Josh Haas – Co-CEO & Founder of Bubble, Building the No-Code Future

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Welcome back to the Casey Adams Show. Today we have a very special guest, Josh Haas. We are here at Web Summit in Vancouver. Josh, thank you so much for coming to show today.

Yeah, it's great to be here. I really appreciate you having me on.

Of course. So we met last night at an awesome dinner and for those that don't know, Josh, Josh is the founder and CEO of Bubble, which is a no code platform that I've been familiar with for years. So when we met last night, I was so intrigued to not only now have you on the podcast, but to really dive into your journey. Because I first off, I'm not technical and my last software company I had a non technical partner and I remember in the early innings of ideation, brainstorming, we were looking into Bubble, we were looking to hire software engineers and I always have seen Bubble as like such a great, not only resource for founders, but to bring ideas to the world. And I know last night you talked about how, you know, the technical founders shouldn't be the only ones bringing these ideas to the world. So before we dive in, and for those that may not know, what is Bubble and what is bubble today I should ask, and when did you start this company?

Yeah. So Bubble is really a tool for helping founders express their visions. That's how we think of ourselves. It's a AI visual development platform. And what that means is basically you describe what you want, AI builds it, and unlike Vibe coding platforms, Bubble expresses back to you what you're getting created in a visual, human friendly language. So instead of talking about code, it talks about like, here's your ui, here's what happens when a user clicks on a button. Here's what happens as you know, it sends an email, it processes a payment, what, whatever the behavior of your application is. So that's kind of the essence of what Bubble is.

Love it. And I know before we really dive into the journey here, last night at dinner, AI, we're here at the Web Summit conference, as I mentioned, and this idea of AI and applications are being talked about. Obviously, it seems like every panel for you guys, how has AI changed your business over the last handful of years? Given that you've been at this for a while, you've no code software, and now you see a lot of these platforms that have come up that are helping with this, as you said, Vibe coding, in a sense. But when did you guys really start to think about implementing that into the business and the product and how has it changed the business overall?

Yeah. So AI is the technology we've been waiting for. When we started Bubble, we were trying to figure out what's the easiest way for a person to describe to a computer how they want software to work. Right. And we built this language for expressing that. And then AI fills in the missing piece, which is the sort of fuzziness of human communication, because the Bubble language originally required a certain amount of precision, even though it was still in very like human friendly terms. Now you can talk to Bubble in sort of the vague language you use with your friends and it sort of interprets it for you. So we've been working it into the process product over the last year and a half and we're still integrating it like we're continuing to release more AI powered features. But the sort of end state we're building towards is that working with Bubble is almost like Having a partner developer sitting right next to you who's sort of, you know, whiteboarding for you. Oh, you want this here? That's what this is going to look like. And having that very interactive sort of dialogue with the computer.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, when you think about the future of Bubble and more of this conference overall, what have been some of the takeaways this year? Moving into 2025 with all the new models coming out, with so much innovation happening, it feels like quarters are years. Right. Like there's so much happening and you as a company of your size staying on the pulse is super important. And how do you guys think about the future of where this goes in terms of, you know what? I know Sam Altman and a lot of people talk about this idea of like a one man billion dollar company that can really just build software at scale with platforms like Bubble, in a sense. How do you think about the future of AI and how it not only is implemented in your business, but just the general overview.

Yeah, so I forget some famous science fiction author said this and I do not remember who this quote is from, but like, the future is here. It's just unevenly distributed.

Right.

You have people today building things that would take 100 engineers to build five or 10 years ago. And they're doing it as a one person team. And it's absolutely game changing because the whole entrepreneurship community is kind of built around the assumption that software creation is the bottleneck. That's the ball entrepreneurs hit. And when that changes, it just completely changes the dynamic of the industry. It makes idea testing, idea creation, company scaling just so cheap that, I mean, it's going to unlock a way of innovation like no else. So we view our mission as making it so more people are those people with the outsized impact. Because right now the people who are really benefiting from this are the highly seasoned engineers who are also deep AI experts. Like that narrow demographic is crushing it today. And we're trying to expand with our product to make it so that, you know, the typical entrepreneur has that experience and has that leverage.

Absolutely. And going back to the, the early days of Bubble, I remember hearing on a podcast you did your first, your first customer wrote you a $50 physical check. Is that right?

Yep.

So bring us back to those days when you're first, you know, trying to identify who you're working with, who the customers are, and really the idea overall. You know, talking about the bottleneck of entrepreneurs. Like you have an idea for a software product, boom. If you're not technical, you Hit a wall and you have to go figure that out. And that obviously historically has been very challenging, including for myself Even back in 2020 of non technical co founder. What do we do? How do we recruit, how do we find talent? Bring us back to the early days of bubble. And what did you see in the market that made you a want to go create this product in the first place? And what were some of the challenges that you were seeing out there in the market back then?

Yeah, so flashback 2012 New York City CO working spaces tech meetups I was the co founder of another startup, so I was kind of immersed in that world and just meeting a lot of very early stage founders. And what I noticed was the non technical founder got so much disrespect. Like they were almost like a punch line of jokes. Especially like the bizzle school students. Like you know, there's always like a. Oh yeah, non technical founder wants an engineer to join them for equity. Why should the engineer take equity in their shitty company? There's like so much contempt and it's like, you know, on the one hand I definitely met people who played into the stereotypes and certainly met people who are like, all right, your idea kind of sucks and you don't realize it and whatever. But I also met like a lot of people who were domain experts, highly knowledgeable, highly motivated and had great ideas. Right. Because you know, newsflash is not just engineers who have connection to the world's problems and understand what's worth building an application. In fact, I would say that you kind of want everyone to sort of be involved in that. So when you see a disrespected, underserved demographic, that's always an opportunity. And I had the experience of like being the technical co founder for multiple people. I did a startup before this. I spent a summer helping some friends with the company. I gave some advice to people in those shoes and the consistent things I noticed one, their options were super, super limited, right? Like you know, pay $10,000 to Dev Shop in Eastern Europe and get back crap or you know, try to persuade someone to like, like join your startup for equity, which like 1 in 21 in 50 people were succeeding at. You know, get a VC to invest on spec. Yeah, good luck with that one. Right. And the other thing I noticed is that a lot of these people were very, very capable of telling the computer exactly what they wanted, right? They could like sketch out a diagram, say, you know, I want when the user clicks here, this to happen. And that's what programming is, right? Like if you can tell that to a computer. Why, why do you need to like learn about HTTP and databases and servers and network. Like seems silly to me. So sorry. That was like a long winded.

No question.

That's like the, that that's the core, that's the core business insight I have. Yeah.

And back then, what was out there for a problem like this? Like were there other competitors back then that were doing this? You know, no code idea like bring us back then. Because I don't really have too much context around like what was the market back then?

Yeah, so there was like a lot of like static stuff. The, you know, the wix. WIX was around, Squarespace is around. So like if you needed a marketing webpage that was there, Shopify existed. So if you wanted to do E commerce, that was there where people were hitting walls was with when they wanted to draw outside the lines. Right. Because most web enabled businesses don't. You know if, if you're selling a physical product, you're an E commerce company, but if you're selling, if your business is digital, you generally want control over the user experience. That's often your differentiator or even if it's not your differentiator, it's like important for you to like execute in your market. And that kind of customization optimization almost always went to hiring an engineering team at the end of the day. So there weren't really good options on the market to do what we were trying to offer to customers.

Got it. No, that makes total sense. So I know you referenced the first customer, but you start bubble, you're building it out. What were those first year, two years like in terms of really trying to find product market fit? And again I referenced the idea of, I remember on the show you mentioned how people, customers were starting it and they were kind of hitting this wall and you would build a feature, come back to them and say hey, like try this. Now walk us through that first year, two years when you were really trying to find product market fit. And for any founders that are out there that are maybe using platforms like Bubble or they're a software engineer themselves. Like how do you rec. What's your advice to founders when they're first launching software products? Especially in this era of AI 2025 where it's much easier to test ideas but us back then. And I'd love to hear your feedback on that.

Yeah, so I'm kind of a believer both back then and also today that in the very early stages, analog's better than digital. You want that human Connection for a couple reasons. One is it's a lot easier to get someone to try something new if you're there as kind of the marketing page, the salesman and you know, being in there yourself. And then it's a lot easier to see what's working if you can watch someone interact with your software.

