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Travis Makes Money
INTERVIEW | Make Money by Building Software Without Learning to Code with Emmanuel Straschnov
00:26:59
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- [00:01]
Emmanuel Straschnov
Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney. Let's go get ready for a new case. We're gonna crack this case and prove we're victorious partners of all time.
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New friends.
- [00:10]
Emmanuel Straschnov
You are Gary the Snake and your last name, the Snake Dream team hid new habitats.
- [00:17]
Ad Voice 1
Zootopia has a secret reptile population.
- [00:20]
Emmanuel Straschnov
You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at home. You're clearly working at Zootopia 2, now available on Disney. Rated PG.
- [00:30]
Travis
You're listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast presented by gohighlevel.com for a free 30 day trial of the best all in one digital marketing software tool on the planet, just go to gohighlevel.com travis. What is going on everybody? Welcome back to the Travis Makes Money podcast where it's our mission to help you make more money. On this episode of the show, I have a new friend, Emmanuel Strashnov. He co founded Bubble after Harvard to democratize software creation, empowering anyone to build without technical training. Self taught in coding, he developed Bubble's core product based on his belief that humans shouldn't have to learn a computer's language, the computer should understand their language. And now since Bubble came on the scene, there's, I don't know, a hundred copycats that have done something similar to them. So Emmanuel had the first movers advantage there, I think. But I appreciate you taking the time to come on the show, man. They were welcome.
- [01:25]
Emmanuel Straschnov
Thank you. It's great to be here.
- [01:27]
Travis
So let's go back in time. First of all, before we talk about some of the amazing things you're working on these days. Curious. The first time, the first dollar you ever made where you felt like you were hooked, like I can't believe I just made money getting paid to do X. I'm going to keep doing something like this.
- [01:43]
Emmanuel Straschnov
I actually remember that very vividly. It was in December 2012, so quite early for us actually because we started working about June, May, June 2012 and then we were, you know, building the initial version of the product. We recruited our first beta or alpha, the users, I would say in maybe September, October 2012. And then right before Christmas we got a check in the mail. One of the interesting things with Bubble is because we use Bubble to build our own SaaS platform like in addition to the editor. And so we couldn't actually at that point process credit cards. We hadn't built that feature yet. And so we had to get a check. And so no kidding, actually, I mean today I kind of feel stupid now. I wish I had framed it back Then, you know, it was $50. And $50 actually led me to your question. Like, in all seriousness, it was, wow, people are actually paying to use a product that frankly was not that pretty, had a lot of issues, but people could see enough value in it, even though it was a very early version. And so those $50 actually matters. And I, I did cash them in and I didn't get a check.
- [02:43]
Travis
Absolutely, dude. That's why I love the question. Because it is one of those things where you go, like, it wasn't about the amount of money, it wasn't about the financial freedom that $50 allowed you to not have. You know what I mean? Like, it wasn't. It's not about that. It's just proving the principle. It's like somebody paid money for this crazy.
- [03:00]
Emmanuel Straschnov
Yeah. Validation. Yeah, it's.
- [03:02]
Travis
Yeah. And. And it happens to be the only correct and real form of validation that exists anyway, because. You know what I mean? I feel like founders do that thing where you start, you get excited about what you're building, you talk to your friends and your family and they're all like, oh, such a great idea. You jump on some customer calls and they're like, oh, yeah, totally build it. And you go raise money and you build the thing, and then a year later you go back to the same people and they're like crickets. You know, nobody actually takes their credit card out and puts it down.
- [03:27]
Emmanuel Straschnov
So I think it's Paul Graham from Y Combinator who once said, you know, the right. The good startup ideas are the ideas where someone is willing to give you some money for a very crappy version of your early. Not the one where all your friends say, oh, wow, it's a, it's a cool idea. Because this actually does not matter. They're just trying to be nice. Yeah.
- [03:45]
Travis
How much did you guys, like, what percentage of your overall time working on the business did you allot to just product?
- [03:55]
Emmanuel Straschnov
Oh, 95%.
- [03:57]
Travis
Yeah.
- [03:58]
Emmanuel Straschnov
Like for how long? Long time. I would say probably four, three, four years. We have a non traditional history in here because we didn't fundraise. So when you don't fundraise, there are two things that happens. First of all, you don't spend time fundraising, so you have more time to spend on the product. But also you have less people. By definition, you can hire less people. And so the product we're trying to build was complicated. A lot of code had to be written. Things are changing now a little bit. I mean, AI would be very helpful today, but back in 2012, 2013, that was not a thing. And so, yeah, I mean it was a lot just building the product. In all transparency, I do put custom support that I was in charge of part of product because back then it was not about, you know, hey, I can you refund me? Or I forgot my password. It was really, hey, I cannot figure out how to do this or there is a bug and we need to fix that. And so I do put that in the product process because 99% of the emails we would get were just like product stuff that we had to fix or improve.
