Hi all,
Jumping in here to explain a bit what goes on behind the scenes.
We do listen and carefully log feature requests from users (in no company before have I actually gone through and read every single backlog item that exists, but trust me that I’ve done that here!). Our roadmap does not explicitly aim to address features requested by ‘whales’. Rather, we do our best to look holistically at all feature requests as well as all other work we need or want to do. Ultimately, we have a limited amount of resources, so we have to invest in work that we think will address pressing issues, have the greatest impact for the product and/or the company, help us realize a particular vision we’re aiming for, etc.
In short, we absorb a wide range of data to formulate a roadmap that we feel best serves the community and the product in the short and long terms. We certainly hope that Bubble will be around for a long while and grow - we hope you get that sense as well.
Specifically on the topic of crowdfunding features: it doesn’t really work like that. While as a PM I would love a machine where I can input money and output a feature, in reality there are lots of complexities to this. For example, for all that Bubble makes building a complex web app easy, Bubble itself is quite a complex product technically to work on, so we not only need high-caliber engineers, but we need to effectively onboard them and teach them all the ins and outs of Bubble’s codebase. Also, if we prioritize features in the short term purely based on what people are willing to pay us for, that would result in a lot of short-term feature gains at the expense of important long-term projects. (The fact that people feel so passionately about a particular feature is something we notice and take into account as we build the roadmap.)
The current top 4 priorities - the BIG projects that are on the docket - are performance, reliability, the editor redesign, and revamping our responsive editor. These priorities have not changed recently. We’re making headway on the first three and hope to begin the fourth in earnest soon. A few months ago, we also explicitly decided to reserve some engineering bandwidth to work on smaller feature releases, both to satisfy common feature requests as well as making those investments in the product - this is where features like large CSV imports / exports, Algolia, database change triggers, Airtable, etc. have come from.
On the feature request brought up specifically (white labeling / other CNAMEs) - this idea is in the mix. But, it is much harder than it sounds to build into Bubble. @peterj has been engaging on this idea (e.g. here) and we’ve talked about this internally. If this feature only took a week, we probably would’ve done it already. Our best analysis is that it takes much more than a week and is also a risky feature (domains are complicated and messy) - so not something we can just whip out quickly.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, I highly recommend skimming Josh’s monthly community updates (July’s). We started doing this to give you all a better sense of what we’re working on. We don’t take our community or your continued use of Bubble for granted at all; we just can’t build everything everybody wants right now!
Cheers,
Allen