Founded in 2019, Fast broke onto a crowded eCommerce payment platform scene by promising that it would provide online shoppers with a checkout experience that would rival anything else on the market in terms of convenience. Fast users would be able to create just one payment profile and then use it across every participating online retailer.
No more plodding through the process of making a new account every time you want to buy from a new store – a prospect that’s especially unattractive on mobile. With Fast, customers could make one-click purchases with any online store that used the platform.
From the beginning, it seemed inevitable that the Australian startup’s climb to the top would be, well, fast.
The interest it attracted from investors certainly was – at least at first.
Unfortunately, as cofounder Domm Holland recently explained, “Sometimes trailblazers don’t make it all the way to the mountaintop.”
After a very successful initial round of funding, it seemed obvious to many analysts that Fast would hit a BILLION-dollar valuation.
The company made headlines just last September when news broke that it had closed a $130+ million round of series B funding. Among many of its notable investors were powerhouse payment processor Stripe (which put in $20 million during Series A) and the former CPO of Uber, Manik Gupta.
It wasn’t just the draw of a revolutionary one-click checkout platform that seemed to attract this kind of investment, either. As Holland explained in a 2020 interview, Fast’s long-term goals included an “identity API” that could store all of the critical information users needed to shop around the Internet (i.e., contact information, shipping address, etc.).
An innovation of that magnitude would have the potential to profoundly change the way people behave online.
So, what went wrong?
Fast forward to the beginning of this month and the high hopes many had for the burgeoning startup have come to a crashing halt.
The first signs of trouble began at the beginning of the year when reports circulated that Fast had hired around 400 employees in 2021 while spending somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million/month for much of that time. Bysome analysts’ projections, the company would’ve needed at least $30 million a year just to keep their staff of 150 engineers (that doesn’t include any amounts for sign-on bonuses).
In that case, spending more than $100 million wouldn’t be hard at all.
And yet, Fast reportedly closed the year with only about $600,000 in total revenue to show for these efforts.
Then, at the end of March, the company once again made headlines for the wrong reasons by cutting jobs in an effort to raise money.
Finally, the recent news broke earlier this month that Fast was shutting its doors.
As one unnamed employee is quoted to have said in an interview with Protocol, the problem may have been:
“We waited too long and we ran out of money.”
Yup, that’ll do it.
The source goes on to say that they believe the company “misjudged significantly” how the VC environment changed over the course of the last year.
“What was acceptable revenue and burn and prospects for growth in the summer of 2021 looks very different in April of 2022.”
A lot of questions still surround the shuttering of Fast.
One of the most pressing of them is “What should my company use instead of Fast for our checkout?”
While many of the aforementioned questions may never be answered, there’s a clear solution to this particular one.
Dominate.
Our unique one-click checkout extension is powered by none other than PayPal and works seamlessly with:
And, as it works with PayPal’s Pay-in-4 solution out-of-the-box, your customers can opt to pay for their purchases in four completely interest-free payments – but you still get paid the whole sum upfront.
Dominate is completely customizable, making it easier – and cheaper – than ever before to design the perfect checkout page (or pages) for your unique website.
These features are just the beginning. To learn more about why Dominate is finding so many fans across so many markets, visit the website or check out this helpful video below:
