Open Letter to Bubble Product Strategy

Meta
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I love this product and I have made >100k with it. As have many people in this forum providing help to beginners and feedback to your product. Plugins and marketing. For free.

And we really want to help you improve.
But it seems you hardly let us.
Here is another attempt.

Leverage your community.
It is your biggest asset.
It provides free marketing. It makes great plugins, agencies, help videos, forum posts.

At least half your new features:
Disgruntle your community as they were not asked for their input before building or during building. You make the launch post as if itā€™s the last part of your checklist, then ignore the sometimes ingenious feedback given. A wall of silence with no new improvements is what meets us. Elements, such as the table element with great potential but no follow-through, await us. Please after announcing a new feature also act on the feedback given back by users.

Meanwhile the bubble forum, your bug reports & twitter is full of useful and easily actionable low hanging fruits that would certainly improve the product. Xano launches new features requested by the community every month. Xano pricing is 10x cheaper than bubble at scale. Cloudflare 100x. We would forgive that if:

There were less outages, less new features launched with clear bugs, less bugs that have existed since 5 years but most important of all: 100 quality of life improvements per year. You made them recently. Then 5 years ago but never since.

Sit 5-10 of us power users in a council.
Ask for feedback regarding option sets. Regarding reusables. So many quick fixes would become apparent. The product would be much easier to use, versatile and loved by now. But instead you focus on some projects which regard things that do not need much improvement (elements tree, expression composer, client agency search etc) and change our way of working completely over night with no user interview beforehand

Please, user feedback is where it is at. Its how most companies got and remained huge. Get input from your power users. Many of which on twitter or the forum share a love/hate relationship with bubble instead of a love relationship. It is in your hands to change this. Ask them what needs to be built instead of come up with it yourself. Cos we are the ones with 50 apps built per developer that will move over to weweb+xano, softr, noodl, etc., wherever the clearly growing nocode market, that you could still conquer, takes us.

A vita of 5 used to be hardcore bubble devs

  • one did well on twitter, sold courses but joined a competitor cos community was being left out
  • one owned the bubble forum but left for competition as his feedback was being ignored
  • one made some genius bubble plugins but now uses weweb + xano
  • one made some genius bubble plugins but now uses noodle + xano
  • one made some bubble plugins and courses but now uses xano

Its not too late but it is getting later by the month.
Choose whether to act.
And start with community.

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Totally agree

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100% agree, there needs to be a council of power users.

Here if you need me Bubble (doing client work almost every day since 2020).

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It should be a huge wake up call to see such power users leave the communityā€¦ I donā€™t understand how Bubble can just ignore this.

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Also they need like 4 official staff to just answer peoples questions here. What happened to @sam.morgan ?

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Great post! I full agree @TipLister

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Heā€™s crushing it on a different team! But yes, I miss those days of @sam.morgan and, prior, @eve, being around to help.

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The mounting feedback about Bubble is making me more and more nervous to continue to commit to it as a platform. Really hope to see the tide change directions.

Support for this post

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Thereā€™s nothing to add here. Tass said it well enough. And way more has been said over time here and on Twitter. Bubble team is well aware of it.

Not sure why measures are not taken.

Seems like Bubble as a company and Bubble community do not share vision any more.

Iā€™m reminded of Steve Jobs famous joke. Feels like Apple in 90s, Bubble has a hole on the bottom. Sinking. While company tries to keep it staring in the right direction.

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Great points. Iā€™m in support of this

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Agree. Still a massive silence / void over workload unit pricing transparency which I feel is going to push even more people away as the legacy plan pricing stops come October. Not one person in my network has willingly upgraded from legacy yet and further alienating community with these random haphazard new features doesnā€™t help.

It seems there is a clear lack of strategy at the top of Bubble. There seems to be a lot of focus on agencies and making the ability for agency partners to be found and get work within the Bubble ecosystem which then pushes individual developers to one side. Not everyone wants to spend 5 figures on an app build and some people actually enjoy the process of building apps themselves.

You then have Bubble making moves like getting Gregory to make tutorials (great move, should have done this years ago) but what is it? Are you focusing on agencies and customers who can drop 5 figures on an app build and wanting dedicated plans or do you want the indie developer to explore and be creative. It doesnā€™t seem to be clear and all the mixed signals would put me off massively if I was new to this space and considering Bubble for a project.

To top it all off for me personally, the only interaction I get from Bubble is sales rep emailing me rather disingenuously offering to ā€˜helpā€™ as my app is seen as one with a rather large workload unit consumption. I ask what help is being offered and I get the dedicated plan pitch. That is not help Bubble. That is sales.

