Hey everyone,
Curious if there is a list or success stories around Bubble Apps/Businesses built exclusively on Bubble that have seen successful exits/acquisitions?
While it’s not exactly what you asked, the success stories on this page are interesting and probably as close as you might get to an answer.
I know of a few Bubble Apps that were exclusively built on Bubble that were acquired → although the second they had an inkling of an exit they went into overdrive to leave Bubble.
It’s a shame as Bubble just has to get their act together on security, stability and some other basic features and companies wouldn’t have to run away from their whole ecosystem the second there’s a chance of an exit.
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Thanks! Encouraging to see several received funding (so signal that traditional Venture Capital is comfortable with a business built on Bubble). The gap I’m curious about is how do potential acquiring businesses (e.g. larger techcos or PE firms) feel about a Bubble-dependent business vs traditionally coded/independent business.
Ah, so it sounds like they may have shared my POV. My concern is that building a business on Bubble is one thing… but building an asset that is to be sold then maintained by the acquiring business is another aspect altogether.
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While we haven’t yet sold out or been acqujired. We are a Seed Round company, having raised 7mil so far built on bubble. That said, while we plan to keep our main product offering on bubble for quite some time we are investigating what it would take to build out our own product, own the code, the infrastructure, and to do so outside of a #nocode environment that doesnt support full code export (like weweb does).
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Interesting. Thank you! Do you know if the inquiry to build that new product is stemming from the Exec team, the engineering team, or the VCs participating in the Seed? (or a combo of them).
Internal decisions. Lots of factors.
We feel we’ll be better positioned to build a revamped and feature packed and well thought out v 2 on code as we continue to scale. That said, it’ll be a new offering and we’ll continue to sell our bubble app sass since it makes us north of a mil a year.
Bubble is so amazing but a custom coded instance has so much to offer in terms of performance gains, insights into your app internals. Hosting pages on a cdn, building truly lightweight apps, etc
There’s also a lot of drawbacks. Like hiring a bigger dev team, infrastructure costs, etc. Effin headaches. Which is why I love bubble.
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BUT you guys are kinda hiding the fact that you’re on Bubble… 
So that kinda supports my point
The way one can justify building on Bubble to clients or investors despite the lack of code export is that if their product grows to the extent that Bubble has become a limitation/liability, then you can probably afford to build it using traditional methods. All Bubble apps can be built in a few months with traditional development and the right budget, so if Bubble was to completely fall apart then it’s not totally unreasonable to build it out all over again. Of course I’d rather not.
Also many times in my experience the conversion isn’t around what it’s built on rather how the financials look. Many times they’re investing in or acquiring the company for the financials and customer base rather than where it’s built.
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That’s the justification. It’s worth noting that pausing dev for a few months can have a significant impact on a company’s growth. Regardless, that justification works for a developer / founder.
What’s the justification for Bubble neglecting to offer the resources startups need to create enterprise-level applications?
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Sure, for hockey stick growth startups that aren’t a tech startup. But for others…
I guess it depends on the investor or buyer. I’ve met multiple that prefer staying in the no code space for companies with existing MRR because of the quick feature iteration and ease of split testing.
Granted I’ve not seen any 100M seed rounds in apps built in no code or anything but if you have that funding you’re likely building with the big dogs in something like nextJS.
If you’re doing $100k/mo with 5% monthly churn & have upward trajectory most investors won’t care what you’re built on as long as it’s sustainable enough to continue growth and if needed rebuild elsewhere for longevity.
Just like bubble having a database 10000x slower than firebase they still secured a PHENOMENAL $100M series A funding, 8-10x the average series A round. The existing architecture may have been cheecks at the time but they had upward growth, high MRR, and a solid growth plan.
Technicalities of software can be worked out and rebuilt but strong growth and MRR isn’t near as easy to replicate.
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That’s true, especially based on the tech debt that their diligence team associates with a no-code platform. But there are many valuable startups without any significant MRR, especially true technology apps. That makes it even harder to prove that the no-code platform can scale…
You think they aren’t kicking themselves for that?
Not at all. Our customers and investors are aware what they’re getting into. If not, we aren’t hiding anything at all. Maybe I gave the wrong impression.
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