Middleware Market Fragmentation by Workflow
Isaac Nassimi, SVP of Product at Nylas, on the market for developer middleware
This kind of market fragments because the product is only half the sale, the real differentiator is the customer workflow it plugs into. Appcues is sold to product and growth teams that want no code onboarding, feature announcements, and in app prompts tied to MAUs. Daily sells usage based video APIs and WebRTC infrastructure to developers who need to embed live calling or voice into software. Those are different buyers, budgets, implementation paths, and success metrics.
-
Appcues sits in the product adoption lane. Its core jobs are walkthroughs, checklists, in app messages, and feedback, and its pricing scales with monthly active users, which fits SaaS teams trying to improve activation and expansion inside an existing product.
-
Daily sits in the communications infrastructure lane. It gives developers SDKs and APIs for video and audio, plus underlying WebRTC infrastructure, with pricing tied to minutes and usage. That matches engineering led use cases like telehealth, customer support, or AI voice agents.
-
Adjacent markets can still converge at the feature level without converging at the company level. Video features are already becoming more uniform across SDK vendors like Daily, Twilio, and Zoom, but the customer still chooses based on the broader workflow they need to power, not just a checklist of APIs.
Over time, more middleware categories will look like this, with a few shared base capabilities and then clear specialization by buyer and workflow. The winners will be the companies that turn a messy technical job into the default tool for one repeatable use case, then expand outward from that beachhead without losing that fit.