Millions of adults stumble through common life challenges and milestones that sit at the intersection of law and finance. Think about getting divorced, settling an estate, or buying and selling a home — all of which involve opaque and often antiquated processes that feel tightly guarded by those “in the know.”
BluBinder wants to solve this problem, and then some. Their goal is to eliminate friction, error, and confusion for individuals and families by providing digital solutions for common life journeys. But after raising $650,000, BluBinder Founder Liesl Leach found herself in a predicament: Traditional development teams quoted her upwards of $50,000 a month to build out the first version of the app, and it was still going to take well over six months to develop even if things went perfectly smooth.
Liesl didn’t have that kind of money or time — BluBinder needed to get to market fast. So she changed course and brought on Erik Silk, a product manager and soon-to-be BluBinder co-founder who had experience in no-code. Within just a few weeks, BluBinder was live — with plenty of runway and opportunity ahead.
Less than a year since their official launch, BluBinder is gaining steam, and their second product even has four pilot distribution partners with six more in the hopper. If it weren’t for Bubble, they’d still be building.
Inspired by mom, motivated by necessity
Liesl describes BluBinder as “the financial navigator for life.” Prior to founding it, she held a 25-year career in financial services, working on product innovation teams at both startups and big banks like Citi, JPMorgan Chase, and Capital One.
When her late mother was diagnosed with dementia, Liesl moved from New York City to Northern Virginia to be closer to her family. Then COVID-19 struck — and both of her parents became sick. “We realized, ‘What if our mother didn’t go first? What if they both went? There’s a lot that’s going to land on our shoulders, and we don’t know where any of the information is or what we’re supposed to do.’”
As Liesl searched for answers, she ran into tangled processes that often relied on physical papers, countless time, and endless resources. “These are the journeys that families go through,” Liesl explains. “There’s a lot of money at stake, there’s a lot of emotion at stake, and yet we have a lack of resources to help.”
BluBinder makes these journeys not just manageable, but modernized for time-starved, money-conscious adults. But after working with an early team to research, design, and test product-market fit, Liesl found that building the app with a traditional dev team was shaping up to be a very expensive endeavor. “We were spending a lot of time dealing with the process and not really getting a lot of output.” Hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get a V1 app off the ground was beyond what the business could sustain.
There had to be a better way than the slow, expensive slog of traditional development.
Fortunately, there was. When Liesl brought on Erik to help take the business to the next level, he offered up a new asset: Bubble.
A no-code playbook makes it all possible
“Both of us have backgrounds where we’ve shipped lots of products at bigger companies,” Erik says. “You expect it to take a really long time. When I first started playing with Bubble, it was one of those ‘too good to be true’ moments.”
“When I first started playing with Bubble, it was one of those ‘too good to be true’ moments.”
Erik had been familiar with Bubble and no-code for about 18 months before joining BluBinder and recognized the mounting pressure to get the product to market ASAP. Having just completed and received investment from Techstars, BluBinder needed to show traction — but the conventional, pricey dev team contracted to build the app was still several months away from producing anything launchable.
In April 2023, they ended their contract with the dev team and Erik built BluBinder on Bubble from scratch instead. Just one month later, they had a live, functional product — and could officially go to market.
Soon, BluBinder added another key member to the team to help support the rapid pace of iteration: professor of philosophy turned Bubble-Certified Developer Roberto Loss. He had been teaching himself both Bubble and traditional coding on the side, and he helped supercharge the BluBinder app through custom code snippets. He even built his own Bubble plugin for BluBinder that enables a phone or tablet’s camera to take multiple pictures of something — often needed for ID or document verification — and stitch it together into one file.
“There’s so much you can do with the platform itself,” Erik stresses. “And if you have a little bit of extra outside code, you can slip in things that make the end result even more efficient.”
Today, in addition to their custom plugin-in, BluBinder integrates with an Amazon Web Services (AWS) AI tool that extracts and analyzes key text from user-uploaded documents, like names, dates, and instructions. BluBinder aims to use this technology to help verify, translate, and even programmatically relay legal and financial documents and data, like a trust or power of attorney. And because of Bubble’s robust security standards and controls, they know they can support users with confidence.
Scaling as an employee benefit
When BluBinder began piloting the app with a small credit union in Wyoming, one of their key learnings was noticing that the most active users were the credit union employees themselves, rather than the intended credit union members. This insight led to a lightbulb moment for distribution strategy: positioning BluBinder as an employee benefit.
Only eight months since their pivot to Bubble, BluBinder has secured four partner customers and is in talks with at least six others. In 2024, Liesl says, the focus is on opening up an institutional round of investment to “grow in the areas where we’ve found success.” Erik adds that they also plan on “sharpening the first-time user experience” and refining “complicated journeys.” With a core team of five and several other key vertical experts on board, BluBinder has the technical foundation in place to iterate and scale however the wind blows.
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