So…so, you guys are saying my two years building the first version is a bit overkill :)?
I work on the project a few hours a week, sometimes weeks not at all, but if I average it a 5 hours a week I easily hit >500hours.
Of course I did have zero Bubble, Design, Database OR development skills going in, so there is that 
whoops. Eric if you are reading this, just know I read and liked you book!
hey if you enjoy it who am i too judge!
but also taking into account that you spend 5 hours a week it makes sense. If you would condense the the work into 40h/week it would take 3-4 months 
Actually a lot of what is said above is good wisdom. It also presumes the Bubble user actually knows what a good database/design etc looks like…I am going through a itteration over itteration proces, slowly learning what works and what doesn’t.
And it is a fun hobby project, so I do not mind it too much .
Haha! But it can STILL be useful to get it out in front of people–if that is the ultimate goal. You’ll be amazed about how a feature that you thought was super cool, people don’t care about, and all they want to do is this one part that you thought was a throw-in-feature.
My experience: I am the Director of Product for a fintech startup in NY. I have been working in Product for nearly 4 years. Previously, I collaborated with an engineer to create an online network for a cappella group. I use SQL at work, took a course on Java in college, and did Codeacademy for HTML when I was working in marketing. I do not code in python or javascript, but I have absorbed a lot by osmosis.
The first app I built in Bubble was an internal tool for my colleagues. It came to my attention that their current tool had major pain points and insufficiencies, as well as being a $20k annual subscription.
I met with a teammate to understand the functionality that would be needed for “the correct solution”, and started looking at Bubble that same day. In the course of two long late night sessions, I “winged” a database design and UI (would not have been so fast without my professional background), and learned bubble by trial and error (no patience for tutorial courses).
I showed my work to stakeholders, had them test it with a mock example, learned what was broken, needed to change, would be nice to have, etc., and put perhaps an additional 4 or 5 hours into a feature that allowed us to export an attractive PDF that contained scheduling info for our event attendees (only possible via plugin and custom workflows).
That took, all in all, maybe 20 hours of development. The basic functionality:
We cancelled our subscription. Fast.
The next app I built was a virtual version of a card game my friends and I love. This is much more complex and has taken considerably longer. I haven’t kept good track, but it’s probably in the neighborhood of 75 hours, and the roadmap stretches on for easily another 24-50 hours of work.
Many of those hours were due to “re-factors” - hitting a performance issue and realizing I needed to change something fundamental, realizing I hadn’t been leveraging repeating groups as well as possible, or just figuring out the dang logic needed to get the game to work. Other time, of course goes into testing. With support for 8 players in the same game simultaneously, there are a lot of edge cases and scenarios to support.
The card game works quite well, and we’re really at the part where I’m just looking to improve performance, add a few more high-impact features / nice-to-haves, and eliminate critical bugs (stale data displaying on the screen can wreck a card game).
Thanks for the input @simonriker
Love it! 20k replaced with 20 hours of work…
Your account is pretty new so I assume that you are using Bubble only a month… which is impressive as you already have shipped two apps!
Yes, many extra hours spend on building the app comes from not knowing enough about best-practices - but you will get there and I am looking forward to see what you come up with.
But let me ask you this: taking into account your product management background how much of the unnecessary work/rework comes from bad design, bad UI choices etc? Although your apps are internal tools or just for fun so I assume you do not perfect your UI etc I’m curious what’s your take on it.
Hello.
It took me less than 2 months (working at nights and weekends) to build my last app (the third one). I’d say somewhere around 60 hours. The app is a tool to collect feedback from your users and help you plan which features to build next.
But there’s something really important: this is the time I spent in Bubble. I spent maybe 20 more hours in Sketch designing everything. And I mean everything. I’m a web designer (not coder) and making changes in Sketch is much faster than doing it in Bubble, when you have already created groups, workflows, etc.
My Sketch design and my final app are almost identical, check it yourself:
Sketch design:
Final bubble app:
BTW, in case you want to have a look, you’ll find it here: http://fidlio.com
Great app and it’s really impressive for only 60h of Bubble work! Congrats
That’s was the answer I was waiting for. Thanks @cristian1
Just downloaded Sketch couple days ago looking forward to use it in the next app design. Good to know the Sketch is much faster when it comes to designing than Bubble - that’s what I thought but wasn’t sure about it.
btw there no in Favicon at https://app.fidlio.com/
Would love to hear some more advice from designers, so please chip in!
Thanks for your comments, @bartek.dev
Sketch is a great tool, but if you’ve never used it before it has a learning curve too. It maybe takes the same time to “design” something in Sketch as it takes in bubble. But what I found in my previous bubble projects, where I didn’t use Sketch, is that I tend to start and finish one page before moving to another one, workflows included. And when I’m designing the second or third page I realize something looks better in a different way or whatever, and then I have to change things that are already “finished” in previous pages, and that takes time in bubble, especially when there are many groups, etc.
Btw, the lack of favicon in fidlio is intended. I allow users to customize the look and feel (change logo, colors and… favicon), so that their fidlio site looks similar to their app and end-users don’t feel they are in a different app.
But let me ask you this: taking into account your product management background how much of the unnecessary work/rework comes from bad design, bad UI choices etc? Although your apps are internal tools or just for fun so I assume you do not perfect your UI etc I’m curious what’s your take on it.
Design learnings / iterations have yet to cost me any unnecessary time. But yes, I am building for friends and colleagues, so I’m not being terribly picky with cosmetics. So long as the tools are intuitive (which thankfully they have been on the first go-round), then I’m happy, at least for these two examples.
Yes, I suffer with that problem too. I hope Sketch will change how I work and save me some time.
oh I didn’t know it was possible. I’ll look into it thanks
Well, there’s not a “native” way to do that if you want a dynamic favicon, you have to use basic HTML, just have to put this code in every page:
