Zero to $20m ARR in Two Months: Inside Bolt’s 7-Year Journey to Overnight Success | Eric Simons, Co-founder & CEO
The Peel with Turner Novak
Turner Novak
4.6 • 11 Ratings
🗓️ 20 February 2025
⏱️ 113 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Eric Simons is the Co-founder and CEO of StackBlitz, best known for its breakout product Bolt, letting anyone build full stack apps from text, in the browser.
Bolt launched in October of 2024, quickly growing from zero to a $20 million revenue run rate in two months, making it one of the fastest growing products ever. But Eric will be the first to tell you it wasn’t an overnight success - the product didn’t even work the first time they tried building it.
We go behind the scenes of the seven year journey building the tech that eventually led to Bolt, how to avoid distractions, being capital efficient, living in a frat house for $100/month, and squatting in AOL’s headquarters for $1/day when he was 19.
Eric also takes us inside the weeks after Bolt’s viral launch, figuring out a new business model on the fly, his strategy for fundraising and PR, why you should open source your code, Bolt’s playbook for building a community around the product that enabled their viral launch, and how AI is changing software forever.
Timestamps:
(0:00) Intro
(2:24) Building full stack apps from text, in your browser
(4:19) Running an operating system in the browser
(11:48) Why Bolt failed the first time, almost shutting down the company last summer
(20:18) How Bolt went viral from one tweet
(28:33) Differences between ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor
(39:38) Why AI code gen changes the software world order
(42:01) What happened inside Bolt going from zero to $20m ARR in two months
(47:32) Not sharing fundraises publicly + his PR strategy
(58:57) Why the team never gave up for seven years
(1:01:07) Living in a frat house for $100/month
(1:04:07) How to be capital efficient
(1:09:00) Living on $1/day in AOL’s HQ when he was 19
(1:14:01) Inside Bolt’s Series B
(1:21:03) Bolt’s hiring and product roadmap
(1:32:58) Creating a new inference-based AI business model
(1:38:07) Eric's playbook for building a community of users
(1:44:05) Why you should open source your code
Referenced
Try Bolt: https://bolt.new/
Bolt on X: https://x.com/boltdotnew
Check out Webcontainers: https://webcontainers.io/
$0 to $4m ARR case study with Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/customers/stackblitz
Bolt’s open source code: https://www.bolt.diy/
Bolt / StackBlitz is hiring! https://stackblitz.com/careers
Eric’s favorite cafe, The Lighthouse SF: https://thelighthousessf.com/
Lady Gaga’s “one person” montage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRxsX_30tjs
Living inside AOL HQ at 19 years old: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/meet-the-tireless-entrepreneur-who-squatted-at-aol/
Bloomberg coverage of StackBlitz Series B: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-21/ai-speech-to-code-startup-stackblitz-is-in-talks-for-a-700-million-valuation?embedded-checkout=true
Joel Spolsky’s blog: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/
Follow Eric
Twitter: https://x.com/ericsimons40
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-simons-a464a664/
Follow Turner
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak
Subscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | There's all these no code tools that only exist because how else would you let non-taking |
| 0:04.6 | people like write code other than some drag and drop thing? That's gone now. The entire category |
| 0:08.4 | is gone because AI can write good code from text, right? Like there's all these, it's like became |
| 0:13.9 | very clear. Holy crap. The entire software world order is is getting rewritten. Bolt is really the first |
| 0:20.5 | product that came out and really |
| 0:22.6 | cracked it and really proved. And now there's a lot of other companies that are kind of coming in |
| 0:26.5 | and doing this in various ways. This is the moment that we've been working for for seven years. |
| 0:32.2 | Welcome to the Peale. I'm your host, Turner Novak, founder of Banana Capital. Today's guest is |
| 0:36.7 | Eric Simon's co-founder and CEO of StackBlitz, best known for its breakout product, Bolt, letting anyone build full-stack apps from text in your browser. For a lot of people that try Bolt, it was kind of like that for the first time since Chatut team. It's mind-blowing. Just put it an idea, and it's ready in 20 to 60 seconds. Bolt launch in October of 2024, quickly growing from zero to 20 million annualized revenue in two months, making it one of the fastest growing products of all time. We blew out Anthropics GPU capacity. Dario emailed me, he's like, it's like the fastest thing we ever seen grow on this platform. But Eric will tell you it wasn't an overnight success, and the product didn't even work the first time they tried building it. We were talking about spinning down the company at the end of last year. We go behind the scenes of the seven-year journey building the tech that eventually led to Bolt, how to avoid distractions, being capital efficient, and living on a dollar per day squatting inside AOL's headquarters when he was 19. I actually really love being there. |
| 1:28.3 | I was coding like 12 hours a day. |
| 1:30.3 | Eric takes us inside Bolt's viral launch, how software is changing, and figuring out a new business model on the fly. |
| 1:36.3 | When we launched Bolt, so much stuff was going wrong. |
| 1:39.3 | And his strategy for fundraising and PR, why you should open source your code, and Bolt's |
| 1:43.3 | Playbook for building a community around the product that enabled their viral launch. |
| 1:46.3 | Build community along the way no matter what, because it is useful to have that, to have |
| 1:51.8 | a distribution mechanism. When you have something that's really going to work, the message |
| 1:56.5 | will get out. |
| 1:57.4 | A quick thank you to Sam Dentee at Bolt, Joe Floyd, and Emergence, and Alex and Garav at |
| 2:01.5 | Mantis for their help brainstorming topics for Eric. |
| 2:04.1 | A reminder, I publish two episodes of The Peel every week exploring the world's greatest |
| 2:08.1 | startup stories just like this one. |
| 2:10.4 | Tune in next week for my conversation with Camduty at Brickyard, the Metro Capital |
... |
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