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Eric Simons

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2025-03-13
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2025-03-13
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  1. “Yeah, like here's and not just look like here's here's kind of a working demo of what it will effectively feel like, right and because that just, you know, if a picture is worth, you know, a thousand words like a live actual demo is worth billions, you know, like you can feel it. It's real. And that's what we're seeing like a lot of the, you know, the businesses that are adopting Bull now, that's the use case that they're using this for is high fidelity prototyping because it's like now faster to make real prototypes using a bolt and writing, you know, before it was too expensive. Like the idea of like, let's prototype it by having the engineer's code to prototype. It's like that would take forever. It would be expensive. Now it's faster to do this with both encode and have a real working software product than dragging around frames and figma to actually make a static version of it.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Unless there's something that's very sophisticated that we're working on, we tend to keep them pretty light. I like to just have the minimal amount of context possible that it just ensures everyone's on the same page and that the key outcomes for whatever feature that we're working on are going to be present when we get there, you know? Because the things that when these things, when these documents get really beefy, if you're looking at, God, there's so much stuff to decipher. You know, the problem is a lot of people are going to gloss over it. When it gets kicked to development or design or whatever it's just going to start snowballing into a lot of stuff, it's just better to keep it as simple as you possibly can. And at least that's kind of our approach to the thing. And often it's some of these things are like, here's a link to a bolt.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, on the engineering side, we use linear heavily on kind of producting. I think we were using Notion and making like PRD type stuff in Notion. And then we used Figment for like design. And we actually use Bolt for a lot of design and prototyping at this point. It says you can imagine. But yeah, I think the tooling is nothing, nothing crazy. There's nothing crazy sophisticated, you know, like I think we'd be investing a lot more, and especially as you start splintering people out of being on the same collaboration. So that's where this stuff really starts to matter because you don't have a time where you're able to dynamically catch things that weren't going to be brought up.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “We're all getting on a phone call every day and we're front to back doing this. And again, another reason why more context on less heads, every person at the company is aware of everything else going on at the company, right? So people can independently be making decisions that are generally by default more”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Hour okay, yeah, and we just go over everything, and I think we're going to probably start as the team's kind of growing, we're going to start splintering off into different sinks or whatever. But the thing about just having everyone in the same room every day is that a lot of people will complain that it's, you know, this is on Twitter, you'll see people say, oh, like it's the most expensive use of everyone's time, right? But it's like, yep, but like there's zero percent fidelity loss in that. Everything is everything every day is being audited front to back and being discussed front to back. And so when you're in these times of just extreme growth, right? You want as close to zero percent loss, right? On communications. And so that's how we've been doing, especially since Bolt went online. And I think it was like the week after Bolt went online. We were like every day until we're through this or whatever.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And then there's like, hey, we've been kind of cooking something interesting. This tastes this, I don't know, this, I think people are going to like this. I think this is a killer dish. And so you kind of have to balance those things. And I think it's actually a function of just years of experience doing it. I think if you kind of rewround like 10 years ago, I would have had really no, I would have had the just the years of getting my butt kicked by the free market to have kind of cultivated a sense of this stuff, you know. You kind of have to build your own gun instead for it, I guess, is the best way of putting it, you know.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “There's just thousands of millible apps being created a day that weren't before. And how does that change things? I mean, like that's now, there's small businesses that are, you know, they would have never made an iPhone app before. It made no sense. It's super expensive. Now that's not the case. I mean, like there's kind of these things where it's like, hey, we should go and take bets here. So there's kind of this, it's. I think the best analogy would just be like it's kind of like I think Working at a restaurant, being like a chef, it's like there's some amount of feedback from the customers, right? Of like, this thing didn't taste good.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “A lot of things that you just don't even know are possible to do, right? And so people aren't going to be necessarily explicitly asking for them. And so there's been kind of a couple of these where we kind of use our gut instinct on like, hey, this, no one's asking this in meaningful numbers at least, but we think this is going to be a big deal. Best example was last week with native mobile app support. Like that's the bioreception, like the biggest thing we've ever launched. And it was something that even internally at the company was like, this, you know, I don't know, people are like yawned about these other things, right? And then it's always this balance of like how much are we just triaging various things versus like that new capabilities. But it's like this strikes me as an important one where we, you know, put some chips into the middle of the table on. And the okad dead right. Like it's just this mind-blowing experience. And now.