A major mistake you want to avoid when hiring a Bubble agency is hiring one that can’t code.

Also known as citizen developers, these agencies limit the capabilities of your software product because they won’t be able to code their own plugins to solve the limitations of no-code.

This is why we transitioned from a full-code agency to one with a more hybrid approach. We wanted to offer users all the pros that come with no-code development, such as lower costs and faster turnaround times, with none of the design limitations and scalability problems.

We also own an SEO/content marketing agency called SaaSpirin, where we’ll actually market your product using our unique “bottom-of-the-funnel first” approach. After we’ve brought in your first few customers, we’ll learn more about their needs, and use this feedback to improve your software product.

This is another differentiator between us and Bubble agencies that just build out features, launch your product, and hope you can bring in customers. We’ll help generate your first customers and tailor your product around their feedback. 

Below, we wanted to dive deeper into the core reasons why we transitioned into a Bubble agency that uses full-code to overcome certain no-code problems.

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Who are we: We are Belighted, a hybrid full-code and Bubble agency. Because we have 15+ years experience developing full-code software products, we can offer you the best of both worlds. We can launch an application within a matter of weeks using Bubble’s rapid development and if you need a feature that Bubble doesn’t offer, we can code it ourselves. So if you’re thinking about building a software product, consider hopping on a quick call with our founder.

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It's 25 to 50 percent cheaper to develop software with no-code

A major factor that contributed to why we started using Bubble is cost savings. In our full-code days, we had to turn down many startups with amazing ideas, simply because they didn’t have the budget to build a full-code application.

But since we adopted Bubble, we can develop applications for 25 to 50 percent cheaper than if we focused solely on full-code.

Instead of employing teams of front-end developers, back-end developers, UX designers, and product managers, we can have a smaller team achieve the same thing, and pass this cost savings onto you.

As a rough example, if it took us $80,000 to develop a software product with full-code, we can build the same app for $40,000 to $60,000 with a hybrid, no-code approach.

We can launch an MVP within four weeks

Before we started using Bubble alongside full-code, it would take up to three months to deliver MVPs to clients. This often left our clients exposed to market changes that occurred during this timeframe.

But when we started using Bubble, we dramatically cut down the time it took to build an app, allowing us to go to market much quicker. Currently, we can launch an MVP within four weeks or less.

From here, we can gather market insights, learn if there’s really a demand for the product, and tailor features around customer feedback and preferences.

And this is another factor we believe sets us apart from other Bubble agencies. We pride ourselves in understanding your industry and what your customers want and building software around that; not just building a bunch of features that seem like good ideas.

We can test new ideas and gather feedback quicker

Once you’ve launched an MVP, you still have to interview customers, find out what they like and don’t like about your product, and pivot around this feedback.

With full-code, implementing this feedback was a real hassle. Building out the most simplest features took at least a couple of weeks and this delayed the feedback loop between us and our clients.

Since we started using Bubble, we shortened this feedback loop down to, in some cases, a couple of hours. A client would finish up a video call with their customer, send us the meeting summary, and we’d implement this feedback before the day was over.

We can still code our own APIs and plugins

The Bubble marketplace has hundreds of plugins coded by private developers that allow you to do almost anything that Bubble doesn’t allow. 

For example, if you want to charge customer credit cards and PayPal accounts, you can download the Braintree plugin. Or, if you want to connect your app with another app and access its data, you can install the Bubble App Connector. This way, you can perform actions inside your app depending on what another app did.

And if a client wants something that Bubble’s plugin marketplace doesn’t offer, maybe a client wants to add a very specific feature unique to their business, we can build one in a couple of days.

This allows you to take advantage of the benefits of no-code without any of the drawbacks. You can develop apps faster and for a lower price while keeping the flexibility of traditional, full code.

Bubble is the most established no-code platform

The last reason why we chose Bubble is because it’s the most established no-code platform on the market. Bubble has been around since 2012 and it’s backed by massive investment funds like Betaworks and Third Kind Venture Capital.

Around 200,000 developers currently use Bubble, with over 500,000 apps built on the platform since 2012.

This gave our team peace of mind knowing that in the next 10 to 20+ years, there’s a high likelihood that Bubble will still be around. So we can build client applications without worrying about migrating everything onto a new no-code platform in case Bubble goes out of business.

We didn’t want to take the risk of using newer no-code platforms that aren’t so established because if things go south in a couple of years, we’ll have to migrate everything and this is a massive headache.

2 Examples of apps we built with Bubble

Here are two apps we recently built and launched with Bubble:

• The Enneagram Institute’s “My Personality”
• Innpact

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The Enneagram Institute’s “My Personality”

We launched My Personality for The Enneagram Institute and 95 percent of the app was built using Bubble.

In short, My Personality allows the institute to create questionnaires and for coaches to send these questionnaires to their coachees. Once a coachee completes the questionnaire, coaches can generate detailed reports to understand a coachee's personality type and learning style.

We initially built My Personality eight years ago with full code, but our client wanted us to get rid of unnecessary features and essentially simplify the app because they now understood their business better.

We migrated the app onto Bubble, used the drag-and-drop editor to add these new features, and launched the new app, all with zero downtime.

From here, we gathered customer feedback, did some A/B testing, and used this information to improve the second version of My Personality even more.

However, we did code a couple of features ourselves. For instance, we couldn’t find a report generation system that met our client’s needs, so our developers built one from scratch.

Innpact

Innpact is a financial services company that offers advisory and third-party fund management. When we built Innpact’s web app, we took a more hybrid approach, with the front-end being built and hosted on Bubble and the REST API backend built with traditional, full code.

We built the first version of Innpact several years ago, but after governments changed financial regulations, we had to launch a second version that complied with these new regulations.

One of the regulations we needed to follow was that data had to reside in certain countries. For example, with the GDPR, all Innpact’s data collected from EU citizens needed to be hosted in Luxembourg.

So, we maintained a distinct separation between the backend, database, and Bubble in order to store user data on servers inside Luxembourg. Merely 30 percent of Innpact is hosted inside Bubble. 

Still, Bubble was very important because it allowed us to build a user-friendly front-end and gather client feedback within a fraction of the time it would’ve taken with traditional code, while our traditional coding skills allowed us to meet our client's specific requirements.

Partner with a Bubble agency today!

If you’re looking to partner with a Bubble agency that knows how to code, book a 15-minute call with our founder. During this call, we’ll walk you through our hybrid development approach, which looks like this:

Discovery call: We first jump on a discovery call with you where we’ll get an idea of what you’re trying to build and your expectations for this project. After the call, we’ll give you a rough estimate for how much this project will cost.

Scoping: Next, we’ll gather all your product requirements such as what features you want and how you’d like your user interface to look.

Design: Our UX designers will begin turning your ideas into a product mockup. We’ll send this mockup over to you, ask for your feedback, and tailor it around this feedback.

Bubble development: Using Bubble and our programming skills, we’ll build out this mockup into a working application with all the functionalities you’re looking for, all while keeping you in the loop on how the development process is going.

Marketing your product: Once you’re happy with your product, we’ll launch it and pass you on to our team at SaaSpirin, our marketing agency, where we’ll use our bottom-of-the-funnel SEO approach to drive conversion to your product.

This entire process takes between four and eight weeks. So if you want to take advantage of the benefits of no-code and traditional code, book a quick discovery call with us.