Intro to building Bubble apps that scale
Introduction
Background
Not Quite Unicorns (NQU) specialises in saving apps from other freelancers, agencies, and citizen developers. Clients come to us when they hit a wall with their app, have bad experiences with agencies, or have built themselves into a hole and need expertise to get out of it.
As a consequence, we very often see how not to build a Bubble app - more than we see how to build a Bubble app.
Our business model is a productised service. We do not bill hourly - we bill by task. That means that as an agency, our goals when building are to:
Build in a maintainable way
A maintainable way means a way that makes it easy to revisit, re-use, or modify a feature, without having to tear it up entirely
If we take shortcuts, we shoot ourselves in the foot, because it’ll take longer to iterate on down the line, when our client is still working with us
Build things the best way, not just a working way
Virtually every problem in Bubble has multiple solutions. It is up to us as developers to first know what those solutions are, and then evaluate the best one.
Never be satisfied with “good enough”, and you’ll thank yourself in the long run.
Build for the needs of tomorrow, rather than the needs of today
Linking the two above points, everything we build must be built with the client’s future in mind.
We do not build features in isolation. Features are designed to solve core business problems - it is solving these problems that we optimise for.
Therefore, even if the immediate requirements of a feature are fairly small and simple, we should build it in a way that supports simple future development.
We’ve done pretty well for ourselves by following these principles. The average Gold tier Bubble agency is over 5 years old. NQU is 2 years old at time of writing. We achieve this by retaining clients and showing them that we deliver good value.
We are not the most expensive option on the market. Therefore, our edge comes almost exclusively from an obsessive focus on building things in a maintainable way that makes it easy to change them in the future.
What this guide is and is not
This guide is not intended to be:
A bible of the only, correct way to build things on Bubble
A claim that no better approaches exist than the ones we suggest
A course on Bubble basics
Rather, this guide is intended to be:
A proven, documented approach to building apps
Food for thought to develop your own best practices
A system on how to think about building on Bubble
This is not a best practice guide. This is a good practice guide - if you follow the principles and systems in this guide, you will likely end up with a good app. This is because the principles and systems we speak about here encourage you to think about Bubble in a certain way.
This guide is opinionated and to the point. We think it’s the best way to build a Bubble app, but every app, agency, and client is different, so you may find some parts irrelevant or counterproductive for your own development style. We will make generalised recommendations, but there are always edge cases which we acknowledge.