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Category: Startup Journey
00:00
In the first day, I think we added like 60K. I remember one of our engineers was like, "Guys, we added 60K today.
Oh my god." And you I jumped in was like, "Yep, it's cool, but like this is, you know, this is like launch day. This is going to go away." And that didn't happen.
Every single day, we kept adding more and more ARR. In the first 2
00:17
months, we went from 0 to 20 million of ARR. Everyone we were talking to had never seen anything like it.
We were actually we were going to go out of business last year. You know, we spent seven years building out the core technology of the product.
couldn't figure out how to actually effectively monetize it. We had one last experiment
00:33
that we ran um is it's a product called Bolt. Finding product market fit.
It is purely how many people you talk to. It is purely that you people there maybe early in their product career to kind of have lots of cool ideas about things they could build and whatever that are not really attached to the reality of
00:49
the actual end user customer using the product, what they're trying to do with it, the challenges they're currently running into with it. One of the things we really invested in early on with Bolt was like community.
You know, we've hired in a couple of folks who their entire job is just talking to our users. And so I think that's really the only
01:04
way you can meaningfully scale the full cycle of user feedback is just having great people that are in your community or on your actual core team. That's their entire job and they're all working together.
You have to learn how to be intellectually honest with yourself. And it's like, am I not giving up because that's what people say you should do, or
01:21
am I not giving up because I actually really like I have conviction in this and like I just want to see this I I really want to see this made possible. I I think the only way I learned how to determine when it was time to pivot versus time to iterate was just
01:41
I'm Eric Simons. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Stack Blitz and we're the creators of Bolt.
new. People went to bolt.new, typed in the idea of a website or whatever that they wanted to make, hit enter, and 30 seconds later, they had a a web application ready to go.
First two months of launching Bolt, we
01:57
went from 0 to 20 million of ARR. The 3 months since then, we've added another 20 million of ARR just about, and we now have almost 4 million registered users and are continuing to grow like a weed.
02:12
I like computers from a pretty early age. I was like building computers like be gaming computers and that sort of thing.
That was actually when my co-founder and I met was when we were you I think around 12 or 13. The first product that my co-founder and I built.
We basically built a version of Dropbox
02:29
before Dropbox existed. And this is back in like 2006 or 7.
At that time, the way that you kind of bring your digital documents between school and home was like USB flash drives. You're like 12 or 13 or whatever.
You're going to forget this, right? You're going to leave this at home.
Happened all the time. And so we had the idea of like, hey, let's just
02:45
make a digital storage service that people can upload their homework to or whatever. And it took off like wildfire like the entire many school districts in Illinois and just kind of across the Midwest started using this thing.
I think at that time I was I was like 18 or 19. I for come out Silicon Valley.
We
03:00
had gone through one of these accelerator program. At that time they would give you like 20K.
So we went through that money and then we're out of money but we the product wasn't ready to launch. And so I was like what do you do?
We just so happened to had access to the AOL building at that time because one of our investors said was renting
03:15
office space out of there. So I had a key card to get into the AOL building and so there's couches here, you know, I could sleep on the couch, there's a gym and so they have showers.
I was 19. Expectations for quality of of living are pretty low, I think, at that age.
And so I I ended up just, you know, starting to live out of out of their
03:31
headquarters. I I would I was just coding from 9:00 a.m.
to 11:00 p.m. 12:00 p.m.
I did that for like I think like 4 months um until they they eventually someone like someone finally caught on that I was living in their headquarters and they they found me and threw me out at like 5:00 in the morning. I didn't know anyone in Silicon
03:47
Valley. I'm not from California.
I went and like slept on a table at Starbucks until they opened. Thinking was a company that we didn't really intend to be a company.
Basically, we had a whole bunch of different startup ideas we were trying on the side. We were building lots of different web applications as a result
04:03
for each of these startups to stay afloat. We were like, "Okay, you know, we actually know a lot about building web applications cuz we're we're doing it so much.
We could probably like teach folks online and, you know, charge for like our courses and and make money to keep us afloat so we can keep trying other ideas." Kind of the funny thing is
04:19
like of all the things we were working on at that time, Thinkster was the most successful of all of them. We were teaching a lot of people.
