ATS platform Fountain builds calendar integration In one hackathon

Fountain scales scheduling from startups to enterprises using Nylas

What does it take for a 50-person Series A startup to land a roster of Fortune 500 clients? One engineer, one universal calendar API, and a healthy dose of hustle is a good place to start.

Fountain is an all-in-one hiring system, applicant tracking, and recruiting platform that helps companies around the world hire hourly workers at scale using self-service interview booking, automation, machine learning, and customizable workflows. In just a few years, they’ve grown to power hiring solutions for companies like Safeway, Grubhub and Deliveroo.

Using Nylas, Fountain revamped their scheduling feature, going from proof of concept to production in a matter of weeks.

Challenges:

Building a contextual scheduling feature

No interview exists in a vacuum. When Fountain users book interviews, they’re choosing a block of time surrounded by other work meetings or personal plans. Fountain wanted their scheduling system to work in harmony with their users’ whole schedule.

Fountain set out to build a scheduling feature that operated as a single source of truth, showing users their Fountain appointments in the context of their personal and work calendars.

Solution:

It took Fountain one internal hackathon, one engineer, and the Nylas calendar API to build the scheduling feature they had in mind, uniting users’ calendars regardless of their calendar platform.

Moving from idea to production in no time

“Making fast changes and being able to iterate quickly is core to our business,” says Dan Taylor, Product Manager at Fountain. “Nylas is the fastest way to get interoperability with all of the different calendar providers. We went from idea to execution in a couple days.”

The prototype Fountain built at their internal hackathon accomplished exactly what they hoped it would, instantly syncing users’ external calendars with Fountain calendar events using a React frontend and Ruby on Rails backend.

Fountain’s Nylas integration changes the way users interact with their service for the better. Now, Fountain users don’t have to bounce from one calendar to the other, double checking if they’re double booked. Fountain delivers context directly to their calendar.

Speed to market delivered with one API

Fountain’s scheduling has to work because they’re on a fast-paced work schedule of their own. The difference between being competitive and beating the competition is measured in sprints and development cycles. Fountain wants to make the most out of each moment.

Results:

Nylas brought together a disparate network of calendar platforms, making all of them easily programmable using one API. Instead of spending valuable time building scheduling integrations for each provider, Fountain built one integration for all platforms.

“Using individual APIs would have taken three times longer,” says Taylor, adding that alternative API providers wouldn’t have supported smaller calendar platforms that Fountain customers rely on. With Nylas, Fountain can ship fast without compromising the breadth of calendar coverage.

“We could iterate on our internal view of the calendar without worrying how it integrates with outside providers,” says Taylor. “We know very little about how Outlook 365 works, but our customers are using that calendar system and it’s integrated to our product via Nylas. This allows us to offload that knowledge to Nylas and not have to worry about how Microsoft’s product works, or any of the other myriad of calendar providers.”

After bringing their Nylas integration into their users’ hands, Fountain logged fewer feature requests simply because they built the feature users had requested. The amount of time users spend using Fountain’s scheduling solution has also dropped. It now takes users less time to view, modify and manage appointments because their service is more streamlined.

Success at scale with Nylas

Fountain is taking the time they saved with Nylas and putting it to work. The Fountain team is focused on aggressive international expansion, as well as leveraging AI to build smart scheduling that recommends appointment times or automatically rejects appointments that conflict with either user’s schedule.

On the Nylas platform, Fountain knows they can expand with confidence and continue to serve everyone from early stage startups to SMBs to the enterprise.

“Scheduling will be a core part of our product no matter what company is using us, Nylas just makes that scheduling a little bit easier,” Taylor concluded.