One-click checkout startup Fast is laying off its staff | Hacker News Reader

One-click checkout startup Fast is laying off its staff

airtable.com

92 pointshubraumhugo83 comments

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This guy was sounding the alarm a few days ago https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1509854025746898946

Apparently the founder has a shady past https://www.npr.org/2022/02/17/1081201040/domm-holland-fast-...

Half? This says they are finished:

https://twitter.com/fast/status/1511399486836334592

That was fast. They should explore the niche of one-click mass layoffs next.

> That was fast.

I see what you did there.

Pretty sure better.com tried that already...

It'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.

Their website indicates they are shutting down for good.

https://www.fast.co

They over did that one with that last sentence - an obligatory reference to some abstract quote about failure.

Yesterday they launched a re-designed website. Today they closed doors. https://www.fast.co/

Yikes

Talk about engineers having an existential crisis on making things no one will ever use.

And 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.

It's all a big Fugazi

Crazy that they were still redesigning their website considering that their entire core app barely even worked.

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

Maybe 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

a 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

84k 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.

And I presume he got severance?

if the company is folding as it sounds like, severance might just be whatever you can steal from the supply closet

From what I've heard so far, no severance - just pay/benefits through Friday of this week.

sorry, but what does "30k sign 220k base" mean?

$220,000 base compensation per year. $30,000 signing bonus

30k signing bonus, 220k normal base salary

That'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.

How did they blow through $102M in ~14 months?

Welcome to the tech startup world, baby.

It 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.

>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.

IMO “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.

I 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.

I think it's fair to draw this distinction, sure. The bean counters aren't necessarily able to change direction of the business, even if they can see it coming.

And I also think it's OK to have an excessively aggressive growth strategy too. Why not? Maybe it will work out.

The problem is when such a strategy can't be falsified until after all the money is spent. That's not a strategy, that's just gambling. It's been really common in my experience - when a strategy isn't hitting its objectives, double down on it, and spend more! Until ultimately all the investor's money is wasted.

http://www.paulgraham.com/pinch.html

It’s only a difference of scale, not of kind.

Thanks for the link!

LinkedIn says they had north of 600 employees -- 666 oddly enough. 456 in the US.

If your average payroll cost is $100k for 600 employees, that costs the business $135k, so payroll alone is $76m/year, or $6.5m/mo. If average payroll were closer to $200k, double that obviously. You can blow through $100m in no time.

On, unbelievably, $600k in revenue in 2021 per The Information. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/why-stripes-fast-hor...

Great contextualization.... I can see the payroll now. But on $600k revenue?? That is super nuts. There are sites selling on 'empire flippers / flippa' that make equal to that revenue for a WHOLE lot less valuation. nuts...

Pieter Levels is a 1 man PHP shop doing more revenue than that and at 95% margin.

Seems like they have a bunch of highly expensive sports sponsorships. This seems to happen often when you have a bro-y CEO who wants to rub elbows with that kind of crowd. I can't imagine that moved the needle much for them - but it sure costs a lot

At least in my experience, many more founders than you might expect have zero business sense and basically think that "growing the business" = hiring lots of employees. At 200k a pop all in, 100 employees will cost you 20 million. And so on.

One-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.

I thought Amazon held a patent on this?

It expired a few years ago, hence the startups chasing the space.

I'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.

B2B. 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.

I 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.

Just 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?

If Bolt captures half of the Fast customers they can have 100% growth!

https://xkcd.com/1102/

This guy maths

The company that is missing there is Shopify.

They somewhat quietly released ShopPay which at least based on our store is doing well.

And Block (formerly Square) which has Cash App Pay.

Can the link for this thread be changed to the official announcement: https://www.fast.co/

Whatever was at the Airtable link submitted is now private

The Airtable was a list of Fast employees looking for work

New Airtable is here: https://airtable.com/shrOl16tQLXq5Eswc/tblRVSv9UklbXJbod

Whats 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)?

They didn't even have a shopify plug in! So they were shut off from 95% of their market, which was smaller online retailers

This is just the beginning. As we see easy money dry up, we are going to see a lot of unprofitable startups go belly up.

Exactly. Cheap debt is not so cheap anymore, so VCs are going to stop steam rolling all their asymmetric bets.

I am sure the VCs will be flush from their ponzi scheme investments in the Web3 space.

The 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

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30923032

Here is list of some startups that closed post successful raise https://www.cbinsights.com/research/startup-failure-post-mor...

some notes and learnings to take away

What 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?

Here are 240 sites (as of today):

https://www.nerdydata.com/reports/fast/72951386-2c5a-4372-9c...

So 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.

It's interesting to me that Stripe funded Fast because Stripe has built their own one click checkout solution.

This is the mentioned startup from that "Stripe & YC are the Mobs of Silicon Valley" tweet thread:

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)

The 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.

Updated the link to the proper one

The 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.

That’s Bolt, this is Fast.

It’s the founder of Bolt talking about Fast raising funding.

That's gotta be cathartic for the founder of Bolt. Seeing the company that made a deal with "the Mob" go belly up.

Maybe, maybe not. That thread makes it sounds like Fast was cannon fodder to prevent Bolt and others from growing.

Got curious about this so I found the original HN discussion [0], which is a definite must-read for context/response if you read the tweet thread.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30066969

Wow. I almost took a job there but something felt very off.

The page appears to be private. How to get the access?

for some reason i thought that amazon had a patent on 1 click checkout?

They applied for the patent in 1997, which means it expired in 2017.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5960411A/en

https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/37/e6/81/3ebb1f3...

You'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.

I 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.

Their 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.

Wow, they spent god knows how much on a race car driver sponsorship to get… 100 views.

They 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

That 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.

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