S2 Episode 7: Building Software Development Tools for Everyday People
Welcome to the seventh episode of season two of the LowCode Podcast! In this episode, we sit down with David Siegel, the mastermind behind Glide. Explore Glide's origin story, why Google Sheets is the backbone of the platform, and hear firsthand the challenges and triumphs David experiences as a CEO while focusing on democratizing software development.
Whether you're an entrepreneur looking to build an MVP or a business owner seeking to streamline your operations, the insights from this episode will definitely fuel your journey.
Transcript
Jesus Vargas: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Low Code Podcast. Today we have with us today, David from Glide. I'm super excited to have David here. David, how are you?
David Siegel: I'm great, Jesus. I'm with my colleagues. We are in an Airbnb sprinting on the Glide Big Tables.
Jesus Vargas: Nice.
David Siegel: the new higher scale data source for Glide. So it's great to be together in person.
Jesus Vargas: Yeah, it is. So I wanna go back in time and I wanna understand better why you guys decided to stop working at Xamarin at a Microsoft or a Windows company and build your own product. What was the reason of leaving probably a comfortable job and starting something on your own?
David Siegel: There were a lot of reasons. The first is that my co-founders and I, co-founders of Glide, we'd spent all of our career building software development tools for a really small audience and technical software developers. And they're really fun to build for because they're super powerful users. They have all of this knowledge. When you build for example, when you build tools for software developers, like Visual Studio Code or GitHub, or when you build tools for designers like Figma, tools that require a lot of expertise and knowledge to come with the user, that combination is explosive and really exciting. But they're very narrow tools. And I wanted to just do a startup in general for the experience of challenging myself and learning as much as I could really quickly. before I sort of reached a plateau in my career where I'm just sort of mature and being an executive or something like that.
Jesus Vargas: Yeah.
David Siegel: Um, and when you, when you embark on a startup, you have to ask yourself, like, could I spend 10 years working insane hours on this idea? And although our strengths were in building software development tools, I didn't have another decade in me of really like loving the software engineer user that I had been. building for for so long because that's you have to like be really invested in the users you're building for
Jesus Vargas: Mm-hmm.
David Siegel: and After years of building for them and throwing conferences for software engineers and communicating with them I wanted I wanted a fresh audience
Jesus Vargas: Okay.
David Siegel: and I also had this kind of personal desire to have my wife or my parents like understand what I do
Jesus Vargas: Yeah.
David Siegel: Oh, I built this new CI for building and distributing mobile apps. Like they didn't really get it. Um, so you put all those things together. We want to challenge ourselves. We want to learn a lot. We want to create a new company and we want to use our strengths and building developer tools, but we want to build it for a new audience. Maybe if we built developer tools that let anyone create the software that we're normally empowering, uh, just technical, very small groups of engineers to build. that would be an ambitious, bold, challenging mission.
Jesus Vargas: Was that the first idea that you guys had in terms of what the new startup that you wanted to build should focus on? Or you ideated on several topics.
David Siegel: We made a couple of developer tools for software engineers. So we have one that's still very popular to this day called QuickType. It's an open source project, quicktype.io. And it's a really powerful and popular tool. I estimate about 100,000 engineers use it every month. That helps you write code more quickly when dealing with data. It was kind of the inspiration for Glide. So we had some small ideas about how we would turn that into something that companies would pay for. Then we built another sort of machine, machine learning driven, uh, analytics tool with a really good developer experience called auto tune. And the idea was you would add the simple JavaScript snippet to whatever website you're working on, and then you would tell auto tune a few basic variables to try, and then it would run permutations with different colors and header copy and. calls to action and layouts and a machine learning algorithm on the backend would like kind of tune and optimize your websites. That was one, and that was kind of interesting, but again, wasn't the thing that like makes me leap out of bed every morning and like sprint to my desk to, to build the next feature, like something to help people optimize their, their website.
Jesus Vargas: Also was the goal was to have a lot of users that the target market was everyone or just millions of people instead of thousands.
David Siegel: Well, just having a... just having a large vision
Jesus Vargas: Okay.
