Building an all in-one freelancer toolkit on Bubble 🥷

This is how Sylvain Naessens, a freelance product designer, used his own experience and no-code knowledge to build a solution that helps other designers get more done in less time. 🙌

"I discovered the world of product design while launching my first startup, and less than one year ago I started to learn no-code.

I began first with Airtable, then Webflow, and finally Bubble.

As a freelancer, you’re often bombarded with tedious tasks that keep you from focusing on what you love to do — like invoicing, income and project tracking, rate setting, etc.

I built a toolkit for myself to help solve this issue. Then a few months ago, I decided to share it with other freelance designers to help them become more productive and grow their business."

Introducing Ninja Designer

"I called this toolkit Ninja Designer, an all-in-one toolkit for freelance designers. It's a niche I knew pretty well!

Ninja Designer provides a single place where you can find all the tools you need for your freelance design business. From invoicing, to project management, rate calculator and more.

It's the first no-code SaaS I've ever built.

At the moment, 150+ beta testers are using Ninja Designer. I plan to release more features in the next months, like a job board and an image search engine."

Building with Bubble

"I used Bubble to build Ninja Designer. I chose Bubble because I think it's the best no-code tool to launch SaaS products.

I'm not gonna lie to you, Bubble has a learning curve, and it's the reason why communities such as Makerpad or the Bubble Forum are very helpful.

Here's the approach that I used to build Ninja Designer:

• I listed all the core features I needed: login, signup, invoicing, to do lists and more
• I used Makerpad's app clone tutorials like Airbnb and Instagram to better understand Bubble and its logic
• I went through all the available tutorials on Bubble blog that were relevant to the features that I needed to develop for my app. For example this tutorial to build a Quickbooks clone.

Challenge 1: Getting the architecture right

"When you build a SaaS app, you build what we call a single page app: one sidebar menu, one header, one content area.

With Bubble you can build this type of app in two ways: one single page app architecture or a multi-page app that fakes a single page navigation.

I chose the single page architecture for performance and UX benefits. But in Bubble, with a single page app you put all your designs and workflows in one page and at the end it can be a REAL MESS.

You often end up spending hours to understand how your app is organized.

If I had to do it again, I would definitely choose the multi-page architecture, so each core feature will have its own page with its own designs and workflows."

Challenge 2: Marketing

"Marketing takes time and a lot of effort! I'm not full-time on Ninja Designer, so I have to focus on just a few channels. Slack has been my best acquisition channel so far.

Here’s what I’ve found: to get your first users you must have a simple acquisition strategy. What are your quick wins? Where can you quickly get access to your target? I didn’t have time to do detailed SEO which is why I put content marketing aside and focused on Slack.

I used the “small ask” trick. Instead of being spammy I just asked if freelance designers on Slack could complete a quick survey in order to understand their pains.

In the survey I asked them if they wanted to sign up for the beta for free. And guess what? I got more than 150 signups!"

​Read the full story.

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