I think I fell in love with Bubble and NoCode around 2021. At the time, I owned a marketing agency, working with major brands and startups, helping them scale. Most of our work revolved around building their marketing teams, offering CMO as a service, and creating content.
One of the main struggles we always faced was onboarding each brand. Over the 13 years of running my agency, we worked with companies like Etoro, a fintech company valued at $10 billion at the time, Microsoft, and Unilever, helping them craft messages and improve their sales processes. No matter how good we were, seamless onboarding required the brand to have a strong brand book and a full identity. Let me tell you, startups would spend $100,000 to $150,000 on branding and come away with a beautiful logo, some color palettes, and ideas for social media design—but no real branding, no language, nothing we could truly use.
While I had a keen interest in solving the brand book issues, the day-to-day agency life and hustle took up too much time. Still, I realized that building something was the best way to transition from an agency model to a SaaS platform.
In 2019, I started thinking about building a platform for my agency. I wanted to create a better process for agencies like mine, helping us understand our manpower and how much we could or should charge. The idea was to create a contract-based platform that would break down every task in the contract into cost and time structures on the back end, while giving employees a task list on the front end, allowing us to work with clients solely through this platform.
Over the years, we learned that one of the most time-consuming aspects of agency work was the email ping-pong. One HR company we worked with sent over 124 emails in one month, and that was just one person in a team of six! So, we got to work, planned everything out, created workflows, and defined features. We began looking for development companies to build it for us. The prices ranged from $30,000 for an MVP to over $100,000, and some quotes didn’t even include design. As the year came to a close, I thought I’d invest in improving our workflows and onboarding more clients to scale—but then Covid hit, and life changed.
It took me another 12 months to get back on the horse and think about building another platform. This time, I used Bubble. My goal was to build a storytelling platform for startups that needed help pitching or selling. The concept was based on a draft of a book I was working on, titled Fck the Slides*—because I couldn’t stand any more bad presentations and wanted to fix the problem.
We started with an external agency, building with Bubble. Over the next two years, I switched between three agencies, hired and replaced a couple of developers, built and stopped, launched a beta version that failed, and watched others build and launch. Even now, I’m still struggling. Despite being a full-stack marketer, author, and skilled manager, I can’t seem to make it work.
So, I decided to buy a course or two and learn, to better understand Bubble, to explain my needs more like a product manager. And let me tell you, while I enjoy the learning process, Bubble is a language that requires time and practice. I’m not yet fluent when it comes to building things on my own. Sure, I’ve built a landing page, a few small workflows, and a couple of responsive pages. I can explain my needs better now, but building something entirely by myself on Bubble? There’s a better chance I’ll learn to speak fluent Italian in 60-90 days—and I’ve never spoken a word of it!
In today’s ecosystem of solopreneurs and indie hackers, building on Bubble was supposed to be the best, the easiest—the one thing I felt was missing in turning me into a true one-man show. Maybe I should invest more time, hire better developers on Upwork or Fiverr. Maybe I should build fewer features or start a new project.
One thing is clear: Bubble isn’t for everyone. Building something major requires a lot of time, commitment, and the ability to speak the developer’s language.
What do you think? Is NoCode a real solution for everyone? Should I keep learning or focus on my other strengths and pay others to build?
Note: I’m working with an external bubble developer to build my next project, I still hope and wish, I’ll be able to learn it somehow.
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