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)

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
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.

**Eric Simons** (0:05)
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 went from zero 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:22)
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?

**Eric Simons** (0:30)
Most importantly, it's 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:38)
You basically were building a tech first and then looking for a problem to solve later, which is often what people tell you not to do.

**Eric Simons** (0:44)
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 going to be the consensus for you. You got to have like confidence in your convictions on how to best play the hand.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:53)
A lot of people see these stats, and they sometimes don't see that. There was also years and years of work before that.

**Eric Simons** (0:59)
It was kind of like, you know, Bolt's this overnight success seven years in the making.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:05)
Today my guest is Eric Simons. Eric 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're currently the number one most popular web AI code app with over 3 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 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, 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 Eric Simons. This episode is brought to you by Epo. Epo 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 Epo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features. And Epo 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. Epo 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 analytics cycles. Epo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A-B testing flywheel. Epo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Epo at getepo.com/lenny, and 10x your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com/lenny.
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