BUBBLE

Emmanuel Straschnov and Josh Haas met while studying at Harvard and both wanted to build web startups. The problem was neither of them could code well enough to build what they imagined.

They tried learning. It took too long.

They tried hiring developers. It was expensive and slow.

So in 2012, they started building a tool that would let anyone build a sophisticated web application without writing a line of code.

For years, Bubble was a small team operating out of New York with almost no outside money. They built quietly while the no-code conversation was still a niche hobby.

They charged small monthly fees and reinvested everything. The product slowly got more powerful and attracted a dedicated community of builders who started calling themselves Bubblers.

Some of those Bubblers built real businesses — SaaS companies generating thousands of dollars a month in recurring revenue — entirely on Bubble's infrastructure. That was the proof of concept that mattered.

Bubble charges monthly subscriptions ranging from free (with Bubble branding on the published app) to several hundred dollars a month for professional plans with custom domains, more capacity, and access to advanced features. The platform makes money from the builders, not from the end users of apps built on Bubble.

There is also a plugin marketplace where developers sell extensions that add capabilities to Bubble apps — Bubble takes a cut of those sales. The model is a classic developer-tools subscription play, except the customers are not traditional developers.

The core product is Bubble's visual app builder — a drag-and-drop editor where users design the UI and define the logic of their web app without writing code. It includes a built-in database, user authentication, payment integration via Stripe, and hosting.

The plugin marketplace extends the platform with thousands of community-built and professional plugins that add features like maps, email, analytics, and third-party API connections. Bubble also offers a native mobile wrapper that allows web apps built on Bubble to be published to the iOS App Store and Google Play.

Bubble grew the way good tools grow: by being genuinely useful to a small group of people who then told everyone they knew. The Bubblers community became a self-reinforcing growth engine — tutorials, templates, forums, and YouTube channels created by users who had built successful businesses on the platform.

Bubble did not need to acquire customers. The customers acquired each other.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated everything. Suddenly there were tens of thousands of people who wanted to build software products but had no technical background and a lot of time.

Bubble was the obvious answer.

Bubble has always had a reputation for being powerful but complex. New users often hit a steep learning curve before they experience the platform's full capability.

That is a real retention problem — the people who most need no-code are often the ones who give up before they reach competence. The rise of AI coding tools is the bigger long-term threat.

If a non-developer can now describe a web app in plain English and have it generated automatically, the value proposition of no-code visual builders changes significantly. Bubble is betting that its infrastructure, database, and deployment platform remain essential even if the design layer gets automated.

Bubble's $100 million Series A in 2021 was led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), one of Silicon Valley's most established late-stage growth funds, with participation from Coatue Management. The round valued Bubble at approximately $1 billion, making it a unicorn.

An earlier $6.25 million raise in 2019 had come from SignalFire. The IVP investment was significant not just for the amount but for the credibility it brought — IVP had backed Dropbox, Twitter, and Supercell, and their decision to lead Bubble's round signaled that institutional investors believed no-code was a permanent shift, not a trend.