Axial Builds Custom Suite of Internal Tools in Bubble

Since 2010, New York-based Axial has been a trusted platform for business owners and advisors looking to connect with investors. When Simon Riker joined Axial, he brought his outside-the-box problem solving skills with him, poised to serve customers’ needs. Thanks to Bubble, Simon was able to focus his skills on revamping Axial’s internal tools as well, saving the company tens of thousands of dollars while paving the way for a suite of customized solutions.
Searching for the right tools

Simon joined the Axial product team in 2016 without any prior training. As he learned the basics of product management, and got hands-on with SQL, Simon found success in his new role. But he bumped up against the limitations of the engineering team’s bandwidth when it came to turning his ideas into products. Still, Simon soaked up everything he could, rising to lead the product team within a few years’ time.

One day in 2019, Axial’s chairman of the board — who’d taken to spending long hours in the office — said he had something to show Simon. That something was Bubble. They quickly agreed it was a big deal. “We could both just tell that this was representative of a leap forward,” Simon said. Bubble didn’t just feel like a technological leap to them, but also a leap forward in terms of lowering the barriers to creating fully functional products. “With Bubble, I could be a full-stack team of my own,” Simon remembered thinking.

A full-stack team in product manager’s clothing

Simon got to work on a solution for one of his teammates, Axial’s director of events. She was running a live event program on the back of tooling that wasn’t getting the job done. A custom solution built on Bubble could both curry Simon some favor with his colleague, and save the company on the $20,000 annual subscription for the subpar tool. After a few whiteboarding sessions to align on features, Simon set to work building something that would address her pain points.



Within just three days, Simon created a custom tool on Bubble that allowed Axial’s go-to-market team to easily schedule in-person events, including filling out their clients’ meeting schedules during those events. The events director loved it and switched away from the costly service she’d been using. With Bubble, Simon was able to quickly stomp bugs and iterate on new product features himself, as soon as needs arose internally.

Bubble lets product managers act on their creative impulses. I could be a full-stack team of my own.

The scheduling solution was such a big hit, Simon decided to expand his Bubble app to host a full set of Axial’s internal tools. His associate product manager then used Bubble to build a searchable database for internal product releases, including automated posting of new feature announcements to Slack. That project took less than a week, start to finish.

“Now that Bubble's in our toolkit, we experiment differently. Product managers and other less-technical folks can quickly create prototypes on their own,” he said. Simon’s built prototypes of new product features, an idea bank to help with roadmapping and prioritization, a force ranking system for product feedback, and advanced tools for gathering customer feedback with features unavailable in off-the-shelf solutions. All on Bubble, and all at a fraction of the cost of hiring developers or buying and customizing commercial products.

Unlock your product leaders’ creativity with no-code development

In Simon’s experience, no-code platforms like Bubble empower product leaders to be more creative and productive. “Bubble means that as a single contributor, I can function as designer, product manager, and developer all at once, and can build whatever I'm imagining,” he said. No-code cuts through what Simon called one of the core limitations of the traditional product management role, namely that you need a team of engineers to deliver your vision. “If you have an idea, you can just go and make that happen,” he explained. “If you're a product manager today and you aren't using a no code tool like Bubble, you might as well be Spiderman refusing to sling webs.”