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Never coming to like an office for 10 people. We've hired the people working for us are in Europe or across the US. And I think, and we have one or two other people we've hired that are in the Bayer at this point. But yeah, I think we kind of look for folks that are intrinsically just trying to build great stuff and are interested. And then the first people that we hired, the reason we found them is that they were users of stock puts, you know, like that was a lot of people that The majority of people we hired at the company have been people that actually came from our community, basically. And so when we want to hire people, we put out a tweet and say, hey, we're hiring an engineer. And then we get DMs or whatever, right? Those are the general qualities we look for, though, you know.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, that for us, and even if the folks were hiring out, it's like hiring people that don't care about the titles and they don't care about, you know, it's not like they're people, of course, it's where people have like a career trajectory and that's one thing, but it's like they really are motivated by just Chucking their ego at the door, and they're there to like collectively build something great, not just kind of, you know, be the brilliant jerk, right? You know, most of the people that we've hired have been, you know, in Europe. And we're a fully remote company. My co-founder and I are in the Bay Area. It's funny. Back in 2018, we rented an office and stuff. And we were like commuting into it because we thought we'd hire people here and like a year into it. We were like, what are we doing”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Someone running into an issue, going and fixing it, cooking up the UI on the spot and landing this thing, like without involving anyone else on the team, right? And so I think it was the culmination of just high trust and, you know, People like we all just have enjoyed working together over the past. I think that's why that's the only reason anyone would ever stay right at a company for that long or whatever. And so. Sorts of stressful situations, I think, are make or break, right? Like those are make or break for any team. And so I think that what's happened is really, you know, it is a direct reflection of the strength and the bonds of the people that are making this thing and supporting the thing.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “It is usually folks are kind of at a job for start for a year or two. They kind of go to another one. And the problem with the turnover like that is that you can't take like really long bets like the one we did. And so we've had kind of from the get-go, again, this comes back from bootstrapping the previous company, like just having less people and more context per head. Like that's just been how we do it. And we feel very strongly about it. The reason for that is one that you can have high levels of trust with anyone you're talking to because you know that they had a lot of context. It's not like this person's completely in the dark in some quarter of the company. The second thing, everyone has agency to actually get stuff done front to back, right? And there's no political community to get stuff approved by. There's no dot, you know, you so when you look at what kind of what happened with Bull, I mean, we had engineers that were like front to back were on a call with.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, yeah, I think a lot of, I mean, a lot of, again, I mean, if you kind of look at where a lot of the other folks in the Code Genotext AppSpace have really been struggling, a lot of it has been scaling their servers and stuff, right? And it was kind of like both this overnight success seven years in the making. All of this stuff, like there's no way, if you freewinded like year two, we can, there's no way we could have, we would not be at the growth and on DAUs and revenue or whatever, there's just no way. And so a lot of it is the technology we made. And most importantly, it's been the people, like the people, like, you know, 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, right? Like that's a pretty rare thing to see. Like in Silicon Valley.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, you know, so it's as hard as we go to people and kind of be like, what do we do? And the playbooks we get back are like take six months or a year or something. And it's like, this isn't going to work. Which is funny. This is what it's all about, right? I mean, this is, you know, at least for me, this is that level of intensity is. It's challenging, fun challenges, you kn”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Everything, like my chief of staff and I were doing customer support 95% of the day, you know, just anyways. So yeah, it was a crazy wild time. And I mean, it still is. We've had a little bit more time to kind of grow into this. And usually I mean as a company to grow into like even 20 million ARR, you get a year at least or something, you know, to kind of staff up.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Inference cost would be kind of low because you're expecting people to use it a lot, right? And so you can't do these agentic experience things. It would be too expensive. And what we ended up stumbling into is that, okay, actually people are willing to pay more, right? People want to pay for more inference because we've crossed this threshold where you can get a very tangible ROI. You know that this is providing a tremendous amount of value to you, right? So anyways, that was like, that was like one thing. And, you know, the servers were just melting anthropic ran out of GPUs for us. Like Dario emailed me. He was like, listen, we just, we don't have anything more to give you at the times where we're like, how do we deal with, you know, it was just, it was just bananas, you know, for weeks. It felt like in 300, you know, when they're surrounded by like 10,000 people. And our team is just like doing everything. There's 15, 20 people just doing it.