David Siegel: that you can inspire people to join a startup with. Like I wanted to be just large and impressive and inspiring. And I grew up really loving what Apple did to computers, making computers, which were these complex at one time room sized machines that no one really thought would have. that normal everyday people would have anything to do with such a bold, challenging idea in the early days of the PC that not only would every business have some have a computer and maybe even people would have computers in their homes. Like this was a crazy idea at one point. So I've always loved that idea of software or software, I'm sorry, technology, computer technology that seems inaccessible or not relevant to people in their everyday lives. The idea of the creative leap. that makes that relevant and valuable to a broad audience and it brings into their lives. And today, you know, computer, what does computer mean? Like this is definitely a computer. We put computers in our ears, like you have, we put computers on our, our wrists, we put computers on our face soon and into our bodies. I'm sure in the next decade, you know, the computer changed so much. So software development is like very, very closely associated to that idea. And somehow. made computers go everywhere and become very relevant to people and software too, obviously like for consuming it, but there's this big missing, missing piece of the people who use those computers and use the software that those computers run influencing that software, creating it for themselves.
Jesus Vargas: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
David Siegel: So, um, it just seems like a challenging, challenging problem that if solved would just be explosive and, and would be hugely impactful.
Jesus Vargas: When you were thinking about that, when you were thinking about Glide, did you think about a company out there or someone who had already done something similar? Were you thinking about WordPress, what WordPress did for websites in terms of software development? What were you looking up to? Because today we have a lot of no-kin local tools, but back then, I mean, it's not that long ago, but the space wasn't even born yet as it is known today. So what were you looking up to?
David Siegel: Sure. Well, we weren't looking at the existing companies that tried to do Glide because if we look too closely at them, there's this funny story like when we were brainstorming about what to work on, my co-founder Mark said, oh, we should make it easier for people to build apps. And I said, no way. Every time I've seen someone try to build an app builder for companies, it's this unlovable, terrible product. And even worse is the software that you actually create with that app builder. It's even worse. And
Jesus Vargas: Okay.
David Siegel: I was like, I don't want to touch that with a 10 foot pole. And Mark said, well, you know, do you think it's possible to actually do this well? And, you know, through a couple more questions, I realized that I should actually view that as opportunity that all the existing solutions were so bad. But what I looked for for inspiration, I mentioned Apple, like Apple making computers so personal. I was, I wondered, is there a similar opportunity? for software development itself. So that's one analogy. Another was just looking at Microsoft. Microsoft as a company that creates developer tools and got their start selling compilers and building productivity tools. I think Microsoft is probably recognized as the world leading developer tools company. So I thought, is there a Microsoft that has maybe better product and design sensibility that's building developer tools, but... for the office audience, for like, you know, the people who use Word and Excel, a broader audience. And GitHub as well as sort of an exciting GitHub, now part of Microsoft, an exciting collaborative place that really elevated this idea of creating software to something that was the basis for a community and a brand that people really find attractive.
Jesus Vargas: How did you came up with the name for Glide?
David Siegel: Glide. Well, usually when people create software companies, they come up with these like really technical and kind of annoying names. This has changed a bit, but like, you know, these automator.ai or confabulate tricks or, you know, these sort of gross names that you wouldn't want to like say when you're home, you know, if we're going to make software development tools that are relevant for everyday people, I wanted to term that like everyday people would find attractive and interesting and they would be able to say it without feeling embarrassed. Um, so glide is kind of like an everyday world word with positive connotations. It makes you think of sort of going up in the air, something that's smooth and easy. Um, and it kind of is a little bit of a related to Excel. Excel is a word because we were inspired by spreadsheets in the early days. Excel is like this word that kind of launches you up into the air and makes you go faster.
Jesus Vargas: Okay.
David Siegel: Um, So Glide kind of has a little bit of that as well with maybe a little bit more panache
Jesus Vargas: Yeah. And then when you were, so when you were ideating, you decided on a product. How did you, so you started as CEO and then Mark as CDO, I think Jason was there as well. How did you decide who was gonna do what?
David Siegel: Um, I think it was just pretty clear based on our strengths.
Jesus Vargas: Okay.
