Emmanuel started Bubble nine years ago with a vision of empowering non-technical founders to build their product without engineers. Not âprojects,â but real businesses with real products:
I want someone to build [the next] Airbnb, and people donât know itâs built on no-code. Itâs a harder problem to solve, but if we solve it right, then weâre changing software forever.Â
But changing software forever doesnât mean replacing developers with no-code, according to Emmanuel. What no-code does mean is that it frees up developers to focus on more important problems:
The biggest impact of a company like ours is that weâre finally going to free the time of expensive coders so that they can work on more important things.
I would argue that every SaaS company out there has an engineer putting together a login systemâitâs a waste of resources for the world⊠Iâd rather have these people write code for actual problems.
Convincing potential clients and future founders that a no-code solution like Bubble can power their business has been, and still is, an uphill battle.
But a combination of patience, nine years of development, and a growing number of success stories, Emmanuel sees the tide turning:
You donât want to go to market too soon, where your product is not fully-baked, because youâre going to have to fight the skepticism. And when people say, âWell, okay, can [your product] do this?â And you say, âNo,â youâre going to reinforce the skepticism.Â
So we had to wait for the product to be powerful enough that we could say, âActually, yeah, you want to do that? Yes, we can.â And that took us some time, [but] as soon as we had that realization that now we were mostly saying yes when people would ask questions, we were like, okay, now weâre ready to grow faster.
âGrow fasterâ doesnât necessarily mean just user growth to the Bubble team. For Emmanuel, he believes âusersâ growthâ and education of the product is a much more compounding effect than mere user count growth:
[Weâre working to put] educational efforts in place so that more people understand how Bubble is different from other no-code tools. [Because] making sure we can keep up with not just our growth, but also the growth of our users, have a compound effect here.
âŠWhatâs more important for us today is maximizing the number of people that know how to use Bubble. And so if they know how to use Bubble, and then end up creating an app, and then pay for the main product, and theyâll buy plugins, [and so on].
Through a deep focus on user education and user experience, Bubble has built a platform that is powering businesses that likely wouldnât have existed without them.
The value weâre creating for our users was very obvious because they kept telling usâI mean, we knewâthat without us, their businesses would not be existing And that was for us a very important source of satisfaction and thatâs what kept us going.
And providing this level of value for Bubbleâs customers has provided Emmanuel with a personal sense of value and satisfaction:
I think no-code is one of the most exciting things we can work on today, and⊠my hope for no-code is that five years from now, we donât talk about no-code. I just hope this is the way to build things, and so working on something as fundamental as Bubble is very exciting.
đ€ What we learnedâŠ
Emmanuel and Bubbleâs nine-year focus on user education and user experience is one of the primary factors in the platformâs growth.
While marketing and funding hype certainly helped drive user growth, Bubbleâs investments in user education (âusersâ growthâ) has compounded to drive Bubbleâs user growth and retentionâleading to some of Bubbleâs incredible client success stories
Takeaway: âUsersâ Growthâ leads to âUser Growth.â
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