No-code has opened doors for people to find the most interesting solutions to some pretty big problems. Whether it’s farming, business development, or running a community — there’s a place for no-code to change the game.

We were very impressed with what Nicolas Cabrignac was doing with no-code in helping companies improve employee satisfaction with actionable recommendations. His AI-powered platform has now made it into Techstars 2021!

Here’s his story.

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Hi, my name is Nicolas Cabrignac. I’m 24, and I’m from France. I’m the co-founder and CPO of Think Confluent, an AI assistant that helps teams design the employee experience that each teammate expects to have.

I have a cognitive sciences background. Basically, what I study is the human brain and behavior through a combination of knowledge in neurosciences, psychology, anthropology, mathematics, philosophy, and AI. It sounds pretty complex, because the human brain and behavior is complex!

From the beginning, I realized how helpful it could be for people to have basic knowledge of how their brain works, from a scientific perspective. I started a blog hosted on WordPress with my current co-founder, Sarah Allali, to help people better understand their emotions and feelings.

The corporate struggle of employee feedback

After the end of my degree, I had to find a job (like everyone, I guess), but my co-founder and I felt like the working world was… well, broken. The idea that cognitive sciences could help managers better understand their team members' individualities led me both to entrepreneurship and to fight for a new management paradigm.

On the one hand, we figured out that it was highly complicated and time-consuming for managers to understand the needs of their team. The challenge is even harder for HR at a company level. The only way to do so is through 1:1 or other unscalable solutions, which most people rarely do.

Simultaneously, team members lack a valid way to express themselves within a company, which means they can rarely give honest feedback. This missing link creates a real gap between what employees expect and what companies finally provide for them.

Through no fault of their own (usually), most companies then fail to match their employees' individual needs, and this leads to significant issues: people hate going to work and sometimes, they quit.

Just imagine you are in the company for two years. The only thing you want is a more flexible schedule on Mondays, and you end up filling a 50-question engagement survey about the corporate culture to finally send to your HR team, which gets distilled into a vague, unactionable message like “______ rated themselves as 3/5 happy.”

The birth of Think Confluent

That was the beginning of Think Confluent. But at this point, there was still the barrier of developing software without being a coder. Fortunately, I heard a podcast where Charles Thomas explained the success story of Comet, a French startup that used Bubble to build its MVP. So I said to myself, "why not give it a shot?". And there started my no-code journey.

We set out to create a much more personal way for companies to collect feedback from their teams. With Think Confluent, each person has a free space to talk about anything that matters to them. And when I say talk, I really mean talk.

Think Confluent is a scalable way for companies to take care of people individually. Unlike other competitors who focus on quantitative data analysis, we built a solution that processes with qualitative data at scale to accurately capture what matters the most to each person and return a clear roadmap to leaders.

Going from insights to action

Teams can use audio, plain text, or video and send feedback to our AI. Our AI anonymizes, merges, and understands all feedback to create a comprehensive digest for the managers. So instead of getting «the team is 62% happy», managers receive «some people struggle to balance their professional and personal life as the deadline approaches» which is much more actionable.

What makes Think Confluent unique is that employees are not just here to give feedback. Additionally, our AI works as their personal assistant. Once someone has submitted negative feedback, Think Confluent suggests a tailored roadmap to improve the pain point.

Then, we follow up with each employee individually through the weeks, taking care of their strengths, weaknesses, personality, and expectations to build the employee experience they dream of.We can build a future of work where people work at their best where, when, and how they thrive.

Building Think Confluent on Bubble

The only tools I used to create Think Confluent were Bubble for developing, Figma for wireframes, and Notion for CRM and miscellaneous. I built the website and the app with Bubble in around 90 days. Bubble is currently the most powerful tool to build fully functional software, and we didn’t need other specific tools for app development.

We have, of course, connected our Bubble app with Notion and Figma. Figma has a built-in API from Bubble, and I have connected Notion by myself using Bubble’s API connector. However, the most exciting connection with other tools is in the app itself.

We have connected Bubble with GPT-3 from Open AI with API connector as it is the core of our product. We also have connected Think Confluent with Slack API to enable our users to link their Slack account and send reminders and notifications through Slack.

The choice of using only a few tools is deliberate. I see many people using fairly heavy tech stacks. I believe that there’s no need to use too many no-code tools. Instead, the right tool for the right thing, used to its full potential, is far more valuable.

We finally managed to join Techstars with our AI-powered no-code software, but I believe we can go even further!

Thanks for sharing your story with us, Nick! You can follow his journey on Twitter here.