It only took Guilherme Rodrigues, Rafael Crespo, and Luciano Júnior a year for their fast growing innovative frontend platform, Deco.cx, to include some of Brazil’s top brands. But their quick success is not a surprise for co-founder Guilherme. According to him, their clients rave about their “fast page loads”, where a 100 millisecond improvement can increase conversion rates by 8.4%. These glowing reviews are largely attributed to building with Deno and Deno Subhosting.

The challenge

Prior to using Deno, the co-founders struggled to find the right tech to realize their vision of making it as easy as possible for developers to build for the web without sacrificing end-user performance.

While working together at a previous company, Guilherme, Luciano, and Rafael realized that building e-commerce frontends was getting more complex, while negatively impacting performance. “We were held hostage by the tools there,” Guilherme joked, referring not just to the tooling available at their employer, but also in general in the JavaScript community. “Everything was JavaScript-heavy SPA architecture with React or React-like framework, which just isn’t suited for content heavy web experiences such as e-commerce.”

They knew there was a huge opportunity at the intersection of providing a performant, JavaScript-light website, with an intuitive, simple development experience. They also focused on e-commerce to start, since it’s the ultimate test of developer experience and performance, where each delay has a tangible impact on revenue. “E-commerce is especially tricky, since the lower margins means the solutions must be simple and cost effective,” added Luciano.

The solution

Guilherme started following the Deno project since its inception in 2019, and believed this modern, “batteries included” approach is the future of programming. But their employer resisted adopting it, citing it was “too cutting edge”. Despite this setback, the co-founders believed so strongly in Deno’s vision — making programming simpler with zero-config, a built-in toolchain, and native support for TypeScript and web standards APIs — that they left to start a new company built on Deno.

“Building with Deno helped us move faster,” Luciano says. “We built everything in one year.” The team also used Fresh, a next-gen Deno-native full stack web framework that sends zero JavaScript to the client, for its modern developer experience and snappy performance. Coupled with Deno Subhosting, their clients’ ecommerce frontends are all server-side rendered from the edge, close to their clients’ users. This stack unlocked 5x faster page load speeds and a 30% jump in conversion rates for their clients’ such as Zee.Dog.

The future of Deco.cx

Despite being around for a year and having already onboarded some of Brazil’s biggest brands, Deco.cx plans to expand beyond e-commerce. “We want to be the web editor where you don’t have to choose between full code and no-code,” Guilherme says. “Deno has given us the speed and flexibility to pursue these big ideas.”

Want to leverage Deno Deploy’s fast, scalable multi-tenant infrastructure to run your users’ untrusted code? Check out Deno Subhosting.