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

Stack Blitz's Bolt, a text-to-app tool, experienced explosive growth, reaching $30M ARR in just four months after launching from near-company closure. This success is attributed to a seven-year-developed web container technology perfectly suited for AI-powered browser applications and a small, highly effective team. Bolt's rapid growth challenges conventional startup wisdom, highlighting the importance of perseverance and recognizing market demand. The company's success is attributed to a core team that has been together for five years and a unique approach of building technology first, then seeking problems to solve, defying conventional startup wisdom. This segment offers valuable insights into the importance of team cohesion and a flexible approach to innovation. Bolt's rapid growth followed seven years of development on web container technology, perfectly suited for AI product creation. This segment emphasizes the importance of long-term vision and perseverance in achieving breakthrough success. Unlike competitors using cloud servers, Bolt utilizes a locally-run operating system within the browser, resulting in significantly faster and more reliable performance. This technological advantage is crucial for Bolt's efficiency and user experience.Bolt's simple interface and fast, reliable technology, built on seven years of web container development, allows users to create functional applications quickly. This segment showcases the product's core functionalities and its innovative approach to application development.Bolt integrates with production-grade hosting providers and databases, enabling users to deploy and share their applications easily. This segment highlights the product's user-friendly deployment process and its potential for wider use. The company was on the brink of collapse before launching Bolt. However, the launch resulted in an unexpected surge in revenue, reaching $30 million ARR within months, showcasing a dramatic turnaround and highlighting the unpredictable nature of the startup landscape. Bolt's partnership with Expo allows users to create native mobile apps through prompting, expanding its capabilities beyond web applications. This segment demonstrates Bolt's versatility and its potential to empower non-developers in creating mobile applications. This segment highlights the years of foundational work in web container technology that preceded Bolt's rapid growth, emphasizing that the impressive 0-40 million AR in five months was built upon years of prior development. It underscores the importance of unseen groundwork in achieving significant results and prompts a deeper discussion about the web container component. The speaker describes the creation of the web container technology, explaining how the initial idea stemmed from making a web assembly-based operating system that could boot quickly in a browser. This segment details the inspiration drawn from Figma's browser-based approach and the goal of simplifying the developer environment setup process, highlighting the pain points of traditional methods and the potential for a browser-based solution. This segment contrasts the compute model of Bolt with cloud-based IDEs, emphasizing the scalability limitations of server-based solutions. It explains how the web container technology addresses these challenges by utilizing the end-user's device resources, reducing costs, avoiding server-related issues, and enabling a more responsive user experience. The speaker also discusses the challenges of building a product around the technology and finding a monetization strategy. This segment describes the initial post-launch experience, highlighting the overwhelming positive reception and the rapid growth in active users and revenue. However, it also details the unexpected challenges faced, such as the lack of mobile responsiveness, insufficient server capacity, and the need for a revised pricing model. The rapid growth forced a quick adaptation to the unexpected demand.This segment describes the company's adaptation to the unexpected demand, including changes to pricing plans and the challenges of scaling infrastructure. The speaker recounts the experience of Anthropic running out of GPUs, highlighting the intense pressure and the need for quick problem-solving. The segment emphasizes the unusual speed of growth and the challenges of scaling a small team to meet the demand.This segment explains how a small, experienced team contributed to Bolt's rapid growth. It contrasts Bolt's approach with other companies struggling with server scaling, emphasizing the advantage of the underlying technology and the importance of long-term team stability. The speaker highlights the rarity of startups retaining core team members for extended periods and how this stability enabled them to make long-term bets. This segment reflects on the counterintuitive approach of building the technology first and then finding the problem to solve, highlighting the success of this strategy. It draws parallels with the impact of Ajax, suggesting that focusing on enabling new possibilities with emerging technologies can lead to significant breakthroughs. The speaker also emphasizes the importance of perseverance and surviving long enough to find a winning product-market fit.This segment discusses the importance of a conservative financial strategy, especially during periods of market exuberance. The speaker shares their experience of bootstrapping previous startups and how this informed their approach to Bolt, emphasizing the need for a low burn rate and taking numerous shots on goal. The importance of minimizing expenses until clear market demand is evident is stressed.The speaker discusses the challenges of making decisions that go against the prevailing wisdom, particularly during times when rapid growth and increased headcount are prioritized. They emphasize the importance of having the conviction to make decisions based on one's own assessment, even if it differs from the consensus view. The importance of survival and perseverance is reiterated. This segment highlights the importance of high trust and individual agency within a remote team. The speaker emphasizes how engineers can independently solve problems from start to finish, fostering a sense of ownership and reducing reliance on cumbersome approval processes. This leads to increased efficiency and job satisfaction, contributing to long-term employee retention. The speaker discusses their approach to hiring, focusing on individuals passionate about building cool things, rather than those fixated on titles or career trajectories. They prioritize candidates who demonstrate a collaborative spirit, possess a diverse skill set (e.g., customer interaction, design, engineering), and ideally, are already part of the company's user community. The speaker discusses the challenge of prioritizing feature requests in a rapidly growing company. They emphasize the role of intuition in identifying potentially impactful features that users may not explicitly request. The example of launching a native mobile app, despite internal debate, showcases the importance of taking calculated risks based on market trends and experience.This segment describes the company's daily company-wide meeting, used for open communication and real-time problem-solving. While acknowledging that this approach might not be sustainable long-term, it’s currently crucial for maintaining high communication fidelity during rapid growth. The discussion also touches upon the company's use of various tools for project management, design, and prototyping.The speaker explains the company's approach to Product Requirements Documents (PRDs), emphasizing brevity and clarity. They argue that keeping PRDs concise