Introduction
Jamstack is getting more popular over time and is constantly evolving, becoming an excellent approach for wider audiences in various industries. The benefits of Jamstack influence the number of companies choosing it for creating new businesses. And today, we will answer the question: why use Jamstack for corporate venture building, explaining the pros and cons of this approach in the context of creating a new business line inside the existing enterprise.
Corporate Venture Building is the process of creating an independent company in the “start-up” form inside a bigger, established enterprise. The main goal of this approach is to develop a new business model, diversify the company’s offers, and reach new markets.
Of course, it’s not an easy process, requiring an adequate budget, a dynamic team, and an innovative idea. People engaged in the project have to deal with many pain points on their way to success, and the main of them are:
- Technology match with the company environment
- Cooperation between different teams
- Time to market
- Compliance
- Data leaks
- Web app crashes
- High-volume traffic management
And, of course, remaining competitive.
Jamstack – Quick Overview
Jamstack is a modern web development architecture that enables you to build web apps and websites based on the microservices methodology. According to Jamstack Community Survey 2022, this year, “the number of people who have used serverless technology jumped to 70%, taking it fully into the mainstream.” – and Jamstack remains the standard architecture of the web.
Why?
There are thousands of reasons. Jamstack lets you build a highly-performing website and web app, and meet all the project requirements with the tech stack of your choice. Decoupling the front end from the back end started a new era in web development, and brought the customers a long list of benefits, like high-SEO ranks, outstanding UX, easy scalability and full flexibility.
If you need any more information about Jamstack, check out our guide through Jamstack for non-technical leaders or our video interview with Colby Fayock, senior FE & UX developer and the author of the very first Jamstack Handbook.
How Jamstack overtakes the main pain points of Corporate Venture Building?
Technology match with the company environment
Thanks to decoupling the front end from the back end, the Jamstack approach gives the users and developers full flexibility in choosing the tools they want to use in their app or website. It enables using various CMSes, static site generators, and hosting of your choice. This encourages you to match the technology to the tools that are already used in the company, and as a result, cut the time (and money) spent on team training.
Additionally, thanks to its serverless nature, Jamstack allows you to combine almost any other web app or external integration through the API with your website or web app. So if you want to use the same CRM or payment system across your business, you can do this with Jamstack, cutting the costs of buying and implementing new tools.
Cooperation between different teams
Building a new product often requires close cooperation between different teams, both internal and external. Since Jamstack is a cloud-based solution, it enables team members to work within the project in real-time without influencing other members’ work. It’s a great approach for larger companies with granular control over user roles and authorization.
Time to market
A shorter time to market makes testing the idea on the real audience possible quicker, which is extremely important during new business line creation. Listening to the customers and addressing their feedback in your app is a great way to build a product that will meet users’ requirements, and build a loyal audience around your product.
The best way to validate your idea and reach the market fast, with the ready-to-use initial version of your product is by building the MVP. Here, we have to admit that Jamstack may not be the cheaper option to build the MVP, but it is a great choice if you want to work on the same product from the beginning, as Jamstack is great for improving and scaling the solution in time.
Compliance
Enterprises have to fulfil many high norms, may it be for product quality or security. Additionally, in the UE, the companies have to comply with GDPR which protects the user’s data. And anyone who worked with it knows that it’s not as easy as adding the Cookies Pop-Up on your website – it requires many additional settings and changes within the company.
Netlify, the Jamstack creator has partnered with legal experts across Europe to make sure that any product in the Jamstack ecosystem is compliant with GDPR and to ensure that any website or web app built with Jamstack is safe in terms of compliance issues.
Want to build your new venture with Jamstack?
Data Leaks
Building a new brand inside the existing enterprise may be a big challenge in terms of data security. Any data leaks may influence the whole company, so security is essential in projects like that.
Here, Jamstack is standing at the forefront of other approaches – headless CMS and API communication with external integrations makes it the safest and most secure solution of all. What’s more, the wide offer of frameworks, CMSes, and other tools that we can use during Jamstack development allows answering even the strictest security standards of the industry or country, where the product will be released.
Web app crashes
Very often the whole new business line is based on the web app or website, so its stability is necessary to achieve success. A web app that often crashes translates to a loss of money and the trust of potential customers (and we have to remember that at the stake is trust for the mother-company), so the stability of the app is the key here. According to Global App Testing research, the average cost of a single hour of downtime is $100,000.
Jamstack is an extremely stable approach since it provides static pages, that are displayed to the users as static HTML, delivered via CDNs. Of course, you may wonder “okay, but what about the third-party integrations connected to my website through APIs?” – here we can reassure you – if APIs are managed properly, their downtimes won’t cause the crushes of your website.
High-Volume Traffic Management
Many big enterprises invest in corporate ventures that bring to life solutions complementary to their main business line to life. That means, that usually, they presume that their existing customers may become the users of the new product, and this usually means high traffic on the new website.
The Jamstack approach makes your web app or website highly scalable because the content is distributed to the user via a CDN as static HTML files. And that means that no matter how many people use it at the same time, they will be served with the highest performance, and even the highest number of active users won’t crush your website, simply because the website doesn’t rely on the server performance.
Remain competitive
In the digital world, we actually live in, corporations must evolve and adopt new technologies to remain competitive. Jamstack is a future-proof solution, that allows using all the modern stack, in the way you want to, whether it is creating a new business line, further product development or testing a new idea. Nowadays, frameworks are built to stay on the market as long as possible, so they are flexible and constantly improved. And by choosing Jamstack you can be sure you’re using the blessing of the modern stack.
Cons of Jamstack for new corporate ventures
Like any other approach, Jamstack has its downsides too, that may influence the decision of using it during the corporate venture building. In our opinion, they don’t discredit it from being used in your project, but they’re worth mentioning.
Not cost-efficient for building the MVP
As we mentioned before, Jamstack is not the cheapest option on the market to build an MVP. So if you are not sure if the idea is worth considering or not good enough to reach the market, investing in Jamstack can be doubtful. But that’s rarely an option during corporate venture building, as big, experienced enterprises are standing behind it. They know they have to minimize the risk and run deep market research before starting any new product.
Once invested, further Jamstack development and website maintenance are extremely cost-efficient because it doesn’t require data storage or access to the server and the hosting is much cheaper for static websites and web apps. What’s more, while choosing Jamstack you can stay with the tools that you are already using, so you don’t have to worry about additional investments in staff training or new programs.
Long build times
Websites and apps are sometimes rich in content and functionalities. Jamstack is based on the pages that are pre-generated in the build time, so it can become very long, especially for very big sites.
However, there are some methods that help overcome this challenge:
- Splitting sites into sub-sections and creating micro-sites from them. In this case, changes made on the micro-sites do not trigger a rebuild of the whole webpage
- Limitate the pages generated in the build time for the most popular ones
- Incremental builds – rebuilding only certain parts of the site (where the changes appeared)
Web Apps Built with Jamstack Examples
Until now, we were involved in numerous Jamstack projects for Corporate Venture Building from different industries, like insurance or digital media. Below you can check the Case Study showing up a Jamstack project that we’ve created as a new business line for Admiral – a leading insurance company in the UK.
Web App Development
Wrap up
Thanks to its flexibility, serverless nature and high performance, Jamstack covers all the most popular challenges that appear during creating a new business line. Whether you want to build a website or a web application, you can be sure that Jamstack provides the best developer and user experience.
Want to build your new venture with Jamstack?
