This Week in Startups - E1021: Bubble Co-CEO & Co-Founder Emmanuel Straschnov built a no-code platform to empower the next generation of programmers, shares insights on bootstrapping to over 300k users, developing skills while scaling & more

Episode Date: January 24, 2020

0:53 Jason intros Bubble CEO Emmanuel Straschnov 4:25 Defining "no-code" and how Bubble differs from other no-code tools? 9:04 How much more efficient is Bubble than popular coding schools? How advanced do you have to be to learn Bubble? 14:16 Emmanuel shares Bubble's origin story and explains what Bubble unlocks for startups? 16:51 Emmanuel demos Bubble & explains notrealtwitter.com 21:17 What are some Bubble success stories? 26:12 Why did Emmanuel wait 7 years to raise their Seed Round? 29:23 Will no-code decrease the demand for developers over time? 33:26 What is Bubble making per user per year? What will that be in 5 years? 34:32 When did VCs take interest in Bubble? 39:43 How are Emmanuel's managerial skills developing as Bubble scales their team? 46:13 What is the core beachhead for Bubble? 48:11 Is there a no-code education platform in the works?

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Get 10% off your first month at BetterHelp.com slash twist. That's BetterHELP.com slash twist. The hardest thing to do as a founder in the early days is find a technical co-founder. How many times do you hear that? I can't build my startup. I can't find a developer. I'm up against Google and Facebook paying developers at King's Ransom. We're just not competitive. There aren't enough developers in the world. All of that complaining. All of that nonsense is ending because of a movement called no code. And people are combining that no code movement with the lean startup movement, which is a movement to use the most efficient product or service, the most efficient demo, what we call. call an MVP, minimum viable product, to answer questions about your product. So as an example, if you were going to build a service like Calm.com, a meditation app, the minimum viable product could be something like a landing page with a single audio file on it and a video of the ocean and just

waves coming in and out of Honolay Bay on Kauai, gentle and relaxing, and then maybe a voiceover. and you could build that in an hour or two. And in fact, that's what Com did. Com built the minimum viable product, got people addicted to it, and then add it and built on it, answering questions along the way about what their users wanted. This is super efficient, and it keeps you from spending six months building a product only to find out you don't have product market fit. In other words, consumers don't need or want or love the product you've built.

and as we all know, startups are about speed. The founders who can run more tasks at cheaper prices can learn more than the founders who go on the product death march, building a product in a vacuum for six months, 12 months. That's how we actually used to do it in the 90s and the 80s before that when people were building desktop software. You'd spend two years building a product only to find out nobody wanted it. That is ending because of a movement called No Code. No, C-O-D-E. If you search for no-code or the hashtag no-code on something like Twitter, Reddit, or Hacker News, you're going to find tons of people talking about companies like Squarespace, Zapier, Webflow,

and, of course, bubble.io. And the CEO and co-founder of Bubble is Emmanuel Strachnov. Yep. I got it? Yep. Oh, praise Jesus. Straschnov, I got a name right. My dyslexia worked with me today.

You heard my little preamble. You've been doing no code for about seven years. Is that right? Yeah, almost eight now. Almost eight years. And for people who are fans of the show, back in 2011, we had one of the original no-code products and founders, Anthony, from Squarespace on episode 112. In 2016, we had Zapier's founder, Wade.

That's episode 626. Howie from Airtable, which is kind of, can be used as part of NoCo was on episode 814. And then last year we had Vlad from Webflow on episode 973. So those are all episodes you can go reference in the archive of this week in startups over the last decade. And Squarespace was one of the first to make it super easy for non-technical people to build a gorgeous website using templates. And you could really edit these things and they added shopping. And now we're moving on to this sort of next phase where people are including a little more code.

I think you and WebFlow are probably the most advanced tools for building websites now. Explain to the audience what you define no code as and then how you would differentiate, say, what you're doing at Bubble.I.O. with Squarespace versus Zapier versus Webflow. So two questions there. So the way we define no code is some movement to empower people to do things that used to require code and to empower them to do that without code. And the gain is twofold. The gain is that it's much faster to build

because usually the abstraction we're providing is a high-level abstraction. What does this mean when you use the word abstraction in this context? Well, that means is that at the end of the day what the computer is going to consume is, you know, zero and ones. Right.

And over the course of the last 40 years of technology, we've been adding layers of abstractions to make it more easier to manipulate for people. Right. So if you write a web app today in React, you know, you don't write zero and ones, but you're going to write button.on click, for instance, if you want to trigger a click or something.

