how's it going everyone are you all doing yeah let's go let's go let's get the vibes going let's get the vibes going yeah excited to chat here today I you know by the end of this why I hope that you get out of it is maybe some some advice I wish I had had before kind of trying to hold on to the tail of the dragon with the past months of what we've been up to and you know so I think for us you know I how many people here have heard of bolt on you by the way just kind of curious oh wow dang I guess I'm still used to being like has anyone heard of stack blitz and there'd be like two hands and that sort of thing okay so cool so everyone's used this thing you're wherever you tried um so uh is anyone aware of how long we were around as a company before we launched bolt on 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 x-axis uh way back seven years the the ARR starting at the bottom of this that's in November uh sorry that's October of last year's when that thing starts the ARR was 0.7 million that's that's over seven years what it had gotten up to right and at the time that we launched bolt uh you know we were a team of less than 20 people and when we put it online we had absolutely no idea what was going to happen like we thought uh we were getting ready to shut down the company actually at the end of last year um this was like the last you know uh not like pivot of the company because it's the same core technology that was used to build this product that we've been building for seven years but we we couldn't figure out a way to kind of create a commercial offering that made sense at a venture scale we've been around for a long time and uh so you know our expectations were like if we can add a hundred thousand dollars of ARR by the end of the year with this thing that would be that would be game changing right obviously kind of beyond our wildest expectations of what happened and since then we've over doubled it but the i think that to me the the really crazy thing about the graph you're looking at is how clean of a ramp that is right like there's not this like jagged edges during the the insanity uh of the early days and the product we put online was really it's it's like those race cars like it was an mvp it's like those race cars where they strip everything out and it's just like metal there's no back seat there's no side seat it's just like this you know that's kind of what the product was like so the fact that you know our team was able to scale this uh was just unbelievably impressive and so that's i kind of want to talk about what that looked like and how to structure teams to be able to actually rally together and um you know be able to to scale what would normally take at least a year to grow into right uh the best analogy of what it feels like have you ever seen the movie 300 um during this time right like on this revenue ramp kind of like probably at the tail end of that we were looking at probably 30 or 40 000 active customers at that point you know on month two a team of less than 20 people so this is kind of apt you got this small group of people you know surrounded by just tens of thousands of things that are uh maybe not trying to kill you in our sense but like it felt like that i mean the support load was was unbelievable we had no there was not a person on our team that had you know success or support uh in their title right it was my chief of staff and i largely responding to support tickets and whatnot but the the main thing we were able to make this work because it was this just an incredible uh camaraderie amongst the people on our team and we'd been working together for seven years at that point um and we were just extremely aligned and very lean and very fast and those are not new things for us like that's how we've been operating all along right and one of the core uh you know philosophies that we set out like my co-founder and i uh he's actually a childhood friend of mine he and i have been building uh websites together since for like 20 years now literally since we're like 13 years old and uh the company we did before stackless before this one we'd actually bootstrapped that thing from the ground up ourselves like we we were broke living on couches um and when you do that you really learn how far a dollar can stretch and it's very obvious how most startups are just incredibly inefficient when you're in the in the phase of trying to find product market fit right and uh so this is kind of where this mantra that that we've had at our company for you know uh almost a decade now really kicked in which is you really want a small number of people with more context per head because what that means is that people at the company have more agency they can just go and build things they don't have to get permission to build things right um there's not this whole chain of command you have to go through etc everyone's very empowered things just move a lot faster you can just go and you know make uh uh you know immediate impact which again is really important when you're dealing with this sort of like scale right of course for startups the name of the game when you're finding product market fit is you need to be able to take as many shots on goal as you possibly can because like fundamentally getting product market fit is is just like an enterprise sales pipeline like if you're a sales an enterprise sales rep and you want to close a million dollars of pipeline you don't go and talk to like three people and assume you're going to close a million dollars of pipeline you're talking to like 100 200 people at your top of funnel of those you know half of those maybe take the next call of those you know maybe 10 are remaining that are actually warm leads of those you close three or something right same thing with like you know building products and building startups in the early phases you need to stick around as long as you possibly can which means you need a lower burn rate you do not want to have more people at the company right um because humans are the most expensive thing for a company doesn't mean you shouldn't hire them but it means that you know it's important for your ability to have a durable uh you know enough time to actually take