How Bubble bootstrapped a visual programming tool for non-coders to $100k/mo

Wow this has been a disappointing discussion up to now, with most commenting on how much visual coding tools suck. That's not the take away here, at all.

A frequently asked question is "where is Access for the Web?", closing aligned with "what happened to 4GL languages and tools" or "where are the RAD (rapid application development) app builders for the web?". This is an answer; they've hit $100k monthly. They have found a market where many, many similar projects (I've listed them here before) have not. The relevant and amazing thing is how? How have they succeeded where so many others have failed?

The interview gives some answers:

He (Josh) was in New York, and everyone, literally everyone, was asking him to be their tech co-founder to start a business.

We started "recruiting" users at tech meetups in New York. With the startup wave, everybody was looking for a tech co-founder, and there were plenty of co-founder-dating meetups. ... We went there and told people that while we couldn't be their tech co-founders, they could use Bubble, as it would allow them build the whole thing themselves.

The following year (2013) we did a pilot at Harvard Business School, which I had just graduated from. Their first year entrepreneurship class required students to build something under a very tight budget, and Bubble was a good solution for this.

Answer; these guys had a kick ass network and expanded it. They had direct access to people in their market who were starving for this type of app.

Bubble platform is the most advanced no-code tool that exists so far. It allowed many entrepreneurs (including me) create apps fast and with low budget which otherwise would take many months and tens of thousands dollars to build. It's true, I'm a bit biased here, because it also became possible for me to start a no-code development business which never existed before. So we focus on building apps without code for people who don't have time or patience to learn the no-code tools or who don't have budgets to afford the traditional development. And for the sceptics that doubt about the complexity of apps that can be built without code you could check our portfolio at https://bubblewits.com ↗ (this web-site is too built on Bubble). But we have taken it 1 step further and created a no-code platform for all things no-code. The main part of the paltform are the no-code templates built for Bubble. Which makes building new products and startups even faster (just like creating a web-site with Wordpress themes is easier than doing it from scractch). If you are curious take a look here: https://zeroqode.com ↗

I watched the demo video. It looks like what the Visual Basic form builder was for Windows programming in the 90s.

However it will be difficult for non programmers. The very first dialog about Google Maps has menus "API provider" and "Query". I wonder how many non programmers know what they are. They can take a guess and learn but maybe this is still too low level. The second example is about building a login form by configuring its input fields. Maybe adding a completely configured dialog would be good enough for non programmers. Programmers can edit the details. Same for every other component.

However I remember that non programmers didn't use Visual Basic, as easy as it was. Programmers did. Some non programmers built sites on MySpace some 10 years after VB, then wrote on various blog platforms and configured themes, then ended up on Facebook and other non programmable social media platforms. Outside the Web the most used non-programmers programming tool is still probably Excel. I've seen amazing stuff build there from people who couldn't write a two lines script in Python.

What I'd really like is a smarter compiler. My normal dev process is

1. Write code

2. Run code

3. See error

4. Google error

5. Write code to fix error

6. Repeat

I'd like a compiler that helps speed up steps 3-5. I know IDEs do some of this, but I'd like a compiler that automatically fixes errors instead of just telling me what went wrong. One that fixes parentheses that I left off or automatically fixes typos in variable names or function calls. One that knows to keep things DRY and creates a function for me when it sees the same similar code written twice. One that knows when I wrote an inefficient bubble sort and swaps it out with a faster sorting algorithm etc. One that can make my code run faster. I think this is a long way off, and I know it's really hard to write a program that writes code, but it's always seemed that programming simple things is way harder and takes longer than it should to me.

I've seen plenty of visual programming tools and lots of other things to help "non programmers." I've even helped build one.

The fact is that if you can think and communicate precisely enough to describe your ideas then you can enter them into a computer fairly easily in a language like python or basic. If you can't then no matter how fancy your tools are you still need something intelligent (currently a human programmer) to pull the idea out of you and encode it.

Stuff like this isn't useful to people who are incapable of programming and is just a highly coupled mess that can't be easily automated and version controlled.