How to launch a web app in 3 weeks ...
Happy Sunday!
In less than 3 weeks, we built and launched weekly-warmup.com. The site scrapes all the major data providers in the commercial real estate industry and catalogs the reports in a searchable database.
How did we do it? …
☝️ Before I get started … If you’re new here and find this stuff interesting, subscribe below! I send one email weekly, and you can unsubscribe if you don’t like it.
How to launch a web app in 3 weeks …
I spent last week’s newsletter discussing the business case for creating the Weekly Warmup. In short - we created a research tool that can be used by people throughout the commercial real estate industry in hopes of growing Weekly Warmup subscribers. (and Bullpen’s brand recognition).
In this week’s newsletter, I’m sharing how we built the Weekly Warmup in three weeks, including the cost to build.
1. The Tech Stack
I used godaddy.com to buy a URL, bubble.io to build the web app, and browse.ai to scrape the data provider’s websites.
GoDaddy is a well-known web host, and Bubble is the top no-code web app development tool on the market. Browse.ai is a young no-code tool and was the source of most of the bugs I had to troubleshoot in the development process. However, it is way more simple to use than building your own web scraper from scratch.
Total cost = ~$200/month in hosting fees
2. Design
I used Bubble templates to build a wireframe of the web app and sent it to Brian from Big Fog for further design and branding. Brian created several branding concepts for me to choose from. With one round of iterations, we landed on the final fonts and colors.
Total cost = Not sure because Brian hasn’t invoiced me yet, but I think it will be between $1,000 and $1,500.
3. Building the Web App
I genuinely enjoy building web apps on Bubble, so I did all the work to get the app built and online.
It took me about a week to build the first iteration of the app (around all of my other duties as Bullpen CEO). If I was building it from start to finish in one sitting, I estimate it would take 12 hours.
Testing and troubleshooting took a while. I spent another week testing and iterating on the scraping automation, ~12 hours.
Total cost = my labor hours, but if you hired an agency to do it, they’d charge you an arm and a leg (~$15k+).
Next Steps …
Now that we’ve launched the app, we’re promoting it through our Weekly Warmup newsletter and various social media channels.
My big focus is determining whether or not the web app is profitable for us to maintain. We want this tool to materially grow the number of subscribers to our Weekly Warmup research publication. If we’re successful, it will create a possible new revenue stream via selling advertisements in our newsletter.
One of my favorite parts about being an entrepreneur is contributing to mini-projects like this. I’m excited to see where it goes.
That’s all for this week!
PS … Baby #2 is coming soon, and the probability of me missing a few Building Bullpen newsletters is high. Wish me luck!
✌️📤
Tyler
Founder @ Bullpen