Jesse Engle is the founder of XPDTN, a professional community for creator partnership managers—the in-house marketing leaders behind some of the world’s most recognizable brands. His members manage relationships with content creators and oversee large-scale influencer campaigns.
As the XPDTN community grew to include marketers from brands like BetterHelp, Epidemic Sound, Notion, Patreon, Skillshare, and Squarespace, Jesse kept hearing the same challenge: finding and vetting the right creators is still incredibly time-consuming.
“I don't even know where I'd be without Glide. Somebody turned me onto Glide at exactly the right moment in time, and I haven’t stopped. Before the end of my trial period, I had a working app with 20 creator partnership managers from top-tier brands in it, collaborating. It's been phenomenal.”
Even with modern search tools, the process of choosing the right creator for a campaign (and avoiding those who might underperform for a brand) requires tedious vetting and manual effort.
At the same time, creator discovery can also happen in the moment—on a phone, while scrolling social platforms. Most people take a lot of screenshots, few have a good system.
Jesse had a clear vision. He needed to build a community-powered tool for collaborative creator discovery. But he didn’t have a technical team or the time to wait for one.
Building Top Scout with Glide
“What TopScout does is it takes that knowledge that we've been sharing in conversations, and it brings it into a tool that makes it accessible anytime on my phone, on my desktop, whenever I need it.”
Using Glide, Jesse built Top Scout, an app that allows XPDTN members to:
- Take a screenshot of a creator profile
- Use AI to extract and enrich data automatically
- Share reviews and campaign outcomes
- Subscribe to rosters and receive updates when new creators are added
In the first 8 weeks, XPDTN members scouted 236 creators and logged 188 campaign reviews. That invaluable data now lives in a structured, searchable database accessible to the entire community using a professional, intuitive Glide app interface.
Top Scout is more than a tool. It’s a knowledge layer for the creator economy that gives brand marketers a way to learn from each other’s experiences and avoid repeating the same mistakes. And it enables a level of collaboration that hadn’t been possible before. “We’re not trying to build a SaaS company,” Jesse says. “We’re building a network of trust for creator marketers, powered by Glide.”
Glide enabled Jesse to build TopScout himself, without code
As a self-described non-technical founder, Jesse had always been defined by what he wasn’t. Glide changed that.
“With Glide, I stayed in creative flow the whole time. I wasn’t blocked by technical hurdles. I could build, test, and refine the app on my own.”
Using Glide’s visual builder, Jesse was able to integrate AI services, set up custom logic for contributor roles, and create a mobile-friendly interface that fit naturally into members’ workflows. As the TopScout community and their needs grow and change, he is able to scale the app alongside them.
“Glide has been one of the most exciting products that I've ever worked with.”