The Path to Scaling a Digital Enterprise with EssentiallySports and Vercel

[Music] hi everyone my name is Malta hello yeah I'm the CTO for cell and um we're the the provider of the frontend cloud and the creators and maintainers of nextjs um we work with customers such as Under Armor Nintendo zapier um and many

other of the largest Enterprise brands in the world kind of getting their web experiences to the best and most stable that they could be and today I'm speaking with my young who works at essentially Sports which is a global brand for sports entertainment use I think and um which has gone through like a pretty substantial growth cycle over the last years um so great to have you here how are you doing today I'm doing amazing quite anxious as well so and um it's definitely been a great journey for

us over the last few years um and good to be here and talk about all the good things we've done and I would love to share our learnings with everyone here awesome actually so I'm personally like I must admit not a sports person um so maybe others aren't like uh what's what is essentially Sports what are you guys what are you guys doing um so essentially Sports essentially is um um digital brand focused on telling best stories about America's favorite Sports

celebrities um so that pretty much sums up our vision but in terms of business scale uh in the last year we published over 400 unique content pieces every day and crossed 1 billion page views aggregated over the year wow by the way before I joined forel which was a year ago I ran uh the desktop search team at Google and that sounds like the type of site that I would have to deal with every so often um okay I'm glad you

don't have that penalty anymore that you just talked to me about um awesome like what I one thing that actually I think really is interesting also in the in the realm of operations is like you are an engineer you are pushing code and but there's this news team who are pushing articles so does that create any particular challenges on how you operate well so to answer that it goes down to how we have evolved as a business initially it was just a fun project uh wouldst with three CS

Engineers from University um that also kind of plays into that the company in terms it's very tech savvy um but back then because it was more like a hobby so we were just running this WordPress service somewhere everything was just tightly coupled into that single service we would have themes to put out the user interface out there and the whole CMS system and of course uh when the website started getting big um the service would crash all the time um and there would be

firefighting in the night people would be just rebooting the service again and again I recall somewhere in June July 2019 there was one Sunday where we had Wimbledon finals uh there was the Cricket World Cup as well and uh a British GP and well that was a disastrous night because um we had that like really innocent what press service running somewhere trying to do its job and the engineers just spreading the REO button

uh it was a bad day for the company because a lot of people content uh people in the content or they worked a lot to make that day a big success for the company but the technology didn't really stand up to that test right and that's probably the original story of how we have scaled from there to a point where I think this year we scaled from 800 active reader sessions to around 75,000 active reader sessions and we didn't even realize it because we were out having drinks and to clarify now you're