Future of Coding - Bootstrapping Bubble.is: Emmanuel Straschnov

Episode Date: November 28, 2017

Many of you may have never heard of Bubble.is. That's because they don't build for developers. They build for business people who need to create technology but can't afford to work with developers. Over the past four years, Emmanual and his cofounder Josh have bootstrapped their drag-and-drop website builder into a profitable business.Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcodingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi this is Steve Krause. Welcome to the Future of Coding. Today I have Emmanuel Strachanov here. He's the creator of Bubble.is which is a do-it-yourself coding platform. It allows business people and product managers to build basically program computers but without code. A lot of these phrases will be familiar to listeners of the podcast. It's kind of like the dream that we're all trying to create. But what's unique about you guys is that you guys are like a business that actually has customers that are paying. It's pretty unheard of in this space.

So I guess one of the things that struck me when I first heard about you guys is how quickly you got your first paying customer. Can you give us the timeline of how that happened? Sure. Well, firstly, hello everyone. So I don't know if it happened that quickly. It took about a year. To get your first customer.

To get our first paying customer. My co-founder, Josh, started Bubble. At that time it wasn't called Bubble, late 2011, like December 2011, I think, was the first commit on GitHub, and we got our first paying customer in December 2012. I think one of the things that made that we found that first customer was our early decision

not to go for developers, but to go for people that were not technical because what was happening in 2012 and it's still the case today probably even more today that a ton of people had ideas to start websites uh like startups so i wouldn't say website it's more like you know um tech startup that has a fairly simple application but that requires like a web application and so a ton of people wanted to build things and it was extremely hard you know that was a post Facebook IPO time it was extremely hard to find tech people and so if you go to them saying we have this solution it's a bit limited but might get you to actually

try something and you tell them by the way it's gonna be $50 a month because that was our first price point they're like okay sure I mean not everyone would say that but a ton of people would say okay sure and that's how we found out first people got it so I would your first customer was $50 a month I remember at some point one of your early customers turned into a larger customer almost more like a consulting customer yeah so that's about happened two years after, like in 2014. Got it, so one year after you were getting $50 a month customers.

Right. And then another year after that you got? We got a much bigger one, which actually enabled us to survive a lot in the early days. It was not a consulting, it was more like, it was a funded startup in San Francisco and they needed to build a product. They outsourced the version one.

Building the version two was complicated for them with another outsourcing firm. What was that? With another outsourcing company, it would have been impossible. Evolving the first version was impossible as well. So they basically were in a situation where they had business deals lined up and the product was not following and what happened is that hired they hired one of our very early users um that brought us in they were in a situation where they were like in a very bad situation i think um and what happened is um

when people in the bad situation they make bold moves and so the bold move was to use bubble and so then we had a special deal where basically we were building a lot of features at their request. I mean, that's features we would probably have built anyway, but we basically guaranteed that we would change a little bit our roadmap to make sure that that would work for them. And we got that in exchange of a much bigger payment. That seems like a dream situation. Yeah, I think we're pretty lucky but I mean there are some disadvantages I mean of course you depend a lot from one customer you certainly do things that you were not certainly planning on doing like I would

assume like 70% of what we did for them was useful for everyone but they're 30% honestly that was not necessarily the best thing to do so there is a cost but on the other hand having a steady income is very valuable in the early days, especially if you are bootstrapping. I mean, without them, it would have been very hard to bootstrap. Yeah. So it seems like it happened almost by accident to some extent. Yeah. I mean, we certainly did not try to find them. So if that's what you mean by accident, I wouldn't say it's an accident in the sense that it's actually, there has been a pattern so far with our larger clients.

It's always an existing user that gets hired by that client that brings us in. Fascinating. So the $50 a month customers are really just lead gen for when they get hired. Yeah, even though I have not entirely sure, but I think the one that joined the startup never even paid. He was a free customer but so funny it doesn't matter honestly like at that time you know the number of $50 client we have was very low you know got it so if if you were recommending to someone who's trying to start business in this space would you give any sort of advice to like strategically get a big

customer like you guys got or you can't really shoot for it that way? It's a bit tricky because you don't want to fall into consulting business. I mean, maybe you want, and then you'll be a consultant and it's fine. But it's not necessarily what you want to do. For us, we were fortunate enough, but it was really, to be honest, because of the nature of what we were building,

we almost never built anything with them on bubble we just were adding features on bubbles so that they had two people basically in-house building that I mean there were a few rush where I remember helping them I think a few elements to the application on a weekend or something but there was never the core of our service so far as he didn't feel like consulting totally and again it probably was a perturbation for a little bit of time and mostly beneficial for the platform mother for the remaining time for this I would say like 70% of the time but so you have to be tricky if you

find such a deal it's perfect yeah it's it has to be the right business has to be the right customer got it yeah totally Yeah. Totally. So you mentioned that you guys bootstrapped a business. Yeah. That's, in a lot of ways, that's like not the traditional path for a startup. So like how did you come to that decision to like bootstrap the business? So we decided that very early on. It was mostly based on two things. One emotional and one I would would say, more rational.

