Dom Holland: It is like the nirvana of online shopping. Someone was asking, could you ever have thought it was going to be this big? And I was like, well, actually, yes. I mean, I think every founder should be delusional enough to think that it is going to be huge. The best, fastest and easiest way for a consumer to buy something is from the point that they're looking at it, right, is they're looking for shoes. They want to buy the pair of shoes, let them buy the pair of shoes.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to Add to Cart, the podcast that Express delivers all you need to
Dom Holland: know in the fast moving world of e commerce. Every month, Nathan Bush from 12 High and an E commerce industry expert.
[Voiceover]: We'll share the news, research and insights
Dom Holland: that you need to know to keep
[Voiceover]: you at the top of your game and of course, keep your customers adding to Cart. Hello and welcome to Add to Cart. My name is Nathan Bush, host of Add to Cart and e commerce strategist at 12 high. Now, as a customer, what's your biggest gripe about online shopping? I'd say for most of us it's the checkout process, having to fill in those same 10 fields of information about our name, contact details and our delivery addresses. Most which rarely ever change. Today we speak with Dom Holland from fast, whose mission it is to solve this problem for the entire Internet. Their tagline is that they are the world's fastest checkout. Originally from Australia, Dom recently moved his family over to San Francisco to chase this vision. Today, Dom takes me through how he came up with the idea of fast and how he created a prototype within 48 hours. He also talks about how he secured a co founder and investors using Twitter and why he thinks Australian retail is leading the way in innovation on the global stage. So thanks to our partners Shopify plus and Signet, here's our conversation with Dom Holland from fast. Dom Holland from fast. Fast, welcome to ADD to Cart.
Dom Holland: Thanks so much for having me.
[Voiceover]: Pleasure. You're a former Brizzy and Bondi boy now living over in San Fran, is that right?
Dom Holland: Sure is, yeah. I spent the first 10 years in in Bondi and then I spent, you know, sort of six years floating around in New South Wales country. New South Wales, and then ten last, and then the last and bit in between and then the last 10 years in Brisbane. So yeah, beautiful.
[Voiceover]: And now San Fran, what was the. I'm sure we're going to hear about it, but how's the difference between San Fran and Australia?
Dom Holland: You know, so aside from COVID I think there's a lot, you know, a Lot of similarities, you know, Australia between Australia and the U.S. it's quite a, you know, quite easy place to kind of adjust to. You know, if I didn't have a funny accent, no one would realize that I wasn't from here. And, you know, everything else is fairly similar, obviously. Slight nuances and whatever, but all in all, pretty similar. I think at the moment there's a stark difference, like the way, you know, the sort of COVID rates in Australia versus in the US like, is making just a very big difference to, you know, the way the world is. Sf, you know, itself here as a city has a huge homelessness problem at the best of times, like, to a level that I think most Australians just couldn't comprehend. And Covid is only, like, amplifying that. And so anyway, so there's a lot of that. And we're coming into the cold season here, too, and I miss the warm back home. And, you know, it's. Anyway, it's. Yeah, it's.
[Voiceover]: It's horrible here, mate. It's. It's bringing into summer. It's.
Dom Holland: We've.
[Voiceover]: We've got Covid slightly under control. Touch wood. Even Melbourne's out of it. Yeah, it's a horrible place to be. You wouldn't want to be here anyway.
Dom Holland: Yeah, I hear.
[Voiceover]: So we're here to talk about your new ventures. Probably not new, and it probably doesn't feel new for you Fast And I have been following your story. It's obviously got a lot of press, but I love following you on Twitter, mainly because you have such a great way of bringing people along on the journey, and I've loved following you in the start of the Fast. Can you. I think the best way to explain it, and the way I've heard you explain it before, is how the idea for FAST came about.
Dom Holland: Sure.
[Voiceover]: Can you tell everyone that story?
Dom Holland: Yeah, yeah, sure. So, you know, I'm married with two little kids, and my youngest child, Cody, was in hospital. So we had my wife. Wife's grandmother staying with us. You know, he was in hospital for a few weeks, so really needed some extra help around the house. And one night she was sitting at the kitchen table, she was ordering groceries. Ordering groceries from Kohl's and forgot a password and just couldn't log in and order groceries. I literally couldn't, you know, sort of just buy food. And this was a beautifully innocent, you know, old lady sitting at a table with a purse out, just unable to spend a couple hundred dollars on a credit card. Just didn't make any sense. And so you Know, at the time I built a prototype of a passwordless authentication system that I thought would be great for e commerce. Just, you know, she could have just clicked the link on email and logged in, no password needed. And you know, I built a feature at the time that once you had used it once on one site, you get one click login to every other site. Because why, why make you go through that process again? We already know who you are. And I put on Product Hunt, which is a sort of big, big website for, you know, independent makers and had tens of thousands of people use it in a couple of days and realized that a lot of other people, you know, figured that the state of the world was, was kind of broken as well and didn't make sense. And so I spent a few months not sort of diving head into the project or, you know, starting a venture, but just kind of thinking about it and realized it was a massive opportunity.
