We’ve all wished we had an extra set of hands (and maybe an extra brain) to help with the ins and outs of daily life, whether at home or at work. Athena has made a business of connecting their clients with those extra hands and minds — and helping them make the most of the help — by matching them and teaching them how to work with executive assistants (EAs).
Headquartered in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Athena’s global staff of more than 1,500 serves thousands of clients. That means it has a lot of data to keep track of — from tracking billing and employee payroll to managing professional development programs for their EAs. And because its business is delivering customized services to clients, it naturally has custom requirements for its software.
Rather than spend big on off-the-shelf solutions that would require even more investment to customize, Athena decided to build its own tools with Bubble. It’s an investment that’s paying off in a big way.
To code or not to code: an easy question
Established in 2018 to amplify the trajectory of unicorn founders, Athena supports leaders in government, business, and other walks of life by not only matching clients with highly trained EAs, but also teaching them how to delegate tasks to get the most out of their own personal and professional lives. The intention is for clients to form one-to-one partnerships with EAs that transform clients’ lives at work, at home, and everywhere in between. On the other side of the relationship, Athena gives their EAs access to career opportunities not readily available to them locally.
When Peter Dimov joined Athena as its director of data science in 2021, the company was looking for a Human Resources Information System (HRIS). They couldn’t find an existing HRIS that offered the flexibility they needed, and the ones that came the closest were, of course, prohibitively expensive. So Athena decided to build its own. “We wanted to completely customize what the employee lifecycle looks like, right from the first moment that you start [working for] Athena as an executive assistant,” Peter told us. “So we said, ‘Let's go out there and make the best version of an HRIS that we can.’”
The team saw two options: write code from scratch or pick a no-code platform to build on. “We went down the no-code path because we wanted to roll out new features super fast, and do it however we wanted from a process perspective,” Peter said.
From there, the choice of which no-code platform to use was clear. “I first encountered Bubble at a startup, where I was working with one of the founders. He wasn't able to get resources from the engineers, so he said, ‘Screw it, I'm gonna build this myself.’ But he wasn't an engineer, so he picked up Bubble,” Peter said. Helping the founder with that project was a turning point in Peter’s own career. “It was a magical experience,” he said. “I thought, man, I've been writing so much code for so long, when I can just click two buttons to get this stuff done. I'm never writing code again!”
I thought, man, I've been writing so much code for so long, when I can just click two buttons to get this stuff done. I'm never writing code again!
1 engineer, 1 year — and 95% cost savings
In approximately one year, a single engineer at Athena built and deployed their entire HRIS solution — plus a handful of additional Bubble apps to boot. Athena has Bubble apps to track employee laptops and time off requests. A Bubble-made org chart app fits the company’s unique organizational structure to a tee. Plus, the apps all integrate with the core HRIS tool, which also does the core work of matching clients to EAs. Athena engineers are now experimenting with AI to improve the matching system and power custom chatbots. Bubble’s at the heart of those projects, too.
Unlike other tools that focus only on front- or back-end functionality, Peter likens Bubble to the glue that brings Athena’s entire tech stack together. “It’s a headache when you have multiple systems that you're trying to get working together,” he said. “Bubble is just a really elegant solution.”
“Bubble is just a really elegant solution.”
Bubble has also been a huge cost savings for Athena, especially compared to licensing and customizing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. “We thought we would get better outcomes ourselves, and now we're there,” he said. “And we're doing it at — call it the cost of $100,000 per year compared to probably around $2,000,000 per year.”
Better outcomes? Check. Fewer headaches? Check. And a 95% savings? Check.
Easy to build — and easy to maintain
When he talks about Bubble, Peter likes to tell a story about a candidate he once interviewed — an “enthusiastic person with no experience as an engineer.” Athena was hiring for a role that would involve taking over a half-built Bubble app that Peter had started. Peter gave the candidate a weekend assignment to build a to-do app in Bubble. She showed up Monday with her app in hand, got the job, and hit the ground running.
“That's awesome, right?” Peter said. “Literally somebody with no experience. I thought there would be a big transition period coming into the job, but within a month and a half she owned it entirely.” This candidate’s success is a testament both to her own skill and adaptability, and the power of no-code to make software development accessible to teams everywhere.
You don’t often hear about companies saving millions by rolling out their own custom ERP software with an engineering team of one — or at least, you didn’t before Bubble. But judging by Athena’s success to date, it sounds like the decision to go all-in on Bubble was more than the right fit.
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