And I can't even say whether they were smart or not. I think so far it's worked out for us. So the emotional thing was we started a company to be our own bosses and we didn't really feel like having someone telling us what to do. Some people said that investors are not necessarily that involved. It's not necessarily how I felt it at the time. Maybe I was wrong, and Josh was basically on the same page with me.

But that's how we felt about it. So we were like, why would we have someone tell us what to do? Let's just do that ourselves. Then the second thing was, from the beginning, we felt that what we were trying to do was probably too long-term from what I was hearing at the time from VCs, from people that would deal from VCs, from people

that would deal with VCs. Basically, like dealing with someone that has like LP pressure, like limited partners who have, you know, they commit their money for a few years and like five years or seven years and they want to get their money back means that your investors will have external pressure that I totally understand. I sympathize with that. It's hard to have customers in your bag that say, where is my money? But the result is that they put expectations on you

that are going to be hard to sustain in the short term if you think you're in the long term. Because something like Bubble takes a very long time. Like firstly, if you think about it from the very beginning, you need to build a product that's good enough so that people can build their own MVPs. So an MVP on Bubble has to be a meta MVP. And that already takes a few years on Bubble has to be a meta MVP. And that already takes

a few years because it has to be fast. People basically shouldn't realize it's built on something like Bubble. So that would take you a very long time. I would say two years. At that time, I wouldn't say I would know when, how soon we would get that, but certainly more than a few weeks to get an MVP. Then you need people to hear about you. Then you need people to learn the platform, which is going to take time because the platform is not necessarily going to be good enough to be learned. So you're going to have to iterate a little bit. Obviously, documentation at first is not going to be as good as it should.

And then once they have learned how to use the platform, they're going to be building something. And only then, maybe, if things go well, firstly, they will start paying and then they will start talking to their friends. Before that, they're not necessarily going to talk to their friends. That is a very long time horizon that i would estimate that like three years plus and it doesn't really fit the vc time frame yeah the other problem with pc is that as soon as you start raising money by definition you leave you live on the lifestyle that you don't

need like you haven't heard and so um then you put you in a situation where if you cannot raise an extra under trouble yeah and we didn't want to get in that situation that makes sense you know the VC mirror go-round is like once you get on you can't get off but there's only like one or two ways to get off yeah you get acquired or you fail are you so I'm curious how you sustained yourself for the first year or two without revenue company how much revenue coming in Do we doing the selling project? Do you have savings? That's another thing like the reason why we didn't raise money just happened because of lies that Josh and I

Josh and I had enough savings to live probably like two years and have in New York without An amazing lifestyle, but okay got it cool that makes sense so however when we go to first payment was actually quite borderline I'm glad the first actual time where we started getting salary happened because I was myself becoming a little bit at risk yeah that makes sense yeah it's it's so impressive that you guys were able to pull it off so we ran into each other a few weeks ago at a Lean Startup event. Eric Ries just launched his new book, The Startup Way. And one thing you said that struck me as pretty insightful

was that Bubble is like a really enabling platform for the Lean Startup community. It's like the tool. Without it, people with business ideas who want to start companies are like hamstrung. They need to find that technical co-founder. And this platform could enable them to iterate without it. Right.

It's more that actually the idea of starting a business is more like even in a big company, like what Eric described, what you should do in your organization to try things. Bubble lets you build something extremely quickly. Like as soon as you get as you understand how it works, that way you can literally build an MVP for something in a few hours. And then even better is the speed of iteration. If something doesn't work, if someone tells you, hey, I can't see that button,

well, it's literally as simple as dragging and dropping that button, and it's done. And that speed of iteration goes very well with the Lean Startup methodology. So I'd be curious, with Bubble as a company, how did you think about Lean stuff? Do you have your actionable metrics? Is that how you prioritize what to build next? Yeah, yeah, I mean we push code probably five or six times

a day and we have very quick feedback because of the community we've built. As soon as something doesn't work for someone, we hear about it on the forum or by email. Usually in the forum, we're very fortunate to have a forum that works very well, that's very active. And so, yeah, I mean, now we tend to be a little bit more careful because what happens, though, is when you have a lot of users and especially apps working in production, you cannot change behaviors that quickly. So we push new features quickly.

