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Meetings
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#3 : Meeting with Beev

written by
Clara Cros

Last September, the Beev team opened the doors of their office located in the 13th district of Paris, at WeWork avenue de France. We had the opportunity to talk with different members of their team: Abhinandan, Lead Product Manager - Corentin, Lead Developer - Simon, Developer - Abdelhamid, Operations Manager and Yael, sales.

They were able to introduce us to more of Beev and share with us their current and future vision of NoCode !

Interior of WeWork Avenue de France

A little background

Beev is a platform that facilitates the decarbonization of the mobility of companies and households. It allows them to acquire an electric vehicle and a charging station at home, in companies and in all types of public places, by proposing the best offer according to their needs.

The company currently has about 40 employees, the vast majority of whom are part of the Sales team. The other large majority is part of the Product and Tech teams.

At Beev, these two teams work as one and work hand in hand:

  • 1 Lead Product Manager with a tech background
  • 1 Junior Product Manager
  • 2 UI/UX Designers: before their arrival, mock-ups and prototypes were made by the developers themselves!
  • 1 Lead Developer
  • 2 Developers: one already having a NoCode culture before arriving at Beev and the other, in internship, who is currently trained on Bubble ✅

Focus on Abhinandan, Lead Product Manager
Before starting his adventure with Beev, Abhinandan attended an engineering school in India. He then came to France to complete a master in management. This was followed by a position as Product Manager in a company developing a mobile app in traditional code. It was then that he became interested in NoCode out of curiosity, especially in Bubble and Notion. As his enthusiasm for NoCode technologies grew, he decided to move to a PM position in a company using these tools: Beev.

Wordpress and Bubble

The Beev platform is divided into two distinct applications:

  1. A landing page developed on Wordpress - beev.co - to ensure better results in terms of SEO. The tool NoCode Elementor was used for the development of this landing page.
  2. The main site that serves as a customer portal - app.beev.co - is developed via Bubble. This space allows all the user management: onboarding, customer and partner dashboards, comparators, geolocation map of the terminals, card policy generator, etc.

Landing page Wordpress - beev.co

Homepage app Bubble - app.beev.co

Some key figures
12,000 is the number of leads since the creation of Beev
8,000 is the number of users of the Bubble application
150,000 is the number of monthly visitors on the Wordpress application

Why NoCode ?

Chanez and Solal, the two founders of Beev, had no coding skills and wanted to develop their MVP quickly with scalability possibilities. They therefore opted for a development of the application via Bubble, despite their lack of experience with the tool.

Bubble was also an obvious choice for them because it meant they didn't have to hire a team of developers.

As Beev's success grew, the adoption of in-house developers finally became obvious. Corentin joined Beev as a full-stack developer 6 months ago. With a background in traditional development and having complemented this with experience in NoCode in his previous company, Corentin's profile is totally in line with Beev's current vision, which is to move towards a stack LowCode .

When he arrived, Corentin took over the work on the initial Bubble application. He did not want to start from scratch with a new Bubble application. It is therefore the same Bubble base since the creation of Beev, that is to say for three years.

An important work of audit of the pages and the database was nevertheless essential in order to correct the existing bugs and to clean the application. In parallel of these corrections, the creation of new functionalities was worked on.

Beev's growing success has also meant more data to integrate into the application. stack The limits of a 100% NoCode tool have thus become apparent and this is why they now claim to want to move towards LowCode.

"Take the best of both worlds"

Beev's teams are indeed claiming an approach that is increasingly LowCode. According to Abhinandan, it is important to know how to get the best of both worlds: code and NoCode. He believes that the two are complementary and that the code can overcome some of the limitations sometimes encountered with NoCode.

For its part, NoCode allows for shorter development times and sprints, and therefore for faster achievement of the set objectives.

The other advantage of using NoCode technologies, according to Abhinandan, is the ease of understanding that it allows between teams: it is easier for Product Managers to make developers understand their expectations, what is expected in front and back. It's not necessary for the PM to have a technical background in order to explain their needs to the developer. This is what allows Beev's Tech and Product teams to work together!

Their future vision?

Their future vision is therefore the following: to stay on a stack NoCode , especially Bubble, but export their database outside the tool, for example on Xano. Separating the database from the back and the front will allow, if there is any problem, to change a single element without having to modify the rest. All this will lead to a better scalability of the application. Their short term goal is to have an architecture LowCode.

According to Corentin and Simon, it is no longer necessary to switch to a stack 100% code to be able to scan. The addition of code and NoCode is now the most optimal in their eyes.

As for Abdelhamid, Operations Manager at Beev for the past 10 months, NoCode is no longer limited to MVP - it is now synonymous with rapid evolution and scalability. He says that NoCode tools are still at the beginning of what they can do for us, and that it is a sector that is likely to take up a lot of space in the market. Abdelhamid had no knowledge of NoCode tools before he came to Beev!

What other tools?

We have previously seen that the Product and Tech teams work mainly on Bubble. What about the other teams? Are they working with NoCode tools?

The answer is yes. Both the Ops team and the Sales team work with Hubspot and Aircall on a daily basis. Zapier is also used as a link between Bubble and Hubspot.

Why Zapier and not Make? Because they think the former is easier to handle and the latter is more intuitive.

To summarize, here is the list of NoCode tools used by the Beev teams:

  • Bubble
  • Wordpress
  • Zapier
  • Hubspot
  • Aircall

Training and skills development

Currently, documentation is provided via Notion in order to facilitate the onboarding and learning of newcomers. Finally, the Beev teams want to create a real Beev library and make documentation an automatic process for each team member. For example, Gatien recently created about fifteen APIs that had to be documented on Notion. Today, all the APIs are documented on Notion (the use-case, why use it, etc.) and the different documentations are sorted by team (Product, Tech, Ops, Sales).

As for practice, "in-house" trainings are set up to train the developers on Bubble. In this way, Gatien who had no knowledge of the tool when he arrived was able to master it quickly. Indeed, thanks to these trainings he was able to master the logic of Bubble in one week!

Some tips to share with us?

Corentin, Lead Developer, wanted to share with us the following advice: the use of the Javascript Toolbox plugin of an existing plugin that allows, thanks to the visual element "Expression", to insert code directly on Bubble. According to him, this opens up possibilities that make it easier to work on Bubble.

Secondly, creating your own plugins is also something to do in order to keep control over your application.

It is therefore clear: the integration of code in Bubble, and thus the LowCode, is a must have!

Thank you to all the Beev team !