Why Bubble’s greatest success can lead to churn and how they’re tackling it

Emmanuel Straschnov

|

CO-CEO & Founder

of

Bubble
EP
53
Emmanuel Straschnov
Emmanuel Straschnov

Episode Summary

Today on the show we have Emmanuel Straschnov, co-founder and co-CEO of Bubble.

In this episode, we talked about the rise of no-code tools’ popularity, why Bubble decided to raise funding, and the challenges they face with churn due to the nature of their product.

We also dived into the challenges Bubble faced when designing their customer onboarding, how their pricing strategy has evolved over the years, and why Emmanuel believes that qualitative insights are more valuable than quantitative analysis.

As usual, I'm excited to hear what you think of this episode, and if you have any feedback, I would love to hear from you. You can email me directly on Andrew@churn.fm. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter.

The Children Who Came After Them

Mentioned Resources

Highlights

Time

Why is now the time for no-code platforms 00:03:32
Why Bubble decided to raise funding 00:12:00
Does the nature of Bubble’s product make its churn rate higher? 00:13:00
The cost of switching product development platforms 00:15:25
Bubble’s challenge in designing their onboarding 00:17:51
How Bubble tries to educate the community about the value of no-code tools 00:29:20
How Bubble’s pricing strategy has evolved over the years 00:32:57

Transcription

Andrew Michael
Hey, Emmanuel, welcome to the show.

Emmanuel Straschnov
Hey, it's great to be here.

Andrew Michael
It's excellent. Today's an exciting episode. And for the listeners. Emmanuel is the founder and co CEO of bubble, a visual programming language for web and mobile application, whose goal is to make code obsolete. Emmanuel was born in Paris. He studied computer science and mathematics that you call a Polytechnic and received his MBA from Harvard Business School, after seven years as a bootstrap startup and more than a quarter of a million users pebble raise 6 million in its first round of funding in June last year. So my first question for you Emanuel is why is now the time for No code.

Emmanuel Straschnov
I think there is a combination of two things that happen. The first thing is, there is a lot of skepticism around the no code idea. I mean, now no code is hot. And so people are less skeptical. But over the last 30 years, a lot of engineers would always say, Oh, yeah, visual programming will never get anywhere, you can do what you want with it. And so it took quite some time for tools to get good enough for people to start being excited again. So we started bubble in 2012. And I think it's in 2016, or 2018, that people started being excited about no code. And at that time, our product, for instance, was much more powerful, and could actually start delivering the promise that no code is about, you know, like, letting people do the same thing with without code that they would do with code. That's one thing. And I think the second thing that also had a pretty important impact is, if you remember the early years of the decades as the gate like 2010 2012 2014 it was all about learning how to code like you know, a lot of people camps, you know, Code Academy was extremely hot in New York. And I think governments were investing a lot. khou.org was, you know, generating a lot of noise. And I think people, sadly, almost, I want to say people have realized that after a few years, it's not that simple to teach everyone how to code coding is still and I can say that because I'm a coder, myself a fairly tedious task that is not for everyone. It requires a certain type of personality. And so people turned that into me by the idea that everyone would learn how to code. And so the combination of these two things led to no code thinking is primetime today,

Andrew Michael
I think. Yeah, I definitely echo the points in terms of like, turning down the idea of these visual coding software because recently I was one of those people that shined on it until like a couple of months ago, I decided to redo the podcast website, actually, which is going to be launching on the years anniversary. I built it in web flow, which is not nearly as advanced as what you do at bubble yet. But I was just blown away. And I felt like I had been living under a rock to see like how powerful these no code tools had become. And then today I was playing around with bubble and just seeing how quick and easy you can sort of be able to like pull in different aspects, different tools. I think your onboarding process, you even show away where you can create them in the app, in the sense that you can search for location on a map, you can save it to a database, and then you can visualize and show those locations on the map. And I think that's in the past, could have taken a few hours to get right, it was in a matter of minutes up and running and with bubbles are definitely changed my skepticism.

Emmanuel Straschnov
Well, I'm glad. And this is actually like, what you just said about, you know, the minutes versus hours is, to me the actual value of no code, like the value of the code is not necessarily that it doesn't involve code so more people can do it. I mean, it is true, but more importantly, it's probably 50 times to 100 times faster. And that is extremely valuable for everyone including quarters, you know, so it's actually changing a lot how the business world works. So far. software development is always the bottleneck of business. You know, whether it's startups will be companies, and no code is actually a very good way to fix that.