[Voiceover]: What were you doing at this time? Were you actually in the e commerce world at that stage or was this kind of a side idea to what you're already doing?
Dom Holland: No, this was just like a pur. Just a concept I whipped up in 48 hours and just kind of ran with as like a. Yeah. Side project. I think I thought about, you know, sort of login identity and payments and for a long time and, and I think that this was the amalgamation of like 10 years or 15 years of thoughts on, on the subject. And I just kind of had this moment of clarity where I, I figured that there was a much better way. And yeah, I spent three, a few months not working on the project full time, just kind of pondering on the space and realize that like fundamentally, you know, passwords aren't the problem, they're just a symptom. The reality is that it's. The issue is that we have to keep identifying ourselves as consumers over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. And it means we, you know, create passwords for every site individually. It doesn't make sense. We have to do that. We have to fill in, you know, every form individually. So 1. It's a slow and terrible process. Most forms are like long and arduous and then we're just giving the same information over and over that we give a thousand times before. And then on top of that, now everyone has these sort of siloed versions of our identity. So, you know, move address and everyone's got this old address in this system. You got to tell everyone your new address. And so, you know, I think that, that fundamentally what we set out to solve it FAST is to sort of scale consumer identities between businesses and just make it easy for people to do things online. Once you've logged in to fast, once one click login to the rest of the Internet, you know, once you've checked out, once using fast, one click checkout to the rest of the Internet, you know, once you give us that sort of basic profile, then you can use that wherever you want to use that in one click. And so that's, that's, you know, the basic premise of fast. The way that people think of us is as a one click checkout for the whole Internet. And it's really just kind of like one benefit of the larger network that we're building.
[Voiceover]: And so just to cement that in people's heads because unfortunately we're not a visual medium. It's literally just the fast button. In a checkout where you would Normally have your PayPal, your Afterpay, your credit card details. It's just a button that says fast.
Dom Holland: So actually it's a button that says fast checkout. And it seems, it may seem like a slight difference, but the reality is 95% of people that use fast checkout for the first time have never heard of us before. They've never seen the button before. They just click a button that says fast checkout and they can expect, you know, they're going to get a fast checkout from clicking the button. That's exactly what we give them. The primary place that you see our button is actually on the product page. So we are on the checkout as well. But the reality is, is that every merchant puts, is on the product page and that's quite unique. So we sit next to or typically above the add to cart button. And most of the time stores, you know, probably 99% of the time stores will refuse to put payment buttons on the product page because they just let you buy one thing at a time, one amount, right? No store in the world wants to sell only one item unless, unless they're selling cars or something like that. But the reality is normally, you know, retailers want to sell you multiple items. They want to increase their average order value. They don't want it, they don't want you to buy five items individually. Imagine if Kohl's did that, you know, in every, you know, they, you used Apple Pay 100 times from product pages, it would cost one. Every order would be fulfilled individually. So you'd have 100 boxes arrive, but you would have to pay shipping 100 times. So you would pay calls 100 lots of shipping fees. And, but also is the payments have an incremental cost. So typically when a retailer processes a transaction, it has like in america it's like 2.9% and 30 cents per order. In Australia, it's like 1.75%, 30 cents. And in those cases, the store would pay an incremental fee of $0.30 on every single item people purchased. And so the cost of delivering this would go up. Cost to consumers goes up. So it just, that's they refuse to do it. The difference in fast is that we batch transactions. So every time you click Fast Checkout, you get one click Checkout. It literally purchases whatever you're looking at. Instantly you click it and it'll pop up with a box saying auto confirmed. It is like the nirvana of online shopping. And but if you do that, you can keep browsing. We obviously leave you on the site. We don't kind of take you, you know, through this add to card view card checkout, and then like 10 steps and then up to a page that says you're done. Leave. We leave you in the shopping modes. You just look. Look at a pair of socks, click fast checkout, buy the socks and then keep browsing. Look at a pair of shoes, click Fast checkout, buy the shoes. But now you've got one order with two items on it, even though you've done it separately. So you can just buy the socks and walk away. But the reality is most people are probably going to keep browsing and we see that. And so when you buy the shoes, we add the shoes to your original sock order. And so as a consumer, your card only gets charged once. As a merchant, you only have to pay one payment fee for delivery. Consumer then gets to aggregate the value of the two purchases together to hit the free shipping threshold for the store. So when they bought the socks, maybe they have to pay an $8 shipping fee on top, but once they added the shoes, then maybe they probably hit the free shipping threshold now and suddenly the shipping cost comes off the order. We do all of this automatically and then once. And so that's, that's a really big difference is that batching functionality. And we see 88% of all orders through Fast Checkout come from product page. So it is like absolutely stark how, how many people are using our product page checkout versus our car page checkout. And you know, we've been consistently driving conversion rate uplifts like immediately within days or typically within like the first day of, well, upwards of 25% increase. And these are for stores doing over $100 million. And we, you know, drive conversion uplifts of like 60% for stores doing, you know, in the sort of tens of millions or single digit millions. So it's, it is amazing the difference that it makes to business and it's been really effective.
