Our non-profit finds surplus supplies from schools and businesses to give to under-funded schools that are in desperate need of them - everything from books to desks to computers. We also help schools create and manage volunteer opportunities for students.
Since we’ve no longer been able to keep up with all of this manually, we decided to build an application so the schools can handle a lot of it among themselves.
What follows is my experience so far with the project. Perhaps it will be helpful to someone else who’s trying to get their own site built.
First of all, I’ve faced some bumps along the way, and the responsibility for that rests on me. I don’t have much experience leading a project like this and hiring developers. I haven’t done a great job of it - I was hiring developers without doing enough due diligence and I always had a hard time laying out all of the features we needed up front, so it’s been quite a build-as-we-go situation. There are thousands of kids who didn’t get the school supplies they should have over the last year because I just couldn’t get this application working.
As for the history of the project in Bubble:
In December 2016, I found someone here on the forum who offered to help me build the first phase of the application. They said they loved what we’re doing, so they’d do it for free and it would just take a couple of weeks. Very nice! But I said no, I want to pay because I know it’s going to be more complicated than it seems at first glance. We settled on $2000. Unfortunately, 3 months later, although this person had put in a lot of work, there wasn’t much to show for it. Their heart was definitely in the right place, but it just wasn’t working and I needed the project done, so I paid $1500 of the $2000 and started looking for someone else.
I found Gaby, who came in and did a bunch of good work in March through June, but she got busy (understandably because she’s so good!), so I had to find someone else.
I found Geoff, who did good work too, but then he got busy with his own project. No problem.
I found Salar. I paid him $1600 to wrap up the build, which his team wasn’t able to do in the end - there were still many things not working. At that point, he suggested I hire them to build the app from scratch because he didn’t love how it had been designed on the back and front ends. By this point, I had already spent $8000-$9000, much more than I was hoping considering we’re a non-profit, but he convinced me this would be better in the long run. So I paid him an additional $4000 and about 3 weeks later their work was done and I was left with an application that had perhaps 25% less functionality than the original app, plus at least 100 bugs. His team was too busy to fix the bugs, and he said they bill on an hourly basis, which means when the time is up, the time is up. They also don’t offer refunds. He did eventually offer me $500, but it cost me thousands of dollars just to get the site working the way it had before, so it didn’t seem fair I didn’t accept it - it seemed maybe he needed the money more than me. Anyway, everyone seems to love Salar and CoBubble here in the forums, so they must be doing a great job for others. I think it was just bad luck - sometimes these things happen in life. Move forward.
I then talked to BubbleWits, but the time difference was an issue for my schedule. I talked to AirDev and they seemed great, but they didn’t want to fix bugs - they were more into building new features, which I understood.
I found my next developer in the summer, but that one was a failure within the first couple of weeks.
I found my next one in September. They were doing good work at first, but recently they’ve gotten busy (this happens with Bubble freelancers) and the work has become sloppy, is usually way overdue and whenever I do eventually get the “I’m done” email, I go in and find dozens of bugs.
BUT… this story does have a positive ending - I hope. About a week ago, I finally found my 7th developer - myself! I’m finally learning Bubble. It’s been a challenging learning curve, but I’ve been fixing the inefficient database architecture and cleaning up the confusing front end. Workflows that took 10 seconds before are now down to 2-4 seconds.
The best part is it’s actually really fun!
The moral of the story? Keeping in mind that I am a sample size of only 1, so I’m sure others have had different experiences, here are a few things you may want to consider if you’re new to Bubble:
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If you’re thinking of getting something built in Bubble, yes, there is definitely a strong case to be made for hiring good people to do it so you can focus on being the founder. Absolutely. But I just want to say that if you think you might be into building this kind of thing, there’s also something to be said for doing it yourself. If you’re non-technical, it may seem impossible at first, but if you stick to it, it gradually makes sense. I’m sure there are great Bubble developers out there and they should get your business - I’m just saying that for me, after going through 6 developers and talking to several others, I’m having the best luck doing it myself. I have a better understanding of what it needs to do, and I’m encountering so many poorly-done things in the site that it’s become clear that no one will put the care into this that I will. Plus, if I had done this from the beginning, I would have saved a good chunk of the over $20,000 (which our non-profit doesn’t have) on developers.
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Do your best to write out every single thing your site should do ahead of time, including how every piece of information interacts with every other piece of information. And if you pay for even just a little help with your site, get help with at this stage because it sets up everything. Also know that even if you this, it’s really hard to think everything through all the way. There’s just so many little things that come up that you won’t have anticipated, so there’s bound to be decision-making on the fly. That’s another reason why it’s nice to know how to change things.
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Adding to the above, if you do work with developers, be careful whenever you ask for more features. You may think it’s a simple thing, but it may cause the project to not get finished. On top of that, as I go through my site now I see that some things I asked for, which I thought were simple enough, ended up really complicating things, like adding crazy workflows or conditionals or filters, etc. You can certainly propose ideas to developers, but be sure to ask them how complicated it is because it may not be worth it. In the end, simple and working, with fewer features, is better than complicated and buggy with every feature.
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Understand what you’re getting ahead of time when you hire developers. You may think you’re getting a site that works, but you may just be getting their time. Of course, that’s quite evident when you’re just paying someone by the hour, but isn’t as clear when you shell out $4000. Ask for contracts and read them.
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Bubble is frustrating at times, but super fun once you get to know it. I’m thoroughly enjoying building this thing myself now. And with that, I’m back to work
