Hi all,
This is our October community update! Read last month’s update here.
This was another solid month of execution and shipping features! A lot of great work happened across Bubble in September, and we feel that we are settling into a rhythm as an almost-one-hundred-person company. We were thrilled to welcome a new head of Finance, Jing, who completes our overall leadership team, and while there are always growing pains at a company our size, in general we have been operating more smoothly and with higher output than we have in the past.
We were very excited to participate in the Nocode Summit in Paris over the past couple days. Emmanuel presented during the opening ceremony and also gave a longer talk, and we had a few other members of the Bubble team in attendance as well. By all accounts, the turn-out was fantastic and the energy level was very high: there’s a lot of excitement about no code in Europe right now and it was great to tap into that and meet some of you in person.
In addition to Jing joining us to lead Finance, we welcomed the following members to the team:
- Shaahana joined us as a Product Design Intern
- Yiran and Salil joined as Software Engineering Interns
- Henry re-joined us as a Product Manager (he had previously interned with us as an engineer)
- Yi joined as a Software Engineer
- Zayn joined as our Immerse Program Management Associate
- Eloise joined as a Sales Development Representative
- Eram joined as a Technical Product Support Specialist
- Carly joined as the Director of Product Marketing
As always, open roles can be found here, and we especially 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
We’re excited to announce a new and improved form for job requests, replacing our old request for proposal form. If you want a Bubble professional or agency to help you with your project, the new form helps guide you through key questions and sends your projects out to relevant agencies. Agencies who are part of the RFP system now also have better filtering on projects. One repeat piece of feedback we heard about the old system was that posters were overwhelmed by the number of proposals, many of which were generic. These changes are geared towards driving fewer, more relevant proposals, something that we will continue to iterate on with our fantastic ecosystem of agencies and professionals.
Another fun announcement this month is that we are starting an annual program to donate to Open Source software projects, as an effort to give back to the software communities that enable Bubble to exist.
In the product, we released the following:
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A Bubble-native way of creating tag lists with Repeating Groups, or any other use case that benefits from variable-width, auto-wrapping Repeating Group cells
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Global color variables, making it easy to change colors across your entire app in a single click! No more editing tens or hundreds of styles and elements whenever you change a color in your design.
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Taking advantage of color variables, we updated our default styles for new apps, so that Bubble’s out-of-the-box styles will be better looking and easier to customize. As part of that release, we also added the ability to customize the placeholder colors for inputs.
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We made some much-requested improvements to Group Focus behavior to make it easier to build things where clicking an element both shows and hides the group.
We are also very excited to launch a comprehensive video course on using APIs in Bubble applications. This is the definitive resource on what APIs are, how they work, and how to use the Bubble API Connector to bring them into your app!
This month in numbers
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New conversations via bug reports or support@bubble.io: 9,792 (up 1.6%).
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Average first response time to messages: 1h 24m during business hours (down 7.8%)
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Average response time to messages: 1h 26m during business hours (down 2.3%)
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Tickets closed by the engineering team in the past 30 days: 111 (down from 148)
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Average days to closure for tickets closed by the engineering team: 12.2 (down from 21 days)
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Average days to closure for high priority tickets: 2.4 (down from 7.3 days)
Things on our minds
As we enter the final quarter of 2022, we are beginning to think through our priorities for the upcoming year. One thing that continues to be top-of-mind for us is growing our customer base and revenue: as a venture-backed startup in rocky economic times, we want to be leaning into our business results to make sure that we continue to have access to capital to invest in our team. As mentioned in previous updates, we are fortunate enough to have raised a lot of cash last year, so unlike other tech companies, we are not looking at cost-cutting or layoffs, but to maintain this strong position for the long-term, and build the product and community we really want to create, it’s important that we continue to be a fast-growing company from a top line perspective.
What this translates to in practice is a lot of focus on onboarding new users and turning them into customers, via an overhaul of our signup flow, experimentation with different forms of free trials, in-editor onboarding and education, and features that make it faster for users to build useful apps such as the component library we are working on. It also involves making sure we retain our more successful users and help them grow on us, which is why we’re investing in version control, deep technical improvements to systems performance, the new pricing model with auto-scaling capacity, and building out our sales and technical success management organizations. Finally, we are working on overhauling our marketing and messaging, as well as investing in our community and ecosystem, which we see as our most powerful growth lever.
As always, we are planning for the long term: we want the Bubble platform to be empowering people to create software twenty years from now. Getting there is a delicate balance of short-term commercial success, longer-term investments in our product and technology, building the team, and managing our cash runway. We feel very lucky to have such a great team already, a generous bank account, an amazing community and ecosystem, and a product we are very proud of (even though there’s so much more we want to build!)
What we’re currently working on
Following up on our latest post about pricing, we are continuing to do technical work on capacity and auto-scaling. Our focus right now is on making improvements to the way we track capacity usage to ensure that the metric is stable with respect to changes we make to our code: we have had incidents in the past where a bug we release or a change we make significantly impacts the capacity usage of applications, and want to reduce the degree to which capacity usage fluctuates over time prior to enabling auto-scaling. This stabilization work should be behind-the-scenes: the total capacity usage of applications should not significantly change, and instead should become more stable moving forward. We are in the middle of the backend work to make this change, which is substantial and involves adding some new database technologies to our stack.
Other ongoing workstreams:
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We are working on our new components system to improve how easy and fast it is to build beautiful apps on Bubble. We have it built and are currently testing it! In parallel, we are working on onboarding tutorials to help users learn about it and how to use it.
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Our work on an improved version control interface continues: we are doing internal testing on many of the features, as we finish building out the remainder.
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For the overhaul of our network architecture and infrastructure, we are starting with improving our credentials and configuration management. Our first production system will soon be using the new system; we were aiming for end of September, and it is now more likely going to be early October.
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In order to increase our overall reliability, we are working on the way our alerting and observability systems work. We finished testing our proof-of-concept, and are finalizing the plan for rolling it out to the company.
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Our push to migrate code of CoffeeScript continues; we are now down to 15.0% CoffeeScript in our main codebase. Typescript is now up to 3.9%, with the remainder being Javascript. We are bumping up the priority of this work, with the hope of getting through it and onto other technical improvements that are enabled by it.
Happy October,
Josh and Emmanuel
