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Vercel raise $40M Series B

vercel.com

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Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#81

Post by JumpCrisscross »

caust1c wrote: post #73
tomp wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long will that persist? Any such company has no chance of being included in e.g. S&P 500 so there's clearly strong pressure in the opposite direction...

Who cares about being in the S&P 500? It's a dumb status symbol and nothing else.

> It's a dumb status symbol and nothing else

If trillions of tracking dollars with a measurable boost on valuation and trading [1] and thus a measurable reduction in the cost of capital [2] is “nothing else,” then yes.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138641810...

[2] https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/handle/10453/130246

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#82

Post by jariel »

gk1 wrote: post #70
CyberRabbi wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have no idea what it is after reading that blurb. AWS “fits perfectly” with my workflow so in concrete terms how is this different?

Marketing is responsible for communicating value to their users and buyers, not the entire population. Consider the possibility that if you can't wrap your mind around a product even after several explanations, maybe you're not the target audience. I don't mean this in a negative way, and concede that Marketing often fails to even get their users and buyers to understand.

This is the wrong answer (and maybe a little condescending) because the product is targeted at the widest of tech audiences.

Vercel is failing on communications a little bit.

They don't have some highly specialized tech that 'nobody should understand' - they're literally making tech for the front-end masses, basically 'tech commoners'.

There are literally a handful of people on this page saying 'what does this do?' - how often do you see that on an HN page?

Anyone in tech, should be able to plainly understand what every other tech companies does, within a few sentences.

Some of it might need to be abstracted, and some of it may not fit very well into a sentence - but at least the Wikipedia version should be clear.

Explaining Next - the frame work in slightly more mechanical terms, and then, separating the notion of 'hosted service' would be great. (If that's what it is, because frankly I'm not even sure).

If you go to vercel.com - nowhere does it really say 'what it is'.

The introduction is 'Vercel combines the best developer experience with an obsessive focus on end-user performance. Our platform enables frontend teams to do their best work.'

That is 'bad communication' because it's completely not informative.

Sometimes marketing speak lingers on 'why it's great' - fair enough, but that statement above isn't even that, it's secondary jargon.

'We enable teams to do their best work' It needs some work.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#83

Post by akuji1993 »

jgalt212 wrote: post #65
akuji1993 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> avoid being acquired Don't think that's possible after raising such amounts of money. Their way out is now either getting aquired for loads of cash or going public. Going public also means loosing parts or all of your control over the company. Those investors will want to see their money back some time in the future.

> Going public also means loosing parts or all of your control over the company only if all shares have equal voting rights.

Which is the case for the vast majority of IPOs

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#84

Post by skeeter2020 »

staticassertion wrote: post #68
4778468d wrote: post #59

Oh god. Even companies raising $40,000,000 can’t explain what they do: “Vercel combines the best developer experience with an obsessive focus on end-user performance. Our platform enables frontend teams to do their best work.” Nice, inspiring evocative words, but I care to find what the fuck Vercel IS, and this is not an answer. Maybe if I reword the above it will become clear: Vercel lets developers have a really gr…

That's not surprising - lots of the time you want to write what he impact is up front. It was pretty easy to just click "Documentation" and see more: https://vercel.com/docs > Vercel is a cloud platform for static sites and Serverless Functions that fits perfectly with your workflow. It enables developers to host Jamstack websites and web services that deploy instantly, scale automatically, and requires no supervisio…

Do you think it's reasonable for someone arriving at the website with the very common question of "what exactly do they do?" to click the "Documentation" link?

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#85

Post by moeamaya »

neurostimulant wrote: post #78
paulintrognon wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where would those DBs be deployed? I mean, can vercel host DBs or do you still have to figure out a way of host them yourself?

You're supposed to use other hosted database vendor or your own database server if you need it. I don't think they offer any database service.

What’s the recommended DB host? Does the Next community have a go to?

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#86

Post by keslert »

flyinglizard wrote: post #30
Pandabob wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been wondering about this exact combo for a while. Your site looks nice. Any gotchas when using Shopify as just the backend? Did you use the Nextjs e-commerce starter template?

Thanks! We developed from scratch, I frankly wasn’t aware of the template when we started but also wanted a very specific look and feel (and the whole planet section on the bottom of the welcome page obviously had lots of work). Not aware of any issues. We did quite a tight integration with Shopify such as the entire website shop is 99% generated from the Shopify items (which in turn are generated from the Print On D…

I have a site (https://familytreechart.com) with a similar integration with Shopify but one thing I've never figured out is how to send someone to Shopify's checkout page with a preconfigured cart. It looks like you are managing the cart on the nextjs side. How are you generating the checkout page with the right items? I've resorted to creating a DraftOrder, but those don't allow for discount codes so I also had to handle that on my end when creating the draft order. Email in profile if easier.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#87

Post by joshuakelly »

A very happy customer of Vercel here, and a Next.js user.

Vercel makes it really easy to deploy isomorphic JavaScript applications, to the point where I barely have to think about the runtime context. Thinking back to the ~2015 era, it feels like magic in comparison.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#88

Post by liminal »

I'm trying to decipher what this is. So far I've learned there's a thing called "Jamstack" that seems to be about static websites. How does one manage databases with this technology?

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#90

Post by madeofpalk »

naavis wrote: post #13
talolard wrote: post #2

Poor Gatsby. We run a Gatsby site, it was great to setup fast fast fast and has been a pain in the butt ever since. Next, from our limited experimentation, has much better ergonomics and it looks like the company has a stronger grasp on go to market. Crazy how fast that happened

Could you describe what kind of pain points have you had? I've been building a photo-intensive static personal website lately. I started off with Next.js, but later switched to Gatsby, because so many things just worked out-of-the-box with it. This was especially the case with optimizing and resizing images. For Gatsby there is gatsby-image, which works super well. For Next.js there is next-optimized-images which is…

The common complaint about Gatsby is that it's slow. Once you reach a certain scale of records you're ingesting from Contentful or wherever, Gatsby really starts to chug down trying to infer all their types for GraphQL (I believe this is what causes the slow down).
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