How I used the No-Code Platform Bubble to Make My Daughter’s Ice Cream Truck Finder Idea a Reality
My daughter is eight years old, and she loves ice cream. I mean she REALLY loves ice cream. So when she hears the music (which I think sounds creepy) from our local ice cream truck, she usually runs around the house frantically trying to find her shoes and birthday money so she can get her favorite cotton candy-flavored popsicle. The problem is, by the time she found all those things and then grabbed me so I can go with her to chase down the ice cream truck, the truck was often long gone. She finally got to the point where she asked me if we could make an app so she could know ahead of time when the ice cream truck was coming. I immediately thought, “What a great idea!”. I’ve also been an entrepreneur for the last 16 years, so I’m always eager to teach my daughter about entrepreneurship. The biggest thing I wanted her to understand is if she can dream up an idea, she can go out and make it…at least with some help.
Having just invested about $50,000 to build an minimal viable product (MVP) for a tech startup that I launched recently, I knew I was not at all interested in investing that type of money to make her food truck finder app come to life as much as I love my daughter. I had dabbled with using the no-code platform, Bubble, in the past, but I never quite got the hang of it. I had success with other no-code platforms in the past, like Microsoft Access (using their macros) and Zapier. However, here’s no way to make a full on mobile app with any of those platforms, so I tried to give Bubble another try. I heard about plugins that would allow you to put a native app wrapper around a Bubble web app. The plugin I used used for this project was the Bubble Developer Kit. In addition, I decided to take a Bubble boot camp which they had recently started offering. Candidly, the boot camp did the trick, allowing me to get over the humps for some of the basic things I needed to understand on the platform. I was able to get the basic functionality of the app completed literally within a few weeks. If I had known what I was doing, I could have probably gotten it done much sooner.
From there, my wife threw out the name, TruckZilla, which my daughter and I loved, I helped my daughter using Canva so she could art direct the logo, and I worked with my daughter using Figma to create the overall user interface and experience. I involved my daughter in the process as much as possible. I posted the app on an entrepreneurial Facebook group, and I had an individual from Australia that wanted to distribute the product there. We finally have now gotten both the iOS and Android version of TruckZilla.
With both versions up, I’m working with my daughter to starting e-mail food truck and ice cream truck owners to try TruckZilla. We’ve created an e-mail template in HubSpot so all she has to do is Google them, find their e-mails, enter them into HubSpot, and email them the template. Making money isn’t even a primary concern with this business, although I actually think it can do quite well. I’m most concerned about mastering the Bubble platform as well as teaching my daughter as many elements of entrepreneurship as possible.
Working with Bubble on this project has shown me the possibilities of no-code in so rapidly and inexpensively creating an MVP for a tech idea, and validating it. I’m not sure I will create an MVP any other way going forward unless it’s simply an idea that can’t be built on the platform for compliance reasons (Bubble is not currently HIPAA compliant for example). There are also simply ideas that can’t be built with no-code right now. For instance, the MVP for my tech startup, ONTrac, would have been extremely difficult if not impossible to build in a no-code platform. There are other no-code platforms that I looked at as well like Adalo, but ultimately felt like Bubble gave me the most flexibility. If you’ve got an idea for an app MVP, I would definitely recommend leveraging a no-code tool like Bubble to validate it if you can. That being said, there is a learning curve to it, so taking something like the Bubble boot camp might be worthwhile for you. Good luck with your project!
