CEO David Siegel - Glide Apps Future Plans - Mobile Apps - Interview 🎤😱

in the next month or so we're gonna add a support for excel we don't have plans to support the app store um glide is gonna be around for the long term um our mission is to create a billion software developers by 2030. what's up everyone welcome back to this channel today we have with us david siegel who is the founder and ceo of glide which is a no-co tool that is mega popular and check this out the tool is for creating mobile web apps and it's very powerful it's very quick to create apps it connects itself to your google sheets and uses it as a database and also very soon you will also be able to connect to excel that is hosted of course in the cloud i have been asking david about glide apps and mobile native applications and when client will have that feature so make sure to watch the video to find out if at all they will have this feature and also glide might be launching new products new features and yes they will so check out this video you'll find out everything and with that get your coffee and have fun in this interview one more thing make sure to hit the like and subscribe button if you hear anything interesting in this video and if you don't want to miss anything in the future about no code and tools and tips and tricks then also make sure to hit the bell and hit off and with that now let's go into the interview cheers all right everyone so today we're gonna talk to david siegel who is the founder and ceo of glide which is a very popular no cutout and well i'm using glide a lot and i'm also hosting some rooms on on twitter like spaces but also on clubhouse and people talk about glide all the time so i thought hey why not get the founder on this channel and talk to him about glide in the future and what do you think about the future of no-code and how does this change the way we do things so i'm very happy and honored that you came you came to this channel i'm happy to be here alright so let me ask you the first question for people that might not know glide as well as as we do right um so what is glide all about and why should we be excited um glide is is all about letting people who don't know how to write code create amazing software we want to make it easy and fun for anyone to create amazing software is just our our vision of the company and uh it's not it that's just supposed to be very high level very general we want you just to break it down and to just emphasize things like when you make software you should feel that it's easy to do and you should have fun doing it and the result should be amazing um that's that's an extra special challenge on top because you can make it so that people can make software but usually it's not very amazing usually it's kind of sad so uh we just want we want you to have this great experience making great software okay okay so um so what i see in client is very interesting because you're not creating any kind of software you're creating mobile mobile apps right mobile web apps to be specific so my question uh is because of course i've used it a lot and i have i can like grill you basically about a lot of stuff but before i do that because i would love to do that i want to ask you about what is the difference between bubble adalo and glide because many people use those and they want to understand for which use case i use which tool sure um well i'll start with that question like why would you pick each one of those there are really good reasons to pick one over the other um bubble is the most powerful uh it's i think 10 years old it has a you can do workflows um very interesting logic and interactions so if you have a very complex use case and you want to build for the web meaning you know desktop browsers on laptops i think bubble is still is a great choice for that it's it's it's a little bit notorious for its steeper learning curve because it is so feature-rich and uh adalo is uh is is more similar to glide it's kind of mobile focused and i think you could pick a dollo if you if you really want to go to the app store they have functionality for that glide is a little bit of a marriage between those two it's very powerful and it targets the web like like bubble and it also has this mobile focus or at least it's traditionally focused on mobile like adalo um but some of the benefits of glide the most important one is our google sheets integration and the integrations that we're going to add for other data sources that you care about so both in a bubble and a dollo in bubble and a dollar you use their internal source of data and they have integrations for connecting to other stuff as to all these tools um but we made the strategic decision early on we said google sheets is very popular people are familiar with it it's a great way to collaborate on data and people already have their data there so we're going to make this great sync experience between the the apps you create in glide and your data in google sheets and in the next month or so we're going to add a support for excel hosted on microsoft 365 to expand that and uh one of our most requested data sources that we have working in development is airtable and basically wherever you have data we want to connect and let you build software on top of it so we're much more about enabling you to build with the data sources you already have and we don't want you to sort of bring them into a glide's universe or keep them keep them right very interesting and this just makes glide really collaborative and it connects to these broader ecosystems of existing data data sources okay yeah i really like that you you put a glide in the middle because your web app and your mobile right so you're exactly in the middle between those