- Products
- Solutions Use casesBy industry
- Developers
- Resources Connect
- Pricing
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
“We process billions of financial transactions each day. The Nylas platform provides us with a secure, scalable solution for extracting purchase and delivery data from user emails and surfacing it in our app in real-time"
– Engineering Director
Our customers love having greater visibility into email conversations across their business. It’s made it even easier to deliver a solution that massively automates and improves how our clients can operate,”
– Tim Randall, CEO, Zigaflow
Our Nylas build required the lowest level of support we’ve ever needed for a third-party software solution. We didn’t have to start from scratch, allowing us to go live much faster
– Jay Cutler Co-Founder, Staffing Engine
The vision for Recital included email scanning right from the start. We needed to prove the product was viable while also setting ourselves up for maximum compatibility down the road, all on limited time and resources. Nylas was a natural fit.
– Brendan Mulholland, Co-Founder and CTO at Recital Software
Once we found Nylas, we didn’t consider any other product. A contextual email API was a perfect fit for our use case, giving sales reps direct access to their personal email inbox,
– Taiwo Oyeniyi, Chief Technology Officer, Distrobird
Building from scratch would’ve taken time and money–all while competing against other initiatives on our roadmap. We needed to focus on our number one priority: improving user experience.
– Alexander Plumb Sr. Product Manager
"A unified calendaring experience is essential for lawyers to definitively know what event happened for what client at what time. They need to be organized and they often rely on shared calendars."
– Alexandre Yeremian CEO of Jarvis Legal
“For us, the main pain point that Nylas addressed was providing [calendar integration] in a consistent manner across multiple platforms and providers,”
– Oliver Lamming CTO, CatchApp