“The reality is, if you make it easy for people to buy things, more people will buy things.”
Those are the words of Fast CEO and founder Domm Holland, who started his one-stop-shop online checkout business after his wife’s grandmother struggled to purchase her Coles groceries.
“When my son was born, my wife’s grandmother was staying with us. She was sitting at the kitchen table trying to order groceries from Coles.
“Having forgotten her password, she couldn’t log in to order the groceries. I was left thinking how ridiculous it was, that a little old lady wasn’t able to buy food on her credit card.”
That story underpins the ethos of Fast. In Holland’s own words: “We aim to make life better for people.”
“I thought a lot about the space and realised that the entire e-commerce experience is broken because of an identity issue. We continually have to tell websites exactly who we are, filling in 20 fields every time we want to buy from a new online shop.
“We created Fast to sit across the whole checkout process. We are the home for your receipts, your orders, your tracking – basically the entire home for consumers online.”
Fast works to simplify the checkout process for consumers. It is a one-click checkout tool, which allows customers to purchase from stores without repeatedly entering their personal details. By speeding up the checkout process, Holland says both the consumer and the business benefit.
“Our job is to make life easier for the consumer, so that buying is as simple as possible. This obviously also helps the business.”
Having grown from a team of two to 80, and raised $30 million in the middle of COVID-19, Fast has undergone an accelerated period of growth over the past 12 months. Holland puts this down to the universal need for the product and hard work.
“It’s actually really, really difficult to build a global product from day one,” he said. “It’s easy to kind of see the flashiness, but the reality is we work really hard. There is a huge team of people here that work really hard to make sure we are delivering the best product possible.”
“It can be a lonely journey. It can be really brutal, but you just have to keep moving forward.”
“We serve merchants in 42 countries and buyers in 200 countries, and have 10s and 10s of thousands of consumers that use Fast to check out.”
Holland built his company with marketing and branding at the centre. Fast comes with a fully kitted ‘swag store’ where customers can purchase branded merchandise.
While on the surface the store seems to be a clever marketing strategy resulting in thousands of people wearing branded merchandise, Holland said it was purely created to see if the Fast technology worked.
“I’d love to claim it as being some brilliant strategy that we cooked up,” he laughed. “But it was really for product testing to begin with.”
So what would this successful startup owner tell other founders?
“Build a strong core audience.”
Holland champions tweeting and very public growth to allow a company’s audience to feel like a part of the process.
“We were able to build a big community behind us, which definitely gives us a large platform to promote ourselves. It has been invaluable for us.”
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