Firstly, I sincerely hope you are safe, happy and healthy at the moment.
Just a quick update that I have just opened a Whatsapp group for people who want bleeding-edge (sometimes pre-release) access, and behind-the-scenes views of Fast.
You will get the latest updates and can test new features as soon they are released!
If you want in, join here: https://chat.whatsapp.com/GpIir5sORBI1yh4tKgrOdA
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The time has come. The Fast Swag Store is live, with the first-ever public demo of Fast Checkout.
What to do:
Go to fast.co
Click “Fast Signup”
Register and then click the link to our Swag Store
Experience our 1-Click Fast Checkout.
It’s a great cause, with a super Fast checkout, so try it out now.
We would love your feedback, suggestions, bugs etc.. so please reply once you have tried it.
Every single dollar paid is going to SF Public Schools for COVID-19 relief, to help feed kids - we are covering all costs of making and delivering the Fast Swag.
Thanks so much. Stay safe and happy.
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🛑 Important: If you want more updates, give this a ❤️so we keep releasing them publicly.
Very very soon we will be unveiling the first store in the world with Fast Checkout enabled.
In the lead-up, this coming week we are launching a completely new website at fast.co, and will be letting people pre-register for Fast Checkout.
Those who are pre-registered will be given the first access to use Fast Checkout, so make sure to follow on Twitter @domm or @fast this week for the website launch announcement.
Our first product Fast Login, is still growing each month and enabling tens of thousands of people around the world to quickly, easily and safely login without passwords.
As an example, on a single integrated e-commerce website, Fast Login now processes over 4,000 logins a month, enabling nearly $800,000 in purchases, and powers over 70% of all site logins.
What may surprise you is that all of the current live technology that powers Fast Login, and the website at fast.co was built by me, many months ago, before Fast hired a single dedicated engineer.
Our entire team has been focused on rebuilding the core Fast infrastructure, building our upcoming Fast Checkout product, and refreshing Fast Login.
We made this decision in order to invest in infrastructure that can support an order of magnitude more than incremental updates to the original platform I built.
This also means that at scale, we will continue to serve an incredibly large audience in milliseconds, not seconds.
What we’ve knowingly held back on is publicly accessible updates to our core Fast Login product for some months now, but this has been an easy trade-off as we prepare to launch the upcoming Fast Checkout to hundreds of millions of consumers, and beyond.
It’s easy for most startups or businesses to be trapped into short term thinking and action, especially if they are chasing the elusive product-market fit, or beholden to a small group of primary customers.
However, before we began building Fast Checkout we tested the market, pre-registering merchants with over $30M GMV in three days. As we prepare to launch Fast Checkout, we have been engaged by retailers, brands and e-commerce giants, representing over $100bn in annual revenues, many of whom are investing in Fast and will become early customers.
Given the clear opportunity and scale that Fast will serve from launch, it was critical to invest more heavily in our longer-term product and infrastructure.
Now, I am getting more excited every day as we come very close to sharing Fast Checkout with the world, it really is one of the most magical experiences on the internet and will set a standard for eCommerce.
Make sure to follow on Twitter @domm or @fast this week for the website launch announcement and the chance to pre-register to be one of the first-ever users of Fast Checkout.
This week was a big week for our team, we onboarded three new fantastic Fastronauts and are preparing for two more new Fastronauts starting this week:
Software Engineer - ex Lyft
HR Manager - ex Sight Machine & InMobi
I got some great candid feedback from one of our most recent new starters this week that they felt a little thrown in the deep end and lost when they first started, so I will be spending some extra time on onboarding and ensuring our new starters get well settled in from the start.
Our onboarding experience was already a focus for me, given the importance of team in our company, and hence why we had already placed an HR manager; but feedback like this means that I can really effectively prioritize my time and efforts to where it’s needed.
I will post in the coming weeks the refreshed and magical onboarding experience we are developing at Fast.
We had the very first Fast company-wide All-Hands this Friday, it was really great to have the opportunity to bring everyone together to tighten our feedback loops, and ensure everyone is on the same page.
We are a very transparent organization, internally and externally, so ensuring that information is flowing freely throughout is absolutely vital and is a big factor in driving our growth.
Want to hear about something else that I didn’t cover here, let me know:
Security engineer
Front-end engineer (Next.js & React experience important)
Site Reliability Engineer
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🛑 Important: If you want more updates, give this a ❤️so we keep releasing them publicly.
We have three new non-product/engineering Fast team members (fastronauts) starting this coming week, with an office manager, a HR manager, and a Chief Communications Office (+ Government relations).
It’s really important for us to build an extremely strong and scalable operational base, to complement our solid engineering and infrastructure base. This will ensure we can support our growth, with fewer fires to put out as we are rapidly scaling Fast Checkout.
We also have another Product Designer joining the team on a contract basis from Monday for a few months.
Each of these Fast starters is phenomenal, very high caliber, coming from InMobi, Facebook, Apple, Google, Visa, DraftKings, CloverHealth and more.
We have several last-stage interviews with some solid engineering candidates this week, across front-end and back-end.
Despite the need to grow our team, we are extremely selective with the candidates we interview, and then more so the candidates we actually hire.
Our engineers typically have a minimum of three years of experience at top-tier, later stage, high growth technology companies. They have experience working on products used by tens of millions, hundreds of millions or billions of users.