David Siegel: Um, and we did this, uh, startup accelerator incubator program called white combinator and they said, you know, one of the questions that they will ask in the meeting, which isn't too important. I would say when you're just people with an idea, trying to find someone to care about what you're building. They said, Oh, they'll ask you. who the CEO is and if you guys don't already agree on who that is, if like multiple people raise their hand and say I'm the CEO, that's a big red flag to investors that you don't have a stable team. And so we just sorted out our roles for clarity very early on.
Jesus Vargas: Do you think that was a good choice? Would you do something else today instead of being CEO?
David Siegel: Um, well, I mean, honestly, like every role inside of glide fascinates me from support to sales, to marketing, to engineering, like if I could, if I could somehow like duplicate myself and like work on everything, I just love it all. Um, but no, I think we're like, we're pretty happy with everyone's roles in the company.
Jesus Vargas: And how, I mean, obviously the role as CEO, when you started three, four people, and today that you have a larger team, 30 people around maybe, how has that evolved? Because originally probably you were even coding or being part of the product, and now you do maybe a bunch of other things. How has that evolved? And yeah, how has your personality evolved with that as well?
David Siegel: Interesting question. Um, yeah, when you're three people and you have no customers, you're trying to put your website up, you feel a bit silly saying I'm the CEO of this. I never took it too seriously. And it's very, you know, you can start a company for probably a hundred dollars today, so the barrier to becoming a CEO is lower than ever. Um, but, uh, yeah, now that the team is about 40 people, um, And we're, we're leading through creating something that is such a challenging idea. The software development tools for everyone. It's, it's one of the more ambitious software companies that you can create. Honestly, the, the software that creates software. Oh, and by the way, you don't have to have any technical knowledge to succeed with it. Oh, and also the software you build with it is going to be very sort of contemporary and smooth and fast and well designed. You're also solving the design challenges. It's like, it's huge. Um, not as challenging maybe as like open AI and like creating an AI, but like it's on that spectrum, like it's. Um, uh, but yeah, it's sort of like, you know, connecting the dots between the different teams, hiring great leaders to head up our sales marketing, engineering, et cetera. Um, keeping people inspired, keeping the energy and momentum of the company, uh, up and increasing, especially when you're working remotely, which is just hugely challenging. Um, representing the company well, explaining the vision, explaining the ideas. Um, it's, you know, Chuck supercharging the community. Um, those are.
Jesus Vargas: Do you spend your days mostly with your team or outside? Like, I don't know, raising money, speaking with customers? Is the, what do you do on a day to day basis?
David Siegel: Most of my time is spent with the team and talking to customers. Yeah. I don't, focus right now, especially because, you know, we just, we raised our series a last year. I'm not a lot of time. I'm spending no time raising money. I will talk to investors, but mostly it's just, it's about building glide. We have a huge ambitious plan. And we built up the team a lot just in the last couple of quarter or so, actually. So helping that team gel, um, helping create clarity, uh, helping just run the plan and build what we're building.
Jesus Vargas: Do you think it's very challenging or not so much when you had the starting team, everybody's probably very much aligned and then you start onboarding people that don't know the story of Glide or know how you started, but see the company where it's in today, but don't know like the journey it has gone through. Do you think that becomes a challenging issue when growing?
David Siegel: Yeah, it is extremely different
Jesus Vargas: it's not something that you fix, but what do you do in order to make it easier for them so that the strategy is the company's alignment? I see that ourselves and the team, when you start growing, everybody hopefully does the best they can do, but sometimes vision is not the same throughout the company. So how do you make everybody go the same way?
David Siegel: Well, it's something I'm learning and it is a big challenge. One thing that helps is, um, just being a broken record and like telling the story and explaining the mission. Every Friday we have a whole team sync and we'll talk about the mission. And when we do something, I try to put it in context. Why are we doing this? It's explained it over and over and over again, as if everyone just started that week, it is one of the most important things you can do. I think. That that's the trick. Like, you know, if you start with a team of four people or super connected and they built the first version of the product in a room together and you have that kind of mind meld, and then you add 20 people and now you're working remotely and there's new people joining all the time. Uh, it's easy to sort of forget that the environment has changed and the company has changed so much because you built up that context and those assumptions in your mind, you have to throw them away. Um,
Jesus Vargas: Yeah.
