We Were Going to Shut Down Our Company…Now We’re Worth $700M | Eric Simons (Bolt)
A live demo of building a $2B mobile app with Bolt and how real product teams actually use AI prototyping tools to get work done faster
Dear subscribers,
Today, I want to share a new episode with Eric Simons.
Eric is the CEO of Bolt, an AI coding platform that has exploded from 0 to 3M users in less than a year. Eric gave me a live demo of building a $2B mobile app from scratch with Bolt, how Bolt’s “overnight” success was seven years in the making, and how real product teams use AI prototyping tools to get work done faster.
Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.
This episode is brought to you by Vanta — Join 9,000+ companies like Atlassian and Quora who use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time. Get $1000 off at vanta.com/peter
Eric and I talked about:
(00:00) From almost shutting down to $20M ARR in 2 months
(01:20) Watch Bolt build Spotify with a single prompt
(03:59) Live demo of building a $2B mobile app in 15 min
(05:16) How to test your prototypes on mobile with Expo
(15:00) "Vibe coding" secrets straight from Eric
(18:38) How Bolt will solve the AI debugging doom loop
(24:34) The AI prototyping use case that most people aren't thinking about
(27:21) The inside story of scaling Bolt from 0 to 3M users
(41:10) Why AI products are like surfboards in a tsunami
Prototyping billion dollar apps in 15 min with Bolt
Welcome Eric! So you just launched the ability to build native mobile apps with Bolt. I’d love to see it in action.
Sure! You can now go from idea to App Store just by prompting.
Let’s try an example by prompting: "Build me a mobile app that is a clone of Spotify." At first, it looks like ChatGPT until the right side of the screen appears with a full developer environment booted inside the browser.
This is the tech we spent seven years building – an operating system inside your browser.
It's now installing dependencies and writing code.
It’s nice that Bolt handles installing the libraries for you. I’ve always found that annoying as a beginner programmer.
Exactly. The bi-directional communication between the operating system layer and the AI agent is key. The AI has complete access to all processes, runtime, and file system state. When things go wrong, you can really dig in and investigate.
Wow the Spotify UI looks great!
It's pretty incredible, right? This is just the UI – we can keep prompting and building on top of this. But let's try another app. We were talking earlier about how Calm, the meditation app, is worth $2 billion. Shall we build that?
Yeah let’s do it!
Ok here’s the prompt I’m going to use: “Build me a beautiful and minimalistic mobile meditation app like Calm.” Of course, you can create a detailed PRD if you want but let’s just try it with this single prompt. We’re vibe coding after all.
Yeah, if a genius like Karpathy is doing vibe coding, I have no shame in doing it too.
Absolutely! You're not going to use vibe coding for transaction logic at JP Morgan Chase, but for building user interfaces, you can be creative and experiment.
Let me show you something cool – the Expo integration. While you can see the mobile preview on the web, if you download the Expo Go app and scan this QR code, it will build the app on your phone in real time.
I love it. That means I can try the prototype on my phone or even show it to real users. But how do I actually deploy the app to the App Store?
Click "Deploy to App Store" which takes you to Expo. All the tooling you're seeing for running this app is theirs. They have a service called EAS that fast-tracks getting your app into both Apple and Google's stores.
You do need to sign up for individual Apple and Google developer accounts which costs $100. But once everything's set up, deployment should only take 5-10 minutes.
I love how you partner with platforms like Expo for App Store deployment and Superbase for databases to extend Bolt's functionality.
100%, we've integrated with the best specialized companies right out of the box. If we wanted to add a Superbase database for features like user login or tracking meditations, we can do that right here. Expo handles mobile, Superbase handles databases, and Netlify does web hosting.
Ok but what if I want to undo a change in Bolt that broke my app?
Great question. We show a “Rollback to Checkpoint" button on every previous message. So if you don’t like the change, you can roll it back instantly.
Ok so what’s your top advice for getting the most out of Bolt?
If you’re building something for production, here are my top 4 tips: