Before Matt Graham started RapidDev, he co-founded a startup at Harvard that eventually hit a $1.5 billion valuation. But by then, he’d already moved on — he had figured out exactly the kind of company he wanted to build, and that wasn't it.
In this episode of The New Build, Matt breaks down what that clarity has meant for how he runs the Gold-tier Bubble agency RapidDev, what 400+ product launches have taught him about what makes a product (or a founder) succeed, and the counterintuitive reason he's betting harder on services just as everyone else is running away from them.
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About Matt Graham
Matt Graham is the CEO of RapidDev, which won Bubble's 2025 Agency of the Year award. Before starting the agency (somewhat by accident, as he tells it) he was a nuclear engineer, a Navy instructor, and an MBA student at Harvard who co-founded two companies, including one that became a $1.5B unicorn. He always knew he wanted to build something he could compound over the long haul, and RapidDev turned out to be it.
About RapidDev
RapidDev is one of the world's largest no-code agencies, helping founders and enterprises build and launch products without traditional engineering teams. In five years, Matt bootstrapped it from a two-person freelancing operation to an international 220-person business. Today, it has expanded beyond pure development into growth services and AI implementation consulting.
What you'll learn in this episode
This conversation is for anyone wondering what 400+ product launches will teach you. It’s also for anyone who's ever wondered whether the steady path and the ambitious path have to be mutually exclusive. Matt has thought about this more carefully than most — he's mapped his own risk tolerance, made the unconventional call more than once, and built a business that reflects exactly the kind of founder he wants to be.
You'll hear how he thinks about why most founders wait too long to ship, what the successful ones tend to have in common after watching hundreds of launches up close, and why he's doubling down on services at a moment when everyone else seems to be running away from them. There's also a candid thread running through the whole episode about what it takes to build a company that lasts, from managing client expectations to getting a 220-person team to move with the same instincts.
Episode timestamps
00:00:00 — Episode preview and introduction of Matt Graham, CEO of RapidDev
00:01:43 — From the military to Harvard to no-code: Matt's unexpected path to building an agency
00:05:59 — How discovering Bubble changed everything — and why it's one of the few genuinely 10x-better products Matt has ever seen
00:08:38 — The #1 mistake founders make: Being afraid to ship before it's perfect
00:09:55 — What separates founders who succeed from those who don't (it's not intelligence)
00:12:51 — A PSA for future founders: what the best clients have in common before they hire RapidDev
00:14:00 — Two client success stories that show what's possible when the right founder meets the right technology
00:18:48 — The services boom thesis: Why Matt believes we're in one of the biggest technology revolutions in human history — and what that means for agencies
00:21:56 — Biggest regret and best decision in building RapidDev
00:26:55 — Will AI kill the agency model? Matt's counterintuitive answer
00:30:17 — Inside RapidDev's AI brain: how they monitor every client interaction to catch problems before they escalate
00:33:11 — Why culture is the most underrated lever when you're scaling past 200 people
Key insights from this episode
Ship before it's ready — the feedback loop is the product
The most common pattern Matt sees at the agency is founders who hesitate to launch because something is still not quite right. In his experience, what you're shipping is almost certainly going to change anyway once real users get their hands on it. The value of Bubble, he argues, is that you can both build fast and respond to feedback fast. Waiting to get it right in isolation means you're optimizing for a version of the product that doesn't yet know what it needs to be.
Fearlessness matters more than talent, but it's not enough on its own
When Matt looks at the founders who break through versus the ones who stall, the differentiator is the ability to keep moving after things don't work. He's careful to note that being fearless doesn't guarantee success, but that people who stay in motion tend to keep learning, keep discovering, and eventually hit something that works. The ones who stop are usually the ones who needed just a little more time.
Expertise will always be valuable
Matt made a deliberate choice to build RapidDev around services at a moment when most people are treating services as a stepping stone to something else. His view is that a huge portion of the economy — business owners who have no experience managing developers or IT — will always need trusted advisors, regardless of how good AI gets. The founders and agency owners who try to do everything at once, he argues, are the ones who plateau. Depth in one area, done consistently, is what actually compounds.
Reinvest before you enrich yourself
One of the decisions Matt credits most for RapidDev's growth is consistently putting money back into the business instead of taking it out. While peers were buying real estate or cashing out, he was hiring people to take things off his plate so he could focus on the next level of the business. The insight isn't just about capital allocation — it's about buying back your own time early enough to actually use it.
Resources
- RapidDev — No-code development agency co-founded by Matt Graham
- LightForce Orthodontics — 3D-printing orthodontics company Matt co-founded before business school
- Veho — Package delivery startup Matt co-founded at Harvard Business School
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The New Build is a bi-weekly podcast exploring how solo founders and small teams are building products that reach millions of users. New episodes drop every other week.
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