Building a SaaS in Bubble from $0 to $1000 MRR in 60 days

Happy New Year!

This is James from the NoCodeSaaS newsletter - where I take you along for the ride on building a profitable SaaS business without code in Bubble. Covering everything from technical builds in Bubble through to strategy, pricing and marketing.

TLDR: This is the first issue in a new series for the newsletter where I build a new SaaS in Bubble from 0 to $1000 MRR in 60 days. But before we get to to that I thought I’d share an update on where I am in my own journey.

I quit my full time job last year to go all in on building my own software business on Bubble (which was super nerve racking!). I’m building an app for Shopify merchants called UserLoop - it lets them survey their customers and collect feedback.

It’s been a super fun and challenging ride. The app is now collecting millions of responses for merchants all around the world and giving me a full time income - though I know I still have a long way to go!

I’ve learnt a huge amount over the last year building the application (and sharing some of what I learned along the way in this newsletter).

Alongside building UserLoop, I’ve also been hosting a podcast with Kieran where we talk about building a software business without code, being a mentor in Bubble’s Immerse program and done some freelance work to help several other founders launch their own profitable SaaS apps with Bubble.

Photos from No Code Summit, BubbleCon & Bubble's offices in NYC

I was also lucky enough to attend the No Code Summit in Paris, and the first ever Bubblecon in New York, meeting a ton of the Bubble team in person.

Kieran and I are organising a no code event in London this year on Tues 21st May - we’ve already lined up some incredible speakers, you can bag early bird tickets here. Excited to share more on this one soon!

A key learning for me last year was the power of combining AI and Bubble to build apps we would have never thought possible just a few years ago.

The AI features I added to UserLoop helped boost sales, reduce churn and differentiate from competitors. AI was also pivotal to the freelance apps I worked on, it’s quite mindblowing what is possible.

I believe OpenAI and Bubble are the most potent combination for anyone looking to start and build a profitable SaaS business in 2024.

There’s never been a better time to break free from your 9-5 job and build something.

Now is the time to seize the moment and break out to build something for your own.

With that in mind, I wanted to do something new for newsletter to kick off 2024.

I’m going to build a totally new SaaS application in Bubble and grow it to $1,000 MRR in the next 60 days.

As you can probably gather, the app is going to have AI at it’s core.

I’m going to take you on the journey from inception, build, marketing, earning the first $ and ramping up revenue.

I’m going to take everything I’ve learned from building UserLoop, working on freelance apps, attending events and learning what works to market an app and apply it on this project.

I’ll be making video updates of key steps of the build and sharing them here in the newsletter.

I’m planning on covering a ton of topics relating to the build…

Functionality

Deciding what the key features of the first version of the application should be for launch. I want to launch with a basic set of features which perform well and then iterate based on user feedback. This was critical to building UserLoop which was insanely simple when I first launched it!

I have a good idea of what I want to build based on a problem I’ve been experiencing myself whilst building UserLoup - it’s actually something we’ve recently discucced on the podcast.

Target Audience

A really important part of embarking on building a new SaaS is nailing down your ICP (ideal customer profile).

Who exactly are you building this application for, why will they value it enough to pay for it, where do they hang out, how can you reach them, what kind of language should you use in your marketing that will resonate with them?

These are just a few of the questions we’ll answer when building this app. It’s a really important step, failing to do this can lead you to building something nobody is actually willing to pay for.

Remember the YCombinator golden rule. Make something people want.

Traction Channel

Once we’ve worked out who the ICP for the app is, we need to work out how we are going to reach them.

This is crucial to meeting my goal of getting to $1k MRR in 60 days. It’s all very well building something, but unless you can sustainably reach your ICP and get them to sign up for your app, you don’t have a business.

I’m going to cover some basic methodology of running experiments to find your top performing traction channels, and double down on the ones which are working.

This will be a process of experimentation and iteration, working out what works and doing more of that.

It’s likely we’ll try experiment with a mix of paid advertising, content and social.

SEO has worked really well for UserLoop but 60 days doesn’t quite give us enough time to build and validate that particular traction channel.

Design

I’m going to cover how I plan to design the first version of the app, starting with database design.

I intend to use a UI kit like Basis to build the app, which has massively sped up development on projects I’ve worked on recently.

Tech Stack

Obviously the tech stack will be based on Bubble as my main tool of choice. The other 2 key parts of the stack I am anticipating are OpenAI and Stripe.

I’m planning on implementing several key features of OpenAI in the build…

• Whisper audio transcription

• GPT-4 Turbo

We’ll cover how best to implement these in Bubble via the API connector, and how to create and manage complex prompts and branching logic.

We’ll also cover setting up Stripe, using the payment gateway - and cover how to configure Stripe’s webhooks to manage users moving between different plans.

We’ll likely also look at Postmark for setting up transactional emails in the application which I have covered here previously in the newsletter.

Monetization

We’ll cover how to come up with the positioning for the first set of payment plans, and a launch strategy for rewarding the first users to sign up and use the application.

We will look at how to develop attractive pricing pages which drive conversions, and how to build a high converting signup flow.

How to implement a freemium model, and implement feature gating to limit certain features to users on certain plans and incentivise upgrades.

Freemium plans and feature gating have been key to driving paid upgrades in UserLoop.

That’s it for this week

Thanks for subscribing, it means a lot! I started this newsletter in 2021 and it’s been super fun to share my journey so far with you all.

I'm really excited to start this new challenge, and continuing to build and scale my main app UserLoop in 2024!

I’m starting the challenge from today, so I’m going to get building this weekend and update you in next week’s issue on progress.

Don’t forget, you can still bag earlybird tickets for our upcoming NoCodeUK event in London on Tues 21st May here.