If anyone has a source that’s the founder saying this, please reply with a link.
___________
This tweet appears to be the source of the legend:
>> “BuiltWith is an amazing site that I use regularly. But it's also an amazing business. 1 fulltime employee. $14m a year in revenue. [...] Disclaimer: I do not know 100% if this is true.”
The key takeaway for me was that the mid-2000s were the perfect time to be a founder of a software tool. I can’t help but feel that there are so many tens of thousands of similar stories without such a successful conclusion.
In previous roles I’ve used BuiltWith before and it’s an invaluable tool. There’s a few companies with similar approaches except focusing on social media profiles (HypeAuditor comes to mind) that spawned in (iirc) 2017 after Instagram made significant changes to what data were available through their API.
It seems similar that Etherscan had this type of first mover advantage with automated data indexing and basic discovery tools for the Ethereum blockchain.
I wonder what the next wave of straightforward software utilities will be like.
I'm doubtful every business can make it to $14M ARR, but I bet many companies could generate $1M ARR without needing employees. And that amount of money would be life-changing for many people (with, of course, the potential to sell what you've created to exit).
I've spent much of my life chasing the "make it big" startup dream. I'll be pretty content if I can generate meaningful recurring revenue by building things I love. Still trying to decouple hours worked from the paycheck.
It's been a few years now, but a co-founder and I took the 'solo' (almost) route, refused to take money we didn't really need yet, refused to hire employees we didn't really need yet. We spent 8 months building our product, and when we finally did decide we were at a point we need to raise money and hire to scale, we had both had significant life changes that meant we didn't really have the heart to see the idea through. We had the self-awareness to realize that. So we sold out completely, and because it was just us, and for a pretty short amount of time, we made out pretty well. All of this was totally off the usual SV radar, and definitely not considered a startup success story. But who cares, it worked out great for me personally and allowed me flexibility to do the things I do with my time now. So many people quit the rigid, corporate culture only to join another rigid, corporate culture that just goes by a different name, "startup." Doing it on your own with no outside resources for as long as you can is totally valid, and only the VCs will try to tell you otherwise.
I've been making a little progress on the "building things I love that generate revenue" piece (in part thanks to the HN crowd!), but oh boy, do the goalposts always keep shifting.
I remember the first dollar I ever made on the internet felt so amazing and validating... but several adjustments later, the mentality is more like "okay, but I still can't do this full-time."
Goalposts aside though, I'd agree that if there's a scenario where you have the autonomy and freedom to work on just the things you love, that's a game-winning scenario.
I realized recently there’s tax pressure to make money from equity and exits over income and revenue, since the cap gains rates are so much lower than income tax rates. Depends on your jurisdiction but alas.
That is my perfect scenario as well. I don't want the startup investment hustle, I just want to run a comfortable software business for people in my community.
At that revenue number and with no innovation and no R&D (zero employees), seems like a no brainer for some smart hacker to replicate and provide the same service for less.
BuiltWith is 16 years old. Their business has been fully commoditized and ripped off so many hundreds of times that most of these "competitors" don't even have names. They're just email addresses in your spam folder. I have literally hundreds of mails that look like this -- "hey, wanna buy a list of every site using your competitors' services, enriched with business info and key employee contacts?".
The "$14M ARR" appears to be a journalist's guess/estimate of the company's revenue in 2015, which Gary said was an exaggeration, per https://www.ipobase.com/builtwith/
I would bet that BW is long past peak revenue now.
It sorta seems like they won the 'right place at the right time' lotto in getting the links on about us. A competitor might have a huge battle to win that market share.
Genuine question, outside of bragging rights, what advantage does this kind of PR have ?
If you found a niche that no one else has turned into a race to the bottom yet, why would you want the world to know about it ? It's like Warren Buffet telling everyone what stocks he will be picking.
Maybe if the startup was yet to gain traction, this would help get the word out. But from the sounds of it, it is already generating a ton of revenue.
This doesn’t seem like a paid promotion piece, although it could be. I don’t see any direct connection between the author and the company/founder.