[Voiceover]: Stationary brand Milligram are the prodigal sons of Shopify. Starting life 10 years ago as a Shopify store before packing their bags for an adventure with another platform. Milligram are back over to Shopify Plus. Milligram now have over 100 employees and four physical stores. So they needed a platform that had integrated content and commerce, reduced technical debt, the ability to have promos live immediately and most of all be reliable in peak season. As an added bonus, they were able to optimize their search bar conversion rate from 4% to almost 8% with Shopify Plus. Now that's something to write home to mum about. To read more of Milligrams story and to see other case studies, visit the customer section on shopify.com au+ that's a huge behavior shift, isn't it? From both a customer perspective and a retailer's perspective. Because retailers obviously loving that cart process and even Google Analytics have got that process built into it where you can see drop off rates at certain points.
Dom Holland: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, well, if you've got a 10 step process, there's a lot of areas for you to drop off. If you've got a one click checkout, there's not many areas for somebody to drop off. So it makes sense why the conversion rate would go up so much. But again it's, you just wouldn't want to do that with a PayPal or an Apple Pay or a Google Pay or something else because you're opening up a whole number of other problems. And you know, we built batching because the best, fastest and easiest way for a consumer to buy something is from the point that they're looking at it, right, is they're looking at their shoes. They want to buy the pair of shoes, let them buy the pair of shoes. They shouldn't need to go like through four other pages to get to that point. But the reality is that shouldn't come with the trade off that a business sells less things or that loses, you know, that it costs them more money to fulfill that order. And so we, yeah, we engineered batching from the ground up. You know, we're hooked into inventory and we've got a full order management system, everything built in to facilitate batching. It's a very complex product, but it's completely necessary so that we can reduce all of that friction out of the checkout process.
[Voiceover]: And from a customer's perspective, how do you keep them logged in across mobiles, desktops and the rest without requiring that input of password or fingerprint for every purchase?
Dom Holland: Yeah, I mean it's actually really simple. So it's just the fact that we're a cross site session. Right. So it's like if you go to any of the sort of major, major Australian retailers, it's likely that you're still logged in. Right. I know that the Amazon, you know, isn't as big in Australia as it is here, but if you go to Amazon, you're still logged into Amazon, you can come back two months later, you're still logged in. Right. They keep you logged in. But the reality is that's what FAST is doing. We're just also allowing you to tap into that session when you come from another retailer site. So it's quite simple. It's just the fact that we sit as an intermediary that multiple companies will use, so we don't give them access to your data at all. But whenever you click the button, it loads our infrastructure so that we can identify who you are and then we'll go back and tell the merchant to process an order for you.
[Voiceover]: Gotcha. And the changes in Chrome cookies and everything that's meant to be coming, that won't impact you at all?
Dom Holland: Not at all. Not at all.
[Voiceover]: Okay. From a retailer point of view, if someone transacts via fast, what kind of. Because the retailer is still fulfilling. Obviously you're not a marketplace. You literally just transacting for them. How do they get, what kind of data do they get?
Dom Holland: All of the information they would have gotten from making you go through a 10 minute survey process. They get the same thing in one button click. So we always say we're just the fastest and easiest way for a merchant to collect the information from you. It's just that instead of you having to type it manually, we've already got it, we've got it ready to go and in one click. But yes. So they get all of the, all of your checkout information, everything to fulfill the order. Yeah.
[Voiceover]: And customers can connect any type of account, whether that's credit card, afterpay or whatever, to their FAST account.
Dom Holland: At the moment we only do credit and debit card. We definitely will have a later offerings in the future, but right now it's just credit debit card. We also you can use the voucher code, whether it's a sort of store voucher code or a fast voucher code, if you've got a stored value at the merchant, it works with that. So we're sort of very flexible in that and we will add sort of additional payment methods next year.
[Voiceover]: I mean literally, you've solved probably the biggest frustration for both retailers and customers outside of last mile delivery. And you make it sound so simple, like it was just kind of there staring at everyone all along.
Dom Holland: Yeah, well, it is like that. It's really about having an independent company who's there to solve those problems. The reality is there are other companies in the space, but they're not designed to solve these problems. Like, you know, Apple is trying to, you know, sort of bolster its own ecosystem. It's not actually set out to solve every consumer's problem, otherwise they would make it available to every consumer and they wouldn't force your bank to give Apple a cut before they would like let everyone use it. It's so, you know, we, we literally are just trying to make it fast and easy for every person on the Internet to buy things or to log in or you know, to do whatever. And so where it's available on every device, every platform, you know, the bank agnostic and, and so it's a big thing and, and, and, but just not being tied to a platform ecosystem, whether it's a device platform ecosystem or E commerce platform ecosystem, is, is really important. And then having it as a company that's not backed by an advertising network, you know, you don't want to kind of be selling your data and your purchase history every time to a company that's like just sharing it with advertisers, you know, so that constantly, you know, you can't buy anything without being targeted by ads.
[Voiceover]: Yeah.
Dom Holland: That's why having an independent company is really important.
[Voiceover]: And obviously what I've heard is like, obviously Amazon has this within their own network. And what you're saying there is like that's fine for Amazon to have that within their own network and that one click checkout because they've got all my details. But what happens if I'm shopping outside of Amazon? No one's doing that job. So do you see the situation where you kind of have you really hardcore Amazon customers who continue to go through there and then you're the one for everyone who just wants choice around shopping, wherever, whenever they want, including I suppose social channels as well?
Dom Holland: Yes. So this is a really interesting point and it's kind of hard to grapple how big Amazon is here from Australia? Like, you know, I knew that Amazon was a lot bigger in the US and is in Australia obviously been going for a lot longer but when I moved here last year it like was just jaw dropping how prevalent it is. And honestly it is like such an amazing experience. Anything you could possibly imagine is available on Amazon and you can just pull up the app or go to Amazon.com you know, type, search for whatever you want, click on the product, click Buy now and you like and you're done. It's like it's, it's not quite one click. They sort of remove the one click but, but it's very fast, right? And you're already logged into Amazon, they've got all your details. Once you buy stuff, you know, the, the other good thing is once you bought something, everything you bought from Amazon is in like you, you click on your orders and everything's there. Every product you've ever bought, the delivery status of them. You know, you can, if you've got a problem with it, you can initiate sort of, you know, refund or return or you know, seek help from from there. It's just like really easy. And you know that everything you bought was from there. And so what fast is, is it gives you all of that benefit, but it gives it to every single retailer on the Internet, right? And so at the moment, if this isn't just for Amazon, the reality is that what consumers are doing here in the, in the States like a lot is they will go and see a product that they like on a website and then they will go to Amazon, search that product and then buy it from Amazon so they don't have to go through this checkout process. So then they know that they can manage the product more seamlessly later on even. And even if it's more expensive on Amazon, they're still doing this. So everyone's got this concept of like Amazon being dirt cheap and you know, they definitely are sort of competitive on price but they're typically not the cheapest anymore. And so it's this like ease of use that they're getting because you know, it's just easier for people to buy and manage from there. And so we give all of that to a business. We give a button that when consumers click the button, it's a one click checkout. It's faster than actually checking out on Amazon.com if an Amazon user. But this could be the first time you've ever visited that retailer site. You could have like not clicked on anything on their site. Before the first click is a FAST checkout button and you bought whatever it is you're looking to buy. And then every single thing that you purchase through FAST goes into your FAST feed. You can track deliveries, download receipts, you can one click reorder items all from one place. So all of the benefits that you the previously only got from being part of from, you know, shopping on Amazon.com, you get from fast for every website on the Internet. So suddenly that opens up like tremendous opportunities and gets people, you know, buying for more independence and small businesses and whatever else.
[Voiceover]: Yes, absolutely. And I can imagine with customers there, because you are a new brand, there's got to be a certain level of trust that you've got to build with customers to create an account and give over all that information.
Dom Holland: Right.
[Voiceover]: How do you create that trust? Straight up.
Dom Holland: Yeah, maybe you think that. So we are embedded into merchant sites and we typically just get the inferred trust the consumer has. They were about to hand over their credit card details and information to a random store that they've just come across. You know, we pretty safe these days. Most of the western world has good protection from banks. We're not too worried about our sort of credit card numbers being, you know, stolen. So we're quite, you know, especially now with COVID everyone's quite comfortable entering credit card numbers into a website. Right. That's it's just into an e commerce site and the reality is no one really questions it.
[Voiceover]: Right?
Dom Holland: Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, we kind of get the inferred trust that the website would have if it's. There's a button says FAST checkout. When you click it, a pops open a checkout form. That's it. You enter your name, email, phone number, delivery address, credit card information. It's the fastest checkout form you'll ever use. Takes 30 seconds and you buy whatever you wanted to buy. Now you get one click checkout from then on.
[Voiceover]: Cool. And so you had your big launch in September. Can you tell us some of the retailers that you've had on? Because I've gone on the FAST site. I can see that you actually can buy the FAST hoodie using FAST. If you want to test it yourself. Where else can people go on and have a look at how FAST works?
Dom Holland: Oh, you know, there's lots of stores we have. I put out tweets occasionally. People follow me on Twitter @Dom D Omm. They can see I put out lists of things you can buy. One click, one click bacon, one click beauty products, one click coffee One click fashion. Pretty much anything you want these days. There's a store that's got fast with it. It's always fun.
[Voiceover]: Very dangerous.
Dom Holland: Yes, exactly. Fire pits. Yeah. It's kind of amazing. All the different stores still women and men and kids and whatever else. You know, we launched in partnership with BigCommerce and so opened up to their ecosystem. They've got 60,000 stores across all categories. So, you know, there's lots of stores coming on board every day.
