation is much appreciated, but so is the money that will let us hire and set aside even more developers to "scale me" out a bit. We need to address immediate concerns pertaining to documentation and community support on DrupalCommerce.org. We'll need to make sure we follow-through on our longstanding 2.x strategy to bring some sanity to the user experience for administrators even as 1.x has privileged developers. All the while, there will be more than enough module maintenance and distribution work to go around!

Addressing these needs for Drupal Commerce should only require a fraction of the money we've raised, but it's a good start that will have an immediate positive impact on the thousands of people already using Drupal Commerce to power their online businesses. If you think you can stomach working with me on a daily basis and have the chops to help us succeed, be sure to get in touch.

Topics: WorkInvestmentDrupal