Our journey: Dropsolid, past and present

We’ve been building Dropsolid since 2013, from a sustainable vision and with an ambitious mission in mind. Still led by our two co-founders in charge of a close-knit team, aimed at SMEs and large enterprises.
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A single vision, two founders and 1,000 free websites

Our journey started in 2013, when co-founders and co-CEO's Steven Pepermans and Dominique De Cooman put their heads together. Their shared passion for open source was the basis of a strong vision: to make digital experiences accessible to anyone through open technologies.

Accessible digital business

Their mission? To make digital business accessible for every entrepreneur in Belgium. A larger-than-life dream, deemed impossible by many. Until the first turning point arrived: a thousand free websites for Belgian businesses.

It didn’t end there. At Dropsolid, we also taught smaller SMEs to get started with their new website and take their content management into their own hands. This way, we enabled them to start with a solid, scalable, and growth-oriented website.

At the same time, we helped large organizations to industrialize their website environment. Take for instance our multi-site platform for Gezinsbond, which hosts over 700 small websites.
 

Innovation recognition

Our open vision was a key factor in our recognition by the Flanders Innovation & Entrepreneurship government agency as an innovative company. We’re officially accredited as a supplier for training and advice, both of which are available through the regional government’s kmo-portefeuille subsidy.

The arrival of Dropsolid Experience Cloud

Nick Veenhof, who has been a familiar face in the Drupal community, joined the team as CTO a few years after Dropsolid was founded. His arrival spurred a new growth spurt for the business. Nick led the creation of our R&D department, which is how Dropsolid Experience Cloud came into being. We updated our ambitious mission: we would make DXP technology available to any business through an open approach. We didn’t want digital experiences to be limited to large enterprises only. Everyone should be able to transform their website into the best possible digital experience, powered by Drupal as the content management system and supported by Mautic for marketing automation and Apache Unomi as a customer data platform. These three platforms communicate and share data with one another, enabling visitor segmentation. The result is a consistent and relevant digital experience. The ultimate goal is to respond to closed-sourced software with an open-source platform - which makes us unique in Europe.

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Growth that sets things in motion

Our team has grown alongside our business. Our current team consists of 90 Dropsolvers - every single one of them experts in their respective fields. We unbiasedly hire employees regardless of age, origin, gender, belief, or disability. And we’d like to extend these numbers to the rest of our company.

Our client portfolio, too, has grown together with our people - ranging from SMEs to enterprises. The MarTech industry is moving forward quickly. And we? We’re growing, too. Our service offering has increased, our platform has grown into a full-fledged DXP and we’re proud of both Dropsolid Experience Cloud and Dropsolid Digital Company

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Set values throughout our growth

Despite our rapid growth over the past few years, a few key factors have remained constant. Our passion for open source is still the foundation of our company. This has manifested itself in our open vision, open communication, and open partnerships. The differentiating factor? Our strong vision on digital entrepreneurship. And there’s more: our six core values - Help, Grow, Enjoy, Challenge, Trust and, Connect - provide a sure footing as well.

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Dropsolid and ESF

The European Social Fund (ESF) program and the Flemish government have awarded a grant to our internal project on alternative ways of work organization. The aim of this project is to improve the learning and adaptability of organizations and to improve the workability of employees’ work. We focus on redesigning the organizational structure and adjusting and monitoring the culture within our company.

This ESF program will help us to achieve the following objectives:

  • Increased employee happiness.
  • Improved customer net promotor score (NPS)
  • Professionalization of the organization, focused on guiding employees towards open thinking and autonomy.

Dropsolid in numbers

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1 open vision

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2 founders

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9 years of expertise

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80+ Dropsolvers