Hi all,
This is our November community update! Read last month’s update here.
The highlight of October was flying the whole team to New York City to work in-person from our Manhattan office. It was fantastic to meet everyone who we’ve been collaborating with virtually, and we spent the time doing a lot of brainstorming and long-term planning that’s just easier to do face-to-face. We had discussions around almost every aspect of our business, and coming out of it we have a lot of energy and new ideas that we’re looking forward to bringing to life in 2023!
As part of that week, we also hosted a community meetup for our NYC-based users and anyone else who could make it (we had at least one person fly in from Canada to attend!) Turnout was great, with 60+ folks showing up, and we had a lot of fun meeting you all face-to-face. Thanks so much to everyone who came! The venue was personally significant to Emmanuel and me: it was a bar downstairs from the first Bubble office we worked from after graduating from renting desks in larger spaces.
Another highlight this month was the launch of an official Microsoft Clarity plugin, which is a fantastic tool for entrepreneurs and product owners to get visibility into how users are interacting with their Bubble apps.
In hiring news, we just crossed the 100 employee mark yesterday! This month we were excited to welcome:
- Roody, Kylie, and Tenzin, joining as Technical Product Support Specialists
- Michael, joining as an Account Executive
- Nishita and Scott, joining as Product Designers
As always, open roles can be found here, and we especially encourage community members with solid Bubble skills and a love for helping people to join us as Technical Product Support Specialists
Changes we made this month
This was a great month for planning and team-building, but somewhat as a consequence, it was a lighter month for product updates. In addition to our usual bug fixing work, and some continued tweaks to our homepage and new user experience, we released:
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Some additional improvements to our job request page, building on the work we announced last month
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An option to allow plugin developers to test their plugins on Node 14 prior to the upgrade date. We don’t expect this upgrade to require plugin code changes, but want to allow testing just in case.
We also published a new “Getting Started” video course which is meant to be the definitive, in-depth video guide for new Bubble users, replacing the older video course we had that was built years ago and out of date.
This month in numbers
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New conversations via bug reports or support@bubble.io: 11,643 (up 13.8%).
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Average first response time to messages: 1h 25m during business hours (down 0.5%)
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Average response time to messages: 1h 35m during business hours (up 9.0%)
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Tickets closed by the engineering team in the past 30 days: 80 (down from 111)
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Average days to closure for tickets closed by the engineering team: 5.4 (down from 12.2 days)
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Average days to closure for high priority tickets: 0.4 (down from 2.4 days)
Things on our minds
Coming out of our week together in person, each team has a queue of ideas, problems, challenges, and opportunities we are still sorting through. While it is hard to pick a single theme to focus on, some of the things we talked about include:
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Evolving our design system for the editor
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The value proposition we offer our customers on Custom plans and ways we could make them even more attractive
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What areas are most important to focus on to help new users learn Bubble
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The state of our ecosystem, and how to help agencies and freelancers
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What investments we most want to make in our technology, and what those investments would unlock in terms of performance, security and compliance, team productivity, and achieving a global infrastructure
…among many others! The long and short of it is, we have a lot of work ahead of us on all kinds of different dimensions. We came out of the week with a renewed commitment to continue to improve our operational game as a company, because we’ll need to be incredibly driven, efficient, and passionate to get through everything we want to accomplish over the next year.
What we’re currently working on
Following up on our latest post about pricing, we are continuing to do technical work on capacity and auto-scaling. We are working towards an interim release that will not make any changes to the way we price Bubble, but will expose the ability to chart and manage your app’s usage over time, so that we can start previewing what an auto-scaling / usage-based approach to pricing might look instead of the hard capacity caps we have today.
Other ongoing workstreams:
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Our new components system is almost done! We are testing it out with some of our new users to see if it speeds up app creation. Stay tuned for further announcements!
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We are working on an extension to the font and color variable feature we recently released to allow users to define their own variables.
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Our work on an improved version control interface continues: we are still doing development work and hope to have exciting updates soon.
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For the overhaul of our network architecture and infrastructure, we have made some behind-the-scenes changes to our credentials and configuration management, and are working on changes to our deployment system.
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Our push to migrate code of CoffeeScript continues; we are now down to 9.8% CoffeeScript in our main codebase. Typescript is now up to 5.5%, with the remainder being Javascript. We are bumping up the priority of this work, with the hope of getting through it and onto other technical improvements that are enabled by it.
Wishing everyone a lovely November,
Josh and Emmanuel
Thanks for the update!
