Our ninth meeting took place in Boomrang's offices, in the heart of the 2nd arrondissement of Paris, rue Saint-Anne. During this exchange Alexis Prat, co-founder and CEO of the company, was able to talk about his career, the birth of Boomrang but also to share with us his vision of NoCode and to explain how this technology has been beneficial to them in times of covid.
Following an exchange in Brazil, during which he made his first escape game, Alexis realized that escape games were developing all over the world, and that more and more brands were opening in France, but that none of the players already present on the market could offer an escape game with a choice. The idea of offering escape games via gift boxes was therefore born in his mind.
Alexis launched Boomrang in 2017 with 1000€ in her pocket. One of the particularities of Boomrang is that the startup has chosen not to raise funds and is growing only through its sales and the value created by its customers.
He was still a student at the time and had no real experience in the business world when the idea of Boomrang Gifts came to him.
At the same time, he discovered Bubble and trained himself to the tool in a totally self-taught way. The numerous forums existing today as well as the slack community NoCode France did not exist at that time, so it was obvious that he had to train himself to the tools NoCode. Alexis quickly improved on the tool, which allowed him to put the first Boomrang Gifts website online and sign his first partnerships with escape games in 2017.
Boomrang Gifts was subsequently incubated at Station F, the world's largest startup campus. The company quickly realized that traditional development would be too costly for them, so they opted to adopt a stack NoCode . At the time, they were the only ones using NoCode tools on campus. Indeed, the other companies were reluctant to adopt these tools, especially Bubble, because for them the tool meant limitations for their projects.
Boomrang has never raised funds and they have no plans to do so in the near future. They are proud to say that their growth is healthy, and this without external financing.
Boomrang's range has been expanded and now, in addition to the escape game boxes, they offer virtual reality boxes. They are therefore positioning themselves on original gift boxes; on everything that the other big players in the market are not doing. For example, they have released The Voice coaching boxes thanks to partnerships with former talents of the show or eSports coaching boxes via partnerships with pro players on games like Fortnite and FIFA.
The boxes are now available online and in major retailers such as Fnac and Cultura.
Did you know that?
The market of the gift boxes is a particular market...
Indeed, we all know the 2 main players that are Wonderbox and Smartbox. But did you know that the brands Vivabox and Dakotabox also belong to these two main players?
Wonderbox and Smartbox have 99% of the market!
In a few words Boomrang is :
During the first containment, in 2020, 90% of Boomrang's turnover was lost.
It was then necessary to quickly find a solution to bounce back: the idea of virtual events appeared, and this for companies - to allow employees to keep in touch via cooking classes, blind-tests or virtual escape games. This was made possible thanks to the speed of NoCode.
Boomrang Events was then born and became their second activity, in addition to Boomrang Gifts.
Nearly 1,400 virtual events have been offered to companies over the past year and a half, including major accounts such as Google, Facebook and Amazon.
At the beginning Alexis and his team worked only with providers for the creation of these virtual events, and as time went by they decided to develop their own escape games via Bubble. Boomrang Events now has 3 games of its own developed internally on Bubble, in addition to its work with providers on topics such as cocktail and cooking classes.
Today the Boomrang product range is :
This game platform is now sold abroad as several companies have made the same request to Boomrang teams.
The work of the teams is divided as follows: 50% on the boxes (Boomrang Gifts) and 50% on the events (Boomrangs Events). At the time of publishing this article, the team is composed of about fifteen people:
The team includes a lot of very young people, whose first professional experience, because until now it was a lot of profiles in alternation that were recruited. The objective over the next few months is to recruit more senior profiles, with more experience, to provide the rest of the team with the knowledge and perspective that they do not necessarily have on all subjects.
Boomrang has a stack 100% NoCode and works with Bubble, Make and Figma.
Make is mainly used to connect their services: the Zoho CRM, the Google Drive, the Bubble website, the Slack... all with relatively simple automations.
According to Alexis, NoCode should be seen as a strength, not a weakness. It is no longer a technology that is only used to create MVPs.
However, he says not everyone can be good at Bubble. It takes a mindset that not everyone has to be good at this technology. He believes that you need to have a real willingness to learn and a certain alertness; a problem solver's mindset.
Bubble is therefore at the heart of the company at Boomrang and there is a real desire to build a team NoCode internally.
Today their 100% NoCode strategy is totally assumed and Alexis even recommends to entrepreneurs to use NoCode tools to get started!
Alexis is strongly convinced by NoCode, according to him this technology is a logical evolution of things. The NoCode is the next step, which adds the visual side to the traditional code: we are still at the very beginning of the techno!
However, according to him, there will always be a need for developers because to be a developer NoCode it is necessary to have real technical skills. It is therefore very rare to find good Bubble developers, with expertise in Bubble AND in code. The NoCode is therefore not supposed to represent a danger for the so-called traditional developers.
It is indeed easier to know how to do everything than to know how to do everything WELL on Bubble, according to Alexis.
Just like in traditional development, a Bubble application will only be scalable if it is well designed. Not everyone can do Bubble and technical skills are essential.
Alexis himself has realized the importance of this expertise over the years: the products he offers today have nothing to do with those offered at the beginning of the Boomrang adventure. In 2016 his use of Bubble was limited to a simple brick system that has nothing to do with the current level of development.
Finally, even if NoCode is gaining more and more ground, there is still a lot of evangelizing to be done, both with entrepreneurs and schools.
Boomrang is :
If Alexis could go back in time he admits that he should have hired more developer profiles NoCode in order to delegate more quickly. Finally, if he had to give one piece of advice to be good at Bubble it is to be curious and TRY.
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