Hi all,
This is our April community update! Read last month’s update here.
March was a very busy month for us! A lot happened, both good and bad, across our product, our community and ecosystem, and our business operations. Some of the highlights:
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We hosted a virtual event on AI – see recap here! – with 2,217 attendees, as well as helping with in-person community meetups in Toronto, Portland, LA, and Atlanta
And the lowlights:
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We had extended downtime, due to a DDoS attack
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We were caught up in the industry-wide SVB fire drill (due to the heroic efforts of our Finance team, we were in the minority of companies able to get enough operating funds out of the bank prior to the FDIC takeover)
We also welcomed some amazing new hires:
- Deedi, joining to lead our Content team
- Mark, joining as a senior engineer on our Platform team
- Mac, joining us as an senior tech recruiter
- Alexis, joining as our Director of Partnerships
If you would like to join us, check out our careers page here. As always, we highly encourage community members with solid Bubble skills and a love for helping people to join us as Technical Product Support Specialists.
Changes we made this month
In addition to shipping Version Control, we made a number of other changes to the product:
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We launched a new, high-performance design canvas, which is available as an experimental feature while we ensure it’s completely stable
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As part of that release, we made the Elements tree resizable, which fixes an annoying UX painpoint for bigger apps
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Another experimental release which we plan to ship to everyone once we’re done testing: categories in the expression-builder dropdown
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We did a full overhaul of the My Account page on our website: we think it’s a big upgrade!
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We announced an official CommandBar plugin, which is an incredible way to let power users interact with your applications
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We announced an official LottieFiles plugin for Bubble making it super easy to add responsive, high-performance animations to your apps
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We added the ability to navigate to a dynamic page, which makes it significantly easier to change URL parameters from reusable elements, and paves the way for follow-on work to make our “Go to Page…” action even more powerful
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We finally created a way to convert from monthly to annual plans without having to downgrade first – long overdue, I know!
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Another overdue Easter egg: the right-click menu when you click in the elements tree now matches the right-click menu when you click directly on an element on the page.
Also worth mentioning, we kicked off our first ever community build contest. March’s contest just wrapped up: stay tuned for the winner announcement, and for the start of April’s contest!
This month in numbers
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Tier 1 (FAQs, account and billing issues) handled tickets: 4,955 (down from 5,396)
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Tier 2 (app development questions and bug reports): handled tickets 2,615 (up from 2,331)
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Average tier 1 reply time: 36 minutes (up from 31 minutes)
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Average tier 2 reply time: 1 hour and 25 minutes (down from 2 hours and 23 minutes)
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Tickets closed by the engineering team: 130 (up from 128)
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Average days to closure by engineering for high priority tickets: 1.6 (down from 11.4)
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Average days to closure by engineering for all tickets: 5.8 (down from 13.3)
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Incidents and regressions: 17 (down from 19)
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Of those, the number that are high-severity (greater than 20 bug reports): 2 (flat from 2)
Things on our minds
As mentioned above, we had a number of fire drills this month. The DDoS attack highlighted some weaknesses in our relatively-new Platform team’s incident preparedness, which we are addressing via training and practice scenarios. The SVB meltdown highlighted the importance of a diversified cash management strategy: we are happy to report that we now have significant institutional diversification and risk management.
Another thing we’ve been thinking (and talking) a lot about is AI. A couple notes on how we are approaching the recent advances in LLMs and generative AI:
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We don’t view AI as a substitute for no code. Rather, no code is a great language for AIs to communicate with humans in: a system that spits out code is much less friendly and workable than a system that can interact with the Bubble editor. Therefore, doubling down on the usability of Bubble and the robustness and power of Bubble’s platform is just as important in the age of AI, and any investments we make in AI will be on top of, not instead of, our ongoing product investments.
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We do think AI is a long-term game changer in the no code space, and that it is important for us to integrate it into the Bubble editor. We’re not in a rush; we think that while “build a webpage from a text description” demos are cool, the real game-changers for no code is making the AI accurate (getting complicated workflows correct is hard!), iterative (you’re never done with just v1!), and interpretive (the hardest part of starting from a pre-built app is understanding how it is put together). In the short term, the full power of the latest AI advancements is available to our users already: if you want Bubble help and advice, GPT-4 is already very powerful, and if you want to get super-quickly to designs, you can go from AI → Figma → Bubble using our Figma import feature. So while you will see more and more AI-powered features from us, we are making a deliberate choice to experiment with various directions before committing to how we integrate AI into the Bubble editor, and to make sure we build the best long-term solution.
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The other big thing for AI is using Bubble to build a frontend for AI-powered functionality. Teams building AI-powered apps move much faster when they use no code rather than code. As announced at our AI event, we are investing in partnerships and integrations with top AI companies such as Microsoft/OpenAI, EdenAI, and PhotoRoom, and expect to hear more from us over the coming weeks and months in terms of additional resources and tutorials for integrating AI into your apps.
What we’re currently working on
There’s a number of product improvements currently in the works:
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Building a Table element (similar to a Repeating Group but can customize each column and header): we’ve finished the design, finished a proof of concept, and are now working on building the remaining features
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We’re working on moving our interactive lessons into the new application creation flow, so that new users can get in-app coaching on how to build various features. We expect to experiment with this in April.
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We are making some updates and changes to the API for building server-side actions in plugins, both to fix some bugs and to enable upgrading to node 16, which requires switching from a synchronous to an asynchronous API. This is in the works and should be built in April; we will communicate out to plugin developers when it is ready for them to start upgrading.
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Replacing capacity with auto-scaling / overages and updating our pricing accordingly: we are close to being finished
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We are continuing to work on overhauling our infrastructure, with the goals of enabling SOC2 certification and improving page load performance
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Moving off CoffeeScript and onto Typescript. We are now down to 1.5% CoffeeScript in our main codebase. Typescript is now up to 12.8%, with the remainder being Javascript.
Wishing you the best,
Josh and Emmanuel
