How does Nylas compare with enterprise low-code and no-code platforms such as Instabase, Unqork, Podium, and OutSystems?

No code solutions are nothing new. We're actually seeing a reprisal now. You see it every decade in the market. For a long time, you've been able to write code using flow charts if required. You can find some examples of what that looks like though it’s not great for anything but the most simplistic solutions and it doesn't scale. The moment you want another piece of functionality or decision making into that flow, your complexity goes up exponentially. I would put that on the no code side. 

On the low code side, there are two versions.

Having pseudo code in your platform is cool and interesting to me. It’s a little scary because you don't know what's happening between those pieces of low codes that you're writing. 

Then, there’s less code. I always agree with less code because when I hear it, I hear optional code and some of that means having really, really, really intelligent defaults that give the user the power to turn on something incredible one day and fiddle with the knobs as they please to get it perfect. I'm actually pretty happy with that.

Another thing is that having all of these micro-value companies that empower these very small, tiny pieces of your application that you ideally stitch together into a sort of Frankenstein can create a lot of problems. 

The first is that your code, instead of being “if this, then that”, becomes “if this, then that and then that and then that and then that.” To me, that doesn’t sound very performant. It sounds very brittle.

Giving the users and our customers the ability to solve that in one shot is pretty awesome. The ability to get your sentiment, your clean conversation and the actual email itself, and all of the headers that you would possibly want on that, analyzed in one request or one web hook notification is first class developer experience. That doesn't just make the stakeholders happy because the feature’s getting done, it also makes the developers happy because they're building something that they're not going to regret later.