Fast vs. Bolt

Hi everyone 👋

The news of Fast’s shutdown leaves Bolt—with its $1.3B raised and $11B valuation—as the biggest standalone player in one-click checkout.

While sometimes lumped in together, Bolt and Fast had very different trajectories as companies:

Bolt's revenue is at 100x of Fast’s, with $60M a year against Fast’s $600K in 2021
Bolt started out targeting large ecommerce brands, while Fast went after small merchants
Bolt is payment processor and gateway agnostic, while Fast exclusively processed payments through Stripe

Here’s a short writeup we did on Bolt’s product, competition, and TAM expansion opportunities for one of our on-demand research customers.

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Thanks!

Jan & team

New & upcoming interviews

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New

Bo Jiang, Co-Founder and CEO of Lithic: $60M Series C from Stripes to enable novel consumer fintech experiences through composable card issuing primitives
Gaurav Baheti, Founder and CEO of Procol: $4M Seed from Sequoia Surge to help food retailers in India turn around inventory faster and get better margins
Sampad Swain, Founder and CEO of Instamojo: $7M Series B from AnyPay to build a mobile-first Gumroad for Indian creators and SMBs

Upcoming

Liana Guzmán, CEO of Folx: $25M Series A from Bessemer Venture Partners—talking to learn more about the growing trend of identity-led telehealth companies
Ryan Miller, VP & GM at Persefoni: $101M Series B from Prelude Ventures—talking to learn more about the rise of SaaS platforms helping enterprises manage their carbon footprints to comply with ESG standards
Brennan Spellacy, Co-Founder and CEO at Patch: $20.8M Series A from Coatue—talking to learn more about the software layer emerging to automate the time-consuming work of carbon accounting and offsetting
Justin Intal, Co-Founder and CEO at Forage: YC S21—talking to learn more about helping online grocery and ultrafast delivery companies grow volume by accepting online EBT

Product update: View on-demand research Q&As in app

We previously launched workspaces, where on-demand customers can submit questions they want answered and see the questions they’ve asked in the past.

Last week, we updated question pages to show the answers to people’s questions in-app. Now, on-demand members can see all answered questions in their workspace.