These days, more accelerators and early-stage (seed and pre-seed) investors in tech startups want to see a live minimum viable product (MVP) before backing a project. Creating your first product demo or MVP used to require spending thousands of dollars on help from an engineer, but thanks to no-code tools like Bubble, startups can now build custom, complex web products entirely visually—without code—for a reasonable monthly subscription.

If you're building with Bubble and looking for early venture capital, you may get questions from investors about your tech stack and how you got your product to market. That's why we put together this quick guide you can use to explain no-code to your potential investors.

Not always! Most investors are looking for a great idea, strong product market fit, proven demand, and a good, sustainable business model. However, one of the best ways to prove your own idea and test it out is to get that MVP to market and hear what real customers have to say, before investing more time and giving away more equity to your company. That’s why Bubble is a great tool for bootstrapping startups and product ideas. Below are the most common questions you may get about Bubble and how to answer them.

What is Bubble?

Bubble is a programming tool and cloud platform that enables anyone to build their web applications visually without code. Bubble is one of the earliest players in the no-code space; more than 1 million web applications have been built on Bubble. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world use Bubble’s responsive visual editor to make applications ranging from VC-backed startups to internal management tools and personal projects. Bubble significantly cuts the time it takes to build web products, from marketplaces to CRMs to social networks. Once an app is built, it is hosted on Bubble’s cloud platform and scales automatically. Bubble users retain the full intellectual property of their application (design, workflows and data), while Bubble retains the IP of the non-app-specific engine.

Why are you using Bubble to build your product?

To spend way less in the short run and long run. Because companies don’t need to hire engineers to get their product to market, Bubble is more affordable by a few orders of magnitude. In recent data surveys, including Bubble’s 2020 No-Code Census, respondents claimed that no-code saved them the cost of 2-3 engineers per application, or on average $200,000-$300,000 a year based on the median salary of a U.S. based programmer in 2020. Bubble users have stated Bubble is anywhere from 10x to 50x cheaper than traditional development. This reduced cost leads to a better use of capital in the very early stages of the company and lower dilution for early investors and founders.

To iterate at show-and-prove speeds. Bubble is an easy-to-use higher-level language, making building and modifying a web application much faster. Founding teams can iterate on the product in a matter of hours, and therefore leverage early feedback very quickly.

To scale as much as your success allows. Bubble apps scale automatically. When apps reach a certain scale, they can migrate to a Dedicated Cluster that isolates them completely from the main user base and gives a lot of headroom when traffic goes up. We’ve seen apps handle more than 500,000 page views daily on such configuration. Apps on the main cluster currently reach more than 30 million page views monthly.

There’s a lot you can do in Bubble. A common concern with no-code tools is about their limitations. Bubble is extremely open-ended compared to other tools (and therefore requires a few hours of learning). Having said that, there may be situations where Bubble’s visual language isn’t best to define the desired behavior. In such cases, users can build their own plugins with code that can be integrated into the application, or purchase plugins built by the Bubble community. With this fallback, there is no limit in terms of what can be built on Bubble.

Bubble is the most powerful no-code tool for web applications. Bubble is currently optimized for web applications. While Bubble applications are responsive and work great on mobile devices, Bubble does not offer an out-of-the-box solution for native applications that are distributed through the app stores. Some users have successfully wrapped their applications for mobile as well.

Are there examples of other successful apps built on Bubble?

Here are some of the Bubble apps that have done big things:

• Dividend Finance runs a solar panel financing platform for homeowners and a CRM for installers. They have raised more than $330M and processed over $1B of loans through a Bubble-built solution since 2014.
• Cuure is fully built on Bubble and has raised €1.8M from top investors in Europe.
• Comet scaled to $800,000 revenue on Bubble before raising its first $13M round.
• Teal raised $5M for their careers platform built on Bubble. Read more on our blog.

Many users have built profitable businesses on Bubble without raising funding, and many more have gotten funding with their Bubble-built apps. You can discover more about our users and what they built here.

What is Bubble—technically?

Technically, Bubble is a JSON-based declarative language for web application assembly. It’s designed to let non-technical and technical users combine hand-coded javascript modules seamlessly into a working node.js application. It supports both front-end javascript components that the user can combine in a free-form way, and back-end server components the user can link together. Bubble is designed to replace programming languages and frameworks that are traditionally used for web development (Ruby on Rails or node.js on the back-end, and React, HTML, JS, and CSS on the front-end).

How stable is Bubble?

The stability of Bubble as a product and platform is at the core of our strategy. We want to become the default platform for startups, and we want Bubble to be an easy sell for tech solutions at small to medium enterprises.

Our platform: Our deployment process includes a suite of more than 600 tests to prevent bugs from getting into production. Our uptime over 30 days exceeds 99.95% on the main cluster. Alternatively, on a Dedicated Cluster, users control when they update their code, which is made available to them a few hours after release and testing on the main cluster, leading to an uptime of 100% for most boxes.

Our company: Launched in 2012 by the same founding team that is running the company today, Bubble has been profitable for many years before raising its first round of funding. This controlled growth strategy is a source of stability for our product, community and company. In 2019, raised our first round of funding to help us scale faster as startups grow on Bubble. We announced a $6.25M round in June 2019 led by SignalFire and, in July 2021, Bubble closed a $100M Series A round led by Insight Partners. Our other backers include Ali Partovi of Neo, Eric Ries of the Lean Startup Method, David Tisch of BoxGroup, and the founders of Warby Parker, Mulesoft, Okta, Harry’s, Allbirds, Peloton, Hootsuite, Datadog and more.

Our guarantee: While we plan on being around for a long time, we’ve committed publicly to release our code in open source with migration instructions if we ever were to shut down shop and cease offering our service.

Conclusion: Why should investors fund no-code startups?
Investors who invest in no-code startups are more likely to see their money go to actual market growth rather than development costs.

No-code is here to stay, and more than 1 million people are building tools with no-code. Bubble-built apps have already been seen in prestigious accelerators like YCombinator, and we expect the trend to continue as it becomes easier to build and test out digital products without needing a team of engineers.