Some relationships are filled with constant fighting over children, money, work, and even little things like doing the dishes or hobbies. Such couples struggle on a daily basis and can’t find any common ground... Fortunately, the romance between startups and Node.js isn’t one of them!

Founders keep on choosing Node.js for their tech stack because of its simplicity and open source nature (and the fact that it's based on JavaScript, the most popular programming language among web developers). Thanks to Node.js, young companies can blossom and show their value faster. And isn’t that the foundation of a great relationship?

Read on to find out why startups love Node.js so much - and why it deserves your love too!

Why both unicorns and bootstrapped startups are choosing Node.js to develop their MVP?

Here are a few good reasons why startups use Node.js as their foundation:

• Node.js is easy to learn
• It’s also very simple
• It offers faster time-to-market (TTM)
  
• Scalability
  
• Node.js can be used everywhere
  
• It’s incredibly cost-effective
  
• It’s surrounded by a vibrant developer community
  

This is true for both bootstrapped "garage" startups, well-funded startups with several hundred thousand or even millions in their pocket, and the most exciting unicorns with more than $1 billion valuations.

Let’s take a closer look at the benefits Node.js brings to startup teams.

7 Advantages of Node.js for Startups

1. Node.js is easy to learn

Loving you is so easy...

Node.js is open source and has a gentle learning curve. It’s a walk in the park for developers who have JavaScript and Object-Oriented Programming basics. This is more than enough to start. Once devs get to clarify the client-server model in their minds and catch up with the asynchronous flow, they’re ready to take advantage of this tool.

Learning Node.js is a pleasant experience and startups are sure to find a large talent pool of developers out there who know the JavaScript programming language and Node.js like the back of their hands.

Also, sometimes it might be reasonable to finish your ongoing relationship and switch from your current tech stack to Node.js. Netflix is a great example of this - the video streaming giant replaced its Java + JavaScript combo with one neat solution, Node.js.

Yahoo on the other hand started its adventure with Node slowly, like step by step. As they said:

“Initially, we used it for performing simple backend tasks like file upload. Since then, Node.js has become one of the top programming languages for developing new front-end applications at Yahoo.”

2. It's so KISSable! (Keep it simple, stupid!)

It’s the simple things of life that make living worthwhile…

Before launching their product, startuppers usually end up wearing many hats and deal with complex tasks every day. No wonder that they want to keep their application development as simple as possible.

This is why Node.js is such a smart technology choice. It's a cross-platform tool, which means that it allows sharing one tech stack on both the front end and back end (server-side) - and reusing a lot of the code for increasing the speed of mobile or web application development.

Fun Fact: More than 22K websites in the U.S. take advantage of Node.js - among them tech giants like Twitter, Accuweather, IMDB, and PayPal.

3. Faster time-to-market (TTM)

Love needs time to blossom, but you don’t have much time when building an MVP. Fortunately here - we can talk about love from the first... line of code.

For startups, time is priceless and there’s never enough of it. They need fast and iterative development. Using Node.js allows testing, deploying, and delivering the product as fast as possible. They run on lean budgets and lean teams that strive to accelerate their product release time.

Releasing an MVP early is a smart move because it lets companies find their niche and fit. CBI Insights recently analyzed 101 startup post-mortems and concluded that 42% of startups fail because of a lack of consumer need.

Case in point? The German startup Pinky Gloves recently went viral for offering a product made “by men, for women” that blatantly stigmatized sanitary products for women, getting a bad kind of buzz. Needless to say, the team agreed that they have a lot to learn.

4. Scalability

Can you measure or scale love? Not really.

But with Node.js, you don’t have to worry about that because the technology is scalable at its core. This is a key benefit Node.js brings to the table for ventures planning to grow fast.

Startups need to develop lightweight and fast systems that offer an excellent real-time response and can be easily scaled up later when they become more popular.

Thanks to load balancing and the ability to handle a massive number of concurrent connections, Node.js is a great pick for businesses looking to use the microservices architecture that allows projects to scale easily.

Walmart replaced its legacy system with a microservices architecture and Node.js - and saw instant growth of 20% in overall conversions (98% in mobile conversions!). Walmart managed to save 40% of the computing power and cut costs by at least 20%.

