How Bolto’s website moves lightning fast
with Sherpa and Claude
“Sherpa brought our website development up to the speed of the rest of the organization.As fast as we ship products, do rebrands or form partnerships, the website is able to keep up.”
Bolto is an AI-powered recruiting, payroll and HR platform, building the AI-native Workday. It’s a Series A team winning around 20% of every YC batch, going up against HR companies with thousands of employees. It wins by being scrappier and faster than all of them.
The website is a big part of that. “Even when we don’t think people are looking at the website, people are looking at the website,” says Owen Oktay, Bolto’s COO. “You’re very rarely going to have somebody buy from you that doesn’t look at your website.”
On Webflow, the website was the one thing that couldn’t keep up. Owen spent months teaching himself Webflow just to make basic changes without breaking the page, and any new page took around two weeks.
Bolto moved to Sherpa alongside a full redesign. The Sherpa team took the new Figma files and everything from the existing site, like scripts and SEO metadata, and had it all loaded in and ready in under six hours. It’s now custom Astro code Bolto owns, so they aren’t locked into a website platform. Sherpa hosts and maintains it, and gives the team and their agents everything they need to run it from Claude.
under 1 hour
30+ screens
the whole team
What running a website from Claude looks like
On Webflow, only two people at Bolto could change the website, Owen and their designer. Now, as Owen puts it, “anyone can prompt Claude, not anyone can use Webflow.”
The YC partnership page was the first big test. On Webflow it meant a scope for the designer, a few days of Figma back and forth, then another week of building, around two weeks for one page. Sometimes Owen would sketch an idea in Claude and pass it along, but getting it onto the site and on brand was still the hard part. On Sherpa, Owen talked through what he wanted with voice dictation and sent it to Claude. Because Sherpa already knows Bolto’s site and design system, the YC partnership page was built in about ten minutes and live within the hour.
Smaller changes are just as quick, whether it’s borrowing the design from another page or adding a section that links out somewhere else. “I can just take my vision and put it on the site within minutes,” Owen says.
Now the whole team can get involved. If someone sees something on the site that could be better, they just fix it. When Owen onboarded Murn, Bolto’s CEO, Murn called it “one of the more magical product experiences I’ve had in a while.”
Arjun, Bolto’s Chief of Staff, is in the site all the time now, publishing content and making changes to keep everything up to date.
“Having worked with Sherpa for about two weeks now, exceptional product. It makes it obscenely easy to create and publish content. I’ve used WordPress and Squarespace and Webflow, and Sherpa is just leagues above.”
Redesigning with Sherpa
Omaid, Bolto’s designer, has built sites on Webflow and Framer for years. Taking a full site from Figma to live used to take him about two weeks, and even with the new Webflow and Framer MCPs it still took days, because the quality wasn’t there. On Sherpa, a whole site loads in within a couple of hours. “I genuinely wish I’d found out about you guys sooner. I just made all 30+ Figma screens in a couple of hours.” What impressed him most was the detail. Animations he’d spent hours getting right in Figma came through on the site exactly the way he built them.
Live on Sherpa
Omaid has built dozens of websites for different companies, and recently more teams have been asking him to build theirs in custom code. He’s seen how it tends to go. After the handoff it feels great at first. Then someone pushes something live that shouldn’t be there, breaks the design system, or forgets something for SEO, and rankings fall off a cliff.
When Bolto told Omaid they were using Sherpa, a platform he’d never heard of, he was skeptical. Thirty minutes of testing it and he was sold. It had all the benefits of a custom-code site, plus the guardrails, without the headaches. To him it felt like everything he loves about Webflow and Framer combined with everything he loves about Claude and ChatGPT.
His favorite workflow is to comment on specific elements, use Wispr Flow to talk through a change out loud, and then watch Claude make it happen. When he publishes through Sherpa, he has peace of mind knowing the site is safe. He’s stopped using Webflow and Framer entirely, and now he recommends Sherpa to all his clients.
Moving at Bolto’s speed
Owen and Omaid’s whole workflow has changed. Owen can often get a new page 90% of the way there in about 30 minutes, then Omaid comes in for the finishing touches. A cycle that used to take weeks now happens in under a day. “The work isn’t a big bear of a task anymore,” Owen says. “It just works.”
Owen gives Webflow credit for being “very innovative for their time,” but thinks that time has passed. “If you’re on Webflow, you are kneecapping yourself in how quickly you can develop and iterate on your site. Sherpa has basically allowed me to say, okay, I don’t have to staff an engineer, they’ll handle it for me.”
It wasn’t just the workflow that got faster. The site did too. SEO was Owen’s biggest worry going in. “Number one concern was SEO,” he told us. That worry turned into one of the biggest improvements. Bolto’s Lighthouse scores went up more than 20 points across the board. In a retro three weeks after the switch, every SEO metric was holding steady, and the site was actually on track to get more organic clicks.
