I’ve spent the last three years working with two different Bubble agencies, both of which have let me down. I’m convinced that the majority of agencies are subpar; the good ones don’t need to market themselves.
Instead, I want to build an in-house development team to grow our transportation management app.
I am looking for suggestions on the roles I should hire for. The current agency owner recommended:
Product Owner
Project Manager
Senior Developer
Junior Developer
Business Analyst (as needed)
UX/UI Designer (as needed)
This seems excessive for a Bubble-based project.
I’m based in Southeast Asia and, due to the complexity of the industry and the app, prefer to hire locally to facilitate in-person meetings. (ideal locations for me are Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand).
If you have advice or have worked as a full-time developer focused on a specific application, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
You probably just don’t really know how to go about hiring a good agency - and how would you? Bubble skills and experience are completely different from any other traditional dev skills, and Bubble doesn’t give any measurable way to judge an agency’s ‘quality’. The tiers are essentially just measures of size.
Freelancers have the problem (well, stereotype) of being a bit flaky and running off. Big agencies in Bubble tend to charge you $$$$ and outsource to a junior developer in Africa/South Asia and end up with a really tech debt heavy app.
I think it’s really rare that even a complex Bubble app needs more than one developer. One good senior developer and you’re good to go. As you add more, the senior dev spends more time cleaning up the work of the junior devs than they would just building it themselves. I’ve audited a lot of apps with in house teams/a few developers and haven’t found a single one that isn’t plagued with technical debt and bad build practices. I’ve audited equally complex apps built by one good developer that are in an infinitely better place.
Contract this out, you don’t need that many designs and design is pretty easy for anyone from a freelance platform to do with a quick brief.
The trouble with Bubble is that for the most part it handles poor optimisation well, so people overestimate their skill significantly and truly good senior devs are actually quite rare.
@georgecollier you gave me exactly what I needed to take the next steps. Thank you.
Coincidentally, as I saw this comment notification, I was reading another thread where you mentioned you were working on a post on how to hire a developer. Thanks for saving me from searching for it!
Can second what @georgecollier says. I work with large and complex app and I do it alone. With good practices it’s not a problem. Increasing staff size is also creating overhead and need for communication and understanding - the hardest part of any project.
Maybe I posted this in the wrong location, but this is not how I typically hire…
Its more a request for suggestions or advice based off my current experience in order to help me prepare to define the candidate profile I would need in order to hire.
But thanks for your interest. If you have any suggestions, I’m all ears, and will keep you in mind when I list the job posting in the future.
I know this wasn’t directed to me but at my agency we strictly staff one developer per project. So, developers will sometimes have multiple projects if the workload for one project isn’t high, but individual projects will only ever have one developer touching them.
Right now, I personally only actually work with one client, because I know them well and know their project and business inside out. That project isn’t anywhere near full time for me. Trust me when I say that it’s really hard to make a single project require a full time, 40-hour a week dev, let alone multiple! Bubble’s meta-app (the one you use to view their site, your apps, manage payments etc) only has a couple of devs and I’m pretty sure they do other stuff in Bubble too.
Just keep in mind, if you insist on having a senior developer full time, you’ll be looking at a minimum of $80k+ a year. In SE Asia, you could maybe get one $30k+ a year but they’ll be hard to come by, as the best devs in SE Asia are already working on the western salary for other companies!
Closer to $60,000 USD on the lower side. There are large companies in SE Asia that are technology companies at their core. The developers they look for need to be competent, and so they offer very attractive pay and packages. Normally you can see these advertised for developers as $5,000/month plus benefits. A friend of mine used to work at one of these companies in Bangkok as a Product Owner and he was getting paid $11,000 USD per month, and that was five years ago.
I have been running our agency for the last few years. Officially on the Bubble Agency page for one year although we have been around since 2016. I would be happy to jump on a call to give you some tips on how to be successful. You can learn from my experience.
We mostly work on very large enterprise Bubble apps that are very complex.
I should be available tomorrow if you want to set up a free call with me. Direct message me with a time that works for you and I can see if I can make it work.
Sorry you haven’t had a good experience hiring an agency so far. Creating your own team sounds like a great idea.
Hope to hear from you soon and I can share all my tips to help you out.
This answers the questions as to why I’ve always felt like the 3 PMs and agency owner would forget key points we discussed in the previous weeks. It must be really easy for an agency to take on multiple projects and create 40+ hours of work a week for a dev. - this explains a lot. But should also explain why my self-cooked solution is to hire someone full-time.
In your agency, is the client working with a PM or are they communicating directly with the dev?
