How To Get Hired As A Bubble Developer

Jobs / Freelance
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Sister post to my ‘How To Hire A Bubble Developer’ guide. There are so many rubbish job postings on the forum that I wanted to make this short guide on how and where to find Bubble jobs. This is coming from someone that’s been trying to hire developers recently (as a side note, please don’t cold DM me wanting work).

How To Make A Cold Forum Post

If you make a forum post saying you’re available for work, you need at least some of the following:

  • portfolio
  • website
  • client testimonials
  • forum activity
  • certification

If you make a post without many of these, without posting additional information like your hourly rate or geography, it shows a clear lack of commercial awareness which instantly writes you off. What do I mean by commercial awareness? It’s an understanding of how businesses work and how they are (or aren’t) successful. If your post contains none of this useful information, it shows you have no clue what employers are looking for. Employers want commercial awareness, because how can they expect you to build a product for them if you don’t understand their business?

In addition, you must write with good grammar and language. That of course doesn’t need to be English - it can be whatever language you’re looking for clients in. But in the age of Grammarly, ChatGPT, and all of the other tools to help with your writing, there’s no excuse for not proofreading your post.

I have never made a forum post asking for work so can’t tell you how successful it will be, but I imagine it’s the least efficient way of finding work. It’s a bit like shouting with a megaphone in a town centre, most people will probably ignore you, because someone hiring can see it as ‘this person can’t get work elsewhere → not very experienced → don’t hire’. That’s not necessarily true, but it’s what happens.

Gig Marketplaces

Gig marketplaces like Fiverr and Upwork might be a good place to start. Whilst I haven’t done Bubble work there, I’ve used them for freelance work. It’s a good place to build experience on smaller projects, and, equally as important, build up a bank of client reviews. You won’t make as much, but you’ll get seller protection, you can compete on price (as that’s how decisions are made on these gig marketplaces…), and can get items for your portfolio.

RFP Area & Forum

You can respond to RFPs on the Bubble site and on requests for development on the forum. I’ve had two leads and one sale from the RFP tool. When responding to these requests, you should:

  1. Ensure the message is not completely copy-pasted - make sure the lead knows that you have read and understood their requirements
  2. Provide a cost range and timeline range. This doesn’t need to be precise at all but it means if your cost is higher than what they’re looking for they won’t waste your time.
  3. Sell the meeting, not the service
  4. Provide evidence of competence, like the forum post guide above
  5. Provide (relevant) past work wherever possible

Ensure you give leads an opportunity to meet with you if they’d like. Like the forum post, ensure your response is professional, clear, and well written.

Contribute to the community

This is how I got my first work. I contributed various AI tips and resources to the forum, which meant some people got in touch as I seemed like a person of authority on that matter. You might want to try making templates and plugins too (I’ve done neither). Forum clients are generally familiar with the basics of Bubble as they’ve tried it themselves which I like as it makes communication and meeting of the minds easier. I know lots of people in this forum that’ve had plenty of success just by being active and adding value to the community (and they’ll probably even comment on this post). This:

  1. Proves your competence to any potential hirer
  2. Raises your reputation in the community
  3. Helps you learn as teaching reinforces your own understanding

But I don’t have any past work!

Build something then. Build something for yourself. Build something for a friend. Also, it’s a given that these should not be based off of templates. If you have no past work, and no app that you’re proud of to show, then you’re not ready to be selling your services to others. My first apps were apps I built for myself that generate a little bit of passive income. They’re nothing special, but they’re something. They look good, and they run well. You don’t need anything more. There’s no excuse for not having any past work available upon request.

tldr; if you make a forum post saying you’re available for work without much else, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. If you’re a good developer, and you understand what businesses want, you will find success.

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Nice post, @georgecollier, thanks.
I agree about how useless it can be to post asking for work. Whenever I’ve seen one of those posts, I’ve thought that the author must not be very good, and unfortunately, there are more and more every day.

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Thanks George…what do you mean by selling the meeting, not the service?

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The conversion objective of your proposal :slight_smile:

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Very few people will spend any amount of money worth having without first checking you actually exist, so there’s that. Showing you want to find out more shows you care about their project and not their money. As it turns out, about 20% of my clients I never meet, but I think the point stands. Focusing on the meeting means your response focuses on how you can serve the client, not how much the client needs to put up to serve you.

Also, I’m not a salesman - but my other business is a relatively large YouTube channel. What I’ve learned from there is it’s all about the hook. You need something that makes your reply stand out from all of the others. For me, that’s that I tell them the exact price of their project ($10K) before even meeting them. I know @cmarchan’s is his forum activity + number of solutions. The man is Bubble’s 6th biggest solution provider. It’s a clear point of differentiation that means they want to learn more and they have a fear of losing a good deal if they don’t.

