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> Tiny daily sales numbers which all employees received was the first such warning sign. Internally, Fast was transparent on sales. Every day, every employee wo

> Tiny daily sales numbers which all employees received was the first such warning sign. Internally, Fast was transparent on sales. Every day, every employee would receive a sales summary email that listed the number of sales completed with Fast checkout, and the total sales amount. > Fast did less than $300K worth of sales and below $6K in revenue on most days from January 2022 to April 2022. There were days with around $2,000 in revenue for Fast. I'm actually surprised that everyone was receiving daily updates of company revenue. If you're surrounded by 100s of people at a company known to give high base pay but you're seeing daily revenue numbers in the range of $1K to $6K (they had $600K total revenue in 2021, supposedly) then you have to know that your time is very limited. I assume they were led to believe that more investment money was just around the corner to keep the business going? With a $10 million monthly burn rate they would have needed a staggering amount of capital to just continue to exist, let alone execute any plans to turn the ship around.

meetups323 5y ago
The entire culture of b2b startups IME is "yes we're burning money now, but just you wait till Moby Dick comes along... just implement XYZ features marketing/sales says are important and we'll have him in no time!" Of course, this is somewhat tautological: if they weren't burning money, they'd just be a company. Startup phase complete.
- ceeplusplus 5y ago
  The difference being that in successful B2B startups you don't have 600k ARR at 500 employees.
gregdoesit 5y ago
Author here. I was wrong on this information and updated the article - got a correction since. L6 and above employees would receive this: staff+ engineers, eng leadership, sales etc. There are companies where this information does go out to all employees in the spirit of radical transparency. Skyscanner is an example where every day, every employee gets the full revenue breakdown. These numbers are also shown on monitors across the company.
- encoderer 5y ago
  Lol. L6. Look no further folks. This guy Dominic was clearly LARPing a startup. Leveling frameworks before traction is a joke to me.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    Even startups benefit from job titles and hierarchy. Even startup employees benefit from a visible promotion path. Remember, they had hundreds of employees. Not just a couple people in a small office somewhere. Most likely, the levels corresponded to pay bands and helped determine where people fit into the seniority hierarchy (such as determining who receives sensitive daily information updates)
    - sergiotapia 5y ago
      Levels before you even have product market fit is a joke.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - alar44 5y ago
      Yeah that’s all fine and good but 6 levels is ridiculous for a new startup. My company has been around for 30 years, doing $75 million in sales this year, has 300 employees and we now have 4 levels, one more than last year, and even that feels artificial.
    - encoderer 5y ago
      You are 100% right — for late stage startups where you would normally see 500 people. At the Fast stage, the only viable promotion path is ship work that impacts the business or close deals that bring in revenue. The promotion levels game is something you play in larger organizations to engineer a rat race for people because it turns out they really like that. But no, a startup does not benefit from hierarchy quite the opposite in fact. That crap is all overhead it’s necessary as you grow but actually detrimental to your success.
brundolf 5y ago
> I'm actually surprised that everyone was receiving daily updates of company revenue. My company posts daily new user signups in #general on Slack. That's not quite revenue, but you could almost extrapolate
axg11 5y ago
Amongst a sea of negatives, that they continued to share these numbers with employees is a positive mark for the culture at Fast. Sure, it's easy to say with hindsight that Fast employees should have seen the demise coming. On the other hand, they also watched one of the founders raise $100M+ from Stripe. Perhaps they thought the burn could continue and eventually the product would reach traction.
jimbokun 5y ago
By my back of the envelope calculations, they would need to raise about $10 million a month to sustain that burn rate.

meetups323 5y ago

The entire culture of b2b startups IME is "yes we're burning money now, but just you wait till Moby Dick comes along... just implement XYZ features marketing/sales says are important and we'll have him in no time!" Of course, this is somewhat tautological: if they weren't burning money, they'd just be a company. Startup phase complete.

ceeplusplus 5y ago
The difference being that in successful B2B startups you don't have 600k ARR at 500 employees.

gregdoesit 5y ago

Author here. I was wrong on this information and updated the article - got a correction since. L6 and above employees would receive this: staff+ engineers, eng leadership, sales etc. There are companies where this information does go out to all employees in the spirit of radical transparency. Skyscanner is an example where every day, every employee gets the full revenue breakdown. These numbers are also shown on monitors across the company.

encoderer 5y ago
Lol. L6. Look no further folks. This guy Dominic was clearly LARPing a startup. Leveling frameworks before traction is a joke to me.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Even startups benefit from job titles and hierarchy. Even startup employees benefit from a visible promotion path. Remember, they had hundreds of employees. Not just a couple people in a small office somewhere. Most likely, the levels corresponded to pay bands and helped determine where people fit into the seniority hierarchy (such as determining who receives sensitive daily information updates)
  - sergiotapia 5y ago
    Levels before you even have product market fit is a joke.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - alar44 5y ago
    Yeah that’s all fine and good but 6 levels is ridiculous for a new startup. My company has been around for 30 years, doing $75 million in sales this year, has 300 employees and we now have 4 levels, one more than last year, and even that feels artificial.
  - encoderer 5y ago
    You are 100% right — for late stage startups where you would normally see 500 people. At the Fast stage, the only viable promotion path is ship work that impacts the business or close deals that bring in revenue. The promotion levels game is something you play in larger organizations to engineer a rat race for people because it turns out they really like that. But no, a startup does not benefit from hierarchy quite the opposite in fact. That crap is all overhead it’s necessary as you grow but actually detrimental to your success.

brundolf 5y ago

> I'm actually surprised that everyone was receiving daily updates of company revenue. My company posts daily new user signups in #general on Slack. That's not quite revenue, but you could almost extrapolate

axg11 5y ago

Amongst a sea of negatives, that they continued to share these numbers with employees is a positive mark for the culture at Fast. Sure, it's easy to say with hindsight that Fast employees should have seen the demise coming. On the other hand, they also watched one of the founders raise $100M+ from Stripe. Perhaps they thought the burn could continue and eventually the product would reach traction.

jimbokun 5y ago

By my back of the envelope calculations, they would need to raise about $10 million a month to sustain that burn rate.