Bolt.new: How we scaled $0-20m ARR in 60 days, with 15 people — Eric Simons, Bolt
00:00:00.000 | how's it going everyone are you all doing yeah let's go let's go let's get the vibes going let's
00:00:20.520 | get the vibes going yeah excited to chat here today I you know by the end of this why I hope
00:00:27.300 | that you get out of it is maybe some some advice I wish I had had before kind of trying to hold on to
00:00:33.900 | the tail of the dragon with the past months of what we've been up to and you know so I think for
00:00:40.260 | us you know I how many people here have heard of bolt on you by the way just kind of curious oh wow
00:00:45.360 | dang I guess I'm still used to being like has anyone heard of stack blitz and there'd be like
00:00:49.620 | two hands and that sort of thing okay so cool so everyone's used this thing you're wherever you tried
00:00:54.600 | um so uh is anyone aware of how long we were around as a company before we launched bolt on
00:01:01.200 | yeah seven years yeah um so to kind of hit the graph of this thing so if you if you rewind uh you know the
00:01:09.420 | x-axis uh way back seven years the the ARR starting at the bottom of this that's in November uh sorry
00:01:15.240 | that's October of last year's when that thing starts the ARR was 0.7 million that's that's over seven years
00:01:21.300 | what it had gotten up to right and at the time that we launched bolt uh you know we were a team
00:01:26.400 | of less than 20 people and when we put it online we had absolutely no idea what was going to happen
00:01:32.340 | like we thought uh we were getting ready to shut down the company actually at the end of last year
00:01:36.480 | um this was like the last you know uh not like pivot of the company because it's the same core technology
00:01:42.900 | that was used to build this product that we've been building for seven years but we we couldn't figure
00:01:47.220 | out a way to kind of create a commercial offering that made sense at a venture scale we've been around
00:01:51.860 | for a long time and uh so you know our expectations were like if we can add a hundred thousand dollars
00:01:57.220 | of ARR by the end of the year with this thing that would be that would be game changing right obviously
00:02:01.700 | kind of beyond our wildest expectations of what happened and since then we've over doubled it
00:02:08.260 | but the i think that to me the the really crazy thing about the graph you're looking at
00:02:13.060 | is how clean of a ramp that is right like there's not this like jagged edges during the the insanity
00:02:20.740 | uh of the early days and the product we put online was really it's it's like those race cars like it
00:02:26.020 | was an mvp it's like those race cars where they strip everything out and it's just like metal there's
00:02:29.220 | no back seat there's no side seat it's just like this you know that's kind of what the product was like
00:02:33.300 | so the fact that you know our team was able to scale this uh was just unbelievably impressive
00:02:38.420 | and so that's i kind of want to talk about what that looked like and how to structure teams to be
00:02:42.900 | able to actually rally together and um you know be able to to scale what would normally take at least
00:02:48.740 | a year to grow into right uh the best analogy of what it feels like have you ever seen the movie 300
00:02:54.020 | um during this time right like on this revenue ramp kind of like probably at the tail end of that we
00:02:58.260 | were looking at probably 30 or 40 000 active customers at that point you know on month two
00:03:03.300 | a team of less than 20 people so this is kind of apt you got this small group of people
00:03:07.460 | you know surrounded by just tens of thousands of things that are uh maybe not trying to kill you in
00:03:13.060 | our sense but like it felt like that i mean the support load was was unbelievable we had no there
00:03:17.620 | was not a person on our team that had you know success or support uh in their title right it was my
00:03:22.340 | chief of staff and i largely responding to support tickets and whatnot but the the main thing we were
00:03:27.220 | able to make this work because it was this just an incredible uh camaraderie amongst the people on
00:03:31.940 | our team and we'd been working together for seven years at that point um and we were just extremely
00:03:37.060 | aligned and very lean and very fast and those are not new things for us like that's how we've been
00:03:41.940 | operating all along right and one of the core uh you know philosophies that we set out like my co-founder
00:03:48.660 | and i uh he's actually a childhood friend of mine he and i have been building uh websites together
00:03:53.540 | since for like 20 years now literally since we're like 13 years old and uh the company we did
00:03:59.540 | before stackless before this one we'd actually bootstrapped that thing from the ground up
00:04:04.100 | ourselves like we we were broke living on couches um and when you do that you really learn how far a
00:04:09.620 | dollar can stretch and it's very obvious how most startups are just incredibly inefficient when you're
00:04:16.180 | in the in the phase of trying to find product market fit right and uh so this is kind of where
00:04:20.740 | this mantra that that we've had at our company for you know uh almost a decade now really kicked in