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:eyes: :+1: Thanks @georgecollier !

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Oh, man… a thousand times that, especially the part about not being ready (for whatever the reason) to be selling your services to others. The type of post that baffles me the most these days is the “I have a client who needs me to build x feature… please tell me how to do it!” Those posts pop up more than you’d think, and I always wonder what the client would say if they knew their developer was relying on free help from the forum to build their app. In my opinion, it’s downright irresponsible, at the very least, and it could be viewed as shady as hell, given that services were sold which cannot necessarily be rendered in the manner in which the client is likely expecting (i.e., that the developer has the knowledge to do what they said they could do).

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I always think about replying with words to this effect but figured these posts happen so often that it must be me who’s wrong in the head about it :sweat_smile:

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Thanks George!

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Amazing as always, @georgecollier ! Since my initial day here, everything I read from you has been valuable. Congratulations on consistently delivering insightful content to the community!

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That’s an awesome guide!
Promoting through knowledge is the best thing. Doing personal projects with proper planning helps a lot to learn (I did too while making a multivendor school-management-portal ).
Moreover, helping the community on our own shows the passion. I will keep the notes for the future.
Thanks George

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Great post! You really put effort into assisting the community with highly requested topics. Additionally, I have a question: What do you mean by “Also, it’s a given that these should not be based on templates”? Does this imply avoiding premade templates like a CRM template, or does it extend to framework templates like the Canvas one?

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Yes

More tricky, but I would never use the Canvas framework in client apps. Too much bloat, slow. Just build from scratch.

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I have never personally tried it, but building templates can be a great way to attract clients if it is done correctly

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Absolutely! I completely agree that helping others and sharing useful resources is an awesome way to get noticed. It would be fantastic to hear from people who’ve actually created bubble templates themselves.

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Interesting post and good points thanks!

Personally, I’m of that age that I have been creating web apps since, well since the web was created. I started as a developer then project manager, solution architect, IT Manager and Enterprise Architect. I then went through the processes of a (failed) startup which saw me go back to the basics and create the technical solution hands-on with Bubble.io.

It opened my eyes that now a single ‘developer’ with absolutely no, or very limited, knowledge of html, css, Jscript, php, Groovy, SQL, Server management, etc, etc… can create a pretty impressive full solution in days or even hours that would have taken a team of experts with multiple skills weeks or even months a few years ago.

This is an incredible advancement and enables people with a vision to get to market with very short lead times. On the other hand, it opens up the technical market to a much wider audience.

Now as a personal lifestyle choice I enjoy helping other startups build their technical application and leverage low code solutions such as Bubble.io.

The challenge I and others face is not on the technical skills side but we all need to be experts in marketing because the competition is intense. I only see this trend continuing, especially with ai. With a few well phrased natural language commands a website will to a certain degree build itself.

On the point of asking the community how to do something, I have never taken on a major assignment and not had to ask someone something or at least searched for an answer. Every project has a new challenge that’s what I love about working in IT. Indeed, in the past I have hired some major agencies on multimillion dollar projects knowing that they don’t have all the answers because we wanted to use the latest version of the latest software to get the latest features for competitive advantage. On the other hand, I have also sacked a very big agency for charging for time for their staff to get trained. I’m paying money to get expertise without having to train my staff.

My advice would be don’t shy away from bidding on work that you don’t have all the answers to, but make sure you have enough knowledge to know it can be done and have the confidence that you can solve the problems in good time. BUT don’t charge the client extra for your research time, that is self-development and comes from your training budget. Or to put it another way ensure your day rate is high enough to allow for a training budget.

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I personally only charge for effective hours.

Obviously, its hard to draw the line between effective hours and not having all the answers, like learning how an API integration works, which, in my opinion, is effective hours because there is no way I can research every single API.

Also, its hard to say if testing multiple solutions to a problem is effective hours. Like, if I have three different ways that I could build the backend for a feature or map a database.

I usually don’t charge for the two ways that didn’t work, unless I have talked to the client about how there are multiple ways to build a feature and confirmed if they are happy to invest the extra money into making their app great.

But this is just me, I usually do fixed-priced projects anyway so I will just not include learning in my quote for the project.

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Thank you for the tips @georgecollier

It looks like contributing to the community is the preferred way to get hired, so I have some questions:

  1. do you think that answering some questions on this forum periodically (in addition to writing tips posts) is a part of the contribution that helps with getting hired?

  2. Posting in the forum VS making YouTube videos, which is more deserving of the effort and time?

  3. Do you have any thoughts about the effectiveness of posting in other language? I mean I am thinking about posting in Arabic but I don’t know how many Arab are here or how willing are they to hire developers, also there is no special category for Arabic language. Is it better to focus on English?

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Yes

Forum

If you’re comfortable in another language, target customers and audiences in that language :slight_smile: