Dennis H. Lewis walks through ten mistakes Bubble app founders make, from user experience and optimization to strategic integrations. Learn what costs founders money and how to sidestep each one.
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Ever wondered why your bubble app starts out great, then suddenly turns into a tangled, confusing mess? You're not alone. After auditing hundreds of bubble apps, I can tell you most founders make the same 10 mistakes. And those mistakes are costing you money, users, and your sanity. Stick with me. By the end of this video, you'll know exactly what to avoid, so your bubble journey feels less like a horror story and more like a rocket ship. Hey, I'm Dennis Lewis from Ratio.dev. my team and I have worked behind the scenes fixing and scaling more bubble applications than most folks have ever built. Our mission is to help founders like you get results without turning your app into a Frankenstein's monster. Let's jump in and see exactly what you need to look out for. Mistake number one. Just because you can build it, should you? Bubble makes it really easy to build just about anything. But easy doesn't mean smart. I've seen entire teams waste weeks chasing cool features that nobody cared about. If you wouldn't bet cash on a user wanting it, skip it. Focus on what moves the needle for your users, not what feels like fun or exciting or interesting to you. Mistake number two, ignoring your user and obsessing over yourself. You are not your user. Always be talking to real customers and reworking your experience based on their pain and not your ego. I'm just as guilty of this as you probably are. You fall in love with your product and I remember when we very rudimentary version of Zircles and I couldn't wait to put more stuff in there and we did a lot of stuff and know what happened? Nothing. Nobody cared. There's still a bunch of features in Zircles that we moved into expert mode so that we could streamline the experience for normal users. And that was probably the best thing that we've done done when I this they probably shouldn't be able to see when you could hide them behind the privacy rules. And guess what? You can still use those fields in your workflows. They won't. Data won't be visible to the customer browser and that's important. If you're stuck figuring out privacy rules, definitely reach out to us here at ratio.dev. i think this would be a good moment to mention that we have a free no code resource center. You can use the link below or go to ratio.dev Sign up Name and email. That's all it takes. It's full of vetted plugins, tools, how to videos, lots of great stuff. Quick plug there. Mistake number five, Unoptimized fonts and images. Nothing will slow your application down more than stuffing it full of heavy images, not using optimization on your images. Having 10 fonts installed in your application that you're probably not even using, but maybe on two text field somewhere. Hone these down. That's where you can save a lot of milliseconds on your page. Load speeds important there. Mistake number six Overloading the front end. Look, most newbie bubblers, they build workflows, the interface, click a button, it does 50 different things. Well, guess what? That's making all those things bog down the experience for your user. And that's what earns bubble applications bad fame for being slow. Move as much functionality as you can to backend workflows that are triggered by the front end, and they happen without slowing down the experience for your user. That is a true nugget of how to overcome many, many obstacles in your bubble application. So really take that into consideration. Mistake number seven Plugin addiction. Every plugin slows you down. The little ones that are visual elements that you're using on the screen, a progress bar or date picker or something like that, those aren't normally problematic. It's the plugins that do a lot of things because they're getting loaded on every page of your application. Even if they're not being used on that page, the structure is being loaded into the browser and that will slow things down. The more you pile plugins on, the heavier your app gets. So be really careful to only install plugins that you really need. Go back every month and look and see. Can I get rid of a plugin here or there? If you can do so. Waiting too long for core integrations. Mistake number eight this one a lot of people won't think about. But one of the key benefits of building in bubble is that it integrates really well with pretty much any external service that you might want to bring data from or send data to combine your functionality with some other system. Most bubble applications leave that for I'll do that down the road. But the benefits of creating the one two top three integrations that your users need early will really give you a boost. Does your user need to connect with LinkedIn? Figure that out. Maybe that's not the best example, but really stop and think before I build more stuff into my application. Who can I be a good partner with to not only make my application more useful, but you may even be able to actually leverage their audience. You can reach out to that company and say, hey, we've just integrated with your service. Could you mention that in your next newsletter or whatever. So there could be all sorts of benefits to really employing important integrations. Now, don't just integrate for integration sake, but if it really means something to your users, definitely do it sooner than later. Mistake number nine Reinventing the wheel. Instead of using reusable elements, you need to understand and embrace reusable elements in your mobile application. That is probably one of the key reasons that bubble applications become unmanageable. You have similar workflows on this page, on that page, in this repeating group over there, and every time you need to fix something, you've got to go to 17 different places and fix it. And that is not a recipe for success. So learn to structure your bubble applications using reusable elements so that you make your application more efficient, but you can make it more scalable and sustainable in the future and you won't end up wanting to bang your head on the wall to make a change. That should be easy and it's just going to drive you crazy. Mistake number 10 disregarding design and UX design isn't decoration, it's user experience. It's trust and conversion. So don't do a half baked job. Your user will notice and they'll leave. And here we can help you a lot here at Ratio.dev, we have our own design team and we have a lot of experience in designing really nice looking bubble applications. If you're stuck there, reach out to us. We'll be more than happy to help you with that. And now I'd like to share a couple of bonus things. So if you spend 50 hours building your Bubble app and 0 hours marketing it, you'll lose by default from day one. You need to market just as hard as you build, otherwise your dream is just another app out there collecting dust. Okay, so build in public, but definitely obsess over. Are you cultivating a list? Are you building a community at the same time that you're building your application so that when you launch, it's not launching to crickets. So if you really are serious about building, scaling and winning with your bubble application, you shouldn't have to do it all by yourself. My team and I have packed our best tools, tested plugins, how to videos, podcast episodes, great books to read into our free no Code Resource Center. There's a link below, you can go to ratio.dev it's free. You just need to put in your name and email and I promise you that you will find a lot of really great help on your personal bubble journey. So definitely grab that now. By the way, we update the resource center every week. It's just getting better and better. This has been quick.
View of the most common mistakes that we see bubble application builders making. By all means, if you're stuck on something that I didn't mention, reach out to us, send us a comment, contact us on our website. We'll be glad to have a conversation and help you on your journey as well. Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this video. Thanks for watching. See you on the next one. It.