David Siegel: so yeah, I think just that that's one job of the CEO is like, be the broken record. That just reminds people of the mission and talks about the customer and, uh, ex you know, tell stories from the early days of the company to share that culture and builds new culture by getting the team together and, uh, and learning what they value and how they can get along and how they can build.
Jesus Vargas: Cool. So now coming back to the product, a question that I've always had is, why, if you were coming from Microsoft, why the first version of Glide was built on top of a Google Sheet and not Excel? Did it make sense, since you were already in the Microsoft space, to build a product that sat on top of Microsoft products?
David Siegel: Um, so that's, that's another great question. Um, Microsoft bought a startup that I was in and I spent two years there. And ever since people say like, Oh, you're a Microsoft guy. You're coming from Microsoft XYZ. Like I've been a Mac user my whole life and open source
Jesus Vargas: Yeah.
David Siegel: guy. And, um, glide was like, you know, built on Macs and, uh, it's deployed on Google cloud, um, there wasn't a lot that we thought to like bring with us from Microsoft. Um, Also, we were very paranoid when we started the company about having any conflict of interest. We never, we didn’t want anyone to think that we were like working on something for Microsoft and then we thought, oh, we could do this ourselves and own it. So we better like leave.
Jesus Vargas: Um...
David Siegel: We didn't work on glide when we were employed by Microsoft. We like kept, there was a firewall there. So yeah, implicating like Microsoft ideas and technologies was, was very far, um, from our, from what we were thinking about. But, um, Practically speaking, there are a ton of integrations with Google Sheets out there.
Jesus Vargas: Okay.
David Siegel: And it was just popular with the kind of early adopters that we were talking to. And
Jesus Vargas: Okay.
David Siegel: also at the time, online Excel had basically no traction as far as I knew. And we also weren't even using it. So yeah. And when we would interview customers and also our early customers were like friends, family. tech workers in San Francisco, everyone had exposure to Google Sheets and not to Excel
Jesus Vargas: OK. And then eventually, you ended up adding multiple data sources. And I think Glide's tagline of building up from a spreadsheet now no longer exists. So do you think that choosing Google Sheet as the first backend of Glide was the right choice? Did it get you the right customers? Because something that I want to talk more about is how the customer persona for Glide has been changed. evolved or changed, or maybe you targeted a certain type of customer and eventually you changed that. Was that the right choice to start from a spreadsheet? Because if we look at the space, every other no-code app builder out there is starting the same way. They all sit on top of Airtable, Excel, Google Sheets. So based on who you are targeting today, do you think that was the right way to get started?
David Siegel: I think so because it really tested the idea that non-technical people would want to create practical software. We did get a lot of the wrong type of customer.
Jesus Vargas: Mm-hmm.
David Siegel: That's people who they're trying to...
Jesus Vargas: And was that because of pricing or features?
David Siegel: Lots of reasons.
Jesus Vargas: Okay.
David Siegel: I wouldn't say that connecting to Google Sheets was something that brought us closer to the wrong type of customer. And the wrong type of customer is like, you know, Glide's customers are existing businesses that want to improve through creating custom software, not the person who is a company of one with an idea for an app store app who thinks that they can. Create a big company predicated just on the app experience. Glide is mostly concerned with creating private software for existing companies. And so yeah, I think a lot of those people will use Google Sheets because it's basically free. So you have people who are custom, who think maybe that software is free.
Jesus Vargas: Mm-hmm.
David Siegel: And so that, in that sense, that's not a great customer, but I wouldn't, I don't think it would change anything because it created so much buzz and momentum and got us a lot of feedback and. In the early days of a company, you don't need the perfect customer. You need people who actually are interested in what you're doing to create a feedback loop and to create all for your team. And you can't go too far in the wrong.
Jesus Vargas: But are they giving feedback that's not valuable eventually because you're clining someone else and they're giving feedback for their use case?
