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No-code startup Bubble raises $100M
251–260 of 327 posts
Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Simply not true. I’ve been programming with bubble from “technical aware founder PM/founder” and bubble is liberating. In the past i’ve built a webapp that : - Renders desktop - Renders mobile - store in database - after a conditional form - create a complex journey of to do list with defaults based on answers of previous cond. form - connects to an external system with cron daily - sends email daily from backend - u…
I just looked through there website and I fail to see how it would be quicker or better than spinning up a quick rails app with a bootstrap template. Most of my time developing is thinking about the domain model and workflows. Once I've decided on that it takes a matter of minutes to code features and then you are not restricted in your ability to adjust and enhance after the fact.
I think there's a lot here that even as an experienced engineer I hate to start doing from scratch. Now combine that with time to focus on the business
* Where to deploy? * Where to store the code? * Which library to send emails with? * Which 3rd service to send emails with?
A long time ago I spent 2-3 weeks building something to do all the above. After completion, I started going to customers and realised those 2/3wks were basically wasted time because I could have just put a google form and would've done just as good a job. Except now you get something a bit better than that.
Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M
#253Can someone help me understand the no-code movement and what supposedly has changed in the last few years? I know Microsoft tried to allow non-developers to create apps without developers, and they have been trying for decades. But failed! They built an app that allowed you to drag and drop blocks, and they tried a visual query builder(not sure what the exact name was) for SQL. They added a workflow builder to ShareP…
> Can someone help me understand the no-code movement and what supposedly has changed in the last few years?
People (on the customer side) want automation that people who nominally aren't coders can build.
People (on the seller side) want sweet enterprise sales with maximum vendor lock-in.
Nothing, really, has changed... that's been the story forever.
> I know Microsoft tried to allow non-developers to create apps without developers
Hence, Excel, Access, PowerApps...
Also, really, the low-/no-code capabilities and empower analysts vs. devs to build tools or perform tasks that would otherwise take one-time dev or DBA time is also a selling point around a lot of the SQL Server ecosystem, e.g., SS[R/I/A]S.
> I know Microsoft tried to allow non-developers to create apps without developers
Yes, and have lots of success and lock-in from doing that.
> But failed!
No, no they didn't.
Oh, I mean sure, their no-/low-code tools require a lot of the same skills to build decent apps that arr required for other software development because coding was never the hard part. But, from MS’s point of view, that's irrelevant to the problem they are solving.
Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M
#254Having myself used some no/low-code tools (service-now, mendix, outsystems), I do think they are the future, but...
I think they suffer from their business model, which often aims complete vendor lock in to milk their customers as long as possible. This is currently their only way to earn back the hard invested money of developing such a tool.
We need a, open source, community driven, no-code tool.
Using existing tools I often suffered from these things: - closed source. - expensive monthly fees. - Any apps build with it are not really property of the developer, but are intellectual property of the low code tool corp - either bad ux ui or not horizontally or vertically scalable - Datamodel, Algorithm or business logic can not really be extracted from the low code platform. - You now need to become a specialist in this low code platform. These low code platforms outdate faster then the typical programming language. - The best developers look down on it so you get "lesser" developers. - If a feature is not available in the low code platform then you are stuck. - If there is a real bug in the low code platform you are screwed because you now need to open a ticket, but the engineer looking at the ticket is more help-desk then engineer. The majority of tickets they solve are from dummies not understanding the platform and they assume you are one of them. Will take several months to convince them it was a bug and was never solved during the time I was on the project (2 years). - You cannot run it on premise, unless you have deep pockets - They have non or terrible git integration. Or other collaboration problems. - Due to their dynamic nature are often slow in performance. - Corps HR department runs a different low code platform then their finance department and now it becomes a political shit show.
Terrible situation when you grow beyond the low-code platform and need to move away from it.
Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M
#255I read as "No-code startup bubble...“ and it still works as a title.
