4 Reasons All Tech Founders Should Be Building on Bubble.io – ratio.dev

Okay, so today I want us to give people four really good reasons why they should consider building their SaaS solution, their website, their web application in bubble. And I think a good place for us to start talking about this is to cover the founders dilemma.

Sure. One of the things that really people have to understand is that it doesn't matter how much money you have to put into your startup. There are always constraints. And there's two big constraints that every startup has to go through. One is money. Okay? It's, you know, it doesn't matter if you have 10 million in the, in the bank or you have 10 grand, okay? There's always a limit. And what you do with that money and how you spend it is going to determine how well your, your business does. But the other big constraint is time. And this one, nobody gets around. There's 24 hours in every day, and you can hustle and you can bustle and you can, you know, sleep, minimal amounts of sleep, but it doesn't matter. You're still not going to get more than 24 hours out of your day.

And that is important because.

Because time building takes time. But it's not just building. There's so much else that you have to get done. So you have to build community, you have to do marketing, you have to.

Cultivate your team. You have to do, you know, all of the bureaucratic stuff that has to be done to make sure that your business doesn't, you know, disappear overnight. You have to deal with your payment processing. You have to deal with so many different things, and they all require time. And so if building consumes 80%, 90% of your time and 80, 90% of your money, then everything else has to fight for the scraps that are left over for the dog after, after dinner. And that is the first big reason why every founder, every, especially every tech founder should be building on bubble today. Not because bubble is amazing and beautiful and.

Brilliant, which it could be, and maybe it is in a lot of senses. It's just because it's going to free up money and time. You're going to do things faster and you're going to spend less.

It's going to free up the two most valuable resources that you have, and.

Those are the biggest constraints that every startup has. So even if you're going to throw the whole damn bubble application out the window four years from now, ten years from now, six years from now, you still should be building it in bubble today because of those constraints.

There is what we like calling a traditional development money pit. If you don't choose to build in bubble. You're in for burning a lot of cash.

You are. You're going to burn cash, you're going to.

Hire developers, you're going to hire designers, you're going to hire systems administrators to keep those servers running there. You're going to be, you know, you're going to spend time making sure your entire tech stack is always up to date with all of those latest patches and security issues and all of that plumbing, you're going to have to dedicate.

Do you think people underestimate these, these development costs?

I think that they don't realize that they can avoid them.

Because they don't know. They don't know about bubble. They don't know about this amazing team called ratio.dev that can just save them both money and time.

So how does. I mean, you've sort of already touched on this, but how does Bubble actually fix this problem, this money pit problem?

Well, first of all, you can build really fast, which is a huge benefit.

And we've, you know, in previous podcast episodes, we've actually talked about how fast is fast. It depends on what you're building.

Right, of course it does.

But you can get something, you can get an MVP build, a pretty big MVP build in couple weeks.

Yeah. And sure, some things are a little bit more complicated and, you know, you may have something in your application that requires more. So maybe instead of a couple of weeks, it'll take you six weeks. Doesn't matter. That same project using traditional development would take six months.

So are there real, can we give people, like, real examples of how much does it cost to build something in bubble?

It's tricky. It's tricky to come up here on a YouTube video and say, or maybe.

Not cost, because it really depends on what you're building. But what about how much time people can save compared to traditional?

You can save months. Let's. Let's leave it at that. And you can save tens of thousands of dollars. Let's leave it at that. Now, can you do it for 150 bucks? No, you can't. I mean, if you want to compensate the 150 bucks with a year's worth of learning how to do bubble write, maybe you can because you're, you're compensating, you know, money with time. But, but if you want to get it out there quickly and you want it to be a solid solution, then it's going to cost you more than that. But it's not going to cost you 100 grand.

What would be Like a practical way of allocating resources.

In my opinion, from a business point of view, the practical way is to say, where's the balance point? Where is the sweet spot between money and time and functionality? Because you're going to have to make all of that balance out. There's no other way to do it. You're not going to launch your product with 100% of all the features that you want on the first time out. And you're not going to. You know, it's going to take some effort, it's going to take work, it's going to take some, some investment, but it's orders of magnitude less.

