Build your startup and validate in Bubble to save time and cost

What is it:

goodgigs is a platform and community to connect mission-driven companies with professionals who want to use their skills for good.

Maker Insights:

"Bubble has been an incredible platform to build this project on. It's so comprehensive that you don't really need much of a no-code stack at all, Bubble does basically everything you could want. There is a little bit of a learning curve upfront, but once you get the hang of it, look out, because you're in business."

The forum, and community are also really helpful. If you ever get stuck on an issue, this is the first place to turn to. You'll have your fix within a matter of minutes!

What did I learn:

1. Built in Bubble and the advantage this gets you is that with plug-ins it has all that you need to create a working application. Spend more time getting your first 1000 users and talking to them to validate what are their needs and wants?

Bubble has a bad rap for not being mobile responsive and difficult to build for that screen size. However, this app is really well done and resizes nicely. This would be a good app to model after to study how they were able to make mobile friendly. I haven't seen under the hood on this app, but my guess would be is they planned for this with initial design and made a three column app. With 80% of the content within the middle column, it allowed for an easier implementation by stacking a few small cards on the outer columns so that when viewed at a smaller size it stacks nicely and naturally. Good job here making a Bubble app usable on all screen sizes.

2. Membership app - good UX to allow for a user to create their profile before signing up. This reduces friction to starting and once a user starts entering their information, they can then save their profile. This is a tactic used to reduce the steps before a user begins to have stored value into the platform thus increasing the likelihood that they would save their profile to not lose something (the time put in to creating a profile). Bubble has user sign in plug-ins to handle user log in and information and I think this is a great example to see the flexibility of seeing a user submit information before they create a profile, and that information being stored in their profile.

3. Adding jobs - I am not seeing how a company can add jobs to the job board but my assumption is that this is currently being done as a manual process on the backend by the Maker.
This is smart because just starting out making a job board is tough. It's all about getting solid traffic which it looks like the Maker is using a podcast as a content play to drive people to the job board. It would appear that a good long term play would be to automate adding jobs, but right now starting off its a good bet to skip that development until you need it. If and when you do need you'll have a wonderful problem, lots of companies demanding that they give you their job reqs.

I do think there is a missed opportunity for the Maker here. If I am a company how do I contact goodgigs to add my job manually? When you go to the Company page there would be a good opportunity to insert a link to a form or atleast drop an email for Dale to reach out to the company and investigate to see about if the company fits the qualifications to be listed.

I've learned this the hard way. I've never made it easy to allow users to submit projects to Side Project Stack. When I did implement a form on my site, I started to receive Maker's projects and it left me thinking about wishing I had done it sooner.