The New Build

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 wh...

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 framewo...

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. In this episode, Emmanuel sits down with Eric to talk about his new book, Incorruptible, and the forces that quietly corrupt even the b...

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. 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 cl...

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 202...

Most impact-conscious businesses treat social good as a cost center‌ — ‌something funded by profits from the "real" business. EqualReach flipped that model: When refugee talent gets paid for dignified work, EqualReach gets paid too. The mission and the revenue are structurally the same thing. In this episode, Abhinav talks with EqualReach Founder and CEO Giselle Gonzales and Product Lead Olena Vol...

Matt Graham's agency RapidDev has 220 employees working on 250+ active projects. That means he sees more product launches in a month than most investors see in a year‌ — ‌and the learnings are clear. In this episode, Emmanuel talks with Matt about what actually separates successful founders from those who stall out, why being "too smart" kills momentum, and the specific mistake that wastes the mos...

Sam Rudy spent over a decade booking recording studios for major artists worldwide, a job that involved sending 50+ emails just to book a single session. He had zero coding experience, but his co-founder Ricky convinced him that Sam’s deep industry knowledge made him the only person who could solve this problem. In this episode, Abhinav talks with Sam about how he went from "this feels impossible"...

Brian Henderson's experience managing his family's laundromats revealed a technology gap across the entire industry‌ — ‌so he built a separate company to solve it. Wash-Dry-Fold POS now serves over 1,200 laundromats across all 50 states, and in 2023, Brian and his co-founder purchased the original three family stores that inspired it all. In this episode, Abhinav talks with Brian about how he iden...

Before he even launched the Turing app, Vai Singh grew his YouTube channel to over 45,000 subscribers in less than a year‌ — ‌while working full-time as head of strategy at a major European space services firm and raising a young daughter. The science education platform he built next proves you don't need to quit your job to build something real. In this episode, Abhinav talks with Vai about his d...

Fuzzy Khosrowshahi has scaled three products to billions of users: Google Sheets, Slack, and now Notion. His approach? Surround himself with experts, ship before it's perfect, and bundle strategically. In this episode, Bubble co-founder Emmanuel Straschnov talks with the Notion CTO about the strategies behind building and scaling products that actually win. Fuzzy breaks down why bundling creates d...

Six weeks before SXSW Sydney, Paloma Newton and Jackson Gritching made a decision that would define their startup: pivot their entire business strategy, build an MVP from scratch, and compete on one of the world's biggest stages. In this episode, Abhinav talks with the co-founders of Elita Blueprint about how they won their category at SXSW Sydney while simultaneously building their pet health pla...

Meet the solo founders and small teams building apps that reach millions of users — without traditional dev teams. The New Build is a biweekly video podcast that breaks down exactly how. 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. What worked, what di...