Helping Clients help their Customers – using bubble.is

I had a quick 30-minute meeting with a client earlier in the week.  He had some ideas on an app he was thinking could help him save time with his Customer quoting process.  Yet another client looking at ways to help make a business process easier and faster – and providing a better Customer Experience.  Good stuff!

As we were chatting, cost came up (it usually does).  I explained to him that when I’ve looked at outsourcing development, I’ve been quoted high-5/low-6 figures for development of native iOS apps; I could see the sticker shock on his face.  I told him because I use bubble.is for web-app development, I can provide a compelling price for my clients than what a “traditional” firm might charge.  It still amazes me how bubble.is hasn’t reached “rock-star” status in the app-dev.  With the rapid growth of interest in Progressive Web App (PWA), I predict bubble.is will become significantly more popular by 2020. Rock-star status…But I digress…

My client’s web-app requirements are still evolving (hey, isn’t that why we like iterative development) as I believe he has a vision and is trying to figure out how to marry the business process part with technology.  However, he’s not unique in this manner.  I often find business owners with an acute pain point with a business process and a rough idea on how to fix it using technology.  And that’s where I come in to listen, reflect and provide guidance to them.  When it makes sense (and it usually does), I do some prototyping so my clients can get a better sense of the technology and how it can help them solve a business process issue.  I can spend a couple of hours to take an idea or concept from a client and create a prototype with some level of functionality.  Then I send a weblink to the client so they can try it out on their mobile device or laptop.  They can see it, interact with it, figure out what works and what doesn’t work.  And we iterate from there.  Powerful stuff.  And bubble is a game-changer to make the process happen quickly.

Now back to my client.  So within a couple of hours, I’ve prototyped a mobile-centric web-app (using bubble) with his company’s branding, a main screen, customer account page, ability to take and store pictures from a smartphone (thumbnail and large size) as well as some collateral information (to help my client’s customers).  For good measure, I added a favicon with his company’s logo and also a logo for creating a home screen button.  After publishing this blog post, I’m gonna make another tweak to the app I thought of while writing this and send him the link so he can try out the prototype.  Oh, did I mention developing the prototype on bubble was free?  No license fee…wow!  Bubble has got something special going on.