Right.

Like there's tools that'll let you see how people interacted over the Internet. You can like, you know, analyze clicks and stuff like that. And I think that definitely has a place in like an early stage journey. But looking over someone's shoulder, asking them, oh hey, you know, is this good for you? Is this not good for you? What do you, does this resonate with you? Like it's hard to substitute for that. So early, early journey for us, we were going to where our customers were, which is meetups to find tech co.

Founders and talk about the perfect marketing.

Right there.

Exactly.

I mean it's basically a dating market for people looking for the thing that we were trying to substitute for. So a lot of awkward conversations, lots of like, hey, you know, try our thing. And they're like, wait, you're not a tech co, you're an engineer, you're not tech co founder, you want me to build it myself? And like, just like a lot of non comprehension. But yeah, we found some brave souls. And yeah, like you said, like our early journey was like very tight communication with our first builders. Like we'd be talking to them multiple times a day. We'd be figuring out what obstacles they were hitting. And we found the sweet spot was like having about like six or seven people we were working with because too few. And you build for one customer and your solution doesn't generalize too many and you can't have that kind of like you get spread too thin. You have that deep connection they're trying to do. So for us like that range let us made a general product that could solve a lot of different people's needs but still kept us relatively focused.

That's so cool. And I think something you said about pricing and how it was build for free, pay us when you launch. Where like the, and I love that simple line. I don't know if that's still today. Yeah, but the buy in where you spend all this time building something, you're on this great platform and you know, I think it's such a user friendly approach. Especially in those early days when you're like those brave souls that you say hey, go invest this time, learn this new product, learn this new way of building it's. Really cool. And I want to maybe bring up some examples of. I remember when I first came across bubble years ago, there's this community of people that are like bubble builders that, you know, they'll go out, they'll build this amazing product and their product will get acquired and like they're people that have no technical skills. They build this great product using your service. And I found that so fascinating where there's people that are just so they're able to go build, you know, get acquired and have no really technical background. And I'd love for you to talk about the community you've built around bubble because it seems so vibrant. And again as I, when I first came across it, I was like, wow, like this is really cool. As someone especially that's non technical that is wanting to go kind of run into the same problems of trying to go find someone technical, recruiting all those things. And it's really cool to see that community be so vibrant.

Yeah. So we kind of view ourselves as like a gateway drug to being like an Internet technology creator.

Yeah.

You know, we have stories like, you know, users who started as like a manager of a fast food restaurant and are now like a web developer because of kind of, you know, encountering us and going through that. And the really cool thing is our builders help each other. Right. Like it's not like a one to run relationship where it's like them having a relationship with us. It's like them having a relationship with each other where they learn bubble skills, learn business skills, share tips and tricks, support each other. And whenever I go to a user conference, we've hosted some user conferences and events and stuff like that. And I get to interact with people. The energy is amazing. I don't even need to be there. The community is like feeding off each other and it's always so cool. And whenever I do introduce myself, they're always so excited to tell me what they've created with bubble, how it's kind of transformed their personal career trajectory. And I just love hearing those stories.

That's amazing. I want to talk about the business front. So you guys started the business bootstrapped for seven plus years.

Right.

And correct me, but you guys started, I think you said 2011, 2013.

Right.

In that era.

What was the mindset back then around either raising money, bootstrapping and what were those early conversations like and what led to inevitably just bootstrapping it for the first seven years of running the business?

Yeah. So we started at a peak of a bubble which led to the name A little bit.

Oh, I was gonna ask where that comes from. So.

Yeah, so. So, because we started at a peak cycle, fundraising was popular and the sort of working assumption as entrepreneur was you were going to raise money. And I really want to question that assumption because I felt like a lot of people were raising not because it was necessarily the right thing for the business, but because it's almost a form of validation. Right. Someone writes you a check, you're anointed as a serious entrepreneur. But one of the things I've learned both, like, personally and watching, you know, you know, I mean, we've had people build 6 million apps on bubble. Like, I've seen a lot of founder journeys.

Yeah.

One of my takeaways is the successful people don't have their eye on validation. They have their eye on the customer.

Right.

