Man, has anyone seen this tweetstorm?
Ryan Breslow 
on Twitter: “Shopify is Eating their Ecosystem (thread):” / Twitter
What if Bubble just clones their top selling plugins and templates…
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Super interesting thread, @Boost… thanks for posting it.
Personally, I want to believe it’s mainly about the level of scumbagginess of the people at the helm of the ship, and I have never seen two folks who appear to be further to the left on that scale than Josh and Emmanuel. However, it’s no surprise that at some point, the entity itself grows beyond the ability of any one person’s (or even many people’s) ability to control it, and then stuff starts to happen that appears to go against everything the founders had in mind when they started the endeavor.
The question in my mind is whether or not this kind of thing is inevitable because the pressure of growing a behemoth into, well, a bigger behemoth is so enormous that the folks at the helm convince themselves that they are always doing the right thing, even when it’s clear they are not. But, having never been in those shoes (or anywhere near those shoes, of course… heck, I don’t even know how to find the stores where these folks buy their shoes), I have no idea if it could be as easy as someone at the top saying, “Nope, we simply ain’t doing that shit, and anyone who has a problem with it can get the hell out.” I want to believe it could be like that, but I’m sure that’s just me being naïve.
Anyway, thanks again for posting the link, Boost… really interesting stuff.
Best…
Mike
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I wouldn’t worry about that. They have so many other things they need to do to build their product to reach as wide an audience as they wish to. I’m sure they are fine with taking the 25% off the top of every sale at the moment. I’d imagine Bubble still has about 5 years before they may start to look at how else they could benefit the investors, but at the moment, they need to keep improving the real product, make it more accessible for others, which is why they have stated their intentions with the $100 million in funding is going toward, engineering team build out, expansion of educational products and evangelism.
And personally, I don’t mind competing with Bubble in the template marketplace since they would just be another developer in the marketplace.
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Most plugins I have built were born from a deficiency in the Bubble platform as it currently exists.
I fully expect those deficiencies to be resolved as Bubble iterates on their product and will thus eliminate the need for those plugins.
It would be different for plugins that provide new features or functionality.
Having said that, if Bubble spends its time expanding the plugin system capabilities to give developers the ability to build more robust functionality they could leverage a ton of talent to build out more features than they ever could build and maintain on their own.
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The thing about bubble is they are more of a programming framework than a platform. The diversity of what can actually be created is near limitless. Sure they will start to create pieces that better interact with the bubble framework such as the native box integration but to do EVERYTHING that EVERY integration does will be near impossible. Their will never be a point where the plug-in store or templates become obsolete.
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Fascinating thread @Boost thanks for sharing. Plugins are additional net revenue (25%) for Bubble, with near-zero cost. Taking a plugin “in-house” would mean a net loss of revenue and an increase in support costs.
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