Here is my answer to the Bubble survey, for which I gave Bubble a 7. I thought it would be interesting to share and get some other perspectives.
Bubble is an amazing product and a great achievement. But the strategy is of concern for a few reasons.
1 - Talk of being feature complete is unsettling when this is not (and never will be) the case. I’d like to hear that Bubble is going to raise and spend a lot of money to take the product to the next level. Instead, you seem intent on remaining a small team and progress is slow.
2 - Lock-in risk is a massive disincentive (only increased by point one), especially given that performance seems alarmingly bad. It takes me 30mins to upload a few hundred transactions - something I guess my PC could do in the blink of an eye. (Admittedly, I’m still on the personal plan). I expressed before, that this could potentially be remedied by a feature that converts bubble apps to portable code - this might be a tough technical challenge, but it’s the feature that could take bubble from fringe to complete dominance.
3 - Another bugbear is the refusal to provide a forward-looking roadmap, so we - your paying customers, who are expected to commit the future of our businesses to your platform - are completely in the dark about how the product will develop.
For these reasons, I think Bubble is at severe risk of being overtaken by a competitor who piggybacks on Bubble’s ideas but addresses the core issues (essentially a fast follower). I hope I’m wrong because I’m a fan.
@stu_bowes The same arguments have been made for years - Of which, I respectfully disagree w/ most of your points (not all I disagree with). As a 4 year veteran, I’ve developed multiple apps with Bubble, even back in the days of not having looping (well, not looping the way you think it is)!
Bubble is what you make of it. And so far, I’ve been able to make everything clients have asked of me with the current Bubble functionality and make a decent profit. What else matters?
Do I have to make some compromises w/ Bubble? Of course!
Do my software engineers (I own a software development company w/ 10 full time, in house developers) have to make compromises w/ custom code based on budgets/timelines? Yup.
Perhaps you could elaborate on what “feature complete” is to you - That’d help some other folks to chime in. Perhaps take a look at the Idea Board and see if those features are already there. If not, add it and then add a forum post - That usually gets a lot of folks upvoting.
Here, yeah, I do agree mostly. Bit of an uncomfortable convo with potential clients!
There used to be a roadmap - It was up for a long time. It’s not there anymore, but every single monthly communicae from Josh (bubble founder), has the most current, forward looking roadmap items in it. I get why they took down the old roadmap, it was stale, had large, ambiguous tasks and wasn’t updated often… Now, we get a fresh update every month.
Sounds like something is off – should be way faster than that. That wasn’t my experience when I transferred my records, and that was before they overhauled the CSV uploading last year to make it faster [New Feature] [Beta] CSV Upload Overhaul. Perhaps ask Bubble support to take a look.
