> How on Earth did the company raise so much money with so few milestones of any kind being achieved?
Fast pitched itself as taking the prudent path compared with e.g. Bolt. The latter went for big clients first. Fast started with small businesses.
There were clearly other issues. But the closing era of cheap capital favoured the bold, and Bolt’s seizure of the fertile low grounds cut off Fast from its growth. Despite Fast taking the orthodox path.
this doesn't answer the question at all, it's just a bunch of bullshit words strung together. we never raised any money, and we had more to show than Fast although we were in a completely different industry. this goes to show that all that matters is knowing people, it doesn't actually matter whether you have a real business and have achieved anything at all.
VCs sometimes follow "hot" companies. Companies become hot when several VCs think they are hot for whatever reason. When the company is hot and gets offers, other VCs will rush to give them more offers and at that point you might not even need a deck or any metrics anymore. The startup can then bid those offers against each and can end up raising even more they initially were trying to.
Fast did great job hyping the company on Twitter, likely the founder also was a good storyteller. The old adage is that you raise with a story, team or traction. Sometimes the story actually pans out, like with YC Airbnb is often an example of company that struggled for a long time in the beginning and no-one could really predict how big they could become.
traction doesn’t matter. or we would have raised. story and team maybe. i think that VCs buy into a certain type of person. maybe a younger version of themselves. somebody they want or wanted to be. that rules out anyone who is nerdy or weird. and they like to go to parties to hear what others are investing in and then do the same.
Who? (Also, given an open market, as was the case when the Amazon patent expired in 2017, the company fundraises to scale will beat its more timid competitor. This is basic strategy.)
If you were in a different industry…great execution in the wrong industry is as good as a Ferrari in a swamp.
> all that matters is knowing people
Sounds like you’ve been through some shit. I’m sorry for that.
The point I was making, summarily, is that Bolt ate Fast’s lunch. It went straight for the big customers. Fast wanted to grow towards them incrementally. In this story, if anyone had a fundraising connections advantage, it was Fast—they were Stripe backed. Bolt outmanoeuvred them (and was lucky).
This is unorthodox strategy. Fast played it conservatively. Bolt swung for the fences. Curiously, Bolt landed the home run.
I don't know why on earth this is downvoted. You're 100% correct and I'm bewildered that this 'conservative' trope is prevailing in the thread. Both companies spent functionally the same amount of money, and both maximised different terms of the [customer count]*[customer revenue] equation.
Fast made what was manifestly the wrong decision, both in hindsight and in foresight (I'm happy to post my WhatsApp screencaps from a year and a half ago when I was exploring starting a co in that space). It's not possible to build a hands-off 'platform' like Stripe in that space - integrations are complex, and so integrating a large number of small clients predictably bogged them down till they ran out of money.
(That's not the only reason, I'm sure. It was also a shitty implementation of one-click checkout: most saliently, it wasn't one click. Anyone who actually tried Fast at the time - and I & my prospective cofounder shared the few tiny client websites either of us found like they were rare gems - could see that it was a terrible implementation, in a space where UX is literally the entire game. Many actually did, e.g. this guy from back then: https://chrisfrantz.com/checking-in-on-fast/)
you can build a great business in any industry. VCs think this is limited to a handful of industries which they happen to think are hot. because of that thinking many good deals are lost.
Going for bigger clients is the prudent path.
Small clients require far more initial investments and the payoff will be much later.
We failed to raise money exactly because we had a bunch of small clients and not enough revenue. It was a prudent decision for the potential investors - but the main failure on our side was not to network enough with our current investors in order to get another friendly round of investment.
We had a competitor that was doing exactly the same thing (with worse metrics) that raised several millions a few months later, so it wasn't too far fetched.
VCs invest in a lot of baseless crap - sometimes the crap turns into gold and sometimes in order to be the chosen crap you need to know the right people.
Fast pitched itself as taking the prudent path compared with e.g. Bolt. The latter went for big clients first. Fast started with small businesses.
There were clearly other issues. But the closing era of cheap capital favoured the bold, and Bolt’s seizure of the fertile low grounds cut off Fast from its growth. Despite Fast taking the orthodox path.