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “There's a whole bunch. I mean, the list of problems that were happening every single day was nuts. I mean, like to start, we had never had a plan on Stackas.com, you know, for more than $9. We had one price, nine bucks, right? And so we launched Bull. We're like, again, we don't think we'll think hopefully people like this, but nine bucks doesn't get you a lot of inference. And so people burn through nine bucks in like 48 hours. And they're like, I want to buy more. How do I buy more? Why wouldn't you take my money? So it's like that within the week, we raw just completely new pricing plans. We could upgrade, which ended up has kind of now become the standard. All the other guys in the space have copied this, where, you know, prior to bulk going online, co-pilot, like all these previous AI things, everyone kind of wanted this like Netflix model where there's like one price. It's like all you can eat or whatever. And the problem is if you do that, like you can't really, you want the.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “We cut the right corners on the thing to get it online, but we had this just growing influx of people using it going, you know, how is there not a mobile responsive view? How are chat passages not? We got the 20 million of ARR without a mobile responsive view, by the way. Just throwing that out there, you know, it was like iPhone not having copy and paste until like iPhone 5 or whatever, you know, this was that was that for us. It was like no mo. We looked at it on mobile. It was terrible, right? But there's like stuff like that. So we had to just like, and then we're a small team. And so we're completely unprepared. For just the growing traffic and”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. So on day one, it was like there's a great reception to like the tweet, you know, we were like, wow, this is like, you know, one of the biggest things we've ever seen. And I think on the first day, you know, I think we added like 60K of ARR or something, which was like, I mean, crazy. We were at, you know, again, we were at 600. So we added like 10% in a day. And I remember our DevOps engineer like he was the one who would flag me. He's like, guys, we had 60K today. This is crazy. I was like, yeah, yeah. But like, this is launch day. Like it's the tech crunch peak of initiation or, you know, the classic startup. Yeah. I was like, listen, yeah, I'm trying to like temper enthusiasm for the team. I'm like, this is great. Got a lot of work to do. And then the next day, you know, we added 80k or whatever it was, right? And it just kind of kept going.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And I'm glad that we didn't heed the advice because we tripled the company and kicked up the burn rate. There would be no bolt. We would go out of business a long time ago, right? I think that's the hard thing about. An entrepreneur, I think, is you kind of have to Period at the time where you have to kind of make judgment calls that are not going to be the consensus view. Maybe years later, it'll become the consensus view, but you got to have confidence in your convictions on how to best play the hand.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Go and buy software, you should be going, we're a tiny startup. Can you sell it for half? Everything you buy. I just like keep the brewery as low as possible because you need as many shots on gold as you can possibly get because you have no idea. And I think just generally for startups, that's the right way, in my view, to approach it, you know, unless you're seeing, again, immediate demand and pull or whatever. Yeah, I think that'd be kind of like maybe the extra context I add on top is like I think that we ended up doing a good job of like being extremely conservative during a time in which during 2022 2020 and 2021 which were times where exuberance and growing headcount was like KPIs of companies right and and were things that were being you know with a lot of a lot of you know emotional force of like hey you guys ought to be doing this and”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Just seem really compelling. But when you do that sort of risky deep technology play, Yeah, you need to, and we were very good about this, like the previous company, Albert and I did, we bootstrapped it all the way through to acquisitions. We understood and we were like living hand to mouth, like bootstrap that thing. So we understood out like how to have a low burn rate and take a lot of shots on goal and make every dollar stretch beyond what anyone would think is reasonable or possible. And that's how we played our hands with stack blitz. You know, like when we, you know, we didn't raise money for the first two or three years of the company's life. We were, you know, bootstrapping it. We did raise money. We barely spent it, largely because it was like we need to just take a lot of smart bets. And it doesn't make sense. And, you know, I would just say generally just people pulling the product out of your hands. You don't want to be spending money. You should be like default, no. And like when you.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “All great points, all great points, right? Because what we're dead right, like for, and you know, fortunately, my co-founder, we had built a lot of unsuccessful startups before this. We spent most of the 2010s churning through ideas on things. And so we, you know, what we had conviction was like, this seems like a technology that will be important. Like it seems like the web is the most ubiquitous, like the pitch or the theory at R I was like, the web is the most ubiquitous platform in the world, but yet it has no, you can't use the web to like build the web, right? Like every other platform, like Mac has code. Windows has Visual Studio. The web had nothing. And we were like, at a minimum, Google should probably buy this thing from us. It seems like it should probably be part of Chrome. And at a minimum, right? And we thought, hey, this could, you know, this could be a huge enabler. The vision of just making it as easy to build full stack applications as using Canva, right?”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Kind of why we were kind at the end of the journey where it was like, you know, we're taking shots on goal and we, you know. Some points got a connected bat, right?”