From 0 to 1,000 template installs: My journey as a professional Bubble template developer

Hustling-Labs · 2024-07-23T19:13:55.212Z

My name is Jesus Vazquez, and I have been a Bubble developer for the last five years, building and selling Bubble templates for the last three. I run Hustling Labs, a no-code development company composed of two Bubble developers and myself. Today, we’re celebrating over 1,000 template installations and wanted to share my journey with you. Perhaps I can inspire someone to get started in whatever they want to do in life.

Before we proceed, I want you to know, I’m from Puerto Rico, english is my second language and I come from a really poor background in the southern part of this small Caribean island. I add that just for context, I had to learn english so I could improve my life. If I did it, you can do it too.

The Early Days

I began my journey by developing sites for clients from my WordPress days. After six years of creating directory and e-commerce websites on WordPress, I needed a more customizable solution for my clients. That’s when I discovered Bubble. Starting with small projects, I had no design or coding skills and had to learn everything from scratch. Unlike WordPress, where themes handle most of the work, Bubble required me to design database architecture, create workflows, and focus on the design aspect.

StitchedOn

My first Bubble project was StitchedOn, a platform that collected the best Bubble tutorials into an easy-to-search site. Initially a personal Airtable database that I shared with some friends so they could get started too, I transferred it to Bubble to create a more user-friendly UI/UX. After a year, I sold StitchedOn on Flippa for a few hundred dollars to focus on building Bubble templates full-time.

Here’s a run down of some of our most popular templates:

Codeless Wizard

Originally known as Building Block Labs, Codeless Wizard was my first template and was designed as my personal repository for landing pages, building blocks, and features. Despite not keeping up with it, this free template has had 141 installations and helped attract word-of-mouth for our other templates.

Direxact

Direxact was my second template, developed to scratch my own itch. It’s a directory business template blending features from Yelp, Airbnb, and Uber Eats. Initially, the design was poor due to my lack of design skills, but we have consistently improved it, publishing 3-4 updates per quarter. With 246 installations, it’s our second best-seller. This is a paid template.

Societal Labs

Our third template, Societal Labs, aims to be a mix between Circle.so and Facebook, allowing users to host their own social media communities. This has been our best-seller so far, with 249 installations. This is also a paid template.

Framestatic

Framestatic aims to be a building block for platforms like Product Hunt. We achieved about 75% of the necessary features, and with 174 installations, it is our fourth most installed template.

Hero Blocks

Hero Blocks was an experiment that didn’t pan out as expected. We plan to merge the successful elements into Codeless Labs soon.

Blog Labs

Blog Labs allows developers to create Medium and Substack-like platforms easily. This free template has been installed 148 times and is gaining traction.

Desmily CRM

Our newest template, Desmily CRM, is an e-commerce CRM with API integrations with Shopify. We plan to add more features, including subscriptions and Stripe integrations, and make it a paid template soon.

What Do We Get Out of All This?

Web design clients. We get a few leads a month, although we turn down most projects as we’re focusing on big projects for the most part.
A few hundred dollars per month from template sales, enough for some Happy Hours.
Street cred, as it works as our portfolio.
It’s also cool to help people build their dreams, from time to time I get emails with people stories on how they use our templates, that’s always cool and inspiring.

How Did We Get Installs?

We have done some marketing to attract customers to install or buy our templates. Here are some of the most successful ones:

Launched Societal Labs on Product Hunt.
Listed on various software directories.
Scheduled launches in active Facebook Groups.
Wrote blog posts.
Created landing pages for most templates.

What didn’t work so well?

Since this is just a side hustle for me at the moment, I have a full time job and my focus is on my clients projects, I haven’t invested a lot of time on the following strategies which could be gold mines:

Build in public on X
Take advantage of Reddit to answer questions
Post regularly on LinkedIn
Cold outreach

I’m sure others could make this work but I just don’t have the time.

What’s Coming Up?

50 Bubble Plugins by the End of 2024

We plan to release 50 plugins, mostly API integrations, by the end of 2024. We have already released nine, including integrations for Pexels, Emojis, ConvertKit, TinyPNG, OneSignal, Loops, Encharge, Hexomatic, and MailerLite. Upcoming plugins include Facebook Graph API, Threads Graph API, Instagram Graph API, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, X, MailChimp, Shopify, and Klaviyo.

New Templates

Social Media Manager: A template similar to Buffer and HootSuite.
Task Manager: A new Task Management template similar to Trello, Monday.com, and ClickUp.
Codeless Labs Makeover: Redoing the Codeless Labs template to include dozens of new elements, landing pages, and dashboards.

This journey from zero to 1,000 installations has been filled with learning, experimentation, and growth. Each project has taught me valuable lessons, and I look forward to what the future holds for Hustling Labs.

Have questions? I would love to help, send me a DM or an email at jvazquez@hustlinglabs.com

antonio.xu · 2024-09-01T10:24:15.190Z

Felicitaciones Jesús!

Your story inspires me as I’m just starting my journey in Bubble (Module 4 of the Airdev course).

I searched for StitchedOn, but I couldn’t find it. Is it still live? I’d appreciate any resources you find helpful in learning Bubble.

Hustling-Labs · 2024-09-01T19:05:31.489Z

Hello Antonio, I sold StitchedOn a few years back and it has been shutdown. Since then I’m building templates and plugins at Hustling Labs and publishing my own video tutorials on YouTube. Below are the links:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@hustlinglabs
Hustling Labs: https://hustlinglabs.com
Bubble Marketplace Profile: Hustling Labs Contributor Profile | Bubble

What are you building or looking to build?

fede.bubble · 2024-09-01T22:57:34.378Z

Thanks for sharing!

antonio.xu · 2024-09-01T23:04:53.491Z

Right now Im building a pet adoption platform to start building my portfolio.

I want to start a nocode software development agency and start my own SaaS.