They don't care whether external, you know, media is praising them, investors are praising if they. If they do grow. And that's how you build momentum as you grow. But, like, in the early days, doesn't matter. So I was like, coming into it a little, like, a little skeptical of, like, the, the vibe around fundraising. And then relative to our business, we had some initial conversations. The market, like, had no idea what we're trying to do. Like, the early investor conversation. This is partly on me. Like, my co founder and I were not, like, skilled fundraisers, hadn't done that before. So, like, I'm sure a more experienced person could have made a round happen for us, but our initial conversation was just feeling like, you know, these people do not understand what we're trying to do.

Did you try to fundraise in the early days?

We had conversations, like, we were, like, filling it out and our two takeaways was, you know, market isn't ready for us to rapidly expand and our product isn't right for us to rapidly expand because we didn't want to get on the user growth, like VC journey yet. We wanted to get the product really, really, really, really solid. And I've seen companies burn out, right, because they take cash, they get sort of committed to the, like, you've hired a team, you need to raise a follow on round. Your metrics aren't good enough. And we didn't want to play the metrics game yet. We want to make sure the product and market was ready before playing the metrics game. And that served us really well. So I'm very glad we bootstrapped. I think we did a little too long, to be honest.

Seven years. Is that accurate?

Yeah, seven years, which, you know, benefit of hindsight, I probably would have tried to raise three or four years in which still would have been a very long bootstrapping journey. But I think we would have during faster.

So during that bootstrap journey, how big was the team? What did that look like and what were some of the takeaways from that, as you mentioned, extended seven year journey? Because I think even I talked to a lot of founders and even myself. My last startup we raised a seed round and that was our only round. And I think there's so many use cases of why people do it, but it's not always the right decision. And one of my board member always tells me optional, right? Where like have the option to fundraise, but if you don't need to like have that option as well. And don't be dependent because as soon as you get, you know, dependency that you're, you know, of course it can work out and in many, it does many times. But also on the flip side, a lot of times it doesn't work out. The metrics, the growth stagnation, you can't raise a follow on. It's hard and I've seen it time and time again for people I know as well. So what was your biggest takeaway from that seven year journey when it comes to maybe like cash utilization, not expanding the team too much for people that may be bootstrapping out there today. And questioningly, hey, should I go raise?

Yeah, yeah. So when we raised our first round, we had grown the team to 10 people based on customer revenue. And at that point we were paying them, you know, not like huge salaries, but real salaries. We had income from customers to like support a business of that scale. Getting there took a long time. You know, we started with just me and my co founder. We slowly built out a team, team, 2, 3, 4, 5 people, up to 10. When you're bootstrapped, you have to be very efficient with cash. So a $200 a month SaaS service was like a meaningful expense that we thought about. Whereas today I'm like, all right, cool, move on. Don't spend team time on that. So the spending regime has to be really geared toward it. Your personal circumstances matter, right? Like my co founder and I were both lucky enough to have pretty high paying jobs before we went to the entrepreneurship route. And we both saved cash personally. And if we had not put away savings, it would have been a much harder journey because there was a long time that we were burning money before we started making enough money to like start paying ourselves. So you know, that Matters a lot too.

Yeah. And I think too, like, there's as much as people can watch interviews, learn from people as soon as they click their phone off. It is a personal thing.

Right.

Whether that's personal Runway, whether that's. You have kids. I just got married a month ago and I'll tell you that how I view the risk appetite, even four years ago, and I'm young and I still have like high risk appetite, but it's just, it really does change in terms of like where you are in life. So I appreciate the perspective there and it's really cool to hear that when you guys did raise, I. And of course, whatever you want to speak to there, but you guys have done two rounds and you know, I've, I've interviewed so many founders here on the show over the years. We've talked about all the round dynamics, you guys, it seems there's like a non traditional path of like raising a round and then raising like a mega round. Talk to me about like your fundraising journey through these, you know, the two rounds, I believe, and what led to, you know, the, I don't want to say untraditional, but maybe you can speak to that.

Yeah. First off, just like, you know, nice on slipping in the marriage month ago. Congratulations. That's huge.

Thank you so much.

I hope web summit is not replacing your honeymoon.