However, we don't change things. Like, it has to be always backward compatible. I'm not talking about refactoring I'm talking about behaviors so now we are much more careful in testing things like that things we just don't push and we don't put into tests to know that we shouldn't push them like what's an example of something that went wrong it's not that it goes wrong it's just like we made some design decisions. For instance, a very practical example is, it's a little bit like, you need to know Bubble a little bit to understand what that means, but when you design a search in the interface for something in the database, and you say these constraints equals the value

of that input, we decided a few years ago when we started that if that value is empty, we ignore the constraint, which means if you imagine like an Airbnb type page where you have a list of apartments, if you don't put the mean price and the max price, we show everything. Another design decision could have been, well, if there is no price, let's say zero. And it could go both ways. That's the kind of thing you cannot change anymore. I can't change. You can't change that because that would change apps in production.

I got it. Which is something like... Do you not have a notion of versioning? We do for some stuff, for the API and stuff like that. For the actual application engine, not really. Interesting. So if you change something, it changes the apps running production right now.

Right, so we make sure that never happens. Like we don't change things that are already word prediction does it feel like that constrains what like you know how better how much better you can make the product no because you can always figure out ways to get around that like for instance for this i mean we haven't implemented that yet but it's on our roadmap we do that pretty soon it's going to be a checkbox somewhere in the application that says ignore or not ignore when the value of the constraint is zero. So you can build on top. You can build around.

I mean, no, it is certainly a constraint in some ways, but honestly, that's the constraint you want to have otherwise that means no one uses your product. Got it. Cool. Okay, so this is kind of a strange question. So everyone in this world, everyone who listens to this podcast is trying to make the future of coding.

And one thing that strikes me about Bubble is that it really feels like you guys are trying to make the silver bullet. You're trying to solve the essential problem. You're tackling it head on. Is this it? Do you think that in 10 years people will be like, yep, this was the thing that, like now you don't need to code anymore this is bubble or like is this is it like is it more niche because right now it's it's it's successful but it's still small yeah like i don't think like is it the community doesn't know about bubble yet i imagine the people listening now have never heard of bubble well yeah i mean we're starting to work on that because we instead need to change but yeah right now

our community is very strong but very small and we're trying to grow it. Now obviously, I mean to your question, I'm biased, but I wouldn't be doing this if I were not thinking that it would actually become the new standard. That's our goal. Our goal is clearly to be the new standard, which doesn't mean, by the way, that coding is disappear.

It is gonna disappear. It's gonna be a slightly lower level task, and I'm not doing that at all in a bad way. Yeah. Lower level in the sense of the stack. Yeah. If you think about technology, technology is a stack, right? Abstractions.

So we tried to add another layer, which I don't think is actually more different. It's probably... Going from JavaScript to Babel is probably less of a leap than going from assembly language to JavaScript. Yeah. What makes it feel a greater great is because it's visual. But effectively, I think it's not as big of a deal. But so coding is still going to be involved and necessary

sometimes. Like in the bubble ecosystem right now, some people do code. We have marketplace of plugins where if a feature is missing, whether it's an element of the page or an action in a workflow what people can code them and it's great I mean the beauty of the model though is that once something is coded for them for someone is good for everyone but we still want coders to be involved okay it's something we haven't pushed very hard right now because I

think you need to choose a little bit your battles at first and we decided that our product and communication should be geared toward non-developers but we actually started to change that a little bit. Got it. So this is again it's like a weird question there is like a strong community who listen to this podcast and who are like trying to make the future of coding it's like a whole research community there's all sorts of people I don't like research community. There's all sorts of people. I don't want to name names, but there are all sorts of people.