- [04:55]
Travis
Can you give us sort of a framework to think through how to develop product better? Like customer calls, you mentioned emails, customer service tickets. Like how exactly are you collecting feedback informing new product features, prioritizing development and getting it done in a quick enough manner where you're not wasting months on end or wasting salaries and precious Runway when you're just getting started.
- [05:22]
Emmanuel Straschnov
So my take of doing that, and I have to say with the recent tools, maybe that's changing a little bit. But I've always been of the school of thought that less users with more in depth conversations is better than more users and a lot of data points. It's much better to have five users with more. You spend an hour each. And what, what I was actually doing, I was doing screen share. So back then it was Skype, you know, that hates us a little bit. I was like screen sharing on Skype with users and just watching, they would say, hey, I can't figure out how to do this. And so we'd say, okay, show me your screen and show me how you do it. And then you just shut up and you watch and you, you can learn so much by doing that, you know, putting a lot of sophisticated analytics in your product and have, you know, hundreds of thousands of people clicking on the same thing and failing to do that because number the charts. I'm not going to show you what one screen share session might show you. Now with AI and the recent tools that might be changing a little bit. I think one of the great things with the recent generation of tools that you can ingest more things and try to get sense out of it. But I still think that anecdotal, in a good way, you know, qualitative, I guess I would say conversations actually better than quantitative. Early on, you, you don't need hundreds of users to, to figure out if your product is working or not.
- [06:33]
Travis
Would that change based on the type of software that you're building at all? Like if you're going direct to Consumer versus small business or enterprise.
- [06:40]
Emmanuel Straschnov
Yes. I mean, this is very much for a product like ours that is a complicated. Was. Is still a complicated interface. You can do a lot of things for people who don't know, think about it as Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, this kind of product where you have a lot of buttons. And so for something like this, I think you have to see what's working and not working for people. If you're building something like Tinder, for instance, where people swipe, then for that. Well, first of all, you need many users for your product to be valuable. That's something that is not true for a product like us at first because you have a network effect, but also you want to see where you see friction. And then it probably makes sense to be more like quantitative. But even then, I would still think that for the first weeks or few months of a product life, qualitative. And just watching people is the best way. By the way, it can be pretty painful. I mean, once we actually. One of our very, very first beta testers probably was Josh Smother. So Josh B. My co founder. And that was very, very early. And we, we wanted someone to test and we were just. I was spending a week at his house in Bay Area and we needed someone to test and well, his mom was around and so we asked her, hey, can you test? And then you watch someone struggling, trying to do things with this thing that you thought was obvious because, yeah, it's that. And then you realize it's not working and you're like, oh, shit, like, we have some problems here. And so sometimes you want to jump and say, hey, come on. Like, this is. Come on, it's not that hard, right? And shutting off, taking a notepad and just writing down all the notes is a very important skill here. But out of that 20, 25 minutes with his mom, our product went. We saw like a meaningful improvement just by watching her for 20 minutes and then fixing all the things that we had to fix.
- [08:17]
Travis
Yeah, yeah, no kidding. It seems like the best companies still to this day are the ones that are led by product. And everything else kind of gets a little bit easier from there.
- [08:27]
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- [08:58]
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- [09:28]
Travis
When you developed this tool, I mean I personally didn't realize this was 2012 like that in terms of technology, we're speaking a long time ago, right? Like that's. There's a lot of things, especially in the no code obviously space that, that have popped up in the last few years. Did you see at all where any of this was going at that time? Or were you, were you sort of like, like what was the goal initially with the, with the tool like to, to make it more accessible for, for people who didn't know how to build software. To build software. Or like what exactly was the.
