Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz)

The rate you're growing is absurd. You're from this cohort of companies that are just growing at rates that we've never seen in the history of startups. The company was on the verge of going under when we launched Bolt. And what ended up happening is in the first two months, we we went from zero to twenty million of ARR, and we've already crossed thirty million of ARR with the current rate we're on. Our forecast for the year is we We want to get to a hundred million a mirror. This is just uh nonstop wild shit. How is this possible? What has allowed you to Grow this much this fast with such a small team. Most importantly, it's and the people. It's rare to find startups where you have kind of the core group of five, six, seven people that have been there for five years plus. What people tell you not to do. I think that's the hard thing about being an entrepreneur. There are periods of time where you have to make judgment calls that are not gonna be the consensus view. You gotta have like confidence in your convictions on how to best play the hand. A lot of people see these stats and they sometimes don't see that. There was also years and years of of work before that. It was kind of like you have both this overnight success seven years in the making. Тима гест і ексим. Ерик із ко фотор и сіот.

Which makes a product called Bolt. Which is currently neck and neck with cursor for being the fastest growing product in history. They're currently the number one most popular web AI code app. with over three million registered users. Two months after launching last October, they hit twenty million ARR. At the time of this recording, they're approaching forty million ARR.

The story of Bolt is wild. They actually started the company seven years ago and were about to run out of money and shut down. But they realized the tech that they've been building for the past seven years called web container. was perfectly suited for building AI products in the browser, so they launched the product with a tweet, and, as Eric describes it, It was an overnight success, seven years in the making. If you'd like to better understand the cutting edge of AI coding apps and where things are going with AI and product building,

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