No, we were in Hawaii. We had a great time. So it was so funny. We were married in Newport, Rhode Island. We went to Hawaii. And then as soon as I got back, it was like conference mode. I was in London last week for this big podcast conference. Now we're here. So it's been pretty back to back recently and it's, it's. I, I say wife. Oh, my wife. Isn't that. It still feels so new. So, Bill, thank you so much for bringing that up.

Cool. Anyway, back to your question about our fundraising journey. So it is very different raising as a bootstrap profitable startup than as like a startup without revenue that's dependent on fundraising. You have much more leverage. It's much more of a relaxed, like there's no such thing as relaxed fundraising. Fundraising is always high stress. I've not talked to a single entrepreneur who is, who hasn't felt like a fundraising period was like intense for them psychologically. But it makes a big difference when you know you have a walk away option. Right. And just go back to running your business. So that helped a lot. So our seed round, you know, it's funny, at the time we raised a $6 million seed and that was a huge seed. These days, 6 million, you know, like $6 million seed is like, all right, cool. Why don't you raise 50 million seed? The world has changed a lot. But back then, that was a big seed round and we actually fell in between investor brackets, like the seed stage. Firms didn't want to do around that big and want to give us less money at a lower valuation than we felt was, like, appropriate, given how much of a business we had built and how much cash we needed to go to the next level. And then the Series A companies were. Firms were looking at us and going like, you guys are like, weirdly immature for a Series A company. You haven't built out all the stuff that, like someone who raised a seed round and had built out infrastructure and team would have. So they're giving us side eye. So eventually our round was led by Signal Fire, which is very flexible fund that does a range of seed to Series A. And because they did that range, they were comfortable with, like a big seed and they, like, knew how to think about us. So. Yeah. So, like, one takeaway, I do not know, going into this whole fundraising thing, like, I had heard someone say it, but, like, it wasn't visceral for me until I went through it is like, you really have to look at what kinds of. What sizes and industries of deals investors do. Because I think to a lot of new entrepreneurs, they just sort of see investors as like a single category and you have to get granular or you're just wasting your time in the meeting.

Like, they absolutely will not fund you.

It's not a thing.

Absolutely. No, that makes total sense. No, that's great. And then if you want to speak to it, you guys have done two rounds. Right, Right, right.

So then a few years after that seed round, we did a Series a. It was $100 million round. So much bigger. We did sort of at the height of the market and we took advantage of that to like, really shoot for the moon. And I'm glad we did, because a lot of companies that raised less cash over like 2022, 2023 really struggled when the market turned around again. So another advice I have for founders is if you can get cash, get cash. And I've heard the opposite advice. You'll hear warnings about not going for too high evaluation because then you'll have a hard time growing into it for a subsequent round. And that's real. But what you said earlier about optionality is a very, very important thing when building a company. Optionality outweighs a lot of other considerations. So I would always say, like, set yourself up for optionality. Have more cash than you think you're going to spend. Got it.

That's very good. Very good piece of advice right there. And I appreciate you sharing all that. When you think about bubble today, I would love to talk about team size now. You know, in this era where especially to what you guys are building, you know, you see so many teams getting smaller engineering teams, but you also have this dichotomy of like the biggest companies in the world, like they can just do way more. And as you guys, who are builders for builders, how do you think about team size and scale when it comes to the actual software engineers on board? So curious how you view that.

Yeah, I mean, I think team sizes overall are just going to keep on shrinking and shrinking and shrinking and we're excited to be part of that process. Right. Like, I would rather live in a world with like a million, you know, five person companies than 100,000, 50 person. I do the math. Right? Yeah, yeah, right. Because I think it's better for entrepreneurs, right? Like more opportunities, more chance to be an owner, you know, smaller prizes. Right. Smaller markets, but that's great. Like a lot more opportunity for a lot more people. People. It's better for consumers because there's more optionality and it's just more efficient overall as an ecosystem. Right. Like, you know, the age of like tech giants where like one company owns like, you know, the whole thing, like it's not great for innovation or consumers. So I'm excited that like, you know, AI bubble, all these like structural factors that make it cheaper, easier to build stuff are just like making it possible to do more and more refer and for people. I think it's actually great for opportunity for people.

