Fast Is Shutting Down
theinformation.com
theinformation.com
Looks like they have announced their shutdown on Twitter [0] but it hasn't reflected on their website yet.
It looks like they're a fintech company specialising in the '1-click checkout' space.
EDIT: fast.co now announced their shutdown on their site.
>Buying online has been forever changed by the incredible team at Fast. The dedication, brilliance and spirit of this remarkable team is unparalleled and will forever be the legacy of Fast.
If so how did they justify a $120M valuation and plan to deliver returns on what can trivially be replaced by a form-filling browser extension?
I'm not saying this shouldn't exist - it actually sounds very valuable. But I see it as a one-off purchase for local software, not a SaaS from a bloated company that is on the hook for delivering returns to investors.
Not for nothing, there can be a lot of value in simplifying things that could be trivially solved on a small scale by a programmer in an afternoon. A classic Hackernews comment about Dropbox and rsync comes to mind... sure doesn't seem be the case for Fast though.
In contrast, a non-rent-seeking form-filler is no threat for merchants and is a win-win for everyone. In fact, it wouldn't even need explicit support from the merchant to begin with, where as Fast needs commitment from the merchant to integrate.
I'm kinda happy that their attempt to seek rent on what is essentially form filling went down the drain where such an idea belongs in the first place.
I ended up a shop.pay user without even really asking for it, and I like it so much that I click the purple button every time I see it as an option.
With apple and google pay and other similar platforms integrating directly with your browser this type of product seems like a crowded market with very little existing need.
Agreed on shop pay which also comes with the rest of the store. Even Bolt has the whole checkout flow at least
I don't think the idea is really that bad, and a form-filling browser extension would not be comparable to what they were trying to do here. The idea is pretty compelling in isolation - your random mom n pop ecommerce site can compete with Amazon on price for a lot of things, but it can't compete with convenience.
If I go to Amazon I can buy something with one or two clicks and be pretty certain that my card details aren't going to get stolen and the thing I ordered will probably arrive when they say it will just about.
If I go to a random ecommerce site I probably have to register, have to enter my card details and confront the possibility of getting ripped off. It's so much less convenient, so for most purchases I just go to Amazon, which is bad for a bunch of reasons.
What Fast was promising to do was to bring that convenience and trust to ecommerce sites, so that they could become more competitive with the Amazons of this world, get more sales, make more money, consumers save money, everyone wins.
Of course the problem is that they're only compelling when they're ubiquitous, and when everyone already has an account and everyone already trusts them. It's a bootstrapping problem, one that only really works if you burn a whole bunch of capital to get both consumers and suppliers signed up, or if you can piggyback off someone else's market penetration, e.g. Stripe, and even with that leg-up they weren't able to survive. All of this also ignores the existence of paypal, apple pay, google pay etc which do offer most of the convenience already.
The bootstrapping problem seems like something of their own doing, both because it's a server-side solution as opposed to client-side, but also because there's most likely rent-seeking and extra fees involved. Every merchant wants to make more money so they should've had near-complete coverage very quickly unless there's a significant downside for the merchant for participating in said system.
that was fast !
I don't think if I hired as fast as I possibly could continuously without doing anything else I'd be able to get anywhere close to that number in 14 months.
Perhaps they closed up shop with a huge treasure chest remaining?
I run a startup with half the revenue but at a valuation fifty times lower. I pay myself peanuts and my family suffers from that. I mentally calculate what these folks must have been paying (themselves and others) to burn anywhere near that much cash. I can never shake the feeling that I'm a huge sucker trying to build a profitable business.
If you dig under the hood perhaps they took money out, their friends / family got money out, favored vendor deals, related party transactions?
I mean seriously, how do you evaporate $100M in a YEAR with only $600K of revenue to show for it!
So yes, money goes to waste, this isn't always considered a "bad" thing given how many startups go under even with well intended founders.
SV has made a repeated bet that getting rid of almost all normal "red tape" (think audited financials, regulatory disclosures etc etc) is a net positive.
Startup after startup has found this a successful place to start massive globe spanning companies (and smaller ones).
Maybe after Bolt first.