Andrew Michael
Yeah, and I definitely think like a lot of them are disguised and a lot of waste is no code at startup. So obviously Zapier one is a famous example. But I think like other examples that just came to mind after you said, this now was something like segment where in the past, you would have had required like data engineers to do a lot of the work between popping different tools together some new toys afterwards, where now you just flick a switch, you add a few details, and then you have an integration flowing into your data warehouse. It's just incredible, like how little effort you need to do now to be able to create powerful applications and have powerful data store. So definitely time is one of those big, big, big pluses for no code. So why raising funding now? So you've been building bubble now for over seven years. Like I mentioned earlier, have a quarter million users that might even increase since then, since the funding announcement. But what was the motivation to go out and sort of raise this round of funding? Now? What are you trying to do in this next year, two years?

Emmanuel Straschnov
So I got the more important question here is, why didn't we raise money earlier? Because that's actually what was more unique, like raising money is actually more straightforward. So the reason why we didn't raise is we felt so I think the time of no code was not there. We just talked about this. And, again, the level of skepticism is fairly high in terms of product. And so what we decided was, let's actually focus on the product first, not try to get too many users and get to a position where we could tell people without misleading them with applying to be frank. Oh, hey, you can do Twitter or Airbnb on Bumble. And a lot of people make that promise but they actually don't necessarily deliver on it. And we truly do. Like you could literally close we're on bubble today. But it took us something like You know, five years to get there. And so we felt that fundraising too soon would put some pressure in terms of timing that would not be healthy, to reach that goal. And so the reason why we raise money afterwards is because we actually reached that goal. And then we had to hit the opportunity as hard as we could. And even though we were profitable and you know, generating revenue, I think the opportunity ahead of us is too big for us just to do it in a bootstrap auto finance way.

Andrew Michael
Yeah, absolutely. I think the power of no code is enormous. And like the opportunity in front, it's almost endless. I think. You also have some really good success stories. I was reading through that you've had companies use bubble to get into Y Combinator, which I think was Plato, you had others that raised over 300 million in process of a billion dollars of loans with bubble powered platform. And they've just bootstrap businesses. It's 30. k Moammar within six months so some really exciting stuff coming out then I'm sure this is like something that must excite you quite a bit is seeing what people are building now with bubble. What's been your biggest surprise It's something someone's both.

Emmanuel Straschnov
Well, every application honestly, Baba is so open ended, in a sense that you can really put all the elements on the page, however you want them, you can have as many as you want on the page, then you can create those workflows saying, you know, once a user clicks on this button, do this, do this, do that and have as many actions as you want. It's hard actually, for us to sometimes predict what people are going to build. And sometimes what we see is some I, you happens to me that I look at an application and I have ways to see that it's built on the whole game console. And I'm like, how did they do that? I didn't know that was possible to that on the platform. That is the coolest thing. An example I have often is this guy that built an advent calendar for his girlfriend using our product. So not a business at all. Not something that I thought someone would use Bumble for and turns out to use it. And that is, that is the best thing in general when you create open ended tools that empower people to do things. That's it. Usually what happens when people start using your tooling the way you didn't think about? it?

Andrew Michael
Yeah, I can imagine just seeing all the different tools. And then I think lucky, you've got in some cases, at least in the early stage, you have the branding that you can still be able to see if there were made with bubble or not. Because, like you said, there's some tools that are out there like MDMA today, Kickstarter can almost be cloned. And you would know that they were built with Babel. I've seen a few of these swell other networks now, like make a pad. And so for the next chef tutorials are teaching how to do these clones. And obviously, bubble comes up in a lot of these tutorials to get it done. So one thing I'm interested about your business and I mentioned, just before we got on the call as well was, it feels to me and maybe I'm making the assumption that there's sort of this double edged sword when it comes to your product in the sense that you would probably typically attract quite a lot of young startups entrepreneurs wanting to get started, but they've never seen it really through so you see quite a lot of high churn due to the nature of Small businesses fail because the businesses fold themselves once people get to a certain stage of growth, and then they potentially move platforms and start to build their own custom app, and is this the case like, how are you dealing with this at the moment?

