From bankrupt to $20 million ARR in 2 months, Part II

He’d taught himself to code.

He’d moved to Silicon Valley at 18 years old to pursue his dreams.

He’d founded not one, not two, but three companies.

But now, after seven years, Eric Simons was stumped. Despite everything, StackBlitz was on the brink of bankruptcy. And with a baby and an Ironman coming up, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Eric was determined. In his own words, in fact, he’d never been happier.

Still, the team still needed a miracle.

With nothing left to lose, for all of 2024, they experimented.

Bolt was the last experiment on the list before the end of the year, and with it, StackBlitz.

Missed Part 1? Read the full article on our website.

Welcome back!

ICYMI: Every other Thursday, Zero to Unicorn shares the life stories of billion-dollar founders, investors, and operators.

They’re the untold tales of the miraculous founders who have made it to the pinnacle of their industries against all odds. They’re the impossible pivots that arose out of necessity, the years where the product was great but the business wasn't, and the moments our protagonist almost walked away. And expect the highly coveted, hard-won lessons they learned along the way.

We also host regular, in-person Zero to Unicorn founder fireside chats in SF and NYC. In fact, we’re hosting one tonight with Alvin Salehi, co-founder of Shef. RSVP, come by, and say hello!

That’s all for now. Enjoy Part II of Eric’s story!

Ethan and Arek 🦄

The first iteration of Bolt actually dates back to February 2024 and was based on a problem Eric had experienced in his own life. 

At the Unicorner Zero to Unicorn Founder Fireside, he shared how he tried to build a website for his own wedding in 2021. Partway through the project, he was distracted by other priorities and never finished it. He eventually gave up and switched to Squarespace, which he found frustrating to use. The vision of this product was to eliminate exactly that kind of friction. 

The team constructed a prototype, a barebones AI tool that could turn a simple text prompt into a working application. However, it failed because the models just weren’t good enough back then to make the idea work. The apps and websites it created glitched and fell apart. The seamless experience they were after, the simplicity of writing what you want and getting a full website or app ready to use, was nowhere close to feasible. 

Zooming out, we’re in a moment where a lot of companies are scrambling to add AI to their products. The StackBlitz team held off because they saw the technology in its early, unusable state and didn't see how it would improve the experience they wanted to create. So they waited. 

In retrospect, this was the right move.

In May 2024, the team had their perspective flipped. It was Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 3.5, a model that, in Eric's words, "has changed software development, period. We got a kind of sneak peek of it, and we were like, ‘This is good, this is going to change everything’."

They pulled Bolt off the shelf and went all in. For all of July, August, and September, they were heads down. 

With a company, a baby, and an Ironman on the line, the stakes were high.

And the first outcome couldn’t be better. With less than 6 months of training, Eric crossed the finish line of a full Ironman at the end of October 2024: it was a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a full marathon, completed in 12 hours and 15 minutes. 

As impressive as that is, the success they soon saw with Bolt somehow topped it.

The “launch strategy” for a product that would go on to reshape how software gets built was a single tweet that went viral. 

One day after the post, Bolt had added 60,000 users. One of the engineers messaged the team in disbelief. 

But Eric wasn’t fazed. He had already seen his share of launches. They get people excited for a few days before fading away. He thought, this one would follow the same pattern.

To his surprise, it didn’t. 

It just kept growing and growing.

Bolt reached $4 million ARR in just four weeks, crossed $20 million in three months, and hit $40 million in five. 

It’s one of the fastest-growing startups of all time by revenue velocity, with only ChatGPT faster.

Its patience, combined with seven years of StackBlitz infrastructure nobody else had, meant that when the right model arrived, they could move in 90 days while competitors were still figuring out their roadmap.

The team finally had a moment to breathe, albeit a brief one. They knew they had a hit product on their hands. After driving through hell, they had finally made it out the other side. 

What they didn’t expect was just how fast the market they were building in was growing.

"It was kind of like a murder mystery," Eric said during a Forbes Talks episode. "What is going on? Who are these people using it? Why are they using it?"

The users weren't coming from just one place, and they weren't one type of person. 

Somewhere in the middle of watching Bolt grow in ways founders couldn’t fully explain, something clicked. Users were coming from everywhere because the shift happening underneath Bolt wasn't really about Bolt, but a fundamental change in what software development could look like and who could participate in it. Bolt happened to be in the right place with the right execution when that shift began.