two but here's the thing a lot of people ask me hey can i build mobile native apps with glide because glide is cool okay i have my app but can i put it in the app store kind of obvious question right but you cannot right so what are your plans in that regard we don't have plans to support the app store um it's uh it's not the type of customer that glide is focused on glide is mostly interested in people who don't want to go to the app store because they're making apps that aren't appropriate for the app store we call these apps for work or private apps most software in the world is not in the app store the app store is this very small sliver of software that's public facing open sign up and trying to get millions of users for example we're interested in the software for a business that has 50 employees or 500 customers and they want to create something very specific and custom for their use case and not we are actually not interested in the entrepreneur who thinks they have an idea for a better twitter or instagram um bubble is interested in users who want to build the next twitter yeah so if you want to build something with a billion users um glide is not going to uh we're not focused on that yet maybe we'll get there but we're more interested in these sort of high value niche custom specialized apps that aren't for broad distribution and product we're more interested in in private okay now i understand your pricing because i wanted to ask you because i checked your pricing and it kind of tells you a lot of good story about what the target customer will be because i obviously care about something you call private signing which means that only people that i allow to sign in right could sign in would be which would be like an internal app you know you can protect this thing and that starts forty dollars a month right plus two dollars for each user now if i have a lot of users like a lot of users then that would be ultra expensive but now you kind of clarified why that is the case because you are actually targeting more like internal company internal company apps that maybe help productivity health discovery right yeah yeah a company paying two dollars per employee for some custom piece of software that they didn't have to spend a hundred thousand dollars to build is a steal right but if you're an entrepreneur and you have no money to spend on your project and you want 10 000 people in a private community to talk about no code that's twenty thousand dollars a month on glide um so that's probably not something you're gonna pay for we do have volume pricing if you have a lot of users you can talk to us and we'll make it work um but no we're if you're if you have this cool idea for a new private community and there's no business plan um that's not the tool that we're trying to help you all right so now that we have basically clarified what client where that is positioned also from the point of view of what kind of technology you can create right because you're basically going to create mobile web technology right with it you're going to export that also the pricing is clear what kind of apps do people create also just note that we we want to change our pricing we it's kind of it's kind of confusing now it's our only our second design of our pricing system um we had our initial pricing and then we have this public private pricing and we want to do something that's more all you can eat create as many apps as you want uh with a clearer way to think about it um and we're working on that for next week okay i'm looking forward to that um and what kind of direction will that go what do you want to improve on um well we just want it to be easier to understand okay and and right now our pricing is for each app you have to decide whether or not to upgrade it all right so now you want to have okay just to make as many as you want um but uh if you have a lot of no code listeners a lot of them will will say like david why don't you guys make a plan that's seventy dollars a month and i can have unlimited we're not going to do that i'm sorry because unlimited is is potentially very large yeah it's harmful for you guys businesses have to host it and everything right yeah yeah that's a lot of people don't realize is like software is not free um to run or even to build right um and uh so if you make an app with tens of thousands of users like that could cost a thousand dollars per day like the costs grow facebook and twitter if you want to create the next twitter um it's very expensive to run twitter it's not free right um so our pricing model has to sort of scale with use so that's what we're absolutely actually uh startup advice right because this is not just for no code it's actually for startups right they're starting something and no code is super helpful okay uh for that right because your prototype but startup advice uh wrapping up with david just said um i mean you have to keep in mind that whenever you create any pricing and you make something unlimited or you make something lifetime or whatever god knows something bad like this then you have to pay the price for the data center because they will charge you anyway okay so then you're screwed right because you can't change you already told the guys that they get it for free for very cheap forever no good right so don't do that um so i totally appreciate that but um what kind of apps do people create with client okay so yeah their web apps uh they're for businesses cool so give me some ideas what can i create um well a really exciting example uh just two weeks ago was pga's ryder cup and they're one of our enterprise customers this is a huge international golf tournament in sheboygan wisconsin and it was usa versus eu and they made glide apps