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Vercel raise $40M Series B

vercel.com

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Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#111

Post by fillipvt »

With AWS CDK and Amplify developing at the speeds they currently are, I think businesses like Vercel will have it really hard in the coming years to attract customers.

Happy for them though! I've been using them for a long time, but I've also just started learning CDK and Amplify and I think these could provide the same benefits, and in some (very specific) cases with zero costs. This plus databases such as Fauna or DynamoDB, and I wouldn't be able to see my self using any other thing for a good long while.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#112

Post by 1123581321 »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #84
staticassertion wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Just about every page on the site explains what they do, or describes part of what they do in a way that makes inference easy.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#114

Post by laczi »

NextJS is awesome, but vercel as a business still doesn't seem to make sense to me.

There is a free tier and then pricing starts at $20/user/month. For unlimited usage in deploying and consuming static/generated/rendered content and APIs.

iiuc, vercel runs on aws. Isn't the math fundamentally flawed on this kind of a business model if it isn't backed by owning the compute/network substrate first? Egress charges would be brutal. Targetting gross margins of 60-70% sounds like it would be hard.

Would love to hear from VC/founders with their insights, esp for building dev tools businesses and "monetizing" frameworks which isn't something that's happened too often (or happened at all recently?)

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#115

Post by polote »

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…

They want enterprise customers, not single developers. So they use the usual bullshit marketing wordings.

Their only goal is to get someone high level in a big company feeling the sentence is cool so that he lets his email in the "get demo" page.

This is just normal enterprise sales, and this is probably why they managed to raise so much compared to most similar services. They really have a strong business focus and a sales team

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#116

Post by setgree »

mbesto wrote: post #95
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…

This is basically called the Ladder of Abstraction: https://www.toolshero.com/communication-skills/ladder-of-abs... YOU aren't the audience for this press release because the people they are trying to attract are more interested in abstract concepts than concrete ones. E.g. "I'm a great visionary CTO of a 100 person dev team and I use Vercel". A developer doesn't care that Vercel raised $40M, all they want to know is…

I like this idea, thanks for the link. Just noting that it's funny for an article about effective communication to have a prominent typo in its key graphic ('concreet')

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#117

Post by aoeusnth1 »

liminal wrote: post #88

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?

I think the idea is that instead of generating the original http content based on your DB, you have static webpages which have JavaScript call out to your dB-backed API to modify the content in an SPA. This can then be made more efficient with automatic server side rendering.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#118

Post by snicksnak »

judging by the url ("the next web") I expected something related to web3 or p2p and then was kinda disappointed to see yet another react framework.

Side note: somehow my ISP (vodafone) has problems delivering me this domain, only was able to visit via opera with their vpn enabled.

Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B

#120

Post by theturtletalks »

moeamaya wrote: post #85
neurostimulant wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I personally have Caprover running on a $5/month DigitalOcean droplet where I can create DBs on the fly for small projects. I normally switch to a better hosted platform for bigger projects. Heroku is also good but the free plan is 10,000 rows and the next plan is $9/m.
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