00:04:26.500 | which is you really want a small number of people with more context per head because what that means
00:04:31.860 | is that people at the company have more agency they can just go and build things they don't have to
00:04:37.060 | get permission to build things right um there's not this whole chain of command you have to go through
00:04:41.700 | etc everyone's very empowered things just move a lot faster you can just go and you know make uh uh you
00:04:48.660 | know immediate impact which again is really important when you're dealing with this sort of like scale right
00:04:53.860 | of course for startups the name of the game when you're finding product market fit is you need to
00:04:58.420 | be able to take as many shots on goal as you possibly can because like fundamentally getting
00:05:03.620 | product market fit is is just like an enterprise sales pipeline like if you're a sales an enterprise
00:05:08.820 | sales rep and you want to close a million dollars of pipeline you don't go and talk to like three
00:05:12.820 | people and assume you're going to close a million dollars of pipeline you're talking to like 100 200
00:05:16.980 | people at your top of funnel of those you know half of those maybe take the next call of those
00:05:22.180 | you know maybe 10 are remaining that are actually warm leads of those you close three or something
00:05:27.380 | right same thing with like you know building products and building startups in the early phases
00:05:32.100 | you need to stick around as long as you possibly can which means you need a lower burn rate you do
00:05:36.660 | not want to have more people at the company right um because humans are the most expensive thing for a
00:05:41.860 | company doesn't mean you shouldn't hire them but it means that you know it's important for your
00:05:45.620 | ability to have a durable uh you know enough time to actually take shots on goal case in point one of
00:05:51.620 | our main competitors of our previous product when we were in the ide space they got acquired basically
00:05:57.460 | stripped for parts two weeks before we launched bolt right and we were on that same trajectory but purely
00:06:02.580 | a matter of they they didn't have enough runway to actually get to the other side of this thing and
00:06:07.300 | they were good like they would have been meaningful competitors in this space to us right um okay so that's
00:06:12.420 | this is you know there's a whole bunch of reasons this is important those are kind of the
00:06:15.540 | main reasons um again this is not new a lot of uh you know folks that do startups repeat this sort of
00:06:23.220 | thing you want to have people to have a great shared uh you know shared set of core values that uh you
00:06:30.180 | know where it's low ego high trust um they're obsessed with making the user successful and underneath you
00:06:37.940 | know chaos they have grit and resilience right if you if you aren't in this sort of insane situation like
00:06:46.340 | we were uh and you have folks that are already having trouble with the ups and downs of a startup i will
00:06:53.700 | tell you it it would not have been possible to do what we did um with folks that they didn't have just
00:06:58.900 | incredible grit and ability to check their ego and focus on what really mattered right um so great people is
00:07:05.220 | what it's what it's always about um so that's i think from a team perspective those are the things
00:07:10.660 | that that really uh stick out to me from you know what what allowed us to uh uh you know really scale
00:07:16.980 | with the traction that we saw um and we're seeing to handle and this this probably applies to um not just
00:07:24.580 | like this crazy extreme situation that we are in growing the company but in general you know at startups
00:07:30.900 | there's going to be things times when just everything's on fire right and uh and a lot
00:07:36.740 | of you probably relate to this where it's like sometimes it's good things on fire it's just you
00:07:39.780 | know tons of customers sometimes it's bad things that are on fire right um and there's just lots of them
00:07:44.740 | and the question is how do you how do you prioritize and the best analogy that that uh i have uh leaned
00:07:50.900 | into like as an operator is like imagine that you're you know a fire truck squad you have one truck
00:07:56.900 | and you're in a town that's completely on fire where do you start and the answer is you have to make hard
00:08:03.700 | decisions and choose where the high impact areas are from infrastructure uh you know and the key people
00:08:10.500 | that that need to be saved right and it's tough because all these things it's it's hard to gauge uh
00:08:16.100 | sometimes what's actually going to be the most important thing but that's the job right of
00:08:20.740 | firefighting and so that's uh and a lot and that and what you're what you're saying is there are some
00:08:26.180 | fires they're just going to have to burn and that's okay right but if we focus on on saving the right
00:08:31.300 | things focus on the right things um that'll make up for you know all the other things that we that we
00:08:36.180 | have to let go because we simply can't focus on everything as a small team but there's actually an added
00:08:40.900 | benefit of that is that you don't get lost in the million things if you if you just hired a whole
00:08:45.860 | bunch of people you feel like you have to do all of these things it turns out focusing on 10 of the