What we're trying to do with no code is to add another layer. And that new layer is a new thing, which is actually not that new to be fair. People have tried in the 90s to do this, but I think it was a little bit too early. But of the recent wave, the new abstraction is purely visual, which means the medium has changed. Instead of putting your hands on the keyboard and typing, you're going to use a mouse. Right. And so what we see what we're doing is just a natural extension of what has been

happening over the last 30 years. In many ways, when you think about the jump from MSDOS to Windows that happened in the late 80s, is no code. You know, MSDOS was code to use a computer, Windows was no code to use a computer. What we're trying to do is about programming. And so to get to your second question about how are we different from the other tools, in particular early players like Squarespace in the early decade, last decade, we're going much more for functionality. functionality has very customized granular behavior. You know, what if the user is locked in and he lives in Paris, what should happen?

If he lives in London, what should happen in San Francisco? Enabling people to define those kind of customized behavior without code is what we do that a lot of players currently don't do. So it means, you know, adding a lot of logic, API connectivity, like we live in a world where most services now, we can leverage a ton of services via APIs. for people that are less technical, it's basically a way to leverage another service

by making some requests behind the scene, asking, you know, Stripe to do something and it returns a response. So we added connectivity to those APIs, database, and custom logic at a very granular level to empower people to create pretty much anything they want today. Like today, and I can honestly say that, I think we're the only people to do that.

You could literally build a product as complicated as Airbnb.com, as the web app, you know, on bubble. Other no-code tools. Without developers. Without developer. I mean, as a bubble developer, so I will never tell you it's going to take you like a day to do. Right. But you can probably, if you know how to use bubble very well,

you will get to a solid MVP of an Airbnb-type marketplace in a week to 10 days, and then you would polish it to get to something really, really powerful, probably in a month or two. And if you were writing the hard code as developers, that would take much longer. You're talking about three to six months. At least.

Yes. And so a way to look at this might be to say, hey, there was DOS going into something like Windows. So you went from, you know, instead of double clicking on a folder and seeing the files in it and dragging and dropping them around, maybe to a thumb drive or maybe into your email as an attachment, you used to have to do that with commands on the command line. Now we have websites that can be built, just like using a word processor on Squarespace. but then if there's some even higher level detail, like maybe including a Google map and doing some logic around a Google map or maybe processing payments with Stripes API,

that's the kind of stuff you're building in. Exactly. The next abstraction layer. So that's abstraction and a much more customizable interface and editor. And so the flip side, there is a little bit of a longer learning curve with us versus some of the other tools. Right.

Which I think is fine. I mean, this is something we embrace. I mean, when people start using our tool, we tell them it's going to take you, you know, five to ten hours to learn it. But then you will be pretty much as powerful as if you had been writing code for the last 10 years. But we embrace this thing that you have to learn the tool. And today we have a bunch of code schools opening, right? Tons of places you can go, general assembly, Lambda school, et cetera, to spend $20,000, nine months of your life to learn how to be a developer. you're telling me that these same group of people can spend zero dollars, watch a bunch of YouTube

videos, and in, let's call it, two weeks of doing projects, build something that would have taken somebody at Lambda School or, you know, General Assembly, nine months of education and $20,000 to learn. Yeah, well, you could also take classes to learn how to use bubble all the tools. In fact, it's already starting. So I think what's going to happen is that at some point, these coding schools will have to the next mainstream technology, and if it happens to be bubble, they will teach bubble. The reason why these schools can charge that amount of money is because the market is still not

ready to only hire visual developers on bubble, for instance. So you still call them developers? Yeah, definitely. Do they have to have the aptitude that is necessary to become a traditional coder? Let's use the word traditional coder. So in other words, if 20% of the population is capable of reasonably getting through a code school. Is it now with tools like Bubble or Webflow, 50% of people could get through it in your

estimation? College educated people, let's say. Yeah, so college educated people definitely, I mean, the way I usually describe when people ask us, how technical do you need to be to use Bubble? Yeah, that's kind of the question I'm asking. Right. So if you can build like a family simple budget on Excel, you know, this is the money we're making this year or this month and this is how much we need to spend, you know, for housing,

gifts for the kids and everything. If you can build that and understand exactly what you're doing, you can definitely use bubble. Right. When we get back from this quick break, I want you to show me the product. And I want you to explain to me what impact this will have in the next five to 10 years in the development of startups. And who is embracing your tools today? Is it startups? Is it big companies? Is it developers who are doing consulting when we get back after this message on this week's Hey, you want to turn your idea into a business? You want to turn it into a website? It's time to get to work.

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Your friends use it. I use it. Everybody loves Squarespace because it provides beautiful, customizable templates that are also powerful because they have e-commerce built in. Now you don't have to have a beautiful website and e-commerce on the side and figure out how to glue it all together. Nope, you just use Squarespace and you can buy a domain choosing from over 200 extensions. Again, you just have to go to another site to get your domain.

But what Squarespace has done is they put this all together with the perfect, beautiful, customizable template. And of course, you know, they keep adding features but charging you the same price. So they added search engine optimization. They added analytics. They added free and secure hosting as well as their award-winning 24-hour support. And it's all optimized for mobile. So you know, you open some websites.