[Voiceover]: I'm going to put you on the spot. Have you got a favorite? There must be a favorite store that you love, one of those.
Dom Holland: It's a good point. I tell you what a product that seems to be like, I think Shark Wheel. Shark Wheel sell electric skateboards and. And they sell skateboards that have a 540 degree wheel. So it's not a circular wheel. So it's an interesting product and apparently it produces more momentum that can carry you across, you know, gravel surfaces and off road surfaces and whatnot. So that's. And a lot of people have bought their electric skateboards. A lot of people. So I think that's an interesting product. And they were one of our large partners.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, that's cool. It's very Stan Fran. So take us back to the founding journey. Actually, that's the question I was going to ask you. Has your grandma or your. Your wife's grandmother used Fast yet?
Dom Holland: Yes, she's used and she's very proud of being the origin story. So we actually call her nanny. I've been revealing this lately. We don't call her granny, we call her nanny. I very intentionally say granny so that people don't think I'm talking about like somebody who lives in our house and looks up at our kids.
[Voiceover]: My poor nanny was ordering us groceries and she couldn't do it.
Dom Holland: Exactly. So I make sure that people understand it was a grandmother. Yeah, brilliant.
[Voiceover]: So tell us about your founding partner. I know you've had the idea and you're able to spin something up a prototype within 48 hours, but I understand that you've all also got a partner who's come along on the journey. Tell us about her and how that relationship came about.
Dom Holland: Yeah, so I, I officially incorporated the company in March 2019. So much last year. And then I actually raised. So I launched on. I launched fast login on March 14, 2019 and I raised an angel round in Sydney in May last year. And then I caught the next flight to the US in June. I knew I wanted to basic company here and I wanted to set up. And so I figured I would just start networking and meeting people and I wanted to build a big business. I wanted to find people who'd be able to help in that journey. And yeah, one of the people was Alison by Alan. She was. I would just reach out to people cold to build networks. When I got here, she was one of the people I reached out to. I literally sent her a DM on Twitter saying, hey, I'm an Aussie founder here for, you know, in the us Would love to tell you about what I'm doing. She, she was head of global product operations at Uber and Uber's money team, obviously very relevant field. She'd been there from 2000 to 24,000. Also seen immense scale as a tech company. Had a great background and she was an angel investor. So I knew she was interested, interested in startups. And yeah, I caught up with her and told her what we were doing. She loved, loved the concept. She had written a thesis about frictionless finance a couple of years earlier, which basically was our company, you know, what we're building now to a T. And so she was really interested. She wanted to invest in the company as an angel. Wanted to introduce me to some, to a venture capitalist that she, you know, who's ranked the number one fintech investor in the world, which is Jan Hammer. She introduced me to him and I sat down and had breakfast with him in September last year, and he made an offer on the spot to lead a free seed round in the company. And so I went back to Alison and sent her a message and I said, you know, Jan's in. Are you, Are you in? And she wrote back and she said, yeah, I already told you I'd invest. And I said, no, why don't you come and help build the company? And so she did. She, you know, left Uber after five years in October last year. She took a few weeks to go on a belated honeymoon and then. And we started working together from November last year. So in November there was just two of us here in the US and we, and we very quickly got started building. Building what is really fast today.
[Voiceover]: Yeah. And are you able to say how many employees you're up to now?
Dom Holland: About 70. Yeah. Obviously it's like, you know, we get getting people coming on board every day, but about 70 people now. Yeah. So in about 12 months we've grown. Yeah. Wow. Two to 70. Yep.
[Voiceover]: Huge growth. And I understand that you call yourselves fastronauts.
Dom Holland: Yeah. So it was hard for me to kind of get my head around because of the accent but so in my head it's. They say fastronauts because, you know, it's asked anyway. So fast Bastronauts is what they call fastronauts. Yes.
[Voiceover]: Okay, nice. And in terms of that funding that you got, could. Do you think you could have done that in Australia or you had to be in the US to do that?
Dom Holland: No, so I don't think I could have had. So I didn't think that every company needs to be based here. First off, I don't think that we could have done what we've done with fast in Australia today. I don't believe it. One is, you know, we're going after like, you know, we are available to sellers in 42 countries now, Australia being one of them. We do have live sellers in Australia, but we also have, you know, available sellers in a much larger number of countries. But the US is our sort of business focus for the next, you know, kind of six months. And it's a market that's, you know, 13 times the size of Australia. So it's a market that can just support much larger businesses. You know, the same level of impact I would have had trying to service our local market in Australia is just, you know, for the same amount of my time, I get more, you know, bang for my buck here. But you know, also investors here, you know, there's, we can support much larger growth. There's more capital here. But the primary reason I came here is, is for talent. You know, there's not all of the engineers in the world. The vast majority of the engineers in the world who built like consumer network scale businesses, businesses that support billions of people or hundreds of millions of people are based here in San Francisco or the Bay Area. And so that's a primary reason and capital is similar is that the majority of the world's capital for investing in consumer network scale businesses are here in the Bay Area. So I definitely, I really didn't try and raise money from Australian BCS I knew would be the case. I did meet with a few in the end. And they don't have the same appetite for risk sort of actual network scale ambition that US investors have. They don't quite like grasp the same principles as clearly just because the US is more sophisticated and here they've seen network effect businesses many, many times work. They understand the mechanics of it. They understand just how quickly a company can grow. We just don't have as many examples of very, very fast growing companies. We are one of the fastest growing companies in the world with definitely one of the fastest growing Companies in the Bay Area, maybe the fastest growing company in Silicon Valley. And, you know, from Australian standards, you know, so we're like, you know, probably the lead of the pack from a Silicon Valley perspective. And so from an Australian perspective, it just. If you told somebody in Australia we were going to do what we're doing, people, like, they think I'm crazy here in Australia, they would have thought, you know, you're crazy.
