6 ms·
One-click checkout startup Fast is laying off its staff
- simonsarris 5y agoHalf? This says they are finished: https://twitter.com/fast/status/1511399486836334592 https://twitter.com/fast/status/1511399486836334592
- mkl95 5y agoThat was fast. They should explore the niche of one-click mass layoffs next.
- paxys 5y agoIt's not quite clear whether they are shutting the company down entirely or shutting the product and pivoting to something else with a smaller team.
- parkingrift 5y agoTheir website indicates they are shutting down for good. https://www.fast.co https://www.fast.co
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- neya 5y agoThey over did that one with that last sentence - an obligatory reference to some abstract quote about failure.
- cyrux004 5y agoYesterday they launched a re-designed website. Today they closed doors. https://www.fast.co/ https://www.fast.co/ Yikes
- 1270018080 5y agoTalk about engineers having an existential crisis on making things no one will ever use.
- ramesh31 5y agoAnd I'm sure they all knew it was happening as they were working on it. Things like that are why I gave up on caring about anything in this industry and just do the bare minimum to earn my paycheck.
- thewarrior 5y agoIt's all a big Fugazi
- mardifoufs 5y agoCrazy that they were still redesigning their website considering that their entire core app barely even worked. https://chrisfrantz.com/checking-in-on-fast/ https://chrisfrantz.com/checking-in-on-fast/ Like this is just so bizarre, they had seemingly top tier engineers (and a lot of them!) and they couldn't get a working check out experience? Can't wait for the post mortems
- midrus 5y agoMaybe they couldn't agree on the frontend framework to use. Not entire companies, but I've seen projects fail because of this or some similar decision paralysis
- causi 5y agoOne-click checkout Under what circumstances is this not a foolish thing to want? I thought it was cool on Amazon until I realized it was just a tool for generating unwanted orders that you then have to cancel.
- ghostly_s 5y agoI thought Amazon held a patent on this?
- feifan 5y agoIt expired a few years ago, hence the startups chasing the space.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Sohcahtoa82 5y agoI've never thought one-click checkout was a good idea. I buy stuff on Amazon on a semi-regular basis and I've never used it. Just seems like a great way to accidentally order the wrong thing occasionally.
- threeseed 5y agoB2B. My partner runs a Shopify store where companies come back each month to stock up. Apple Pay, Shop Pay etc. have made a big difference in conversions and customers seem to like it as it skips a few steps for them.
- TrueGeek 5y agoI love one click checkout. Amazon is okay, and I've used it a few times on sites that support it. But if a site has one click Apple checkout it makes it so much easier. I don't have to worry about them having my credit card info, and it takes 1 second to check out.
- idontknowifican 5y agoa dude of mine was hired there a few months ago and given: 30k sign 220k base 4 yoe as a react developer he told me he didn’t understand the business bit it seemed cool. at least i can steal him away now but damn
- paxys 5y agoThat's a crazy salary for someone 4 years in the industry. Way above average. When you get offered that, the company is either truly hiring the best of the best and doing revolutionary work, or throwing away cash and about to go bust. Seems we found out which one this was.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago84k for 3 months of work ain't bad, on to the next gig in a stupid hot job market. Maybe apply for unemployment too until landing the next gig.
- altdataseller 5y agoAnd I presume he got severance?
- fndomoraes 5y agosorry, but what does "30k sign 220k base" mean?
- ceasesurthinko 5y agoThis is the mentioned startup from that "Stripe & YC are the Mobs of Silicon Valley" tweet thread: https://twitter.com/theryanking/status/1485784884681474048 https://twitter.com/theryanking/status/1485784884681474048 In the tweet: Ryan Breslow, CEO of Bolt, talks about how Stripe funded Fast which is a competitor of Bolt, and for the same valuation despite Fast having no traction and being relatively new. (I do not condone or condemn the opinion of this person, just thought it would be relevant to this post)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ajkjk 5y agoThe page isn't loading, but anyway it's pretty clear that what makes a mob a mob is its use of violence to get its way, so... that doesn't sound right.
- ceasesurthinko 5y agoUpdated the link to the proper one
- aaaaaaaaata 5y agoThe term "mob" itself conjures imagery of a horde of people in the right places stopping their in-group from being unseated. Don't think the how is important.
- yunohn 5y agoThat’s Bolt, this is Fast.
- danappelxx 5y agoIt’s the founder of Bolt talking about Fast raising funding.
- _fat_santa 5y agoThat's gotta be cathartic for the founder of Bolt. Seeing the company that made a deal with "the Mob" go belly up.
- throwmeariver1 5y agoTheir YouTube account was a guilty pleasure of mine it always looked like straight out of Silicon Valley… the tvshow. Straight cringe inducing marketing bro culture bullshit.
- reducesuffering 5y agoWow, they spent god knows how much on a race car driver sponsorship to get… 100 views.
- throwmeariver1 5y agoThey deleted the good stuff like the ceo skydiving to a keynote presentation :( He still has a nice compilation twitter https://twitter.com/domm/status/1423346248329879554 https://twitter.com/domm/status/1423346248329879554
- shmoogy 5y agoThat pissed me off. I signed up for their thing to get a hoodie - it was not frictionless and they cancelled it never sending me my order.