Everyone who's been on my podcast is a guest that are trying to do this. And we've been trying to do this for decades. What has everyone missed that you guys were just like, what was the key insights that everyone else missed? I don't know. It's hard to answer that question. Firstly, I don't think we necessarily have figured out something that other people haven't

figured out and I can't tell people have missed. One thing I can say when I look at what some other people are trying to do, I feel we probably have a less academic approach and a little bit more of a business first approach, which is let's create something that people want to pay for and want to use for their business today, instead of rethinking how do we make something that is in line with academic papers. It can be blurry sometimes. For instance, App Inventor became a startup. Thankable is basically built on top of App Inventor, which was started as a research

project for MIT. It was implemented by Google. So yeah, I think another thing that happened, so the reason why I think it's easier to do this today than it was like 20 years ago is what's happening is the pressure on the business world for technology, especially web development, is so high right now that you can go to people with a limited product at first and they're still going to want to use it. I think what was happening 20 years ago, if you're trying to do that, if we had come with something like Bubble 20 years ago, at first of course it's limited. I was mentioning our first paying customers like 50 bucks.

Honestly, at the time, bubble was not pretty. It was slow and full of bugs. But they were still paying for it because they had to, because there were no other options. What would have happened 20 years earlier, if we hadn't done that 20 years ago, is people would have said, well, I'm just gonna hire an engineer,

because it's okay, they're not that expensive anyway. I can find one. What's happening today is that it's impossible to find engineers, so people have no other choice. And so you can basically start selling, so people have no other choice. And so you can basically start selling, making money, which is important. I mean, it's not like money is important, but it's a good way to build a sustainable business.

And more importantly, iterating while having a non-perfect product. I think that would have been much harder 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago. Yeah. But so I don't think people have missed necessarily something. I think today is the right time to try something like Bravo or like making programming easier and more accessible. I think that was much harder 20 years ago. Got it.

It's like a perfect storm of people really want to create technical businesses and programs are really expensive. Yeah. And also like technology is the right place for those things to happen. There are a lot of things. Cool. Yeah, I think that you saying that you're not doing it like in an academic way, I think is like definitely one of the striking characteristics of Bubble. At one point we talked, I mentioned like how obsessed with Brett Victor.

And I could remember wrong, but I think you said something like you don't know him or you like didn't read his paper. No, no, I mean I've been following from far what he's doing. I don't know him personally. But you've read his papers? Yeah, well I've mostly watched his presentations to be honest, more than read his papers. I think what he does is very interesting. It feels to be a little bit more fundamental than what we do. Yeah, I guess what fascinates me is I'm obsessed with Brett Victor's work and his writings, and Chris Granger. There's a whole community of people who like Alan Kay's work,

and I read their papers, and I see what they're up to. And they have all these insights. And you're very opinionated, being like, yeah, it's neat, but it's just not really that relevant to me. Yeah, I feel like in some ways we're a little bit in a different space here. Yeah, my goal, I mean, if you ask me what my goal is, sometimes I could say like, yeah, to redefine programming, but even more, to be honest, is empowering people to create things online today.

I would say most of the time for the businesses, sometimes it's for side projects, but I want to empower people to create their businesses online. It's very clear. Which is a little bit of a different thing. That's so clear. Yeah, it's very different than... And that does change some design decisions.

I mean, that probably means that sometimes we might find some shortcuts that we have to fix afterwards, but that's where we're going first. Cool. Yeah, that's very clear. I like that kind of clarity. Okay. So one... And I think another thing is by doing that you basically talk to a different kind of audience.

If you go for a little bit more academic things, you probably talk more to developers. We on the... The way we did that, we went for people that actually needed something like what we were doing. And those are like, for instance, not developers because no developers have an issue today that how do I build yes developers you know they could build something on an older way or new way if you have one but it's so that was also changing a lot like the audience which shows was very much in line with what we're trying to achieve yeah I personally

think it's easier to start something with non-developers than developers. Yeah, yeah. Well, so here, maybe that's... Could you mind giving me some advice? So I want us to... One target customer I focus on is students. They're non-developers. Those students I work with are non-developers when they start out and they want to make

games, they want to make things on the internet. And right now they have Scratch, which is amazing, they have MIT App Inventor, they have a few different other platforms. One of the things I struggle with is that kids can't really pay. Yeah, that's kind of where my head, do you have any thoughts on,

if you were to start something like Bubble, but with students as your audience, what sorts of thoughts come up? I mean, it's tricky. What kind of students are we talking about? Like high school students? Sure. Or middle school.

Or middle school, right. Because I would say for college, actually something like Bubble would probably be what they would need. Yeah. It's probably for some... Like hackathons, Bubble is probably the right answer. Well, that's more how you reach them but I'm saying in terms of you know the complexity of tools of applications you can build I feel I think if if you're trying to I mean

send directly to students and building a business out of that is hard because as you saying that I'm paying I think that's a different conversation but I would say there are two different options. Either you make that as a non-profit, which some people have done, and then you can get funded with grants, and you have a social aspect to creating a tool that makes learning easier, or you sell content to schools. But that one is actually pretty tough. That's pretty tough. Yeah.