shots on goal case in point one of our main competitors of our previous product when we were in the ide space they got acquired basically stripped for parts two weeks before we launched bolt right and we were on that same trajectory but purely a matter of they they didn't have enough runway to actually get to the other side of this thing and they were good like they would have been meaningful competitors in this space to us right um okay so that's this is you know there's a whole bunch of reasons this is important those are kind of the main reasons um again this is not new a lot of uh you know folks that do startups repeat this sort of thing you want to have people to have a great shared uh you know shared set of core values that uh you know where it's low ego high trust um they're obsessed with making the user successful and underneath you know chaos they have grit and resilience right if you if you aren't in this sort of insane situation like we were uh and you have folks that are already having trouble with the ups and downs of a startup i will tell you it it would not have been possible to do what we did um with folks that they didn't have just incredible grit and ability to check their ego and focus on what really mattered right um so great people is what it's what it's always about um so that's i think from a team perspective those are the things that that really uh stick out to me from you know what what allowed us to uh uh you know really scale with the traction that we saw um and we're seeing to handle and this this probably applies to um not just like this crazy extreme situation that we are in growing the company but in general you know at startups there's going to be things times when just everything's on fire right and uh and a lot of you probably relate to this where it's like sometimes it's good things on fire it's just you know tons of customers sometimes it's bad things that are on fire right um and there's just lots of them and the question is how do you how do you prioritize and the best analogy that that uh i have uh leaned into like as an operator is like imagine that you're you know a fire truck squad you have one truck and you're in a town that's completely on fire where do you start and the answer is you have to make hard decisions and choose where the high impact areas are from infrastructure uh you know and the key people that that need to be saved right and it's tough because all these things it's it's hard to gauge uh sometimes what's actually going to be the most important thing but that's the job right of firefighting and so that's uh and a lot and that and what you're what you're saying is there are some fires they're just going to have to burn and that's okay right but if we focus on on saving the right things focus on the right things um that'll make up for you know all the other things that we that we have to let go because we simply can't focus on everything as a small team but there's actually an added benefit of that is that you don't get lost in the million things if you if you just hired a whole bunch of people you feel like you have to do all of these things it turns out focusing on 10 of the things often gets you the lion's share of of the result that actually matters so it forces you to actually have clearer thinking and what you're going to go put your time and focus into as a team right um and uh you know i kind of mentioned the story of for us you know we've been around for a long time like eight years now as a company and you know over the past eight years in the valley there's been a lot of things that people will say and believe and you go to things you know the gatherings of people and they'll kind of repeat these same things then they'll change all of a sudden so a couple of these like just random examples uh back when we started 2017 2018 remote work was like very uh looked down upon it was like there's no way you could do that um my co-founder and i we just you know the best candidates we saw were coming in from all around the world and so we uh when we had actually gotten an office in sf we thought we were going to set up shop here uh six months into paying this you know five thousand dollar a month office we're like what are we doing like we haven't hired a single person here uh we went fully in on remote in like 2018 pandemic hits then the world's like remote work this is it like how you know blah blah and now we're kind of flipping back to previous you need to have your own thinking right because if you just try and follow whatever you know the press or investors whatever say it's it's going to be a nightmare you're you're going to be distracted by a whole bunch of decisions that fundamentally are not actually coming from your assessment of reality um another great one is to the topic of tiny teams if you were raising money in 20 if you're a company in 2021 you had investors they were screaming at you ours were uh you should raise more money you should hire a whole bunch more people that's how this is successful and then if you waited 12 months in 2022 they would come back and they'd say you need to lay off a whole bunch of people you need to stop spending money and and you know and for us we're like we never were spending money we never did increase 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 want to say it's you don't want to be contrarian for contrarian sake some of this stuff uh that that is repeated actually you know tends to be durable advice but i would just encourage you to like think for yourself and don't just adopt a lot of the hive mind stuff because the you know it seems like the best companies tend to have independent decision making that really allows them to succeed so um of course uh leading from the front is very important again this is not a new thing but what i'll say in the first week of bulping online it was uh it was it was pretty touch and go because again the product was very was very brittle um and it became clear to me like if if if i don't myself and the team don't get out and make ourselves visible to the community and and engage with them people are going to churn and they're going to go away and they're not going they're going to lose belief pretty quickly because