We had like I think it's at like 100,000 something people that were you know using this site uh to learn how to do web development. And the biggest problem the people learning were having.
I mean this is common with anyone that's learning
04:35
how to program is not even like learning how to write the code but it's actually setting up your development environment which is basically mean setting up your computer to be able to even like run code. That is a huge huge huge challenge whether you're like a beginner or you're an advanced developer.
We were running into this problem with the people using
04:51
Thinkster of they they just couldn't get the stuff set up in their environment to even learn how to write the code. And we had the realization like okay actually it should be possible theoretically to just kind of like run an entire dev environment inside of the browser itself.
You know not using servers, not
05:06
install anything locally like we can actually run it in a web page, you know, inside of a browser tab. And we were looking at all these different technologies that have released in browsers and we were like someone must have done this already, right?
Like cuz we we were just trying to solve our own problem. We weren't trying to start a company like we were just trying to teach people on Thinkster.
We looked
05:22
around and there was just nothing. There is nothing that could actually do it.
I kind of knew that this is like something very different at that point because it, you know, it's like I'd never run it across something like this where I kind of technically knew the underpinnings that this should be possible, but yet no one had gone and done it. That key insight was really what led us to start
05:39
stacks cuz we were like, "Okay, well that would be huge for people learning how to code to not have to set up environments. It would make it way more accessible.
people could just use this as an environment to just keep building in like why would you even need to set up a local environment necessarily. So that was kind of the origin story of stacks and it came out of thankster
05:56
directly. We had spent half a decade building building out this technology.
The the problem is that anyone that really understands how to write software already knows how to get stuff set up on their local computer and will tend to
06:13
actually just gravitate towards that because they are super familiar with it. The issue is if you're going to build something that's web- based that is getting people to actually leave their their environment is a huge challenge.
We tried out a whole bunch of different experiments um over the course of the past, you know, 2 years or whatever. All
06:28
of them were very cool. generally like the people that that try these things out thought they were really awesome but it didn't move the needle from like a a monetization standpoint.
My co-ounder and I have like talked about you know do should we pack it in shut down the company and so that was you know like last year we made the decision my co-founder and I um with our with our
06:44
board and stuff of like okay we're going to spend the rest of this year going and trying everything that we think is cool idea and and if that doesn't work out we'll have left no stone unturned and we'll go and kind of prepare to kind of start spinning things down. How would I walk away from this knowing that I I
07:00
gave it everything I had? Like last year when as this was kind of going on with the company, I also had my first child and if you talk to anyone that has a kid, you don't get a lot of sleep.
It's pretty high stress. So, I had a lot of challenges kind of going on just from the personal side, the work side.
I woke up one morning last April after my daughter was born and I was like, I'm
07:16
going to do an iron man, like a full iron man. And and I and it was like 6 months from that.
I never ran a marathon or whatever. the six months um you know of last year I was kind of bringing full intensity to every part of my life like physically going and training for this thing mentally with with my job uh going
07:33
and you know really figuring out leaving no stone unturned and just trying a lots of different experiments etc and so kind of bringing full intensity to those things and and I got to tell you I've never been happier in my life um I've never been happier in my life really investing in in myself my co-workers and my products and my family and my
07:49
business with just such uh intense dedication and I is okay with whatever the outcome was. If we end the year and, you know, our destiny is the same, so be it.
Let the the universe, you know, let the universe decide, right? Um, I've
08:04
done everything that I possibly can do. And Bolt was like the last the last experiment we had before we're going to kind of start winding things down.
Uh, what Bolt allows you to do is like to actually, you know, using just text, you can type in an idea of an app or a website you want, it'll build it. The
08:20
launch strategy for Bolt was like we put out a tweet. Like that was it.
There was no blog post. There's no press release.
So there's just like a tweet and and that tweet ended up going viral. So what ended up happening is people they saw our tweet, they went to bolt.new, typed in the idea of a website or whatever that they wanted to make, hit enter, and
08:36
30 seconds later they had a a web application ready to go. In the first day, I think we added like 60K.
