Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons…
Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder & CEO of StackBlitz)How Bolt went from $0 to $40M ARR in just five months with a team of fewer than 20 peopleListen now on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. Brought to you by: • Eppo—Run reliable, impactful experiments — Eric Simons is the founder and CEO of StackBlitz, the company behind Bolt—the #1 web-based AI coding agent and one of the fastest-growing products in history. After nearly shutting down, StackBlitz launched Bolt on Twitter and exploded from zero to $40 million ARR and 1 million monthly active users in about five months. What you’ll learn:
Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-bolt-eric-simons Some takeaways:
Where to find Eric Simons: • X: https://x.com/ericsimons40 • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-simons-a464a664/ • Email: Eric@stackblitz.com In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Introduction to Eric Simons and StackBlitz (04:46) Unprecedented growth and user adoption (10:40) Demo: Building a Spotify clone with Bolt (15:28) Expanding to native mobile apps with Expo (19:09) The journey and technology behind WebContainer (25:03) Lessons learned and future outlook (29:15) Post-launch analysis (34:15) Growing fast with a small team (41:00) Prioritization at Bolt (45:51) Tooling and PRD's (48:42) Integration and use cases of Bolt (52:24) Limitations of Bolt (54:24) The role of PMs and developers in the AI era (59:56) Skills for the future (01:14:18) Upcoming features of Bolt (01:20:17) How to get the most out of Bolt (01:23:00) Eric’s journey and final thoughts Referenced: • Bolt: https://bolt.new/ • Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/ • Wix: https://www.wix.com/ • Squarespace: https://www.squarespace.com/ • Dylan Field on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanfield/ • Evan Wallace’s website: https://madebyevan.com/ • WebGL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL • WebAssembly: https://webassembly.org/ • CloudNine: https://cloudnine.com/ • Canva: https://www.canva.com/ • StackBlitz: https://stackblitz.com/ • Lessons from 1,000+ YC startups: Resilience, tar pit ideas, pivoting, more | Dalton Caldwell (Y Combinator, Managing Director): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/lessons-from-1000-yc-startups • Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/ • Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/ • Dario Amodei on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dario-amodei-3934934/ • Linear: https://linear.app/ • Notion: https://www.notion.com/ • Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/ • Atlassian: https://www.atlassian.com/ • Photoshop: https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/ • Figma: https://www.figma.com/ • Greenfield projects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenfield_project • Gartner: https://www.gartner.com/ • OpenAI researcher on why soft skills are the future of work | Karina Nguyen (Research at OpenAI, ex-Anthropic): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/why-soft-skills-are-the-future-of-work-karina-nguyen • Albert Pai on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertpai/ • Bolt’s post on X about “Bolt Builders”: https://x.com/boltdotnew/status/1887546089294995943 • Sonnet: https://www.anthropic.com/claude/sonnet • ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/ • Breaking the Rules: The Young Entrepreneur Who Squatted at AOL: https://www.inc.com/john-mcdermott/eric-simons-interview-young-entrepreneur-squatted-at-aol.html • Imagine K12: http://www.imaginek12.com/ • Geoff Ralston on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoffralston/ • AOL: https://www.aol.com/ • Bolt on X: https://x.com/boltdotnew Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com. Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy Lenny's Newsletter, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. |
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