This is critical, as we use a cutting edge tech stack across our front-end, back-end, and infrastructure, to ensure our Fast Checkout product can scale to literally millions of purchases a minute, with < 100ms transaction times.
We still have some room for more front-end and backend engineers, ideally, with extensive React & Next.js experience on front-end, and Go on the back-end. If that’s you, reach out and come in to meet me and the team.
Fast is a wonderland for incredible product designers, allowing those with a deep understanding of user behavior, who want to be unhinged in using design to push the boundaries of UX and unlock the future of e-commerce.
Over the next 12 months, Fast will power 1-click checkout for hundreds of millions of users, in dozens of countries, with varying languages and currencies.
That provides lots of UX challenges, we must pioneer and design a product that will enable a teenager in Mumbai or an adult in Marseille or a grandparent Michigan to each transact online easily, quickly and safely.
We have a small number of product design roles still available on our team, as well as the Head of Design role, if you want the opportunity and responsibility of working at this scale, feel free to reach out to me to discuss ASAP.
Want to hear about something else that I didn’t cover here, let me know:
Front-end engineer
Back-end engineer
Senior product designer
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If you like this update, please give it a ❤️so we keep releasing them publicly.
We hear lots of Fast puns given the name, but more so because people are usually surprised by how fast we act & respond.
Being an early-stage startup, speed really is everything. It’s not about rushing through tasks, it’s about efficiency, and reducing latency between tasks. The absence of a deadline, should not eliminate the importance of speed; it needs to be a default state of the business.
The more efficient you are, the more runway you have, without more capital or dilution.
Once operating at speed and highly efficiently, the momentum you achieve is incredibly difficult to slow down and propels you far further forward than your competitors.
To give you just some insights into how this philosophical adoption of speed transposes to real-world activity:
Notifications ON, always monitoring email, Twitter, LinkedIn, there is simply no other way to be prompt and reactive.
Respond to highly suited candidates/partners/investors immediately, 24/7.
There is simply no point in delaying a response, reducing delays between contact, decreases total engagement time before action: ie. hiring, partnership, investment.
Every activity/task/job should be an ASAP job, no matter how big or small; allocating the priority for speed to non-time sensitive tasks helps to set a culture of speed.
External suppliers will quickly start to prioritize your tasks by default above others, simply because of your continued insistence on speed.
A 10-20% premium cost, for speed, is typically always worth it; sometimes as much as 100% more could be worth it for a much faster response time.
In all periods of downtime, drive more activity and push outbound activity. (Not saying you can’t ever not be working, but during work periods, you simply must be as productive as possible)
Find early team members and co-founders who are highly autonomous, the less guidance and management they need, the less bandwidth they will take from you or their manager.
Without a doubt, the early success we have had, has been in building our team, as well as because of the team building we have done.
I only arrived in the US in June 2019, with no network, and with only funding from a small angel round, I began cold outreach amongst very high-quality individuals, seeking ‘mentorship’.
7 months on, one of these individuals, Allison Barr Allen, left a 5-year stint at Uber, to become our COO, postponing a career in VC. Several others are active mentors and/or angel investors in our company.
As soon as I received the first term sheet for our pre-seed round, I kicked off full-scale recruiting, I engaged and employed 12 contingency recruitment agencies, I bought the LinkedIn, StackOverflow, AngelList, Woo hiring products as well as some other smaller ones.
I then began huge amounts of outbound activity through GitHub, LinkedIn and Twitter (I still actually drive lots of activity now despite a big talent pool).
I began interviewing, often 10+ candidates a day, I screened hundreds and interviewed over 80 engineers before hiring one; all were from top companies - Google, Apple, Facebook etc…
We hired a videographer to produce high-quality hiring content and staff interviews, which we posted to social media to attract new candidates, and promoted these through the ad tools on social media.
We pitch our candidates during interviews, in the exact same way that we pitch investors during meetings.
We only hire candidates who follow up in the day or two after an interview professing their desire to join the company. This keeps our early team highly engaged in the mission, continuing to drive us forward despite the typical startup ambiguity and change in roles, team etc…
Our entire team helps interview and screen candidates; we extended offers to multiple candidates last week that I haven’t even met yet. The quality of these candidates, and our ability to attract the level of talent to the team without me, speaks volumes to the quality of the team we already have.
We now have an active talent pool in the thousands and have the most incredible candidates competing for our roles, who typically wouldn’t work at a company as early as ours.
Our team is already built of an incredible group of people coming from Uber, Square, Shopify, Paypal, Postmates, Visa, Walmart, and many other leading companies.
There is no silver bullet to hiring, but if you drive lots of activity, pick the right candidates, inspire and sell to your candidates as if they are customers or investors, you will be in a great position.
Thanks to everyone who came to our casual drinks on Friday, we plan on hosting lots of events in our new space so stay tuned.
I like the idea of a public Friday show-n-tell for our latest product advancements, highlighting a particular team (ie. design or engineering, or product…) each week.
Make sure you are following on Twitter for more info:
Want to hear about something else that I didn’t cover here, let me know:
Technical hiring manager
Head of engineering
Senior product designer
Domm Holland (Founder & CEO): @domm // domm@fast.co
Allison Barr Allen (COO): @abarrallen // allison@fast.co
Team: @fast // hi@fast.co // careers@fast.co
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