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And he makes a photography template and creates a website within minutes. Here it is, superhuman wallpaper.com, to showcase superhuman inbox zero images. And you can see how fast he's doing that. Go to Squarespace.com right now for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use that offer code twist TWIST and save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. I know you don't need the discount, maybe, a lot of you. But go and take that 10% so they know that we sent you. Go to Squarespace.com right now.

It's a great product. And thank you, Squarespace. You're one of the longest supporters of the podcast. And on behalf of the founders who listen and come on the show, appreciate that. Okay, let's get back to this episode. All right, welcome back to This Week in Startups, the podcast domain named This Week in Startups.com on Twitter at TWA Startups. And at the end of the show, Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz are going to call in and talk about

their latest investments. So stay tuned for the end of the show. If you want to follow us on Instagram at TWA startups and today on the program, Emmanuel from Bubble, you can go to bubble.io. This is part of my fascination with no code. interest in this space is not that I want to do this. It's not that I care necessarily about your business, Emmanuel. I'm sure it's going to do well. What I care about is what your business could enable. I love investing in salespeople, marketers, people who understand customers really well, like customers support people. But they have had to, before today, be paired with

a developer in order to get funding, in order to get a product to move forward. And the promise of startups being able to get to, say, year two, with 250K in revenue without ever having a developer, is the greatest unlock I can think of right now for our economy and for entrepreneurship. Do you share in this belief? And then who is using your product? So, yeah, we definitely change this belief, and this is actually the reason why we started the company in the first place.

seven years ago, seven and a half years ago, at a time where no code was not a thing. The reason we started that, because we were in New York, and I think New York was an interesting place for that, where you had a ton of very bright domain experts that you just described that were just not able to get their product live and test things. They had ideas. They had ideas. And they knew their customers in their market because they were working in fashion, media, media, advertising, a lot of things, exactly. Publishing, Wall Street, New York Capital of the World. And so to give you actually the original story behind the company.

Go ahead, origin story. It was not my idea. It was my business partner's ideas, Josh. A shout out, Josh. Yep. And so what happened with him is that he started helping someone that was a domain expert, working on a product. And it was for a professional image keyworders.

So people that, you know, that put keywords on images. That was before machine learning and before Instagram. It was like back in 2010. Yeah. And so Josh helped him build this product, which turned out to be a great product, but for not that many people, not many people had that profession. And so eventually it was not enough to sustain the life of two people,

including an engineer, Josh being the engineer, that is not cheap. And so Josh ended quitting, and he ended feeling pretty bad about it because it essentially killed the business, the business start. And when you was reflecting on that experience, he felt like this product really deserved to exist. It was making the life of those people, these professional image keyword is definitely better. and the fact that technology is so expensive is why it was not sustainable.

And so he started thinking, how can we reduce the cost of technology so that, you know, one person that is a domain expert could actually create something like this and make a living out of it. It probably would not be the next Facebook, but could very much be, you know, a good lifestyle business for him and his family. Right. And that was the idea behind bubble. And so what we're talking to is still the same people today, actually. Like, non-technical founders is a major bulk of our users. And what the pitch we tell them is exactly what we tell.

We don't necessarily tell them, hey, this is a new way to program. We tell them this is how you can get ideas off the ground for pretty much nothing, except like a few weeks of your time, and then you can start testing them. All right, let's pull up a demo here, and we'll SportsCaster, for those of you listening. I see we've pulled up what is the editor. Right. It looks to me like some combination of Photoshop or maybe balsamic, some of those. I would say PowerPoint.

Powerpoint or InVision. Yeah. PowerPoint's a good one because you have objects and elements on the screen. And so we see here we're creating a new thing and the new thing. So what we saw just earlier is, you know, you kind of build the different elements on the page. So for instance, a map and input a button. And then you program it by creating some workflows, which we just saw on the screen and the workflow being, you know, when the user clicks on this button, do this, do this, do that.

And this, this and that could be, you know, for instance, create an entry in the database, sign the user up, send an email, connect to Stripe. charge of credit card to stripe to be more accurate, delete something, modify something. And we've basically pre-built all those elementary blocks looking at, you know, websites that everybody knows, you know, like Twitter, Facebook, Airbnb. We're looking at, you know, all the interactions you could be having as a user. And we looked into how can we create those elementary Lego blocks, basically, to let people build those workflows.

And we don't constrain you in any way in terms of how many workflows you can have on the page. You can have as many actions as you want in each workflow. So that's where you can start becoming extremely customizable. But we got to the point where, back to what I was saying earlier, a website, you know, like Twitter can be built on Bubble just by clicking. Going to take a lot of actions, you know, a lot of clicks and everything, but the medium is not going to be writing code. Has anybody built a Twitter clone on Bubble.io yet?

Actually, yes. If you go to NotRealTwitr.com. Not real Twitter? You did that as an internal project to demo? So truth is, I did not do it. One of our users based in San Francisco did it. Got it. to try.

