Next.js Creation Motivation

Guillermo Rauch shares the origin story of Next.js, which came from his need to simplify web development.

"I was trying to build the website for the company, zeit.co, our domain name at the time. I said, 'Okay, to get started with React, I have to do like get a PhD.' The alternative to Next.js is that you have to procure the chassis, the wheel, the engine. This is actually what was happening to engineers when I started the company. I was like, 'Okay, so how do you start a new idea?' 'Oh well, I go to Home Depot and I shop for like 200 different kinds of wheels, and I grab the wheel, and I go to this thing, and then I assemble it for my one car, and then maybe I get started running it, and then maybe I see if I have product market fit.'

This idea is so powerful that you cut down the time for humanity to go from some hypothesis to a production grade deployment, going down from weeks of setup to seconds. It seems obvious. What was not obvious and felt like endless pivots was narrowing down the scope. We started out with 'Oh, you can deploy anything - you can deploy Java, you can deploy Haskell, you can deploy PHP.' Then we realized, 'Wait, why are we doing all this?' Clearly we believe that the modern web will be powered by frameworks like Next.js, and we believe there's alpha in the market in democratizing this idea of using JavaScript as your backend and frontend language, which massively simplifies software development.

So I will say we didn't pivot in the sense of going into a different space, but we simplified the offering way, way, way significantly."