I guess software is never “done”. But I think I am ready to share my first bubble app, Bagheera. (Yeah the homepage is not built with bubble but with Strikingly, which I regretted doing).
Bagheera is a CX-centered customer journey mapping software, I hope those of you who work in marketing or as UX designers may find it useful.
I’m mostly writing this to say: Thank you, Bubble and thank you Bubble community.
As a background, I’m a marketing strategist. In the past years, I’ve had many ideas for products, some of which I’ve turned into startups. But what I was really missing was a way to quickly develop prototypes without having to spend money on software development for what are ultimately just experiments, side projects.
Sometimes I did end up investing, to varying results.
Sometimes I tried some of the ridiculous “app builders” on the market.
Sometimes I hacked my way around a prototype in perhaps ingenious but absurdly complicated ways (WP+ a bunch of plugins+Podio+Zapier+Typeform and other combinations).
At one point, I tried to learn Python, and I soon realized coding was not for me: I am not a particularly detail-oriented person, and the number of mistakes made made debugging hell. And that was to print “hello world”, or little more than that. I seemed to get stuck on such low-level issues, what I really wanted was a way to play with way larger building blocks. To build the house with bricks instead of gravel.
Then Bubble came into my life, and finally made it possible for me to experiment, fail, iterate etc. on my time instead of on my money, and this while really enjoying in the process. It is finally possible to build relatively sophisticated software with no code, for real. F***ing awesome.
But if you’re here you know that already.
So here are some ideas:
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Bubble has a huge, not fully exploited potential as a tool for people in my situation startuppers with no devs on team. Projects like the Code Free Startup are great, but Bubble itself could leverage this more in its communication.
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Another thing Bubble could tap on is education. It’s a great way to learn how programming works, be it for kids, for academic interest or whatnot. I am sure if I tried to learn coding now I would be at a big advantage.
The above values do not come across on your website, and I am sure some more marketing effort would bring huge rewards. -
Implement a reusable element to ask for bug reports.
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Implement a better (and cheaper) way to export pdf (I know I tried this already @emmanuel, just trying again ;-))
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integrate a live chat api
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Integrate with one of the mushrooming chatbot builders
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There are many things that are not clear from the documentation, and they took me a while to learn. Stuff like conditional formatting, object states, privacy settings. It would be awesome to have tutorials on these topics
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When I realized I was gonna have at least a dozen data types, I had to figure out how a database works. So I watched some youtube videos on relational databases, and I learned quite some stuff (see my point above about Bubble’s educational potential). It would be great to have a Bubble tutorial on how to structure complex data in Bubble (ex. when to create a “parent” column, when to use lists, etc.). I imagine programmers take this for granted, but for the rest of us there’s a lot of learning to do.
That’s all I can think of for now.
Thanks!
PS. Some parts of my app are still not working great, please message me for bugs/comments
