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Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

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Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#161

Post by BossingAround »

swyx wrote: post #156
chrismorgan wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related: ConvertKit rebranded to seva and then fairly promptly rolled the decision back based on customer feedback. https://convertkit.com/staying-convertkit gives details. I was pleased at the reversion, though for completely different reasons: I think the rebrand was foolish purely because it went from a memorable name with meaning (even if that meaning didn’t exactly match the purpose for all of their customers) t…

wow, i wasnt even aware of that rebrand. seva sounds so awful, whereas im already super invested in the ConvertKit story. good reversal of decision there.

As a person who has never heard neither ConvertKit nor Seva, both sound absolutely equal to me. 0 preference as a passer-by.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#162

Post by BossingAround »

mikro2nd wrote: post #63
tango12 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EDIT: Not sure why, but from the article: > Vercel strongly connects to the words versatile, accelerate, and excel.

Self-delusional marketingspeak. To me 'Vercel' sounds like a brand of cheap batteries.

Batteries is what came to my mind. Like Duracell.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#163

Post by kylemh »

zoul wrote: post #18

“We decided to retain our signature triangle logo, although we have simplified it.” Is this satire? Can’t tell.

It's not. It was previously considered signature because it was a prism with a gleam on one corner. Post-simplification, I would still consider it signature, but definitely not unique.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#164

Post by CSSer »

PKop wrote: post #157
CSSer wrote: post #71

I’m surprised to see so many people nagging about the brand. As one user pointed out, there’s a big newspaper brand with that name already. And otherwise, who cares, really? Same company. It’s not a soccer team.

I think the discussion would be different if the new name was better. Replacing zeit makes sense, not sure the chosen replacement was any good.

Fair enough. I guess I know what Zeit means, but not Vercel. Maybe they just wanted the “V” to fit nicely next to the triangle? ;)

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#165

Post by simonw »

mrkurt wrote: post #118
simonw wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python works great on Now once you figure out how to deploy it there. The lack of detailed documentation around Python does make me nervous that they may drop support for it some day though. My notes on running a Python app on Now v2: https://github.com/simonw/til/blob/master/zeit-now/python-as...

Do one for fly.io! :D

Already done! https://github.com/simonw/datasette-publish-fly

They wrote about it on their blog: https://fly.io/blog/making-datasets-fly-with-datasette-and-f...

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#166

Post by arist0tl3 »

RonanTheGrey wrote: post #137
sholladay wrote: post #50

I gave up on Zeit when Now v2 came out because, besides it being more complex and a pain to migrate to, they went back on their promises about no vendor lock-in. Up until late 2018, their site had a very different philosophy that they abruptly abandoned. [1] [2] Fool me once... 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n...

I was an early adopter of Now v1 and loved it. I evangelized it to all my clients, used it on every project - it was such a breath of fresh air that deploying a server was now so easy. Ok, I get that serverless is a different paradigm. And I understand the arguments for it. But I refused to use Now v2 precisely because they violated their promises they had made -- but worse, turned it into "just another AWS". If I wa…

Hey, I'm curious about your migration. Can you contact me via my profile?

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#168

Post by pier25 »

adriand wrote: post #45

As someone who has been involved in many branding projects, it is amusing to see all the negative commentary on the rebrand. This is human nature 101. Everyone always hates rebrands. In fact I am willing to bet that the executives who eventually bought into this new name also hated the new name when they heard it. Whenever we presented a new name to a company that wanted to be rebranded, we always asked them not to p…

Yes but that doesn't mean Vercel is a good name either.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#169

Post by pier25 »

choward wrote: post #24
zoul wrote: post #18

“We decided to retain our signature triangle logo, although we have simplified it.” Is this satire? Can’t tell.

Same with this: > Vercel strongly connects to the words versatile, accelerate, and excel. It also "strongly connects" to the words "vermin" and "decelerate".

To me it sounds like some corporate pharma company...

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#170

Post by pier25 »

Touche wrote: post #104

What does a rebrand signal? That investors are unhappy and that the founders need to align the brand with the vision... Or is there a more positive reason to rebrand? I would think you don't rebrand if things are going super well, right?

Other than the practical reasons (Zeit is a common German word) their product and focus has changed quite a bit.

They started as serverless docker and changed to CDN + edge cloud functions to specialized hosting for front end projects.

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