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Defer

Zero infrastructure background processing platform.

Defer enables Node.js developers to move slow code out of the user's journey. Its simple and well-documented API enables developers to improve web applications' performance in a few minutes instead of days. Bryan and Charly noticed that all companies end up building similar abstractions and dashboards over the existing open-source (BullMQ) or commercial solutions (AWS SQS + Lambdas) to support background jobs, CRONs, and workflows. Defer brings a full-featured and managed platform with a Vercel-like developer experience that comes with an operational dashboard, enabling developers to focus on product work. After building the self-serve version of Defer in 8 weeks and onboarding 5 paying customers, their recent HN launch brought 250+ users and a warm welcome from the Node.js community with the 2 biggest newsletters featuring Defer and tech influencers spreading the word. Defer is now available as a Node.js solution but aims to become a cross-language reference.
Defer
Founded:2022
Team Size:2
Location:Paris, France
Group Partner:Nicolas Dessaigne

Former Founders

Charly POLY

Charly was a tech lead at Algolia, where he built a background jobs processing platform that contributed to $12M of new revenue. Charly enjoys speaking at international conferences (React Europe 2019) and wrote many reference articles on TypeScript and GraphQL relayed by recognized international newsletters such as GraphQL or TypeScript Weekly. After working in open-source, he now focuses on enabling Node.js developers to build reliable async flows with Defer.
Charly POLY
Charly POLY
Defer

Bryan Frimin

Strong of 8+ years building back-end and server architectures in start-ups, Bryan developed expertise in crafting resilient and scalable infrastructures. Passionate and involved in open-source, he contributed to Erlang, NSD, and many other projects over time. He now focuses on building the best PaaS to run async flows with Defer.
Bryan Frimin
Bryan Frimin
Defer

Company Launches

Hi everyone! We are Charly and Bryan, and we’re happy to present you Defer:

Defer allows developers to quickly create and run background jobs without infrastructure.

Background jobs are vital in building responsive and resilient web apps by moving slow code outside the users’ journey (ex: pulling and sending data to external APIs, sending emails).

Why are we building Defer?

Bryan and I have been working for 10 years in startups of many stages (pre-seed to Algolia or Dashlane stages).

In all those experiences, part of our work included crafting similar background jobs solutions and their internal dashboards, as Charly did at Algolia for the Shopify Integration Pipeline.

We identified a gap between current solutions and actual product needs that leads to a repeated waste of engineering time (initial cost, support, and maintenance) and bad user experiences across all companies.

As consultants, we also faced companies that preferred to keep degraded user experiences to not invest in R&D in background jobs.

All those combined experiences led us to create Defer to help companies match modern product criteria (great user-perceived performance and an increasing number of integration with external APIs) with minimum effort while keeping the developer experience at heart.

Our solution

Defer enables developers to use a background jobs solution that matches their product needs without reinventing the wheel or building fragile layers.

Defer brings a unique developer experience that makes it easy to create or transform existing functions into background functions (function version of a background job) without the usual distracting boilerplate code that current OSS solutions bring:

Defer’s infrastructure then handles background function executions with the configured parallelism and retries, without infrastructure work or DevOps knowledge.

The Defer Dashboard allows developers to manage applications with multiple environments and get a sense of their product’s health with analytics and filters-rich executions list view:

Finally, developers get notified on Slack upon failure and can quickly access the execution’s logs and business metadata to narrow down the issue and keep users in the loop.

Focus on your product.

Get started with Defer in a few minutes without refactoring or configuration, and start building delightful user experiences:

Company Photo

Company Photo

Selected answers from Defer's original YC application for the W23 Batch

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Build robust web-apps with background functions

What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.

Defer aims to improve the developer experience of building background operations in web-applications. Background operations are ubiquitous in modern web applications, from interacting with third APIs to sending notifications. Still, such features always require infrastructure work from the early stage and are hard to scale at later ones. Defer envisions that developing features such as sending notifications and exporting data should be as easy as deploying your Vercel application.

YC W23 Application Video