Inside the AI Startup That Added $1M ARR in 7 Days

AI is actively transforming our lives, and an amazing example of that is the crazy story of Bolt.new. D-R-I-C-S-I-M-O-N-S, I'm the CEO of Bolt.new. And you're about to see what happens when a tweet becomes more than just a tweet. The moment the tweet went out, we sat in silence and prayed to God. My dad's an electrical and software engineer. And so growing up, we always had some type of computer at home. And I remember just playing this tank game on this really basic computer and just blew my mind. I've been working with my co-founder Albert since we were 13. My first memory of coding was I made a program on the TI-83 graphing calculators. I made a math program of all of the formulas that we learned and just kind of distributed around the class. And people were using it for their homework and tests and stuff. Eric and I, we grew up down the street from each other, met each other in junior high, played on the football team together. I think Albert and I had a short stint in sports. So I think in high school, he and I kind of transitioned to being full-on nerds in computers. We just liked building things. We were kind of just builders at heart. The first memory I had about building with Albert was in high school. This is before Dropbox existed. And Albert came up with the idea. He said, you know, I hate taking my flash drive to school. And Albert had the idea of, well, let's just make a site where you can actually just upload your schoolwork, your doc files or whatever, and you should access them anywhere. What a concept. If we had pursued it, it would be, we could have taken out Dropbox. That was the first thing we worked on. And it was wildly successful. It was called Forget the Drive, forgetthedrive.com. I think we're still paying for the hosting of it. We graduated high school, and both Alberts and my parents wanted both of us to go to college. They came from humble beginnings and wanted to give Albert and I a better shot at life than they had. And so when we looked at going to college, it's $30,000 a year for in-state tuition. And so for me, it was why would I do this? And so I didn't. And that's why we ended up coming out to Silicon Valley, because we wanted to build great products. Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area have been experiencing a mini tech boom. The energy in the early days felt intoxicating. Being in Silicon Valley in 2011 was the best time to be in Silicon Valley. Giddy up. We're extremely excited. Yeah, it's been a crazy year. it's really america on steroids but it also shows perhaps just how much the center of american capitalism has been shifting west from wall street to the bay area that era was defined by the mobile phone boom apps uber snapchat obviously facebook instagram tiny photo sharing company basically hit the jackpot last week when facebook bought it for a billion dollars you had people here that were here for the right reasons. They were here to build things. We were surrounded by people who had big dreams, big bets, and weren't afraid of failure. It was the beginning of a new era for technology, and one where you really had to cut your teeth on learning how to actually build great companies and be capital efficient. And so coming here, it was we found our people. When Albert and I first came out to the Valley, we got a very small seed investment to work in our first company. And if you haven't lived in Silicon Valley, the cost of living is very high. We went through the first couple of months ran out of money but the investment group that we were a part of they actually had office space at AOL headquarters What trending today This is what trending The man who never left work, even after his job ended, Eric Simons, has come to be known as the AOL squatter. And here's why. They have food. They have ramen you can eat. They have couches you can sit and work on. They have a gym that had a shower. And I was I'm just going to sleep on that couch. I'm going to take a shower at the gym. I'm going to do my life you know, two T-shirts and a pair of jeans. I'll do that over here and and just live and work out of here. And that's what I did. I was able to get away with it for a lot longer than I thought I would. AOL's David Tinkin told us, quote, it was always our intention to facilitate entrepreneurialism in the Palo Alto office. We just didn't expect it to work out so well. I know you're 20, you were 19 at the time, certainly showing the quintessential entrepreneurian characteristics. For the first five years of being in the Valley, I was known as just the AOL squatter. And then I was I've got to do something that's more notable than that, because that can't be the pinnacle of my career. We got the idea for StackBlitz when Albert and I were teaching web development courses. We were teaching people online. And so I was trying to find a way to let people run the code I was teaching without having to install this stuff on your computer. Because to set up a web development environment locally takes anywhere from hours to days for things that are more complicated. We understood the cutting edge of web browsers and what they were capable of. And I searched everywhere. I was how has no one done this? The early days of StackBlitz was purely just a technical problem that we're trying to solve. OK, how do we get these things to run in the browser? Traditionally, people have used containers in the cloud for that. But we're just OK, is there a way where we can reduce that friction even more? The first year of StackBlitz was actually really brutal. Albert and I were doing our courses business at that same time. And so what ended up happening is our two-man crew, effectively, was running two companies at the same time. And the more that we focused on StackBlitz, the lower the revenue went on the thing that was actually keeping us afloat. The demand for StackBlitz was huge. developers were loving it. We were trying to chip as fast as we could, especially because other competitors were kind of popping up. So eventually we were able to sell our previous company. And then going into 2019, we finally were able to focus on it full time. We had a bit of cash in the bank just continuing to bootstrap the thing. We were hey, we need to get more folks to help us do this thing. Albert and I were burning ourselves out just coding and marketing or whatever. And the first two folks that we got in touch with were actually folks that had been using StackWiz. I just basically just reached out to Eric and asked hey, do you guys need help? I love your product. Yeah, let's talk. When I joined, StackWiz was for the first time launching an enterprise product. We really strongly believed in the technology that it has a purpose. It has value. and that it can make a difference. A great product or a great technology is not enough. And that appeared to be the case for this company, again. Irrefutably cool technology, but we couldn't figure out how to actually incorporate it into developers' workflows in a way that it was something we would use every day, and therefore it could be a venture-scale business. There were moments that were really setbacks, I guess, in the