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)
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
Lenny Rachitsky
5 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 13 March 2025
⏱️ 89 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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:
1. How Bolt reached nearly $40M ARR and 3 million registered users in just five months with a team of only 15 to 20 people
2. How Bolt leverages WebContainer technology—a browser-based operating system developed over seven years—to create a dramatically faster, more reliable AI coding experience than competitors
3. Why Anthropic’s 3.5 Sonnet model was the critical breakthrough that made AI-generated code production-ready and unlocked the entire text-to-app market
4. Why PMs may be better positioned than engineers in the AI era
5. How AI will dramatically reshape company org charts
6. Eric’s wild founder story (including squatting at AOL’s HQ) and how scrappiness fueled his innovation
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Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-bolt-eric-simons
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Where to find Eric Simons:
• X: https://x.com/ericsimons40
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-simons-a464a664/
• Email: [email protected]
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Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
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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
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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
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Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | 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. |
| 0:05.7 | 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 |
| 0:21.6 | of ARR. This is just a nonstop wild shit. How is this possible? What has allowed you to grow this |
| 0:28.1 | much, this fast with such a small team? Most importantly, it's been the people. It's rare to find |
| 0:32.1 | startups where you have kind of the core group of five, six, seven people that have been there for |
| 0:37.1 | five years plus. |
| 0:38.4 | You basically were building a tech first and then looking for a problem to solve later, |
| 0:42.0 | which is often what people tell you not to do. |
| 0:44.4 | I think that's the hard thing about being an entrepreneur. |
| 0:46.7 | There are periods of time where you have to make judgment calls that are not going to be the consensus view. |
| 0:50.6 | You got to have confidence in your convictions on how to best play of the hand. A lot of people see these stats, and they sometimes don't see that. There was also years and |
| 0:58.0 | years of work before that. It was kind of like, you know, Bolt's this overnight success, seven years |
| 1:01.8 | in the making. |
| 1:05.5 | Today, my guest is Eric Simons. Eric is co-founder and CEO of StackBlitz, which makes a product called Bolt, |
| 1:12.6 | which is currently neck-and-neck with cursor for being the fastest growing product in history. |
| 1:18.4 | They are currently the number one most popular web AI code app with over 3 million registered users. |
| 1:24.2 | Two months after launching last October, they hit 20 million ARR. At the time of this |
| 1:29.2 | recording, they're approaching 40 million ARR. The story of Bolt is wild. They actually started the |
| 1:35.5 | company seven years ago and were about to run out of money and shut down. But they realized |
| 1:40.3 | the tech that they'd been building for the past seven years called Web Container was perfectly suited for building AI products in the browser, so they launched the product |
| 1:48.0 | with a tweet, and, as Eric describes it, it was an overnight success seven years in the making. |
| 1:54.0 | 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. |
... |
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