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No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

reuters.com

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Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#211

Post by mattzito »

knighthack wrote: post #201
zubairlk wrote: post #198

It 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…

> You can throw 30 software engineers and have a system and increase velocity that way. This makes absolutely no sense at all. You obviously have not read _The Mythical Man-Month_, and judging by what you've written I completely doubt the entirety of what you've said. Speed is one thing. The long-term maintainability and usability of a system is another thing altogether. I have serious doubts about this 'no code' mov…

I think you can read the statement through a charitable or uncharitable lens - the uncharitable way is "throw 30 engineers at a problem and it'll get faster"

However, in the context of the other comments the GP made, I interpreted it as, "You can have a larger team with a properly built system with usability and maintainability, with good separation of concerns, and speed things up that way, but we have a smaller team and so bubble serves us well by allowing us to get things done quickly".

> I have serious doubts about this 'no code' movement.

I think the GP was pretty transparent about what it is good for and what it is not - I think the "wordpress for apps" is a good description. Wordpress is great for a particular class of problem, and then when you get to a certain level of complexity, you end up throwing it out and rewriting it, or putting so much on top of/around it that it is unrecognizable.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#212

Post by mackrevinack »

their website is obnoxious on mobile. im trying to scroll down the page to see what they are about but it keeps focusing on the email sign up box which scrolls me back up to the top of the page and opens my keyboard. i guess ill have continue not knowing what bubble have to offer

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#213

Post by ActionHank »

minitoar wrote: post #104
zamalek wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue with no-code/low-code is that it puts the cart before the horse, or rather, the developer before the user. When you look at the amount of time spent staring at a screen, your users spend way more time (person-hours) looking at your app than you do coding it. Why all this focus on what is arguably the least important actor in the system?

Perhaps this is obvious but the answer is: cost. Developers are expensive. Delivering a viable poc cheaper, sooner, even if you end up having to redo it all anyway, can be an excellent trade off.

Wonder if there will be similar businesses and freelancers who will start to specialize in the migration from no-code to code in the same way that there are for on-prem to cloud.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#214

Post by vsareto »

zubairlk wrote: post #198

It 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…

How easy is it to debug something in Bubble for a dev and non-dev? They're using Javascript for the custom code part of the platform. Is it the same for the no code part?

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#215

Post by yellow_lead »

zubairlk wrote: post #198

It 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…

What are the limitations? You say it's suited well for MVPs. Is it well suited for our typical web app that has evolving and increasingly technical logic as business needs change?

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#216

Post by goatlover »

robertwt7 wrote: post #7

The 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.

Also Dreamweaver and Flash Builder for Flex.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#217

Post by rfrey »

flarg wrote: post #107
ramraj07 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People (especially the kind that hangs out in HN) dont seem to understand that there’s a vast ocean of fairly smart people, much smarter than the average (or even above average) programmer, who are unable to build what they can imagine because of the coding bottleneck. I know many, and it’s not for a lack of significant effort that they are not able to learn to code in a way that’s meaningful. I suppose there’s somet…

In life sciences the people are smarter than any developer but software is IT-captured so all they can work with is Excel. No code is meant for these people. Software developers will never deliver what life sciences needs without no code.

"Software is IT captured"? What does that mean? You can have Python running and be creating software in an hour.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#218

Post by long_time_gone »

surfingdino wrote: post #168

I used to work for the client who bought a no-code solution all devs advised against. It was meant to make it so simple to write business logic that even non-technical BAs could do it. Nobody understood how it worked and the devs spent six months trying to make it work before business admitted it's useless.

Let’s say I buy a motorcycle to deliver packages and it fails due to size constraints. That doesn’t make motorcycles useless, it means I chose the wrong tool.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#219

Post by arihant »

redsymbol wrote: post #139

Some people here are giving examples of using Bubble a few years ago, and found it too limited to be useful. Have any developers here used it recently ? When I first looked at Zapier about 2.5 years ago, as a developer I found it limiting and just not useful compared to writing custom webhooks that I sometimes glued together with cron jobs, etc. But since late last year, Zapier has matured so much I am able to use it…

Yes, last moth. Bubble is such a nightmare to use and learn that it’s simply easier to learn something like Vue with Firebase. Just to get a basic value from JavaScript code to display in UI, you need to put together this weird pipeline sort of logic. The back end requests aren’t really back end, the logic is still front end regardless of where the code is executed. The result is there is no way to implement a queue. Using an API that rate limits, can’t use it in Bubble. For API calls things have to map into their weird data types and in their world, a phone number is an integer.

But the biggest issue is that learning curve is even higher than tools like react. And the steps to do basic things are so tiresome it’s just easier to write code. UI prototyping is fast, sure. But not much faster than tailwind.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#220

Post by long_time_gone »

goto11 wrote: post #199
yourenotsmart wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can someone help me understand the no-code movement and what supposedly has changed in the last few years? It's a basic error of attribution. We need complex systems, and we build them typically by text source, which is the most efficient way of coding a system (as we've found over the decades). Because the source looks arcane to an untrained eye, people attribute the complexity to the form of the code: text source…

I remember similar sentiments among geeks when GUI's became more commonplace compared to command line interfaces like DOS. But the reality is that for the majority of people using a GUI is much easier than a text based interface. A full-blown general purpose text-based programming language is of course always more powerful, but a task-specific GUI can be much more efficient for the particular tasks they are designed…

The people calling no-code useless are the same ones who think Excel is useless. It isn’t a tool for them.
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