Emmanuel Straschnov
Right? So we do indeed have these kind of two turns like earlier in the lifecycle of a customer when people just start a company on us and the company doesn't work out, which happens, you know, with most startups, that that trend doesn't matter. It does not worry me at all, because what we've noticed is people churn and indeed go from pain to non paying, but they don't leave the platform, they just come back after a few months with another project. So that does not it's not a problem. The churn with that is more like a graduation when companies do extremely well. And so kind of migrating off the platform. It used to be a huge problem for us two years ago. Today, honestly, I mean, it happens sometime, but the cost of recreating something from scratch with engineers, when you have to Built on Bumble, and it's already generating revenue, because if it's not generic generating revenue, you won't be able to raise money or to fund, you know, recreating the thing is extremely high. And so that company, for instance, that has raised $300 million, they told us two years ago that they want to be acquired by another entity. And the other entity said, You guys need to rebuild everything from scratch. And actually started and two years later, they're still using us, because it's very, very hard to do. So we don't want to abuse that position. Again, it does happen. But we know what to do there and how to address that. And it's really just about making sure the platform scales better is more reliable and more faster at scale. And so we're just executing on these to keep them what I would say that the market forces are very much in our advantage, because it's not because you make a lot of have a lot of traffic that is going to be easy to hire good engineers. I mean, everybody is struggling, struggling to good, get good engineers. And so effectively, it's much simpler. To stand bubble, the last thing that we've noticed is the case of this company, for instance, that raised these $300 billion. So they have a team rebuilding everything, but at the same time, they also have their bubble developers, improving the platform because they get continuous feedback. And so it's a race, you know, between the engineers and the bubble team. And like the bubble team, as you know, on their side, outside, and the team working on mobile actually evolves the product faster. And it takes a very long time for them to so I'm not even sure whether they will catch up.

Andrew Michael
Yeah, that makes no sense. I think the switching costs just as the bigger you get, I think the more they grow, and the more powerful your platform becomes, the harder it gets to sort of keep up with that change.

Emmanuel Straschnov
Yeah, one thing I say about that, I think low insurance investors because investors are really the one that care a lot about churn and they should, I think churn on the low end, if you look at companies like Shopify and stripe, they have enormous churn. If you look in person at the end, you know, because most people that start something on Shopify, Don't sell anything after a couple of months after that, right? most developers that integrate with the stripe API, I don't know the numbers, but my guess is that many, many of them never charge more than $100. But because of those very successful companies with this kind of churn, investors have understood that if you are in the long tail, it is normal to have high churn and it's okay.

Andrew Michael
Absolutely. And specifically, when you're dealing with SMB space, it's absolutely normal to have churn. I think it's worrying if you don't have a percentage of customers. Yeah, some of yourselves. It's worrying, though, when you don't have a good percentage of your customers with the chariot flattens out, but definitely you can understand sort of in the long tail and the low end of the market, early stage startups as well. It is high risk games. Michelle. So that's sort of one of the challenges that you're trying to tackle and it sounds sort of definitely like you've got a good grasp on it. And as the platform becomes more powerful, sort of that graduation moment will becoming less and less For you, what are some of the other challenges that you're facing when it comes to tuner attention I mentioned earlier, I tried out and signed up for Babel myself and started going through the onboarding. It seems like you guys must have been through a few iterations of that as well to get to where it is today trying to sort of show the value and the power of it. Because it is, at the end of the day, it's a simple tool, but it's still a complex tool. So what are some of the other challenges you've been facing?