David Siegel: Well, for at least for basically two years, we're just putting the fundamentals in place and I still say we're, we're putting the fundamentals in place. So, you know, the customer says I need a button that when I press it is going to add data to the spreadsheet so that I can build this Tinder competitor. Well, we can just like listen to the first two thirds of that.
Jesus Vargas: Yeah, okay
David Siegel: We need a button that adds data because this customer who's using glide in their warehouse really needs to, to track when the inventory is missing. And so. As long as we sort of kept our framing of where we're taking Glide ultimately, you can filter the type of feedback to understand like where you need to add a capability. Um, and we never got too distracted by people trying to build app store apps or public facing social networks and stuff. We, we had enough clarity to like never really take that seriously as a future for our business
Jesus Vargas: Now when you're looking at that feedback, is that feedback was very valuable at the beginning? Is it still as valuable today? Is it like today are you launching new features or even new products, whatever, based on feedback? Or do you think that you know what your client wants and then you decide what to launch next and then publish it and see if it sticks?
David Siegel: We, we build with a ton of feedback, but the feedback comes from, uh, in many cases, either existing customers who have successfully built glide apps at their company that are used by hundreds of people or, uh, customers that we view as like sort of the next step for the company that maybe talk to our sales team and tell us the requirements. And they say, we really like what we really like. Uh, we really like what glide is. Um, we have these are non-technical and our people do a proof of concept. They built the app. In two days, when we set three months aside for this, we can't believe how easy it is. Um, but we export a data from our production database into a Google sheet to create the proof of concept. And for us to actually buy and deploy, like we need a direct connection to our Mesa, my SQL database or something. That's the type of feedback we get every day. So we write that down and prioritize it.
Jesus Vargas: OK. How has the roadmap for Glide changed? Has it always been the same? Or do you think there has been a main pivot or pivots during these two, three years?
David Siegel: I think one way it's changed is last year we were focused on sort of growing horizontally, sort of taking the mobile interface and expanding to web and desktop. And if you're just listening to this podcast, I'm like spreading butter on toast with my hands to demonstrate growing horizontally, sort of like adding an adjacent interface style to mobile and adding Airtable, Google Sheets, file upload, I'm sorry, Airtable, Excel, file upload, and BigQuery, sort of scaling horizontally in data sources. And what we learned last year is like, these were good things to add to be, we don't want to just be this sort of one trick pony of Google sheet to mobile app. We view ourselves as a general software developer tools company, building software for non-technical people. Um, so I'm happy that we were able to expand that way, but this year is all about going deeper and increasing the capabilities of glide with automations, third party integration, simplifying just the, the, the basic business use cases that today require you to sign up for other. related tools and sort of connect web hooks and zaps and stuff are really trying to simplify that because that's very hard very hard for average people to figure out
Jesus Vargas: But that has always been kind of the vision of Glide Hasn't it, because I remember a couple of years ago, you mentioned Glide apps, Glide pages, and then automation, which is something that we're starting to see this year. But has there been anything that changed in this process as you start learning more about who your customer is?
David Siegel: Has there been anything that changed? I think, yeah, we're still pretty much executing, the urgency changed. We wanna
Jesus Vargas: Okay.
David Siegel: just move faster all the time because we can see that this is a very competitive space, no code. And it used to be, if you said no code just two, three years ago, you would think of like. landing page builders launching on product hunt. And now there's a lot more credibility about no code going into businesses. And, um, so that, and that's, that was where we thought things were going. Um, so that's become clearer. And just for example, Zapier launching Zapier tables, interfaces, air table launching interfaces. There's sort of, we call it like the three legs of the stool interface database, and then automation. And you see companies that started with database, adding interface and automation and companies that started with automation, adding interfaces. So you see this kind of expansion happening and it's extremely competitive. So very exciting. Um, that that's really,
Jesus Vargas: Does that mean that do you think that eventually a small and medium businesses, I mean enterprise business will end up choosing just like today, you decided you're going to be using Google workspace or the Microsoft environment, will that happen with these app builder platforms that you will choose glide and do everything in glide or you'll choose Zapier and do everything there, or do you think that even if you choose some tool, you'll end up using multiple tools that do kind of the same thing?