[Voiceover]: You're crazy. With a cool accent over there, though.
Dom Holland: Yeah. A complete lie. So anyway, so it's. It definitely. I don't think for this type of business, it would have been possible in Australia.
[Voiceover]: Was there a moment where you're in Australia, you had this idea, you had this prototype, you've been talking to people and you went, this is much bigger than where I am right now. This is a huge idea. I need to relocate my family to the US Which I understand you got a young family, relocate the family to the U.S. i don't have all the contacts I need over there, but I have faith that this idea is good enough that I can make the contacts, get the investments over there. Was there a moment that you went, I've got to go?
Dom Holland: Yeah. You know, I think that all founders have got to be partially delusional. You know, someone was asking, do you think that, you know, could you ever have thought it was going to be this big? And I was like, well, actually, yes. I mean, I think every founder should be delusional enough to think that it is going to be huge. And so I definitely had that same view. The reality was, it was, you know, I think I. That day on Product Hunt, it was the number two most rated product on product and literally just drove so much traffic. Five days later, Andreessen Horowitz, you know, the massive VC fund here, reached out. I was just sitting at Brisbane, like, this is just something I whipped together. I bought a 15 template on ThemeForest and, like, built a scrappy, scrappy prototype. And it was then, I think it was probably the, you know, Andres, of course, I just realized there's something, like, really big here. And it was literally from that point forward, I knew I wanted to do this. I did want to do it then. This was in October 2018. I did want to do something here then, but it just wasn't the right time for my. Obviously, my son had just been in hospital for three weeks and had sort of ongoing, you know, care, and it wasn't the right time for us. That's. That's pretty much the reason why I was, you know, it's funny that it was the sort of inception moment for the company because it was also the thing that prevented me from working on it for months. Right. He said I couldn't just sort of go and, you know, jump off and build this.
[Voiceover]: Yeah.
Dom Holland: And so that, why, that's, you know, it was March in it, you know, when I went, I just have to, I, I thought I'll put it off and I, I won't sort of start any venture and I'll kind of leave it. And I spent a few months sort of just tinkering and whatever and then in about, yeah, February last, last year, I thought, I just can't. I just can't not. I have to do it. It's, it's huge. It's the way that the web should look. It's like. It was so. It's so stupid, you know, seeing every day, every day you have to use a password, every day you have to fill in a form, every day you have to check out and like go through this terrible process. It just like screams at you, you know, how much the web needs this. And it's still now, you know, anytime I have to log into something now, it just kills me. Anytime I have to check out manually now, it kills me because. Especially because we are in market. So, you know, it's his sort of blinding vision that meant that I couldn't put off any longer.
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Dom Holland: Yeah. And actually so I came to the US in June with an esta. So you know, three months sort of business, you know, and tourist visa and set up networks and whatever and I raised a precede round in October and then I came home and got a visa and moved the family over. So the family only moved over in November and so officially we. I became an official resident of the US in November last year. So I would travel back and forth. I would do sort of three or four weeks in the US and then one week in Australia and then keep. I kept doing that from June till November last year. But yeah, and so then we moved over in November. And so they had, you know, a few months here and then Covid hit and, and so it's, it was a pretty big blow to them. They obviously hadn't met, really met many people, you know, at all. And we were living in a two bedroom apartment and, and suddenly, you know, one, you know, you've no backyard to energetic kids. You know, it was hard, hard to be an apartment in general. And at the same time they go and close all the parks so that you're not spreading germs, tell you not to leave the area. And so you're just sitting in the middle of, you know, SF City, which is not a great place for kids at a time when you can't go anywhere. So it was, it was pretty hard for them.
[Voiceover]: And I can imagine that would have been stressful for you as well, because you've got these young kids that you want to spend time with, make sure they're happy. You've uprooted their life, but at the same time, you've also gone over for a really, you know, clear purpose is to build and grow this business because that's what it's all for.
Dom Holland: Absolutely.
[Voiceover]: And you're doing that in a two bedroom apartment in lockdown.
