FAST

Domm Holland was an Australian entrepreneur who had sold his previous company, Tapster, and moved to San Francisco. He co-founded Fast with Allison Barr Allen in 2019.

The pitch was simple: online checkout is broken. People abandon carts because typing in credit card numbers, shipping addresses, and email addresses is annoying.

Fast would store your payment info once and let you buy from any participating merchant with a single click. One button.

No passwords. No forms.

Fast was a checkout button that online merchants could add to their stores. When a customer clicked "Fast Checkout," the purchase completed instantly using stored payment and shipping information.

Fast planned to charge merchants a small percentage of each transaction — the standard payments model. The company positioned itself as a layer on top of Stripe, handling the front-end experience while Stripe processed the actual payment.

The problem: Stripe launched its own one-click checkout product, Link, which did the same thing.

Fast Checkout was the core product — a button that merchants embedded on their e-commerce sites. Customers created a Fast account once, stored their payment method and shipping address, and could then buy from any participating merchant with one click.

Fast Login was a companion product that let users sign into websites without passwords. The company also offered a developer API for custom integrations.

The technology worked fine. The market didn't need it.

Domm Holland was a prolific Twitter personality. He built a massive following by tweeting about startup culture, hiring, and Fast's mission with infectious enthusiasm.

The brand awareness was real — Fast was one of the most talked-about fintech startups on tech Twitter. Holland also landed a $102 million Series B from Stripe, Addition (Lee Fixel), and Index Ventures in January 2021.

Having Stripe as both an investor and the underlying payment processor seemed like a massive strategic advantage. It turned out to be something else entirely.

Revenue. Fast reportedly had only around $600,000 in annual recurring revenue at the time it shut down, despite having raised $124.5 million and employing over 400 people.

Merchant adoption was extremely slow. The one-click checkout value proposition sounded good in pitches but was hard to sell to merchants who already had Shopify's checkout, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and increasingly Stripe's own Link product.

Switching costs were low and the differentiation was unclear.

Fast raised $124.5 million in total. The seed round brought in $2.5 million.

The Series A raised $20 million led by Index Ventures. The Series B was a massive $102 million round in January 2021, led by Stripe, with participation from Addition (Lee Fixel) and Index Ventures.

Stripe's investment was the headline — having the world's most valuable private fintech company invest in your checkout product seemed like ultimate validation. In hindsight, it may have been Stripe doing due diligence on a potential feature, not a potential company.