The New Build

Software is changing. Builders are changing. The playbook is changing. The New Build breaks down exactly how today’s solo founders and small teams are building and shipping apps that reach millions of users — faster, leaner, and without traditional dev teams. Hosted by Bubble co-founder Emmanuel Straschnov and producer Abhinav Narain, we have candid conversations with founders building with modern tools and leaders at the forefront of the industry. You’ll hear about what worked and what didn’t — no fluff, just real tactics and takeaways. New episodes every other week. Subscribe, borrow, and then go build. ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ Bubble is the only fully visual AI app builder that lets you vibe code without the code to launch real apps to real users. To date, 6 million builders have launched over 7 million apps that collectively process more than $1B in transactions a year. We can’t wait for you to hear their stories. Start building at <a rel="noopener noref

The New Build is a business podcast hosted by Bubble, with 13 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Bubble hosts The New Build, a business show with 13 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #12

  Obsess Over the Problem, Not the Solution: 3 Mobile-First Playbooks | Season 1 Finale

  Jun 23, 20261h 13mS1

  For our Season 1 finale, we did something different: three founders, three industries, and one bet they all made independently—that mobile had to be the anchor for their business. In this episode, host Abhinav Narain sits down for three shorter conversations with the teams behind Clover Dogs, Land, and MMARA. Julian of Clover Dogs explains why a dating-app swipe—not another shelter directory—is what finally makes rescue adoption feel joyful, and how AI now onboards a shelter's entire roster of dogs in minutes. Andrew of Land makes the case that his climate-resilience app is deliberately not a weather app, and why he traded fitness-tracker-style risk scores for a plain-language model borrowed from horoscope apps. And Obi and Onyi of MMARA share how a beauty company selling hair products became a women's health platform using hair loss as an early signal for conditions like lupus, PCOS, and thyroid dysfunction—and why they refuse to build on agentic AI that's wrong about women's health roughly 60% of the time. Across all three, the same lesson keeps surfacing: get obsessed with the problem, not your solution. Find this episode’s full show notes here: * https://bubble.io/blog/the-new-build-12-clover-dogs-land-mmara Topics covered: Why mobile is the right anchor for some businesses—and genuinely wrong for others When the interaction model (a swipe, a daily read, a daily log) is the product Designing for behaviors people already do, instead of asking them to learn new ones Using AI on the back end to remove operational friction for non-technical partners Why a "pivot" is really just iteration you should be doing every day Links: Clover Dogs: https://bubble.io/clover-dogs Clover Dogs (iOS): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clover-dogs/id6753950948 Julian Reeves (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/julian-reeves-a19157112/ Land: https://land.supply Land (iOS): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/land-climate-tracking/id6755068546 Andrew Haarsager (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/haarsager/ MMARA: https://www.themmara.com MMARA (iOS): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mmara-my-hair-coach/id6745461031 Obi Chukwuma (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/obianozo-chukwuma/ Onyi Chukwuma (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/onyi-chukwuma-7baa4220/ Start building: bubble.io

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  Episode #11

  What Behance, Adobe, and A24 Have Taught Scott Belsky About Art & Tech

  Jun 9, 202641 minS1

  Scott Belsky has spent two decades at the center of how creative and technical work gets built, shipped, and scaled — and almost none of it followed a conventional path. In this episode, Emmanuel Straschnov sits down with Scott Belsky — founder of Behance, longtime Chief Product Officer at Adobe, prolific angel investor in 100+ companies, and now partner at film studio A24 — to explore the frameworks he's developed across a career that spans product, entrepreneurship, and storytelling. They dig into why empathy consistently outperforms passion in building products, what the "messy middle" actually demands of founders and teams, and how Scott thinks about the AI moment from the rare vantage point of someone who has been launching AI-driven features in creative tools for over a decade. Find this episode’s full show notes here: https://bubble.io/blog/the-new-build-11-scott-belsky Topics covered: Why the focus group that almost killed Behance actually validated the entire vision "Empathy outperforms passion": what this means in practice for early product decisions The most common mistake early-stage founders make — and why Instagram's login data explains it The "windows blacked out" analogy for leading teams through the messy middle Scott's experience co-leading Adobe's product reinvention after the Behance acquisition Two types of creators: content creators vs. artists, and why they want completely different things from AI tools Why builders should design model-agnostic products in the current AI landscape The Ramp investment story: how "spend less" as a core principle made everything different What Scott actually looks for in founders — including a litmus test he uses in every pitch meeting Why optimism is both a founder's greatest asset and their biggest liability Scott's one piece of advice he wishes he'd had when starting Behance Links: Scott Belsky on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottbelsky Behance: https://www.behance.net The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky: https://www.themessymiddle.com/ A24: https://a24films.com Start building: bubble.io ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ Chapters [00:00:33] Introduction [00:02:13] Scott's unlikely path from Goldman Sachs to entrepreneurship, and what drew him to design along the way [00:05:45] What Behance's first (and only) focus group revealed: creatives didn't think they needed another network — and why they were wrong [00:09:43] Common founder mistakes [00:12:44] Defining the messy middle [00:18:11] What it felt like to lead product inside Adobe after the Behance acquisition [00:21:06] How builders should think about AI models [00:24:28] Why Scott joined A24 and what excites him about new IP and risk-taking storytelling in an era of sequels [00:31:45] What Scott looks for when investing in founders [00:37:30] The one lesson Scott wishes he'd had at Behance: knowing when not to be a contrarian

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  Episode #10

  The Lean Startup Author on Why Building Fast Isn't Enough | Eric Ries

  May 26, 202645 minS1

  <p>Eric Ries wrote The Lean Startup, the book that gave a generation of founders the MVP, the pivot, and the build-measure-learn cycle. He's also an early Bubble investor who believed in the democratization of building before most of Silicon Valley took it seriously.</p><p>In this episode, Emmanuel sits down with Eric to talk about his new book, Incorruptible, and the forces that quietly corrupt even the best companies. Eric introduces the concept of "financial gravity" — the structural pressure that bends successful companies away from their founding purpose — and explains why it starts pulling the moment you succeed, not...

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  Episode #9

  Bootstrapping a 300-Person Company Without Raising a Dollar | Clément Llehi (Makko)

  May 12, 202643 minS1

  <p>Most founders build software first and a business second. Clément Llehi did it the other way around — and that sequence might be exactly why Makko works.</p><p>In this episode, Abhinav sits down with Clément, the bootstrapped solo founder of Makko, a facility management company based in France. Starting with no co-founder, no outside funding, and no coding background, Clément spent his early mornings cleaning offices at 5 AM while consulting at Capgemini by day and designing what would eventually become a platform running operations for 300 employees and over 600 enterprise clients by night. He shares the momen...

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  Episode #8

  Allbirds' Former CEO Talks $4B IPO, Starting Over, and His New Playbook | Joey Zwillinger

  Apr 17, 202646 minS1

  <p>We recorded this just after Allbirds made headlines this month for selling its footwear assets, but before they announced their pivot to AI infrastructure under a new name — all roughly two years after Joey Zwillinger stepped down as CEO. He founded the company in 2015, took it public at a $4 billion valuation in 2021, then watched the stock collapse more than 96% before stepping down in March 2024. Rather than retreat, he's back—building Biologica, a women's hormonal health company, with lessons that only come from living through the full lifecycle of building, losing, and starting over.</p><p>In this episode, Emmanuel talk...

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