And does it work? And do you think it could scale? So it works. I mean, it's not the full Twitter. Like you can create accounts, tweets, follow people, retweets, send the direct messages. So that's the core of Twitter.

That's hilarious. And does it scale? You would scale probably to a few, yeah, it can scale to like probably a few hundred thousand users. I'm not going to pretend we could scale today to where Twitter is as a social network. But maybe to a million daily active users or 100,000? 100,000. Yeah, definitely.

And that's very much where all of our engineering work is, by the way, like most of the work we're doing right now is towards scale. Because back to the fact that we're mostly going for our entrepreneurs, we are, and that's something very important. We're not trying to build something, you know, to just make MVPs. I don't, our goal is that there's no difference between, you know, the prototype with the mock-up, the MVP and the full-scale production software. So the goal is...

And we want to keep them all along. Let me, we state that back to you. The goal is to have the prototyping software, which could be something like, I guess, people use balsamic to make mockups and InVision, right? Those are the tools for making those. You want to be able to have those, what do they call those mock-up tools? Yeah, probably. What are the top ones? I know InVision.

I think InVisian is leaning the way now, yeah. Yeah. So I get all the time for my startups. Here's a link to an InVision mock-up of how our next 2.0 app is going to look. And you can actually, it's clickable and you can use it on your phone. But it's not the actual app. You want to see the InVision and then the MVP, which is what bubble and Webflow and others create, then eventually become the production.

And all of that on the same platform. So right now, those three things are done on a tool like InVision, then a tool in the middle like NoCode. And then in the final instance, they're done manually on something like Amazon Web Services using some, or maybe Heroku or something. And using engineers, yeah. And using engineers. The first step seems to be done, correct?

Yep. Like the envision step plus the MVP. Check, you've done that. You can do that on bubble, yes. You can do that on bubble. It takes longer because you're actually making something functional. But over it's shorter because you don't redo the work. Correct.

That's 100%. Now, so we're 100% done with that step, that paradigm shift. The next paradigm shift would be to go into production. And you're how close to getting that percent done? 50 percent, 25 percent. When will you be done with that when you could say, you know what, this thing could go Twitter to the moon. It could go to a million daily active users or 10 million. So we already have a few major success stories.

One of our users in San Francisco has processed over the last four years over a billion dollars of business volume. We can get in the detail of what they do. It's a fintech company selling loans to homeowners that want to install a solo pattern on the roof. a process over a billion dollars of loans through a bubble-built software. You're kidding. No, I'm not. Wow. I'm not.

That's very real. Because that was literally my next question is, what's the biggest success story? You can say the name of the company or no? Yeah, I can. It's called dividend finance. Dividend finance. Finance. We'll pull that up.

Okay, dividend finance. So if somebody wants to get a solar array put on their home, right. They can walk through this workflow, do their order. Yeah, I think the business starts more with the installer. So you start with an installer, and the stellar shows up with an iPad, and you apply for a loan. Ah, fantastic.

And so the web addict created. How long, when did they start building this? So a long time ago, actually, 2014. 2014, they both started building it on a bubble. And they still running on us today. Wow. And did they just contact you at some point, or you just watch the traffic go up? When did you first become aware of them?

Well, pretty early on, because in 2014, Bubble was not what it is today. And so at that time, they had to talk to us a little bit to confirm a few things. We had to add some features just at their request. We did invest a lot on that particular relationship because we want those success stories. And it's actually something we keep doing, honestly. Like when the users emails us and tells us, hey, I have my interview with YC, we are very careful to make sure that things are great for them. Because no code is cool now, but it will become a real thing. And then my goal actually is that no code is not even a thing anymore.

And just, you know, development happens with visual interfaces and we don't even talk about no code. Yeah. Will only happen once we start having, you know, 50% of the YC batch on. bubble or like a no-co tool. What do you think? Two to three times the number of people will be able to develop, five times the number of developers? No, I would say 50. The reason is, I think for one person that can write good code, I can think, I think there are

at least 50 people that are wired the right way, but just were not exposed to code as a class kids. So I think the order of magnitude is much bigger than that. Will this lead in 10 years to the demise? of the high paid elite coder and will it create a lowering of developer salaries? Answer that question when we get back on this week at startups. Are you tired of dull and ineffective meetings? Are you tired of everybody not being able to hear each other or see each other and then getting distracted and doing their email or texting or watching Netflix?

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Let's get back to this awesome episode. All right. Everybody go check out bubble.io and build a website and then send it to me. And I'll give you 100 grand. You spend 12 weeks at me at the launch accelerator. And stick around for the end of the episode when Ben Horowitz and Mark and Dresen are calling in to talk about Ben's, latest book at the end of the show, a special segment. And my guest today, Emmanuel from bubble.io

is making no-codes offer. You toiled away for six or seven years. Nobody cared. Nobody funded you. Nobody liked you. Nobody liked you. Let's be honest. Nobody would. Our users loved us. But nobody else. Yeah. But at the end of the day, users, the investors didn't care. What did they think? They didn't like you. Why didn't they like you? What didn't they like about? They thought it was a crazy dream that would never work? Actually, no. I think they thought it had already been tried many, many times over and not succeeded. Because if you think about it, you know, FileMaker ProN Access were some kind of these tools, front page to some access.

