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Comment by 4778468d | Hacker News Reader

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 great time concentrating super hard looking super close at how fast things are. The thing we do lets you do the best thing you do.

Ah, now it’s crystal clear what Vercel is.

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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 "if I push code to your stack, will it host my JAMstack".

NOW, I would argue that a good press release for a devchain based company can talk to BOTH audiences, and I think the criticism there is fair.

The quote "Vercel combines the best developer experience with an obsessive focus on end-user performance. Our platform enables frontend teams to do their best work." isn't actually from the linked press release, it's from the home page https://vercel.com/

TBH I think the linked blog is targeted at a dev audience, and if it isn't then "They don’t care if an application is CSR, SSR, SSG, etc. as long as their end-user is delighted." (with those acryonyms linking to a Next docs page) is probably not supposed to be there.

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')

Ya, I actually read about it first here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000SEIW9E/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...

Highly recommend for the techies here who want to hone their writing skills.

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 supervision, all with no configuration.

Seems fairly clear what it does.

> lots of the time you want to write what he impact is up front.

This one is better than most zero information PR lines. For what it is worth the statement can't be written by GPT-3.

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?

For a developer audience, yes. For a non technical audience, no.

It's square aimed at developers though, so shouldn't be too much of an issue.

It's square aimed at companies who hire developers. They want company money, not developer money. Sure, some developers pay for Vercel's products, but they want big chunks of money that managers approve to expense.

This assumption that any developer might automatically navigate to documentation page sounds silly. This is not true. Developers glance the page like normal people do and the OP's concerns are not wrong.

I would! I also like to look at the job openings page when evaluating a technical product. The experience they ask for can give a lot of insight into internal engineering health.

Haha I do this too but stop telling everyone about this one weird trick or our secret will be out!

OP posted the non-tech audience answer and is hot under the collar about it. Do you need them to spell out every part of what they do? Part of investing is due diligence

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.

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

That’s a jaded view. The truth is that most enterprise customers are not making a decision based on a front page blurb and are going to Vercel because they have a problem they already need solved.

The problem here is “I want to avoid increasing the number of backend and SRE engineers for the customer-facing portions of the business and I have a team bought into next.js already or are platform-agnostic.”

People are not Stumbling upon vercel. The developers are coming through next.js. That said, I think this is evidence they could have better copy on the front page.

For an Enterprise customer there is not a lot information that helps to make a proper decision whether it's worth considering, regarding regulation, risk and compliance. I wish you didn't had to go through the whole sales game to find these kind of information out.

"Vercel is the best place to deploy any frontend app."

One of the first sentences on the home once you read past the heading.

So you read two sentences, but not the rest of the page? They explain everything pretty clearly.

To be fair, I eventually got there (I think) but I don’t use Next.js and the banner of “building the next web” threw me off. It’s essentially web hosting, maybe on the PAAS end of the spectrum like Heroku. Seems like they turned up the collaboration dial, which gives them an entry point to team sales. That’s the best I could tell.

Here is a technical talk by the founder explaining what it does: https://viennajs.org/en/meetup/2016-10-special-event/whats-n...

Every single thread on HN is filled with the same cynicism. It's getting boring and I consider myself to be a cynic.

What are you even complaining about in this comment? You are complaining that you can't learn what a company does in a single sentence? Or are you claiming that vercel is a bullshit company (because it isn't)

Also, if you scroll down just a little bit in that page you learn exactly what vercel does.

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