to scan people in and out scan their badges as they come and go from the grandstands and to to count the number of people entering the different parts of the tournament to make sure that they were not over capacity and to run they're lost and found so this is an example of a business they have what we call a field ops use case which is what we kind of specialize in with our mobile our mobile focus so they have employees in in the field out of the office on their feet on ipads and mobile devices using sensors uh like location and time stamps and taking pictures and doing scans that's a very popular use of glide and if you go if you take a look on our website we have all these templates of the common use cases and one of our template galleries is called apps for work and that's where you can find the most common business uses of glide sort of inventory tracking personnel hr delivery is a very big one tracking deliveries giving truck drivers ipads and mobile phones running glide glide kind of makes your the spreadsheet you're already using in the business more open to updating by more people in a highly controlled way so if you have like a thousand delivery drivers in your food delivery business for example you can't really share a google sheet with all 1000 of them and say hey every time you make a delivery can you just check off this road it's going to be messy you know they're outside and they're going to make mistakes and someone's going to delete the whole thing by accident but with glide you can just make a glide app right on top of that and share with 10 000 people and all they'll see is the check box and all they can press is the check box and it's highly controlled uh and it's not brittle right so that that's the kind of patterns that we see yeah i mean with 10 000 people i think the pricing will be painful but you're right of course uh yeah that would be so that's the basically the idea of of protecting the google sheet or the excel that you're going to have in future right i'm protecting it from people messing it up right putting a user interface on top of it um which is glad in this case okay that's very interesting and of course i mean i will show on the screen that's at a high level that's what software is software is a user interface usually on top of a database and you could just not build software and you can tell your users to update the database they're going to break it and it's not exactly there is no validation and everything going to go yeah pretty much stuff um right so uh what i want to know next like okay so you're saying you you don't want to focus on the native app aspects okay cool but what's what's on your roadmap okay where where is this whole thing going so before you answer it let me tell you a tiny story i have a few friends that use glide and they are mostly funny enough actually there are financial advisors find you know people helping other people with finance and well they use a lot of google sheets there right so and then they created apps on top of glide and i asked them before we started this interview i said hey i have david with me what shall i ask him and they had some crazy questions which they're gonna all come here but they also said that if client goes down the drain for whatever reason would not happen then their business will be in jeopardy because they already built the basically the basis of their business on top of glide being financial people using sheets a lot putting the app on top of that right which is really important so you guys became very important for these people's lives so what is on your roadmap those people want to understand will you be around do you have funding rounds do you you know what i'm saying do you know what are your plans right because they are they are building their business on top of you guys um well first of all thank you for to your friends for building your business on top of clyde uh yeah we we've we've seen this quite a bit i've seen a financial firm with like a hundred apps where they make one app per client and uh you know if you're managing wealth for people you know twenty thirty dollars a month or even two dollars a month for one of those clients is again it's uh like a rounding error that's not a significant cost whatsoever especially if your financial advisors can like customize the app on a per customer basis which glide lets you do that's that's a superpower that no one has even had before um but yes glide is gonna be around for the long term um our mission is to create a billion software developers by 2030 uh which presupposes will be operating until 2030. um yeah i would say uh yeah glide's doing great we have many customers we have a real business and uh we're not a ephemeral startup that's going to disappear all right so so right so are you planning any kind of getting any kind of funding right in order to finance some bigger plans that you have and you know also what are those bigger plans um yeah like any startup um we uh we consider how to fund our business and we have a lot of great options uh especially uh in today's fundraising environment um but i have no concrete plans that i feel and are worth sharing all right all right and so the the product line okay so in what direction would it go in the future right so okay you have a lot of cool features you kind of mentioned before you have qr code scanning right because you said that that's the use case um you have i'm not sure do you have gps location or something like that right so you can build so that's cool right you can build apps you know that's it opens up a lot of use cases um so what are you planning for the future uh for the product right what kind of new features are you having in the pipeline well a major one is actually