Got it. It's interesting. so your decision to sell the business. Actually, I've always been in favor of doing things with schools. We do some more like in business schools. Yeah, yeah, I saw that. We do some lectures, like sometimes I do some lectures I went to Harvard University of Chicago. I mean it's very, in some ways it's more because I like doing that than a business strategy. It's great to be visible in the school because a typical MBA student or business undergrad student is a very good candidate for Bubble as a user. I'm not sure I would build our entire strategy on that because they don't pay. And there is another thing, just to go back to the idea of focusing on businesses

and letting people build things. At the end of the day, when businesses use you, it's the best proof of concept. They pay you. Well, yeah, but not only do they pay you, but also they test your thing in real life. Yeah. With their users. With their users and at scale. I mean, we had one customer this summer that went viral on the internet.

Can you say which one? It's called CoinStarter. CoinStarter.com. CoinStarter. Yeah. And they went on the internet. They had millions of views. Can you say which one? It's called Coinstarter, coinstarter.com. Coinstarter. Yeah. And they went on national television, like they got viral. That's a proof that something, you know, that your technology works at scale. Damn.

Well, I mean, it has some challenges and then we need to scale everything, but that's a good thing when you start working with people that actually make businesses because they make money and they push the product to grow. If you work with people that are not trying to build businesses, there is a risk of just being a prototyping tool or a cool tool to learn. Which I mean, I'm very happy when people use Bubble to learn.

I hope, I actually have a vision where I think at some point computer science should be taught with a tool like Bubble, maybe not Bubble but a tool like Bubble. A lot of universities teach with Scratch. Right, but Scratch I think has limitations because as soon as you're like 10 or 12 it's a bit boring to have a character that moves and I think you could move into more interesting things and I think Bubble would be a great candidate for that. But what I'm saying is that yeah you need at some point to go to scale, to show that your technology works. Yeah, I'm just so struck by how that one decision of targeting business people who can't code,

how powerful that was as an enabler for you guys. It enabled you to be bootstrapped, it enabled you to iterate. You turned out okay. Yeah, pretty great. That's awesome. And like tweaking just that one little piece like if instead you work with students or you work with developers or with hobbyists like the entire business wouldn't make sense. That one thing was key. Okay so what about Bubble do you think you guys do really well and what parts of Bubble

are you still embarrassed about? Oh, a ton of stuff. Bubble was two guys until four months ago. Now we're six people, so now we're aggressively hiring and we want to professionalize the organization much more. Especially because as we were just talking about, since we're working with these businesses, we need to start being more enterprise compatible. Because some of the businesses using us are actually growing and they have higher expectations. So the thing I'm embarrassed about is,

well, if you go on our website actually, like on bubble.ai slash roadmap, you see what we have. Bubble.ai slash. What we have in line in terms of technical things, but there are a lot of things we would like to fix there to work better at scale. And then we need to have a better documentation, improve our onboarding process, a lot of things we would like to do. Wow, I love this. Bubble.is slash roadmap.

Yeah, you can see what we are up to. We need to have 24-7 support. We need to become a company that big businesses can rely on for their IT. Which is a very big responsibility, by the way. It's what Salesforce and Microsoft do. It's hard for a startup to be in that space, but there is a great potential in doing that. So if you think about the different things that programmers do, they design interfaces, they work with databases, they do analytics, they have version control, there's a lot of different pieces to being a software engineer. What pieces are you focused on now?

You mean for Bubble users? Yeah. Well, we have to offer everything. What's the current focus? Current focus is performance at scale. Scale, got it. But it's not necessarily something that our users have to worry about because we take care of that for themselves.

Having said that, we're also providing them with some tools to optimize their application because the way you design your application can have performance impacts. So we have new new analytics tools to see where capacity is using and stuff that is being used and stuff like this. But so yeah, our current focus is there, but that's not really something that we ask our users to be proactive about. It's more we have to just make sure that everything works fine. It's one of the big challenges of Bubble because by definition, when you empower non-technical people to do things,

they tend to do crazy things. And they don't necessarily understand that one query is gonna be extremely slow and they just expect it to work. And they don't worry, they don't think in terms of indexes, like database structure and all those things. And so we have to basically make that work for them. Yeah, help them scale.

