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Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

forbes.com

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Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#11

Post by jshawl »

ritchiea wrote: post #3

I just don't get Gatsby. It feels over-engineered for the small static site use cases it is the best tool for and definitely not a good alternative to dynamically generated pages from other frameworks like Next.js, Rails, Django, etc. Maybe the engineers that preceded me on the Gatsby project I worked on took a wrong turn but we ended up with long build times and ever growing complexity around the create pages functi…

+1 I wasn’t expecting a “static site generator” to require a JavaScript runtime.

Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#12

Post by gk1 »

cpursley wrote: post #10
ritchiea wrote: post #3

I just don't get Gatsby. It feels over-engineered for the small static site use cases it is the best tool for and definitely not a good alternative to dynamically generated pages from other frameworks like Next.js, Rails, Django, etc. Maybe the engineers that preceded me on the Gatsby project I worked on took a wrong turn but we ended up with long build times and ever growing complexity around the create pages functi…

> Gatsby has slick looking docs I think you might be on to something; I don't even bother with projects without good docs or a readme. Edit: Not sarcasm. I value my time.

Can't tell if that's sarcasm or not. I've 100% seen startups lose prospects and deals because the docs weren't great.

If anyone who's selling software thinks their docs are only for users, and don't get read by prospective customers, they're missing out on customer prospects without even realizing. Many people even skip the homepage and everything else and jump straight to the docs to figure out what the product does, whom it's for, how it works, what it integrates with, and so on.

Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#13

Post by subpixel »

yodon wrote: post #8
bithavoc wrote: post #6

Gatsby.js raised money, Next.js raised money, and then Gatsby.js raised even more money.

Thanks for pointer to the next.js raise, this significantly increases the odds I'll use them - the last few times I'd checked the project's commit history, it looked like the lion's share were from one guy who could disappear at any time due to a better job, a girlfriend, or getting hit by a bus.

I'm curious where Netlify (who has raised $95M) fits in the landscape when the dust settles.

Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#14

Post by tomlagier »

ritchiea wrote: post #3

I just don't get Gatsby. It feels over-engineered for the small static site use cases it is the best tool for and definitely not a good alternative to dynamically generated pages from other frameworks like Next.js, Rails, Django, etc. Maybe the engineers that preceded me on the Gatsby project I worked on took a wrong turn but we ended up with long build times and ever growing complexity around the create pages functi…

This was my experience as well. I thought it might be aimed at news sites with content in WordPress as a faster alternative front-end. It certainly positions itself as "for everyone", but it felt wildly over engineered when I used it for a small static site.

Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#15

Post by stevebmark »

I don't think enough people are thinking about what will happen when these companies do eventually run out of money (both Next.js and Gatsby). Not just to their hosting services, but to the open source tech driving the platform itself. Meteor never gained much traction but it sat in a similar parallel of hoping to provide hosting services and just burnt money away. Next.js* however has gained a lot of traction, but it's worrying to monetize these open source style tools that a lot of companies are building fundamental infrastructure on. I don't know if this kind of open source > paid hosting business model has paid off in other similar spaces. Are there examples?

* Edit: Excuse me, Vercel!

Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#16

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

tiborsaas wrote: post #9
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #7

it's kind of ironic that the main value proposition of static site generators like Gatsby is that it's just a file so it's portable and you can take them anywhere, instead of getting locked into server/client based database systems, yet here they are, trying to monetize by building the "the best way to build and maintain Gatsby sites". From my point of view, if they succeed in achieving that goal, that means Gatsby t…

That's just going with the WordPress model. You can install WP anywhere, but for convenience you can pay a small fee and speed things up. But I also think that 28mill is outrageously lot of money for what the service is. True SV scale :)

it's different from wordpress, for the reason I mentioned above.

The main value proposition of static site generators COMPARED TO 1st generation CMS like Wordpress is that they don't require a database and are lightweight and portable.

It is common sense that not everyone will want to run their own database and a server, so a wordpress.com makes sense.