- hildaman 5y agoThis is just the beginning. As we see easy money dry up, we are going to see a lot of unprofitable startups go belly up.
- sithlord 5y agofor some reason i thought that amazon had a patent on 1 click checkout?
- teraflop 5y agoThey applied for the patent in 1997, which means it expired in 2017.
- toomuchtodo 5y agohttps://patents.google.com/patent/US5960411A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US5960411A/en https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/37/e6/81/3ebb1f33c41b4a/US5960411.pdf https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/37/e6/81/3ebb1f3...
- UglyToad 5y agoYou're right but how the hell is this patentable!? The patent system is patently nonsense if "make there be as few clicks as possible" is worthy of a couple of decades of protection. Probably more context in the patent doc which I'm not going to read because any energy expended on the whole stupid system (other than ranting) is wasted.
- pacificmint 5y agoI think the reason a lot of people have heard about the one-click-patent is that it has served as the poster child for frivolous patents for the last 25 years. So yes, your outrage is shared by most people. I stopped holding my breath for reforms though.
- vincentmarle 5y agoJust for perspective on the startups who are trying to compete with Apple and Google: Apple Pay - 1,621,494 customers Google Pay - 1,107,759 customers Bold - 7,593 customers Fast - 1,203 customers Bolt - 581 customers Bolt is next?
- mtoddsmith 5y agoIf Bolt captures half of the Fast customers they can have 100% growth!
- threeseed 5y agoThe company that is missing there is Shopify. They somewhat quietly released ShopPay which at least based on our store is doing well.
- peanuty1 5y agoAnd Block (formerly Square) which has Cash App Pay.
- czbond 5y agoHow did they blow through $102M in ~14 months?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- coldpie 5y agoWelcome to the tech startup world, baby.
- CyberRabbi 5y agoIt might be hard to believe but that is closer to the norm than not. Unicorn-bound tech startups tend to operate by spending all their cash to grow the business as fast as possible, intending to raise another round once the previous round dries up. An annual cycle is about right. What happened here isn’t necessarily poor management of finances, instead they failed to grow the business and thus couldn’t attract more investors for a second round.
- czbond 5y ago>Unicorn-bound tech startups tend to operate by spending all their cash to grow the business as fast as possible That seems slow and risky. I come from the world of B2B slow and steady startups - painful both ways I guess.
- doctor_eval 5y agoIMO “failure to grow the business” is totally the same as poor management of finances, when the financial health of the business demands growth. If you keep your burn rate high while you fail to reach your sales targets then you need to pivot well before you run out of cash. I’m continually astounded by the acceptance of businesses which fly themselves into the ground. Repeatedly failing to meet targets requires change, not just charging ahead and damn the torpedoes.
- CyberRabbi 5y agoI don’t necessarily disagree with you, just wanted to draw a distinction between a blatant failure to manage finances and an excessively aggressive growth strategy that fails to pan out.
- danso 5y agoThe Information broke the news[0] (both the earlier mass layoff report and today's closure), but TechCrunch has a non-paywall full article [1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30922051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30922051 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30923032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30923032
- ilrwbwrkhv 5y agoSo the heavy investment from stripe didn't pan out then? I wonder how much of that thread is true at least when it comes to investments.
- stainforth 5y agoWhats the secret sauce here to Fast or Bolt or whatever? 1000 integrations, a plugin for WooCommerce or Shopify that points at your profile that has loaded your Paypal or Visa or merchant processor(another set of integrations)?
- mardifoufs 5y agoThey didn't even have a shopify plug in! So they were shut off from 95% of their market, which was smaller online retailers
- wonderwonder 5y agoWhat websites was the 1 click checkout on? Honestly with Amazon dominating so much of online retail can a company like this even land enough customers to make a profit?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dbielik 5y agoHere are 240 sites (as of today): https://www.nerdydata.com/reports/fast/72951386-2c5a-4372-9c8b-1b596fd85e5e https://www.nerdydata.com/reports/fast/72951386-2c5a-4372-9c...
- atestu 5y agoThis guy was sounding the alarm a few days ago https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1509854025746898946 https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1509854025746898946 Apparently the founder has a shady past https://www.npr.org/2022/02/17/1081201040/domm-holland-fast-stripe https://www.npr.org/2022/02/17/1081201040/domm-holland-fast-...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- danso 5y agoCan the link for this thread be changed to the official announcement: https://www.fast.co/ https://www.fast.co/ Whatever was at the Airtable link submitted is now private
- guessmyname 5y agoNew Airtable is here: https://airtable.com/shrOl16tQLXq5Eswc/tblRVSv9UklbXJbod https://airtable.com/shrOl16tQLXq5Eswc/tblRVSv9UklbXJbod
- jmu1234567890 5y agoThe Airtable was a list of Fast employees looking for work
- sbmthakur 5y agoThe page appears to be private. How to get the access?
- snowman-yelling 5y agoIt's interesting to me that Stripe funded Fast because Stripe has built their own one click checkout solution.
- hizxy 5y agoWow. I almost took a job there but something felt very off.
- aruanavekar 5y agoHere is list of some startups that closed post successful raise https://www.cbinsights.com/research/startup-failure-post-mortem/#2022update1 https://www.cbinsights.com/research/startup-failure-post-mor... some notes and learnings to take away