Dom Holland: Yeah, no, it's not, it was, it was really hard. So they went back to Australia for three months, but you know, they're back now. We moved into a house with a backyard. So it's, it's still, it's still tough. You know, it's hard having so many restrictions, not being able to see people like, you know, how do they build networks and make friends and apply to when, you know, I'd see anyone. Still really difficult, but you know, getting, it's getting better every day.
[Voiceover]: I could imagine though, the upside of COVID is the impact on E commerce and the growth in E commerce and the investment that's coming from retailers, especially the more traditional retailers now to make that as seamless as possible. And then I can imagine that you've got the story where you can go in and go, actually I can give you a real good shortcut here. If you don't want to spend millions looking after your checkout, I've got a nice little shortcut that you can add onto your site instantly. Is that kind of how the story goes to those retailers?
Dom Holland: Yeah, look, I mean, so Covid's been incredible. Obviously, you know, E commerce is a multi trillion dollar market that's been growing by like 30%, quarter on quarter. It's just Astounding at how fast the market has grown in a very small amount of time. So one is that there's just lots of more people buying things and they're buying things in more frequency and a bigger percentage of their spending dollars are being spent online. So no doubt there's been a sort of large flow to E commerce, which is a net positive for every E commerce or fintech business really. I think the other huge thing is that if you're an enterprise size retailer, right, if you're a large, very large retailer, especially traditional retailers who have an online presence, the shift to E commerce has not just meant there's like more dollars, it's the percentage of your business which is now done online has drastically changed. You know, companies like Walmart here, you know, they may have been, it may have been 8% of their business, you know, previously and we're still talking about billions of dollars and it's now 40% of their business. That's a really stark difference to like, to large retailers. And so if you're a big business, not only, you know, it's not just like more dollars flowing through and less coming from traditional channels, but you typically have like, you know, to your point, these companies are spending tens of millions of dollars a year on checkout and it's typically like less, you know, like a subpar experience compared to smaller, you know, more nimble merchants. The cost of change is huge, the speed of change is slow because it's such a large sort of infrastructure projects. And so typically there's like slow to adopt new technology in general. Right. What Covid has done is put such a priority on E commerce for them that all of a sudden they have to reevaluate their entire E commerce strategy. They have to take best of breed like new technology. They have to be looking at what they can do better to better serve people online and to not like lose what is now a critical part of their business. Not like a sale, not one small channel for them. And so fast really, you know, if you're a large retailer, you're absolutely looking at fast. And I think that we will be onboarding far more sort of enterprise customers next year than ever before. You know, you could have in a small point in time for, you know, a sort of high growth company.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, yeah. And apart from obviously payment and fast checkout, is there anything that you've seen in the US that you go, gee, they just do that so much better in the US than Australia. It's a real missed opportunity for Australian retailers.
Dom Holland: Oh, so one of the things I find amazing about, about this place, especially like San Francisco in the Bay Area, you know, this is Silicon Valley. You know, as Australians, I think we always think of Silicon Valley as being like so futuristic and having cars that would, you know, you know, transformers and climb buildings and whatever. It is so old school here. Like you know, you know, parking garages, you know, car parks. You know, they don't call them car parks here, but they, it's such old technology. Like everything is so old and tired. Buildings are old. Like everything's old. And it's normally the opposite, you know, like they don't. They're only just using like chip, chip cards, you know, for EMV chip cards. Now Apple pay is still like being rolled out, albeit very much more quickly now because of COVID But it's like, it's actually quite traditional here. Australia is definitely like typically more like tech forward in a lot of ways, like generally societally. And I've kind of always known this, you know, like car sales.com, real estate.com like these sort of like massive. Seek.com these sort of massive portals that Australia has and had very early pioneered. We had like larger percentages of, you know, online transactions, not financial transactions, but sort of industry transactions going online far beyond. Far before the US did, you know, we just really started looking shopping for cars, shopping for apartments, shopping for houses online well before other parts of the world. And we're always like very early adopters. So I really don't think the US is like really nailed much else. They kind of just get this scale that Australians don't get. And so, you know, you can have niche products that can still sell millions of them, whereas in Australia like it's much small. So there's more choice typically here in the US because of that scale of market. And that is quite glaring. But yeah, I don't think the Mexican taquerias here are pretty good. But
[Voiceover]: it's a really interesting take because. And I love your honesty there because scale does afford you to do a lot of stuff that looks really cool. And it's usually from a marketing or a fulfillment point of view, right? Like you, you can do the same day being you can do the big influencer programs, all that sort of, or
Dom Holland: just making like completely. I mean those two are massive, right? Like the fast shipping here is, is amazing compared, you know, compared to Australia. But I think like just product choice, you know, just having like creating a, you know, a company that sells X product in like in Australia, if you're just serving The Australian market, it's not a. Typically, not going to be a large market for you. And, you know, your cost to produce is going to be high. Like the product itself may, may cost you much. So that's a, you know, it's kind of an interesting dynamic.
[Voiceover]: It's a great take. Thank you. Who do you, who do you look up to as an entrepreneur in retail? Who do you really put on a pedestal?
