Building a marketplace app with Glide

What is it:

Zoomies - Find public group video chats and socialize more during quarantine

What did I learn:

1. Glide feature: Calendar functionality was mobile optimized and easy to use. I thought a key feature that was missing is the ability to add a time to the calendar view. Further, you could not add a submit button on the page to add a meeting or time. I thought that was limited functionality with the Calendar.

In order to add a time, you have to go to another view that had the listings of the meetings and click the "+" sign in the top right part of the app.

2. Glide feature: Speed to ship - This was another app born out of the covid pandemic. During the pandemic because of everyone now working remote and living lives sheltered with stay at home policies, virtual zoom calls became in vogue overnight. Typically reserved for business meetings, now we saw a new behavior by people to use them for social.

What is amazing is these types of overnight shifts rarely happen. To capitalize on this new behavior if you can create solution or technology that organizes this you're solution will be popularized quickly.

The principle here is looking for shifts in behavior of a mass market or a niche group, use no-code to quickly build a solution. No-code gives you the edge to capitalize on these shifts, because the time to market is so fast.

3. Glide feature: Form submission - In this app the form submission is top right with the "+" sign to activate the form. I am not a big fan of this design from Glide. As a product manager this really bothers me. Ideally, you want a large button on the page, that is a different color that calls out with a CTA.

From a product standpoint when designing this page, you need to think about what is the core action that you want your user to take?
1. sign up for a zoom
2. add a zoom call

Essentially an app like this is a marketplace. You must balance both. Marketplaces can be lucrative but they are really hard at starting. In the beginning of creating something you will need to have a decent supply otherwise when your first users show up there won't be anything there for them to stick around and come back.

Many times I see Makers make the mistake of starting a community and a marketplace with out enough supply. You can usually manufacturer some demand but getting supply going can be hard depending on they dynamics at play. You will likely need to be the firestarter for the marketplace by getting all the supply gathered yourself.

You should think through about how you will continue this and enable it to grow. So for example in this app, there is no prominent "submit" button. Adding one at the top of the page would be your best chance at having others do some of the work for you and add videos. As more get added the more valuable your marketplace becomes.

The one problem with Glide is that it doesn;t allow custom development. So say for example you want to display a add button on the list page after a few items are listed. Glide won't give you the flexibility to do this, You will likely only be able to add the form button at the top of the page or use the "+" sign.

This is where no-code haters will scoff at no-code. But what they don't realize is that no-code works best by using the lower learning curve tools to validate your idea, then when you grow out of that tool, and your product matures, investing the time and energy into a tool that is more powerful and you can scale but may require more time and money investment.

That's the art of no-code. And that the value of this database. You can select a product category and see how a basic stack or starter-stack is created. Use this as your basis for starting then once you have validated your concept you can like a hermit crab grow into a new shell. Saving you time, money and frustration in the process.