Low-Code Founders: Tracy Smith, founder of Vipii
Inside the mind of an entrepreneur: our founder of the week tells us about the remote queuing solution he developed on Bubble to reduce physical queues in stores and lower the number of high-risk interactions.
What led you to entrepreneurship?
I’ve always been attracted to entrepreneurship, that’s why I’ve always done side projects alongside my studies. Even though I have a lot of ideas, I still can’t devote as much time to it as I would like.
I studied product management and am now an IT tech consultant. Although I’m not a developer from the start, I was able to extend my field of action and my skills thanks to Bubble which allowed me to develop new projects such as Vipii.
Can you introduce us to Vipii?
During the quarantine, many local stores had to close, preventing people from obtaining goods they needed. When they reopened, I noticed that people were flocking to the stores and there were a lot of queues, which was not very Covid friendly. I figured that these owners and people were in need of a queuing solution to limit these high-risk social contacts.
After doing market research to see what solutions already existed and especially their prices, I realized that they were not accessible to everyone, especially small businesses. That’s why I decided to develop a cheaper remote queue solution that would be simple to use. This idea is not revolutionary in itself, its real added value is its small price which allows everyone to have access to it in these difficult times.
To benefit from it as a business, you just have to register your venue on the application. As a visitor, all you have to do is search for the store you wish to visit and register directly on its page, without having to signup or download anything. The application then announces you when the way is clear.
What challenges have you encountered?
From a technical point of view, it has not always been easy to take Bubble in hand. Responsiveness and application optimization are particularly hard to achieve. The ideal would be to develop a very complete library of responsive elements in order to save time and gain fluidity, as you probably already have at Cube.
Then, there’s a lot of testing and fixing work to be done to make sure that everything works well, that there are no bugs and that the different solutions used to build the application (Twilio in my case) are well connected. It took me several days of viewing online tutorials, reading manuals and instructions for each solution used to feel comfortable with it.
How was the learning and development process on Bubble?
I liked the tool very much right away. I trained with it for a year and a half and I am now convinced that it will have a major role to play in the future.
Originally, I had some experience in backend development and it helped me a lot to understand how to work with Bubble. On the other hand, the ability to build a responsive application is not innate and I had a hard time with that part. I also had to use code to be able to put all the features I wanted, so I bought plugins and integrated them.
Today, I know that if one day I leave my job to start my own project, I will use Bubble to develop my product because I really appreciate the fast and simple iteration capacity that the tool offers compared to traditional code (with which it takes at least 2 weeks to fix the slightest bug when you can do it in a few seconds on Bubble).
I even talked to some developer friends who tested it, and they really liked the tool. They find that it allows them to focus on the things that really matter and add real value.
What advice would you give to those who are hesitant to embark on an entrepreneurial project?
The most important thing is to take the plunge and get your idea validated before spending too much time on Bubble to build the product. Because you have to be sure that the solution you bring will meet someone’s problem, that there are real needs. Otherwise, it is risky to invest time (and therefore money) in it.
This is true even if you want to develop a simple landing page: you must always have your idea validated beforehand by talking about it to get feedback.