Front page and Hot Dog and all of, what was Netscape's one? Netscape came with an HTML builder. So these were the whizzy wig. What you see is what you get, HTML builders. Exactly. And they put you in that bucket. Yeah, I mean, they put you in the bucket of creating things visually. And there is this misconception that we hear from a lot of engineers that, you know, oh, that can't work.

It won't be flexible enough at some point to go low level. And there's no hard evidence for that, except that in the past, it hasn't worked. And the proof that it hasn't worked, to be honest, is, you know, there has been a lot of attempts in the 90s, early 2000. And we still teaching JavaScript in coding schools. Right. So that's why I think we got a lot of skepticism in the early days. and something has happened over the last six months or last year where more tools, and I take some pride in being one of them, but I think tools like Webflow and Zapier have

also shown that it's actually possible to have non-technical people do real things. And then... Real complex things. Real complex business processes. Exactly. I mean, Zapier is the big one for us. When somebody comes to one of our websites like Angel.com, and they apply to come, we have a Zapp that puts it into a Google sheet that we can retarget.

people. We can send them an automatic email through MailChimp. We can put them into type form and send grid or send them into Slack. We do all this crazy processing that saves us. Without being technical. And I'm really trying to train our whole team up on how to do all this stuff. And once they learn how to do it, then you've got regular folks not having to talk to developers and lose stuff in translation and just build it themselves.

And it goes so fast. It goes so much faster. And it gets done to the specification that matters. And what you just say is actually very core in why I think what we're doing has to happen and is important, is that people that use the software should be the one building it. Got it. Because a lot of, you just use a lost in translation sentence. That is fundamentally the problem with engineering.

Like so far, engineers most of the time are transcribing what someone else has in his mind. But the problem is that there are so many degrees in dimensions where you could go that usually goes wrong. And you never have something that you're actually expecting. And so the whole point of these Noco tools is to have, you know, empowering the user to create the product for himself or for people like him. So, you know, if someone wants to solve back to this professional image keyworder Josh was working with in the first days, he was building a product for himself and his people in his profession, and he probably would build the best product better than if an engineer would build it. So you think you can have 50 times the number of developers in the world?

I hope so, you know, at least. At least. If there are 50 times more supply of developers, It would follow that developer salaries and the covetedness of developers, the war for developers, would end. But when I ask you this question, you kind of shook your head a little bit. Why? Because there's just so much demand and there's so much software to be made that it doesn't matter if we had 50 times. We still don't have enough.

Yes. Like, Mark Andreessen says software is eating the world. It's only starting. There are so many places where technology is not being used because of the lack of. of engineering. Yeah. Like, I don't worry for engineers. Engineers will always make a very good living.

And in fact, if I wanted to, honestly, when I see, you know, companies like Uber and Lyft, great companies having thousands of engineers where they essentially do a very similar product, that makes me really, really sad. Like, this is amazing talents they have to replicate similar things. These people should be working on new things and solving real, I mean, they solve a problem. And, you know, maybe it's solving the environment problem that does require probably writing very smart code. So I think right now we have a tendency where we see engineers mostly in some kind of businesses where we think code is needed. But if we were to actually free them, free startups

from needing too many of them in that field, people that can write good code to solve complex problems will be useful in any dimension of the world and probably make the world a much better place. Yeah, I tend to agree with you that my feeling is everybody is going to have, you know, a third of the coding skills of the coding class. So instead of it being that we're going to increase the number of coders dramatically, I think that will occur as well. But there's also the possibility that just a third of what coders do right now will go downstream to people who are non-coters.

So essentially the repetitive, you know, stuff that developers probably don't enjoy doing anyway will just move down. In the same way, when you had to do a mail merge back in the day, that was done by some technical person. then mail merge got built into Microsoft Word or something. Exactly. And now, you know, the first year at a college student or the two-year associate degree receptionist, you can just walk past the receptionist and say, can you do a mail merge and send

this to 100 people? And they're like, of course I can. And that used to be the height of like a technological project in the 80s was to do a mail merge and send, you know, a hundred letters automatically. That was what developers were doing back then. And that's why I think engineers should be extremely excited about no code, actually, because the true point of technology is to increase leverage, how much you can do with the same number of hands. Well, engineers should be all in favor of, sparing them of the repetitive tasks that can be done by no coders or visual developers and focus on the more innovative stuff. What changed in this six-year lonely journey of you just obsessing with your customers and beliefs?

in this product in the face of investors not carrying and then last year. What changed? Did they start contacting you or did you start charging your customers and you started making 10 or 50K a month? What do you charge for the software? So, I mean, it scales with how much user you have. Okay. So it's very free, actually. We have a very generous premium because we want people to learn. I want low friction. We have a lot of people in colleges. So it's free to start. Anybody can go use it right now. If you want to start using your own domain name and not have a bubble-branded banner at the bottom. Got it's going to cost you.