00:08:51.620 | things often gets you the lion's share of of the result that actually matters so it forces you to
00:08:57.140 | actually have clearer thinking and what you're going to go put your time and focus into as a team right
00:09:01.700 | um and uh you know i kind of mentioned the story of for us you know we've been around for a long time
00:09:09.860 | like eight years now as a company and you know over the past eight years in the valley there's been a
00:09:16.180 | lot of things that people will say and believe and you go to things you know the gatherings of people
00:09:22.500 | and they'll kind of repeat these same things then they'll change all of a sudden so a couple of these
00:09:25.780 | like just random examples uh back when we started 2017 2018 remote work was like very uh looked down
00:09:32.820 | upon it was like there's no way you could do that um my co-founder and i we just you know the best
00:09:37.700 | candidates we saw were coming in from all around the world and so we uh when we had actually gotten an
00:09:42.580 | office in sf we thought we were going to set up shop here uh six months into paying this you know
00:09:47.620 | five thousand dollar a month office we're like what are we doing like we haven't hired a single person
00:09:51.060 | here uh we went fully in on remote in like 2018 pandemic hits then the world's like remote work
00:09:56.980 | this is it like how you know blah blah and now we're kind of flipping back to previous you need to
00:10:01.300 | have your own thinking right because if you just try and follow whatever you know the press or investors
00:10:07.220 | whatever say it's it's going to be a nightmare you're you're going to be distracted by a whole bunch
00:10:11.780 | of decisions that fundamentally are not actually coming from your assessment of reality um another great
00:10:17.540 | one is to the topic of tiny teams if you were raising money in 20 if you're a company in 2021
00:10:23.220 | you had investors they were screaming at you ours were uh you should raise more money you should hire
00:10:27.860 | a whole bunch more people that's how this is successful and then if you waited 12 months in 2022
00:10:32.260 | they would come back and they'd say you need to lay off a whole bunch of people you need to stop
00:10:35.860 | spending money and and you know and for us we're like we never were spending money we never did increase
00:10:40.740 | the head count right so you you know it's you want to have these sort of bets that you make and i i don't
00:10:45.620 | want to say it's you don't want to be contrarian for contrarian sake some of this stuff uh that that
00:10:50.260 | is repeated actually you know tends to be durable advice but i would just encourage you to like think
00:10:55.060 | for yourself and don't just adopt a lot of the hive mind stuff because the you know it seems like the
00:11:00.100 | best companies tend to have independent decision making that really allows them to succeed so um
00:11:05.220 | of course uh leading from the front is very important again this is not a new thing but what i'll say
00:11:11.620 | in the first week of bulping online it was uh it was it was pretty touch and go because again the
00:11:18.660 | product was very was very brittle um and it became clear to me like if if if i don't myself and the
00:11:26.500 | team don't get out and make ourselves visible to the community and and engage with them people are going
00:11:32.900 | to churn and they're going to go away and they're not going they're going to lose belief pretty quickly
00:11:35.460 | because we we have so much work to do and so we started running a weekly office hour session where
00:11:40.100 | we let all users tune in on youtube and x or whatever and we just showed them we were building
00:11:45.300 | we're like hey we hear you here's the things we're working on here's what we think they're going to land
00:11:48.580 | people would ask questions etc and so you know again how do you smooth that sort of you know growth curve
00:11:54.580 | you you go and do things that don't scale because user love is it hard to quantify on on you know
00:12:00.740 | specifically but oh my god it works and that's that's how you can really scale um you know love for a
00:12:06.020 | product like this um last thing uh i'll mention you know as far as like tools that we used um support is
00:12:14.420 | something that is now like you can there's a lot of ai tools that are coming out right that help you scale
00:12:19.940 | uh you know all aspects of your business support has been a huge one for us the first two months
00:12:25.620 | that we were online i mentioned earlier uh my chief of staff and i were the primary support people
00:12:30.660 | uh spending a lot of our time doing emails we ended up um picking up a tool called parahelp
00:12:34.980 | everyone's heard of those guys but they are our the ai assistant called sam from those guys is the
00:12:42.500 | top rated uh support assistant um for us and takes out 90 of our tickets automatically right
00:12:49.460 | a year ago two years ago we would have had to hire 50 people to to go and scale to that right
00:12:55.540 | um the leverage that that you can have by integrating ai and there's even custom things we're doing in our
00:13:00.980 | products you know training our own you know little uh models to help people be successful within the