process. Last year, in 2024, we were getting ready to shut the company down by the end of the year. The current plan for how we're going to commercialize clearly wasn't working to the degree it needed to. The momentum and growth with the legacy product on the commercial side had really kind of stalled out When you running a company and you taken capital from investors as an operator you have a responsibility to do the right thing for all shareholders And if you don't see a clear path, it's important to be genuine and look at options that you may not want to consider, but you need to. And it's as we talked about with our board. That kind of brought us to 2024 and we were at $700,000 of ARR. But when you're dealing with that sort of situation where it's are we going to shut down the company or what are the other outcomes? We're going to go and turn over every stone. And so Bolt was one of the things. It was the last thing. It was the last bullet in the chamber of the company. It was the last idea we ran. I was burnt out. And when Eric came to me with this idea for the first time in early 2024 of a pivot, a new product idea, I was initially not very excited about it. To me, honestly, it seemed a little far fetched that we would pull off such a huge pivot at this stage successfully. We were entering the pain cave. We were we were going into the long slog of trying to commercialize the product. and at that time every company was all right add ai into the product blah blah blah i tend to have a bit more of a conservative view when these things kind of pop up because because so many of these things are fads right you kind of just not listen to any of the noise and just purely go for the signal and so when we looked at chat gbt it's incredibly cool and underlying models it just wasn't obvious at that time how it would plug into what we were doing in a way that again would move the needle. OpenAI's models at that time just weren't good enough at code generation to actually write working code. And when it did write working code, the designs were ugly. And a couple of months later, it just so happened that we got an early preview of the Sonnet 3.5 stuff that Anthropic was working on. And I saw that and I was holy hell, this, this, this, this is it. This changes everything. And so we greenlit the project on July 1st and then launched it October 3rd. When you go to Bolt, it's just a text box with a submit button. You put in what you want built, a website or an app, you send it, and in a minute you get a real website back that you can publish on the internet in one click. It's the simplest interface that's ever existed. Once we had proven out that this is viable, it was just a matter of okay, how do we get this deployed and in people's hands as quickly as possible? The board meeting we were going to have, we were going to, you know, kind of decide the fate of the company or whatever was in November. So we had to launch it in 90 days. We were working on an enterprise deal with Anthropic to license the core technology. And the clock was ticking for us to really prove to them that our tech was the right foundation for this kind of a tool. and so we set a very short timeline to execute a company pivot. Everyone at the company just kind of flipped a switch and just got to work. They went full of the spot. The 90 days in building Bolt were, I would describe it as a roller coaster. Those days were pretty stressful because we all knew that this was the last experiment that we were going to run and knowing that if this didn't work, it was probably going to be the end of the company as we knew it. The Bolt sprint felt a grind, but it was also very inspirational and motivating to see what we were able to do in that time. When we launched Bolt we launched it with just a tweet It was a dang good tweet I was up to 2 or 3 a with Eric We were agonizing over every word in the tweet and you know a lot of anticipation and excitement about what was going to happen the next morning. We put it online and, you know, it was insane. When we made the tweet to announce it initially, I honestly didn't know what to expect. Probably expecting nothing to come of it, but it was amazing to see all the feedback. You can literally take a website app idea you have. Could we build a directory where it's just the products of the day, products of the week? Let's make a directory of great products. It's going to design something for you and build it for you in a matter of seconds. Let's see what this thing makes. Something that you'd have to hire a team of designers and engineers and spend millions of dollars on. Boom. There we go. Essential tools for indie hackers. We were a developer company. We thought other developers were going to use this. And we saw the revenue going up. And it was a murder mystery. It's what the hell? This doesn't make any sense. Because then we would get on the phone with some of the customers that were signing up. And they're not developers. They're designers. They're PMs. They're a sales guy from Dallas who's making a website for his daughter who has a medical condition and needs donations. It's what? I don't think anybody at the company has ever seen something take off so hard right out of the gate. It's been insane. I mean, in the first week, we added a million of ARR. We more than doubled the company's ARR in a week. And you got to remember, the company up to that point, we were at 700K total ARR after years and years of grinding. And, you know, you fast forward eight more weeks and we're at eight million in ARR. Everything I've ever launched in my career, there's the spike of the day one, people are excited. And then there's this long trough you've got to grind through. and this, it just didn't stop. We've all wanted to win in a big way the entire time. That's why you join a startup. And to see the team pull together and have an outcome this has been just extremely gratifying and humbling. As far as I'm aware, it's the second fastest growing product in history behind ChatGPT. Hello, everybody. I'm KP. KP tweeted out of the blue, if I was the CEO of Bolt, I would throw the world's largest hack fund, period. Have Guinness World Records, actually set the world record for it, right? Have giant prizes to pull people in, have it just be a lightning rod. The premise being, most people don't know that they can build software now. I see this tweet from KP start going viral. I'm okay, that's interesting. You don't normally just see a tweet gaining hundreds of thousands of views and the next thing you know I just see Eric starts responding. I tweeted back let's do it. How are we gonna actually pull this off? There's a saying that if you stay in San Francisco long enough you end up raising venture capital. We have 42 billion dollars under management, AI AI applications, AI infrastructure, bio and health. And from one to 10, how excited is the firm around this whole new AI wave that's happened? Probably a 15. So you saw the writing on the wall with AI. So you're if you can't beat him, join him. That was insane. They're not going to hire people who don't know how to use the tools anymore. If you don't get really good, you're basically f***ed. Thank you.