Say Goodbye To Passwords And Hello To Fast
24Hundred sells band and artist merchandise as well as vinyl records through its physical store in Richmond, Australia, and its online portal 24Hundred.net. More than 100,000 people visit the site every month. Over the last month, 24Hundred has reported a 63% increase in their Returning Customer Rate, all thanks to a plug-in login tool that they installed, called Fast. As per surveys by Mastercard and Oxford University, e-commerce sites lose 1 in 3 sales because of lost or forgotten passwords, and for SAAS (Software as a Service) businesses, increasing retention and LTV (Lifetime Value) is paramount. Therefore, allowing users to log in without friction is very important, and Fast looks like the solution everyone was waiting for.
Built by Domm Holland, Fast lets users log in to a website using just their email address, to which Fast sends a secure login link which is valid for five minutes. Users can access a site without having to register and the login process takes 14 seconds on average. Websites can install the button instead of a traditional login form, thereby saving their users from having to remember another password.
The idea for Fast came when Holland watched his wife’s grandmother’s unsuccessful attempts at ordering groceries online. She had forgotten her password, and what made it worse was that the password reset function was not working. This was at a high-stress time for Domm and his family when their youngest child was hospitalized, and he thought that there had to be an easier way to logging in to websites.
Fast, which launched on Product Hunt — a global community of product enthusiasts and indie makers — and was the #1 Product of the Day, had its beginnings in Byepass, a prototype of a passwordless authentication technology that Holland built a couple of months ago.
“…the user demand for a real solution to passwords was demanded by consumers; not another bandaid fix like password managers.”
Holland, who has 17 years of coding experience and is a repeat technical founder - having last worked on a startup which transacted $50M in 4 years - (although ultimately shut down due to a legal dispute over monies owed to the startup), teamed up with Joshua Abulafia, who holds an undergraduate law degree and has an extensive background in media/technology. Recently, Abulafia has worked on commercial strategy for Pureprofile and helped launch Mocha, generating $3M in turnover in 18 months. The aim of the partnership was to further develop and commercialize the technology used in Byepass, as Fast.
“It is simply preposterous that in 2019, we cannot transact online without remembering some arbitrary string of characters, an individual store made us create for them. It would be like having to remember a secret handshake at the checkout of a retail store before handing over a credit card.”
Fast is currently a team of two and is backed by an advisory board and impressive shareholders. Holland and Abulafia describe their idea as “the easiest way to login”. When asked about the future, the founders say that they want Fast to be the Mastercard of authentication and want every website and app in the world to use its one-click login technology.
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