Vercel Ship 2025: Building for Fortune 100 Scale (Ramp)

[Music] [Applause] All right. All right. All right. Hope everyone's having a wonderful Wednesday afternoon. U my name is Akash and I'm the director of growth engineering over at RAMP. Um today I'll be sharing a little bit about our story as we migrated to Nex.js. JS. Um, just to set

the stage here a little bit, the growth engineering team at RAP is primarily responsible for driving top offunnel uh, customer acquisition. The website is the primary vehicle through which we do so. Um, additionally, you're probably wondering what is RAMP? RAMP is a finance automation platform geared towards saving businesses time and money. Today we serve 40,000 customers

across the United States. Um, cool. So that's great. That's all put to the side. Would love to now kind of chat a little bit about the context here. So ramp emerged from stealth in 2020. Um, and for the first year we were heads down trying to achieve product market fit. Once we achieved that, we started to turn our attention to acquiring new business. And when you want to acquire new business, you need to have a strong marketing presence. At the time, we we needed a CMS. We had

only one engineer, myself, and then another soon after that was focused on the website. And so, we opted for an out of the box website builder platform. And that gave us a ton of leverage, especially early on. But as time went on and we wanted to do more complex things on the website, we started to run into constraints. And at that point we started to re-evaluate what else is out there. There must be a better way. So at the beginning of last year we effectively took a step back,

re-evaluated our tech stack and decided that it was time to migrate. Today I'd like to share that story with you. Cool. So this is the agenda for today. I'm going to start by giving you a quick overview of why we decided to move to Nex.js. We'll follow that up with a walkthrough of like what was our playbook. It's a pretty gargantuan task to undertake. So, what were the steps? Next, we'll chat about what was the

impact that we saw followed by an anecdote about the Super Bowl ad that we did in February. Um, and then we'll talk a bit about what are we looking forward to in 2025 and beyond. and we'll wrap up with a conclusion. Awesome. Cool. So, actually what ended up happening at the beginning of last year is when we decided we wanted to move to Next.js, we had to put together a proposal for leadership because we're basically advocating that we would slow

down a little bit velocity, put in all this time to invest in a new tech stack and start from from zero, right? And so this is a distilled version of a multi-page document that my team and I put together when we made that recommendation to leadership. So the first thing that was most important to us when moving to a new platform was having more granular control over the user experience. So prior to this we were on a web platform as I mentioned and we were limited to client side

development. So, as you can imagine, there's like a ceiling in terms of how good your core web vitals can be because you don't get to control what's rendered on the on the server versus the client. Um, and you're you're pretty constrained if you want to integrate with some sort of bespoke backend service. You can't really do that. You have to jump through a bunch of hoops, set up a proxy, etc. So, that was huge. We wanted to basically have stronger core of vitals such that we could drive better conversion rates. So, that was point number one of why we wanted to move to