we we have so much work to do and so we started running a weekly office hour session where we let all users tune in on youtube and x or whatever and we just showed them we were building 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 people would ask questions etc and so you know again how do you smooth that sort of you know growth curve you you go and do things that don't scale because user love is it hard to quantify on on you know specifically but oh my god it works and that's that's how you can really scale um you know love for a product like this um last thing uh i'll mention you know as far as like tools that we used um support is something that is now like you can there's a lot of ai tools that are coming out right that help you scale uh you know all aspects of your business support has been a huge one for us the first two months that we were online i mentioned earlier uh my chief of staff and i were the primary support people uh spending a lot of our time doing emails we ended up um picking up a tool called parahelp everyone's heard of those guys but they are our the ai assistant called sam from those guys is the top rated uh support assistant um for us and takes out 90 of our tickets automatically right a year ago two years ago we would have had to hire 50 people to to go and scale to that right um the leverage that that you can have by integrating ai and there's even custom things we're doing in our products you know training our own you know little uh models to help people be successful within the product experience it would have required human support before there's a lot of things you can do um by not just making an ai product but also building around the entire customer success journey to be um you you know powered by that para help yeah para help so i think they're they're uh we're one of their customers i think cursors using them um a couple of just brilliant uh you know young young guys i think out of europe or something running that company um and i mentioned this before with like kind of leading from the front but community this is something that ai cannot replace going and actually talking to users like creating a space for users to try out your product and like learn from each other um is so key and yeah this has always kind of been the case right but especially now if you're building an ai product it's really important that folks can like learn from each other and learn in a place where they can get help um you know from pros right and from the community themselves because this is another way you can really scale the customer experience without having to add headcount within your company itself right and so one of the kind of cool ways that we're doing this i don't know if you've even seen um we are throwing the world's largest hackathon right now actually for this entire month if you go to hackathon.dev you can check it out we have passed the guinness world record by the way this is like already so let's go we've got 80 something thousand people that are participating um but basically we've got this amazing event going on we have dozens of people coming to help uh provide support and uh you know as folks are building out their projects trying out the product um and this has been just in the most the craziest roi we've ever seen from a marketing initiative we've ever done both due to the scale but also the thoughtfulness and like getting augmenting it with both the ai support and the community support etc um this sort of stuff really works right so um to kind of wrap up here uh these are you know the main takeaways if you want to like take a photo of you know the tldr or whatever um these are kind of the main things that you know stuck out to me from the the past couple of months of uh of our experience that really made a difference and and you know again like i said it was very touch and go right for the first especially the first two months just how unexpected and unprepared we were you know for for what happened uh without this these things like this would not have worked 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 army you want a small number of spartans right that's kind of the mentality that we look for when we hire people onto the team so um all right with that uh let's go uh so this is where you can find me um i have to like go to sfo like immediately after this but if if anyone wants to chat about stuff or ever has questions that's where i am on x and then that's my my email address there um i think we have one minute for questions actually if anyone has a burning one there's a microphone up here if you want to come on up but yeah yeah hey how did you decide what to build like did you have a framework for you know talking to users or did you just ideate and you know ship product experiments and see see what stuck or yeah what was the process there yeah you're talking about like for like kind of like how we decided to build bolt or and even after yeah we we tried out like uh probably five different things last year and all of them i mean i think it's you know all the things i've ever built that that really seem to stick with users and resonate always started with something that uh i myself thought was cool you know uh which sounds like very obvious but there's also most of the things i've built in my career have been things that sounded good and like it's like hey this should like maybe increase our arr but it like did intrinsically wasn't something that i was like so so so stoked about that i couldn't sleep at night bolt was one of those things you know and then we certainly put in front of users uh people seemed excited um and i'll tell you this what what the user feedback we got from the early bolt sessions before we launched versus some like launching stack puts was the exact same and the outcomes couldn't have been more different right so again it's all about just like taking shots on goal because you you just don't know until you actually get it out into the world um you can certainly get the early feedback but um you know it's it's all about just getting it launched getting it out there and you know 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 you for having me um hopefully this is helpful