The most impressive Bubble app I've ever seen

Imagine you wake up in pitch darkness.

You find a small torch and switch it on.

As your eyes adjust you realise you’re in the middle of a small cave.

But as you shine the torch around more, you’re able to see more and more of the cave.

Over time you realise you’re standing in a gigantic cavern which stretches far beyond the glow of your light.

*We don’t know what we don’t know, but at least we know that!*

This is exactly how I’ve felt the past few years as I’ve delved into no-code.

At first I was blown away to discover I could connect simple landing pages to other apps using Carrd and Zapier.

Then I found out I could make functional apps with a Google sheet backend using Glide.

Then I found Bubble and realised no-code was far more powerful than I thought. Fully functional apps of almost any kind seemed possible.

But still my imagination was limited by not knowing where the boundaries were.

Wait, you can build THIS with Bubble?

Almost 5 years down the line and my horizons are still expanding every time I see a Bubble app that makes me think:

“Wait…. you can build THIS with Bubble?!”

Recently I had another one of these moments, and I wanted to share it with you.

Because once you know, your horizons are expanded too.

The app is called Synthflow. It’s a SaaS app for building AI voice assistants.

Like many modern SaaS products it has clean design and impressive functionality.

The special thing about Synthflow is it’s built almost entirely on Bubble.

When you sign up for Synthflow you’re greeted with an onboarding experience similar to the best-in-class SaaS products out there.

The app centres around a clean and functional dashboard.

*The dashboard is in line with the best SaaS products I’ve used*

It’s not just pretty, it has impressive functionality

Most impressively, this app has some impressive functionality.

You can of course create AI agents which will operate over the phone, both handling inbound calls and making outbound calls, according to your instructions.

But you can also connect your agents to any API (an API is simply a way for two systems to speak to each other and exchange data), meaning they can decide when to go out and collect data from third-party apps including your own.

*Custom actions let you connect your agents to any API*

This would make it really easy to give your AI agent contextual information about the customer it’s speaking to, for example the status of their order or comparison prices of products.

Code or no-code, good products are good products

Synthflow recently announced it’s raised $7.4 million in investment.

I know there are still lots of investors who will turn down products simply because they’re built using no-code tools.

But it’s good to see there are investors able to see that a good product with traction is investable, no matter what tech stack it uses.

You can read more about Synthflow’s decision to build on Bubble here.

This kind of app is not feasible for a solo developer, right?

This is a great question, I’m glad you asked it.

The app is undoubtedly impressive and has a big feature set. But as far as I’m aware, the majority of it was built by 1 or 2 developers and a designer.

And, in all honesty, the voice AI app I’ve been building recently using the Retell API has a decent chunk of the same functionality already built in.

Here are a couple of screenshots from my app.

You can create an AI voice agent and choose from various voices.

You can assign your agent a mission and include dynamic data within the variable so the agent knows the client’s name for example.

You can also upload a list of clients and then schedule your agent to make outbound calls to them at specific dates/times.

I’ve yet to add inbound functionality but I don’t foresee it being too difficult.

Even better, thanks to my Bullet Launch boilerplate, I’ve only been working on this app for 6 hours 47 minutes so far and it’s already fairly complete.

My three biggest takeaways from looking at Synthflow

Good design makes a big difference to how people perceive the quality of an app. The days of sloppy MVPs are numbered. Sure, you can still get away with it in some legacy markets. But on the whole, good design is becoming the standard.

By connecting your app to other apps and online services using APIs, you can create a user experience which seems almost magical. Synthflow is an incredible product, but a lot of the parts that make you go “wow” are simply third-party services like OpenAI and Twilio which have been cleverly woven in to the interface.

Even Synthflow doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. From what I can tell from using it, the founders aren’t yet sure which market(s) are the best use case for it, so they’ve made a tool which is quite generic, aimed at everyone and no-one. This just shows when it comes to A.I. everyone is making it up as they go along! Kind of reassuring.

Let the possibilities sink in

If there’s one message I want to stick in your brain from this article, it’s the following:

It’s possible to build slick, highly-functional products with no-code tools.

And…

You don’t need a big team to do it.

Final thought

It’s 2024 and the question is no longer can I build this but what should I build next?

It’s time to light up more of our no-code cavern!

Let’s go! 🚀