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Provides the best experience, zero latency, transient cost. There's a permissive free tier, right? Because the other problem with the server is you end up, if you have a free tier, people are mining Bitcoin on it. They're DDOSing people using your servers, right? So inevitably you have to nerf these things and roll them back. But if it's all done on the end device, it doesn't matter. So that's a web container was the key piece and what we struggle with. It took us like four or five years something to build Web Container. What we struggle with for the years after that was just how to build a product around it. Because developers loved it, but they weren't using it in ways that they would pay money for, you know. And as much as I, the nerd side of me wished that that would be enough. There's like a building cool technology was enough. It's like, it's not. Like this, we're here to build a venture scale company. And so that was.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “And so when you look at cloud IDEs, like Cloud Nine was the first one back in 2009 or so, the way these have always worked is that your browser is basically doing nothing when you go to them. Every user that gets connected, there has to be a cloud BM that gets spun up for them. And then your browser's just kind of like taking your keystrokes, sending it to the server, and then sending back the results of it. And that's how all these other AI text two app sort of tools work. They're all using cloud VMs. And the problem is on a small scale, it can work. But as you scale it up, I mean, there's not even 100 million VMs to rent on the planet. But there are like a billion devices that you can run this stuff on. So that's kind of what we've seen with Bull, where, you know, if you want to have build a product that's going to be able to scale to that side, you have to kind of look at all factors and go, we have to build, make sure the technology.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Their fan companies the first month or two is you being onboarding to run that stuff on your computer and set up your environment, right? And we're like, if we could just have that be something you click a link and it just boots in your browser, that'd be huge. It's also, if you look at the other productivity apps that have really worked on the web, they've all had this compute model, right? Figma, when you open a Figma document, there's not like some cloud VM that gets spun up for you to render the documents you're dragging things around. It's using your CPU and your memory to do the work. Same thing with Google Docs, right?”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Everything for design. And obviously, we know how that story has panned out now. And back in 2017, 2016, 2017, Albert, my co-founder and I saw the same sort of story begin to play out, but for web development and like development environments. And specifically, there is some stuff that landed in browsers like WebAssembly, shared memory, service workers, these different APIs. And we were like, oh, whoa, like it should be possible theoretically to write an operating system that in WebAssembly that could run Node.js and NPM and all the tool chains on top of it that you need to do to do web development. And that would be huge because setting up developer environments is a pain for beginners. Like a lot of people churn out. They say like the first thing you do when you learn how to code is not even learning how to code. It's how to set up your computer to even start writing the code, right? If you go join Netflix or anything.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “David Wallace, when they were building FIGO in the early days. And that was, I don't think a lot of people know that FIGMA was also a browser-based deep technology play. When their first pitch for Figma, they didn't have a design tool. Their first pitch was this 3D ball dropping into water inside of a browser tab. The pitch basically was browsers have this new capability called WebGL and the predator's predecessor to WebAssembly. And with these things, for the first time, you could actually create a graphics rendering engine that you could then build a design to on top of, but you're going to have to write that rendering engine from scratch because nothing exists that can just compile into WebGL or whatever. If you want the performance you need, et cetera, it's going to take us years to do, but we do it. We think this will change.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “100% is yeah and um i would say this is kind of surprisingly to me it's like still one of the um contrarian uh viewpoints of our company like despite despite um because over the years it was like when we first this is and that the web container was the bat that we made the company on just to be clear like stack blitz was like a deep a browser based deep technology play on can we make a you know a web assembly based operating system that can like boot in a browser in like 100 milliseconds and like run full on development tool chains like that was really it and like the we gotten the idea for this and kind of the insight that this might be possible because back when my co-founder and i came out to the ballot he and i like grew up down the street from each other in chicago learned to come together at 13 and build stuff ever since and we came up to the valley in 2012 and we just had the good fortune of bumping into dillon field and”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “No, that's amazing. So it's pretty cool, right? I mean, and so what's cool is that, and as you keep prompting on your device, it'll just keep reloading, like without you having to kill the app, it'll just, you know, you can actually see the functionality getting added. And so in this use case that you and I have right now, it's like if I was, if you're never building an app together. Could be on other sides of the planet, and you could actually be not just seeing a screenshot of the thing, but actually touching it and feeling it and putting it through its paces. And so a lot of product teams, I mean, this is changing how people do product development, you know, it's faster to do this than design a whole bunch of Figma frames necessarily, right?”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “By the way Just as I planned, you know. But so on my screen, it's booting up. It's bundling the JavaScript of this thing. And this beta, we just launched this last week, by the way. So if you can see on my screen here, I actually have this Spotify looking app, right? That, you know.