I have an idea for about 6 months. I want to build an own charity miles app (it is an app when you do some sports like walking, hiking, for every km you get sponsored for a good cause). It is my frustration not to know how to start. Maybe need someone with experience to guide me with the steps I need to take. Programming is something I trying to figure out. the bubble app is an blessing because you don’t need to code at all.
Hi,
I found that with Bubble, as with most languages, it’s best if you
A) start by identifying the “things” you’ll be dealing with in your app. “Things” in bubblespeak means anything you want to keep information about – what in other worlds is called classes or entities.
Examples of “things” in your case may be the Person who’s running/walking, the Cause for which the person walks, and the Event of the walk. For each thing, you way want to keep certain relevant information. For example, for the Person, you may want to keep the contact information, for the Cause, the description, pics, etc.; and for the Event, the date, the mileage walked, and the points/dollars raised. Create all those using the data tab.
B) Then move to create the functionality to capture data on those things.
C) And then create the pages that will show what adds value to the app users (i.e. the ones for which people would really come to your site).
For these two, it’s useful to think as the person who will be in front of the screen. How do they call things? What do they want to see? When? Why? What type of device will they use to interact with your app? (If you can avoid designing for mobility in your first app, you’ll save a lot of time.)
Sometimes, you can change the order of things, skipping B for a while and inputting data in bulk instead or skip A and B altogether and just play with look and feel of C, but in the end, you’ll need those parts and probably many more. But this will give you a good feel for what you want/need to do.
If you’re not yet comfortable with Bubble, go over all the tutorials. Ask questions to the forum. There’s a wealth of very knowledgeable people in it and they are very generous with their time. I know because I’ve benefited from it on many occasions. Also, @romanmg has compiled a lot of great advice for beginners (and not so) in her Coaching Bubble site.
Hope this helps you get started. Don’t be afraid to be wrong. Few people get the data part right the first time (if you’re like me, it will take you several iterations because you’ll never think of all the use cases ahead of coding them) and there’s always another way to represent information. Try and explore. You’ll enjoy it, frustrations included.
On a separate note, and to the risk of releasing the fury of many in the forum, I disagree with the “no coding” tag. You still have to “code” in Bubble, but you do so using a different programming paradigm. For most people, this paradigm is significantly faster/cheaper/better than using most traditional programming languages, but the act of using it, imho, is still coding.
Alex
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Start small and build from there! Take one component of your idea and try building that. Sometimes if you look at the big picture you just get overwhelmed with the amount of work involved.
I have been building my app now for almost 8 months and only now putting in the finishing touches. It is a journey, but you need to start by focusing on putting one foot in front of the other and you will eventually get to your destination.
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