Emmanuel Straschnov
Yeah. I mean, it is that one, the one you just mentioned, like avoiding and making sure people go through a learning curve that is real. I think it's about, you know, five to 10 hours depending on how tech savvy you are. But it is a real investment we asking our users to make, and that's where we're losing most people. So that is not even churn because users haven't started paying yet. It was still in the discovery, period. But that's what we have. We have like a significant up between people that sign up, and people that actually stopped building an application on us. The way we still got, I mean, I think it's a combination of three things. One is improved the user interface and making it a little bit more Firstly, a little bit better design. I mean, what we have is a little bit old school, and then a little bit more user friendly for some aspects. So that's one path, which is more of an engineering slash design path. Then there is another thing, which is a bit of documentation. So we're actually hiring right now someone to write a Bible curriculum to hold your hand a little bit better than those lessons that we have, that are valuable to show us that you can do something but not necessarily to hold your hand along those five to 10 hours. And the last thing to be honest, it's a little bit of a communication problem. Like, if, if we had, you know, like, household name companies started on us, and people would know them. And then we tell them what, you know, there were studies of Oh, by the way, if you spend 10 hours on bubble, you'd be able to do the same thing without engineers. I think that would solve all our onboarding problems because people would just stick to Because at the end of the day, if you compare two hours to like some other tools that might seem long, but if you compare 10 hours to, you know, learning how to code, it's like 1%. It's like tiny. And so we plan on those three things at the same time, to building our best users to get those success stories and improve our communication, improve our design and improve our documentation to get to a point where we don't have this drop off.

Andrew Michael
Yeah. And like he says, A lot of it's not even shown yet because it's really people just testing out the platform, I think as well, because you have a free trial or you have a free version actually, you also do get a lot of users just coming in and just browsing just check out what is this and never really intended to build anything to begin with? So it definitely sounds like you've got sort of the three pillars or you focused admit they make a lot of sense. I think the communication is definitely the probably as an industry like as a there's still this sort of misconception, just like I had personally like a couple of months ago until I started playing around with the tools again, is that You felt that they weren't up to scratch or they could never do what code could do? I think this is probably one of the biggest challenges and how are you like approaching this? Now this new education trying to communicate the value of no code? Are you working collaboration with any other no code startups to sort of try and show the power of it?

Emmanuel Straschnov
Yeah, well, we work with make a pad that you mentioned a little bit earlier, who's who's big on education. So it's very good fit. And then yeah, it is a joint effort. And I'm actually my son surprising that I'm actually glad this space is getting more crowded than before, because for the first five years, it was really just us in webflow, to some extent, but web flow at that time was not really no code. It was more like a tool for designers, you know that we generate CSS and HTML code. And so it wasn't to be difficult to evangelize. So today, you know, we're partnering with para bola in San Francisco that does something a little bit different from us between the great adult to try to make it easier. We're Working on air table integration, also thing to basically join forces with all the local tools. So that you know people understand that you can actually do, you can actually do real things. Because at the end of the day, I don't see ourselves as as competitors. This Nokia space is hot today, but it's very small compared to what it could be. My personal goal is that in five years, we don't talk about no code anymore. You know, no code just becomes, you know, the way to build things. And it's a standard and it's not no code. It's just a way to build things. And sometimes you go to code because you want to go low level, but it's actually not frequent. And, and so to do that, because of that, I don't think we're competing. In fact, you know, the pay is going to get bigger, bigger and bigger, and that we already have a fear of sharing it.

Andrew Michael
Yeah, absolutely. See that. It definitely left. It feels like there's no end in sight for where this can go. And, like, I think, listening to one of your previous podcasting, with Jason Calacanis, in terms of luck How this enables in new set of coders, a new set of entrepreneurs who were previously sort of not able to go out and create and build what they wanted. be exciting to see some of the new things that people come up with and able to actually produce now. But I still think there is this challenge in the sense that engineers themselves have a very specific way of thinking and being able to architect an app and be able to understand how an app is going to work is also not as simple as you think, have a visual interface, you can make it really easy. But being able to put all the pieces together in a coherent way that actually produces results at the end is also another challenge and it's part of probably what you learn in coding schools themselves as well. How are you thinking about this challenge? And what are some of the things that you want to be helping with your customers when it comes to the training?

