Optimize IS just won the award for Airtable Partner of the Year, selected from over 1,500 agencies that have applied to the program. The business is flourishing, counting Fortune 100 companies as clients, and building multi-hundred-thousand-dollar projects that span multiple years. Their team has tackled over 700 projects in the past year and a half, and that growth is only accelerating.
While their core niche is building Airtable databases, they have another tool in their arsenal that has been critical in achieving that growth - Glide.
Glide enables the Optimize IS team to create high-quality interfaces and mobile applications for the Airtable databases they’re building for clients—significantly increasing the value they could provide those businesses. With Glide, their databases can go a lot further.
“Once you achieve that level of value level for companies, not only will you have fun in what you do, but the money will just follow.”
“I feel really lucky to have found this combination of tools,” explained Charlie Melendez, co-founder of Optimize IS with his partner Ben Green, “It's completely changed my life.”
We sat down with Charlie to talk about databases, interfaces, and what building a successful no code agency can look like.
Tell me a little bit about Optimize IS
We have a team of about 35 developers at this point, focusing on all things no code. We have clients who have been with us for multiple years now, working with us week after week, and we're building out massive, beautiful systems for teams in the thousands.
You have to stay competitive in this world. It's a very conscious decision where you want to niche down as an agency. In our case, Airtable is our niche.
But surrounding Airtable is a tool like Glide that we have to be good at in order to amplify our value. It turns two-week projects into six-week projects or even more. Glide very quickly became one of my tools of choice for the speed and complexity at which you could build and the user experiences that you can create.
Why did you initially adopt Glide as a primarily Airtable-focused agency?
“When you're building systems for businesses, you reach a certain point where you need a really nice interface for your clients and their teams.”
Airtable didn't have certain interface layers that we needed. That’s where Glide initially won me over—because there aren't that many really effective competitors for the interface layer. It was so exciting to me when I found Glide because I could use my Airtable data and turn it into actionable, live-feeling apps for my clients.
For clients who need on-the-go access to their data and workflows, Glide definitely excelled. I don't think there's any competition at this point in terms of a mobile-forward platform. And I don’t want to limit it to just mobile because what you’re building is really one app that’s both desktop and mobile.
It has really well-thought-out things such as permissioning—better than most other no code tools—where you can permission based on user attributes or based on record attributes. That's something that other platforms still haven't been able to crack.
How does Glide help you serve your clients better?
Every app has three layers - data, automation, and interface. When you know how to convert your client's business needs into all of those layers, it becomes a much stickier experience
If you don't build a proper, beautiful interface layer, people will still function in your database, it will just be very clunky. Focusing on the interface is often one of the reasons a certain project will go the distance and become a seven-month project instead of a two-month project.
“Not only do we solve their initial business needs, but we inspire them to see the different tools their team could be using to interact with their database. ”
We’ll show them that they can also create a client portal where clients can log in and see their orders and your new inventory. That opens up a whole new world that wouldn't have been possible with just the data and automation layers. It's the interface layer that's leading the expansion of that project.
And then, as Glide enhances its value and releases new features, we go back to our clients and say, "Hey, there's this new feature that you can utilize." That helps us upsell them and take them to the next level.
“Being able to show them lots of different use cases very quickly will push what would be a two-month project into a five-month project or a three-week project into a six-week project.”
And that's really all we can do, right? If you can turn the singles into doubles and doubles into triples, then it's good for everybody. It's good for you as a business and it’s good for your client’s business. As an agency, what makes us sleep happy at night is that our clients are giving us good feedback on what we've delivered and the value that we've delivered. We really want to wow them, and this tool lets us do that.
Glide has also done a great job working on its automation and data layers. In the automation layer, there are so many endpoints, especially in AI, where you can transcribe text, turn audio and images into text, and add prompts. You can connect to a lot of different data sources without having to leave and go to a tool like Make or Zapier.
You can stay within the Glide environment and build a fully robust tool that utilizes the data layer, the automation layer, and the interface layer, all wrapped up into one, which is very beneficial. It saves on costs, and it makes you look like a superstar to these clients.
Where do you see Glide helping your agency grow in the future?
We're starting to see a whole new world of projects with Glide. I think more and more very large enterprises are seeing the writing on the wall in terms of no code and how much it can deliver at a very quick pace compared to legacy systems.
We've had very large companies come to us with a new business segment where they just can't use their legacy systems. There are whole new processes and schemas, so they're literally starting from scratch. This is going to keep happening for the next 20 to 30 years—these teams are going to be grasping at straws, figuring out what tool to use and what workflow to use.
The beauty is that we come in and can very nimbly and modularly build what they need so that even as they build new workflows five years from now, we can attach them modularly to what was built prior. We're not trying to boil the ocean or build everything within one system. We're building in a very modular fashion that allows for the flexibility and change that all these companies require moving forward.
Glide is key to this because it allows you to create micro apps for these teams for the use case that they need now, right now. Then, as new requirements come up, you can modularly add a new table, a new feature, or a new page. It's just as flexible as Airtable; it's the same concept—it's no code. It's completely modular.
“You're not stuck in a box where you have to fit your business into our schema. It's the opposite. It's a blank slate. It's the sky's the limit. ”
That’s why it’s such a good compliment to what we build in Airtable.
Can you tell us about some Glide apps you’ve built for clients?
There have been a lot of different types of interfaces for different teams, sometimes at the same company. I built one for a very large Fortune 100 company that helps its marketing team track all of its campaigns and the content creation related to those campaigns.
We also built one massive app that actually allowed this client to triple in size—physically, their warehouse space tripled in size–and more than 2.5x their revenues and income based on the efficiencies created through this Glide interface.
A common scenario a Glide mobile interface would help with is managing inventory on a warehouse floor. Say a customer walks in looking for the small stool they ordered. Without the app, you would have to literally walk through the warehouse and spend time, sometimes hours, looking for a stool amongst a warehouse of boxes.
Now, everything is organized. The whole warehouse has bin locations, so every time I move an asset, I can see where I put it. When the client walks in, I pull up the client’s order, I pull up their bar stool, and I know exactly where to walk in the warehouse.
“You're saving minutes, even hours, and that's just one part of the operation.”
You can see how powerful it is to organize your data and have it in the hands of your warehouse personnel and not on a computer somewhere that they have to walk to.
Any final thoughts?
If you do the right job, you have the right ethics, and you have an accessible price point, these clients will stick with you forever, you know? It's a whole new world and it's a whole new value add at a discounted rate compared to traditional development.
“In one instance, somebody came in with a budget of about three to four weeks. They've now gone over a year and a half, and they don't want to stop.”
This is one of my favorite clients. He's really addicted—in a good way, he tells me. It's so much fun to work with him because he brings me back examples every day of things that we’ve built and how much time they're saving him. Just one app we built has already paid for the whole project several times over, just based on materials savings.
Our goal is to put that bug into our clients—here's how many things you can automate or enhance and make more efficient. Once they get that bug, these clients will be with us for their whole professional lives, hypothetically, for 10, 15, 20, or 30 years.
I'm like a prophet everywhere I go. I can't stop talking about it. if you actually go in this direction, it will change your life, and you'll become more valuable.
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