I remember one of our engineers was like, "Guys, we added 60K today. Oh my god." And you I jumped in was like, "Yep, it's cool, but like this is, you know, this is like launch day.
This is going to go away." And that didn't happen. Every
08:52
single day, we kept adding more and more ARR. In the first 2 months, we went from 0 to 20 million of ARR.
Everyone we were talking to had never seen anything like it. It was, I mean, just an unbelievable shift in the destiny of of our company.
09:11
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10:15
So I'd actually had the idea for Bolt about a year ago, February of 24. At that time, the Frontier models like OpenAI or whatever have you.
You we had actually tried to build a prototype with Bolt. We spent a couple of weeks doing that.
What we ended up finding was the output just was not good enough. Like you would tell it to build an app and it
10:31
just oftent times it would be broken or it wouldn't look good. it wouldn't function properly, which kind of like ruins the experience.
So, we we put that project on the shelf and we're like, "Okay, maybe we'll come back to this at some point in the future when when these AI models get better." Back in May, we just so happened to kind of get a sneak
10:46
preview of the new stuff that was coming from Enthropic with Sonnet 3.5 coding model that has changed software development period. You we got a kind of sneak peek of it and we were like, "This is good.
I mean, this is going to change everything we think." And so we kind of pulled the pulled bull off the shelf and
11:03
yeah took the the latest APIs from Enthropic pulled them together and launched it within 90 days of that back after chatbt had launched a lot of companies were just kind of like adding AI stuff to their products and not even in a very thoughtful way but it was kind of like people just wanted to be like
11:19
relevant and kind of you know show that they were had an AI strategy and we didn't cuz we were just like we don't see the value of this. it's not clear how this is actually going to make the experience that much better, right?
And all of our competitors went were you churning on AI ideas. We held off u
11:35
because we just didn't see we didn't have conviction on it. I think in in retrospect the right move and when we did find the right thing, we went all in.
And you kind of look at like the competitors that we were going up against then versus now it's like a lot of them have either shut down some of them have kind of started to pivot to AI
11:51
but like from like a user and revenue perspective it's like bolt is the number one thing you know we get thousands of emails and tickets and tweets and etc per day
12:07
sorting the the signal from the noise is is you know very difficult challenge But one of the things we really invested in early on with Bolt was like community. Like we have a very great community around Bolt where you know folks really love the product and there's these people that that are really smart,
12:24
genuine, awesome folks that have stepped up and really became like kind of leaders in this community. Yeah.
So that's really how we've been able to scale the both the support but also the product feedback function because these are folks that are like in our Discord or Reddit or Twitter or whatever and they're hearing what people are running
12:39
into. then they themselves might be running into it and they'll and they'll be like, "Hey, this is something we're hearing a lot of.
Here's maybe how you you guys go about fixing it, etc." And we also have people on our team who, you know, we've hired in a couple of folks who their entire job is just talking to our users, helping them get unstuck with
12:54
stuff, hearing their feedback, etc. And so, I think that's really the only way you can meaningfully scale, you know, uh, support and and the the full cycle of user feedback is just having great people that are in your community or, you know, on your uh, actual core team.
That's their entire job and they're all working together. You know, just bring
13:10
in all the data points, make good decisions, and get the proper things prioritized in the product. We like to work on things that users have specifically either like really asked for where it's a big a big pain point or alternatively, it's something that we've
13:25
validated that people want. I think it's very easy for entrepreneurs and yeah, people that are maybe early in their product career to kind of have lots of cool ideas about things they could build and whatever that are not really attached to the reality of the actual end user customer using the product,
13:41
what they're trying to do with it, the challenges they're currently running into with it. And so a lot of this comes down to just experience and like fortunately we've been doing this for a long time.
Like my co-founder and I have been building stuff for almost 20 years. You know, having a good sense of these are cool ideas, but we should probably get to them later.
These are really
13:56
important ideas. We should do them now.