Absolutely. No, it's so cool to hear and I appreciate the perspective there. When you think about life outside of work, you know, you've had this founder journey where as you mentioned, you know, the bootstrap mentality for seven years and you raise all this cash and now there's this next, you know, frontier of where the puck is moving with AI and you guys, it seems, are like very well positioned to take advantage of that more than a lot of companies. On the personal front, as a founder, you know, how have you navigated some of the toughest times in the business and what have been some recurring things in your life that have really kept you in it during the tough times?

Yeah, yeah, great question. I mean, my life has changed a lot. You know, when I started bubble, I was like a single 26 year old, like kid basically. Now I'm like married with two kids. Like, you know, so my life has like changed a lot. What's kept me going is like a couple things. One is a sense of service to our customers. Like a user of Bubble is someone who has decided to bet their business on us. And that means something to me. Like that's, that's, that is isn't like a casual relationship. It's something that I think I have a sense of responsibility for. So I feel an obligation to make Bubble a successful platform so that the people have bet on that platform. And you know, that, that includes a lot of people. That's investors, that's employees. But really our customers at the end of the day are the ones I feel the most obligation to. I want to like see them through, feel like they made the right bet. So that's a big piece of what's kept me going. The second piece is I've gotten a chance to learn and grow, right? Like, my job has changed so much. I used to be, you know, coding, you know, 12, 15 hours a day. Now I'm in meetings 1215 hours a day. But like, you know, it's very interesting how it's evolved and I'm learning new skills and I'm having fun and I've gone to like meet so many interesting people and have so many interesting experiences. So, you know, it hasn't felt like I've been doing the same thing for the last 13 years. It's felt like I've been doing many different things for the last 13 years.

That's, that's so cool to hear. And I was going to ask like, where do you spend most of your time today? Of course you say the 12 to 15 hours of meetings, but you know, you know, this year, 2025 into the future, I remember Sergey Barin from Google was like, AI brought me out of retirement. He, he had this quote where, you know, he was not involved day to day ops. And then they're like, huh? Like this is the next frontier and we have to really like, I want to be involved. Curious to know how your role has changed and your time spent in certain areas of the business has changed over the last 12 months with just like this whole resurgence of, you know, AI and how that's changing the business.

Yeah, I'm loving it. I sort of emphasize the street. I was not out of the business. I've always been pretty, pretty operationally intensive. I've done more internal stuff than external stuff over the years. Like I've spent a lot of time with my team but I've made a point of getting hands on and technical again which for a while I was really more operating at the like big picture technical roadmap level. Not really looking too closely at the code, not really looking too closely at the tech and more focused on like the team structure direction. I've gotten back into the code a little bit, I've written a little bit of code just A, so I can keep up to speed on AI coding tools and B, so that I can help the team really navigate technically through this like time of transition. So I'm having a lot of fun with that. It's been great.

That's amazing. Curious to know as a builder do you ever find time to, you know, when it comes to using your own platform, you have an idea, you, you know, you create some little side project application. I'm curious to know kind of that your thought process on that as a user of your own product, how you really try to use it in your day to day life. And I can imagine one day, you know, and I don't know how old your kids are but I'm sure like my 9 year old niece, it's like have an idea like bring it to the world. Like bring it to the world. And that's such a cool aspect of the platform in my opinion.

Yeah, yeah. I personally have like a little to do management app that I just use for myself and that's kind of like my both my like testing ground to like keep playing with bubble and also just because it's useful for me and like I'm, I'm like a hyper organizer, like I'm natural, I'm a naturally disorganized person so I, I compensate by being, by building a lot of systems for myself. So I love like you know, having a really customizable to do platform that I can make work.

And you built it on bubble?

Yeah, I built it on bubble.

That's really cool. I love that. Are there any, excuse me, success stories on Bubble? There's one that I actually remember reading recently my friend Tyler from Beehive email marketing platform, they acquired a company I believe called Swap Stack which was a bubble company. I'm not sure if you're familiar but I was reading into this recently, this is years ago but I was just kind of came across article or blog post again and you know I want to ask are there certain company examples or projects on Bubble that are like oh this was like the biggest platform built on bubble that people either would know or recognize or that you are proud of when it comes to, you know, the growth that people have had on the platform for their business.

