Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Short-term (< 3 months)
Last year, a potential client approached me with an exciting opportunity: build a complex marketplace platform on Bubble. The budget was substantial, the technical challenge was interesting, and it would have been one of my biggest projects to date.
I said no.
Not because I couldn't deliver it, but because after years of watching founders obsess over the wrong timeline question, I knew they were asking the wrong thing entirely. Everyone wants to know "how long does it take to build a Bubble MVP?" when the real question should be "how long does it take to validate if anyone actually wants this thing?"
The client came to me excited about no-code tools and AI platforms like Lovable for rapid prototyping. They weren't wrong—technically, you can build a complex platform with these tools faster than ever. But their core statement revealed the fundamental problem: "We want to see if our idea is worth pursuing."
Here's what you'll learn from my experience turning down that project and the framework I gave them instead:
Why the "how long" question is the wrong starting point for most MVPs
The real timeline breakdown for Bubble MVPs (based on actual client projects)
My 1-day validation approach that saves months of development time
When Bubble makes sense vs. when it's overkill for your needs
The hidden costs and timeline killers nobody talks about
This isn't another "Bubble tutorial" or "MVP guide." This is what actually happens when you skip the validation step and jump straight to building—and why most AI-powered MVP projects fail before they even launch.
Industry Reality
What every founder believes about MVP timelines
Walk into any startup accelerator or browse through indie hacker forums, and you'll hear the same advice repeated like gospel: "Build fast, ship faster, iterate based on feedback." The no-code movement has amplified this message, with Bubble positioned as the silver bullet for rapid MVP development.
Here's the conventional wisdom everyone preaches:
Speed is everything - Get to market in 30-60 days maximum
Bubble solves the technical barrier - No coding means faster development
Build first, validate later - Real users will tell you what needs fixing
Feature completeness matters - Your MVP needs to feel "real" to get honest feedback
Time to market = competitive advantage - First mover wins
The Bubble community especially loves showcasing "built in a weekend" success stories. Twitter is full of founders celebrating their 48-hour marketplace builds, complete with payment processing, user authentication, and mobile responsiveness. It all sounds incredibly compelling.
This approach exists because the traditional development path was genuinely painful. Before no-code, building even a simple web app required months of backend setup, database design, and frontend development. Bubble promised to collapse that timeline from months to weeks, or weeks to days.
But here's where the conventional wisdom falls apart: faster building doesn't solve the fundamental problem of building the wrong thing. I've seen too many founders spend 3 months perfecting their Bubble MVP, only to discover that their core assumption was wrong from day one. The speed of building becomes irrelevant when you're building something nobody wants.
The real timeline question isn't "how fast can I build this?" It's "how fast can I learn if this is worth building at all?"
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
The client who approached me had no existing audience, no validated customer base, and no proof of demand. Just an idea and enthusiasm for a two-sided marketplace. They'd heard that Bubble and AI tools like Lovable could build anything quickly and cheaply. They weren't wrong about the technical capabilities.
But when they said "We want to see if our idea is worth pursuing," I knew we had a problem. They were conflating building with validation. In their mind, a functional platform would somehow prove market demand. This is the classic "if you build it, they will come" fallacy dressed up in modern no-code clothes.
I'd seen this exact scenario play out too many times before. Three months of development, followed by crickets at launch. The founders would then blame the platform, the marketing, or the timing—everything except the core assumption that people actually wanted their solution.
What made this particular situation frustrating was that they had the budget and timeline to do proper validation. They could have tested their marketplace concept in multiple ways before writing a single line of code. But they were seduced by the promise of rapid development and convinced that a "real" product was the only way to get "real" feedback.
This is where most MVP timeline discussions go wrong. Everyone focuses on the building phase—"How long to set up the database? How long to design the UI? How long to integrate payments?"—without questioning whether the thing being built should exist at all.
The irony? In the age of AI and no-code, the constraint isn't building anymore. The tools exist to build almost anything. The real constraint is knowing what to build and for whom. That's where most founders get stuck, not in the technical implementation.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Instead of giving them a development timeline, I shared something that shocked them: "If you're truly testing market demand, your MVP should take one day to build—not three months."
