| I am a non-tech founder building a app on building, basically very CRM/Data centric for a specific industry vertical I work in professionally. I am pushing Bubble to its limits where I have access to approx 150m records with all sorts of other database relationships to many millions of records. To build this app in a custom software solution, I have been quoted $100k to $500k depending on the backend architecture. Instead, I am spending around $20-30k in development costs to get my app off the ground to be able to pick up the first paying users... at least that's the goal and I'm a few weeks away from launch. I would also say that my "MVP" is not like Airbnb's MVP... my hope (and it seems) that it may be functional enough to nearly (70%) replace my existing CRM that I use day to day. Of course, I am planning to transition to a custom software solution once I validate, so I don't see bubble as a long term solution. I've self taught myself a bit of python and tried teaching myself JS as well off and on, so I am able to generally talk through with software developers what I'm trying to achieve and generally understand the technical things that might be discussed. So I'm not entirely a total non-technical noob. But the issue with Bubble is there is still a high barrier to actually learning how to use the platform for the average non tech person. It's a black box of sorts and they don't have the best education (unlike webflow). I mean come on, you have to pay $800 to take a bubble sponsored course? Lame. Nonetheless, you learn programming concepts by learning how to build on bubble. I'll end by replying to the top comment about code being perceived as complex. Spanish isn't complex. Nor is French. Maybe we can consider Japanese to be more complex. But even then, millions of people speak it just fine. Conjugations in Spanish are complex for a 40 year old English speaker new to Spanish but not complex for a 8 year old native speaker. But after a certain age, life takes hold, you begin working, and you lose the time and opportunity to spend 100's or 1,000's of hours learning another language. Trying to learn how to code is like this. I sometimes need to carve out 3-6 hours of a day to context-switch away from my busy (non-technical) professional & social life to get back into programming mode. Low code tools abstract away hours of that complexity you would have to learn, which allows you to start building something functional quicker than you otherwise would have. I know software devs look at low code and say "what's the matter with this crap, I can just spin up a X to do Y in 1 week, this is worthless!". But you are the native Spanish speaker in my metaphor, not the folks learning Spanish way past the days they had time to learn Spanish in college, trying to build the next greatest Spanish hit song to tell their story (i.e. software app!) |
To probably strain the metaphor, native Spanish speakers see this like you're struggling with Spanish so you give up and instead decide to learn Esperanto because it's easier and a few people have sold it as being a good alternative to communicate across cultures. You run off and spend 4 months on Esperanto and have a song written and a catchy tune that is well received, but when the time comes to publish an album for the Spanish speaking world, maybe you've got some notoriety built but you've still got to start over from scratch and learn Spanish. For most people, they aren't going to make a hit song on their first try, they're going to fail and have to try again, so learning those Spanish fundamentals instead of a shortcut might have been a better use of time.