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Creating a $100,000/mo Business That Helps People Learn to Code

Hello! What's your background, and what are you working on?

Hello! I'm Emmanuel, co-founder of Bubble. Bubble is a visual programming tool that lets people built web apps entirely visually, instead of writing code.

The apps that can be built can have a back-end with a custom database, connect to any kind of API, use community-built plugins, and more. Once an app is built, Bubble automatically handles all the technical infrastructure behind the scenes. In a word, anyone can now create, deploy, and run a web-based software without technical training.

I'm originally from France, and I worked for a few years before getting into technology. I studied math in France before moving to China to work as a management consultant for a few years. I came to the US for business school and met Josh Haas through mutual friends. He had started a company a few months before (it wasn't called Bubble at the time) and was looking for a co-founder. We actually decided to partner after our first coffee!

5 years later — quite amazing since we only had one coffee — Bubble has more than 100,000 users, a team of six people (and hiring!) and is still entirely bootstrapped. We currently earn about $100k a month.

Bubble home page

What motivated you to get started with Bubble?

Josh came up with this idea through a combination of two main factors:

  • He was in New York, and everyone, literally everyone, was asking him to be their tech co-founder to start a business.
  • He had used SharePoint while at a corporate job and created something that non-technical employees could use to build custom software. Watching them build things was very rewarding to him, and he felt he could do this at a larger scale for general-purpose programming.

We were fairly confident from the beginning that if we had the right product that actually made it wasy to program without code, it would sell! So we didn't really try to validate the idea or the concept, but instead started building the product right away.

With the cost of technology going down, bootstrapping becomes easier and easier.

We did get early validation with our first customers though. At the time the product really didn't have many features, and it was pretty buggy and slow, yet we still had a handful of people paying for it. We were simply the only solution for them to start their business.

Financially, we decided from the start not to raise capital, as we felt the product development cycle would be too long for a traditional VC route. (We wrote about it in this post.) Josh and I both had enough savings from previous jobs to be able to live in NYC for more than two years (with a simple lifestyle…), and we didn't start paying ourselves a salary until 2.5 years in.

What went into building the initial product?

We did everything ourselves. It took a lot of iterations, and our early users were so engaged that we would talk to them at least once a day on Skype. After six months of this we'd built our MVP (quite a complex MVP, too, since an MVP for a product like Bubble must allow users to build their own MVPs). We got our first payment from a user in December 2012.

Our server costs were fairly minimal at first, and we only otherwise paid for the office, since we lived on our savings.

Scope-wise, we decided to only focus on the web as our primary platform at first. (Many people told us we should start with native apps.) It was mostly an opinionated, gut-driven decision, but it proved to work just fine in retrospect.

Here is what a very early version of the product looked like:

And here is what it currently looks like:

It has evolved a lot, but the fundamentals are fairly similar. :)

How have you attracted users and grown Bubble?

We started "recruiting" users at tech meetups in New York. With the startup wave, everybody was looking for a tech co-founder, and there were plenty of co-founder-dating meetups.

We went there and told people that while we couldn't be their tech co-founders, they could use Bubble, as it would allow them build the whole thing themselves. We had a few skeptical responses, but a few teams decided to try it, and they stuck with us for more than a year!

The following year (2013) we did a pilot at Harvard Business School, which I had just graduated from. Their first year entrepreneurship class required students to build something under a very tight budget, and Bubble was a good solution for this. It got us a few more users, some of whom now use Bubble to professionally build apps for corporations!

The next few months were very product-centric, without too many marketing initiatives. We did put some content out though, as a way of explaining our mission, but while some posts did well (e.g. You shouldn't have to learn how to code), they didn't convert to users for Bubble. The product just wasn't ready yet.

Then, in October 2015, we launched publicly on ProductHunt. It went beyond what we'd imagined: we got more than 3,000 users in two weeks, and today, two years later, a lot of daily traffic still comes from PH. In terms of upvotes, I think we're in the top 30 of all time, and votes keep coming.

How did we do this? We wrote about it here. But honestly, the main thing is that we waited long enough to have a product that people would really like.

Since then, most of our growth has been driven by word-of-mouth and SEO. Our forum is very active and creates a lot of content everyday, which is very well indexed by Google. Today, more than 70% of the traffic to our forum comes from Google, not from Bubble! This has been an unexpected but fantastic outcome of our forum/community strategy.

My advice to aspiring entrepreneurs: while you should immediately go to market to get early users, wait as long as you can before promoting yourself and trying to be visible. Most people do this too soon.

Today, we're starting to look at expanding Bubble's footprint and becoming the standard for web app development. We're still working on how to do it, but hopefully you guys will hear more people talking about Bubble soon.

What's your business model, and how have you grown your revenue?

Bubble's business model is fairly traditional. It's a SaaS (actually, it's a PaaS — platform as a service) where we charge a monthly fee for some features and additionally provide the ability to add some capacity when a user's app takes off.

We also have a marketplace where users can build templates or plugins and get compensated for them. We had a few different models before the current one, but they weren't as clear to our users. We started charging by user visits and then by workflow runs, but we've learned from users that server capacity is the best resource to sell.

You build a system thinking you know it well, then you realize new things and you refactor.

Because of the marketplace component, our pricing is fairly advanced, and Stripe has been quite handy for this. But the first payment we ever received came before we added Stripe as a plugin to Bubble (because Bubble is built on Bubble!), so it came in the form of a check! We took a picture of it, then cashed it in.

Here's a look at our revenue over the years.

Year Average Monthly Revenue
2014 800
2015 1900
2016 22000
2017 75000

These data exclude enterprise contracts (ACH)

What are your goals for the future?

We're currently very much in expansion mode.

We want Bubble to become the standard for programming and building software. When people need to build something, we want them to go to Bubble first, and then, if it appears not to be the right solution, think about how to expand the platform through plugins to build their product. We're aware this is an ambitious goal, and we're hiring quite aggressively to achieve it.

To get there, we'll need engineering power to make sure everything works well at scale, we'll need to work on native apps, and we'll also need great marketers and community-managers to nurture our community and make it grow while keeping its original spirit intact.

We've actually made our technical roadmap public, and you can see it here.

If you had to start over, what would you do differently?

We certainly made a few bad technical decisions, but I'm not sure if they were "mistakes". They were more like necessary steps. You build a system thinking you know it well, then you realize new things and you refactor.

If we were to do something differently, we'd probably have started hiring earlier. We waited to be financially solid enough to hire two people at once, but we could have started recruiting six months earlier.

What's your advice for indie hackers who are just starting out?

I can't say bootstrapping works for every business and startup, but if you can afford it for the first year or two I think it's a fantastic way to build something real, learn how to make money early, and start scaling.

With the cost of technology going down (Bubble helps here as well!), bootstrapping becomes easier and easier.

If you can afford to bootstrap for the first year or two I think it's a fantastic way to build something real.

Also, I'll say it again: wait as long as you can before trying to be very visible. Wait until you know you'll make the best of the opportunity.

Where can we go to learn more?

Feel free to reach out — I love chatting about these things :).

Feel free to ask anything about product development, community development, bootstrapping, or even politics!