Here's the framework I recommended, which I've now used with multiple clients who were considering no-code MVPs:
Day 1: Create Your Validation MVP
Forget Bubble entirely at this stage. Create a simple landing page or Notion doc explaining your value proposition. Include mockups if needed, but focus on clearly articulating the problem you're solving and how you'll solve it. This takes 4-8 hours maximum.
Week 1: Manual Market Testing
Start reaching out to potential users on both sides of your marketplace. Don't try to build the platform—manually facilitate the connections. If it's a freelancer marketplace, personally match freelancers with clients via email or WhatsApp. If it's a service platform, handle the bookings manually.
Weeks 2-4: Process Validation
Continue the manual approach, but now focus on understanding the actual workflow. What information do both sides need? Where do transactions happen? What causes friction? Document everything, but resist the urge to start building.
Month 2: Automation Decision Point
Only after proving demand through manual processes should you consider building automation. This is when Bubble becomes relevant—not before.
The key insight I shared: Your MVP should be your marketing and sales process, not your product. Distribution and validation come before development, always.
For the specific client, I suggested they start by manually connecting their target users. If they could successfully make 50 manual matches and collect payment manually, then we'd have proof that the concept worked. Only then would building the platform make sense.
This approach flips the traditional timeline completely. Instead of spending 3 months building and then hoping for users, you spend 1 month finding users and then building exactly what they need. The Bubble development phase becomes shorter and more focused because you actually know what to build.
When clients do reach the building phase using this approach, the actual Bubble development typically takes 4-8 weeks for a marketplace, not because the platform is complex, but because we can focus on the features that matter instead of guessing.
Timeline Reality
Building a Bubble MVP ranges from 1 week (simple CRUD app) to 12 weeks (complex marketplace), but most fail because they skip validation entirely
Validation First
Test your core assumption manually before touching any no-code platform. If you can't validate it manually, Bubble won't save you
Feature Scope
The actual timeline depends more on feature complexity than platform choice. Payment processing, user authentication, and real-time features add weeks
Hidden Costs
Budget 30-50% extra time for Bubble plugin setup, third-party integrations, and mobile responsiveness testing
The client initially pushed back on my recommendation. They wanted to see a "real" product, not manual processes. But after I walked them through the math—3 months of development with unknown market validation versus 1 month of market validation with proven development direction—they agreed to try the manual approach first.
They never ended up building the platform.
After two weeks of trying to manually connect their target users, they discovered that the demand wasn't nearly as strong as they'd assumed. The friction points were different than expected, and the willingness to pay was lower than their business model required.
This wasn't a failure—it was a massive success. Instead of spending $40,000+ and 3 months building something nobody wanted, they spent 2 weeks and learned the same lesson. They pivoted to a different approach that actually had market demand.
The real timeline for a successful "MVP" ended up being:
Day 1: Landing page creation
Week 1: Manual outreach and first matches
Week 2: Demand reality check and pivot decision
Total time to valuable learning: 14 days. Total cost: practically zero. Compare that to the standard "build first, validate later" approach most founders take with Bubble MVPs.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
This experience reinforced several key principles I now share with every client considering a no-code MVP:
The building is never the bottleneck anymore. With Bubble, Webflow, and AI tools, you can build almost anything. The real constraint is knowing what to build.
Manual validation scales better than you think. You can manually serve 50-100 customers before automation becomes necessary. Most founders can't even find 10 customers manually.
Timeline pressure creates bad decisions. The rush to "get to market" causes founders to skip validation and build features nobody wants.
No-code tools are amazing for iteration, terrible for speculation. Bubble shines when you know what you're building. It's expensive when you're still figuring it out.
The real MVP timeline includes customer discovery. Most founders only count development time, ignoring the weeks needed to find and understand users.
Complexity creep is inevitable in visual builders. What starts as a "simple" Bubble app grows into a complex system because adding features feels easy.
Platform limitations appear late in development. Bubble's constraints become apparent when you're 80% done, not at the beginning.
The most important lesson: In the age of AI and no-code, the best strategy is often not to build at all—at least not until you've proven demand through non-scalable methods.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS Startups:
Start with a landing page and manual onboarding process
Use tools like Calendly + Zoom instead of building user dashboards initially
Focus on one core workflow before expanding to full feature sets
For your Ecommerce store
For Ecommerce Stores:
Test demand with simple order forms before building full storefronts
Use existing platforms (Shopify, Gumroad) for initial validation
Only consider custom Bubble builds for unique marketplace or subscription models