Bolt.new: How we scaled $0-20m ARR in 60 days, with 15 people — Eric Simons, Bolt

How's it going, everyone? How are y'all doing? Uh, yeah, let's go, let's go. Let's get the vibes going, let's get the vibes going. Um, yeah, excited to chat here today. I, I, you know, by the end of this, what I hope that you get out of it is maybe some, some advice I wished I had before kind of trying to hold onto 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, how many people here have heard of Bolt.new, by the way? Just kind of curious. Oh, wow, dang. I guess I'm still used to being like, "Has anyone heard of Stackblitz?"

And there'd be like two hands and that sort of thing. Okay, so cool. So everyone's used this thing. You're aware of it, you tried it out. Um, so, uh, is anyone aware of how long we were around as a company before we launched Bolt.new?

Seven years.

Seven years. Yeah. Um, so to kind of hit the graph of this thing, so if you, if you rewind, you know, the X-axis way back seven years, the ARR starting at the bottom of this, that's in November. Sorry, that's October of last year is 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, 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 we were getting ready to shut down the company, actually, at the end of last year. Um, this was like the last, you know, not like pivot of the company because it was 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 so, you know, our expectations were like, if we can add $100,000 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 overdoubled it. Um, but the, I think that to me, 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 insanity of the early days. And the product we put online was really, 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 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, you know, be able to scale what would normally take at least a year to grow into,right?

The best analogy of what it feels like, if you ever seen the movie 300, 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 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 in their title,right? It was my chief of staff and I largely responding to support tickets and whatnot.

But the main thing, we were able to make this work because it was this just incredible 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 had been operating all along,right? And one of the core, you know, philosophies that we set out, like my co-founder and I, he's actually a childhood friend of mine.

He and I have been building websites together since for like 20 years now, literally, since we were like 13 years old. And the company we did before Stackblitz, before this one, we had actually bootstrapped that thing from the ground up ourselves.

Like, we were broke, living on couches. 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 phase of trying to find product market fit,right?

And so this is kind of where this mantra that we've had at our company for, you know, 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? 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, 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 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. They're 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?

Because humans are the most expensive thing for a company. It doesn't mean you shouldn't hire them, but it means that, you know, it's important for your ability to have a durable, 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 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? Anyway, 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, you know, folks that do startups repeat this sort of thing. You want to have people that have a great shared, you know, shared set of core values that, you know, where it's low ego, high trust, they're obsessed with making the user successful.

And underneath, you know, chaos, they have grit and resilience,right? If you aren't in this sort of insane situation like we were, and you have folks that are already having trouble with the ups and downs of a startup, I will tell you, it would not have been possible to do what we did with folks that didn't have just incredible grit and ability to just check their ego and focus on what really mattered,right?

So great people is what it's always about. Um, so that's, I think from a team perspective, those are the things that really stick out to me from, you know, what allowed us to, you know, really scale with the traction that we saw and we're seeing.

To handle, and this probably applies to 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, 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? And there's just lots of them. And the question is, how do you, how do you prioritize? And the best analogy that I have 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, you know, and the key people that need to be saved,right?

And it's tough because all these things, it's hard to gauge sometimes what's actually going to be the most important thing, but that's the job,right, of firefighting. And so that's, and a lot of time, and that, and what you're saying is there are some fires that are just going to have to burn, and that's okay,right?

But if we focus on saving theright things, focus on theright things, that'll make up for, you know, all the other things 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 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 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, 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, 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, back when we started, 2017, 2018, remote work was like very looked down upon.

It was like, there's no way you could do that. 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, we had actually gotten an office in SF.

We thought we were going to set up shop here. Six months into paying this, you know, $5,000 a month office, we were like, what are we doing? Like, we haven't hired a single person here. 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, 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 or whatever say, it's going to be a nightmare.

You're going to be distracted by a whole bunch of decisions that fundamentally are not actually coming from your assessment of reality. Another great one is the topic of tiny teams. If you were raising money in 20, if you were a company in 2021, you had investors, they were screaming at you, ours were, 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, you know, and for us, we were like, we never were spending money. We never did increase the headcount,right? So, you know, it's, you want to have these sort of bets that you make. And I don't want to say it's, you don't want to be contrarian for contrarian's sake.

Some of this stuff that is repeated actually, you know, tends to be durable advice. But I would just encourage you to just like think for yourself and don't just adopt a lot of the hive mind stuff. Because, you know, it seems like the best companies tend to have independent decision making that really allows them to succeed.

So,

um, of course, leading from the front is very important. Again, this is not a new thing, but what I'll say, in the first week of Bolt being online, it was, it was pretty touch and go. Because again, the product was very, was very brittle.

And it became clear to me, like if I don't, myself and the team don't get out and make ourselves visible to the community and engage with them, people are going to churn and they're going to go away and they're not going to, they're going to lose belief pretty quickly because 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, et cetera. And so, you know, again, how do you smooth that sort of, you know, growth curve? You go and do things that don't scale because user love is hard to quantify on, you know, specifically, but oh my God, it works.

And that's how you can really scale, you know, love for a product like this. Um, last thing I'll mention, you know, as far as like tools that we used, 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, 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, my chief of staff and I were the primary support people, spending a lot of our time doing emails. We ended up picking up a tool called PeraHelp.

I don't know if anyone's heard of those guys, but they are

the AI assistant called Sam from those guys is the top rated support assistant 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 go and scale to that,right?

The leverage 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 models to help people be successful within the product experience that would have required human support before.

There's a lot of things you can do by not just making an AI product, but also building around the entire customer success journey to be powered by that.

What was that name?

PeraHelp. Yeah, PeraHelp. So I think they're, we're one of their customers. I think Cursor is using them. A couple of just brilliant, you know, young guys, I think out of Europe or something, running that company. 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 is so key. And 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, 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 anyone's seen, we are throwing the world's largest hackathonright 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. But basically we've got this amazing event going on.

We have dozens of people coming to help provide support and, you know, as folks are building out their projects, trying out the product. And this has been just 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, et cetera.

This sort of stuff really works,right? So to kind of wrap up here, these are, you know, the main takeaways. If you wanted to like take a photo of, you know, the TLDR or whatever, these are kind of the main things that, you know, stuck out to me from the past couple of months of our experience that really made a difference.

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 what happened. Without this, these things, like this would not have worked and it wouldn't be working now,right?

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, allright, with that, let's go.

So this is where you can find me. I have to like go to SFO like immediately after this, but if anyone wants to chat about stuff or ever has questions, that's where I am on X and then that's my email address there.

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 what stuck or, yeah, what was the process there?

Yeah, you're talking about like for like kind of like how we decide to build Bolt or even after, yeah. We tried out like 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 really seem to stick with users and resonate.

I always started with something that I myself thought was cool, you know, 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 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 it in front of users. People seemed excited. And I'll tell you this, what the user feedback we got from the early Bolt sessions before we launched versus like launching Stackflix 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 just don't know until you actually get it out into the world. You can certainly get the early feedback, but, you know, 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 any more. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Hopefully this is helpful.