Technology that makes it easy to sketch out a new idea is one thing. But technology that lets you rapidly iterate on ideas throughout the company life cycle, from prototype to personalization? That’s an entrepreneur’s best friend. Why? Because rapid iteration helps companies scale faster. That’s what happened with Jules Marcilhacy and his wellness startup, Cuure. Jules used Bubble to build the first version of Cuure in just one weekend, and kept using Bubble to grow Cuure to $10M in funding and 30+ employees. It’s why, as the founder says, Cuure will always be a Bubble-first company.
“We’re a hybrid system now, but everything we do, we're Bubble first.”
Back in 2019, Jules and Cuure co-founder Hugo Facchin had an idea for a business selling personalized food supplements. They’d seen similar ideas take flight in the U.S. and wondered if the model could work in Europe. The son of a doctor and nutritionist, Jules had some knowledge of the space, and both he and Hugo had experience working in ecommerce. Jules had previously used Bubble after a friend introduced him to the platform a few years earlier, and thought he could use it to stand up a basic version of the Cuure idea. So the pair sketched out their ideas, and Jules took a weekend to build a prototype.
After working in Bubble for two days, Jules had a functional homepage and customer onboarding questionnaire. The app gave recommendations, but users couldn’t actually buy anything yet. It let the founders test their acquisition funnel. “We saw that there was a lot of interest, and the conversion rate was much higher than what we expected,” Jules said.
From idea to first sale in three months
Buoyed by those initial tests, Jules and Hugo gave themselves three months to launch a business. “We had no money, and we wanted to go fast, not waste our time,” Jules said. They set to work on the Cuure brand, sourcing products and customized packaging.
Cuure’s level of personalization meant they couldn’t use a prebuilt shopping engine to power their site. They could look for a developer — maybe a chief technology officer (CTO) — to build a custom engine from scratch. Or, they could keep building themselves with Bubble. A trained engineer who’d taught himself to code, Jules was finding he liked building in Bubble’s visual, no-code environment. So he dove into another solo weekend hackathon and created the first version of Cuure’s personalization algorithm using workflows on Bubble.
Three months after Jules and Hugo started on the project, Cuure made its first sale — a 30-day subscription — which meant Jules had one month to build a subscription engine to process renewals. “When you're an entrepreneur, you just try to make your sales and prove your business,” Jules said. “You want to work for the customers before thinking about long-term things, like the tech stack and scalability.”
Bubble let Jules and Hugo make changes to their acquisition funnel, track the results, and tweak things again, as often as they needed to. “This is when we realized how powerful it was to be able to sit down in the morning and look at user sessions from the day before,” Jules said. “We could see where the friction was, iterate to reduce that friction, and update the site instantly.”
Why hire a CTO when your co-founder can do it?
Starting fast and iterating often led to good things. Six months after they started working on the project, Cuure raised a round of funding from angel investors. They hired a small team, but opted not to bring on a CTO. With Bubble — and Jules — they didn’t need one.
“Everybody tells you that you need to hire a CTO, and you should do it now, not later,” Jules recalled. But adding improvements and new features to Cuure’s website with Bubble was only taking up 20–25% of his time, leaving plenty of bandwidth for his responsibilities as co-founder and COO. Being able to handle both roles by himself was, as Jules put it, “a massive gain.”
The team spent much of the next year focused on operations. Cuure developed logistics center software to better support order personalization, from product selection to printing custom instructions for every order. A Bubble-built user interface let the Cuure team update offers and content on the site in sync with what was happening in the logistics center.
Again, it worked. Revenue grew to over €100,000 a month. Cuure raised a €1 million seed round in July 2020, and they’ve been in growth mode since. Though their tech stack has grown to accommodate their specialized form of personalization at scale, Bubble remains at the heart of how they get things done.
Bubble-first, from MVP to operations at scale
Just over two years later, Cuure raised an even larger financing round — a €10 million Series A — in September 2022. The tech team is now ten people strong, at work on a mobile app envisioned as the gateway to offering customers a broader health and wellness experience. Cuure’s vision is to surround its supplement offerings with on-demand access to experts, testing, and other services to help improve people’s health.
Cuure is creating a fully personalized experience in service of greater well-being. It’s customized, and it’s all built from the ground up. “We start with Bubble,” Jules said. “We’re a hybrid system now, but everything we do, we're Bubble first.”
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