a whole new product not an addition to glide apps but uh our next generation product called glide pages went into beta this morning at 8am pacific okay so it's available now if you just go to glide you can create a new when you click new you used to always create an app and it would ask you which data source but now when you click new you'll choose app or page or mobile app or web page right and the language is a little bit tricky because by web page we mean something quite powerful with search and data updates and actions all the powers of the glide app but it's oriented towards the browser and the desktop because we learn from our customers that they always pair a glide app with some sort of desktop interface whether it's a stretched out glide app on a tablet on your laptop or some sort of admin interface or editing the spreadsheet itself there's always a component on a traditional pc like laptop or desktop so glide pages is just a it's a new version of glide that targets uh that design environment that that formula very nice so hey you just announced a new procedure very nice major new area yeah okay yeah we're it's not launched yet so just keep it quiet but we invite everyone to try and give us feedback on our forum um but we're gonna make a lot more noise about it in the fall later okay and what and how is it different from like stretching an existing glide amp to a desktop kind of experience can you what is the difference yeah so all the fundamental building blocks the components that you build your glide page out of have been designed for large screens they're fully responsive so for example the the main the main um the most important component that we think people will use today and glide in glide apps it's usually called an inline list but we have a new one for glide pages called the collection which can make this big wide grid of images and actions and it's responsive when you resize it takes advantage of a large screen and another special thing about glide pages is because it's keyboard and mouse there's a very high data action density so you can have one card that has a menu with five actions in it and you click on them they do different things you program them separately so i think that you know your typical glide page will have three to five to ten times more actions because it's it's less about consuming or recording what you do on a mobile device and it's more about administering updating and doing a lot more work interesting um so glide pages will specialize they're more powerful right so hey listen after this interview i would jump on it and test it in case i didn't even know that that exists but can i imagine it like i can have multiple like of those elements next to each other because i have more space right i can arrange them in a grid in general right i can put like a map here and a form there and like a picture here and so on and then um i have some kind of no no okay no no so um we that that's another big difference between like glide and bubble for example or even a dollo um a dollo and bubble have general and web flow too they have these sort of general two-dimensional layouts uh layout systems which are pretty good for people who know how to design uh but ninety percent of people don't know how to design their app they just wanna do it quickly and have it look really great um so glide is siding with the ninety percent not the ten percent um and we we still manage more of the design process but we are interested well first of all glide pages do show more data at once they're more data dense um we have a component called i think it's called buttons or button bar and you can put like six buttons next to each other which makes sense on a big screen but on a mobile phone six buttons in a row is not correct um but we will over time make glide's layout system a 2d layout system more powerful um but not yet um but there is one exciting new concept in glide pages which is a container so you can make a container with child elements and you can apply like a visibility condition to the entire container or styling to the entire container so we're starting to add some more power to layout system but no you can't say i want a map here and a button here and then on top of the map i want a picture yeah no i was not expecting that much flexibility but just a grid and i can drop in just into the grid so they can be next to each other because i thought i don't know you have more space but it doesn't matter right it's a beta i love to test it i'm already looking for it let's finish the interview i can test it no i'm just kidding uh so i have a few more questions right so we know like if you if you have that feedback leave it to us after you try pages on the forum because we have some mock-ups of how to do sort of a multi-column thing where you can put stuff side by side it's not in the beta but maybe you could make it for launch we have some ideas about how that could be yeah who knows but yeah first i have to check it out in order to give any feedback that makes sense but i'm very excited about it so thank you for announcing it um and well this video will go live people check it out right oops uh so make sure your servers can real you can just remember you can just type glide.new in your browser and you'll you'll be able to create a new app or page very nice i love it all right so i also want to talk to you about the overall no code space do you see yourself as a no code app or do you do you even like this classification and you know how will no code evolve over time and change the way we do things um yeah glide is definitely a no code app and for some reason that i haven't figured out i don't like i don't like this no code phrase or i don't like the conversations that