But static sites can be deployed anywhere and there already is a huge ecosystem of vendor independent and free static site hosting sites like Github (which is subsidized by Microsoft), Gitlab, etc.

For Gatsby to survive and thrive in this ecosystem that is completely different from the wordpress ecosystem, they will probably need to do a lot of things to create a lockin, in which case there is no point in using Gatsby. After all, all Gatsby does is just compile some files into static site. Nothing magic in there.

Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#17

Post by chmac »

ritchiea wrote: post #3

I just don't get Gatsby. It feels over-engineered for the small static site use cases it is the best tool for and definitely not a good alternative to dynamically generated pages from other frameworks like Next.js, Rails, Django, etc. Maybe the engineers that preceded me on the Gatsby project I worked on took a wrong turn but we ended up with long build times and ever growing complexity around the create pages functi…

AFAIK, the thing that sets Gatsby apart is the integration of the built static site and React to do pre-fetching. The output from Gatsby is not just HTML, it's HTML + React javascript, with data loaded from JSON files. That means that once the site has loaded, Gatsby can pre-emptively fetch all the linked pages, both React components and data, to give instantaneous second click page loads. That's a pretty impressive feature in the wild, the second click is neck snappingly fast. I'm not sure if this is an option in other things like nuxtjs or not.

But, you're right that Gatsby requires a lot of code. To get a simple static site setup, it's a lot of work. Plus it changes very fast. We stopped paying attention for a few months, and things broke on the next upgrade.

But, if web performance is the goal, Gatsby is hard to beat. In addition to pre-fetching, it also inlines every resource, images, CSS, the whole thing. So a single HTML fetch should be enough for a full first paint. That's a lot faster than a usual static site, which in turn loads all the additional resources before it can show the site to the user.

Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#18

Post by ritchiea »

gk1 wrote: post #12
cpursley wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gatsby has slick looking docs I think you might be on to something; I don't even bother with projects without good docs or a readme. Edit: Not sarcasm. I value my time.

Can't tell if that's sarcasm or not. I've 100% seen startups lose prospects and deals because the docs weren't great. If anyone who's selling software thinks their docs are only for users, and don't get read by prospective customers, they're missing out on customer prospects without even realizing. Many people even skip the homepage and everything else and jump straight to the docs to figure out what the product does…

Good documentation is immensely valuable. Likely an absolute must have to be a huge ecosystem like node, rails, etc. But extensive documentation certainly can't replace being a simple, well organized and elegant tool for the job. Last I checked the Gatsby docs felt more complete than the Next.js docs. Writing this out makes me want to head over to to the Next.js repo and start contributing.

Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#19

Post by city17 »

stevebmark wrote: post #15

I don't think enough people are thinking about what will happen when these companies do eventually run out of money (both Next.js and Gatsby). Not just to their hosting services, but to the open source tech driving the platform itself. Meteor never gained much traction but it sat in a similar parallel of hoping to provide hosting services and just burnt money away. Next.js* however has gained a lot of traction, but i…

Isn't Wordpress a perfect example of that model?

Re: Gatsby raises $28M Series B led by Index Ventures

#20

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

stevebmark wrote: post #15

I don't think enough people are thinking about what will happen when these companies do eventually run out of money (both Next.js and Gatsby). Not just to their hosting services, but to the open source tech driving the platform itself. Meteor never gained much traction but it sat in a similar parallel of hoping to provide hosting services and just burnt money away. Next.js* however has gained a lot of traction, but i…

open source => paid hosting model makes sense when the tech is heavy and not easily portable anyway. For example, confluence develops kafka and makes money with kafka cloud. Mongodb develops mongodb and makes money with their cloud, etc.

None of these are portable systems.

On the other hand, the whole reason for static site generators is its lightweightness. So by design it's hard for these vendors to have lockin....unless, they deliberately create lockins. Which is why i think this model is not really a good model. They created something that's valuable exactly because it frees people from getting locked in, but they will probably need to make money by trying their best to lock in users.

The only endgame I can see from this is these people using up all the VC money to give out freebies to attract as many users as possible, and then selling to Microsoft.

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