It starts at $29 a month. Great. And then you can grow up. So for as little as $360 a year, you can actually do an unbranded site. And if you want to give a little branding to bubble and use the URL, it's still free. It's free free. Yeah. Does it cap the free at some usage?

Or if somebody built something that got a million people a day, you'd still want it to be free. So the logo? The way it works is that we rate limit how much CPU time you can use. So it will get slower. If you're on a free plan and have a million users a day, it's going to be very slow. Got it. you can add more capacity. So a little bit similar to what AWS would do.

Of the paid users, what's the median spend per year? What are the number of users? $800 a year. Got it. So this is still in what we would call the Soho, small office, home office, or SMB kind of space, startup space. DevSumer, startup space, prosumer, I guess is how we would call it. And if we project out in five years, what do you think the average spend of those people will be? It's actually a tricky question because I hope that some of them, we've a little bit like a VC model, you know, like a lot of our users never really grow because honestly the startups are not necessarily working very well.

Right. And then some of them can go much better. I think today's the highest monthly payment we have is $8,000 month. Oh, wow. $100,000 of your client. That's amazing. Right. But honestly, we probably save them half a million bucks in engineering talent.

So they're doing, they're pretty happy. So it will go up with some people, but I also hope that at some points our reach with new people that try things is getting much bigger. And so maybe the average will not go up. What I'm care more is the number of active builders on the platform. And VC started knocking on your door when no code started getting buzzed, or you decided, you know what, let's go out and see if we can raise money because I know you raised a $6 million seat in 2019, your seventh year. Right.

Most people raised the seed in the second year. We decided to raise. So first of all, we were profitable all this time. So we actually reached five full-time employees, 10? No, so it was just the two of us for five years. And we started putting a team together in 2017. And we were profitable with about 10 people, yes, before we raised the money. We decided to raise money.

We felt like we were, it was not necessarily a competitive landscape thing. It was more like we felt we were ready to have like a larger scale. And so we went to go to CVCs. When we raised, because we raised exactly a year ago, that was in February of last year, no code was not really a thing at that point. Did somebody lead that round or is it just a party round? Yeah, a fund called Signal Fire. Oh, Signal Fire, I've heard of them.

Yeah, Signal Fire led around. Yeah. And now since then, with Webflow going bonkers, is everybody knocking on your door now? Are you getting, like, too much attention from VCs? That's typically what happens. I get a lot of emails lately, yeah. Yeah, and they're just like, can we meet,

can we just throw $10 million at this? We need to have a no-code company? Yeah, but I mean, I believe in very, we're very ambitious and we take risks on the technology side, so I believe in being a little bit conservative on the financing side. I think it can harm businesses. One thing I'll say for sure that had we raised the seed round very early on, I don't think I would be here today.

Why? Because it's a very slow development cycle to build a product, to overcome that skepticism. Overcoming that skepticism means, well, first of all, finding people that really need your platform and are willing to work on a product that is pretty limited at first, improving it. Like, you're not going to have exponential curves in terms of user acquisition.

I think for the first five to six years. years. And so you don't want to, except if you have like a reputation that puts you in a situation to tell investors, hey, trust me, in seven years it's going to be great. Yeah. But we were nobody's. You know, we were like unknown. And by the way, look at Webflow's trajectory.

I mean, they actually did bootstrap for a long time. They raised a seed round and then they bootchrap until six months ago. Sometimes things take time and venture capital is not patient capital. It's impatient capital, which is kind of the point. if you're taking jet fuel, it's not to take a leisurely ride around the park on a bicycle. Yeah, I wouldn't say it was a leisurely ride, but it was a very focused ride. Yeah. Like, honestly, the first two years, I think we had like 30 users.

But they were on the platform like 12 hours a day. Right. And completely building their businesses on us. One of them, after three years being that company I just mentioned, like the dividend finance business. All right. When we get back from this final break, tell us. what is the primary use case today and how you stack up to a juggernaut, like say Shopify. Are people using it for e-commerce or is it for other applications when we get back on this weekend startups?

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Thank you to Better Help for providing great service to founders and for supporting this week in startups, which also supports founders as well. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, final segment here. We're going around the horn. And then we'll get Ben Horowitz on the line. Mark Andreessen, talk about the latest book. Emmanuel is here from bubble.io.

It's been doing it for seven years. And they raised $6 million last year. Got what, 20 people now, 15, 20 people? 22 people. 22 people. So it's about to get miserable. When you hit 30, then it gets hard. It's great.

