Nylas partners with Choicely to power the casting process of the world’s largest TV production company

Choicely builds email and scheduling features 10x faster for its no-code app development platform.

Choicely is a no-code app development platform that makes it easy to build and maintain high-quality mobile apps. Non-technical professionals use Choicely’s visual, drag-and-drop builder to stand up custom applications used by global leaders in sports, entertainment, and more. 

The company’s fast-growing customer base includes some of the largest TV production companies in the world, responsible for smash-hit reality shows including Love Island, Dancing with the Stars, and Miss Universe.

Challenge:

Every successful TV production starts with casting, or the process of selecting actors to fill particular roles. Casting directors will evaluate thousands of applicants across multiple projects on various criteria. This process is becoming an increasingly manual, time-consuming endeavor for production teams as they seek to consolidate information across spreadsheets, form submissions, email, social media, video, and other data sources to manage applicants and make informed casting decisions.

So when Choicely’s largest customer in TV production reached out to build a mobile app to solve some of the challenges of the casting process, the company knew it could make a big impact. “One of our customers is the largest TV production company in the world,” explains Kaius Meskanen, CEO of Choicely. “They needed a custom application to streamline the workflows of their casting team, from processing submissions to evaluating applicants, notifying them using email, and scheduling follow-up conversations with those selected.”

However, the Choicely platform didn’t support email or scheduling features at the time. “While our team are experts at building no-code apps and widgets, we didn’t have the time or the expertise to build email features and calendar integrations on our own.” Still, the company recognized the value of these features to solve a critical pain for one of its largest customers.  

Solution:

After scoping the project and deciding that it wouldn’t be feasible to build a solution on their own, the development team at Choicely evaluated pre-built solutions to conserve resources and go live faster. “We first looked at Calendly, a popular SaaS scheduling tool, but found it couldn’t seamlessly integrate into our application in the unique way we needed it to,” says Tommy Eklund, Choicely CTO. The team needed to extensively customize their scheduling events and workflows to rapidly connect casting directors with talent. “Shortly after, we found Nylas. We were impressed with the platform’s ease of use and the extensive selection of pre-built scheduling capabilities.”

“Originally, we had planned to only support calendar services in our solution. But because Nylas was so easy to use and offered additional support for building email integrations, we added email services and built a stronger solution using the same schedule and budget. Once we started work, we appreciated how responsive the Nylas team was. Our feedback was listened to and acted on in moments.” 

Results:

Armed with Nylas’ Email API, Calendar API, and front-end Scheduler, the Choicely team delivered powerful communications features fast. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that Nylas helped us build our new casting features 10x faster,” remarks Eklund. “It took us less than a month to integrate email and calendar, allowing us to refocus our technical resources on building the most robust casting solution on the market.” 

With the successful deployment of their initial casting solution, the team at Choicely now offers a pre-built application that any production team can use, Choicely Casting, to simplify and streamline the casting process. Applicants can submit all of their details using a standardized form, allowing casting directors to review, sort, and select actors in one place. Directors can communicate with the actors they’ve chosen by sending messages and viewing previous interactions on their profiles. If a director needs to schedule a meeting, such as a callback or informational session, they can do so with a single button press. 

“With Nylas, we’ve built a far superior user experience that helps casting directors who manage high volumes of applicants find the best person for the role much faster,” says Meskanen.  

Looking ahead, Choicely plans to offer its new solution across the world. “We’ve already launched Choicely Casting in the Nordics and plan to go live in the rest of Europe soon and go worldwide from there,” says Meskanen. “We see a massive opportunity in Hollywood to support more leading entertainment brands in developing no-code mobile applications.”