Dom Holland: I don't put anyone on a pedestal. I make a point of not putting anyone on a pedestal. I think it's a dangerous thing. I think a lot of people, you know, there's a lot of people who, who may have done brilliant things or occasionally do brilliant things, but no one is brilliant all the time. And, and I think that everyone needs to be, you know, myself definitely included. You know, we all need to be evaluated on each decision. I will say that Jeff Bezos is, is, you know, I always sort of give that name. I think he is a remarkable business person and, and, and really has, you know, has had tremendous levels of success, like generally, but continues to just dominate. And they added 250,000 new jobs Amazon did in the last couple quarter. Like, that's, it's just so hard to comprehend. But not just Amazon, you know, they're, you know, different, different, completely different sectors that they target through different business units and everything they do, they tend to do really well and very shrewd operators. And I, I really think that it's hard to like, find somebody who has had such, such a level of success. Well, I mean, not many people in the world have had such a high level of success, but to have like, repetitive success in multiple areas. I think he's done exceptionally well. But like I said, I mean, I wouldn't agree with everything that Jeff Bezos said. Amazon has Amazon pay, which we compete directly with, and I think that will blow out of the water. So, you know, I don't think that they've got like, the perfect strategy of everything, but I definitely think that he is just an exceptional business person who has done well so many times.
[Voiceover]: And I think the thing with what he's created there is that it is so hard to dissect or pull apart the Amazon business model. Like, even the best analysts can't work out exactly what revenue streams drive other revenue streams. It's this amazing flywheel that just keeps turning right.
Dom Holland: Absolutely.
[Voiceover]: Stronger.
Dom Holland: Yeah. Yeah.
[Voiceover]: You haven't had a conversation with him yet?
Dom Holland: No, not yet. I'll see if he wants to put fast. Check out on Amazon.com
[Voiceover]: you'll be right.
Dom Holland: Yeah.
[Voiceover]: All right, so we've got to wrap up there. I've loved, loved hearing more about Fast in your journey. How can people contact you?
Dom Holland: I'm pretty open. Twitter is always and very, very well engaged on Twitter. I share a lot on Twitter and very open, transparent. You can DM me on Twitter or just at me or whatever, so at Dom D omm. But you know, I share my email address openly on Twitter as well, so you can have it here. It's D o m fast. Fast. Co either of those two ways are great ways of getting in touch.
[Voiceover]: Beautiful. And just out of Curiosity, Twitter over LinkedIn from a business social perspective, you've obviously weighed very heavily on Twitter. Was there a reason for that?
Dom Holland: Yeah, Look, I use LinkedIn a lot to like recruit and, and find new talent and you know, so I, I'm not sort of a hater on the platform, but Twitter is just by far voice, far more connections and I, you know, said the other day, I, if I, you know, actually told people how many investors we got from Twitter, how many staff we've hired from Twitter, how many partners and retailers we've onboarded from Twitter, it would like blow people's minds. Honestly, like a huge portion of our success we owe to that platform. It has been like absolutely astounding. If you go and have a look, there's thousand. There's probably nearly 10,000 people around the world wearing fast hoodies that they bought from, you know, from clicking on swag store links from that we post on Twitter. It's really been an incredible medium for us and one we continue to use so people can share, you know, share along in that journey, connect with the company and. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[Voiceover]: No, it's well worth a follow. OM D O M Dom, thank you very much for joining us today. Really, really love following your journey and looking forward to what's coming. If this has only been 12 months or launched since September, yeah, can only imagine what it's going to be. Thanks so much in the next 12 months.
Dom Holland: Thanks for following. Thanks for having me. Talk soon.
[Voiceover]: Thank you, mate. What a story. Hey. It's one that I have been and will be following very closely. What stood out for me is that Dom saw a problem but he went out to fix it. He didn't go and gripe about it or go to markets in the hope that someone else can fix it for him. He actually saw the problem and went about trying to solve one of the biggest E commerce problems that exists and has existed for a long time. And sure I think he probably simplified the story for us and it is very early days for fast, but Dom has shown us that we don't need to sit back and wait for someone else to solve our problems and there's huge opportunity in it. His comment around Australia actually being very innovative in retail took my attention. I was expecting some crazy stories of how international e commerce experiences that he had over in San Francisco that we don't see here. But the fact that we don't have the scale of markets like the US can really work in our favor. We can actually never let our problem solving brains rest because so often we have to find the solutions for ourselves in such a unique market with a smaller population in a dispersed country that if we're honest, still prefers traditional retail, we have to work super hard for the best customer experience. What the conversation with Dom reminded me of was how can we use these problem solving skills that we use every day not only to solve problems here in Australia, but how do we then influence the experience through the entire world? Now there's an opportunity. If you're looking for more e commerce news, case studies and research, sign up to 12High's High5 newsletter. Every week I read all the e commerce news and send you five things which I've found which will help grow your business. Visit 12high.comauhigh5h I G H5 to sign up for free. Thanks for listening and until next time, keep adding to cart.