00:13:05.860 | product experience it would have required human support before there's a lot of things you can do um by
00:13:10.820 | not just making an ai product but also building around the entire customer success journey to be um you
00:13:16.180 | you know powered by that para help yeah para help so i think they're they're uh we're one of their
00:13:21.300 | customers i think cursors using them um a couple of just brilliant uh you know young young guys i think
00:13:27.940 | out of europe or something running that company um and i mentioned this before with like kind of leading
00:13:33.780 | from the front but community this is something that ai cannot replace going and actually talking to
00:13:40.660 | users like creating a space for users to try out your product and like learn from each other um is
00:13:46.420 | so key and yeah this has always kind of been the case right but especially now if you're building an ai
00:13:52.180 | product it's really important that folks can like learn from each other and learn in a place where they
00:13:57.220 | can get help um you know from pros right and from the community themselves because this is another way
00:14:02.660 | you can really scale the customer experience without having to add headcount within your company itself
00:14:08.660 | right and so one of the kind of cool ways that we're doing this i don't know if you've even seen
00:14:12.180 | um we are throwing the world's largest hackathon right now actually for this entire month
00:14:15.860 | if you go to hackathon.dev you can check it out we have passed the guinness world record by the way
00:14:19.700 | this is like already so let's go we've got 80 something thousand people that are participating
00:14:24.580 | um but basically we've got this amazing event going on we have dozens of people coming to help uh provide
00:14:30.500 | support and uh you know as folks are building out their projects trying out the product um and this
00:14:35.780 | has been just in the most the craziest roi we've ever seen from a marketing initiative we've ever done
00:14:42.100 | both due to the scale but also the thoughtfulness and like getting augmenting it with both the ai support
00:14:47.620 | and the community support etc um this sort of stuff really works right so um to kind of wrap up here uh
00:14:54.580 | these are you know the main takeaways if you want to like take a photo of you know the tldr or whatever
00:14:59.780 | um these are kind of the main things that you know stuck out to me from the the past couple of months
00:15:04.580 | of uh of our experience that really made a difference and and you know again like i said it was very
00:15:11.460 | touch and go right for the first especially the first two months just how unexpected and unprepared
00:15:16.740 | we were you know for for what happened uh without this these things like this would not have worked
00:15:22.420 | and it wouldn't be working now right uh and to boil that down it's like you know you don't want to hire an
00:15:26.820 | army you want a small number of spartans right that's kind of the mentality that we look for
00:15:31.940 | when we hire people onto the team so um all right with that uh let's go uh so this is where you can
00:15:37.540 | find me um i have to like go to sfo like immediately after this but if if anyone wants to chat about
00:15:42.740 | stuff or ever has questions that's where i am on x and then that's my my email address there um i think
00:15:48.340 | we have one minute for questions actually if anyone has a burning one there's a microphone up here if you
00:15:53.220 | want to come on up but yeah yeah hey how did you decide what to build like did you have a framework
00:16:04.420 | for you know talking to users or did you just ideate and you know ship product experiments and see see
00:16:09.220 | what stuck or yeah what was the process there yeah you're talking about like for like kind of like how
00:16:13.380 | we decided to build bolt or and even after yeah we we tried out like uh probably five different things
00:16:18.980 | last year and all of them i mean i think it's you know all the things i've ever built that that really
00:16:24.980 | seem to stick with users and resonate always started with something that uh i myself thought was cool you
00:16:30.820 | know uh which sounds like very obvious but there's also most of the things i've built in my career have
00:16:36.100 | been things that sounded good and like it's like hey this should like maybe increase our arr but it
00:16:41.940 | like did intrinsically wasn't something that i was like so so so stoked about that i couldn't sleep at
00:16:47.380 | night bolt was one of those things you know and then we certainly put in front of users uh people
00:16:51.940 | seemed excited um and i'll tell you this what what the user feedback we got from the early bolt sessions
00:16:58.420 | before we launched versus some like launching stack puts was the exact same and the outcomes couldn't
00:17:03.220 | have been more different right so again it's all about just like taking shots on goal because you
00:17:07.460 | you just don't know until you actually get it out into the world um you can certainly get the early
00:17:11.460 | feedback but um you know it's it's all about just getting it launched getting it out there and you know
00:17:16.420 | iterating as fast as you can so am i cut okay i'm sorry i'm sorry i can't take anymore thank you thank
00:17:23.540 | you for having me um hopefully this is helpful