What's next for NoCode & AI? My takeaways from BubbleCon 2024.
Plus... how to pick the right AI model for your use case, predictions for the Bubble ecosystem and more!
Hey there,
Welcome to this week’s NoCode SaaS newsletter, where I take you along on the ride to building a profitable software business using Bubble.
This is a bit of a special issue as it comes after my trip to New York for the second ever Bubble Conference, where people building with Bubble around the world get together to see what’s next for the platform and learn from each other.
This year I was lucky enough to host a fireside chat where I spoke with George Collier and Emily Bennington about building with NoCode and AI. As you know from this newsletter, nothing gets me more excited than these two topics so we had a blast.
We touched on lots of topics, from how to get started building AI features with Bubble, through to more advanced topics like returning structured data, how to pick the right AI model for your use case and prompt engineering in Bubble.
The full discussion is now live on YouTube here for you to watch - I’d love to hear your thoughts and questions in the comments.
Over the 2 days we heard Bubble had acquired Flusk, launched the Native Mobile App Builder in Beta and announced Bubble Assisst AI. We also got a new design for the workflow tab in the editor and a bunch other updates.
There was a great session from Gregory John on SEO in Bubble (it is possible to rank well!) and another from Petter Amlie on Balancing Workload, UX and Performance that is defiantly worth a watch
It was great to meet so many people building amazing things with Bubble over the 2 days, and lots of subscribers to the newsletter in person!
I was also lucky enough to meet the winner of the free BubbleCon ticket from the contest in this newsletter a few weeks ago - Steven Traykovski (awesome to meet you Steven!!)
Once we wrapped on the conference I was lucky enough to be joined by Sam Morgan and Andrew Vernon from Bubble for a quick chat on the Create With Podcast, where we talked about our highlights from the 2 days and predictions for next year.
So if you’re looking for a quick 30 minute summary of everything that happened that’s worth checking out.
It was a super interesting few days, where I learnt a lot and left feeling super optimistic about the opportunities for people building with NoCode and AI over the next year.
I’ve put together some of 3 of my overall takeaways from the conference below, focussed on Bubble x AI… and what’s next.
1. Bubble should be the default way most AI powered SaaS starts out
Bubble is exceptionally well positioned to win in the AI software development space. It has all the components needed to beat players like Replit if it can execute well.
I see Bubble as being a central hub in my own app UserLoop - it’s the glue that sticks all these other services together. From OpenAI, to Anthropic, Tinybird, Shopify - they’re all spokes around Bubble as the central processing hub.
Bubble combines an IDE, hosting, database, security management, hosting, API management all in one package - with a powerful visual workflow editor that let’s you see what’s happening.
I believe that pretty much every SaaS app that wants to leverage intelligence should start out being built with Bubble. The ability to build, iterate and ship quickly alone is incredibly powerful.
2. Job market disruption will send way more people into Bubble’s ecosystem
As AI increasingly disrupts the job market I expect more and more people to enter the Bubble ecosystem and start building their own software to make a living.
One trend I noticed at BubbleCon this year was how many other ex-product managers I met who were now building in Bubble.
I spent 10 years in product management myself before starting to work full time with Bubble on a SaaS. Skills like product management translate to Bubble and AI really well, as you can often apply your skills to actually shipping features instead of just describing them in Jira tickets.
10 years ago I would never have imagined I’d be running a SaaS without being a programmer, and to be making a living from it.
I’m really excited to see more and more people take that path, becoming independent and building incredible things.
3. Importance of Prompt Engineering
One skill I think it’s super important to work on is prompt engineering. Not only for using in tools like ChatGPT and Claude, but also for building custom complex prompts in Bubble itself.
As I mentioned in a previous issue, I now use the combination of Claude + Cloudflare + OpenAI + Bubble to ship most of the AI features in apps I work with, and that all depends on having a good understanding of how to prompt AI.
Knowing how to write high quality prompts that give clear direction can mean you can ship incredible features quickly with minimal revisions. I covered this example in a previous issue but I’ld love to cover this more in future issues as I think it’s so important.
The other prompting skill it’s important to learn is how to write dynamic prompts in Bubble, with branching and injection of data from the database into prompts.
I’m going to cover this in a future edition, as this is pretty essential when trying to do more advanced things with AI models in Bubble.
Don’t expect to get high quality outputs from AI without making amazing prompts, and providing the model with as much data as possible. Without customizing your prompts and injecting user specific data, you’re not offering anything over what they could do with ChatGPT directly - so this is important to learn.
That’s it for this week!
I hope you found this issue interesting, I feel really lucky to have been able to attend BubbleCon and meet so many fantastic people.
I honestly don’t think there’s ever been such an exciting time to be building software without actually writing the code yourself - what you can build now is truly incredible.
Next week I’m heading to NoCode Summit in Paris - I’ll be covering everything that happens and all the big news. Will you be there? drop me a reply I’d love to meet you and get a coffee!
That’s it for this time, we’ll be back to more tutorial focussed content soon. But in the meantime don’t forget to subscribe to my other newsletter Create With for more weekly news on AI and NoCode!
Until next time, happy building!
Cheers,
James.
PS: Need help building your own NoCode SaaS or implementing AI or APIs? Check out my consulting and development page - I’m love working with other founders and startups to help bring products to life. ✌️
thanks for the shout out :) look fwd to hearing about the nocode conf!