🚪How Wesley & Victor's security app was acquired by Bubble
The No-Code Exit Story of Wesley & Victor and Flusk
Hello there,
Welcome 52 new subscribers. 🙏
I’m so excited to bring you this inspiring story this week. I talked with Wesley Wasielewski, 23 year old no-code wonder kid.
Read about:
✨ The positive effect of Minecraft
🤘 Dropping out of university
🔥 Turning a service into software
💰 Growing to $17,000 monthly revenue
🚪Getting acquired by Bubble and moving to NYC
Enjoy and happy building.
PS: missed last week’s interview? Read here how Xavier built, monetized, grew and sold his info product.
Spotlight ✨
Bubble is the most battle-proven web app builder with many startups on its name and a huge ecosystem of community, resources, experts, templates, and agencies.
It stands out with its full stack development, enabling everything from the user-facing interface to backend servers and built-in database. All without the need to write a line of code or the need to piece together various tools.
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Nowa is a new and growing no-code native mobile app builder. Learn more about their vision in this interview with the founder.
Launchcasts is an ai podcast generator that turns your content into shareable podcast episodes.
Train your very own custom AI model to generate avatars or product shots with this no-code tutorial from Buildship.
🔥 No-Code Founder Interview
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Hello! What's your background?
Ny name is Wesley Wazielewski from France.
When I was 13 years old I learned a little bit how to code in Java. I wanted to develop Minecraft servers to please my friends. In the years after I didn’t code, but the logical mindset of programming stayed with me.
Now I am 23 years old. I was initially studying engineering to become a data engineer. During my studies, I discovered Bubble, I tried it and just loved it. I became a Bubble freelancer and after 3 years of engineering school (2 years to go to get my Master degree) I just decided to quit university and go all in on Bubble.
Bold move! Tell us about the product you made.
Flusk is a security and monitoring tool for Bubble apps. We'll run automated security audits on 21 security checkpoints. For example it checks if you have data leaks, if you have API’s that are not properly secured, if you have unauthorized triggers etc.
Flusk also monitors your app so you have a better way to understand what's happening. We catch all the errors and summarize them in a dashboard.
The idea came to me when Victor (co-founder) and I were doing Bubble freelance work. We noticed that many Bubble app builders don’t know anything about cybersecurity.
And because Bubble allows you to do so much, you can create security issues by just building. This results in a lot of apps in the Bubble ecosystem with critical security issues. Our goal with Flusk was to make the Bubble system more secure.
Which No-Code tools did you use to build and run it?
So obviously Flusk is built on Bubble but only the frontend. Today it would be possible to built it completely in Bubble but 3 years ago the backend features of Bubble were not powerful enough to run all the algorithms and calculations we needed. That is why we built the backend on Xano.
The marketing website is made with Webflow. And we use Make for simple automations. 5 percent of our app is built with custom code, it was needed for some very complex stuff in the calculation of the security tests.
What went into building the initial products?
Initially Flusk was a completely different service where we offered custom (24/7) and fast assistance for big companies to debug their Bubble app. We charged $5,000 per month and we found one customer.
We're like: we found the market, we're gonna be rich! It was our first prospect and after 1 call they became instantly a customer. Okey, we thought, now we're gonna scale it. But the thing is, we never found a second customer. The market was just not big enough. So we had to pivot.
We decided to stay in the security niche because we knew there was demand for security on Bubble. We automated the penetration tests and algorithmically translate it into software. We developed the first version in about 3 weeks and released it in April 2023.
What was the business model and how have you grown your revenue?
The business model was tricky in the beginning. We were selling annual licenses. You could run as many security tests as you wanted for 1 app for 1 year. We didn’t offer a monthly subscription in the beginning. The challenge with security products is that people subscribe for 1 month, fix all their issues and then cancel the subscription and churn.
From a business perspective, we of course wanted to have monthly recurring revenue. We decided to add monitoring to help our users catch errors and monitor users’ activity. This inclined our users to stay and return regularly to the app. So from then on we offered monitoring and security in a single monthly subscription.
Can you share some marketing tactics?
Our main marketing work was:
A lot of outbound emails to Bubble app owners
Being active on Twitter and LinkedIn
Helping people (for free) on the Bubble forum to build trust and authority
Writing in-depth blog articles about security (example)
Offering agencies our product for free, in return for a recommendation to their customers
In total we had a revenue of $9,000 MRR for the software and $10,000 per month for the service we offered to fix the reported security issues in Bubble apps.
Tell us about the crazy acquisition
In February Bubble reached out to us and offered to acquire us. Not only that, but they wanted for us to move to New York and let us work for them to complete our mission to make the entire Bubble ecosystem secure.
It was an offer we couldn’t refuse. Can you imagine… at 23 to move to New York and work for such a big company with such smart people. It took 10 calls to settle on an acquisition price (a combination of cash and shares) and after that the lawyers came into play. We learned a lot to see how closing a deal like that worked, I mean we’re 23, we never talked to a lawyer in our life!
Why did Bubble acquire you?
I think for them it's a good sign for the community. It highlights that they do an acquisition for security which shows they take security seriously by integrating the Flusk features into the current Bubble environment. Next to that, they also wanted us in the team. They thought it was really cool what we managed to do in 1,5 year with just 2 people
What's your advice for no code makers who are just starting out or want to sell their business?
I don't feel like I can give much advice. But what works for us is to do what you like. Otherwise you won’t get that far. I think the passion is what matters. You need to be waking up every day and doing the work because you really want to make a difference.
I also think working 10 hours a day can work for a few months. But if you want to keep going you have to treat it like a marathon and not a sprint.
Congratulations on your impressive journey Wesley & Victor. Thanks for making Bubble apps safe and for sharing your knowledge ✌️.
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