prevents information overload and ensures everyone remains aligned on key outcomes, which is particularly important as the team grows and the daily meeting structure might change.This segment delves into the use of Bolt for prototyping and full-scale product development. The speaker provides examples of how companies are using Bolt to build production-ready software, highlighting the significant cost and time savings compared to traditional methods. The discussion also addresses the use of Bolt for marketing pages and accelerating product development within existing codebases.The speaker discusses Bolt's current limitations, particularly its suitability for large existing codebases. They highlight that while Bolt offers significant advantages, users need to understand the tool's capabilities and limitations. The discussion also emphasizes the ideal user profile: individuals with strong PM skills who can effectively define scope and guide the AI-powered development process. This segment highlights the shift in the Product Manager (PM) role due to advancements in AI-powered development tools. It emphasizes that while building products has become easier, the challenge now lies in defining what to build, ensuring its quality, and overseeing its growth, all core PM responsibilities that are becoming even more crucial in this new landscape. This segment introduces Oneschema and its new product, File Feeds, which enables rapid integration with various systems, including tricky ERPs, in just 15 minutes. The key benefit is eliminating the need for extensive engineering involvement and reducing integration-related headaches and potential outages caused by bad data. The speaker speculates on how organizational charts in software companies will evolve. They anticipate a reduction in the number of front-end engineers, with PMs and designers taking a more prominent role in crafting user experiences, potentially leading to smaller, more agile teams focused on specific product areas. The segment also includes an anecdote about an OpenAI researcher shifting from front-end engineering to research due to AI advancements. The speaker discusses a surprising shift in their user base, revealing that a significant portion are non-developers. This unexpected development led to the realization that the way software is built and organized is undergoing a fundamental transformation, highlighting the increasing importance of PMs' deep understanding of product experience.This segment explores how the increased capabilities of AI will impact the roles of developers and PMs. It predicts that PMs will be more directly involved in the development process, making changes themselves, while developers will focus on more complex tasks beyond the reach of current AI. This shift will necessitate a significant change in the organizational structure of software companies. This segment summarizes the key skills needed to thrive in the future of work. It emphasizes the importance of understanding user needs, effectively communicating those needs to AI tools, and possessing the ability to guide and "unstuck" the AI when necessary. The speaker highlights the ongoing need for problem-solving, articulation, and growth strategies, even with the assistance of AI.The speaker introduces a program designed to assist non-developers building products using AI tools. This program highlights the evolving human-AI partnership, where humans are crucial in guiding and troubleshooting AI-generated solutions, rather than solely building everything from scratch. The segment emphasizes the shift from AI as a supplementary tool to AI as the primary driver, with human intervention primarily for complex or unexpected issues.This segment delves into the technical advancements that have made AI-powered code generation a viable reality. It credits Anthropic's Sonnet model as a pivotal breakthrough, enabling the reliable generation of high-quality, functional code. The speaker discusses the immense market opportunity presented by this advancement and expresses strong optimism about the future of AI in software development. This segment highlights Bolt's focus on seamless integration with existing tools and company workflows, addressing the common concern of compatibility with legacy codebases. It emphasizes Bolt's role as a tool for rapid product development rather than a complete replacement for existing systems.The speaker details two significant upcoming features: a direct integration with Figma, allowing users to transform designs into full-stack apps with a single command, and a Slack bot that acts as a developer, creating code based on conversations within Slack threads. This showcases Bolt's evolution towards more intuitive and collaborative development. This segment offers valuable advice for students considering their career paths in the age of AI. While a basic understanding of programming is recommended, the emphasis is on developing skills in identifying and articulating user needs, and leveraging AI tools effectively. The speaker cautions against solely pursuing a college education based on the expectation of guaranteed high-paying jobs, advocating for following intrinsic interests and pursuing skills that align with the evolving job market. This segment discusses the tools used to build Bolt, primarily highlighting the use of Cursor and Bolt itself in the development process. It also introduces the concept of AI agents as a future development paradigm, exemplified by the upcoming Slack bot integration.The speaker offers crucial advice for new users, emphasizing the importance of clear and specific prompts, similar to writing a technical ticket. They suggest treating Bolt as a developer coworker and provide a practical example of creating a personal website from a LinkedIn profile to illustrate the process.This concluding segment shares a personal anecdote about the speaker's early entrepreneurial experiences, highlighting his resourcefulness and tenacity. It also provides contact information for listeners interested in connecting or providing feedback. Bolt, a web-based app-building tool, achieved explosive growth, going from zero to $20 million ARR in just two months. This success is attributed to Bolt's innovative web container technology, allowing for the creation of full-stack web and mobile apps within a browser. The company's seven-year journey highlights the importance of perseverance and long-term vision in achieving seemingly overnight success. Bolt's AI agent facilitates bidirectional communication with the operating system, enabling rapid app development through prompting. The platform's ease of use has attracted a large user base, including non-developers like PMs and designers. Bolt's integration with platforms like Netlify and Supabase streamlines deployment and hosting. The company's small team (15-20 people) demonstrates the possibility of rapid growth with efficient organization and high trust among team members. Prioritizing hiring individuals passionate about building cool things, regardless of title, has been key to Bolt's success. Balancing feature requests with gut instinct about potentially impactful additions is crucial for prioritizing development. Bolt's ability to create high-fidelity prototypes quickly has attracted businesses seeking to accelerate product development. The platform empowers non-developers to build software, potentially reshaping the roles of PMs and developers. The use of AI, specifically Anthropic's Sonnet model, was pivotal in achieving reliable code generation for Bolt. Understanding user needs and effectively communicating these needs to AI tools are becoming increasingly important skills. The future of software development may see a shift towards PMs and designers directly building applications with AI assistance.