Comment by nickfromseattle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickfromseattle | Hacker News Reader

nickfromseattle

I am a non-technical founder.

I spent approx 18 months developing a B2B SaaS app involving 4-5 separate developers (2 individuals, and 3 separate devs at one agency). Post-launch we grew to about $13k MRR in 8 months.

We haven't added any new features in 4+ months, we've been focused on stabilizing. I can say without a doubt, stability has impacted free to paid conversions, retention and word of mouth recommendations .

It's unclear when we will ever be done stabilizing. As a non-tech founder it appears to me that little nuances across our tech stack are consuming 100% of our developers time (schema?). It also seems like devs spend a very significant percentage of their time re-inventing CRUD.

I'm launching another B2B SaaS, and going to use a Bubble.io and one of their recommended agencies.

Here is what I like:

- MVP cost of ~25k

- MVP launch time frame of 2-3 months

- Almost all of the Bubble agencies I've engaged seem a lot more process and systems oriented than sole developers and dev agency I've engaged with in the last 24+ months.

- Bubble provides a solid CRUD framework, so most of our time is not spent re-inventing CRUD and instead of core features.

Based on the goals of the MVP, it does not appear we have to make any trade offs to using Bubble in terms of functionality - Bubble can be extended w/ code & easily integrates with 3rd party services, e.g. Stripe & SendGrid.

Will check back in 12 months from today to let you know if the product was more successful than the previous one due to choosing a low code platform.

What stack did you use? On the backend, certain frameworks like Rails/Django can reduce this issue, but certainly for Rails you'll always need a dev around and hopefully the same one who built it. That's very hard to keep.

There's still a lot of chaos on the front end and the favored stack changes every few years. The devs three years from now might not be as familiar with the stack you used. It's honestly a nightmare at the small business level for front end.

As a dev, what's happening now with Zapier, Bubble, Tray.io, etc mirrors what we saw with static sites and Wix, squarespace ten years ago. They are not really at parity for SAAS apps but soon will be and then in a few years they'll be even better. Around 2000 you could easily spend 100,000 on a static website of a quality you can get for free now.

The thing with Bubble etc is that to remain competitive you will likely want to add functionality and anything advanced, anything that really moves the company beyond competitors, will require writing code (or buying an expensive service) and that's ok to add later when you've validated the idea. The downside of this is that's it's so easy to make a SAAS app that your profits are much lower. Apps that could have generated 100k/month are now doing 10k/month and a lot of devs have moved onto different problems like blockchain/defi/etc. We've already had great no code in wordpress for a long time and now it's just moving onto serious SAAS apps.

The new paradigm is definitely going to be Bubble/Zapier/etc plus the code that makes your app profitable added as necessary when necessary.

TypeScript / AWS / Auth0.

We ingest a lot of data. We deployed Lambda for queuing, which has helped immensely, but this has caused a lot of other issues elsewhere in the app (something, something schema?)

To create the application we need with Bubble, we absolutely depend on 3rd party integrations, which will require code.

- Stripe

- SendGrid

- Drift / Intercom

Our expectation isn't that there is no-code, it's that there is low-code, and many Bubble dev agencies are actual devs, too.

We will see if Bubble is extendable past $1m ARR or whether we need to re-build the platform.

Cool! I don't understand the exact "schema" issue. Is that your database schema? Having written frameworks for deploying lambda in the past, I can say as recently as 2018 lambda was fairly hard to debug and in general using AWS is difficult for small companies. It's really designed for big business and large organizations where it works really well.

There are some workarounds, for example if your data ingestion is a lot of users uploading excel files, you can just upload from the client side directly to S3 with a pre-signed S3 URL without having to touch lambda. Then you can process the data on S3 using lambda or whatever you want. There are other strategies if you're ingesting real time data.

Yeah, if you're just using plain TypeScript you can certainly re-write crud apps all day and that definitely happens, in fact it's almost certain to happen.

Thanks for sharing. Following along to see how this works for you.

I don't understand it much either.

Not having technical leadership in-house has been a pain. We've made it work, but I think things would be a lot easier if there was someone internal who cared as much as we did.

I also know my hiring skills aren't great, even for roles I know better than Senior Dev / VP Eng / CTO and that it's very likely I'll make a bad hire here.

Thanks for the advice on Lambda, I sent this to our dev. :)

I follow the low code space somewhat closely

Last time I checked Bubble they still required you to write your own login/auth system/screens

If/when that changes I'll consider using them

Else ill continue using saas starter templates like Pegasus that do actually provide this functionality out of the box.

The first tutorial Bubble shows new users is how to create a login system via their UI builder.

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