From clueless to (semi) competent
My journey as a professional Bubbler
Read time: 8 minutes
G’day everyone.
In this first edition of my newsletter, I’m giving a brief history of my Bubble journey to date.
But first, some trivia.
Tidbit of the week
It’s incredible how so much of thinking can produce so little, and so little thinking can produce so much.
We’re all familiar with this icon.
How do you think the famed hamburger icon came about? Perhaps a world class design team hired by Apple to imagine the future of computing ran a design sprint?
Nope. It was created on a whim by Norm Cox, lead engineer on the world’s first graphical computer interface (the Xerox Star).
He designed it to look like a bunch of stacked tabs. And in his words:
I probably did that at 8:30 at night on a Tuesday and never thought twice about it.
So, the next time you’re overanalysing a logo, a tweet, or anything, think of Norm.
On with the show.
In 2019, Emmanuel Straschnov (co-founder of Bubble) came to host a small roundtable chat in Amsterdam.
He was there by mistake.
The organizers of TNW, a big tech conference featuring faces as diverse as Reddit’s CTO and Will-I-Am, had got Emmanuel confused with some other founder.
At any rate, I was there by mistake too. Emmanuel’s roundtable had been booked out, but damned if I was going to miss my chance to talk with one of the founders of Bubble!
As the roundtable went on, it was clear there was a bit of scepticism in the room. Code does a great job. How could a tool like Bubble possibly compete with it?
Emmanuel was undeterred. His conviction was that code was hard to learn and as a society we’re obsessed with teaching everyone to code. But there’s an alternative path.
Rather than pumping out more coding bootcamps and the like, why not change the tools we make software with so that they’re easier to learn?
By doing so, many more people would be able to build software, people who otherwise would never do so.
Emmanuel didn’t know it, but he was talking exactly about me.
A lucky break
I think we all remember that moment where we fully appreciate the power of Bubble. You add an input to the screen, setup a workflow to save it’s value to the database, and pull that value back out to display on the page.
It’s a simple operation. Boring even. But when you don’t know how to code, seeing that value appear on screen and realising that you alone programmed it is exhilarating.
For me, that moment came in mid 2017. I had dropped out of university 6 months prior, and was trying my best to live up to the college dropout who starts a million-dollar company persona. I had a big idea for a blockchain-powered peer-to-peer education platform, and zero experience or skills for how to create it.
I was naïve, but eager. And by sheer luck, one of my desperate Googling sessions uncovered a blog post about Bubble. The title probably said something like build apps without code, and that was enough.
I realized that despite our chronic lack of technical skills, I could build our MVP with Bubble. I was hooked.
As luck would have it, our big audacious idea ended up winning a €50,000 grant from the European Commission.
All of sudden we had a dream scenario. Enough money to pay ourselves full time to work on our startup, and the ability to quickly prototype ideas without any outside help.
What followed was essentially a paid internship in Bubble development. We spent our days coming up with stupid software ideas, building them, and then trying to get people to use them. We were entrepreneurs in search of a business. All the mistakes one could make, we made them.
When we inevitably ran out of money and decided to call time on the startup, I had a year of experience building stupid apps. So I did what anyone would do.
Build stupid apps for clients.
Apprenticing under the best in the business
Ask me now if a Bubble developer is a real developer, and I will argue vehemently that they are. But back in 2018, even while building apps professionally, I was scared to call myself a developer publicly. Real developers code, right? What I was doing was cute, but it wasn’t real development.
That attitude only started to fade away once I started working with people who, in the Bubble world at least, were the real deal.
Gaby, from Coaching No Code Apps, is a true OG of the Bubble world. My professional development career really started once I started working with her, spending a few days a week building functionality in her clients’ apps.
Also at that time was a short spell making tutorial videos for Zeroqode templates, another big name in the Bubble world. It was challenging work. My job was to reverse engineer their templates, figure out how they worked, and then create video tutorials on how to use them.
As anyone who has built from a template can tell you, it’s sometimes easier not to use one at all. Often by the time you’ve worked out how the template works, you could’ve just built the same functionality from scratch.
Yet for me, this was another learning opportunity. I got to see how a professional Bubble agency designed apps. To this day, I believe that reverse-engineering templates is one of the best ways to improve your Bubble skills, provided you have a strong footing in the fundamentals.
Taking this development thing seriously
Things started to properly take off once I joined the Airdev partner program. For those of you who don’t know, Airdev are the largest Bubble agency worldwide. Their partner program was still in it’s infancy back when I joined in 2019, but already they had solid systems in place.
Airdev were ahead of the curve. They had a streamlined process, modular components to build from (in the form of their Canvas template), and coordinated handoffs between specialized roles (designer, QA, and developer).
This experience opened my eyes to the real potential of Bubble. We had no shortage of clients, and they were genuinely thrilled with what we were able to produce in such a short amount of time.
Before long I was offered the chance to work as a product manager (PM), a role that there was increasing demand for. Back then, the PM role was also a sales and design role. We’d be the first face a client sees, and if we managed to convince them to hire us, we’d go ahead and scope out their app requirements, including wireframes, before project managing the build itself.
That role exposed me to a wide variety of different clients and projects, from budget conscious sole-founders launching their first MVP, to seasoned business people hiring a team of devs on retainer to build and maintain enterprise level software. I worked on everything from fintech apps, marketplaces, SaaS apps, and internal project management tools.
Teach a person to Bubble, feed them for a lifetime
Change was afoot again. My journey had started out in education, and I maintained a jealous glance at anyone doing education-related dealings. So when I learned that Airdev ran a cohort-based course training people to become junior Bubble developers, I put my hand up to help.
In a previous life, I worked in video production, and so I put that skillset to use creating a full online bootcamp in Bubble fundamentals.
That bootcamp has done super well, with over 8,000 enrolments, and a large chunk of current partners having gone through it.
Off the back of the bootcamp, I took a role with Airdev as head of learning and development (yes, it was just me in the department). This was more of a strategic role than anything else, figuring out how to improve the training and ongoing education of our growing pool of developers and product managers
In wearing all those different hats, I learned an absolute ton, both about how to build performant, scalable Bubble apps, but also about no- code app development in general; how to scope apps, coordinate projects, manage client expectations, and train new developers (I’ll share my top learnings in a future newsletter).
Nonetheless, I still had the itch to try something on my own, and that’s where I find you now.
The present day
The last months have been a bit tumultuous. I started creating a huge Bubble course, had a baby, and moved house (twice!).
As of right now, I’m mostly focused on getting the course released. Then I’ll plot my next moves. That said:
If you want to get more Bubble related content from me:
Check me out on Youtube, where I frequently publish free Bubble tutorials.
If you’re a non-technical founder looking for a step-by-step guide to building your app on Bubble, my course Think it, Build it is for you.
You can get early access right now for $79, which gives you immediate access to over 18 hours of lessons + lifetime access to the full course once it’s released.
Just note that early access will only be open for one more week. Otherwise you’ll be able to grab the full course in October for $179.
Great story Matt! Inspiring 👍👌🏻
great one !