Monthly Community Update -- May 2024

Announcements
21

It would be great if Greg can record a video using the new “make” plugin :muscle:t3:.
Btw, great videos!

2 Likes
22

Hey folks, I’m seeing a few questions along the lines of “why are we working on this and not that?”

I thought I’d take a second to share how we think about our roadmap and decide where to put engineering resources. I don’t expect you all to agree with every decision we make here, but we really value the community’s feedback, so we want to be transparent with our thinking!

Big picture, we are optimizing for Bubble to become the go-to platform for 95% of new web and mobile development. We think it’s wild that starting with traditional code is still the default choice for many builders, given how expensive, slow, and hard-to-pivot traditional coding is compared to tools like Bubble.

That said, we know we have a lot of work to do to get there: There are legitimate reasons why people still pick code, and it’s on us to make Bubble amazing enough that those objections disappear.

We think the best thing we can do for you all is to be the dominant platform for software development, because it means you’ll have made the right bet by building on top of us. When the ecosystem you are working in is growing, it creates positive synergies. Investment, talent, and resources flock to it, which creates tailwinds for everyone involved. We don’t see a future in Bubble staying the size we’re at today: if we want to deliver on our promise to be better than traditional coding in every way, we have to lean into growth.

Given that, we prioritize two main things:

  1. Helping people who’ve already chosen Bubble as their platform. We view this as our primary responsibility, and the key to growth, because the best lever for us to be successful is to make sure you all have a fantastic experience, grow your businesses, and share your stories with your friends and colleagues.

  2. Acquiring new users and growing Bubble’s revenue. We’re trying to save you all from spending a ton of money on hiring engineers, but that means we need to build out a world-class engineering team, and that costs a lot of $$ — our team today is about a fifth of the size I’d ideally like it to be in a perfect world.

We generally try to build a balanced roadmap of projects that makes sure we’re pushing on both fronts, as well as paying at least some attention to all the varied stakeholders we have as a company (small startups and businesses, scaling companies growing on our platform, professional Bubble Developers and agencies, plugin and template builders, etc). We also take into account some practical concerns, such as the fact that engineers have different skills and aren’t perfectly interchangeable. There are also switching costs for stopping one project and starting another.

With that said, here’s a quick overview of why we’re working on some of the bigger things I mention in my update:

  • Reliability and performance: We owe it to you all to make sure Bubble is a stable platform, and that apps built on us can scale and be blazing fast

  • Mobile: This is the #1 feature requested on our ideaboard, and it represents a huge opportunity. For a large proportion of our users, it makes sense to have both a web and mobile experience. We believe this will grow our business, generate a ton of revenue (so we can keep investing in the platform), and make the community delighted — a win on all fronts.

  • Version control changelog: One of the bigger pain points we hear from growing apps with multiple developers is that it’s really hard to feel confident working as a team because it’s hard to know who changed what when. This feature should solve that problem!

  • Our editor modernization initiative (including the new elements tree, and upcoming work on the workflow tab): One of the biggest things we hear from power users is that there are lots of little friction points in the day-to-day of using Bubble, and one of the biggest things we hear from new users is that the learning curve is high. Also, the technical basis that our editor is built on is old (it uses some techniques that haven’t been cutting-edge since Emmanuel and I started Bubble in 2012), which leads to bugginess and jankiness and makes it hard for us to change things quickly. We think it’s time to overhaul the usability of the editor, put it on modern tech, and make it smooth for power users and new users alike. We’re going piece-by-piece, and we’re super excited about the changes we’re making here!

  • AI: We think there’s a pretty good chance that within 1–2 years, having a V1 of your product built by generative AI will be table-stakes for all players in both the no-code and traditional software development space. It is going to be really hard to get people to choose a tool where you have to painstakingly build everything by hand when there are options on the market that will give you a fully fleshed-out UI in 10 minutes (even if it still requires hand-tweaking afterward). We want to lead this change rather than lag behind the curve. I know this is not the most popular thing we’re working on in the community because it doesn’t speak to your immediate pain points, but think of it as an investment in the future: We’re looking out for the long-term sustainability of Bubble by making sure we don’t get left behind by the next tech revolution in the no-code space

  • Observability: As we look into helping users scale on our platform, one thing that’s clear is how hard it is to build reliable apps on top of us without having great visibility into what’s happening in your app, including errors, issues, etc. We’re investigating ways to make this much easier to help you build confidence in the platform — I see this closely tied to our reliability and performance work. We’re also looking at this from the WU management lens, making sure you have the tools you need to understand where WU is going and how to optimize it.

  • Plugins page makeover: This is a project our Bubble Developer team is working on, since this is all built in Bubble! We think our plugin ecosystem could make it a lot easier for plugin builders to showcase their work, and for app builders to find the right plugin. We view our ecosystem as incredibly important, especially plugins, since they fill in gaps in our core product and elevate us to the next level. We’ve heard lots of feedback that it is hard for users to find the plugins they need and to know if a plugin can be relied on, and we want to fix it.

Hope that’s helpful context! As always, we really appreciate all the feedback.

— Josh

25 Likes
23

My hope is that this ships fully featured, and not half-baked like other Bubble features, like the Native Table or Search which are unfinished.

7 Likes
24

Thanks for the additional context, @josh! I think one of the things that make Bubble so great is the transparency y’all give. Looking forward to what’s to come :blush:

4 Likes
25

Totally rational thesis. The question is, how many dev folks do you have devoted to forging new ground versus cleaning things up? IT Ops is its own thing, of course.

For you to achieve your 95% goal, you’re going to have to go fast AND pick up the pieces. How you’re organized is key for you and for us as existing clients who are largely funding the growth:-)

3 Likes
26

Just two simple things to add before AI or other advanced things :

  • sort by “option field” in the “do a search for” … we are in 2024 and we can’t do this so simple thing. We can filter but not sort :upside_down_face:
  • accelerate the page delivery to the browser… even an light page is too long… very difficult to explain to our customers why a 2 cents wordpress is faster than a hundreds dollars a month solution. They don’t care about tech or capabilities or AI, they just see the result, and sorry, but, it is slow.
3 Likes
27

The top three would make us unstoppable. Couldn’t agree more!

  1. reliability
  2. mobile
  3. version control
28

@josh Can we please include scaffolding? RoR has been doing this for 20 years…

29

It is finally calming to hear this from you @josh . When I made the decision to seek for projects in bubble, leaving my last job, i truly believed that you the founders where good enough to keep this thing alive and improving it every day… and also found an amazing community… I think maybe this decision was right.

Just remember, that as the bubble monster grows (company, teams, projects) you can completly go blind on what is really important for us, your users / customers. I mean I believe in you guys, but I have seen several post growth startup founders saying this, that is hard to not get into…

Thank you for all your effort and sincerity, hope we both have a great future.

3 Likes
30

This is really a good idea and a much better way to use AI for, for the existing users.

I really hoped the reply from Josh had addressed this point.

@daviddr17 how about putting this post of yours in ideaboard?

1 Like
31

@payam.azadi please, fix this kind of problem. Every week I’m losing dozens of users. Please, fix it.

@josh It’s cool to let us know about everything, but, as I said to Payam, I’m losing a lot of money for this incidents.

2 Likes
32

Hope this is going to extend to Bubble’s native Multi dropdown plugin?

Edit: I mean that the plugin is still in dire need of an update :grin:

7 Likes