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Re:What software engineers can learn from the rapid collapse... by lupire on Friday April 08, 2022 @08:29AM (#30956060)
FAST wasted $100M on nothing. That's not conservative.
Re:What software engineers can learn from the rapid collapse... by samhw on Friday April 08, 2022 @11:05AM (#30957965)
I don't know why on earth this is downvoted. You're 100% correct and I'm bewildered that this 'conservative' trope is prevailing in the thread. Both companies spent functionally the same amount of money, and both maximised different terms of the [customer count]*[customer revenue] equation.

Fast made what was manifestly the wrong decision, both in hindsight and in foresight (I'm happy to post my WhatsApp screencaps from a year and a half ago when I was exploring starting a co in that space). It's not possible to build a hands-off 'platform' like Stripe in that space - integrations are complex, and so integrating a large number of small clients predictably bogged them down till they ran out of money.

(That's not the only reason, I'm sure. It was also a shitty implementation of one-click checkout: most saliently, it wasn't one click. Anyone who actually tried Fast at the time - and I & my prospective cofounder shared the few tiny client websites either of us found like they were rare gems - could see that it was a terrible implementation, in a space where UX is literally the entire game. Many actually did, e.g. this guy from back then: https://chrisfrantz.com/checking-in-on-fast/)