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BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

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Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

#151

Post by ehnto »

Ethan_Mick wrote: post #15

Don't hire until you need to. 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 conten…

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.

Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

#152

Post by ayewo »

nrmitchi wrote: post #33
dangrossman wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The photo at the top is almost 10 years old, and was from when BW still had a cofounder. It doesn't any more. He probably doesn't have that office any more.

Quoted post unavailable.

That's likely because this is a blast from the past.

Someone mentioned [0] his HN handle up-thread [1] and linked to his complaint in 2015 about spam from BuiltWith [2] where the founder responded with an apology and a way to remove his site from their index.

Once I understood that value of BuiltWith myself, I absolutely felt the same way about Dan's characterisation of BuiltWith as "brilliantly simple and profitable".

0: He likely found about via an email notification from a neat tool he made for just this purpose http://hnreplies.com

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33185733

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10316060

Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

#154

Post by jesterson »

JamesAdir wrote: post #129

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.

From my experience, their service is plainly terrible/inexistent.

The good thing is you don't need it normally, so I am still a paying customer

Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

#156

Post by jesterson »

Wronnay wrote: post #71

I tested some of my websites. While I got accurate results for some projects, it showed completely wrong information about other projects... E.g. it shows stuff with which I may experimented for one day but which isn't used on the project since multiple years anymore.

BuiltWith accuracy is pretty bad, however it's sufficient to understand what you need to

Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

#158

Post by ayewo »

58x14 wrote: post #14

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…

I don't think that there's a perfect time for anything. I am of the opinion that there will always be room to create stuff, it's just that for certain categories the preparation time will be longer.

Building an MVP will just take longer. So rather than measure the time to a workable MVP in weeks or months, for a product to stand out as being valuable it would probably take a year or more for users to want to consider making a switch.

In fact, I'm working on something vaguely similar to BW on the side. I don't know if I'll succeed or not but I'm loving the research I've been doing so far.

Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

#159

Post by weird-eye-issue »

mmahemoff wrote: post #138
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #116

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

Filenames maybe

Nope my VA is trained to change all filenames to something description such as "dog-playing-with-leash.jpg"

Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

#160

Post by ayewo »

altdataseller wrote: post #100
vasco wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's still no competition now compared to any time in the future for an internet business.

What do you mean? Give me some examples. There are plenty of saturated niches.

They will always be niches that certain people deem to be saturated, but that won't stop a determined entrepreneur from starting up a new venture.

If you went back to January 2007, the iPhone didn't have competition from Samsung's flagship touch-based phones or Google Pixel (because they didn't exist yet). This was a time when Nokia, Blackberry, Sony Ericsson etc were the dominant phone makers and Steve Jobs' original goal was to capture 10 million sales/year with the iPhone, out of the massive mobile phone market.

If you went back to January 2004, the Tesla didn't have competition from Ford, Porsche and any of the other ICE car makers that have now announced EV models in their line up. In fact, investors would consider you stupid for asking them to invest in a car company or even one that planned to use batteries because of how messed up the economics of EV production was at the time.

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