Glide, a groundbreaking startup, is on a mission to revolutionize the mobile app development process within the enterprise sector, making it more efficient and cost-effective. The team behind Glide, a participant in the Y Combinator Winter 2019 class, is committed to simplifying app development by starting with a spreadsheet, and effortlessly converting the contents into a highly functional mobile app.
Before embarking on their Glide quest, co-founders David Siegel, Jason Smith, Mark Probst, and Antonio Garcia Aprea worked together at Xamarin, a cross-platform mobile development company acquired by Microsoft for $500 million in 2016. Their experience at Xamarin exposed them to the challenges and pain points organizations faced when developing mobile apps. After completing their two-year stint at Microsoft, the four founders joined forces to create their own startup to address these issues.
We saw how desperate some of the world's largest companies were to have a mobile strategy, and also how painful and expensive it is to develop mobile apps. And we haven't seen significant progress on that 10 years after the smartphone debuted, Siegel stated in an interview with TechCrunch.
The founders conducted extensive research on nearly 100 no-code tools but remained unsatisfied with the options available. They eventually opted for the trusty spreadsheet, a widely used business tool, as the starting point for their mobile app builder, beginning with Google Sheets integration. This choice presented a unique opportunity to combine the unrivaled success of spreadsheets as a programming model and smartphones as the most successful computers of all time.
With Glide, users can quickly create an app from a Google Sheet's contents without coding, simply by adding information. The resulting app can be customized and shared as a progressive web app, allowing anyone to load it in a browser without downloading it, or published as a native app to app stores. Furthermore, the two-way connection between the app and the spreadsheet ensures that any updates made in either location are reflected in the other.
The Glide founders enlisted in Y Combinator upon the advice of trusted advisors, including former Xamarin CEO and current GitHub Chief Executive, Nat Friedman. The program provided them with valuable insights and access to a vast network, which proved instrumental in the growth of their startup. A key lesson learned by the Glide team was the importance of actively engaging with customers and avoiding the trap of becoming solely focused on building the tool.
Glide is now live, allowing users to create apps using their own spreadsheet data or by leveraging the available templates as a starting point. A free tier option is also available for those who wish to test the platform without any obligations. As Glide continues to gain traction, other no-code solutions, such as AppMaster, are also transforming the landscape of mobile app development, offering various capabilities for a seamless app-building experience.