- [10:01]
Emmanuel Straschnov
Exactly that. With a strong focus on entrepreneurs. And that's coming up because we felt it was an underserved demographics. But also it's kind of goes back a little bit to the social mission that we set for ourselves. I mean I've always felt that technology is a place that should open opportunities to people in remote areas for people to try things. And so if you can empower entrepreneurs that are non technical like then that was really our market to build their products themselves without having to raise, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars for the first version of the application. That's really cool. And so that's what we wanted to do. Now to your question, did we see actually a lot of things that are happening right now with, with the emergence of LLMs and bytecoding. Actually things that we've said were meant to happen and had to happen 12 years ago at a time where people really didn't believe by any of what we were saying here. So for instance, I mean this idea that we've been saying since 2012 that SaaS does not make sense. Like people lose the cost of building software, whether it is for a startup, which was our core use case or product, that for your existing organization you should be building your own things because it's going to be better than a generic software and therefore software as a service should not be. And the reason SaaS existed back in 2012 and was doing very well until what, six, nine months ago is because the cost of building software was too high. But now, as we see this cost going down and we started that trend of lowering the cost of trading technology, and with AI, we are able to go much further. And now we're not the only ones, as you're saying, like some other people are in our space. The cost of building things has gone not to zero, but has gone down sharply. And that leads to what people call the SaaS Procalypse today. And so that in many ways, I've seen the last 18 months, I would say, where we saw, you know, AI getting traction at generating code and generating apps as an acceleration of what we've been saying for the last 14 years.
- [11:51]
Travis
What was the difference between what you had built versus what? Like, when I started making this big surge in the last, you know, call it two, three years, what was there something that you guys were sort of like, oh, man, now we can finally take this piece of tech and install it here and this will make our process that much smoother. Or was it like, really similar to what you guys had already built?
- [12:17]
Emmanuel Straschnov
No. So it's pretty different what we've built because our fund. The foundational aspect of Bubble is that it's a visual language. And I still think that's a better way to build, by the way. And it's not code, so. Meaning the way.
- [12:27]
Travis
Can you.
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Can you.
- [12:28]
Travis
Yeah, I was. Yeah, I just cut you off right when you're about to explain it. I'm sorry, go ahead.
- [12:32]
Emmanuel Straschnov
What. What I mean by that is the way you describe build, but also describe an application and audit. The application is something that works with, you know, arrows, some text, of course, but the logic is displayed in workflows where you see some arrows. Expressions can be read in can are written in English, but the way you build them is just by pointing and clicking. So you don't need to worry about, you know, missing a comma here and there, like a semicolon or this type of thing. So we have visual abstraction. So it's definitely programming. If you don't put the right pieces together, you're going to have challenges and bugs, literally. But it's not code based. And so the emergence of these tools, it was not really three years ago. It's more like 18 months ago really, where we started seeing some vibe coding tools popping is they're like code based. And therefore, even though the initial experience with AI is conversational, so you can speak to the machine like you Speak normally with natural language in English. After that, what's getting generated in his code. And that's what I still, I think it's not the right approach. It's better to have AI generating something that is easier for the user to understand and that's our language, like the visual language. So. But when we saw that technology, so for us it was pretty exciting actually because Bubble is not the easy, was not the easiest tool in the world in the past. Like there are, as I said, many complicated interface, there are many functionalities. And we were seeing like some people were very happy to learn and get it, but some others were kind of reluctant to learn. And so what we're getting with a tool like AI and this ability to use like plain English to do things is that we can make a lot of things much easier and faster for people that don't necessarily want to learn at first and then you get them hooked and then they learn. And so when we saw, and I think this is true for us, but it's true for pretty much any tool out there. I mean like, you know, learning Photoshop is a nightmare. But now with AI you can make it much easier and there are many things like that where I think AI can be pretty transformational.
- [14:24]
Travis
What are some of the use cases that you've seen people like when you first started the company, I'm sure you had sort of an idea like, oh, probably most people are going to use it for this. Have there been any that you've seen that you're like, this is such a cool way to use this platform or this tool?
- [14:38]
Emmanuel Straschnov
Yeah, the core of our use cases is really people starting companies. And so we've seen mostly non technical people, even though over the years we've seen more technical people also using us because it's faster to build on something like Bubble versus coding everything by hand. And so the cool use cases we're seeing are like a marketplace for. For instance, one of the more successful businesses we're seeing right now is a short term rental marketplace. So something between, you know, the booking.com for hotels and Airbnb, like not, sorry, Airbnb and Street Easy, you need like something for maybe three months because you're an intern, so you're interning somewhere. And so that's a business that's done pretty well. You know, they have gmv, which is a total amount of money that transacted their platform is at the tens of millions of dollars. That's. That's pretty cool. That's the cool side from a business point of view when it comes to product. I've seen a lot of cool things that are usually not the one necessarily creating money because in some way these are the use cases that are closest to my heart. So an example that comes to mind, a French guy, I'm from France. There's no relation with that, but because I'm from France, we have quite a few users in France and I tend to hear about their stories, maybe a little bit more. So one of our users, a pretty visible person in the community, has a son who has some kind of autism and, and he was not able to express himself and he's still not totally able to express himself like, you know, something like six or seven years old now. And there was no real tool on the market to help his son express himself in a way that was easy to understand for his parents. And so this guy, this bubble user, just created an app to solve that very problem with, you know, so the right icons and everything. And then after building that, he taught his son to learn that and now they use that to communicate. This is the cool. To me, this is the coolest use case you can think of. Now, this is not what makes money, you know, but this is what actually truly means that we can use technology to solve a problem, whether it's very large problem or very small problem. I mean, this one is a very big problem for him. But the market is very low. Right. It's probably a few tens of people in the world that have this type of condition where an app like that is valuable. But being able to make them, allow them to do that for so cheap means that they can actually do it and therefore have a better life. And that's so. And I'm very fortunate to have seen both. And that's something that still today is the most moving part of my job.