This is why the company could have a smash hit with a product scraped together in 90 days that was, in Eric’s words, like a stripped-down race car:

The product offered what Eric describes as a dead-simple experience: a homepage with the chatbox, and another page with a chatbox next to the product you’re building. 

As Eric had learned earlier when building StackBlitz, friction at the start kills adoption. Bolt from day one aimed to eliminate just that. Going from "I have an idea" to "I have a working app" in under a minute was the only metric that mattered, and that’s what the team succeeded in optimizing for. 

It turns out that the two-page experience of the product got its result, with 500 to 1,000 support emails a day and a Discord community scaling faster than any team of 15 people could formally manage. This community quickly became one of the company’s most valuable assets, telling them what was broken and what mattered most.

The result was a company that had been one board meeting away from shutdown, now sitting at the center of an entirely new category it helped create.

Bolt is simple. Describe the app or website you want, and it builds it for you. It’s neither a template nor a drag-and-drop layout. We’re talking about a complete, functioning web application generated from a simple prompt. If something isn't right, you tell it, and it fixes it. The whole cycle that used to take weeks of back-and-forth with developers now takes minutes.

And what makes it different from tools that just generate code and hand it back to you? Bolt actually runs it and debugs it in real time, autonomously. You just have to prompt it. The combination of a capable AI model plus a real execution environment is what separates Bolt from tools that just generate code and hand it back to you. 

So, as Bolt’s user base exploded, the team faced a strategic question. Who exactly should they build for? They realized that consumers and prosumers drive top-of-funnel growth and that mattered, but who would use the product in the long term? 

Beyond one-time users and solo projects, Eric realized the customers who would open Bolt every single day were businesses and enterprises, because they were the ones with the power to transform how entire organizations build products. If Bolt wasn't good enough for them, it would become a toy. And that was another lesson that Eric had already learned. 

It's also where most competitors aren't. Consumer-facing AI coding tools have multiplied rapidly, but building for businesses is a very different problem. It means dealing with security, integrations with existing systems, collaborative workflows that include non-technical teammates, and much more.

On top of that, agents were just starting to get good.

These shifts shaped the next phase of the product. In other words, it was time to supercharge their race car.

Think about the product manager who has a clear vision for a new feature. Under the old model, normally, they write a detailed memo, route it for approval, pass it by the design team, and get yet another round of approval. Then it lands in an engineering queue, where it waits. 

Weeks, and sometimes months, pass before anything resembling their original idea comes to life, and by then, it's been through so many hands, it barely resembles what was originally imagined.

Eric has a name for all of that: “fake work.” It’s all the meetings, the approvals, the translation layers between an idea and its execution. 

"There are a lot of brilliant people at companies who have been held back by arcane processes," he said during the Forbes Talks episode. And the people who feel that gap is broad, including product managers, designers, marketers, and founders. 

With Bolt, the PM types what they want, a working version comes back, they show it to people, and it ships. It’s a way of giving agency to people again. 

In October 2025, the second version of Bolt arrived, designed for a different kind of customer. It was the kind of product that 75% of the Fortune 500 now use.

If v1 was a stripped-down race car, v2 was the Ferrari. Containing fewer error loops, projects that could scale to a size that matched enterprise needs, and the infrastructure those companies required, including full-scale databases, authentication, payments, security, SEO, and so on, Bolt handled everything inside the platform without any setup. 

And at the center of it all? Professional-grade AI agents. The broader industry is shifting from AI models (tools you query and get answers from) to AI agents. They are systems that go beyond natural language processing to autonomously handle decision-making, problem-solving, and direct interaction with external tools. These tools break down complex goals into smaller tasks and use past context to personalize and refine future interactions. 

Last, but definitely not least, agents can work together. Multi-agent systems unlock the ability to execute complex, multi-step workflows by having specialized agents coordinate and run concurrently, which can take care of complex tasks that used to require entire teams. In other words, we’re talking about fewer bottlenecks and dramatically reduced operational costs. For anyone managing teams and budgets, that's hard to ignore.

Eric sees this as the defining transition of the next decade. 

He believes every person at every company will eventually have their own agentic team. Bolt is oriented around this concept.