are the questions that people like to tend to talk about in no code like no code versus low code and should you code i love programming i have a degree in computer programming it's like one of my great joys in life is writing code and it's part of the inspiration for making glide is like the style of thinking that you do when you write code and what and the things that it lets you create are so special i wanted to give more people access to that so i really prefer to like have a positive view of what coding means and how it can be shared and to spread the at least the feelings that you get when you when you do coding so um i'm not crazy about calling glide no code i think uh i think learning to code is a great idea it's a superpower um it's just shouldn't be required to make like an app for your hr team right or like for a financial advisor to give their client some beautiful portal where they can they can see uh information about their portfolio that shouldn't require reinventing the wheel every time which is still how software development yes i agree i mean on your website i mean on your start page because that's what i was checking the word no code comes up only once right so that's why i was asking it's not like you know all over the place some tools really wanna classify themselves like this i tend to agree with you i'm also a tech person actually i'm a tech person i can't code um i just think that you know most people can't code and they will never right they will never learn to code this too much hassle and they have other things to do right so i i see the same way as you do that they shouldn't be required to develop and also this this digital space that we have created with the internet is growing very fast right and especially in the recent years and most people still can't create for the web right they can only consume mostly consume right and i think that's uh it's a beauty right because there are many great ideas out there i mean i have interviews with people on the channel that have created incredible stuff as as doctors for example right their own application for classifying patients and wow crazy right like go and create that with code it will take you a lot of a lot of money right but also a lot of explanation about hey i want this like that and this should work like this but you have to give this knowledge that you already have as a specialist you have to give it to some developer so that that person can then create your app what i really like about the no code tools or the the tools that don't require you the point and click basically is that you don't have to to hand over the knowledge to other people so they can finally create what you need in or you can just do it yourself and i think that makes the process much faster and also writing code is probably the easiest and best part of making traditional software there are all these other things you have to do when you make software for example shipping your code to the servers that serve it on the internet that's often called deployment that's not writing code but it's this arcane and kind of not very exciting necessary step to take the code from the laptop where the developer makes it and put it on an internet server and make sure it stays online as we saw everyone learned a painful lesson about how servers can go offline even when you have armies of professional coders i'm referring to facebook that wasn't really a code error but it was had something to do with like routers and configuration and stuff that you shouldn't have to really be concerned with if you're just trying to make software for your business so um yeah i love code but i like you know no deployment no version control no security and by no security we're trying to make light apps the most secure software uh that you could build but we you shouldn't have to be a security expert to make secure software for your financial services business for example yeah that makes a lot of sense yeah do you actually still find yourself coding anything or it's over oh yeah um especially since we have an experimental feature called code columns in glide where you can make a custom computed column in the data editor that uses code um and i've been having a lot of fun with that like excel or like google sheets with the equals and then formulas or even more anything so i've implemented a column that runs lisp oh i've implemented a column that runs excel formulas and one that runs javascript and one that runs jq which is a sort of data processing query language um so to make some really powerful columns that developers might be more interested in so the more advanced glide users none of these things are required to use glide is kind of the sort of frontier that we're exploring of how you could extend glide very nice actually but the key thing is like you make one of these code columns and then you can share it with people who don't know how it's made they just paste the name in and they get the functionality so okay so it's like a marketplace for those kind of things then in your app it will be eventually um you can you can kind of see them on your own if you go to column.sph is the little development server that we've set up to work on these and you can play with them guys um yeah you can open it right now if you like column okay cool and uh these are all the ones i've made and um they generate there's ones that generate qr codes um there's one that generates uh branded artwork that is compatible with glide's new brand so we can make avatars and stuff let's see very nice okay wow cool i really love that you do these experiments so how well do you work with users with existing users when you work on these features and ask their feedback before adding it actually to