I personally value positively the direct calls to @josh and @emmanuel made here and elsewhere: these calls seem to me as attempts to prevent this Bubble from meeting the fate of every bubble, which - as well known - is to give so much wonder and amazement for a while and then, at the climax…pop!
With a few negligible exceptions, direct callers are all pointing out very serious problems that impact, yes, on their personal situation, but they are doing so - as they always have done - with a spirit of community.
Personally, I very much appreciate the politeness, the calm and professionalism of those calls (especially if we consider with empathy the drama each of those people is experiencing), and I suffer to see them ignored, just as I have always rejoiced until yesterday to see the magic created by the close contact between community and management.
Bubble became what it is today primarily because of this synergy between users and management. In 30 years, I have seen management very often decide at some point to capitalize on the contribution made by the community - ending up losing, in order, community, market share, and company itself.
Too drastic? Well, everyone here seems to agree that the remaining use cases for Bubble have shrunk dramatically. Anyway, I’ve tried to collect numbers on this point (please check this survey, cast your vote e read the CAVEAT below). At the moment I’m writing this post, these are the results:
- 64 % of the current customer base is going to leave Bubble totally or partially within 17 months
- 18 % of the current customer base is trying to stay but is afraid of not being able to adapt to the new system
Now, will a company that has continued to hire so many units per month for over a year be able to remain profitable once…
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… could find itself with only a small fraction of its current customer base (the survey - which let’s state clear, is currently based on a ridiculous dataset of only 17 respondents - estimates a loss of 80 %) .
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… “build everything on Bubble” will no longer exist because it will have morphed into “build on Bubble only apps that guarantee you a minimum profit equal to the consumption of the WUs you will use without you could have any idea today what that consumption will be and only start developing if you feel confident that you can master WUs keeping in mind that we have to finish tuning them and nocoders are no longer allowed to make mistakes here, since even innocent error could cost millions of WU that will be invoiced!”
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…the community that was supporting you and bringing you hundreds of customers a day is dispersing and indeed boycotting you because of the way you treated it.
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…the ecosystem of plugin will stop growing/evolving
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…it will be recorded on Bubble’s CV that in 2023 it made decisions that forced the closure/escape of its customers.
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…competitors who were previously scrambling to find a small opening suddenly find themselves inundated with demand (and financial resources useful to compete) from customers to whom Bubble taught (at his expense!) the magic of nocode, incubating a market demand that they then blew up for the benefit of competitors.
I hope I’m wrong, however these are not prediction: these are things we are seeing now going live here, on Twitter, Telegram, etc. Personally, I consider it a mistake for management to remain silent while all this unease is being expressed – of course my opinion counts for nothing, but the statement of Bubble values does, and this silence is absolutely contrary to that statement.
So, even if nobody asked us, perhaps the community can still do something to prevent this from going any further. However - and I totally agree with @bcart0v - we should get past the “grievance” stage.
We may try to offer “problems + solutions” to management in a more usable way than a thread with 800 posts. For example, there is no denying that here @Jici with 1 post and 36 likes delivered a strong and clear message. As well as there is no denying that concrete proposals from @boston85719, @tylerboodman , @kossiorek1 , @justin.hume , @gaimed , @NigelG (and many others I’m not allowed to mention here) have all get an answer from Josh…
...Hidden wish :-|
I do hope that the next monthly community update this week will not highlight the “Table element” for the third month in a row, but will offer a clear update and timing on those suggestions which have been said to be “on our list”.
Perhaps our contribution could be more useful going somewhere in bewteen those mentioned above, for example: a series of threads each titled “NEW PRICING - [Problem] - [Solution]” where using likes to the first message could measure the level of how much this or that proposal is felt by the community and any post inside will further elaborate, without deviating from the focus.
[personal belief] Considering all the issues I see popping up every day in the fora, I tend to believe that at this point they can’t ask for help , but they would like to [/personal belief].
Would anyone like to get started?
(1) CAVEAT
- As said, the number of respondents to the survey is clearly ridiculous…But it is a fact that those very few who have participated so far could give any answer and have given those answers. I strongly urge as many people as possible to cast their vote (it is anonymous by the way) so that we can all figure out together where Bubble is going: after all, even those who is going to stay in Bubble today have utility in knowing how much of the current Bubble it is realistic that it will last in 17 months - just to continue to invest time and money with peace of mind ;-).