I’m 18 and have been learning bubble for about 3 months now doing some of the boot camps and stuff but is it realistic to think i could make this a full time job if i get good enough if so where would i start for work I’ve heard about airdevs agency but don’t know actually what you need and how hard it is to get hired.
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Yes, if you’re good.
5 years ago, I’d say not unless you worked at an agency or freelanced (with a solid portfolio to back you up). Today, I think it’s a true possibility. There are several larger enterprise-level companies that have their own in-house development team full-time (I am lucky and fortunate enough to be working for one of them), along with a lot of opportunities working for many agencies, and even freelancing once you get good enough to be able to handle clients directly.
Most important thing I can tell you is never settle with your skillset. Keep growing, in a year or two when you get super comfortable with Bubble and would consider yourself proficient (maybe even less than a year, all depends on you) start learning some basics of languages and traditional coding so you can expand on Bubble’s abilities and create even better user experiences.
Good luck on your journey, I never thought in a thousand years I’d turn Bubble into a full-time job, it was just a hobby and something I did for fun.
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Yes.
Been bubbling/running an agency full time for 3.5+ years now
100% agree about
Thanks
Zubair
https://www.linkedin.com/in/zubairlk/
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What would you say to do when I’ve learned and gotten good at bubble development what do i need to get a job? Where do I start?
First step is build a portfolio. Bubble has a new Developer Certification - However currently, community buy-in is not at 100%, so its weight isn’t huge. It’s just another thing to add to the portfolio, however, and can still showcase your competence.
While doing that, also participating in the forums is huge. Most individuals hiring Bubble Developers will want to see your skill, and a good way to “prove” it is to be answering a lot of technical questions on the forum, and really creating your own “brand” (you).
After you have a portfolio and forum activity, I’d start keeping an eye on this forum for posts about hiring. Recognize that your skillset is still fresh, so you’d likely be first looking for a Junior-level role until you have some experience working for clients under your belt.
These are just recommendations from me, not set in stone. Others may have other opinions. The Bubble ecosystem is forever evolving. You’re here at the right time though my friend.
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Appreciate the help man 
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First, the difference between a career and a way to make a living are a bit different for me than for other people, but I believe a career is something you will be able to do from the beginning of your working life, through to retirement. With that in mind, No, you will not be able to make a career off Bubble.
Here is some life advice. Look toward the future, ALWAYS. Never get yourself caught off guard by focusing only on NOW.
Yes, in the short term, you can definitely get good enough at Bubble to charge other people for your services. At 18 should you be looking at Bubble as a career path; absolutely not. For starters, Bubble is just a platform (ie: a startup/company). You do not want to base your future opportunities on the success of a company you have nothing to do with, and no control over. Looking a few years into the future…well AI.
I know a lot of people who are making a living right now through Bubble who may say I have a misguided idea of what AI will do to the ability of NoCode developers to continue to earn a living, but I personally feel they may be living with their head in the sand. AI right now, maybe 6 months after introduced to the public, is pulling the rug from under a lot of career writers and other creatives (or should I say ‘builders’…you know, people who make things, like I don’t know, NoCode apps). Now, I am not a fortune teller or a time traveller, but I am somebody who is capable of extrapolating what the future might hold based on history and current trends. The future of development is NoCode, but it is AI NoCode development. Just think what people said in 2013 when Bubble first started as an idea, now think about what I am talking about. In a relatively short period of time, AI will be advanced enough, for there really to be NO NEED to pay a developer to build your app. Prompting will become easier. Tweaking will become easier. Essentially, it will be easy enough to build an MVP or a simple software using the AI, you’ll see a dramatic decrease in the demand for NoCode developers.
If I thought about my 3 sons being 18 years old today and them asking me for career advice and they had a desire to utilize Bubble as a way to earn a living, I’d give them the following advice:
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Use Bubble as way to make money today in your free time, much the same way I worked for my University Bookstore at school. It was my Part-Time job.
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Look at all the career opportunities out there that AI will not disrupt. Seriously. I mean seriously. Only a fool would be entering into a career that has a strong likelihood of being either significantly devalued or completely redundant in a few years because of AI.
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Take that list of careers that have no chance of disruption from AI and think about your current strengths, interests and try to figure out which career would be most suitable for you. Working sucks. It sucks even more when you have to work for somebody else. YOU MUST FIND A JOB THAT YOU ENJOY. Check out online what it is that people who are on their deathbeds regret about life. Most will regret not having a job that brought them a sense of personal satisfaction. Life happiness does not depend on Money. There are a lot of factors beyond that which create a happy life, and one of those factors is SECURITY. When people are insecure financially or with their job, they are stressed, anxious and less happy.
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Once you have pinpointed the type of career you’d be suitable and happy in that is not going to be disrupted by AI, figure out what form of tertiary education you will need to enter into that career. Some may require a University degree, others may just require an internship or some form, but whatever is required begin ASAP, and while you are gaining that education, use your Bubble skills to earn income Part Time.
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Once you have started to work in your given career, you can continue to augment your income through part time work on Bubble. Best advice I have ever been given used hand gestures to really get the point across but it is simply ‘Earn up here, Live down there’…implying, live well within your means. Back to the idea of happiness, people who are debt free (at least free of bad debt like credit card debt) report much higher rates of happiness than those who are heavily indebted.
