Today I am joined by the founder of Wealthy Owl. Can you start by introducing yourself and perhaps saying where in the world you are and a little bit about yourself?
My name is Shaurya, I am founder of Wealthy Owl. By education I am an automotive engineer and by passion I am an entrepreneur. I reside in New Delhi, India.
Okay. We've been in contact a little bit over Twitter and you introduced me to Wealthy Owl. So give me that kind of brief pitch. What is Wealthy Owl?
Wealth Owl is basically your personal wealth assistant. Okay. So if the investors want to invest in cryptocurrencies, they don't know where to start their journey and how to capture these opportunities in the market. So the idea is to help them provide some assistance related to data and like tracking the market, tracking the bearish cycle and tracking the bullish cycle so that they can capture these opportunities within the market with less time dedicated to the market so they can enjoy their time and this product can help them grow their wealth as well. So that's the whole idea.
Okay, great. Very exciting. And how big is Wealthy Owl? Is it yourself? Have you got a team? Where are you at the moment right now?
It's at the earliest stage. We are bootstrapped and we have a team of three people. I am working full time on it and two of my friends, they are working part time on it.
Okay. And you've answered my next question by saying bootstrapped. Have you gone down the route of having any investment or is it the three of you working on that right now?
We are taking the bootstrap route till we have some traction, till we have validate our idea in the market and then we will go for the investment. So basically we are holding on right now. We will try out things and once we set the things in motion, then we will go out and ask for investment.
Okay, so one of the things I'm trying to tease out with speaking to Bubble app founders like yourself and others that I've spoken to and we're speaking to, is having actually launched a Bubble app, work a lot with people who have an idea and they're at different stages of getting used to Bubble and building out their app.
So how long have you been building Wealthy Out? How long have you been building Wealthy Owl and how long has it been launched for?
I've been working for the past two months on Bubble and building it and we have launched our first beta version like two days back only. So the beta version is live right now. At current stage we offer some data analysis and we are able to track the market on your behalf. You can track your prices, you can set your target prices and you will get the notification once the market hits that level so that much of we are able to build as of now, and we will continue to develop from here and iterate more from now.
Okay, I was just going to ask, I think one of the challenges with either as an individual with a small group of cofounders, is you have that idea and then you think, I can build this a Bubble and that can almost be so much, so exciting that the marketing plan or how you get those first users that gets neglected. So I appreciate that you're only a few days in having launched the beta. Do you mind just sharing a little bit of your plan of how you hope to get traction and users?
Basically right now we are working through three channels like Twitter, LinkedIn and Reddit. So we are hanging around in the communities there, talking to people around, like we are doing the things that don't scale right now. So writing about it, talking about it, talking to potential users and figuring out how this channel works, like few things work, then we will double on it again and again. So that's our market plan right now.
Okay, thank you. I mean, that's very much the bootstrap route, isn't it? To validate an idea without having to check loads of cash at it. Great, thank you. What would you say? How did you get started? Did you have a look at traditional development? Did you look at other platforms? How did you end up developing with Bubble?
At initial stages, we were thinking of developing it in a more traditional way, but then I was finding some dependencies. Like some of my friends know coding. I'm not from coding back now, my friends know it, so I was more of a dependent on them. Okay, you need to do this for me. That's more of a kind, like a dependency. Then I thought, okay, let's end this thing and use the no code root so that I can build the thing much faster and try out the things much faster. So I end up building on Bubble.
How would you describe the Bubble learning curve? First of all, how did you find Bubble as a platform? Did you social media, Google search? How did you first come across it?
I think more often I get it from Twitter most probably. Okay. I'm always searching for the solution to my problem, so I felt like this is one of the solution. I can use it for my business.
That's very interesting because I get the perception that 'no code' of the term is quite a bubble. No joke intended. I always wonder how people discover no code and no code development to begin with if they're not already using Zapier or Airtable or anything like that.
So you got started building a Bubble. How would you describe the learning curve for first signing up for the platform to being able to develop the features and the web app that you wanted?
The learning curve is quite a bit of a journey itself. Like few things you can learn from some forum. Sometimes you have to be creative, you have to find a solution, like an engineer. Like you want to do some backend workflows and you don't know how to do it so you need to find some creative way out of doing it.
Like in Bubble there are some limitations and some flexibility so you have to exploit those things. So at times it's been demanding that you have to develop some creative route out of the thing and sometimes it is way too easy. So I started with learning, with watching YouTube videos and following some developers on the platform itself and getting some help from them. Over the time I was iterating the things as well.
Great. Yeah that's the route that I find myself encouraging others to take the most is you learn by building and when you find something you get stuck on, you have like the top three places that you look for an answer and hope that you find an answer there. That's really helpful. Thank you. What would you say is the biggest thing you love about building your startup with Bubble?
The biggest thing I love about is the speed of execution. Like you can test one feature a night before and you can put it to the live next day. You can actually test it with live audience very fast. So the speed of execution is very exponential. You don't need a designer to design something for you. Then you will try out the test few things, you can just build it and test it with the live users very fast.
Okay, then what would you say are the main limitations you've experienced with Bubble?
Some of the limitations I experienced with Bubble is considering the database. Like in my case particularly I want to store some numbers in DB which is like provided by the Bubble, the database provided by the Bubble. So I can't store the number with a precision value. You can store the number but it has to be like I wanted to have four places of decimal, I can't define it in the DB itself. So at times I have to use Airtable for precision things because I am dealing with prices and prices can go up to four digit of decimal up like $0.74400. So these very precise data I need to collect and I need to do some calculation over those things. So that's the issue I faced personally. But I can't store that number with very precise value, but I can't define the number of decimals in it right now while stalling it in the database.
And you found the workaround is to use the Airtable API. Okay. I wasn't aware. I can 100% see why prices, especially with crypto and the number of decimal places you need to store is vital app. I wasn't aware that Bubble had an issue with decimal numbers but it sounds like something you've had to overcome.
Yeah, actually if you have to compare two prices and it's in decimal four places, then like 0.007455 and 0.77466. So this is the difference. This has closed the level. So you need to be precise up to that four levels of decimal. And if you can't do it with the database, then it's a problem for me.
Okay. You've taught me something that I've never had to deal with numbers in so much detail, so many decimal places there.
So what other challenges, speaking to other people who are starting out on Bubble or who are in the very early days of launching a product. What would you say the challenges you are facing and what do you think the bigger challenges are for people in that position like you?
I think someone starting their mobile journey, they should be keeping the responsive engine in mind from the first day. If you're not building the pages with the responsive engine in mind, you have to do a lot of rework. You can't like you use the fixed layout and it's good for the desktop, but it will be the worst page on the mobile, so that's an issue. So start building it with the responsive engine in the mind from first version. So it will save you a ton of rework and time as well.
Okay. Yeah. So that's a really good piece of advice there. I'd certainly love to echo that. I've worked with students coaching them and had to break that news to them that using fixed layout everywhere is... They have to change it, otherwise it's going to cause loads of headaches later on. So they might as well do it now.
