Inside Bolt: From near-death to one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons

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 0 to 20 million of ARR. And we've already crossed 30 million of ARR with the current rate we're on. Our forecast for the year is we want to get to 100 million of ARR.

This is just nonstop wild shit. How is this possible? What has allowed you to grow this much this fast with such a small team?

Most importantly has been 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.

You basically were building a, a tech first, and then looking for a problem to solve later, which is often 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 know, Bolt's this overnight success seven years in the making.

(instrumental music) Today, my guest is Erik Simons. Erik is co-founder and CEO of StackBlitz, which makes a product called Bolt, which is currently neck and neck with Cursor for being the fastest growing product in history. They are currently the number one most popular web AI code app, with over three million registered users. Two months after launching last October, they hit 20 million ARR. At the time of this recording, they're approaching 40 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'd been building for the past seven years, called WebContainer, was perfectly suited for building AI products in the browser, so they launched the product with a tweet. And as Erik 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 in product building, this episode is a must listen. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become a yearly subscriber of my newsletter, you now get a year free of Perplexity Pro, Notion, Linear, Granola, and Superhuman. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com. With that, I bring you Erik Simons. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A/B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and DraftKings rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features, and Eppo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolonged analytic cycles. Eppo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A/B testing flywheel. Eppo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com/lenny and 10X your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by the Fundrise Flagship Fund. Full disclosure, real estate investing is boring. Prediction markets are exciting. Meme coins are a thrill ride. Even the stock market can swing wildly on a headline. Hello, DeepZeke. But with real estate investing, there's no drama or adrenaline or excuses to refresh your portfolio every few minutes, just bland and boring stuff like diversification and dividends. So you won't be surprised to learn that the Fundrise Flagship Real Estate Fund is a complete snoozefest. The fund holds 1.1 billion dollars’ worth of institutional caliber real estate managed by a team of pros focused on steadily growing your net worth for decades to come. See? Boring. That's the point. You can start investing in minutes and with as little as 10 dollars by visiting fundrise.com/lenny. Carefully consider the investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses of the Fundrise Flagship Fund before investing. Find this information and more in the fund's prospectus at fundrise.com/flagship. This is a paid ad. Erik, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.