One positive from all this though is I have spent time to learn more about backends and databases and that makes me less reliant on one specific product going forward.

I just canā€™t fathom why Bubble doesnā€™t talk to its users except trying to convert them to dedicated. If I am worth your sales rep time, surely, I probably have other inputs on the product that could be valuable.

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Absolutely @TipLister and thanks for highlighting it.

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Bubble needs to go Open Source to have a shot at this. Commercial tiers will need to drive revenue.

Webstudio, Noodl are great competitors. Budibase, Tooljet, Appsmith are amazing and much faster dev tools in many cases.

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Totally agreeā€¦ I have to constantly reassure clients that Bubble is still the right tool every time thereā€™s an outage and that has now become frequent

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Before did a lot of thing in the past like
A) Interviews with contributors about upcoming features (Was interviewed a couple of time)
B) Alpha testing before Beta release (was part of 1)
C) Release features related to the ideaboard (1 of 4 of my ideas was released, but partially, however, got interviewed on improvment after this releaseā€¦ no news since a few months)
All of that seem to last a few months and Bubble seem to change their mind?
Same thing happen with Support. They try new thing but it never last.

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i agree theres always some green flags that bubble is doing something right and credit where its due, you have made some nice releases recently.

but then its back to:
lets launch something noone asked for and ignore feedback in the very busy launch post

instead of
lets see what sticks and quickly iterate after lots of feedback.

the interviews i was invited to were expression composer 1 year ago.
or database relationship visualization (never saw a change here)
sure these are small problems but theres many lower hanging fruit with bigger outcome to focus on.

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:point_up:

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100% agreed.

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Hi Tass,

Thank you for sharing this feedback with us. We care deeply about our community and value your feedback; community inputā€Œ informs many of the decisions that our team makes, and youā€™ve made a number of important points that are well worth our attention. Weā€™re working hard to improve our product, including a total overhaul of the editor. We also aim to continue implementing many ā€œquality of lifeā€ improvements based on community feedback. As far as gathering that feedback, our Product team has made progress in several areas. We now have a dedicated Design and Research teams that will, for example, source feedback from users at different stages of feature development. All of this is with an eye toward usability.

As Bubble grows, weā€™re committed to improving our processes, and weā€™ll continue incorporating user feedback as we develop and iterate on product features. Weā€™re also planning ways to connect more with our community. Weā€™ve recently hired a dedicated Community team member, joining us later this month, whose priority is exactly what you describe ā€” eliciting and consolidating feedback and creating more impactful ways for the community to weigh in.

As always, please continue to use this forum to connect with the Bubble team, flag any issues to our Support team, or email us at community@bubble.io.

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Well said, @TipLister.

I will say, Iā€™ve been a part of a number of user research initiatives, and have felt heard on the things Iā€™ve communicated - especially the recent elements tree release, which I think provided a good deal of QOL improvements that Iā€™m personally really happy with. In that case, although we didnā€™t get everything we asked for over the course of the beta, the input of testers was taken seriously and for the most part, incorporated into the final release. I felt like it was a really good experience overall.

That said, itā€™s unclear how Bubble communicates the opportunity to participate in betas or user research. And the roadmap is (for some reason) a black box. The result is that your most loyal, knowledgeable users have updates effectively sprung on them - disrupting their workflows pretty significantly - rather than making them stakeholders in those changes from the start, or at the very least mentally preparing them for upcoming changes.

@jayvee.nava, I appreciate your response and am encouraged that there is momentum on making what seems like a somewhat haphazard engagement effort more focused. Please also consider making the roadmap public. Itā€™s disheartening to be so in the dark on whether we will get the things weā€™ve been asking for, for years, and not being able to communicate whatā€™s coming to our clients.

Bubble is special for two reasons: its robustness as a platform, and its community. It wonā€™t be long before other newer, more agile platforms can compete on robustness. Thereā€™s little Bubble can do about that. BUT. There is A WHOLE LOT they can do to nurture and leverage the community. And, in my opinion, itā€™s maybe the most critical thing right now. It is just the nature of humans that if they donā€™t feel valued and heard in a relationship, they will jump ship when another option comes along that provides that. If Bubble doesnā€™t make this a major priority - like THE priority - across all departments, I donā€™t think itā€™s dramatic to say the exodus is right around the corner. Tass is right. Itā€™s already started, and with some of your most loyal people. I sincerely hope the alarm is sounding in Bubble HQ. :blue_heart:

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