🚪How Ranjit acquired and grew a Bubble component library
The No-Code Success story of Ranjit Bhinge and Atomic Fusion
Hi, Katt here.
Welcome to the 131 new subscribers this week. 👯♀️
For this week’s No-Code story I talked to No-Code Founder Ranjit Bhinge. He breaks down:
🔥 How it all started with an acquisition
🏗️ Rebuilding with Bubble
👀 His mission for Bubble Devs
🌿 Growing to 5,000 users
Happy building but first a short spotlight on the sponsor of this week. If you have been following me for a while you know that it’s a topic close to my (business) heart.
✨ Spotlight
A niche job board can be a profitable side project that is easy to monetize. With Niceboard you can build and launch a custom job board in minutes. Literally.
Difficulty: 100% No-Code
Monetization: Get paid by employers for every job that’s posted on your board
Average time to profitability: 1-3 months
Here is how to do it step by step:
Find a tiny niche
Create & launch a job board in 10 minutes with Niceboard
Get jobs on your job board: connect with niche communities, employers and use the backfill option to add jobs from Indeed
Build authority: be active in niche communities and on LinkedIn
Optimize for organic traffic: write about topics relevant to job seekers and employers in your niche
Monetize: Charge $99 for a job post. With 25 jobs per month you can earn $2,475 every month
With Niceboard, you can focus on building authority and growing traffic, subscribers, revenue without wasting weeks trying to build a best-in-class job board.
Just like Dave Gerhardt’s B2B marketing job board generating six figures in revenue.
🎈 5 Cool Finds
With Chipp you can easily monetize your custom GPT or AI app.
20% off for No Code MBA. Learn no-code by building real-world apps similar to ChatGPT, Reddit, and Airbnb. Use code EXITS20 at checkout.
Descript is my fav screen recording tool powered by AI. It even removes UHMs (which I need very badly).
LaunchAI is a Bubble AI wrapper template with everything you need to get your AI app launched in less then one day.
*This section is a mix of paid partnerships (in bold) and cool things I discovered or made. You can get featured in this section by sharing this newsletter with 8 friends.
🔥 No-Code Maker Interview
Hello, what is your background?
I'm Ranjit Bhinge. I'm based in India and have been developing on Bubble since 2019. I have a background in Electrical Engineering and worked on a few ventures right out of college.
During my masters I was writing a thesis on Remote Work and I needed a way to quickly build a social networking app where I could onboard my focus group participants and analyse their patterns of interaction. I landed on Bubble and built my first app - and it worked well.
Since then I freelanced as a Bubble developer and then moved onto being a Bubble consultant. I could leverage my background in tech and also my experiences of having worked on several ventures myself.
When one of my consulting clients successfully raised millions based off an MVP I built, I decided to try and add more value to the Bubble ecosystem. I wanted to set up a product that would help Bubblers.
Tell us about your product?
I was using Atomic Fusion at the time and loved it. It is a library of Bubble components to speed up your Bubble development. At the same time I had just signed up on Microacquire to see what was out there. I saw Atomic Fusion and immediately got in touch with the owner.
After some talks, I acquired Atomic Fusion. As I was a user myself, I could see several other ways in which it could help Bubble developers speed up their process. My vision for it exceeded just UI components, so I redesigned over the next several months and rebuilt it with Bubble from the ground up.
Today Atomic Fusion offers over a thousand components, numerous UI Kits and Code Snippets so that Bubble Developers never have to rebuild something that's already built.
Why did you choose to acquire a product in stead of building from 0?
Back then, I was bad at validating ideas. I decided to acquire a product with a user base and then learn how it all works on the job. Later I also consciously started doing freelance / agency work for early stage founders. All of this helped me learn a lot about how to operate at the MVP/validation stage.
What did you do after the acquisition?
My first iteration was building what I call Atomic Fusion v4, which was a complete rebuild of the platform. I did a couple of months of user interviews, received feedback and noted what customers liked and wished.
Based on this, I designed the updated product. It needed to be more visual, more interactive, with more focus on components. And that's what v4 delivered. Synthesizing the feedback took a few weeks, designing the new version took another few weeks. And building it took about a month.
What is your business model?
Atomic Fusion has a monthly/annual subscription SaaS with a freemium offering. I made the product free right after launching the updated version. This was to get more user feedback and also grow engagement on the platform. I brought back the paid plans after about 3 months of offering it for free.
How have you attracted users and grown your revenue?
Currently I get customers primarily from LinkedIn and Twitter. Next to that the Bubble forum has been a great way of spreading the word. But the best channel has been our own users talking about the platform on social media and YouTube.
I did experiment with ads and SEO, but the target market was small and the ROI wasn't attractive.
I'll be doing a lot more as I start promoting the Creator Program. The Creator Program is how Bubblers can monetize what they share on Atomic Fusion. This was in a closed Beta so far and I'll be opening it up to everyone once some compliance stuff is handled on the backend (around overseas payouts, agreements, etc).
At this moment there are around 1,000 assets, 5,000 users and 3,000-5,000 monthly sessions on the website.
What's your advice for makers who are just starting out?
Avoid selling your project pre-revenue. Paying customers are the best validation of a business idea. You'll get a better deal if you have some MRR. Find a buyer who sees your startup as a step to a larger vision - they will really value what you've built.
Thank you for sharing your great story Ranjit. You can follow Ranjit on LinkedIn or Twitter.
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Niceboard is a great-looking project. Thanks for sharing.