- [16:55]
Travis
Yeah, that's the cool part about removing the barrier to creating technology is that something like that would have never been able to be made before unless that person knew how to code. You know what I mean? Like, exactly. Because there's no money there. There's no, you're not going to get funding, you're not going to, you know, you're not going to bootstrap it yourself. To what end? You know what I mean? So the ability to just go in and tell it that that's what you want, solve a real enables to, you know, enables you to have a better relationship with, with that person. I mean, that's super cool, man.
- [17:24]
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- [17:50]
Travis
with with the platform that you've built. There's a lot of people who listen to the show who are in the what I call entrepreneur community where it's like you're on the side, they're on the sidelines. They maybe have a 9 to 5. They are eager to figure out maybe what's something that I can do to try to make some extra money this year. What can I turn into something full time? Have you seen any use cases for people that have maybe used a tool like bubble to build some form of like a app building or website building agency model at all?
- [18:20]
Emmanuel Straschnov
Yeah, a lot actually. This is a very common use case. I mean the pattern that we've seen over the years is usually someone starting to build an app, maybe full time, maybe on the side for themselves as a business and by doing so building pretty solid bubble skill set. Because you know, as you iterate on your product and you know the more you do it, the better you get at it. Right? But the problem is that often many ideas are not good. Ideas don't work out and it's okay, you know. And so what we've seen, and we've seen that no tens of times, maybe hundreds of times, is someone basically eventually shutting down the app because it was not leading to a business need, solving a business need and therefore there was no business for it. But then they're like, oh actually now I have a skill set that can be valued and used to make money and that becomes an agency. And like for our whole go to market motion, it's difficult to assess exactly the impact of agencies for us. But if I had to come up with a number, I would say it's in the tens of percent. Like 10, 20, 30% of our business is probably coming through agencies. The reason why I can't give a definite number is because sometimes we don't always know what's happening on the ground because it's very local, but it's definitely important. And most of these agencies are exactly follow that pattern. You know, like users creating an agency at first on the side and then now the biggest one, you know, they have tens of employees building apps for people so it's, which is very much mission aligned, by the way, with what we're doing. Like whether people start a business. Like, our mission is really to enable people to start businesses, whether they start a B2C business or an agency. Great. You know, for me it's just the same.
- [19:56]
Travis
Yeah. What if you were looking at it from, from somebody's perspective and they were like, hey, look, I'm, I'm pretty new to this space, new to business in general. I'm not exactly sure, like what, what do I do here? They get on to, to Bubble, maybe they start learning how to code a little bit. How would you recommend somebody goes about like finding your first couple of clients. What do you charge? Do you charge a retainer? Like, what should you, like what part should you focus on? Is it app building that's more needed? Is it website building that's more needed? And I know this is kind of like a generic question. You could probably answer it in a lot of different ways. But looking just for some practical stuff for somebody who just like, I have no idea what to do here, the
- [20:31]
Emmanuel Straschnov
first thing I would say is that it starts with not the product actually, but the problem. I've seen people fall in love with a solution and the product they're building more than the problem they're trying to solve. And that's dangerous because then you keep building and iterating something that is not necessarily solving an actual problem. So yeah, so it starts really by solving the problem. And I think there are many ways to test whether a problem is the right ones to solve without even building anything. Now at the same time, with the recent wave of tools like Bubble being one of them, but vibe coding in general and AI, you can get your product up and running very quickly. So there's no excuse now to not start the product and start having a prototype you can finally put in front of people. What I would recommend is not necessarily, again, don't fall in love too much with the product too soon. Don't start tweaking it too much until you've actually validated that people are interested in, in, in your product. And, and that goes back to the very first question you had about, you know, when do we get the first payment for your product in terms of recruiting customers? I mean, there are many ways to do that. Difficult to give response because each case is pretty different. You know, if it's like B2C, B2B. But there are many things you can do with paid actual advertising. You know, like a few hundred bucks on Google can actually Give you a ton of information on how much people want to buy your thing. So I would recommend. Yeah. Given the recent wave of tools like get something that can be shown, doesn't have to be perfect, and then you show it to people. And then the question is, how do you show it to people? Do you go offline online? There are many ways. I think offline tends to be neglected. You know, Facebook got big on campuses, which is an offline motion. And I think there are still many things that you can do in person if you find the right communities where you want to sell your product.