Yeah, we have a lot of people who have, you know, been acquired, done big rounds. One recent one we're sort of watching closely because they're just very in the moment. In the AI space is this company called Synth Flow that is like AI automation, like agents, so you can sort of customize agents, do business workflows. They launched their MVP and bubble on like two weeks, six months later, they've raised around, they've raised $9 million total. They're growing like super rapidly. So you know, I think with AI like we're seeing a ton of AI entrepreneurs using Bubble as like their like you know, stepping stone for this. But yeah, a lot of stories built stuff.

Curious to know as we start wrapping up here in the conversation, stepping stone wise where you know, if someone wants to go build the next bubble, this next big company and you know, bubble as a platform to get to V1 quickly, efficiently. What's been the historical use case of companies where it's like build on bubble, they raise around. Do they transition off of Bubble to go build it internally? Like is there a world in five, 10 years in your opinion where you know, you never have to leave Bubble or like what is that point of transitioning that stepping stone for in your opinion?

Yeah, so we've seen both, we've seen people who you know, prototype, raise, move off. Great, congratulations. We've helped them.

Absolutely.

We feel fantastic about it. We've also seen people who scale up on us and that's actually what we're really working towards because we think that's the game changer. The point is to not have to have you build out a big engineering team. And one of the things I'm really worried about with the whole Vibe coding movement is those things are spitting out millions of lines of code that a non technical founder is going to be absolutely screwed when they have to iterate on it, fix security issues with debug like because the AI and for people.

That may not know, what's the difference when you say Vibe coding and what the difference of bumble for people that may not know.

Yeah, so Vibe coding is like you have the AI agent basically write traditional code for you like JavaScript, you know, SQL, etc. Bubble is sort of similar Vibe to Vibe coding in the sense that we have that same fluid interaction with the AI. But what gets output is bubbles language, not code. And you can almost think of Bubbles language as Lego blocks. So we've made each LEGO block reliable, secure, so that when the AI spits them out and they click together, you don't have the kind of problems that you get when you're just dealing with, like, AI generated, like, raw code.

Yeah, that's a great distinction there. And two more questions before we wrap up here. If you could go back in time to the young Josh starting, you know, in New York City, starting bubble, getting that first $50 check, what would your advice be to himself, but also any other young entrepreneur out there today that's starting their first project or maybe building on bubble itself.

Yeah. When we say advice would be don't reinvent the wheel where you don't have to. Entrepreneurs love to reinvent the wheel. Right. Like, I think when I meet with founders, what makes them founders is they question assumptions, they think different. They want to not take things for granted, really, that mindset leads to massive innovation. But what I learned the hard way is there's also a cost to reinventing things. So you need to save your reinvention energy for the areas that are really differentiators for your mission, for what you're trying to bring to the world. So if you're not a payroll company, do what everyone else does for payroll, you know? Right. Don't. Don't, you know, get too creative on stuff that's, like, outside of crop. So that would have saved me as an entrepreneur a lot of, like, pain and grief because I. I definitely made decisions where I was like, why do companies do it that way? Maybe we should do it this way. No, just don't, Josh, don't do that.

Absolutely. No, I love that. And last but not least, when you think about the future of bubble, we're here, as I mentioned, at the Web Summit Vancouver event. What excites you the most about bubble? What you guys are building, but also AI and just the future of technology.

Yeah. I think the world where people can go, not just a prototype, because, like today, AI makes getting a prototype super easy. But going from a prototype to production without an engineering team so that you can have entrepreneurs who are not bottlenecked by software, it's just going to open so much creativity. And that's what we're trying to build. We're trying to build the platform for founders to be able to create their vision without having to deal with code, without having to deal with all the problems that code brings. And that gets me up every day in the morning.

I love that. Well, Josh, for everyone that is watching or listening, where is the best place for everyone to follow you, connect with you, and learn more about bubble if they're not familiar already.

Yeah. Go to Bubble IO and we have an AI builder. You can just jump right in and say, give me an app that does this, see what it spits out, and go from there.

That is amazing. Well, Josh, thank you again for taking the time to come on the show today. And for everyone watching and listening, thank you so much for tuning in. Make sure you go follow Josh, check out Bubble, and if you build something on bubble, let me know if it happened from this podcast, because I'd love to see what you guys are building as well. And once again, thank you so much for being here. Yeah.

Thank you, Keith. This is great.

Of course.