Keep it under 30. I'm discovering a lot of new. I'm developing new skills now. Managing skills. Yep. Yeah, you have to actually talk to people and make check in with them, take them for walking talks. And essentially now it's like, if you have 22 people, every month, every month half the people have either a really serious personal issue that they're contending

with or a professional one. So you're basically got a dozen to two dozen serious problems. And you know what the worst part is? You're only aware of like 10% of them because they don't tell you. Probably, yeah. It's brutal. Management is so hard. I went to this Bloomberg fundraiser last night.

Not fundraiser. It's not taking any money. He just had a cocktail party to talk about what he wants to do as president. And you just think about how much management experience he has. And he said, you know, this job is just all about management. And that's what happens. When you get past 20, 30 people, it's no longer about just the customers and the product. It's about managing the people who focus on the customers and the product.

But also that creates leverage to you as a founder. Of course. If you can add those management skills, which as a developer, you kind of have the opposite of management skills. you have focused introverted skills like on the screens. You've got to add them. Have you been learning them or did you just have them naturally? The management skills? Yeah.

I mean, I'm definitely learning on the job. How's that going? I think Josh and I, I mean, Josh used to work at Bridgewater. Oh, he worked at Bridgewater? Right. So he saw that management,

some management practices firsthand. Those management practices are insane, right? Like they're just... Right, so they saw what... They brutalize each other. Isn't that the idea? They're very open with each other. Yeah, I mean, open with...

would be the kind way to say it. I thought that their whole concept was to just absolutely brutalize each other to make each other better. I think it's about like very direct feedback, which sometimes can be bad and can be good. We're not necessarily applying everything from bridge order, but there are a few things actually that, like what? Like the directness in feedback is something that we actually value a lot. How do you get people to give direct feedback?

How do you get them to not couch it and sugarcoat it? And then how do you get people to not be devastated when they get people? Well, when someone actually give rough feedback, especially to his manager or even the founder, we actually say, oh, if that was smart, good point. You know, and then you can tell them that this is the right thing to do when they see problems. Got it. So that's how we try to do this. And on my side, you know, I was in business school, so I was exposed. I mean, an MBA doesn't necessarily teach you how to manage people, but certainly exposes you to some of the principles you should be thinking about.

In your mind, what is great management? while it's finding ways to people do better than they even thought they could on the job. Got it. And it's about all. I mean, it's hard. Like sometimes, you know, creating the conditions for them to express themselves in a way that they didn't even expect. I think that's a pretty good definition. I mean, if you can inspire and support people to do their best work, even if you push them a little bit and the challenges are very hard, the right people will enjoy that.

They will react very well. They will react very well to it because if you're pushing people to do their best work and you're creating an environment that supports them, then even if it's hard at times, they can look back at the time they worked for it and say, I did my best work there. And I'm a hard boss or have been traditionally. Maybe I'm a little soft now. But almost universally, people tell me like I was pretty hardcore, but that they're so proud of the work they did. And they went to other places and the people just didn't work as hard. and the work wasn't as good and so they felt like those years

were kind of lost years I don't think people like to lose years on average work or at least not exceptional people they don't like lose days either honestly yeah it's so people don't like to go home thinking

oh what did they do today yeah I created my I was tired of managing people so I created the most lightweight management tool I call it the EOD the end of day report and so I just tell people at the end of the day before you leave

send in short email to the team or dump it in Slack of the three or four bullet points of what you got accomplished that day. And then some people kind of added to it and they said in the morning, I write an email about what I want to send at the end of the day, what I hope to accomplish. And then during the day, keep that email up on my monitor. And oh, here it is. Yeah, the power of the EOD report.

I wrote a blog post called Lean Management, the power of the EOD report. And let me tell you something. You ask people to spend five minutes writing this EOD report. It was amazing to me. There were like maybe two people on the staff who just would forget. to write them or didn't write them or found it oppressive to write five minutes. And then we looked at what they actually did all day. And it turns out they weren't getting stuff done.

And then for the people who were getting stuff done, they loved writing them. They loved seeing their accomplishment. They loved seeing what they contributed to the team. They didn't find it oppressive as all. They felt like they were getting their recognition and they felt good about their work. And then the big unlock for me was when people left, we could look at their last two weeks of EODs. and say, what did they accomplish over this two-week period? What did we pay them in that pay period?

And is there a better way to do that? And if you looked at what somebody did over two weeks and you paid them, I don't know, $3,000 all in, they were a 70K employee or an 80K employee, you could say, I wonder if I could outsource that and get a better result for the same amount of money or if I could automate it with Zapier or bubble, right? And it turned out like there were people whose job was like, reading email and being in Slack and opening up packages and you're like, why am I spending money on this? They're not actually moving the needle forward. It's not a perfect system, but for

certain people, it's the perfect system. People who want to be left alone. Some people want to be micromanaged. Most people want to be left alone. What is the, and we'll put a link to that blog post in the show notes. What is the use case today, the most popular use case? Because I know you're up against Shopify, and Squarespace now does that. So I would assume building a beautiful website and building an e-commerce store, that's hard for you to compete in that area. Yeah, that's not our core. That's not your core.

