S2E25: We had 90 days to ship or shut down | Eric Simons (Bolt)

Eric Simons spent seven years building StackBlitz (now Bolt.new), a cloud IDE that millions of developers loved but almost nobody would pay for. After raising $22 million from Insight Partners in 2022, the company spent a year building enterprise features for customers who seemed excited. By launch in 2023, those customers had disappeared. The 2021 buying mania had created false demand everywhere.

"Everyone was buying everything. By the time we delivered it, we turned around and they just weren't even there. They were not interested. So there was false demand effectively."

With 18 months of runway and no clear path forward, Eric faced the hardest moment of his career: layoffs, followed by one final 90-day bet on a product called Bolt.

The 90-Day deadline saved them

Eric laid off seven or eight people and told the remaining 15-person team they had 90 days to ship Bolt before the next board meeting. They'd gotten a sneak peek at upcoming Anthropic models that solved problems they'd hit earlier. If Bolt didn't work, they'd start winding down the company.

"We barely got it online in 90 days. We only made it because we had no choice."

They launched with a single tweet on October 3rd, 2024. Day one: $60K ARR. Day two: $80K. Week one: $1 million. Month two: $4 million to $20 million ARR.

"I've been doing startups for 15 years. I've never seen anything like it. Neither had anyone else I talked to."

The customer nobody expected

Bolt thought they were building for developers. Within weeks, they realized their paying customers were product managers, designers, and non-technical founders at companies.

"PMs' jobs have been to write JIRA tickets, assign them to developers, and hope they actually implement it. Now they write the same spec, hit enter in Bolt, and it's done in 60 seconds instead of six business days."

Bolt isn't turning PMs into programmers. It's making them exponentially better at their actual job. Companies ship in one-tenth the time because engineers review AI-generated code instead of building trivial UI changes from scratch.

The Twitter hackathon that cost $100K and brought in millions

A tweet changed everything: "If I was Bolt's CEO, I'd throw the world's largest hackathon." Eric replied asking about prize pool size. Within two hours, they had $1 million committed from sponsors. Bolt kicked in roughly $100K.

"130,000 people signed up. Everyone got free domains through Entry. Everyone used Supabase. ROI was extremely positive. It was probably our best marketing event ever."

Why Windsurf had to sell

When Windsurf sold to Cognition, Eric wasn't surprised. Cursor was doing 5-10X Windsurf's revenue. At that scale, the gap becomes impossible to close.

"Once the flywheel starts like that, it's just harder. If you're going up against a competitor with substantially more distribution, crossing that chasm isn't realistically possible. So you find someone with even MORE distribution than your competitor."

The pain tolerance that built Bolt

Eric's early career included living in an AOL office building and eating at frat houses. He compares it to Navy SEAL training: constant discomfort that builds tolerance for the startup grind.

"A lot of what they train you to do is to be wet and cold all the time. They don't get discouraged by that stuff because it's normal. That's your only move as an entrepreneur: turn over all the stones and be intellectually honest about whether you see a path."

Companies Mentioned: 

• StackBlitz
• Anthropic Claude
• Cursor
• Windsurf
• Cognition
• Devin
• OpenAI ChatGPT
• Figma
• Wix
• Replit
• Lovable
• Microsoft
• GitHub
• Gartner
• Insight Partners
• Paddle
• Supabase

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