Glide’s Evolution: How Moving Beyond Pure PLG Unlocked Enterprise Growth

When the PGA needed to modify their tournament operations software during the Ryder Cup, they didn’t file a ticket and wait. They built and deployed the solution on-site, in real-time. This level of enterprise agility didn’t come from Glide’s initial product-led growth strategy – it emerged from a carefully crafted hybrid approach that expanded beyond traditional PLG.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Glide CEO David Siegel revealed how they evolved their go-to-market motion to match the complexity of their product and customer needs.

The PLG Foundation

Glide’s initial growth came from a radically simple promise: “Build an app from a Google sheet in five minutes for free,” David recalls. This clarity drove explosive adoption after their February 2019 launch, with “hundreds of people a day just creating, creating, sharing.”

But as they scaled, they discovered that pure PLG had limitations for their product category.

The BYOPMF Challenge

Glide faced a unique obstacle: their activation metric required users to not just sign up, but to create meaningful solutions. “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 led to what David calls “BYOPMF” – Bring Your Own Product Market Fit: “That’s what our customers need to find within their own companies is product market fit for the solutions they’re building.”

Evolving Beyond Pure PLG

Rather than stubbornly sticking to pure PLG, Glide adapted. “We supplement that with sales assist,” David shares. “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.”

This hybrid approach helped bridge the gap between initial product adoption and successful enterprise implementation. The PGA story exemplifies this evolution – having leadership on-site during critical deployments to ensure success and gather real-time feedback.

The Template Strategy

To solve the discovery challenge inherent in selling novel technology, Glide developed a template-based approach. “They’re not searching for creating apps without code,” David explains. “They’re searching for the field sales app, customizable knowledge base pickup and drop off custom app.”

This strategy helped customers envision specific solutions rather than wrestling with abstract capabilities.

Enterprise Success Through Bottom-Up Growth

The hybrid model proved particularly effective for enterprise expansion. “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. These organic success stories become powerful tools for expanding within organizations.

Maintaining Pragmatic Growth

Glide’s approach to PLG evolution emphasizes pragmatism over dogma. “We’re not dogmatic about PLG… I’m very proud that I think we’re a quite practical company,” David shares. “I think it’s going to take all hands on deck and a hybrid approach to make something like Glide really scale.”

This flexibility has paid off. The platform now serves “hundreds of thousands of people… building millions of apps,” including deployments at major enterprises.

For B2B founders scaling complex products, Glide’s journey offers crucial lessons: While PLG can provide an excellent foundation for growth, being willing to evolve and supplement that foundation with additional go-to-market motions may be crucial for enterprise success. The key is remaining pragmatic about what works, rather than adhering strictly to any single playbook.