What is the core now? What is the beachhead? Is it marketplaces? Yeah. So our core is really, you know, whenever today you're out of luck with existing tools, you know, like Squarespace, Shopify or Webflow, where you think, oh, I really need to find a tech co-founder to build this. That's where we come in.

Got it. And so we're mostly web. Some people use us native. but it's not something that... When you say native, you mean native web. Generating native applications. Yeah, so you wrap this in it. Right.

Some people do this, but we're much better to do it for the web. So someone that wants to build a web-based business where the website is a core of the product that you're selling. Like Shopify, if you sell physical goods, that's where you're going to be selling. The core of the business is actually setting the good, not the website to sell them, if you see what I mean. So practically, that's going to be, you know, fall under three categories, going to be marketplaces of some kind, social network,

works on some kinds, you know, like connecting people that care about the same thing, like a dribble behance type of things, for instance. Or productivity tools that you sell on a SaaS basis to automate something. So we have people that have built, you know, an invoicing tool for freelancers that is different from some of the existing tools tailored for one type of freelancer, for instance. Someone built a marketplace, you know, for docks on the harbor, so that you can share the docs for your boat, these kind of things. yeah.

But one thing I'll say that Bubble is so open-ended that it's not like we have a marketplace template, you know, you start really from a white page. You think about, you know, the database you want to put in place for your marketplace. And whether you're selling an apartment, a dock, whether it's, you know, a work type of marketplace where you sell a job, publish your job, it kind of is irrelevant for Bubble because we're a little bit lower level than this. So that's how open-ended is. So it's really open-ended.

I noticed, you know, before the show. show, we were looking for a demo video and there's just thousands of them or hundreds to thousands of them on YouTube on how to build bubble sites, how to build no code sites in general. Do you have a no code school? Do you have a no code training program? I see people kind of buzzing around this. And how important is education right now for you? So a great question. Education is critical. Probably more so far than some of the tools because we're more flexible. So flexibility comes with the ability to make mistakes, so it requires education.

Now, because of our bootstrapping history, we've outsourced a lot of that effort to the community. So if you go to our forum, for instance, you sit in forums that's extremely active where people help each other, and a lot of the videos we were looking at on YouTube like a minute ago were actually not built by us. So it is critical, but it's something

that the community has been doing on our behalf, which is great, by the way, and there's the best way to grow. We're probably going to look into internalizing that a little bit to have, like one set curriculum to, you know, make sure that everybody starts on the right foot. But I do believe that to create a successful thing like Bobol, you need a lot of users and create an ecosystem of, you know, freelancers, contributors.

And so you need to create this thing where people will actually start teaching other people how to use. Do you have a marketplace of the experts on the project? Because I would assume if somebody like me comes along and we have the syndicate.com and we've been coding up with traditional coders and it's been a little bit slow. And we've been building up, you know, basically not an angelous competitor, but more of a co-existor, like just a place where we can share deals with people and maybe automate it a little bit. But it was kind of, we started before the no-code thing and, you know, weren't really thinking of that. But if I wanted to hire a no-code developer or a no-code consultant.

We have a directory. Oh, you have a directory? Yeah. What did they charge per hour? Is it half of what? It depends. I mean, there is one company that's great. It's based in San Francisco.

Another one that is also very good in Moldavia, Eastern Europe. They're charging very different prices because of cost-tably. What are the rates? I'm just curious. And how do they compare to straight-up development shops? So I think the one I can think of in San Francisco would do a sprint over two weeks for probably 5K. So it's not that different from code.

However, you get the completed product after two weeks. Got it. Like that's where actually, they don't necessarily try to, when they're based in San Francisco, for instance, they don't necessarily try to compete on the rate, but they can deliver things way faster. Got it. And so he ended up being, I think, 50 times cheaper. Honestly, like, what we hear from users,

like sometimes we get users emailing and say, hey, you know, I was using an agency, now I'm using bubble. They mentioned a price difference between 10 to 15 times cheaper. So they were going to do 150K project and the no code came in at 10. Yeah, so exactly. Which means the no code got done in a month

and the code might have taken six months. Exactly. That's exactly what it is. Yeah. Well, listen, continued success with it. I know you're hiring. Yep. And so your first name is Emmanuel, and people know how to spell that.

And I'm going to guess you have Emmanuel at bubble.io is your email. Yep. Listen, continued success with it. And, yeah, apologies to Ben Horowitz and Mark and Driesen, who we're supposed to get on the line and have them talk about their new book. But we ran out of time. We're going to try to fit you in next time, Ben Horowitz and Mark and Driezen. We'll get you on the line next time, Mark and Ben.

Sorry about that. Didn't mean to run out time, but the interview with Emmanuel went so well. All right, we'll see you all next time on this week's Starves. Bye-bye.