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Have like a test flight of this native application that we can trot on our phones. And as we keep prompting, you'll see it making changes and stuff, right? So this is kind of the first time that you don't have to be technical to make production grade web full stack web and mobile apps. You know, like at this point, I've done nothing that requires developer knowledge to do any of this stuff. That's kind of, I think that's what a lot of people are really excited about with this and majority of our audience are people that are not developers. They're using us. They're PMs. They're designers. They're entrepreneurs because these are people that have always been great at building products. And previously the only way they could get their ideas into coded software was through a developer's fingertips. And now they can deal with.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “And so we partnered up with a company called Expo, and their entire business is making basically React native tooling in this ecosystem that makes it super easy to build beautiful apps and Actuum in the App Store. And so right here, I'll zoom in a little bit. We have this little build-em app with Expo. So if you click that, we kind of instruct you on how to just prompt mobile apps into existence. So let's make another Spotify clone that's an actual native mobile app. Let's say make a Spotify clone. Go ahead and hit enter. And what this thing's going to do is actually, again, spin up an operating system here where it's going to boot up the Expo tool chain and actually go and make a mobile app for us. And what's cool about this is we could actually preview it just in the browser here. But once this thing's done and it boots up, it's going to show a QR code where we're going to be able to scan it. And in real time, actually.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “A couple weeks into the thing, I was seeing people use this for personal use cases like medical donation sites or weddings or whatever. And I was like, don't see people know that Wix or Squarespace exists? Should I tell them? And then it hit me. Those things are so complicated to use. Like there's, I don't know if you've ever seen just the UI of these things, but they're crazy complicated. And that's just for building kind of like a static website. There's no way you could actually build like a functional app. And that's like with both if we were to sit here for another 30 minutes. We would be we would have streaming. You'd be able to make playlists of different MP3 files or whatever. Like you can just keep prompting this thing to keep adding functionality, you know? So is that kind of the, I think some of the cool core experience of both here I can show you some of the cool that we just launched.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “With Super Base. So if I go and just like click the deploy button here, this is actually going to run a production build of this project we made here, right? Again, this is doing this entirely inside of my browser. So, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't cost us anything to do this. So again, you can do this for free, right? And it has gone ahead and deployed this on a real URL on Nullify. This is live. I can share this with anyone. And if I want to have like, you know, buy the domain Spotify clone.com and point it at this. I can click this link here. Then I kick me into Netlify. I can attach this to my account by domain, point at that thing. And then from there on out, whenever I'm prompting Bolt to make changes to this application and hit deploy, that goes live on my public website, right? So it's just, this is like the simplest way to build a web app that's ever existed, you know? Like, that was kind of why the key realizations I have.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “And so that's one of the other aspects around BOLD is this technology we made for the operating system side, the guys that have been working with us for the past five plus years on it before this, they were actually doing machine learning AI stuff. And so it came time to write the agent for Bold, we had just an incredible amount of in-house expertise on how to actually like merge these two different technology sets to have this really reliable experience that produces really beautiful, really functional stuff. So that's kind of like, you know, based on what's really cool about the Bolt experience. The other thing is a lot of these products like you can like make something, but often you want to like actually have a URL where you can share this, like happen like maybe attach a domain to it or whatever have you. So with Bull, we actually have built-in integrations with production grade hosting providers like NetLify. And for databases.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “This up. You can see how fast this is in like a matter of 60 seconds. I said, make me a Spotify clone. And now we have one, right? And it looks pretty darn good.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Been building an operating system that runs inside of your browser locally using your CPU. So we have a very permissive free tier. And it's insanely fast and it's insanely reliable, right? So if I want to like just as a quick example of this, say like make a clone of Spotify, right? And just hit enter. This thing's already getting to work. And already on the right here, this is a full dev environment. Like this is an actual operating system running inside of my browser. And I can run commands on it, et cetera. And really, this is like what you're seeing down here, this terminal and kind of what's backing it. This is what took us really like five, six, seven years to build and make so reliable. Like there would not be a bolt without this technology called Web Container that allows us to run an operating system in the browser. Because what's going on here is our AI agent for Bolt has bi-directional communication with this operating system. It's writing code. It's running the dev server for this thing. It's going to go ahead and spin.