Episode 6 of The New Build: What Matt Graham learned watching hundreds of founders ship (and stall)

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Hi everyone,

Episode 6 of The New Build podcast is live, and it’s one of the more wide-ranging conversations we’ve had on the show — part founder story, part lessons learned from someone who’s had a front-row seat to hundreds of product launches and noticed exactly where things go wrong.

About our guest

I sat down with Matt Graham (@rapiddev), CEO of RapidDev, one of the world’s largest no-code agencies and winner of Bubble’s 2025 Agency of the Year award. In five years, Matt bootstrapped the company from a two-person freelancing operation to over 220 people, achieving 340% revenue growth between 2022 and 2023.

Before starting the agency, he was a nuclear engineer, a Navy instructor, and an MBA student at Harvard who co-founded two startups along the way. That breadth of experience is exactly what makes his take on building, shipping, and playing the long game worth listening to.

What to expect from this episode

A few threads run through the whole conversation. One is lessons you pick up from watching hundreds of product launches up close. Matt has seen the same patterns repeat: Founders who won’t push to launch because something isn’t quite right yet, founders who build a “castle with no people,” and the ones who do break through. What the successful ones tend to share is less about talent and more about staying in motion.

Another is how Matt thinks about risk and the kind of company he’s deliberately chosen to build. He walked away from co-founding opportunities that went on to big valuations, and he’s thought carefully about why. His reasoning shapes a lot of how he runs RapidDev today.

We also got into AI and services, where Matt’s view runs against the grain. He thinks a huge swath of the economy will always need trusted advisors and is betting on that rather than away from it.

And toward the end, we landed on culture. Matt talked about what it actually takes to keep a 220-person, globally distributed team aligned, and why he wishes he’d thought about it earlier.

Where to listen

Episode 6 is live now on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts:

New episodes drop every two weeks. If you have a story about something you’ve built on Bubble, whether it’s a product, an agency, or something in between, we’d love to hear it in the comments or you can submit it here.

— Emmanuel

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