How Bolt.new hit $40M ARR in 5 months

CEO Eric Simons on the unlikely journey from near-death to breakout hit

👋 Hi, it’s Kyle Poyar and welcome to Growth Unhinged, my weekly newsletter exploring the hidden playbooks behind the fastest-growing startups. A special welcome to the 728 new readers who subscribed since last week’s 🔥 post on AI agents for marketing.

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The story of Bolt.new, the AI app builder, feels almost too good to be true.

Its maker, a company called StackBlitz, had spent the previous seven years struggling to stay alive. They had stalled out at $0.7M ARR and were weeks away from shutting down. Then they launched Bolt.new on October 3rd, 2024 with a single tweet. It took off instantly.

Bolt.new essentially became a second ChatGPT moment for its users. The product reached $4M ARR in only four weeks. It crossed $20M in three months and then $40M ARR in five months. Bolt.new now claims five million users and is still adding more than a million users each month. Oh, and the team remains hyper-lean; there are fewer than 40 employees including less than 10 in GTM roles.

I sat down with founder and CEO Eric Simons along with chief of staff Alex Berger on the company’s unlikely journey from near-death to breakout vibecoding hit.

Related resources: You should play with vibecoding for GTM, The surprising patterns behind viral AI products, The state of B2B monetization in 2025, More Zero to One growth case studies

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Bolt.new was in the right place to ride the wave of improving LLMs.

You could read this story as an invitation to just keep building and eventually growth will materialize. Don’t.

StackBlitz found itself with the right technology at a time when the potential of the technology could finally be unlocked. The company started in 2017 with a vision to make it as easy to build full stack web applications as it was to use Figma. The original form factor was an online development environment (IDE) that operates within a web browser. While this proved popular with developers, few were willing to pay for the technology.

Eric had built a prototype for what’s now Bolt.new in February 2024. He didn’t think it would work because the AI models weren’t good enough. Then he got access to Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet model in June; the agentic coding skills were leaps-and-bounds better. By July 1st Eric hard-pivoted back to the February prototype. Bolt.new was ready three months later.

“We had exactly the right technology to unlock the opportunity,” Eric told me. “Suddenly we arrived at a moment when a data center can magically stream code in a browser, and we had the tech to run it.”

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They’ve kept the UX deceptively simple despite building a product that’s incredibly powerful.