It’s an interesting read, and likely brings some marginally additional traffic to the site, so I don’t see any negative exposure here. Perhaps the founder is considering an exit?
Because it's one thing to find a niche and another thing is to make money in it.
For instance, I make software that help Private Equity firms find deals. I can't use it myself, because it requires a completely different set of skills.
I think the only person who can answer that question is the founder. I would posit: if you had that much money what else can you buy besides bragging rights? This coverage wasn’t even bought as far as I can tell.
Even if the ARR is half of that, how do you keep your level of service as a single employee? Don't you take a break, go to a vacation? What happens if you're sick?
At the level that starts with $295 and goes up to $495 and $995, I guess that the customers expect the service to work all the time and have fast support.
Can't understand how it's done without employees at all.
Out of curiosity, is there an open source version of BuiltWith? I'm not necessarily looking to use it, but it might actually be an interesting project to work on. I'm sure you learn a lot of interesting things trying to map everything out..and then there's the parsing/extracting and other aspects of this that could be fun if you're into that sort of thing.
> But the paid version is why companies find BuiltWith so valuable. BuiltWith has turned into a colossal database of everything on the internet. More specifically, a database of potential customers and leads.
> You can find every website using a specific keyword, and technology, and even break them down by location, spending, and social following. It's the perfect place to build your potential customers.
Doesn't this only work well if you can get an email address of a decision maker to contact? Otherwise, it seems like a lukewarm lead at best.
Also, it seems that the products and services a website uses tend to be sticky, at least far down the stack. So this lead-generation approach is really just about picking off technologies at the top of the stack, right?
I am an academic researcher, and we used BuiltWith.com for a project. Gary and Andrew added various technologies that I suggested to them (for a non-paying customer no less). So, great experience!
just a reminder, whether this is an urban legend or not:
1) the pie is big enough, you just have to convince pie holders to give their pieces to you
2) you only need one client to generate all revenue, but many small clients is more intuitive
3) there are many individuals and companies sitting on large revenue streams. headlines come from people that need to advertise, not the ones that don’t.
BuiltWith has gotten quite good. I tested it on my site and it even correctly detected I use Shutterstock for stock images. We don't credit Shutterstock anywhere (already pay them like $300/mo) so it must actually analyze the images themselves to make this determination
“No idea like this had existed, and the domain BuiltWith was somehow not taken already. Gary began building scrapers and his database of technologies.”
I hate this paragraph. It doesn’t mention any domain names but also makes the assumption that com is the only one?
[+] [-] O__________O|3 years ago|reply
If anyone has a source that’s the founder saying this, please reply with a link.
___________
This tweet appears to be the source of the legend:
>> “BuiltWith is an amazing site that I use regularly. But it's also an amazing business. 1 fulltime employee. $14m a year in revenue. [...] Disclaimer: I do not know 100% if this is true.”
Source:
- https://twitter.com/thesamparr/status/1257819248484745216
[+] [-] datalopers|3 years ago|reply
He was supposedly making $14M/yr seven years ago too.
and dangrossman was complaining about the spam back then too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10316060
[+] [-] snorkel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sn0w_crash|3 years ago|reply
A lot of people don’t realize what “$14mm ARR” means. The contract, accounting and legal work alone would require a couple of people.
Not to mention Infrastructure, monitoring, QA, etc - all that good stuff.
It costs money to generate revenue.
[+] [-] princevegeta89|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 58x14|3 years ago|reply
In previous roles I’ve used BuiltWith before and it’s an invaluable tool. There’s a few companies with similar approaches except focusing on social media profiles (HypeAuditor comes to mind) that spawned in (iirc) 2017 after Instagram made significant changes to what data were available through their API.
It seems similar that Etherscan had this type of first mover advantage with automated data indexing and basic discovery tools for the Ethereum blockchain.
I wonder what the next wave of straightforward software utilities will be like.
[+] [-] Ethan_Mick|3 years ago|reply
And then don't hire until you want to.