These are really important high priority things. They need to be fixed and you know uh sorting accordingly and and one of the interesting things too actually about what we did is we actually open sourced the core version
14:12
of bullet when we launched and like even today it's like I think it's like the most popular AI product you know by users of revenue that actually has an open source version. Like there's nothing else out there that really has that other than us.
But it was clear to us was like this is this is knowledge that someone's going to open source this
14:28
at some point and we think it'll just be actually a lot better for us and the AI model providers etc. if this is available for people to try out and fork and improve and whatever have you which ended up being a really key decision cuz a lot of people use Bolt because they can play around with the open source
14:43
version and fork fork it and make it better and you know whatever have you. We've invested a ton in the open- source world in large part because like our product really wouldn't work without amazing open source software that's been built for web development and and otherwise.
For us, it's you it's also
15:00
really important that that those people building different web development tool chains like Vit or whatever have you also care about us and they want to make sure that their these open source projects work well in our technology and our environment. And that's been really key for us.
Yeah, we became the largest backer of Vit back in 2021. We have
15:17
multiple people on our team that all they do is work on open source full-time you. So I think uh developers love our products.
I think in some part because we genuinely care about open source and ensuring that folks uh working on open source get compensated and have a way to actually continue working on it in a
15:33
sustainable way. I I think the only way I learned how to determine when it was time to pivot versus time to iterate was just trying a lot of startup ideas.
like that was you over the course of like a decade through
15:48
that I kind of I I ended up building a good gut instinct of when when we were kind of at the end of the line on a certain idea and it was like okay we need to like pivot and try something else instead. So my recommendation would be to to if you think you need to go deep on something and go along, do it.
16:04
And typically you're gonna you're you're eventually going to find out one way or the other if you were right or wrong and then you learn from that. And and then then if you were wrong, if you're like, "Hey, we went really deep and it didn't pan out." You have to just take that as a lesson as part of the journey.
When I was younger and heard people give the advice that I'm giving right now, the
16:20
takeaway that I would take then was okay, so just don't give up like like no matter what, just kind of like hold on to this idea and don't give up, which is like like I think generally directionally good advice. But there's actually like kind of a line where you have to learn how to be intellectually honest with yourself and it's like am I
16:38
am I not giving up because because that's what people say you should do or am I not giving up because I actually really like I have conviction in this and like I just want to see this I I really want to see this made possible and then seeing it all the way through right cuz I think when you're when
16:53
you're starting and you're trying to find that passion in that's kind of one challenge and then the other side of is you know we saw which is okay we built this amazing thing Now, how do you actually turn into a business? The important part there is, you know, when you're driving through hell, don't stop.
If you're going to go and and build a business, go and try all the way through
17:10
and don't leave any stones unturned because what you don't want then is to look back and go, "Ah, man, we had this really cool thing. I think it could have been really, really important, but we didn't actually we didn't do a full core press and really make sure that we exhausted all options before, you know,
17:26
spinning down or whatever. AI's impact on software development is uh I mean huge like I think I think it's it's clear at this point that software development is going to be probably the number one application of AI that as far
17:44
as like a high leverage uh high impact high revenue sort of thing. All the world's software I think is going to be meaningfully written by AI in years.
I think I think probably you know singledigit sort of years. That doesn't mean that software developers are going away.
There's a lot of things in software development that are just
18:00
monotonous and not intellectually challenging, right? It's just common stuff that you're having to do to build an application and AI just kind of obliterates all that.
Can just take care of all that stuff for you so you can actually work on like more complicated high high value intellectually challenging sort of tasks. And so I
18:16
think we're continue to see more and more of that, right? We're see more and more software built and it's also it's enabling people to that are not software developers to actually go and build software, right?
Whether you have an idea for a website or an app like you can go to Bolt today and do that. The next 5 years of Bolt I think is it's
18:32
it's going to be something that from the Fortune 100 to 10year-olds people are building the future of how you you know stream movies online, how you check your bank account using a mobile app to a game that a 10-year-old had the idea of, right? All these things and some of that stuff you can even do now with Folk,
18:49
right? But the the quality and the scale of which you're going to be able to do this stuff is going to be giant, right?
compared to to what you can do now. Yeah.