We asked Fieldbase co-founders, Adam Thiesen and Alvin Pingol, about building an app that helps teams design, document, understand, and communicate their information architecture in large systems. Adam and Alvin both have product and design backgrounds. They chose Bubble because of the no-code platform's abilities and flexibility.
Tell us about your app and what it does.
Fieldbase helps teams design, document, understand, and communicate their information architecture in large systems. Our goal is to foster better cross-functional collaboration between business requirements and technical details using records, fields, behaviors, and data relationships as the focal point.
We have experienced and firmly believe that teams work better both together and autonomously when everyone has more accessible knowledge of system details.
How does your app work?
In Fieldbase, teams can define and document records, fields, and behaviors in complex systems. They can also add details in each layer of their system and create actionable specs using familiar contexts. These specs can be embedded into existing tools and are easily accessible for everyone on their team.
Teams can see how everything is connected with intuitive visuals. This understanding allows everyone to contribute their own perspective and make better decisions with shared knowledge.
Tell us a little about your background and how you discovered no-code tools like Bubble.
We both come from product and design backgrounds. For the past several years we have defined, built, implemented, and refined systems - each in different industries. We worked closely with clients, champions, stakeholders, and engineers with a focus on bringing new ideas into production. We observed and experienced that no matter how much technologies advance, there are always opportunities for people in different roles to work better together on software projects. Existing tools we had found in our previous roles seemed to increase the problem of information silos by favoring technical roles and abilities.
As we began to talk more with others about challenges in this space, we realized this opportunity was widespread. However, we could also see the considerable challenges in tackling such a difficult and focused mission. Because neither of us are engineers ourselves, we were looking at considerable time and costs to even test our initial ideas with users. We decided to see how far we could take this idea on our own and began looking into no-code tools.
Why did you build your app on Bubble?
We tried a few no-code tools before finding Bubble. We ultimately chose Bubble because of its abilities and flexibility. Since both of us had worked for years with developers, most of the functions made sense right away. We realized within the first day that we could probably build our entire initial scope from our mockups using Bubble.
What have been your milestones or successes so far?
It turned out we could build our entire first scope in Bubble… and in only two weeks! By the third week, we were already getting feedback from others on our alpha product. We learned so much that we immediately started building the much larger beta product we have today.
We’re excited to announce we have launched our open beta! Fieldbase is currently free for teams to try and give feedback. We’ve been getting a great response from those we’ve talked to so far, and are excited to tackle the next phase of our mission.
What are your future plans for your app?
We plan to stay focused on our core mission of helping cross-functional teams have deeper understanding of their systems. Although we have many goals and things we’d like to add to Fieldbase, we also know we have so much to learn from our users and the teams we are working to help.
Our current goals:
- Expand our integrations to existing systems these teams already use such as Slack, Confluence and Jira and spreadsheets.
- Continue to build and improve features that help the design and planning phases of large projects. It is during these phases that both the business and technical teams collaborate most closely.
- Finish features to help the onboarding and initial setup for teams who are new to Fieldbase.
- Finalize our Stripe integration, move to a subscription model, and strengthen our company for the next phase.
Learn more about Fieldbase: LinkedIn | Twitter |Youtube
About Bubble
Bubble is a leader in the no-code movement. Bubble offers a powerful point-and-click web editor and cloud hosting platform that allows users to build fully customizable web applications and workflows, ranging from simple prototypes to complex marketplaces, SaaS products, and more. Over 500,000 users are currently building and launching businesses on Bubble - many have gone on to participate in top accelerator programs, such as Y Combinator, and even raise $365M in venture funding. Bubble is more than just a product. We are a strong community of builders and entrepreneurs that are united by the belief that everyone should be able to create technology.
Do you want your app featured by Bubble? Reach out to us and tell us about your app. In addition to this series, we sometimes select our best apps to showcase on our website.
