Glide’s Enterprise Playbook: Scaling from Individual Users to Company-Wide Deployments
“Hi, I built an app on Glide, and 200 people at my company are using it.” In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Glide CEO David Siegel shared how this common conversation opener signals the start of their enterprise expansion process. But turning organic adoption into enterprise-wide deployments requires more than just waiting for users to call.
The Foundation: Organic Growth Within Organizations
Rather than targeting IT decision-makers directly, Glide focused on empowering operational teams. “We mostly see people in IT operations, HR, marketing and sales teams,” David explains. “The less technical people in a company, people who would say that they are not comfortable writing code, are hugely successful on Glide.”
From Individual Success to Enterprise Interest
The pathway to enterprise deals often starts with successful individual implementations. David describes how these conversations typically begin: “We’ll have a first conversation with the customer and they’ll say, yeah, hi, I built an app on Glide, and 200 people at my company are using it, running x, y and z function on it.”
The Sales Assist Evolution
Recognizing the need to support this organic growth, Glide developed a hybrid approach. “We supplement that with sales assist,” David notes. “Our sales team assists are standing by when people inquire about our enterprise tier or we see a very special customer getting traction on our business tier.”
High-Touch Enterprise Support
For strategic enterprise deployments, Glide isn’t afraid to provide intensive support. David himself attended the Ryder Cup to ensure the PGA’s success with their implementation. This hands-on approach helps demonstrate enterprise readiness while gathering valuable insights about enterprise needs.
Positioning for Enterprise Adoption
Glide carefully positions itself as complementary to existing development teams. “Great developers want to work on sort of the innovative breakthrough technologies that their company is building and not the sort of the day to day operation stuff that we want to automate with software,” David explains.
This positioning helps overcome potential resistance from IT teams by focusing on empowering business units rather than replacing developers.
Enterprise-Grade Infrastructure
To support large-scale deployments, Glide built robust backend capabilities. “Even if you pick your own spreadsheet, we’re running back end services to help email your customers and your employees, authenticate them, do the synchronization, host the files you upload,” David shares.
They also provide enterprise-specific solutions: “If you want to scale to millions of rows, spreadsheets can’t do that. So you’ll pick big tables. Is the native database that we offer.”
The Template Strategy for Enterprise
To accelerate enterprise adoption, Glide developed templates for common business scenarios. Rather than asking enterprises to imagine possibilities, they can preview pre-built solutions that address specific departmental needs.
Measuring Enterprise Success
Glide maintains high standards for measuring success. “Our activation metric on Glide, we don’t consider someone who signed up for Glide to be active until they’ve built published, shared an app that has two or more monthly active users,” David explains. This focus on actual usage helps ensure enterprise deployments deliver real value.
Key Lessons for B2B Founders
Glide’s enterprise scaling strategy offers several valuable insights:
- Enable and support organic growth within organizations
- Develop a sales assist model that can identify and nurture potential enterprise customers
- Be willing to provide high-touch support for strategic deployments
- Position your product as complementary to existing teams and systems
- Build enterprise-grade infrastructure that can scale with customer needs
- Provide templates and reference implementations that accelerate adoption
- Measure success based on actual usage and value delivery
The key is balancing bottom-up growth with top-down support, ensuring both individual users and enterprise decision-makers see clear value in broader deployment. As David notes, this pragmatic approach has led to “many thousands of customers across every type of use case and company size and company that you could think of.”