Emmanuel Straschnov
So there are couple of things here first of all, actually, yes, you if you use bubble, you need to know how to think about you know your data structure you need to know okay, if I want to create an Airbnb type marketplace How am I going to describe the thing that is friends so the apartment, you know and address some features, a review is going to have a title rating, which is a number and then a content for instance, a text. Honestly, a lot of people can do this without a technical training, after a little bit of thinking. And today, yes, today, you will learn that in coding schools, because the thing that you know, to apply these principles you need to be coding, but tools like Bob will actually create opportunities for people to think about this without getting the end of the code, which is a much more efficient way. And so what we've seen in practice is that even without like a ton of training, people might make a few mistakes at first, but because bubble gives you like a very fast feedback loop, when you build things, you will realize pretty quickly Oh, shit, this data structure is actually not very handy because of this and that, and then they fix it. So there's quite some hope there. Now we try to do things ourselves on our side to make it a little bit easier, which is, you know, well, better documentation, a debugger. One of the very important feature We have it the fact that we have a debugger to go to your workforce like step by step. Because, again, bubble is very open ended. And because it's open ended, you can do bugs basically, like, you can make mistakes in your logic. And so there are ways for us to we find ways to help users help themselves. My philosophy here is create the tool holes instead of you know, restricting what people can do to prevent them from making mistakes, create the tools to help them figure out their mistakes themselves. And if you do that, they're very happy because they're, firstly they're struggling, but then figure it out. And people love that feeling, which I think is a cylinder with the feeling that people have at school, you know, when they're kids and they don't understand something and then finally they understand it and actually happy everybody, even people that don't enjoy school, enjoy that feeling. Because it's something that was hard that becomes easy. Right, exactly that that moment. And so that's a better way and that's also a much more scalable way. Because, again, if you create an open ended tool, it's very hard to cover all use cases. But if you create something that helps people think themselves and find their mistakes and iterate on them, that they can do anything.

Andrew Michael
Absolutely. And you mentioned something earlier as well, they come attention. Now I want to just dive into a little bit deeper you the concept of sort of the long tail and have these early stage startups, starting using it for projects and coming back and then starting again, how did you sort of figure this out that this was happening and that you were seeing this regularly? are they keeping the same accounts and just downgrading and then restarting again? And how do you think about this, then in the context of churn, how are you measuring for this?

Emmanuel Straschnov
Yeah, I mean, they were using exactly the same account. And especially in the early years, you know, where we didn't have that many customers, we would see the same names coming back in our success, like Help Desk software, the same names and people would come with new applications. So that's how we found out we really have people that leave us people that hate us, especially in the early days, because, again, that's one of the advantages of not raising money too soon, we could actually spend a lot of time with customers. So believe it or not, but for the first two years, I think I was, personally because I was building the product, but also doing like, custom success. I was on Skype, or hangout all the time, probably like an hour a day with users just to make sure to discuss about what they were doing and help them find feature that they couldn't figure out how to use. And so people were very faithful for that. And so they would stick around today, we can do that anymore as much. I mean, we do phone consultations, but obviously it doesn't work the same. But now we have this community on the forum where people keep helping each other. And so that's also where to keep them. And sorry, Your second question was,

Andrew Michael
and the same was sort of like how are you measuring this as well how you are dealing with this in the context of churn? So I think you mentioned some cases, you don't even consider churn because something you can do with but how are you keeping track of it? Like, is it a metric you keep an eye on

Emmanuel Straschnov
Not too much actually. Because we still like SAS businesses that is Mr driven. And so at the end of the day, the number will attract more is like the net revenue churn. It's something we haven't started optimizing too much like, we know that it come back, we haven't started optimizing too much, and how many people come back because I think at our stage, it's important to go for like, one specific goal and really focus hard on it. And in our case, we want to work on revenue currently. And so we look at net revenue churn is that. So I'm glad that people come back. But it's not something I tried to optimize on.

Andrew Michael
So then the majority of the growth in Nitro new is coming from new business as opposed to reactivation.

Emmanuel Straschnov
Yes. And expansion and expansion is actually really big for us. That's, that's literally the nature of our business. You know, people start companies and as they grow, and then they start paying more. So we're very, we're very fortunate to be very transparent over the last 13 months. I think we only have one month. with positive net revenue churn, all the other notes were negative. No, it's pretty lucky.

Andrew Michael
Yep, definitely. And I think it's when you get to do your pricing and product, right. Like that's great results. I think like this comes up in the podcast quite a lot. And specifically when we talk about like net negative churn in, I think it's always the companies that have this really strong alignment to as their customers become more successful, they become more successful. Yep. Your pricing strategy in the beginning, you've been around for seven years now. Like how is that evolved? Like, what have you learnt about it over the years? Has it changed at all? Or did you just get it right from day one?