the to the product what's your process there well there's a huge range of processes for different features i mean there's a feature that a an enterprise customer might ask us for and then there's a feature that we might dream up as being sort of a far future idea um and um yeah so a big range this this experimental code column feature it's even in the product it's called experimental you have to click a button i understand this is an experiment whenever you use it it's heavily guarded as experimental and in that case that was that came out of one of our fun cycle projects every six months everyone gets to work on the thing that they think is most fun instead of the business agenda and my co-founder and cto mark made these code columns they were originally called yes code column because yes code is kind of our jokey the opposite of no code is yes code um so he made this yes code column and i said i don't want too many jokes in our product interface so let's call it experimental code even though i like yes code um there's even the hell yes which takes right now yeah yeah hell yes code um let's glide actually send javascript code into the column to get evaluated and then come out as it's quite wild yeah no that's really nice i think uh i do have some friends that are developers and use glide as well and they will love that stuff and also anybody who helps out anyone who uses client and they have some they want to solve some complex issue right and so like yeah i can imagine in a company that hr marketing admin right they have some ideas they they they come very far right with glide but then let's say they get stuck for something then they get a developer and the developer finds out that you can do this kind of stuff it's really nice yeah yeah not a smart move yeah we want to we want to make sure that glides has a great story for the developers in your company who want to integrate glide in a special way with their systems and extend its capabilities in ways that we at centralized glide could never have expected ahead of time right um that we want to have a really strong story there i'm speaking about story uh one of my questions is um do you have like the craziest story where a customer used glide to do something that you have never expected um yeah unfortunately i think i've told these stories a couple of times but maybe on on podcasts that no one no one's seen but um i think glad was a month old and a sheriff in the county that i actually live in now at the time i lived in the next county over but a sheriff that was an hour away from where i lived um who was non-technical heard about glide on flipboard from like a techcrunch announcement and he made an emergency app with resources for this big storm that was coming to the county and they shared it on facebook and like 40 000 people got the app and got road closures and all the alerts and he would keep it updated and so he couldn't code he learned about it and in one day he made this happen then two days later 40 000 people used it there's like um wow leapfrogging how software works today it's not getting someone who can't code to have the exact same abilities and power as someone who can it was like a quantum leap in what was going on that was like oh wow like we have an opportunity to make something much better than how software works not just raise everyone to the level of a software developer right so that was amazing and then um yeah like that one that was like the first major eye-opening thing where we were like oh my whoa like that that's some powerful stuff yeah i'm pretty sure that was uh great for your employees for you guys right very motivational okay so are you guys um hiring you're searching for talent for your business yeah always if you go to glideapps.com jobs you'll find the the roles that we have open right now so what are you searching for roughly we especially need i'll just plug this one we need a contractor right now to help with our build system so if any of the more technical people who watch this if you love making uh webpack and react and web applications build much better we're having a little bit of a headache uh on our development team use your help yeah perfect very nice a good shout out i think uh all right i think glide apps is a a glide actually it's a it's a great uh it's a great tool uh it seems to be a very fun company the way at least the way you picture it so hey might make sense to apply all right so um having said that i think uh that we're reaching kind of the end of the interview and what are your final words you want to leave the audience with oh my final words um yeah well like i said we have a new product in beta glide pages and i would love for people to type glide.new into your browser and you'll be able to create a new thing in glide and it used to be just apps but now it's things now you can create many different types of things and try glide pages and visit our community forum and give us your feedback and tell us how we can make it better so we can really really make something spectacular to launch at the end of this year cheers man [Music] having said all of that i do have a few more videos that you should be checking out for example this video here that is one of my early videos about how to create a spending tracking application with glide and here this interview that i had with emmanuel the founder and ceo of bubble which is the most popular local tool and with all of this good stuff i see you in the next video

Channel: Michael Ionita

Views: 625

Keywords: nocode, apps, launch, startup, create, tool, easy, fast, howto, how to, business, learn, app, no-code, build, website

Id: smHD_H-CISs

Length: 32min 26sec (1946 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 19 2021