Got it, scale them. That's very clear. Right. But that can be sometimes fairly complicated. Well, yeah. I think a lot of people said that the reason declarative programming, building this layer of abstraction over JavaScript, for example, one of the reasons people

say that didn't work when we tried it last time is because compiling from what business people wanna do to queries that don't take forever is really hard. That's almost a research problem. That's a really hard thing to do. Yeah, and we've tackled that. So in that way, we're not doing things in an academic way, but we probably work on similar problems

because we have to solve that problem. Will you like publish a paper about how you solved it or no, that's not what you do? So I mean to be very frank, for that specific thing which is converting like queries into something efficient, I don't do that, my co-founder does it. So I let him say whether he wants to publish something one day, I don't know. Got it, cool. It's probably not the most urgent thing. Yeah, you're working on other things yeah so you hired four people last four months

yeah yeah how did you decide all set like you know it seems like it's quite a decision like yeah so so the reason so since we hired four people all of sudden and we bootstrap you can imagine we could have hired people earlier. Yes. Right? So the reason why we waited that long is we wanted to hire more than two people at the same time just to create a team. It's more of a human thing, but when you have two people that have worked together for five

years, just the two of them, it's kind of an old couple. And so bringing a third person can be challenging for the third person. And we felt it would be better to bring at least two, and ideally three at once, which is basically what we did. And then it became a fourth person because we had more needs. So that's the reason why. I've never heard of that. Did you try bringing a third person and it didn't work?

Yeah, we did that for a few months, like two years ago. That was a little bit harder. So that's why we decided to do it that way. Huh. I've never heard that was them. Cool. Yeah. I'm glad.

I mean, if it were to do it again, I would probably have started hiring six months earlier, but just six months. Yeah. OK. One of the things you said the first time we met that I thought was hilarious was that you were really excited for other people to build competitors to Bubble because there's

just like nobody. You're like kind of all, you almost want more competitors to validate the space because it's just like such a wacky idea. Yes, it's actually one of our big challenges right now is, you know, the first time I describe Bubble everybody's going to ask me how is that different from Squarespace. Squarespace is a great product, but it's really not what Bubble is. And if we had more products in our space, it would be easier, you know, for people to see us as a category. I'm actually starting to get a little bit less on the technical side right now and trying

to move more into communicating the vision a little bit. And what I want to communicate is not even not, you know, use Bubble. It's just, you know, you don't need to code to build things, which is something that a lot of people still disagree with, you know. And it's hard because the code brand is very strong. You know, the JavaScript brand is stronger than the Bubble brand right now. So communicating and telling people you don't need to learn how to code, when, you know, you have Barack Obama that goes and teaches you have Barack Obama that says everybody should learn how to code and

stuff like that, it's a difficult message to convey. And the more people we have in that space, the easier it will be. Okay. So which people in the space are you excited about now? If there's anyone that's on your mind? I mean, there are a few companies that are somewhat close to what we do, like Zapier, for instance. Yeah, yeah. Which is not a programming tool, but about workflow automation.

And you don't need to be a coder to use it. So there are people in our space like that. Microsoft has a tool that they call ParaApps, which is actually in some ways fairly similar to Bubble. I don't think many people would see us as competitors because it's part of the Microsoft world. It's very integrated with Office and stuff like that. But no, I mean, the space is clearly heating up.

We see also some people on mobile trying to- Defunctable. Right. For instance, there is also like DropSource. There are some people doing things in our space. So it's eating up. It's not a big category yet and I'm hoping it's going to get much bigger soon. Cool.

Well, that's why we need you guys. Yeah, people like this? Okay. One question I'd like to ask is what sorts of ideas or technology, what sorts of things in this space do you feel like is people are paying too much attention to you just think it's like kind of in our space yeah in the future programming space if you should don't pay attention to like everyone talking about this but don't I don't think that's the right way to go to be honest I'm not trying to follow enough you know the technologies around yeah I'm busy enough I think you're saying the whole space is like, don't pay attention to just just work with customers.

It's a little bit that I do. I'm starting to see more and more startups like talking about AI and machine learning, like programming more efficient. I think it's going to be too far, to be honest. I think it's too fast. I don't know. I'm not definitely not an expert in machine learning and stuff like that. My feeling is let's try firstly to make programming that is easy to understand

before trying to automate it. Because at the end of the day, machine learning would be helpful if we can tell them a little bit what we want to build. And the best way to get there is to create something that understands our natural language, or at least that can be displayed on the screen in a way that is easier for a human to grasp instead of reading like these thousands of lines of code. So I think we're, it's a little bit too early to start putting some artificial intelligence into making the process easier.