David Siegel: I think you'll end up using multiple tools. I think companies will like prefer one sort of software development ecosystem to buy into, but they're always going to be broadly compatible with each other. So if you, you really love glides interface and automation story, but you really like air tables interface for managing your data, you'll use them together.
Jesus Vargas: Yeah. Do you think there'll be a lot more acquisitions in the space, just like Google has a app sheet and there are a few big players in the, in the software world, software for businesses that have been buying last couple of years, a few no code app builders. Is Glide built for that? Is that Glide's goal or do you envision Glide as, as Glide itself and not being part of a major software company?
David Siegel: Um, our goal is to be an independent company and to make the brand Glide synonymous with the ability for anyone to create valuable software. And, um, we don't, we're not trying to build like Microsoft Glide. Um, and I just think that software development is such a potent, uh, part of human experience that like an iconic company and an iconic brand could be built on the premise. And I think the world will be richer if there is a company that represents that to everyone versus sort of merging into one of these behemoth companies. Um, so no, I want, I want, uh, I want, you know, 10 years from now. Uh, okay. Five years from now, let's make it. You just ask someone, Hey, I need to create some software. I, we don't have any developers. They said, you've got to use glide. It's amazing. It's super easy to use. It builds beautiful software. And they have this great security story where it's actually the software you build on glide is faster and more secure than you could even build if you hired programmers. That's, that's the story I want.
Jesus Vargas: Do you think that Glide, just as Glide adds more features, it might also end up being more complex to build very, very custom or complex apps? And I see, I've been recording this second season of the podcast. We have like five or maybe eight episodes recorded so far. And something that I've seen is that either you decide as a no-code tool to focus on the very no-code world, like anyone can build an app. And I think that... was one of Glide's taglines, like a billion developers by 20-something, 35 or something. And on the other hand, you have like, oh, this is a platform that is extremely powerful. And everybody says that they want to cater to both types of users. But in five years, who do you think will be Glide's ideal customer? Will Glide be like the Canva for making an app? Or do you think Glide will be more geared towards? someone that understands a little bit of logic, a little bit of database structure.
David Siegel: Um, we're building for non-technical users. Um, the world is becoming more technical. So, um, it's kinda, I think it's kind of there. It's meeting in the middle a little bit. Like I think, you know, a year ago, you would be, it'd be very hard to find anyone who is like interacted with one of these AI tools. And I think three years from now, like 80% of people that you find will like have used an AI tool in some way. And we'll understand some basic ideas about what its capabilities are and how to, how to get what you want out of it. Um, so I think that that tide is rising, but we're trying to solve what we, what we view as like the very difficult and valuable challenge, which is creating these tools that create powerful, useful software, but always keeping them easy, simple, fun to use. Um, there, there, there is some intelligence, human intelligence required in the tool, like, um, you mentioned logic there, there's room for mastery in these tools and. Um, If you want to create a, an app that shows a list of all of your customers who haven't yet paid, but have ordered more than $10,000 of merchandise in the inventory, they're not based in the U S and, uh, they're there and have no middle name, you do have to understand like how those three criteria about the customer need to be linked together logically to create one criterion that filters a list and I'm using language. It's not very approachable. by saying criterion, but you have to and them, you know, and like, so and is a concept that's a logical concept, but, um, hand and, or are sort of, there's sort of axioms of information that we have to like, either assume people know those things or help them learn it. So there will always be some learning or some conceptual apparatus in glide, but we're trying to minimize it and guide people either by making the product. Anticipate what you want or make better suggestions or maybe use AI. And also on the education front by writing great documentation, tutorial videos where you can actually learn as well. Um, so I think glide will, um, you will always be rewarded if you are more sophisticated user of glide, but we're trying to just, you know, low floor, high ceiling is the metaphor that I hear pretty often for tools like this. Like we want you to be able to, you want to just create something basic? It'd be very easy. And if you want to create a hundred apps to run your entire international organization, they'll be more involved with doing that, but it should still be something that someone who's not an engineer can accomplish.