"One person with a team of 50 agents is going to be faster than 50 people in an office," he said. And that's not just a prediction for Eric, as it's already how Bolt operates. The company has paused traditional hiring, choosing instead to bring on agentic systems across engineering, product, design, marketing, and support.

He expects this entire model to become the norm across the industry, with smaller teams, multiplied agency, and building things at a pace that simply wasn't imaginable before.

The metric he uses to measure this is gross margin per employee. Most companies don't think about productivity this way, but Eric believes it is the clearest signal of how much leverage a single person has. 

Bolt's target for the next 12 to 18 months is $10 million in gross margin per employee, a number that sounds almost implausible, and Eric knows it. But he believes it’s inevitable, and he wants Bolt to be the first ones to achieve it. 

If Bolt keeps on this path, we have no doubt that it will. 

The risk on the horizon is the frontier labs. Companies whose models power platforms like Bolt, like OpenAI and Anthropic, are not going to sit still. Eric has no illusions about this. Asked during Unicorner's Zero to Unicorn Founder Fireside whether they'll eventually build their own Bolt-like products, his answer is straightforward: "I have no doubt that they will."

But he doesn't think that closes the game. Bolt's answer to that threat is flexibility, the ability to let users reach for whichever agent or model is best for any given task, regardless of who built it. 

Besides, Bolt isn't waiting around, as the numbers show. The company raised $105.5 million in a Series B, led by Emergence Capital and Google Ventures, in January 2025. The growth that followed was hard to ignore, with more than one million AI-generated websites built then deployed on Netlify alone by March 2025 and 10 million users by February 2026. 

However, the number Eric is most focused on is where the product is being used day in, day out inside real organizations. Bolt has since 10x-ed its B2B business: as mentioned before, it is now trusted by three-quarters of the Fortune 500. It has also earned a spot in the top 40 fastest-growing software vendors globally, according to Brex.

The product has kept pace with the momentum, with new model integrations landing regularly, and Bolt Connectors bringing tools like Miro directly into the workflow, closing the gap between how teams design and how they build. The team also just launched Design System Agents, allowing users to generate code that is native to your design library, and again demonstrating an ability to stay ahead of the curve. On top of that, Eric recently hinted at what's next: a way to take ideas straight into production codebases without the usual rewrite cycle, something he says product teams have wanted for a long time. We won’t spoil the surprise, but we’re confident it’s worth following.

Behind all the funding rounds and model integrations, what matters most at Bolt is the experience for the user. At the heart of it, that experience proves to be both powerful enough for professionals while still simple enough to use that, yes, even a chemistry teacher who once asked a distracted teenager what would make him pay attention in class could build something with it. Funny how life turns out. 

Bolt's story looks like an overnight success, but it was eight years in the making. The category Bolt helped to create didn't exist three years ago. It exists because one team sat at the intersection of the right technology, the right moment, and the quiet, unsexy work of not giving up before the pieces came together.

Your competitors are free R&D. When other companies experiment with AI features, new markets, or product bets, watch closely. Let them absorb the cost of figuring out what doesn't work.

Don't spend faster than you need to. Before product-market fit, your investors will push you to scale. Resist it.

When the 2023 ultimatum came, StackBlitz still had a year, maybe a year and a half of runway in the bank. So, the company wasn't at imminent risk of running out of money. The harder question keeping everyone up at night was: What are we doing here? That disciplined spending is what bought them enough time to find out.  

Community is distribution. When Bolt launched, it wasn't starting from zero. Seven years of StackBlitz users became the first wave. And when the product caught, it caught hard. Recall the Discord community flooding the team with exactly who was using it and why.

Know why you're not giving up. Persistence is good advice, until it isn't. The question to ask yourself is whether you're holding on because you have real conviction, you want to see that working, or because giving up feels like failure. 

But if you decide that’s what you want, Eric has a message to you: 

Build for professionals first. A tool that works for everyone has to first work for the most demanding users. If it can't hold up there, it becomes a toy. Remember how developers loved WebContainers, but wouldn't abandon the local environments they had spent years perfecting. It was cool, but not a long-term business product. When it came to Bolt, he wasn't going to make the same mistake. 

Talk to your customers obsessively. Eric's formula for maximizing innovation is a simple, timeless message to close with: