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It works best for prototyping and rapidly testing ideas. I joined a startup that didn't have any deep coding skills - but had a great idea and vision for a pro

It works best for prototyping and rapidly testing ideas. I joined a startup that didn't have any deep coding skills - but had a great idea and vision for a product. They had made a pretty decent prototype with Bubble and could quickly implement suggestions from the beta testers. When I joined I instantly suggested re-writing it in a "real" stack. But when I dived into it, there was a lot of built in features of Bubble they were using that would be a pain to write or integrate. The rewrite would take some time. Instead we launched with the Bubble app as it was. It targeted a niche market, and that market came flooding in - it really proved there was demand for the product and the feedback helped shape the end result - months ahead of where would have been if I re-wrote it. But as the app grew we ended up with "spaghetti no-code", slow loading times, crazy hacks, giant bundles (that we had no control over)... but again, it was good enough to launch with and validate the company, and it was fast to try out ideas. We eventually did a full rewrite once we were happy with the overall structure of the app, but the process changed my perspective on the value of no-code tools in the right hands.

jcheng 5y ago
Thank you for a strikingly helpful testimonial. I’m skeptical of no- and low-code but based on your account, I’m now intrigued enough to give bubble a look.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ramraj07 5y ago
People (especially the kind that hangs out in HN) dont seem to understand that there’s a vast ocean of fairly smart people, much smarter than the average (or even above average) programmer, who are unable to build what they can imagine because of the coding bottleneck. I know many, and it’s not for a lack of significant effort that they are not able to learn to code in a way that’s meaningful. I suppose there’s something in your brain that needs to click to write code? Anyways I’d much rather trust a product created by a team described in this comment than one written by a pure group of engineers.
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  Absolutely. It can't be said enough how much of a bubble there is here. Smart entrepreneurs who know how to get shit done don't want to waste their time learning a bunch of rote arcane commands to reify their vision. That said, these kinds of no-code panics happen twice a year around here, and looking back long enough, they're never more than a niche product. We'll see about this one.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- xnx 5y ago
  I like to consider myself one of those people. I find the hosting/infrastructure side much more of an obstacle/hassle than the code. Getting the infrastructure out of the way and letting me write business logic and tools is what I'm most interested in.
- flarg 5y ago
  In life sciences the people are smarter than any developer but software is IT-captured so all they can work with is Excel. No code is meant for these people. Software developers will never deliver what life sciences needs without no code.
  - wittycardio 5y ago
    Life sciences people are generally far less intelligent than the average developer lol
    - ramraj07 5y ago
      I was a LS PhD, now I’m a developer. I can assure you that the average developer is far inferior to most PhD or post docs in any reputable university. Doesn’t mean they are absolutely smart though, I’d argue the biggest issue in research today is that there are a lot of not-that-smart-hustlers in it compared to what researhers used to be 60-100 years back.
mdoms 5y ago
Thanks for your comment which definitely isn't sponsored or paid for.
- mrspeaker 5y ago
  No problem.
anm89 5y ago
This feels like the one valid case to me. Non technical founder prototypes with no code until they can validate their idea and raise and then completely re writes. I'm guessing many people would get this right up until the last step and see how much juice they could squeeze out of the prototype which I would imagine could be fatal in many cases. I still wouldn't suggest this route for anyone.
Toine 5y ago
Wow that felt great to read, thanks for sharing. I believe no-code is incredibly underrated by many early stage startups. Rewrite only once you found your PMF and there's a real performance issue (or other technical reason), just you like you did. One of the best thing about no-code is that you avoid painful, timewasting continuous refactoring while trying to iterate on your products the first months. It's much easier to design & structure the code to be as close as possible to the business (DDD-style) when you write it from scratch after reaching PMF. Being able to iterate fast early on is such an important part of startups. I think code is not great at this.
narrator 5y ago
The area where most no code solutions tend to break is performance. There's some sort of black box that has o(n^2) time and nobody can fix it.
rattray 5y ago
> "spaghetti no-code", slow loading times, crazy hacks, giant bundles Can you say more about these problems? I'm curious what they're like in practice, if/how companies using Bubble can work around them, and whether Bubble might be able to fix these kinds of issues in the future.
- mrspeaker 5y ago
  The "slow editor/loading times" and "giant bundles" is just technical, so should be "easy" to fix! The hard bit I think is the "spaghetti no-code" problem that I've seen in nearly all visual-type programing environments. Just because it's no code, all of the logic still needs to exist somewhere. When we code we can break it apart in many ways, and how you break things apart and abstract things depends on the system. But no-code tools are fixed, and you only have one way to divide up the logic. In Bubble's case, it means there's a "design" section with UI and data-binding, and a "workflow" section with all of the actions that happen: UI interactions and business logic are smooshed in together. You end up with thousands of boxes indicating actions, in a giant list. You can kind of group them, and you can colourize them - but everything is held together by convention. A single logical flow can require many UI elements, and tracking that logical flow through the various unrelated boxes is... spaghetti! In Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs it says "Every powerful language has three mechanisms for [combining simple ideas to form more complex ideas]: * primitive expressions, which represent the simplest entities the language is concerned with, * means of combination, by which compound elements are built from simpler ones, and * means of abstraction, by which compound elements can be named and manipulated as units." Most of the no-code tools seem to miss (or have a too simple version of) the final mechanism: "means of abstraction". So the entire system is built of combinations, that are poorly tied together.
  - rattray 5y ago
    Elegantly put, thank you.
rattray 5y ago
How long did the rewrite take? Was there anything that was worse about the coded version?
- mrspeaker 5y ago
  About 6 months to switch - probably twice as long as it should have, because it was happening in parallel with maintaining and improving the no-code version, and the product requirements were evolving. Switching off the no-code version was a happy day. We'd pushed it further than it was designed to go. The initial advantages of quick prototyping slowed down, and it was getting harder (very hard) to add new features without breaking old ones. Customizing the design (to our designer's high standards!) was... tough. The coded version was better in every way - but part of that was because we learned a lot from the prototype. I personally probably wouldn't start a fresh project with it - but I would recommended it to (technical) non-programmers who want to get an idea out of their head to see if it's any good.
  - rattray 5y ago
    Fascinating – thanks for sharing!
ak39 5y ago
Thank you for sharing this experience.

jcheng 5y ago

Thank you for a strikingly helpful testimonial. I’m skeptical of no- and low-code but based on your account, I’m now intrigued enough to give bubble a look.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

ramraj07 5y ago

People (especially the kind that hangs out in HN) dont seem to understand that there’s a vast ocean of fairly smart people, much smarter than the average (or even above average) programmer, who are unable to build what they can imagine because of the coding bottleneck. I know many, and it’s not for a lack of significant effort that they are not able to learn to code in a way that’s meaningful. I suppose there’s something in your brain that needs to click to write code? Anyways I’d much rather trust a product created by a team described in this comment than one written by a pure group of engineers.

JohnWhigham 5y ago
Absolutely. It can't be said enough how much of a bubble there is here. Smart entrepreneurs who know how to get shit done don't want to waste their time learning a bunch of rote arcane commands to reify their vision. That said, these kinds of no-code panics happen twice a year around here, and looking back long enough, they're never more than a niche product. We'll see about this one.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
xnx 5y ago
I like to consider myself one of those people. I find the hosting/infrastructure side much more of an obstacle/hassle than the code. Getting the infrastructure out of the way and letting me write business logic and tools is what I'm most interested in.
flarg 5y ago
In life sciences the people are smarter than any developer but software is IT-captured so all they can work with is Excel. No code is meant for these people. Software developers will never deliver what life sciences needs without no code.
- wittycardio 5y ago
  Life sciences people are generally far less intelligent than the average developer lol
  - ramraj07 5y ago
    I was a LS PhD, now I’m a developer. I can assure you that the average developer is far inferior to most PhD or post docs in any reputable university. Doesn’t mean they are absolutely smart though, I’d argue the biggest issue in research today is that there are a lot of not-that-smart-hustlers in it compared to what researhers used to be 60-100 years back.

mdoms 5y ago

Thanks for your comment which definitely isn't sponsored or paid for.

mrspeaker 5y ago
No problem.

anm89 5y ago

This feels like the one valid case to me. Non technical founder prototypes with no code until they can validate their idea and raise and then completely re writes. I'm guessing many people would get this right up until the last step and see how much juice they could squeeze out of the prototype which I would imagine could be fatal in many cases. I still wouldn't suggest this route for anyone.

Toine 5y ago

Wow that felt great to read, thanks for sharing. I believe no-code is incredibly underrated by many early stage startups. Rewrite only once you found your PMF and there's a real performance issue (or other technical reason), just you like you did. One of the best thing about no-code is that you avoid painful, timewasting continuous refactoring while trying to iterate on your products the first months. It's much easier to design & structure the code to be as close as possible to the business (DDD-style) when you write it from scratch after reaching PMF. Being able to iterate fast early on is such an important part of startups. I think code is not great at this.

narrator 5y ago

The area where most no code solutions tend to break is performance. There's some sort of black box that has o(n^2) time and nobody can fix it.

rattray 5y ago

> "spaghetti no-code", slow loading times, crazy hacks, giant bundles Can you say more about these problems? I'm curious what they're like in practice, if/how companies using Bubble can work around them, and whether Bubble might be able to fix these kinds of issues in the future.

mrspeaker 5y ago
The "slow editor/loading times" and "giant bundles" is just technical, so should be "easy" to fix! The hard bit I think is the "spaghetti no-code" problem that I've seen in nearly all visual-type programing environments. Just because it's no code, all of the logic still needs to exist somewhere. When we code we can break it apart in many ways, and how you break things apart and abstract things depends on the system. But no-code tools are fixed, and you only have one way to divide up the logic. In Bubble's case, it means there's a "design" section with UI and data-binding, and a "workflow" section with all of the actions that happen: UI interactions and business logic are smooshed in together. You end up with thousands of boxes indicating actions, in a giant list. You can kind of group them, and you can colourize them - but everything is held together by convention. A single logical flow can require many UI elements, and tracking that logical flow through the various unrelated boxes is... spaghetti! In Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs it says "Every powerful language has three mechanisms for [combining simple ideas to form more complex ideas]: * primitive expressions, which represent the simplest entities the language is concerned with, * means of combination, by which compound elements are built from simpler ones, and * means of abstraction, by which compound elements can be named and manipulated as units." Most of the no-code tools seem to miss (or have a too simple version of) the final mechanism: "means of abstraction". So the entire system is built of combinations, that are poorly tied together.
- rattray 5y ago
  Elegantly put, thank you.

rattray 5y ago

How long did the rewrite take? Was there anything that was worse about the coded version?

mrspeaker 5y ago
About 6 months to switch - probably twice as long as it should have, because it was happening in parallel with maintaining and improving the no-code version, and the product requirements were evolving. Switching off the no-code version was a happy day. We'd pushed it further than it was designed to go. The initial advantages of quick prototyping slowed down, and it was getting harder (very hard) to add new features without breaking old ones. Customizing the design (to our designer's high standards!) was... tough. The coded version was better in every way - but part of that was because we learned a lot from the prototype. I personally probably wouldn't start a fresh project with it - but I would recommended it to (technical) non-programmers who want to get an idea out of their head to see if it's any good.
- rattray 5y ago
  Fascinating – thanks for sharing!

ak39 5y ago

Thank you for sharing this experience.