So we've sort of talked about the first thing that I wanted us to cover, which is breaking the. Or escaping the resource trap, right? Yeah. The second thing that I want us to talk about is the importance of being the first in a race. Being first at launching an MVP or being first at launching a product actually matters.

It does matter. Although it, I mean, Apple has proven that you don't always have to be first.

Okay, but we're not Apple.

Right, but you don't want to be presenting your MVP two years after your competition has already launched a real product. Okay. And if you have a good idea, if you have a solution in your head that solves something, that is a real pain point for your customers. The sooner you can get it in their hands, the sooner you're going to be able to know if they're going to pay for it, and the sooner you're going to be able to gauge how good of an idea it really was. So speed to market is an important thing. I mean, there's a great book by our old friend Noah Kagan from AppSumo about, you know, the million dollar weekend. You know, how can you get it done in a. In a weekend? Well, he's optimistic, okay. And he's Noah, and he probably can do more than us mere mortals. But the message there is really cool, that you need to be fast to market, you need to be able to pivot and to measure and to see if what you've buil is worth it. And the way you do that is you launch your application with bubble.

Interesting. How? I mean, let's just say that I have a concept of a product that I want to build in bubble. Again, this really. So it really depends on what you're building. I was going to go back and in the poll.

How does bubble make it easy for people to iterate amongst different versions of the product that we're working on?

So, well, there's the technical part and there's the conceptual part, first of all, because it's fast, because you can change things quickly. You can pivot. You can make radical changes to your application overnight if you, if you have to, or if you see an opportunity, or you can add in a new functionality that your users are demanding in a week instead of in two months. That is really powerful from a technical point of view. You can, you know, you can create a new branch inside Bubble and just change the heck out of it. And then when you're satisfied, you just merge it back in and everybody is updated in it and it just becomes the new version. Meanwhile, you can keep the old version going in its own branch. So that's pretty typical of a lot of development platforms. And now that we know that Bubble is a visual development platform, then it has all of this built in. You're not going to find that on Lovable or Bolt or one of these things.

All right, so we've talked about winning the market race. We've talked about escaping the resource trap. Let's talk about how valuable is it to not have to be dependent on developers?

Gosh, you know this. I don't think people talk about this enough, and it really is important. One of the. My favorite aspects about Bubble is that even if you are the most technically unsavvy founder out there, you can go into your Bubble application and you can understand it, you can read it, you can look at it, you can go into a workflow and study what steps it's doing and how it's doing it. And you can get a pretty good idea of what's happening in your product.

Now, if you're using traditional code and you've got developers, look, you're in their hands. There's no question about it. And I'm not going to be rude in my language here. If we were, if we were sitting down over a beer, I would probably use a different metaphor. But you're going to be caught in their hand because you don't know what they're doing. You don't know. You have really zero idea if the quality of the work they're doing is really there because you can't read the code, because you don't understand it, because you don't know how the plumbing is set up. Whereas in Bubble, first of all, you know that Bubble guarantees you the, all of the technical, you know, the, the, the back end, the, the servers and the databases and all that. You don't have to worry about that at all. But you can also read what the bubble application does.

Do you know, this is absolutely priceless because what you just described, I've actually.

Seen.

Companies pay a lot of money without even understanding how the company that they've been acquiring even works.

Yeah.

And once you actually have or control the company and it's your responsibility to make it better, make it better.

You. You're in for, you're in for some work. Yeah. And you're gonna spend a shitload of money and a shitload of time and, and you're gonna have to hire the most talented people in the world to help you out.

And even those talented people, you've got to trust them. You have to trust them because you don't know. You don't know what's under the covers. You don't know how to see if you know, you might see that there's a bug in your application and you think, oh, that should be really easy to fix. And you go to the developer, he says, oh, but there's something, there's more into that. There's a lot that goes into fixing that bug. Don't think that's just a trivial thing. It looks simple, but it's not really, because, you know, we've got all of these code dependencies that we've been, you know, inheriting over the last six or seven months or years, and we haven't updated and we haven't patched and we have, you know, there's, there's, there's routines in there that were built by somebody that left the company, you know, months ago. And, you know, it's going to take us time, so just be patient, but we'll get there. And meanwhile, you're just signing the checks, signing the checks every week.