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Whatever career you are in, always be looking out for ways to either start your own company or consultancy…the main idea here is that you can take your career experience and apply it to starting your own company and begin to move away from building somebody else’s dream and begin building yours.
In life as much as you can you want to be in charge of your own destiny and not reliant upon others. This means that you don’t want to place your financial security in the hands of a company (ie: Bubble) that could go bust, or introduce an AI system that will reduce your earning potential 10 fold. You don’t want to work for a company as an employee without any real credentials that could be easily used to almost guarantee you find another job at another company at the same pay rate or higher if the company you work for either goes out of business, gets sold and you become redundant or has to slash its’ workforce.
I had a conversation last night with a friend of 25 years. I am 40. At this stage of life, he has a 1.5 million dollar house, a job earning $250K a year, a wife who earns near double a year and a kid. He does not feel satisfied in life because he is not happy in his job and he doesn’t feel he has any form of credential that if he were to leave his current company he could find another job that would pay him the same, or give him an opportunity within the last 20 years of his working life to reach that same current salary. I have other friends who are very much in the same position. Very successful financially, on the outside would seem like they got it all, but like most everybody else, they are stressed, anxious and feel vulnerable to a potential loss of job. Main reason why they feel this way, is because they owe more than what they have in savings, do not have jobs that bring personal satisfaction and do not have credentials that when they walk away from their current job, they are almost guaranteed to find another at the same level of pay.
Another friend. Same age, from the same small town. Didn’t go to University. Instead went and worked for a friends father as a painter. 5 years later, started his own painting service. 25 years in, he is a multimillionaire, has 20 employees working for him and gets to spend a lot of time with his four children.
I’m from a town where I graduated with 120 kids. I’d say at least half went to Ivy league universities. Maybe 2 did not go onto any college/university…could you imagine what most people thought when the second example went to work as a painter instead of going onto university?
Think about things that people will need forever, that will never likely be done via AI, of which there are a lot, and go into one of those fields.
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That is a wild stat… 
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Plot twist…this post was written by AI 
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I graduated in 2001 when the SATs were out of 1600…20 out of the 120 graduates scored over 1500; smart bunch
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Hi,
I started Bubbling when I was 18. I didn’t go to college or anything, I’m just enjoying life and traveling around the world
What is your fallback plan?
You can (I’m employed full-time as a bubble dev), however it’s not really a career that I’d recommend if I was starting now, there’s an incredibly small number of full time roles and most are contractor based, not employed. Average hourly price of development is dropping like a rock too because of the number of people who now advertise bubble dev services, especially in lower income countries where chargeable rates are much lower than what you need to charge in a more expensive one.
Most people who are very active on twitter and here are at the high end of bubble’s ecosystem, take a look at upwork if you want to see the average, there’s more roles advertised at <$10 per hour than >$30. Average price on there of a full site build a year or so ago was about 2-3k in my experience, now its <1k. I’d strongly recommend having bubble as a hobby/side income and pursue something else alongside it.
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Excellent post, but I do think I take a small exception here. While the platform itself may not be around forever, I don’t think you’re only teaching yourself Bubble when you learn Bubble. You’re learning concepts. You’re learning data design. You’re learning interaction. These will carry over to any number of software-design related job and you’ll be in a great position when you land on which parts you really enjoy doing. Awesome you found something you’re passionate about!
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That is what I was looking for in this job I NEED a job that has 3 things
- the ability to not be tied down to a single location
- the job need to be scalable no max paycheck
- I cannot work on a hourly scale I need to be paid for the work I create
I’ve been searching for just under a year now for jobs that fit these categories
THIS ALWAYS HAPPENDS
there is always a negative side to a industry a lot of the time is it saturation but there is always something that comes to bite me in the ass.
From what I have been doing I have loved bubble so far it reminds me of when i used to wake up in the middle of the night to crate mini games on online games for me and my friends to play in the day getting my head around workflow problems is honestly satisfying my life for the past 4 months or so has been bubble/kickboxing/gym non stop spending around 7hours a day on bubble and i have not gotten bored yet just a shame if you are saying its not a good industry to go into not sure what to do now 
@boston85719
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I do not want to make a career in bubble rather have a decently paid job. I have been looking for somewhere to get my foot in the door to the world of business and make a decent salary whilst doing it.
I was planning to use bubble to gain experience in the software design world as a start to understand business and maybe create my own SAAS model and scale that.
But travelling the world and working at the same time was what sold me.
Start your own saas company using Bubble. Find a niche. If you’ve worked at a certain industry for quite some time, identify the pain points and see how technology (a software) can ease those issues.
If you’re using a software that isn’t doing the job that you would like it to do…how would you create it? Build that.
This way, you’re learning Bubble (which you’re doing already), improving your skills in design, database configuration, UI/UX, and most importantly, learning how to build, grow, and scale a company.
You’re 18. You got time.
I ran an agency for 10 years, then pivoted to a Saas company (built on Bubble). The lessons and skill sets learned from my agency world is pretty much the same with running a Saas company.
Worried about AI? Add AI to your Saas company.
Build a brand. Focus on the user experience. Provide quality with an eye for great design.
Make mistakes and learn from them.
There’s no formula to this, just keep pushing forward.
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I don’t have one