The news about Fast shutting down came fast this week!

Fast, a startup that provided online checkout products, announced this week that it will shut down. 

Despite raising $125 million in investment in 2021, Fast clocked a meager $600,000 in revenue last year.

This reflects poorly given that a slow but steady competitor, Bolt, clocked 50X that revenue at $30 million in 2021.

The pandemic greatly accelerated innovation in online shopping, and several other companies created their own one-click-checkout systems, including Shopify.

PayPal was always considered a direct competitor to Fast, while Amazon invented one-click online checkout so long ago that its patent has expired! 

Apple auto-fills payment information on Macs and iPhones, as does Google’s Chrome browser.

But Fast marketed itself as a more modern, easier-to-use solution than the competition, convincing even Stripe to invest $20 million and other investors to shell out over $100 million. 

Fast, which was once valued at $580 million, was soon burning $10 million per month.

Fast ran out of funds after failing to secure additional investment fast enough, saying “We ran out of money.”

In my opinion, Fast didn’t run out of money. They just burnt their way through it. 

What they really ran out of was the ability to deliver what they marketed, after selling the world on how they planned to change it with a single click!