It's funny because it doesn't just happen with small entrepreneurs or micro companies. It happens at large scales as well.

It does. It does. And to me, that ability to understand and to be able just to go in and say you can, first of all, they're bubble developers all over the world. So if you're not happy with who you're working with, you can find somebody else. You can come to ratio.dev and call us. But not only that, you as a founder can go in and tell your bubble developer, I want you to explain to me this, how this is working. Show me, walk me through the workflows, walk me through the backend workflow. Walk me through, you know, what's happening when this page gets loaded so I can see why it's slow and you'll Figure it out.

It's not, it's not, it's not impossible. It's not only not impossible, it's ball makes it really easy because it's visual and it's English.

Yeah. It's not code. It's not code. And.

That ability is priceless for a founder to have that confidence in that they understand their product.

It makes marketing easier, it makes allocating your resources easier because you have a.

Feel for it and it just helps you sleep better.

It does. And it helps you sleep better. Sleep is worth it.

Sleep is worth it. Yeah.

So now we've done three great reasons.

I want to talk about the fourth and last one. There's probably like 24 that we could talk about, but we wanted to concentrate on these four. The fourth one is delivering a complete solution. So there is a limitation about building a product in a platform.

Sure, yeah. You are assuming.

A relationship with that platform and with Bubble, that's part of the deal. You're, you're buying into the ecosystem, you're getting all the benefits and you're getting the other part as well that you know, you can't just export your code and take it somewhere else. That's true. Having said that.

You can also benefit yourself because not only do you get all of the tech infrastructure taken care of for you, basically for that silly little monthly fee that you're paying, they do all of that. But you can build a single application that works for web, that has an external API that can connect with other platforms and other businesses that can work on Android natively, can work on iOS natively, and you can create your own ecosystem without having to be a specialist in any of that.

I don't think there are many other platforms out there that can provide that much security. And you know, yeah, sure, I will agree, you, it's hard to leave, but if you're happy, why would you want to? So, you know, it's cheaper too, right?

Isn't it?

Oh my gosh. If you start looking at server costs, software licenses, systems administration, just, you know, all of those other aspects, the cost will go up. And debugging, how to make all of those pieces fit together and work together and not have, you know, compatibility issues, that is a lot of money.

It's funny because we were actually talking about this on outside of camera like 20 minutes ago and we are proponents of when possible, it's not that we're against up doing the other thing, but when possible we like to just build the entire application or website in Bubble.

Yeah.

Because it does exactly what you were just describing. It reduces the amount of servers that you have to pay for. It reduces the amount of software licenses that you have to pay for. If a client comes to us and they say, I need my homepage be built, you know, using Framer or webflow, we can do it, but we do try to just build the whole thing inside bubble.

Yeah, but we have some advantages. We have Serpy, who takes care of all the SEO stuff that a lot of other people have struggle with. We have some secret performance projects that we're working on in our lab that are going to be coming out soon that will make our bubble applications probably faster than any other bubble applications in the world.

And we've got a lot of know how. So I mean, sure, those are advantages. And if you do your application well and you use all of the tools at your disposal, then you will be really successful with it.

Well, let's just do a quick recap here. So first thing, we want to make sure that people are breaking the resource trap, right?

And you're using your limited resources wisely. So if you can maintain that balance of 45% product, 40% marketing, and 15% all the rest, that is a healthy mix.

The second is, when possible, making sure that people win the market race. Yeah, first. Yeah, fast. First, if possible, get there first.

And if not possible, get there quick.

Get there quick. Or third is making sure that people are not dependent on developers. Not just people, but even just businesses.

Right. And hey, I don't have anything against developers. I've worked with them all my life.

But yeah, and the last one is being able to deliver a complete solution.

I think those are the four most compelling reasons why every founder today should.

Be building, should be building on bubble. Well, I'm happy with this. I think today's was a little bit shorter, but I thought, I thought it's still pretty good cold and nugget people can, can walk away with. Anyways, I'll meet you next week.

See you then.