Yeah, I would agree with that. Like right now, at Bubble, we don't use any of that to be honest. I mean we could start, but I think we have, there are a lot of things we can do just being normally smart, intelligent. We don't need to be artificially intelligent. Yeah. So that's for the next iteration. Got it.

Okay. Do you have a sense, I imagine you're like a business, you're thinking more about business stuff. Do you have a 10 year plan in terms of revenue or number of employees? Or how do you think about the future of Bubble in terms of the product and the business? So first is there is what we want to achieve. So we definitely want to become the new programming standard for any kind of organization. Individuals, large companies, a little bit like what Windows has achieved for using computers. We want

to do the same thing for programming computers. You want to be like a $10 billion, $100 billion company kind of thing. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not going to talk about valuations. Like, what are some valuations you want millions of people using? Basically, what we want to achieve is, in a few years, when someone needs to build software, the first way it's going to go is, oh, I'm going to use Bubble. And then if it turns out that Bubble is limited in some ways,

you will hire a coder to build a plug-in that would be plugged in our interface, which already exists, by the way. We already have this system to build plug-ins, but not many people use it yet. So that's what we want to have. Now what that means in terms of headcount, market cap or sales, honestly, I don't know.

I would say I hope we can keep the team as small as possible. I don't think, I think at some point having too many people makes the organization a little bit too slow to evolve. But we'll see how that goes. And in the short, so in the short term, a little bit too slow to evolve, but we'll see how it goes. In the short term, we really want to expand the no-code category, and not just about BottleWall,

just in general. We want people to stop thinking that if you don't know how to code, basically it's over for you if you want to start a business or build something in an existing business. So that's the first step. And then slowly start getting more and more developers to use Bubble, to build plugins, and to see that actually they would save a ton of time building Bubble for existing stuff

and just spend time coding new things. Like, for instance, building a simple web app where you have an account management system and a database on Bubble takes a few hours. If you were to code that by hand, that would actually take you more time. You have to handle Heroku or whatever hosting solution you're using.

With Bubble, everything just scales out of the box. So we want developers to start realizing that it's more efficient for them to use this. And as soon as something is missing, to start writing code because we let them do that. And then slowly, when that happens, at some point, it will become the new standard. Now, I can't tell when that will happen hopefully sooner

than 10 years realistically it's going to take at least like 5 I don't know we'll see yeah I mean my goal

at some point is you know healthcare.gov all those websites run on bubble yeah I guess that would take

some time yeah totally I see the vision it's very clear to me I my disconnect I don't I don't need to talk about valuations. It seems to me like in order to accomplish something like that brand, you need a lot of people, a lot of capital, a lot of people working on this. Do you think maybe you could do it without raising like $10, $50, $100 million and hiring 100 people? Honestly, we'll see. I don't know. One thing to keep in mind is, you know, that's what people talk about as a 10x engineer,

is the more technology advances, the more one very good engineer can do a ton of stuff. And so, like until three or four months ago, it was two guys and we were handling about 80,000 users. 80,000 end users? No, bubble users. How many end users? I don't know, like probably at least five million page views a month or something and it was just two guys. Would that have been possible ten years ago? No. In ten years or five years probably we could handle, two guys could handle ten times that. Actually in fact if you use bubble it's even more demultiplied. So it's hard to base, you know, headcount projections based on past because, you know, technology can progress.

Yeah, like Instagram was like a billion-dollar company with like four or five people, yeah. Yeah, or maybe a little bit more with like WhatsApp, you know, they have like, I think like 20 engineers, you know, for this crazy valuation and crazy number of users. So I don't know. In terms of fundraising, we've been fortunate enough to have things go pretty well without raising money. Now we have six people.

We're probably going to be eight people, honestly, as soon as possible. We're looking for people now. Would you like to make a pitch? Well, if you're interested in really finding what programming means and make it visual please reach out to us we'd love to talk to you. Your email is at the best way? Yeah it's jobs at bubble.is we're looking right now for us experienced engineer and potentially a designer actually. But yeah so right now bootstrapping lets us hire these people and still you know be profitable. If at some point it turns out

that we're in a situation where it's pretty clear that investing money will return in more revenue and maybe we pull the trigger. Like marketing maybe? Maybe yeah there are a lot of things we need to figure out before being in that position then maybe we'll see. We did have some investor interest earlier last Maybe. Maybe, yeah. There are a lot of things we need to figure out before being in that position. Then maybe we'll see. We did have some investor interest earlier last year. Like some funds reached out. It was not the right time for us to raise anything because it was just, we were making

too much money. We could hire people. It was just the two of us. Like I wouldn't want to have an investor part of the picture at the time. We might, and you know, right now our revenue is still growing like, most of the time double digits every month. Right, it's growing by double digit percentage every month? Like 10.

