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December 21, 2023

How Messly Became a Locum Doctor Industry Powerhouse

“We’re moving as fast as we were a couple of years ago… that’s a testament to Bubble and how well things have scaled since we first launched.”
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How Messly Became a Locum Doctor Industry Powerhouse

1

Bubble Developer

25,000

registered doctors

4.8/5

Trustpilot rating

Dr. Abrar Gundroo has loved creating things for as long as he can remember. “I’ve always been a technology geek at heart,” he recalls. “I was designing websites on GeoCities when I was 11 years old.”
But life often unfolds in surprising ways, and by the time Abrar found himself at Cambridge University with his long-time best mate, Chris Kurwie, he was set on a career in medicine. Soon, he was working for the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) as a doctor — but couldn’t help but notice inefficiencies abound, especially when it came to securing work as a locum tenens (i.e., substitute or temporary) physician. If Uber could match riders with available drivers, why couldn’t an app match hospitals with available doctors? 



While talking with Chris one day, both realized they wanted career changes — and zeroed in on the locum problem space as a potential business venture. Neither Abrar nor Chris had formal tech backgrounds, but in 2016, they officially founded Messly.

Messly started off with a traditional development team, but after years of incremental improvements and sluggish growth, Abar concluded the traditional development approach was too slow, expensive, and bogged down in process, especially for a young company that needed to move nimbly. He taught himself Bubble, built the vision he and Chris had in mind, and broke up with the traditional dev team for good.

25,000 registered doctors later, Messly — the leading recruitment platform for locum doctors in the UK — was acquired by M3, the biggest global network of physicians at over 6.5 million members, which is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Not only are they still going strong, but Bubble continues to power them through their next phase: global expansion.

Slogging through traditional coding

“In the UK, we’ve got this concept of ‘the doctor’s mess,’ which is a place where doctors go to socialize and talk about work, and it’s where our idea for Messly started,” Abrar explains.

Doctors may click with the name instantly, but building Messly took time. He and Chris nurtured Messly in a London-based accelerator that included a modest early investment. The money went toward hiring a CTO and traditional development team — but four years into the business, weak sales and slow development were holding them back.

“It was a traditional React app, and every time I wanted to make a change, it was slow and painful,” Abrar recalls. “Our development team wasn’t able to keep up with the needs of the business.” Abrar and Chris began reevaluating Messly’s sales and technology strategies, pivoting to recruitment agencies with existing hospital relationships, who expressed interest in the app. Soon, he was roadmapping out feature changes to serve this new persona. 

“I had a vision in my head of the new product I wanted to build, and I slowly started to build little side projects [in Bubble] to prove that [no-code] could work,” he remembers. “At the same time, our development team was working on the core project. It basically became me versus our development team. I was developing much faster and shipping features much more quickly.”


“It basically became me versus our development team. I was developing [in Bubble] much faster and shipping features much more quickly.”


Soon, he took over as CTO. “Bubble gave us conviction to make the [business] pivot,” Abrar reflects. “Without it, I’m not sure I would have had the confidence or the vision to say ‘we can actually build that.’ It’s since become a very complex product.” 

Today, that “complex product” has morphed into a robust recruitment platform with jobs boards, secure document storage and sharing, a unique set of tools for recruitment agencies, the ability to securely message back and forth, and more.



“We had an unfair advantage with Bubble,” Abrar says. “It was so much faster and easier.”

20x faster with no-code
Faster is an understatement: Abrar estimates that after switching to Bubble, app development was “probably 12 to 20 times faster than what we did before” — and that’s with only Abrar programming the app on Bubble as a one-person show.

“That speed of iteration has really been a huge competitive advantage for us,” says Abrar. A big feature only takes “a matter of days, maybe sometimes a week.”

Shortly after Abrar moved everything over to Bubble, the COVID-19 pandemic upended the industry. “COVID was a huge tailwind for the market. Hospitals and agencies were willing to think differently and innovate and try something new, and there was more demand for locum doctors.” Being in the right place at the right time — with the capacity to make app changes in a matter of days — proved enormously beneficial for Messly.

Without writing a single line of code, Abrar expanded the initial Messly web app to native mobile using BDK. With more than 430 ratings on the Apple App Store and over 350 ratings on TrustPilot, Messly boasts a near-perfect 4.8 rating on both marketplaces. 



“It would have been foolish for us to continue on the [traditional software development] route when this technology exists.”



“We have four full-time employees,” Abrar underscores, “It would have been foolish for us to continue on the [traditional software development] route when this technology exists.”

Positioned for acquisition — and global expansion

With happy customers, high ratings, and a lean team obsessively focused on delivering a great user experience, Messly found itself “rapidly growing.” In February 2023, after knowing the company for several years, M3 approached them about an acquisition. The deal was closed within six months. 

“[The due diligence process] all went very smoothly,” Abrar says. “I think they saw [Bubble] as a competitive advantage, and certainly when you look at the rapid growth, it reflects that.”

Abrar and Chris aren’t going anywhere. In fact, the acquisition doesn’t mark the end, but rather the beginning of Messly’s next chapter: global expansion. “We’re launching in Australia next year,” Abrar reveals. “It’s really exciting… there’s a lot of doctors that move between the UK and Australia.” 

Messly will need a few changes to adapt and serve the Australian market, and Abrar is as confident as ever that Bubble will serve them well in this next phase. “We’re moving as fast as we were a couple of years ago… that’s a testament to Bubble and how well things have scaled since we first launched.”

Cheers to the next seven years, mates.

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