Hey @DaleCooper I’m from a non-tech background too and have been learning Bubble since May, so I hope this helps to get you started. I practice Bubble everyday, and there are definitely still things that I need to learn and become more familiar with over time, but with that said, Bubble has absolutely unbelievable value for me and I can’t recommend learning it enough. I would never have been able to build absolutely anything close to what I can now, if not for Bubble, without years of learning how to code and program. From my perspective, to answer your question about how long it takes, it depends on how complex of an app you are hoping to build. To begin, I’d recommend watching the Bubble video tutorials (https://vimeo.com/bubblegroup) and taking an online course to get started and familiar the interface and how the data structuring part works. @iamsalar has a course on Udemy which teaches you how to build 7 different apps (https://www.udemy.com/buildastartup/), and @brentsum offers courses on his website The Codefree Startup (https://go.codefree.co/courses) as well. Perhaps one of the courses offered is similar to the app idea that you have.
Aside from taking a course like that to get you comfortable with the Bubble Interface and the different major concepts of Bubble (database structure, querying data, responsiveness), the forum is a really amazing place to come when you’re really stuck. For the trickiest concepts, I’ve learned the most from people in the forum. One other thing I find that’s helped me learn is to create a practice app on your account, and then treat it like a ‘whiteboard’ almost. So, when I don’t understand how to do something someone else is asking about in the forum, I open that app, create a blank page and just try things. That way you’re not worried about things look pretty, or formatting, or messing up an app you already have-- you just get good practice on building correctly.
If you’d be interested in not starting from scratch, you can purchase a pre-built Bubble template, @levon of Bubblewits and Bubblestore sells them here: (https://bubblestore.io/). If you purchase a template, the app is already built and you can edit it however you’d like. You can purchase apps similar to Trello, Yelp, AirBnb, and more there. Another good resource to know is if you are hoping to build mobile apps at some point is to check out @natedogg’s http://codelessacademy.com/ course which teaches you how to turn your web application into an iphone application or an android application. Right now, when you build an application in Bubble it is a web application. Building mobile applications is in beta currently, and that involves building your app on one page within the Bubble editor, and then using hidden/visible groups to display all of your app’s content depending upon what is clicked. Nate recently launched an app called Qoins (https://qoins.io/) which is definitely worth checking out since it was entirely built on Bubble. @vlad has a widgets website which is also helpful to learn from: https://widgets.airdev.co/.
Aside from all of that, the best way is to just read a lot of posts and practice a lot of examples. The more you do that, the more comfortable things will become. Bubble seems too good to be true at first glance, but it is not too good to be true! It’s amazing (understatement)! It continuously surprises me every day how this technology even exists and how I am so glad that I randomly stumbled upon it one day. You won’t find a more helpful community, or a more responsive team so in my opinion, if you have any amount of free time you can’t go wrong with spending it learning Bubble. 