Jesus Vargas: Do you see something that I've discovered recently is that most no-code tools, as they grow, their client, their typical client changes. And while they start in the no-code space because it's a very receptive space, everybody's trying the next new tool. Eventually, as they mature, they start moving towards a more enterprise world.
David Siegel: Yes.
Jesus Vargas: Recently, I was interviewing Formstack and they started as a form builder, but today they're really... focused on the Salesforce world and building an interface between Salesforce platforms and their product reforms and stuff like that. And that means that not anyone in the US or in the world uses Salesforce. So you target a very specific and unique niche that probably has the money to spend a few hundred dollars a month. So do you think that Glide's route will be similar in terms of starting to target more, like larger companies maybe, or do you still... want to cover in the next five years, an SMB that has whatever 20 employees and a Forge in 500 that uses Salesforce or NetSweeter platforms like I mean, you know, 80% of Glide's revenue in the long term will come from what companies like that. Um, and if you look at, you know, I mean, first of all, Glide's largest customers spend thousands of dollars on their one Glide account per month. Um, so when we have customers who are like calling my cell phone on Christmas day, who pay us $10 a month, I'm not very excited about that, you know?
Jesus Vargas: Right.
David Siegel: Um, you can't, that can't last forever. Um, And, but if you look at like the story of Slack, Slack has this incredible free version used by nonprofits and communities and Slack's largest customers. Pay hundreds of thousand dollars of dollars a year for Slack. So like there's, there's real revenue there. Um, what I want is I wanted like a broadly accessible and free in many cases platform that's that used by SMB, small businesses, prototypers, et cetera. Um, but yeah, most of the business will be driven by the largest customers.
Jesus Vargas: Yeah. Doesn't that require a huge valuation so that you have a lot of money to spend on? Like I see mostly bootstrap platforms don't have the capability to have a very large free model or a freemium model because the numbers don't make sense. And then, uh, like Notion, they can throw away, uh, this can codes and stuff like that because they're using VC funds.
David Siegel: Well, we are not bootstrapped. Uh, and also it's like it's usage based. So we won't, there won't be a free version of glide that. Admits a thousand users using it
Jesus Vargas: Would that be the case? Allows you to do everything
David Siegel: every day and like running tons of backend automations. Um, the, the free version of glide will be, you know, first smaller businesses, nonprofits, individuals. And if you scale and you want real power, if you want to connect to an Oracle database to run glides automations on it, like that's,
Jesus Vargas: Right
David Siegel: that's on the business
Jesus Vargas: you're gonna pay for that
David Siegel: yes enterprise tiers. the feature should sell to customers
Jesus Vargas: What is Glide doing? What is Glide doing this year to get new customers? What is the marketing strategy for Glide? Especially since the space is becoming more and more crowded, there are a lot of other tools that are doing a great job in terms of marketing. How do you compare Glide to the others or maybe don't compare, but what would Glide be doing in order to stay as a leading tool in the space?
David Siegel: Yeah. Um, one thing we're doing is we are, we're kicking off the new year with some really exciting new content series. Uh, our unstoppable geniuses campaign is going to have, uh, articles and videos featuring some of the incredible glide customer stories so you can actually see how real businesses build glide apps and like the impact it makes, I think for a lot of people, like the concept is still pretty nebulous and like they, you know, they can read our website and they just still don't understand like what you can actually do with this. So. bringing to life some of those really incredible stories and just sharing them far and wide, um, investing a ton in our community and our ecosystem partners, that's one of the major things we did with our fundraisers last year is build out our, our marketing team towards the end of the year. So we're rebooting our experts program and introducing multiple tiers, creating a lot more support for experts. We're going to like many different no code conferences and we're getting outside the no code bubble. I'm keynoting a conference in Palm Springs in April. for field service companies to show them what a breakthrough glide could be for them in terms of making a custom tooling built by anyone in their company. So yeah, mostly unlike just leaning heavily into our community and finding ways to get them excited, give them early access to features, empower them to like share their stories. A lot of it's still gonna be this kind of groundswell marketing.
Jesus Vargas: Great, super excited. David, thanks so much for joining us today.
David Siegel: Awesome. Thank you and happy new year.
Jesus Vargas: Bye, boys.