Maja Overgård was getting frustrated. After she left her job as a management consultant at Deloitte, she was excited to use her newfound free time to work on some projects of her own. She had been wanting to build a camper-friendly Airbnb-like service in Denmark, and trying to code or use other tools hadn’t worked for her. Enter Bubble, and with it, the ability to build and scale her app idea just like she wanted. Just a year and a half after she found Bubble, Maja’s app Hejcamp was acquired by Campspace, one of the biggest campsite platforms in Europe. The experience proved to Maja that she had exactly what she needed to bring her projects to life without coding.
Happy to answer any questions, if someone is curious about Hejcamp or any of the features on there. Everything is build 100% with Bubble (+ stripe integration for payments).
This is a very inspiring story and congrats on the acquisition!
I had a question in regards to marketing, how did you find your first users? I assume you probably did some marketing in those Facebook groups you mentioned?
I started out by showing public places on Hejcamp, i.e. free places to pitch a tent and book a open tree-hut called a shelter (we have quite a lot of those in Denmark). That way I was able to generate traffic to my site for instance via Facebook groups. As I in the beginning only had public, free sites this was okay for me to post in most Facebook groups as it wasn’t (directly) commercial.
However, a solid traffic base made my site interesting for potential hosts, because their target audience now was using my site to find places to stay in nature. So in that way I used to public data to start the “catch 22” of attracting hosts vs. guests.
Also, I focused a lot on Instagram and building a community there. Instagram eventually became my main marketing channel.
I was wondering if you can provide any info on how Campspace went about integrating Hejcamp into their existing technology since it’s built on Bubble, rather than as a traditional app? Did they continue to use Bubble?
I’m hoping to emulate your success by selling an app I’ve built, but I worry that the fact that it’s built on Bubble might be a deterrent to potential buyers. Their in-house developers are all traditional coders, so I fear that in order for my app to sell, I’d either have to pay to have it reverse-engineered off of the Bubble platform, or buyers would need to train their developers to learn Bubble to maintain it.
That’s a great question. I think it really depends on whether the acquiring party is interested in the app itself or the business made with the app.
In my case with Hejcamp, the primary objective was to acquire the business made with the app. Campspace as the acquring party had exactly the same business model and thus already their own platform. The two platforms/apps are essentially the same and it doesn’t make sense to run two similar platforms. So the business from Hejcamp (i.e. hosts, content, guests etc.) has been and will migrate to Campspace and the Hejcamp app will eventually be closed.
So whether I build my business with Bubble or “traditional” coding wasn’t an issue at all, because it wasn’t the technology itself that was interesting.
Inspiring story - Great work. I am looking to build a marketplace with Bubble and interested to understand a bit more about the design element of the platform.
Did you outsource any of the design work or creative for the build? Or did you do this to through the Bubble features? I am keen to make the initial MVP of the market place as visually appealing as possible, which is something by the looks of things you managed to do?
I built everything in Bubble, also the front-end and the visuals of it. I designed it myself, so unfortunately cannot point you to any external resources.
Did a few mockups in Figma first to get somewhat of an idea of what I would build. However, this was only for the first few elements/pages. After that I just build new pages and elements directly in Bubble.
Hope that clarifies a bit? Let me know if you have any more questions!