10% growth every month? Wow. Yeah, I mean we have ups and downs, but I think the compound average growth rate since our product launch in October 2015 is like 16% every month on average. Can I invest? My God. Well, hopefully no. I mean, hopefully we won't raise money.

Oh man. We'll see. That's amazing. Congratulations, that's awesome. I mean, it's okay. I mean, we're not, you know, huge yet. I mean, I think we've only captured a very tiny part of the market.

Like, I think the market is definitely like a thousand times bigger than what we currently see. We still have a lot of work. Cool. One of the phrases that I've heard you say that I really like is that Bubble is going to be a slow revolution.

Can you tell me a little bit more about that? I can't say Bubble is going to be a slow revolution, but I think visual programming is going to be slow. Business people building applications themselves is going to be a slow revolution, but I think visual programming is going to be slow. And business people building applications themselves is going to be a slow revolution. And the reason for that is it's pretty hard for a large organization to convert to Bubble. Like, you know, it's a big risk. It's a risky move for them, you know.

Firstly, they need to tell their whole IT department that they're going to have to work very differently and in some ways may not be as relevant as they used to be. Like a lot of people have to change the way they work. And so I think what's going to happen that is more likely to happen is new companies will be using these new technologies, hopefully bubble or like competing solutions. And slowly these new companies will be more and more.

And at some point, you know, they're going to start being more than 50% of the market because of how companies live, you know, they're going to start being more than 50% of the market because of how companies live, you know, some companies die and new companies are started. And that will take like a few years. At some point, we'll reach a critical mass and then I think things will accelerate. But at that time, I think I would almost say the revolution will have already happened. But that's probably some, and then it will be much faster. So that will not be slow anymore.

But that's, I think and then it will be much faster, so that we don't be slow anymore, but that's, I think, many years in the future. Like, I think I'm ready to be working in this for the very long term because it's not going to happen quickly. Got it. Yeah, so it sounds like your sales strategy is instead of hiring salespeople, you're just going to wait

until the companies that you want to sell to hire people who already know bubble. Well, I mean, we can't be entirely passive because if you're passive, things don't happen. But yeah, like for Bubble right now, I think we need to invest more in community marketing, making sure that people know that we can build things without code. I'm not sure the next hire we should do is an account manager and a salesperson that calls companies. Because honestly, if we and a salesperson that calls companies. Because honestly, if we had a salesperson right now that would every day call companies, I'm not exactly

sure what they would tell them because they would tell them, hey, why don't you just get rid of everything you've done so far and start from scratch and bubble? That's a very tough sell. So it's more about educating the market, conveying the vision that you can build things without code. And yes, at some point what will happen is that from the inside those companies will hire younger staff or people that have already played with Bubble that will bring us in. But that will take some time. Yeah. And you also mentioned that it's like a marketing thing.

The more success stories in Bubble, the less people will be embarrassed, you said, to admit that they use Bubble. Yeah, it's a little bit the initial we had at the beginning where some people were raising money and not necessarily saying they had used Bubble because it was a new technology. It's like a secret. Yeah, but this is something that we're starting to see much better.

Last week, one of our customers in Paris announced the two million dollar round, two million euros, a little bit more, seed round and they were started on bubble. Did they disclose that? Yeah actually, the investors actually after reached out to us, like to have a chat. So it's starting and those things will get better and the more success stories we have, I mean a two million dollar round is great but it's not, you know, Instagram. When we start having bigger companies that get more visible, at some point where they will say, oh, by the way, I'm not technical, I build out on Bubble, and then our marketing

will be finished. Game has changed. Wow. But that will take some time. Yeah, but you just need one. Maybe not. Maybe not. Maybe that will go faster. Yeah, maybe one of the companies that you already have will take off. Yeah. I mean, but it's a number game because, you know, unfortunately most startups don't do as well as Instagram.

So you need a lot of companies so that one of them becomes a big thing. Not necessarily as big as Instagram, but a big company. Yeah, well they say, you know, when there's a gold rush you sell shovels. Yeah, that's exactly what Bubble is. I don't mind being compared to a shovel. Great, well thanks for taking the time. This has been really fun. Yeah, thank you very much for having me.