By Markus Walter Co-authored by Jerry Teng

TLDR on Glide 

Q: How many businesses lack the technical employees, capital, and/or time to create an app?

The answer? A whole lot of them. 

It might not be intuitive to think that businesses need to make internal apps as we generally consider apps for front facing purposes, like a shopping app for consumers. But that’s where Glide come in. To solve the challenge of making internal apps that businesses need to operate.

Users of Glide have created over 1,000,000 apps with the platform, pretty good traction considering the general fear of trying to make an app (people tend to think of it as a lengthy & daunting process). Adding to this, over 500,000 people & companies have used the platform (including companies like Cazoo or ITV).

Whilst Glide’s curious take on the B2B market is and has been promising for a while now, we can’t ignore the nature of such a competitive industry. Competitors such as AppSheet (Acquired by Google in 2020), Bubble, AppGyver (Acquired by SAP in 2021), and Clappia all have their different versions of what is, essentially, a similar product.

(Turns out that when Google acquires a startup, it makes it integrable with the whole ecosystem lol)

Now you might be wondering, “If there is so much competition what is it that makes Glide…Glide?”(Average beta question) - Glide allows users to make their apps by pulling data from Google Sheets, Excel, or Airtable. Essentially, you can turn a database into an app. Pretty cool huh?

Now I don’t regularly say things are pretty cool lightly, actually, I might do… But regardless I want you to understand the power of it. When you think of internal applications, they all run on company data (duh?), and it turns out all of that data can generally be exported to a spreadsheet with live updates. For example, think of internal inventory management, essentially, you make your employee's UX much better and improve efficiency as a whole, resulting in what I like to call, “more green” (referring to profit in case you are a boomer) for the company.

Now leading on the topic of profit, let’s talk about Glide’s business model. As with all SaaS, they charge a monthly subscription to use their platform. For the ones that are not super experienced, having a monthly subscription fee is a massive W (again W means Win if you are a boomer), especially if you know your customers will use their internal applications for many years. 

Now let’s run some quick math to see if it is advantageous for businesses to use Glide. 

The average cost of developing an average complexity app for companies is roughly between $120,000 - $170,000. 

Assuming a company pays for Glide’s Business plan ($249 / mo), and that it uses the app for 5 full years it would cost $249 x 12 x 5 = $14,940.

Still much cheaper versus the cost of outsourcing it even when compared to the lower end of the spectrum ($120,000). 

Sure, the app doesn’t build itself and there is the cost of time. However, because it is no-code, anyone can build the app. Businesses no longer have to pay over $50 per hour for a dev. A person on the sales team can create it just as quickly. 

And again, this is just to make 1 app, but Glide’s Business Plan allows its users to make as many as possible (Realistically, I don’t think companies need 200 internal applications but you get my point).

On Glide’s end, the annual revenue per business at the business plan is $249 x 12 = $2988. 

There are roughly 200,000 medium sized companies in the US.

If they are able to sell to 10% of the market, then they can attract an ARR (annual recurring revenue) of 20,000*$2988 = $59,760,000. 

This is based only on the medium business market. They also have an enterprise plan that starts at $799/month as well as an affordable plan for individuals.

With something like Glide, and no-code platforms across many different areas arising every day it makes you think… 

Is the future of hard-core engineers overhyped? 

Regardless, Glide’s future is looking bright to me, and that’s why I’m bringing it to your eyes today.  Not to mention, no-code internal tool builder Retool was last raised at a $3.2 billion valuation. 

Glide is currently hiring a wide range of positions from Data Science Engineers to Content Marketers.

Click on the UwU to view their job postings: (UwU)

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