Let’s take a look at another example - the platform we all know - LinkedIn. As its VP of Product at Linkedin - Kiran Prasad said:

“We use a ton of technologies at LinkedIn, but for the mobile server piece, it’s entirely Node-based. One reason was scale. The second is, if you look at Node, the thing it’s best at doing is talking to other services. The mobile app has to talk to our platform API and database. We’re not doing massive data analytics. Node showed us huge performance gains compared to what we were using before, which was Ruby on Rails.”

5. Node.js can be used everywhere

Whenever, wherever - We’re meant to be together…

Node.js helps developers in app development processes that vary in scale, business goals, target markets, and technologies used. FinTech, TransTech, EduTech, FoodTech… Node will handle all the BigTech out there. It’s a perfect match for startuppers looking to build digital products that offer high performance or need to work in a microservices-based architecture.

The biggest tech companies like Uber, LinkedIn, or eBay use Node.js successfully to address the requirements of their divergent markets. Need more “wherever” examples? Here we go:

U.S.

• eBay
• Mozilla
• Medium

Europe

• Yandex
• BBC
• Home Made

Asia

• Rakuten
• Hodlnaut
• Reliance Jio

Africa

• OfferZen
• Vascon Solutions
• Gozem

Node-based products are used both locally and worldwide and are being developed by teams from all over the world.

6. Community perks

Love is the only thing that multiplies when it’s shared - and the vibrant community of Node.js only proves it!

In the 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, Node.js was voted as the most wanted tool among developers building web and mobile apps.

Why is an active community good news for a startup? Because developers get a lot of support and feedback. A thriving community helps devs to avoid reinventing the wheel. You can find plenty of helpful tools that accelerate the mobile or web application development process.

The Node Package Manager (NPM) is the fastest-growing software registry on a global scale. It includes a huge number of libraries and reusable templates developers can easily incorporate into their code to deliver more value faster.

Take a look at GitHub and you’ll see that it’s full of ready-made elements - even complete Admin Panels for implementing in an MVP.

This means that as a CEO / Founder, you will spend less time on developing the solution and training developers without compromising on the quality of the code and final product.

7. Node.js is incredibly cost-effective

Most relationships fight over money, but this isn’t the case here.

Thanks to the cross-platform nature of Node.js, developers can write server-side code in JavaScript. This means that startups don’t need to hire two resource teams to take care of their product's back end and front end parts of apps.

Node.js helps to save a great deal of time, cost, and energy for overall software development - an essential benefit for early-stage ventures with limited cash.

Another cost benefit of Node.js lies in its performance. After migrating from Ruby on Rails to Node.js, LinkedIn managed to cut down from 30 servers to only 3.

Node.js also helped GoDaddy drive a successful SuperBowl ad campaign and enabled the company to handle 10,000 requests per second with zero downtime utilizing just 10% of the hardware.

8. It’s so extensible and versatile

Remain flexible; life (and love) is forever changing…

Startups are always growing and need technologies that are easy to extend. If you had a spike in your user base or you’re looking to explore new industries, Node.js is a great pick because it’s easy to extend and customize.

Node.js works really well with real-time applications: it streamlines the process of handling multiple client requests, allows sharing and reusing packages of library code, and enables fast data synchronization between the client and server.

Migrating to Node.js is also an option. For example, PayPal replaced Java with JavaScript and Node.js easily and achieved a 200ms faster page response time. This move also multiplied the number of requests PayPal could handle per second to deliver an excellent user experience.

Companies that switched to Node.js

Bad relationships sooner or later lead to break ups…

The examples of companies that broke up with their technologies and moved to Node.js prove that:

• LinkedIn switched the back-end infrastructure from Ruby on Rails to Node.js for the mobile app because of its scalability and performance.

• Netflix used Java on the server-side and Javascript on the client-side, but developers found it hard to become proficient in both technologies and did many things twice. After switching to Node.js, Netflix eliminated this problem and achieved other efficiencies - it slashed the startup time from 40+ minutes to one minute, got to reuse a lot of code, and improved the application load by 70%.

• The app servers of Medium were also developed with Node.js together with Nginx. Medium first used it for prototyping, then built a single-page web application, and finally tested it to create a mockup server.

Summary

Sometimes you meet someone, and it just clicks.

That's the best way to describe the relationship between Node.js and startups. It’s healthy and it guarantees profits for both parties. There’s no place for drama and worrying about money. No jealousy, no stress. If you'd like to learn more about Why use Node.js - check out our article that features 9 examples of successful node apps.

With love,
Maggie