I'm doubtful every business can make it to $14M ARR, but I bet many companies could generate $1M ARR without needing employees. And that amount of money would be life-changing for many people (with, of course, the potential to sell what you've created to exit).
I've spent much of my life chasing the "make it big" startup dream. I'll be pretty content if I can generate meaningful recurring revenue by building things I love. Still trying to decouple hours worked from the paycheck.
[+] [-] pevey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scubakid|3 years ago|reply
I remember the first dollar I ever made on the internet felt so amazing and validating... but several adjustments later, the mentality is more like "okay, but I still can't do this full-time."
Goalposts aside though, I'd agree that if there's a scenario where you have the autonomy and freedom to work on just the things you love, that's a game-winning scenario.
[+] [-] aliqot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quickthrower2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] presentation|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ehnto|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tiffanyh|3 years ago|reply
Source: this was posted on HN years ago and the cofounder refuted the revenue claims.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10322265
[+] [-] ec109685|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cj|3 years ago|reply
At that revenue number and with no innovation and no R&D (zero employees), seems like a no brainer for some smart hacker to replicate and provide the same service for less.
[+] [-] dangrossman|3 years ago|reply
For example: https://i.imgur.com/V9raPcV.png
The "$14M ARR" appears to be a journalist's guess/estimate of the company's revenue in 2015, which Gary said was an exaggeration, per https://www.ipobase.com/builtwith/
I would bet that BW is long past peak revenue now.
[+] [-] snoopy_telex|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gibb0n|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rising-sky|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] civilized|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] screye|3 years ago|reply
If you found a niche that no one else has turned into a race to the bottom yet, why would you want the world to know about it ? It's like Warren Buffet telling everyone what stocks he will be picking.
Maybe if the startup was yet to gain traction, this would help get the word out. But from the sounds of it, it is already generating a ton of revenue.
[+] [-] 58x14|3 years ago|reply
It’s an interesting read, and likely brings some marginally additional traffic to the site, so I don’t see any negative exposure here. Perhaps the founder is considering an exit?
[+] [-] kulikalov|3 years ago|reply
For instance, I make software that help Private Equity firms find deals. I can't use it myself, because it requires a completely different set of skills.
[+] [-] bitxbitxbitcoin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] soheil|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fnordpiglet|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JamesAdir|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xwowsersx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ElbertF|3 years ago|reply
You’re welcome to help out. :)
[+] [-] Ensydr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jesterson|3 years ago|reply
Add here useless staff, inefficient processes that come with it.
[+] [-] intelVISA|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SevenNation|3 years ago|reply
> You can find every website using a specific keyword, and technology, and even break them down by location, spending, and social following. It's the perfect place to build your potential customers.
Doesn't this only work well if you can get an email address of a decision maker to contact? Otherwise, it seems like a lukewarm lead at best.
Also, it seems that the products and services a website uses tend to be sticky, at least far down the stack. So this lead-generation approach is really just about picking off technologies at the top of the stack, right?
[+] [-] sebastian_z|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zuhayeer|3 years ago|reply
Wow, just learned that BuiltWith is 16 years old. Always just assumed it must have been built in the last 5 years or so.
[+] [-] jussaying2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yieldcrv|3 years ago|reply
1) the pie is big enough, you just have to convince pie holders to give their pieces to you
2) you only need one client to generate all revenue, but many small clients is more intuitive
3) there are many individuals and companies sitting on large revenue streams. headlines come from people that need to advertise, not the ones that don’t.
[+] [-] forte124|3 years ago|reply
Then you just have to find your slice
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] throwaway45643|3 years ago|reply
How does it deduce the technologies used or is it bug?
https://builtwith.com/detailed/x.com
[+] [-] weird-eye-issue|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmahemoff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mustachionut|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangrossman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattl|3 years ago|reply
I hate this paragraph. It doesn’t mention any domain names but also makes the assumption that com is the only one?
[+] [-] forte124|3 years ago|reply
But thanks for the feedback, I'll make sure I clarify in future posts
[+] [-] seekingcharlie|3 years ago|reply