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"What exactly can you build with Bubble?"
This is a fairly common question from people who have just discovered Bubble.io. The platforms flexibility is both a blessing and a curse for newbies. It opens up a world of possibilities in terms of the apps/websites one can build, but the blue sky nature of it all can make it hard to put Bubble neatly in a box.
Think about Shopify - it's quite obvious that this is a site builder specifically designed for eCommerce merchants (I know there's much more to it that that, but it's not a bad way of thinking about it).
Ghost is for beautiful blogs.
Bubble is for... nocode web apps? This is true, but it perhaps isn't as intuitive as you might like on first reading.
It's often easier to show specific examples. Here are some examples of apps that were built with bubble.
Swapstack is a marketplace that connects newsletters with brands who want to advertise in newsletters. While the company's marketing site is built using a more traditional programming framework, the app itself is built on Bubble.
In terms of functionality, Swapstack is an excellent example of what can be achieved with Bubble. It has user registration, separate roles for publishers and advertisers, portals where users upload information on their newsletter/company and a Stripe Connect integration that allows newsletters to receive payouts from sponsors (with Swapstack taking a fee in the middle).
My favourite part of the app is probably its impressive UI (which can be difficult to achieve with Bubble) - check out this image of its dashboard.
Swapstack was founded in 2020 and appears to be going from strength to strength, having recently announced they've processed over $1m in payments.
There's some well-known brands active on the platform, including newsletter heavyweights MorningBrew and Chartr. Newsletters have grown in popularity in recent years, which augurs well for the Bubble-built startup.
UserLoop is a Shopify app that helps ecommerce merchants to collect customer feedback at every stage of the funnel.
There aren't too many examples of Bubble apps built specifically for the Shopify app store, making Userloop quite the success story. The app integrates with the ecommerce giant via Shopify Web hooks.
The UserLoop site looks very much like a top tier VC-backed SaaS site (and I mean that as a compliment!). It's clear a lot of work has been put into the layout and copy.
It's also great to see a well-thought out blog on the site. Blogs aren't typically the main use-case for Bubble, but UserLoop has a nicely-designed UI and a number of articles that likely bring in some traffic via Google Search.
Interestingly, while the majority of UserLoop is built using Bubble, founder James Devonport has stated that certain parts of the app have been transitioned to more traditional code - making UserLoop more low-code than no-code.
Yep is a lightning quick landing page builder that helps early-stage entrepreneurs and indie makers validate their ideas in minutes. Users are prompted to use best-practices for high-converting landing pages, which makes the whole process incredibly easy. Yep provides analytics, with both page views and conversions (i.e. sign ups) provided for each landing page created.
It's an interesting example of a NoCode Product built with NoCode and demonstrates how even seemingly complex apps, like website builders, can be created with Bubble.
Yep has a freemium model, with all users able to create a landing page free of charge. Users on paid plans can create additional landing pages, get the ability to add custom domains, gumroad checkout functionality and more.
Writier is a GPT3-powered AI writing-assistant built on Bubble. The core feature of the app is that it helps writers by suggesting text for their article/copy/product description. What's particularly cool is that users can set preferences for the style of writing they want - you can choose from "confident", "direct", "informative" and "admiring" among others.
They have standard features that you'd expect from a writing assistant app: export to PDF, autosave and language detection to name a few.
Writier also has an integration with grammerly, which can help users avoid any unwelcome typos.
The tech itself is quite impressive, but what stood out to me was their stunning landing page. As mentioned previously, Bubble apps have a tendency to be more functional than stylish. Writier has both.
If you know of any additional Bubble apps that you think deserve a place on this list, let me know here.