Emmanuel Straschnov
This is a very hard question. Actually. I can think about that for a very long time. I'm not sure we have completely nailed pricing so far. I think we may be, we may need ways to refine it. The main challenge that we have is twofold. We know the pricing that segments will users because we have you know people in high school just Literally just playing, or maybe starting a side project, but not for home, you know, like, you know, $15 a month is really high. And then we have companies that raise $300 million running on us. So we, these businesses, honestly, we are the charge that we could be charging them much more. So you need to find a pricing scheme that works for both. So that's one challenge that we have. And the second challenge that we have is that because we mostly target non technical people, non technical people are not necessarily aware of all the technical resources that it takes to be to run an application. And especially the fact that price comes as we scale is not necessarily something obvious. So to give you an example of what we are doing what we're doing in the early years of bubble, so in bubble, you can run workflows, right? workflow, you know, when a button is clicked signs, a user says, charge a credit card, send an email, change the page, for instance. And so we used to charge people per workflow run, whatever will run in each cluster with having a location of work programs, and so we we had two problems with that is, first of all, we had a lot of people telling us emailing us say I'm building this business, but I'm envisioning so much activity on my side, this is going to be too expensive. So I can't use you guys. That's, I mean, it's not necessarily realistic concern. But you know, when people email you that you have to trade some things that doesn't need to that question otherwise, you know, it's a huge stuff in terms of adoption. And the second problem we're having is that, so people started optimizing the workflows to reducing their workflow runs, but leading to less efficient designs, because, again, nobody's reopened it. And so you can design your application in a smart way. And so that was not optimal. And so we iterated a little bit from this. And it's going to a system that we think is much more efficient today, where basically, we don't have limits on what programs have like usage on the application, but your application by default gets a certain share of CPU time compared to all the other applications. And so if your application starts having a lot of traffic, you're going to be waiting a little bit. And so becomes a little bit slower. And so you can pay for faster performance. What you've noticed is that people are more willing to pay for performance than to pay for usage. Now, as our users user base becomes more sophisticated around the concept of scaling and everything, we might be coming back at some point to use it because actually a more natural way to price things, but it's something we'd see all the time.

Andrew Michael
Yeah, it's interesting. They do experiments in quite a bit. Certainly, I think a lot of sort of the metrics companies like mixpanel, kissmetrics, a few others at the time, they'll use to in the previous used to charge by event, and then they quickly realized that there was restricting their customers from building the event architecture and being able to track what they wanted. I think in the end, a lot of them now are really turned back to just users like monthly right users and not just all users etc. It became really about usage as opposed to sort of a an arbitrary metric. That maybe had some correlation with the tool, but it wasn't really with the value that the customers receiving. I do see like in terms of performance being definitely one of those aspects, I think it might not be as straightforward and clear for people to understand they're like you say a few non technical even from that perspective, that you need to pay for extra performance, because you might in some ways also think that isn't Babel, like a really highly performant tool that I should be using at worrying about performance. So I can tell you have a tricky job ahead of you over the next few years experimenting around pricing and packaging.

Emmanuel Straschnov
But you know, it's we also have the freedom of, you know, experimenting, I mean, especially, we're dealing with most people on a monthly plan so we can do different cohort, we usually grandfather people when we make some changes, so it's pretty easy to test and see what sticks.

Andrew Michael
Absolutely. I can't remember who said this on the show, but like pricing and packaging is a part of your product. It's not something that should be treated separately and just like you're an experiment and you change your product. You can change pricing and packaging, and like you said you've got good controls in place and you can have grants Following procedures that keep your existing customers happy while allowing you to experiment, the best place to be.

Emmanuel Straschnov
Exactly.

Andrew Michael
So one question I want to ask you Emmanuel that asked everybody that joins the show is, let's imagine a hypothetical scenario now that you've joined a new company and Chyna retention is not doing well, this company. And the CEO of this company has come to you and said, Emanuel, I want you to turn things around for us. We have three months to see some results. What would be some of the first things you want to do in those 90 days to turn things around for the company?

