Hi all,
We are excited to announce that Bubble has raised $6.25M in funding from a fantastic set of investors and successful entrepreneurs. This is the first outside money we’ve taken.
We ran Bubble for seven years, funded first by our own savings, and then by customer revenue. We took the slow path to building a company because we want Bubble to be something that lasts. That means having a sustainable business model from the beginning, and building the product, team, and community the way we envision. We’ve been vocal in our dislike for some of the excesses of venture-backed tech culture, especially the focus on rapid growth at the expense of creating long-term value.
Taking this route allowed us to make choices that would have killed a startup that was funded from the get-go. We invested in a deep, complicated product that took years to build, rather than aggressively marketing something sellable but shallow. We have consistently prioritized serving existing customers over making Bubble accessible to new users. We sought out the early adopters who were willing to put up with strange quirks, amateurish designs, buggy features, and dubious documentation because they valued our ambition of giving our users true creative freedom. We are proud when you tell us “Bubble tricked me into becoming a programmer”.
This approach has been wildly successful. We went from barely able to pay our own rents to being a profitable business with a full-time team. When we look at this forum and see how the community of bubblers has taken on a life of its own, how you all help each other and support each other’s endeavors, how you sometimes understand Bubble and what it’s capable of better than we do, we are amazed. People have changed their careers and life trajectories based on our product and this community.
That said, we are far from our goal of making Bubble truly excellent. The downside of executing ambitious aspirations with limited means is that Bubble falls short of what we want it to be along almost every dimension: it’s harder to learn, less intuitive to use, more challenging to debug, less reliable, slower, buggier, and less rewarding to develop plugins for than the image we have in our heads of what it should be. We’re proud of what we’ve built so far, but we have a lot of work ahead of us to deliver the quality of product and level of service that we are working towards.
We believe that delivering that level of service requires achieving scale as a business. We want to be able to run a massive fleet of servers, managed by a world-class operations team, that can scale with our customers from their proof-of-concept all the way to their IPO. We want a massive plugin and template ecosystem with out-of-the-box integrations for every conceivable need. We want talented designers and engineers going carefully over every inch of the Bubble editor until using it is pure joy. We want to provide 24 / 7 customer support in every major language. We want there to be a demo, class, or tutorial for every possible Bubble use case. We want Bubble team members present at every co-working space, meetup, and entrepreneurship club in the world.
We owe it to you guys to get to this scale as quickly as we can. We believe that we are ready to accelerate our growth, and we’ve found amazing investors who believe in what we are creating and are backing our efforts with both financial capital and the kind of expertise that comes from watching hundreds of other businesses scale up before us. We want to do this right, and that means learning from the best and hiring world-class talent, while staying true to our mission of building an enduring company that opens up technology to everyone.
So, we are extremely excited to announce our funding round, and we are even more excited to meet the amazing people we’ll be hiring with the money. Thank you to everyone in the community who’ve supported us to this point, and we hope and anticipate that we repay your support by making Bubble everything you could want it to be.
— Emmanuel, Josh, and the rest of the Bubble team
