So recently there’s been a lot of buzz about Drupal scoring 1 million users. Congrats! Even though WordPress is still ahead, it is with no doubt a very big thing for Drupal’s community and it must feel pretty darn good.

However, all of this hype got me thinking — our markets are full of products yet somehow people tend to build even more. Like, the market of web content management systems is ruled by major pros like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, TYPO3 and others, but there are dozens of new CMSs and frameworks born everyday everywhere around the globe. How come we keep on creating instead of just using what’s already there?

The unsettling human nature

The answer for me was the unsettling human nature. We always want the -er: bigger, better, faster, stronger, longer…Yet, according to stoicism, this insatiable desire for MORE of everything is not a moral failing but a natural evolutionary program. Thing is, stoics believe you have to learn to be happy with what you have. But what you have is not always the best you can get.

From here I will proceed telling things through my own experience which might seem a bit technical. But don’t get thrown away by that. Thing is, the same rules apply to every creator, regardless of what he or she is making — from tangled-up code to a new lasagna recipe.

I was using but not enjoying

In my early twenties I was full of youthful maximalism to have the best or nothing at all (to be fair, I still consider myself to be that way). It was evident in both my personal and professional life. As a young developer working at a web agency, most of all I wanted a simple and efficient tool to work with.

I’ve already had some experience with Joomla, Xoops, Magento and osCommerce but most of the time I was working with Drupal and WordPress. I used the first one for my personal projects since it met the criteria of flexibility. And I did all of the client work on WordPress because at the time it seemed like the only option with a fairly simple user interface. Still, I considered none of them to be a suitable tool for a person who’s not so tech savvy.

Being a programmer and knowing how to deal with the arising technical problems (system updates, plugin compatibility and bug-infested code in general) kept me neglectful for awhile. But having endless s.o.s conversations with my clients and seeing their sites abandoned with mediocre or no content gave me the chills. Companies were investing money but getting nothing fair in return. Unfortunately, neither I nor my colleagues could find a tool that combined simple programming with simple content management.

The tables (we) have turned

That’s when the inner-fuss began. Together with a few like-minded code nerds we decided that settling for smaller things in life is getting us nowhere. We were like those people famously described by Jack Kerouac,the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time…

In 2007 we started creating a website building and management tool for ourselves just to make OUR work and life easier. But it turned out to be a game changer (as the media put it). After two years of constant development and testings we had a stable product: ImpressPages — a new open-source web CMS based on drag&drop feature. We released the alpha version and boom! Results exceeded all expectations and the amount of good feedback encouraged us to dig deeper.

Fake it till you make it

It took four more years to receive an investment from a venture capital and I am not going to whine about how time and energy consuming this whole process was. My wife wasn’t happy, that’s for sure. I mean, I was recording promo videos on our honeymoon. There were also times when my confidence propeller wouldn’t turn and everything seemed worthless.

Now we are counting the seventh year of our existence (starting with the idea) and it’s exciting to look back on how much we’ve grown. We are operating a stable business with more than 47k users and recently released a 4.0 version. With every bit of improvement I feel more self confident and happy. It is amazing how out of utter dissatisfaction we created a tool that was common sense in theory but did not exist in practice.