There are tens of thousands of everyday businesses running on WordPress and the WooCommerce plugin. That's no-code all the way, but since WP sits outside the Silicon Valley hype machine, it doesn't get talked about.
Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Do open source projects have an obvious "run this script to configure your complete dev environment in respect to this project" ? ./configure
That's not even close to being accurate. The real workflow looks more like this: 1) Install an appropriate compiler toolchain. 2) Install whatever other tools are needed (like pkgconfig). 3) Install the necessary *-dev packages for the library dependencies. 4) Figure out which options to pass to configure to include the features you want and exclude the features you don't want. 5) ./configure 6) Go back to step 3 bec…
1 through 3 (I rarely encounter 6 and never 9) are baked into most OS installers and can be done once then saved as a VM or Docker image to be cloned. That level of pedantry is akin to saying "To compile the project applepie.io from scratch you must first create the universe."
Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M
#257I think the biggest problem with this approach is at some point, they necessarily reach a level of complexity that it takes the same amount of time to learn how to use their "no-code" tools than it does to just learn how to code.
I (possibly wrongly) apply the reverse of the “$100 note on the ground” parable to no-code tools.
If a toolchain that allows to deliver fully functional software of appropriate complexity without writing code was even remotely feasible, Apple/Microsoft/Google would have already been pushing hard each for their own take on it.
Considering the immense upside for whomever of the big tech that manages to do it first, and that they can throw much more resources at it than the best-valued SV unicorn, presumably they’ve tried (probably more times than we know); and presumably what they’ve found is that at a level of no-code tool sophistication where it’s good enough it becomes indistinguishable from programming—so they’re trying to attract more people into software engineering instead.
Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M
#258It seems like all the comments here are from non bubble users. We have worked on over 20 client projects in the past 1.5 years using bubble. Specialising exclusively in bubble now. A way to describe the platform would be WordPress for Web Apps. There was a census recently. ~75% clients are startup/MVPs ~25% SME making business tooling Out client portfolio is similar. I've hired fresh graduates in Pakistan, trained th…
Can you give us an example of one of the 30 apps (as per your website) so we can look at it?
Incidentally the only Bubble app I've seen online was mentioned in the Bubble FB ad: Revetize. It actually made me do some research when I saw the ad last week as it seemed so absurd.
https://nocodefounders.com/interview/revetize-interview
0 results on the Apple app store, but there is an app on the Play store called Revetize with "10+ downloads". Perhaps that's it?
Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M
#259Having myself used some no/low-code tools (service-now, mendix, outsystems), I do think they are the future, but... I think they suffer from their business model, which often aims complete vendor lock in to milk their customers as long as possible. This is currently their only way to earn back the hard invested money of developing such a tool. We need a, open source, community driven, no-code tool. Using existing too…
I'm not sure I share your enthusiasm for LC/NC as being the wave of the future. That being said, I have only spent a few afternoons with any of them.
I do agree 100% with your assessment that is incredibly painful to migrate your systems from one of these onto a mature, open-source web development ecosystem. I've witnessed the tail end of one of these Herculean efforts and it wasn't pretty.
The existing LC/NC platforms claim that their sweet spot is prototyping or MVP-style products. Even if one shaves a few months of development time off with this (and even that is not clearly the case), the extra work of building the new system, migrating all the data, hosting, etc, doesn't pass the smell test for me.
Open source web dev has gotten infinitely better for basic CRUD style apps. Hire a few devs with a couple years of experience, maybe even a few out of college, with one experienced engineering manager, and I can guarantee you will get a better proof of concept with React/Node, or any of the other widely adopted open source web dev platforms currently on offer.
Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M
#260The market is comparable to Wix? Divi from wordpress? Again, not sure how these companies last and compete where everyone else is learning how to code. I can't foresee a mature product that is achievable without coding, at all. I always thought companies that uses those builders will, at some point, move out from MVP and hire some coders. Well, I guess there're always market for everything.
How do I build a calculator in Wordpress or Wix?
You're conflating website builders with web app builders.