Great to see a solo entrepreneur not being shy to take (upto) $1000/month. Too many founders are too cheap.
BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees
141–150 of 191 posts
Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree this sounds suspect. 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.
My bet is employees here refers to full-time salaried employees. No doubt they work with contractors and freelancers. The article even says they have "a few people to write content for the blog".
Those need to be managed, I would definitely hire someone to manage and to load off stress yourself.
Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees
#143$14M ARR appears to be urban legend. 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/1…
Can someone tldr on how the site makes money? I read the linked article quickly and still confused what the revenue model is. Thanks!
Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees
#144The 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…
It seems like "mid 2000's was the perfect time" because these fortunes take 10-15 years to get to any meaningful number.
These opportunities exist today, it just starts out with really low numbers in a niche that everybody thinks is super boring and takes forever to build up organically.
Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm having trouble replicating my own success from that era. Everything is more complicated today: the development stacks, the competitive landscape, the vast increase in regulations and liability around handling data, the move from an open web to social media silos and mobile apps, scammers and bots winning the spam wars and destroying most online advertising. I still have businesses I started in the 2000s and early…
This is actually really interesting to hear. I always hear the argument "you don't need a fancy website or UI, when I started my site/app looked like ___" These people created MVPs in 2010. You're now competing with MVPs that can be built with way more features, the latest tech stacks, and more in the same period of time.
I also had a successful SAAS around that period while my later ones failed.
Start a SAAS in a new market, not an established one. Back then every market was wide open.
Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees
#146$14M ARR appears to be urban legend. 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/1…
Can someone tldr on how the site makes money? I read the linked article quickly and still confused what the revenue model is. Thanks!
Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees
#147BuiltWith 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
Filenames maybe
Or perhaps it uses file hashes to determine if certain images are similar.
Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees
#148The 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…
I understand it as the effect of new technology. The internet was still very new in 2000 and we've all witnessed its potential expand into what it is today.
New technology creates new and ripe frontiers. What new technology exists today that unlocked something for the human race? You'll find the opportunities there.
Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is actually really interesting to hear. I always hear the argument "you don't need a fancy website or UI, when I started my site/app looked like ___" These people created MVPs in 2010. You're now competing with MVPs that can be built with way more features, the latest tech stacks, and more in the same period of time.
This can proably be attributed to the barrier for entry for competition being so much lower , so the definition of an MVP has changed. And equally, expectations from end users have risen. Recent anecdotal example of this is the frenetic pace of development in the ML/AI space with opensource tools like Stable Diffusion practically almost rendering moot the business model of OpenAI’s DALLE-2.
To win out MVPs have to either be a value proposition currently not available that people need, or to win a popularity contest based on UX, design and branding. That there are still project management tools being developed and succeeding in a saturated market tells me that the popularity contest never really stops.
Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees
#150The 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…
So true. By the time I graduated in 2012, it was already too late. My first commercial side project failed. There was just too much competition and they got too much funding (I had 0 funding). I already felt that most opportunities for bootstrapping had dried up at that point and so, as a last resort, I decided to try the open source model and had some success in the sense that my open source project got a lot of traction initially.
Unfortunately growth slowed (Google traffic ground to a halt) and there just weren't enough users to monetize. Felt like the door got slammed shut right in my face.
Timing and luck is everything.