TYPO3 Talk With Alain : Treasurer of TYPO3 GmbH

I am a parallel entrepreneur currently living in Switzerland, father of 3, with strong roots in the TYPO3 community. I am treasurer of the TYPO3 Association and technically the founder/originator of the TYPO3 GmbH initiative. I love TYPO3 and the TYPO3 people.

I was getting involved with TYPO3 when we in our agency back in 2006 started to build websites with. The market for websites was rapidly growing and TYPO3 was THE product for a lot of larger companies (at least in Europe). We were able to build on that and scale as a company. I was later part of AOE, which in the beginning focused heavily on TYPO3 as well. I made a lot of real friends in the community, which is really great.

Today I mostly contribute through my work associated with being a board member and being part of the TYPO3 GmbH management. The Association and the T3G are becoming increasingly larger organizations. As I am an entrepreneur I can support a lot in the background.

Well, I think running a TYPO3 business is not so much different in general than running any other software development shop. When it comes to “product relationship”, things are totally different though. I have not seen a relationship with the product and the community that was/is so intense, with any other product (and I have had the chance to be part of other communities as well). TYPO3 is unlike anything else out there.

Frankly, there were times where I was super concerned. The idea to have a commercial leg like the TYPO3 GmbH emerged solely out of pure fear TYPO3 might not survive the changed market landscape. Code contribution was at an all time low back then and the product was lacking quality. This was not surprising as people have become older, the whole CMS industry has matured, core developers now had childrens and mortgages, priorities had shifted. We thought that if nobody is contributing to the extent necessary, we need to have a full time core dev team paid by the Assoc. Luckily things did not get so bad and we have recovered and are even gaining a totally new “cruising altitude” now.

Well this is something I probably should not do as others like Volker Graubaum are working on it. In general, I think we should change our whole ecosystem and adapt to today's cloud-first, no-code, transactional web world. I see this is already happening.

For a long time I thought we missed the cloud thing. Seeing products like Wix and Contentful soar was hard for me as a cloud SaaS entrepreneur. This is something we could have done as well and I think to even bigger extents. I am totally aware that you think I am crazy :-) But think of it, if we started early on, we would have had a huge head start. 

But then after looking at the models these companies run, you quickly realize the TYPO3 values don’t fit so well into the “quick-scaling-at-all-cost-venture-money-backed” story. We would have sold our souls, sort of - and in fact the community would have never accepted such an initiative - and I think rightly so. After all, I don’t think we should not go cloud SaaS - the question is how can we leverage all the great brains, hands and hearts in the community doing so and take TYPO3 - all of it - to the next level.

One could say we have missed e-Commerce as well and I cannot say much against it. We were biased to make a distinction between CMS and e-Commerce. In fact that was wrong.

I think we need to keep pushing and developing the core-spirit of TYPO3. That sounds corny, I know. But yeah, nothing happens without a great attitude. And then I think we need to work more strategically, build initiatives for target groups, target regions, coordinate contributors, agencies and consultants and expand geographically. And it’s 2021, means that needs to go quick.

I think you guys are doing a great job. Keep going places!

For developers, that surely had some relevance. But you know, what pushed TYPO3 back then were companies that were looking for cheaper CMS solutions. 15 years ago, it was totally normal to pay huge licenses for proprietary CMS solutions. More and more companies found that bad, especially because their websites back then did not render much immediate return on investment. They were just digital (and well, in a lot of cases rather ugly) “visitor's cards”. With TYPO3, you could get an enterprise CMS at a comparably low price in that segment. I had hundreds of discussions with decision makers over the years, and a lot of these folks did not even know what PHP was. But they indeed signed the project cheques.

I think it's the combination of the mentioned and the fact that TYPO3 is super stable and has proven a longterm use model.

I always enjoyed the company and guidance from Ben van’t Ende when I was entering the TYPO3 community. He was like sort of a father to me (maybe because he was the only one back then with grey hairs :-)). Frankly, there are so many awesome people from the TYPO3 community. Today I have daily exchanges with people from the Assoc and GmbH boards.

Of course I think the offerings from TYPO3 Association are the ones to consult.

Yes, more active contributors are surely welcomed. I don’t see any space where more contributors would not help. Global expansion, in my view, should be coordinated through TYPO3 GmbH as this needs full, permanent attention.

I run Parashift, an AI deep-tech company and own stakes in other companies. And I am a big fan of all things space exploration.