Editor's note: Since this case study was published, Synthflow has raised additional seed funding and a Series A round, bringing their total funding to $29.1M.
It’s hard to ignore the pervasiveness of artificial intelligence (AI) around the globe — from mainstream news headlines to conversations on the Bubble Forum, recent advances in artificial intelligence can easily look like they sprouted overnight. But for those embracing the AI solution space, these advances have been a long time coming.
Among them are Synthflow co-Founders Hakob and Albert Astabatsyan. They built and launched the product in early 2023, and Synthflow has grown into a robust startup with more than 6,000 app users and $1.8 million in venture capital funding. Plus, not only is Synthflow built on Bubble, but Synthflow also offers a Bubble plugin for Bubble Developers who want to integrate AI agent technology into their applications.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg — with the help of new financing, Synthflow has ambitions to truly change the AI ecosystem for the long-haul.
Identifying opportunity in no-code agents
For no-code enthusiast Albert, Synthflow was born out of trying to solve a problem in his own day-to-day professional life. “The idea for Synthflow was fueled by personal pain points I faced as a no-coder. I realized that the existing solutions were far too complex for the majority of business owners and developers who might not have deep coding expertise.”
It’s that technical complexity that continues to serve as a barrier to entry for many non-developers, particularly in the world of AI. As generative AI has exploded onto the scene, so have wrappers — basically, a concept that describes a custom user interface (UI) laid on top of a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) model to give the technology a user-friendly or purpose-driven differentiator.
But Synthflow is far more than a wrapper; they’ve built a proprietary model that enables users to create agents to perform specific tasks — all without having to write a line of code. For example, you could build a Synthflow Bubble integration that gives instructions to Gmail to send emails on your behalf under certain conditions. At the same time, you could also provide Synthflow instructions to do research on LinkedIn and initiate communication with a sales rep or HR manager.
Synthflow has even been used in the context of augmenting a Customer Support team, saving a joint Synthflow and Bubble business $10K using two agents.
Building and launching in two weeks’ time
The Synthflow team was no stranger to Bubble when they sat down to build their product in February 2023 — in fact, Albert is well-known in the Bubble community. That Bubble expertise allowed him to build the first version of their product in just two weeks.
When Founding Product Manager Alex Stan joined the team, he identified the ability to move fast and simultaneously scale as a clear advantage. “Speed, for sure,” he said — without hesitation — when commenting on how building on Bubble benefits the business. “At least on the frontend and what we do in the UI, there are no limits. The fast iteration pace allows us to test quickly with users and experiment with new hypotheses, which is what I think is most important for early stage startups.”
“The fast iteration pace allows us to test quickly with users and experiment with new hypotheses, which is what I think is most important for early stage startups.”
Moving fast on emerging tech
Bubble’s ability to quickly and easily support Synthflow’s frontend has been essential as they deepen their proprietary footprint in the competitive AI world.
“You have this fear that you can become obsolete tomorrow since you don’t know what’s going to be released by the big players — Google, Open AI, etc. But due to this advantage that we can iterate quickly [thanks to Bubble] and also because we have our own agents and our own proprietary data, we’re less afraid of that.”
Alex stresses that the speed with which Synthflow can learn, iterate, and adapt has been invaluable — even a competitive advantage. “We had a huge amount of users coming from different backgrounds that were interested in us,” he acknowledges, adding that being able to “serve multiple types of users” has resulted in massive learnings for the team.
Fueling ambitions through community
Rapid experimentation, iteration, and development have fueled Synthflow's product evolution and growth through multiple distribution channels — including through Bubble itself.
In fact, after initially launching an early version of Synthflow (then Fine-Tuner) on Product Hunt, it was the Bubble community that gave Synthflow its first foothold in the market. “Our first users were Bubble users, the first feedback was from Bubble users,” credits Alex. “We stand up on the top of Bubble and its community.” As of October 2023, Synthflow’s Bubble plugin has more than 1,200 users.
This early traction also helped swiftly determine product-market fit. “The overwhelming demand from the no-code community confirmed we were on the right track, leading us to devote all our resources to making the platform scalable and feature-rich,” Albert explains.
Part of that push was making sure they were prepared to scale. “As our user base expanded and the app's complexity increased, our team opted to transition to a dedicated instance of Bubble,” Albert shares. “This ensures we maintain the full-stack, no-code flexibility that Bubble offers, while accommodating our app's growing scale at the same time.”
Looking toward the future of AI
While the Bubble plugin and other third-party tools have helped drive adoption, Synthflow’s decision to build on Bubble’s extensible platform has enabled their app to successfully mature and flex. For example, they’re especially excited to expand AI agent capabilities to voice assistants.
“Right now we’re focused on a sales voice AI assistant that would take outbound calls. If you know a bit about sales — and we’ve learned a lot — you waste a lot of time cold-calling people, following up booking calls, usually the early part of the process. This can be automated so the assistant would make calls and try to make the lead hotter,” explains Alex. “Instead of having a rep that answers all the questions over the phone, you would have an AI system that can take all the calls and take action according to the inquiry over the phone. This is the goal we’re aiming for right now.” Users can even white-label their own agent solutions.
“Bubble is probably the ultimate horizontal solution out there that allows people to build applications.”
“We love to be in this ecosystem,” Hakob echoes. “Bubble is becoming larger and larger. It’s probably the ultimate horizontal solution out there that allows people to build applications. I think that’s a great thing in general — building and supporting the ecosystem we really love.”
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