- [22:14]
Travis
What went into the decision to bootstrap manual? Obviously, especially 2012. Like I said, I mean, now it might make more sense with all the vibe coding tools and bubble and things like that. Might be a little bit. Might make a little bit more sense to, you know, not go raise money.
- [22:26]
Emmanuel Straschnov
Yeah. In 2012, bootstrapping was not cool at all. Technology. Yeah, you're right. I mean, the decision came from the realization pretty early on that the incentives, the goal, our goals as founders with the needs of our potential investors, had we raised money and the need of our users were not well aligned. And let me explain a little bit what I mean by this. If you're building something like Airbnb, for instance, the product is pretty simple. Investors are going to want as many people on the platform to rent apartments and as many owners to put their apartments for rental, Right? Yeah. For something like us, we realized pretty quickly that because we started having a few paying customers, you know, these 50 bucks guys, and a few others early on, what they needed us to build was actually more robustness in. Into the platform so that they could have a business that would actually thrive on us and grow on us, both from a product point of view, but then also from a financial point of view for them. And we had a few conversations with investors at that point, like 2012, 2013. In the first couple of years, we never ran like a formal fundraising process, but we were talking to some investors from time to time, and what we would hear is, no, you need to create templates. Platform needs to be more simple. It needs to be as low friction as possible to get as many users as possible. And maybe that was. Maybe it could have worked out, frankly, if we had done that path. But then there was a risk to become another Squarespace or wix, which back then were the big guys in our space. But what we knew is that the few hundreds, tens hundreds at some point, thousand users that we had, really, that's the last thing they wanted us to do. And that conflict is something we felt was unhealthy and therefore, like, it would have been dangerous to take the money now transparently, if you ask. Because we eventually, after seven years, raised around. If you asked me, was it the right move not to raise money? You didn't ask, but I'm still going to respond. Answer that to the question. It was the right move not to raise money, but we did it too long. So I wish we had raised sooner, though.
- [24:23]
Travis
Oh, really?
- [24:24]
Emmanuel Straschnov
Okay, Got it.
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Travis
So you ended up raising a couple of rounds. How, how. How much. How much total have you guys raised now?
- [24:30]
Emmanuel Straschnov
A little bit more. Over 100 million. Like 107 million something. Okay.
- [24:34]
Travis
And where. Where was, where was that capital being deployed mostly? Is it customer acquisition? Is it product?
- [24:39]
Emmanuel Straschnov
Is it mostly product? That's the thing. I mean, the, the. The challenge that you have when you bootstrap like we did. So not only we bootstrap, but for the first three, four years, it was really just Josh and I actually. Yeah. And then you just have two founders building things. It's very efficient. You can build a lot of things, but you find shortcuts and you don't necessarily build your own platform and product in a way that can be scaled with more engineers. And after that, it become. It became quite difficult for us to hire successfully and onboard people and put them in a position they could contribute. And so the longer you go, the worse it gets. And so that's why I wish we had hired sooner.
- [25:18]
Travis
Yeah. Emmanuel, I appreciate you taking the time to come on the show, man. I know you're really busy guy. You got a lot of stuff going on. Don't take that for granted at all. Where can people go to get more from you and everything you're working on?
- [25:27]
Emmanuel Straschnov
So Bubble IO it's easy to find. And then if people want to find me, I'm at E. Strashnauf. I mean, my last name is Complete Emmanuels. Actually, I did change that on Twitter so that people can find me. People can find me Fairly easily on LinkedIn and I tend to respond to messages when people reach out. EmmanuelBabolo I.O. is also a good place to find me. So there are many ways people can get in touch. I mean, if I can help people starting businesses, I'd love to do that. That's what I've been doing for the last 14 years, and I'm hoping to that for many, many more years.
- [25:55]
Travis
Love it, man. I appreciate the work you do in the world. Thank you for showing up and adding some value here today. Everybody else tuning in. Remember, money only solves your money problems, but it's easier to solve the rest of your problems when you got some money in the bank. So let's start there. Here on the Travis Makes Money podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Catch you guys next time. Peace.
- [26:12]
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