Fast Checkout
We have been thoroughly testing Fast Checkout ahead of its first public release on the upcoming Fast Swag Store.
Load testing has had great early results with early testing well over 250,000 requests a minute at < 50ms response times. We are still working to test multiples above this from launch to ensure we can cater to even the busiest peak periods from very large merchants.
We are still iterating on our UI, and always will be, we would love to bring in more incredible UI & UX designers and engineers into the team to further optimize the consumer experience to cater to all demographics, ensuring we have the most usable and inclusive product.
We gave our first external demo of Fast Checkout this week, and have more demos booked for next week with partners.
We are biased, but from testing our 1-click checkout, it really is an incredibly frictionless and magical experience.
It’s so exciting to use it and think of not just the lift to customer experience, and conversion rates, but also of entirely new business models and channels that will be born from this product.
We’re looking forward to being able to share the link to our Fast Swag Store and give you the chance to try it out for yourself.
Retailers & DTC’s
We have been engaged by a number of retailers and brands both in the US and internationally all very excited at becoming launch partners of Fast Checkout, and many have asked to also make strategic investments in our next funding round.
These early retailers represent nearly USD$1Bn GMV, and although Fast Checkout would obviously not process all of that, we are obviously very excited at the early growth opportunity.
We have a meeting in early January with a single merchant in our target launch categories, processing over $2Bn GMV annually who we are very excited about, we hope to can make them a central partner in our launch cluster of merchants. 🤞
We are still very much focused on onboarding an initial concentration of merchants in the fast fashion and beauty verticals, and would love to talk to more merchants in these categories; so more referrals would be appreciated:
Hiring
Given the explosive potential of Fast, the scale of our mission and the financial reward early employees will reap through our company stock options, we are attracting a lot of talent.
We now have nearly 900 formal applicants across all our roles, with nearly 400 of those candidates applying in December alone, and a huge volume in the last week.
We have also received many dozens of job outreach from candidates on Twitter, LinkedIn, and email in just the last week, over and above our formal applications.
We have been interviewing every day this week, we have even had multiple interviews booked for this lovely Sunday.
More exciting than the volume of these applicants is the quality of them, it is humbling to see the expertise and experience many of these candidates have, and their passion for wanting to join Fast.
Some of our business roles have been exceptionally popular, attracting candidates globally, and will take longer to sort through.
We are, of course, continuing to onboard senior candidates in our product and engineering teams, all with years of experience of high growth companies.
We will continue to invest resources into product, engineering, and security to cater to the demand we are seeing for Fast Checkout and to ensure we over-deliver from launch.
Check out and share our open roles here:
Too many men
It has been our focus since the outset to have equal gender representation on our team, however, it has proven exceptionally difficult.
At a guess, male applicants are 4:1 that of females, and in engineering roles, likely higher. We have tried to spend more of our outbound efforts on bringing the ratio to 50:50, and with the sponsorship of fantastic organizations like Elpha, but we have still ended up with larger density in male team members.
As we grow larger, have better infrastructure, raise more capital and further decrease risk, we will continue to push this as a key priority and lift the ratio.
This is not a vanity play, despite it being critical to a well-performing society, it is plainly good commercial sense to gender parity.
To design, build and distribute products designed to be used by a whole society, they must be architected by representatives of a whole society.
Having more of one gender on a team, or receiving a skewed ratio of genders in applications, means we are missing a huge and important portion of the talent pool.
We have started to see better ratio in recent applications, especially in our business roles, but will keep working hard to increase the numbers of women applying for, and being placed in engineering roles at Fast.
Office
Next week is the week that we should be moving into our new office. We’re all pretty excited to be moving, having more room, and a big dedicated space to make our new home for at least the next year.
This does, however, mean moving, organizing services in the new building, clearing out our old space, and all the rest of the tasks involved in moving offices!
Hopefully, we can have it all finished by the end of next week, so we can be completely focused as we start rolling out Fast Checkout.
We are also considering what group activity/s to get for the office, we’re obviously considering the usual options like a ping pong or billiard table, but would love to know if you have a better idea.
Reminder, if you are a founder of an eCommerce company, or DTC, and would like to be based from the Fast HQ, please apply here:
Like this update?
If you like this update, please give it a ❤️so we know. If you think others may enjoy it, feel free to share it with your networks:
Something Else?
Want to hear about something else that I didn’t cover here, let me know:
Key open roles
Head of engineering
Head of security
Head of design
Tech recruiter
Let’s talk
Domm Holland (Founder & CEO): @domm // domm@fast.co
Allison Barr Allen (COO): @abarrallen // allison@fast.co
Team: @fast // hi@fast.co // careers@fast.co