Fast

What did it do?

Fast was a San Francisco-based fintech start-up building a one-click checkout and passwordless login product that plugged into e-commerce sites. The aim was for shoppers to save their details once and then pay on different sites without filling in forms. Through two rounds led by Stripe, it quickly raised more than $100 million.

Why did it shut down?

In 2021 the company reportedly made only six-figure revenue while its monthly cash burn reached as much as $10 million. The product was hard to integrate into merchants' sites, and according to an NPR investigation the one-click checkout option did not appear at all on many sites that carried the code. Slow growth and heavy spending made raising a new round impossible in the cooling investment climate of early 2022. In April 2022 the company shut down and Affirm offered jobs to most of its engineers.

The story

When Fast closed its doors in April 2022, it left behind a startling ratio. A year after raising a $102 million Series B led by Stripe, the company had ended 2021 with only six-figure revenue; according to TechCrunch, its monthly cash burn was running as high as $10 million.

Fast was founded in March 2019 by Australian entrepreneur Domm Holland; Allison Barr Allen was also among the founders. According to NPR, the idea grew out of Holland's wife's grandmother being unable to remember her password while ordering groceries online. The goal was for shoppers to pay with one click on any site, without entering an address, card and password each time. Stripe led a $20 million Series A in 2020 and, with Addition, a $102 million Series B in 2021. PitchBook put the company's value at around $580 million; Index Ventures, Susa Ventures and Global Founders Capital were also among its investors.

But there was a gap between the product's promise and the reality in the field. Using BuiltWith data, NPR examined more than 1,000 sites carrying Fast's code; of 50 randomly selected e-commerce sites, 19 did not show the one-click checkout option at all. Former employees said integration was hard for merchants and that the tool did not always work properly. Meanwhile the company built an image, through ads full of snowboarding and surfing scenes, that looked more like a lifestyle brand than payments infrastructure. The same report also recalled that Holland's previous start-up in Australia, Tow.com.au, had been liquidated in 2018 after a fee dispute with the state government.

In the first months of 2022 its options for new funding ran out. The shutdown, first reported by The Information, became official on 5 April 2022, and Affirm offered jobs to most of Fast's engineers. The $124.5 million the company had raised since its founding had been spent in less than three years. For employees whose stock options became worthless overnight, the closure came as a complete shock.

Fast shows that in two-sided markets such as payments, a product's value is set jointly by merchants' willingness to integrate and buyers' habits. A strong brand and a large funding round cannot, on their own, solve the distribution problem of a product that fails to win over both sides.

Lessons for founders

• Track the merchant-side integration rate and the number of pages where the checkout button is actually displayed as a metric separate from total customer count.
• If monthly burn is a multiple of revenue, discuss at every monthly board meeting how many months you can last if a new round does not come.
• In trust-based businesses such as payments, proving a measurable conversion uplift to merchants is a more durable sales argument than a flashy brand campaign.

Sources

1. Fast shuts doors after slow growth, high burn precluded fundraising options (TechCrunch, 2022-04-05)
2. Silicon Valley loves the startup Fast. But scandals plague its CEO (NPR, 2022-02-17)
3. Fast, the Troubled Fintech Startup, Is Shutting Down (The Information, 2022-04-05)

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