Directly with the dev - and this is an explicit decision + value add, not just a ‘well we can’t afford a PM right now’. Communciating with a PM adds an extra layer of communication to go through which isn’t necessary because we only hire devs that have the commercial awareness to make reasonable assumptions about your business and take the initiative to consider things you might not have even considered in your initial request. It’s important that they’re forward thinkers and can anticipate problems with the request you might have made ahead of time, so you can avoid technical debt. You don’t just want order takers! (I am conscious that this kind of approach might only work well in small agencies - we’re not large enough to see how it scales to a team of say 10 developers)
Say, for example, you had a simple flashcard app and you want to track when the flashcard was last answered. The simplest way to do it would be to add a dateLastAnswered field on the Flashcard data type. The senior dev will take your request, know that in the future you’ll also want other related info like the answer that was chosen, and perhaps want some graphs of answers per day. They’ll know to create a new data type for Answers to facilitate this, even if it’s not required for your initial request.
Same goes for designer - you talk directly to the designer. It makes everything faster, cheaper, and better quality. Of course, I (as it’s still a small agency) am always supervising to make sure everything is good quality. But our general philosophy is to keep it lean.
If you’re going to hire an inhouse team, my recommendation would be:
Find a senior dev that is very technically competent.
Ensure you, or whoever will be instructing them primarily, can work effectively with them and enjoy their work style. Make sure they have the commercial awareness that you want so they don’t have to be micromanaged and can be forward thinkers. Self-driven so they don’t need to be babied by a QA supervisor.
You’re unlikely to find a senior dev who’s very good at design, but they’ll be good enough to make things look fairly smart. If you want better designs, subcontract them on Fiverr/Upwork as and when is necessary, and pass them to the developer. Very unlikely that you need a full-time designer.
Yeah, because the developer has never spoken to you, doesn’t understand your business - only the scope they’ve been given. Which leads to situations like the arbitrary flashcard example I described above → slows everything down → more expensive to develop → causes tech debt → worse user experience
I feel like I can add some value here as an internal developer for an in-house team of several Bubble developers.
When our CEO and CTO decided to start building out our own Bubble team, it was due to similar frustrations with a larger agency. Our executives started by hiring 1 full time developer, and from what I know about that time, it worked well. Our CEO is quite the visionary, and loves Bubble’s ability to pivot quickly, and iterate over products at lightning speeds. He is also very entrepreneurial, so while we are one company, we have several internal products that we manage and build out features on.
After hiring the first dev, they hired another developer, followed by me. When I joined the team it was 3 Bubble developers and our CTO. Now, we’ve grown to a PM, a QA team, and seem like we may be moving to a more product-based team structure (not for sure here, it just seems like the next natural move). Essentially, we’ve built an entire in house product development team all based on Bubble.
I do agree, most products and Bubble apps only require 1 good developer. However, if you love diversifying your product offerings, want several products worked on, maintained, and improved upon at a time, an internal team may be the next move. It’s all very situational, and I agree with the sentiment that most don’t have this need.
It’s interesting how no-code is still so new that every developer/agency has their own unique way of organizing an app build. You’re saying there is no need to work off traditional approaches to app development because this stuff ain’t traditional.
I like the way you’ve set that up, and it makes me feel more confident, if I go against your previous advice not to hire full-time just one good dev is enough. And if you go the agency route for the third time, I’ll want to be in direct communication with the developer.
Thanks for this perspective! This is my justification for being able to keep someone busy as well. Multiple business under our main company, all of which could benefit from internal custom tools. Plus, I can’t picture out app ever complete, as I think there will always be features to add to it.
This is right, each agency will promote a different value add too.
Take Airdev - giant agency, heavy teams, you’ll pay the price for it too. That’s because the value that they promote is ‘you can rest assured we’ll get it done, on-time, and to the project scope, nothing more nothing less’. They’re also very handsoff with the client - after you set them off, they kind of just want to come back to you in a month with the project and be like, here it is. Which is what a lot of people want.
Other agencies will prefer to involve the client a lot more and a lot more regularly - work with them, rather than for them. Some clients prefer that approach instead. There’s an agency for everyone - the problem for people like yourself is there’s no way to assess them if you don’t understand Bubble to a very high level, which means people end up with mediocre apps and a lot of problems down the line, unfortunately.
Just wanted to chime in and note that Airdev now has a “Flex” offering which might be worth exploring. It enables you to work directly with one of their vetted and experienced devs on more of a freelance basis - i.e. you communicate directly with the dev. And it does not require that the client use Airdev’s Canvas framework.