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Awesome. Cool. Yes, this is BolFishcod.new. Things that I think are really interesting about Bull. One is it's just like dead simple. Whether you're logged in or logged out, like this is, it's the same UI. It's extremely simple. It's just a text box. And I think that the biggest difference between Bull and the other stuff out there, it's actually subtle. It's not like something you necessarily see in UI, but it's how fast it is and how reliable it is. And this is because of how we are actually doing the compute because what's going on here is like when you type into whether it's Bolt or another product, it has to spin up a dev environment to actually make that application. So there needs to be some operating system somewhere that's running it. Everyone else runs those things on cloud servers, which those can take minutes to boot up. And they often will run into issues, and then you can end up literally stuck, right, and have to context support to get it done and get unstuck or whatever, right? With Bull, for the past seven years, what our company's been doing.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Kind of for like a month, I was kind of waking up waiting for the day where it just was like okay, I mean like it's this this this this crazy thing happened and now it's not but that's just that data just hasn't come and you see this happening with cursor you see this happen with a lot of these other AI startups and the value proposition is real like the free market is filled is filled with rational actors People are coming to these tools because it is solving problems they're they're able to do way more for way less cost than it would otherwise. And so and that's why I said I think we're going to see more of this, whether it's encoding or kind of other verticals or whatever you know in a sense it's almost like then maybe maybe the new normal right for as AI just continues to get better but anyways”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “The current track rate we have, we're already going to be exceeding kind of the forecast for Q1 with the current rate we're on. And our forecast for the year is we want to get to 100 million of ARR. And I think there's been a couple that would either be on par with cursor or ahead of him or something like that. But I mean, and I think there's going to be more things like this too. I don't think that like, you know, it's just there's something really, you know, I think a lot of people are in disbelief about it too where like this is okay. And this is from when we got to four million of error or five million hour in the first month I would talk with people and they're like, okay, yeah, but like that could go to zero. And then it went to 20 the next could go to zero. And now we're closing on 40. And so I just, I, and so from my view, I was also very skeptical, you know, as this, like I've never seen anything grow like this, right? And so part of me, I was just.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “I mean, I think it depends on probably where you peg the number, right? Yeah, we're here to just build great products, right? And just, you know, push the limits of like what's possible with the technology. And I think that that, you know, we do our jobs well. Kind of crazy things can happen. But I mean, the current.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “With single digit week, yeah, single digit weeks, right? That's the current track rate that we're seeing for the site. Yeah.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “And so, yeah, it's been a heck of a ride. And our team's like 15, 20 people. So it's just dealing with, you know, we're going to be closing on like 100,000 customers and we got our sport teams like three people. So we're trying to scale as fast as we can. So it's just kind of mind boggling just the scale of the demand and how we've had to turn things around to match the demand as best as we can, you know.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Months here and monthly active users is around a million, I think, at this point per month. So it's just, I mean, I've never seen anything. I've been doing startups for like 15 years. I've never seen anything like this. Everyone I've talked to are investors or et cetera. There's not a lot of corollaries to kind of what's going on here, you know. It's kind of extraordinary because I mean, like we, you know, our company wasn't doing AI stuff six months ago. We had no AI products and just out of nowhere, you know, from almost death of the company to being the number one by traffic revenue, et cetera, like, you know, AI Cojen app that's on your web-based in the world. I think the only other startup ahead of us is, you know, for Code Jun, just in general, it would be like cursor.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Yeah, yeah, I mean, when we launch, I mean, the company was on the verge of going under when we launched Bull. Our company stack plants, we had been around for seven years building web-based development environment stuff. And so when we launched this, we were like, this would be amazing if this added like 100K of ARR over the next couple of months. And what ended up happening is in the first two months, you went from zero to 20 million of ARR. And I think we're on like month four or four and a half or something like that at this point. And we've already crossed 30 million of ARR and we're on average across in 40. By the time this comes out, it appears that we're going to be at 40 million ARR. It's just like the scale of the growth of the revenue has been nuts. I mean, and of course, like kind of that correlates with like insane user growth as well. Like we've added, you know, 3 million registered users just in the past few.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “It's really simple. You go there, there's a tux box, and you tell it what you want it to build, whether it's a web or a mobile app. And so it's kind of one of these text to app building tools that become pretty popular over the past few months here. And it's not just like building a static site or something like that, but you can actually build full stack real software with databases and hosting and et cetera, just from prompting. in a ridiculously short period of time. It's not you're spending hours and hours or days putting this together. You can get results in like a minute.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “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 view. You got to have like confidence in your convictions on how to best play the hands.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Importantly, it's been the people. It's rare to find Star Trek where you have kind of the core group of five, six, seven people that have been there for five years plus.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source