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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

#51

Post by strbean »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #16
tiborsaas wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sounds like their offering will basically consist of some fairly simple CI and some static hosting, right?

Those things (particularly the CI) are incredibly trivial to setup for someone who is technically proficient. It might be a hurdle for someone who is primarily a designer with a bit of HTML/CSS knowledge and a "copy and paste heavy" understanding of JS.

I think a large proportion of static sites are built by people in the second category, so the offering makes sense to me. If my reasoning is sound, that just leaves the major issue that this offering is incredibly easy to duplicate, and everyone from Github to CircleCI to Netlify could put in a week of dev time to roll out their own matching offering (if they don't already have this).

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

#52

Post by seanwilson »

KorematsuFred wrote: post #42
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…

I think you have got it right. I own dozens of static websites from 100 pages to 1M pages. I am the ideal customer for a company like Gatsby. I had all the content in my mysql and accessible through a REST api. I had python scripts that would pull data from REST and generate .MD files which then Jekyll would convert to static sites. Everything worked fairly well except long build times for the 1M pages site which was…

Have you tried testing other generators for sites with 1M pages? How about Hugo?

I'm confused about Gatsby as well to be honest. It has a lot of buzz but Hugo does everything I need. It can download data from URLs too and, worst case, just write a short script that does this before triggering the static site generation.

Part of the appeal of static site generation for me is simplicity. I've already hit enough issues with Jekyll having versioning issues when I return to a site I've let sit for a while. I don't want to have to deal with versions and upgrading issues that'll be involved with using Node, Webpack, React etc.

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

#53

Post by nogabebop23 »

subpixel wrote: post #13
yodon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think their strategy is to commoditize the Next.js and Gatsby differentiation; They host all JAM-stacks pretty equally. The add a lot of paid dynamic add-ons that are hard to do statically (and that they told you were BAD_THINGS at the start) like form processing and user management.

I think their model is more realistic as a superset of what Gatsby can offer, but I'm not convinced it justifies 100 million dollars of VC investment. BUT - I'm always off by a factor of 4x (projected costs, effort estimates) so if you think it's worth 25 million, then you should go for it!

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

#54

Post by tomnipotent »

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…

It helps if you think of Gatsby as part of the "Headless" architecture, which presupposes that your app/website is just a veneer on top of other 3rd party tools/SaaS.

So if you're an e-commerce business using Shopify, Contentful, and Algolia, then Gatsby is actually a very nice fit. You could do all of this in Next.js, but you'd be dealing with server-side proxying to the SaaS tools and all that goes with that (e.g. service downtime, adding 100ms+ latency to each request, caching etc.)

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

#55

Post by madjam002 »

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…

I agree, I tried Gatsby to set up a simple static site and it just felt massively overengineered, and despite loving GraphQL I found their GraphQL layer to be more of a hindrance than a help. Moved to NextJS and it's a breath of fresh air, there's no looking back now. Their new getStaticProps interface is so simple yet very powerful.

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

#56

Post by adriand »

nlarew wrote: post #39
crucialfelix wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nextjs does the same thing. That's not a business model. Non tech people often know about Gatsby and compare it to WordPress. I have to warn decision makers that it promises a lot but adds complexity that wastes developer time.

> Nextjs does the same thing. That's not a business model. A business model doesn't need to be unique in order to be successful. Also Gatsby is open source, so I wouldn't expect to find profits falling out of the core library. They make their money through consulting and cloud ops. > adds complexity that wastes developer time Every framework comes with its own flavor of complexity. To blanket say that Gatsby wastes t…

It's also just plain fun to use, IMO. I built a site using Gatsby for a product I'm helping with (https://greeter.ai/) and it was a really fun and enjoyable experience. The site is blazing fast. The ease of React integration, Node modules, Gatsby plugins, etc., further add to developer productivity and enjoyment.

I see a really bright future for slick, fast, well-documented solutions that significantly depart from the Wordpress/massive CMS model and rely on highly-modern technologies that developers enjoy working with. Couple something like Gatsby with a framework that makes design a lot easier too (e.g. Tailwind + Tailwind UI) and suddenly, as a developer, you're so much more capable than previously.

I dunno. This old Rails programmer is loving it. And if I can learn to love it, I think they've got a market.

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

#57

Post by nicoburns »

chmac wrote: post #17
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…

> 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.

Can't you do that much more simply with a simple static site and a service worker?

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

#58

Post by manigandham »

chmac wrote: post #17
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…

Web performance doesn't need any of that. Browsers are very good at parsing HTML and CDNs are a commodity now. A directory of HTML files is about as fast as it gets, no preloading necessary (and you avoid all that JS payload too).

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

#59

Post by dmix »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #47
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…

Next.js is used by enough big companies that I’m not too worried about it. If Vercel the company were to close shop, there are plenty of large teams with a vested interest in keeping the next.js project alive. Also, at some point, improvements are nice but not strictly necessary. It would be fine if next.js went into maintenance mode and just optimized speed or kept up with new react / browser features.

According to Next.js:

> Today, Next.js powers over 35,000 sites at companies like Uber, Nike, and Starbucks.

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

#60

Post by mattkevan »

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…

Congratulations on the cash, but after trying it out recently, Gatsby feels like it was made as a dare to make the process of displaying a bit of HTML and CSS on the page as complicated as possible.
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