Emmanuel Straschnov
Well, first of all, interview users actually believe in qualitative insights more than quantitative insights back to what I was saying in the early years of the company where we'd spend like an hour on the phone with users, I think you can learn much more there. So just you know, pick randomly, five out of the 15 first people that churn when you stop taking the job and figure out to them, hopefully they would answer your email and have a call with them to figure out what's Braking, and then based on that mega changes, my, my guess is that for most people most problems, it's more of a product issue than a business issue. Like sometimes, you know, might say, you know, if you change your pricing or something like that would reduce it, but I doubt it. At the end of the day, especially in the early days, it's all about the product.

Andrew Michael
Yeah, it's and like you say, I definitely This is something that's repeated over and over and over and over again on the show, sort of like speak to your customers. And more so during the early days, because the data itself can only tell you so much like jumping on a call will take you months to hear just speaking to customers and actually hearing their pain points because it really does. Well, the data has got mixed signals you don't have remember the numbers as well to get informed decisions. And at the end of that you're building for people not for numbers. Before we wrap up, like I'm interested to hear sort of your view of the future now and where you see sort of bubble going over the next five years and the no code industry as a whole. What's exciting. What can we be building

Emmanuel Straschnov
Well, a lot of things, I think,

Emmanuel Straschnov
for us, we're pushing very hard on, you know, performance, reliability and scale to have bigger and bigger users using us, at some point moving into enterprise, because there is a real need there. On the whole. Our goal as a company is, you know, within one to two years, become basically the default place when people go to start with based companies. Like if someone wants to start a web based startup, maybe they will end up coding because they found that you know, for what they do doing, coding might be more efficient. But 90% of the case I wanted to stick on bubble and I want to be that default place where that happens. Because once we held there, a lot of the emerging technologies that have been greatly today started with a static space. I think it's a very promising strategy. In the long run. Again, as I was saying earlier, I want in five years, I hope no code does not exist anymore. And instead, he's just everything is no code, except for a few specialists that will be writing code similar Today, some people will be writing assembly language if they want to take full control of the device. But most people don't do this. Our goal here is just to become the new standards, a new layer on top of you know, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Objective C Swift, or Java for Android. And not to be a concept anymore, but just these a new set of programming.

Andrew Michael
That's amazing. And I can definitely see it happening as well. But just looking at where you are today and where you've come from. So I wish you best of luck on that is anything you'd like to leave us with any final thoughts? How can the audience keep up to speed with what you're building? What should they be doing? Next?

Emmanuel Straschnov
I mean, it's gonna sound bad, but I would tell people, obviously, give it a try, like, give it a try to bubble because it's actually free, and it will be free forever until you need your own domain name. So there's really no cost to try. Bear with us in the early days of your experience with bubble because there is a learning curve. But believe me, if you have doubt, go to the forum and ask Should I spend 10 hours to learn this? And people will answer with a thank you, once you go through that learning curve, you have superpowers. And so what that means that for people that are listening that want to start companies and that think, Oh, I can't stop this company, because I don't have engineers. This is not true anymore. You have no excuse. So just go for it.

Andrew Michael
Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's millions of people out there that have these ideas, you want to get started, but just didn't have the engineering skills. As you said, that bubble is now a superpower. And it's up to you to take it on or not. Exactly. Well, Emmanuel was a pleasure having on the show today and looking forward to see what you come up over the next one to two years. And if your vision becomes reality in the next five,

Emmanuel Straschnov

‍Thank you very much. It was great chatting with you. Thanks.

Andrew Michael
And that's a wrap for the show today with me, Andrew, Michael. I really hope you enjoyed it and you're able to pull out something valuable for your business to keep up to date with churn.fm and be notified about new episodes, blog posts, and more. Subscribe mailing list by visiting churn.fm. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you have any feedback, good or bad, I would love to hear from you. And you can provide your blunt direct feedback by sending it to andrew@churn.fm. Lastly, but most importantly, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and leave a review as it really helps get the word out and grow the community. Thanks again for listening. See you again next week.

Comments

Emmanuel Straschnov
Emmanuel Straschnov
About

The show

My name is Andrew Michael and I started CHURN.FM, as I was tired of hearing stories about some magical silver bullet that solved churn for company X.

In this podcast, you will hear from founders and subscription economy pros working in product, marketing, customer success, support, and operations roles across different stages of company growth, who are taking a systematic approach to increase retention and engagement within their organizations.

Related

Listen To Next