Strategies for Pivoting to Find Your Hyper-Growth Solution with Nylas CEO, Gleb Polyakov

You’ll rarely hear anyone say that you’re over-communicating. But what you will hear is that with the influx of communication platforms, especially when it comes to messaging and email services, there are more ways to communicate than ever before, and that causes some trickle-down effects. With so much data and messages coming and going through a system, and emails clogging out your in an outbox, finding a way to sift through each of those messages, decipher it, and identify what is meaningful is becoming increasingly more difficult.

“Email has over 3 billion active users today and is rapidly growing, It will be over five and a half billion by 2025. That intuitively makes sense. Everyone with a smartphone has an email address, everyone with internet access at all, has an email address. And it's this repository of not only all your personal activity, but it's absolutely the database of how you run your business and do a lot of interaction from there across your calendar, across your address book, across your email, it handles a lot of information going in and out of it as a natural jumping-off point.” 

Gleb Polyakov is the CEO and co-founder of Nylas, where he leads strategy, operations and product innovation for the company’s communication API platform. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Gleb details how he led Nylas through a pivot moment three years ago when the product shifted from a consumer-facing software to a backend API. Plus, Gleb details how your first idea is never your best one.

Main Takeaways

• If It’s Not Right, Fix It: Even if you have a company that is showing signs of growth and the metrics are positive but the peripheral numbers are not saying what you think they should be saying, don’t be scared to pivot and head in a different direction. The first idea for any company is not always going to be the most successful one. Keep iterating and keep building to find out what works best for your company.
• An Unstructured Mess: Finding a way to sort through data when it comes to communication platforms remains one of the most challenging and reliable obstacles for developers. The reason? Understanding how to decipher emails and text messages, and understanding various forms of language is difficult to pick apart.
• A Tipping Point: The communication sector remains at a tipping point. As more and more software services provide chat and messaging services, finding a way to properly decipher and break down the data in those messages is growing in importance with few providers that can properly and reliably source that data.

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