Then

When I found Bubble, I was in a startup accelerator program. One of the participants said “have you heard about Bubble?”

At the time, I was learning to code, and I must admit I was surprised by the capabilities described by Bubble’s landing page.

But I was also skeptical, asking “Am I going to invest 3 months learning something, only to hit a wall and have wasted a whole bunch of time?”

Now

Well, let’s put it this way. After using Bubble for 3+ years and working on 30+ projects, what I will say is this. Bubble lets you build varied, powerful, and complex apps.

The complexity possible is a function of your abilities as a Bubble developer.

The MVP

With even 2-3 months of experience (in the right learning environment), a non-technical founder can build a meaningful MVP and gather real customer feedback. These founders can take the “quick, hard-coded” approach to build your MVP. Keep it simple, don’t overrengineer everything, and you can build MVPs that can be quickly validated with real customers.

By 6-12 months, you will be able to transition this MVP into a scalable, maintainable app with real users and real impact. You can start to add some complexity, while iterating on what you have learned from your user feedback.

The “v1”

Depending on your use case, you may stick with “full-stack” Bubble in the medium to long term, or you may start to integrate Bubble with other web services and even backend databases.

What you can build

In the last 3 years, we’ve built: Software as a service toolsCustomer Relationship Management (CRM) systemsCalendar Booking appsLearning Management Systems (LMS)2 and 3-sided MarketplacesSubscription sites Our apps have had dynamic features like: Notification systems with templates, placeholders, modes, and logsChat systems with conversations, messages, emojis, and file/link shares.Audit loggingFile managementMultiple user roles Yep. All possible in Bubble. Without reliance on external plugins, web services, or 🥁… code.

The future

With enough time and experience, I’m confident that a competent Bubble dev could replicate the functionality and user experience of the following platforms with Bubble’s core features and minimal code:

AirbnbStripeSalesforceGoogle MailMedium

The tool

Bubble is a tool, and a very powerful one at that. If you want to implement Bubble in your startup, consider Momentum Academy’s Bubble Bootcamp.