What is Nylas' core value proposition and who is their target customer?

Today, one programmer can do what it took a large team of programmers to do 20 years ago. Something as simple as setting up a web server used to be a Herculean lift. Now, table stakes have got a lot higher for every application, so a one week MVP isn't going to cut it anymore. You see a lot more complexity in applications.

Something every true application needs at some level, whether it's direct to the users or not, is payments and communication. Payments are well figured out and there are lots of companies doing it right. Communications, not so much.

Your application cannot be the only means of communication, because it's not meeting the users where they are. It's not touching the outside world at all and it's not necessarily solving the problems that you need to solve. 

If you want to bring these communications in, you've got a slew of channels to choose from. Each of those integrations is extremely different, so it will take your individual developers and you as a company a lot of time to implement. During this whole time, you are not focusing on your core competencies and building the magic in your application—the juice. 

What Nylas does is make it really easy to implement all these communication channels in one blow. And when I say implement these communications channels, these aren’t just APIs. 

If you want to get Gmail in your application, you're not just implementing with their APIs or their SDKs. There's a lot of things you have to do. You have to build all these layers to handle incoming webhooks or pub/sub requests, build these sync layers, build a ton of opinionated decisions into your database, track thread management, user management, all of this stuff. 

Nylas abstracts all these into one integration that takes care of all of that hard work and actually makes it feel like a single API or SDK, even though under the hood, it's technically not. This scales well far outside of email and turns things like SMS and other channels into just a unified interface that's extremely opinionated and solves the user's problems.

Additionally, something we offer out of the box is a calendar integration. If you think about it, a calendar's really important. It's essentially a contract for communication escalation. It’s a system to be able to plan communication with others in the future.

We provide that kind of prefabricated out of the box functionality for calendar APIs along with the frontend components if you want to add scheduling as a drop into your application and do it in a day instead of a year.