Bring Your Own Product-Market Fit’: How Glide Helps Customers Succeed with Internal Tools

During the Ryder Cup, the PGA’s operations team encountered a problem: volunteers couldn’t count incoming crowds fast enough using single increment buttons. Instead of waiting for a development cycle, they modified their Glide app on-site, adding new counting options that were deployed the next morning. This story exemplifies how Glide approaches customer success: enabling teams to find and implement their own solutions rapidly.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, CEO David Siegel revealed Glide’s unique concept of “BYOPMF” – Bring Your Own Product-Market Fit – and how it shapes their approach to customer success.

Beyond Traditional Activation

Glide sets an unusually high bar for customer activation. “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. “I haven’t casually encountered an activation metric that is more stringent than that.”

This metric reflects a fundamental truth: success isn’t just about building an app – it’s about creating something that delivers real value to an organization.

The BYOPMF Philosophy

“That’s what our customers need to find within their own companies is product market fit for the solutions they’re building,” David notes. This philosophy acknowledges that internal tools need to solve specific organizational problems in ways that work for their unique context.

Empowering the Right Teams

Rather than targeting traditional developers, Glide focuses on enabling operational teams. “We mostly see people in IT operations, HR, marketing and sales teams,” David shares. “The less technical people in a company, people who would say that they are not comfortable writing code, are hugely successful on Glide.”

This approach aligns with their belief that developers should focus on core business innovation. “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.”

From Success to Scale

The effectiveness of this approach becomes evident in how customers expand their usage. “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,” David notes.

This organic growth within organizations led Glide to develop a hybrid support model. “We supplement that with sales assist,” David explains. “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 When It Matters

For critical implementations, Glide isn’t afraid to provide intensive support. David himself attended the Ryder Cup to ensure the PGA’s success, allowing them to develop and deploy new features in real-time as needs emerged. This hands-on approach helps customers achieve their specific goals while providing Glide with valuable insights into real-world usage patterns.

Building for Scale

To support widespread adoption, Glide provides templates and reference implementations. But unlike traditional templates, these serve as starting points for customization. “You need to create software to solve problem x,” David explains. This focus on solving specific problems rather than providing generic solutions helps customers achieve their own product-market fit faster.

For B2B founders helping customers implement complex solutions, Glide’s BYOPMF approach offers valuable lessons:

• Set activation metrics that reflect real value creation
• Enable customers to find their own fit within their organization
• Target teams that own the problems rather than just technical teams
• Provide hands-on support at critical moments
• Create starting points that accelerate customization

The key is recognizing that customer success in enterprise software isn’t about pushing a single solution – it’s about enabling teams to discover and implement what works for their specific context.