Over the past few years, we stepped away from classic agency work to explore what it means to build our own product. We learned a lot, built a lot, and stayed deeply connected to Drupal throughout. Now, we’re bringing those experiences back into a more focused service offering.
Drupal, we’re back.
Then again, in a way, we never really left.
Around 2020, our agency MachbarMacher was in a good place. We had solid clients and a healthy mix of work: commerce platforms, maintenance, and long-term partnerships with SMEs and public institutions.
It wasn’t burnout. It wasn’t bad business. Quite the opposite.
We'd always had a pull toward something bigger: trading agency life for a product strategy - and, if we're honest, toward work that felt like it was actually moving the needle on something that matters.
So we made a deliberate decision: We stopped taking new projects, transferred existing maintenance to trusted agencies we knew well, and gave ourselves the runway to figure out what was next.
That transition took about 18 months. We did it properly — existing clients were taken care of, nothing was dropped. That part we're proud of.
What followed was years of focused product development. We built CrowdPower.Digital, a SaaS platform - built with Drupal, of course - that makes it easier for community projects to raise and manage investments from individuals. Think community housing, community supported agriculture (CSA), cooperative energy projects. The kind of projects that usually requires a lot of legal and administrative scaffolding; we lowered that barrier.
Privacy and digital sovereignty weren’t side notes; they were core requirements.
We considered different growth paths, including venture capital, but decided against them. Instead, we chose to build independently, grow sustainably, and focus on long-term value rather than short-term scaling.
That path came with its own challenges. Team changes, experiments that didn’t work out, ideas that needed to be dropped. In the end, the setup stabilized: a small core team supported by a trusted network of freelancers.
While working on our strategy for 2026, one thing became clear: we had reached another decision point. Our financial runway isn’t infinite. CrowdPower.Digital needs to reach production and generate sustainable revenue. That's not optional anymore.
The obvious routes: double down entirely on the product (fast burn, high pressure), or go back to classic agency work (reliable income, less fun). We didn't love either of those.
So we chose a third path.
We founded HOOK_DEV_ALTER() to do the part of agency work we've always found most valuable: technical and strategic consulting for other agencies and larger Drupal projects. No commodity maintenance contracts. Instead: the deep work — architecture decisions, code quality, team enablement, module development, and the kind of Drupal expertise that comes from nearly two decades of serious involvement in the ecosystem.
This also unlocks something we'd let go quiet during the product years: upstream contribution. For a while, we only allowed ourselves the community work that was directly useful for our own projects. No events, minimal contribution work beyond what we needed. Deliberately. Getting more of that back into our lives feels genuinely good.
And for CrowdPower.Digital, it's also a win: we're still fully committed to bringing it to market, but without the pressure of rapid amortization hanging over every week.
Win-win-win, as we see it. And somewhat to our own surprise, the idea unlocked a big dose of motivation.
We built HOOK_DEV_ALTER(), wrote the positioning, launched the site. Then we talked to people - agency leads, business owners, people we'd worked with before. The response was clear: even in a tighter economy, there's real demand for what we're offering. A few folks specifically said they were glad to have us back in the space.
So here we are.
2026 marks 18 years of my drupal.org membership. Volljährig, as we'd say in German — officially an adult.
Although I've technically never stopped working in Drupal I have a fairly long backlog of modules and contributions I'd like to share with the community over the coming months. Some are already appearing in the Articles section.
For reference, here's where I stand in the Drupal ecosystem:
If any of that sounds like something you could use on a project or inside your team - let's talk.
Based on 20 years in-depth drupal coding and a long-lasting contribution history Merlin helps teams to fix problems and introduce technical innovations. Founder and technical lead at HOOK_DEV_ALTER().
Alongside technical work, he brings experience with collaborative organizational models such as sociocracy, holacracy, and agile practices - helping teams improve how they share knowledge and make technical decisions.
