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BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

5to9.beehiiv.com

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Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

#171

Post by brianwawok »

jeromegv wrote: post #105
brianwawok wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I run a startup not doing that much worse. I have 0 accountants (pay CPA yearly for tax work). 0 lawyers. 0 devops. 0 QA. 0 monitoring . 0 HR. I do have : 3 devs (if I include myself) 3 support (tickets) 2 other supporting roles If I coded 100% myself (which I have in the past and could in the future, it would just mean less new features) and had a way to not answer tickets (like the OP story it sounds like d…

So you are 8 people. Quite a lot different than a single person. If you had a way to not answer tickets, that means you would not offer support to customers, so likely a lot less customers would be interested to pay you. You don’t get to 14 millions by cheaping out that way.

Right, its a different product though.

He has a low support required product. But I can 100% imagine making a product without much support required, and running it. Tis not hard.

Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

#172

Post by brianwawok »

codingdave wrote: post #163
psaux wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be SAAS. The other side of the coin is not the same. You do a multi year multi million dollar deal with a fortune 100, don’t expect 0 lawyers, 0 CPA’s.

You hire a lawyer for that specific work. At $14M ARR, you can afford to hire one when needed. They don't have to be a full-time employee. Same goes for accounting or any other operational staffing. Part-time or project-based contracting works great for such things.

Right, it would be insane to have a full time lawyer (or HR or Monitoring or DevOps) at that size.

At $600 an hour you can likely do all your legal work in 0-10 hours a year.

Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

#173

Post by eloff »

tomschwiha wrote: post #142
sbarre wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Get one of those people to manage the group. You call it the lead role, and pay them sightly more. You don't need a dedicated manager.

Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

#174

Post by princevegeta89 »

selcuka wrote: post #146
princevegeta89 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone tldr on how the site makes money? I read the linked article quickly and still confused what the revenue model is. Thanks!

https://builtwith.com/plans

Right. But how does the advertising part work and why is it so effective?

Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

#176

Post by vasco »

altdataseller wrote: post #169
ayewo wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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' origina…

All certainly true. My point isnt that its inpossible and that you shouldnt try, its just that it is much harder than it was in the past.

And my point is that, that is a weird way of looking at it, because _now_ it's also the easiest it'll ever be, what does it matter if it was easier in the past? The past is gone.

Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

#177

Post by kirso »

dangrossman wrote: post #32
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'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…

>I have a line of home decor that sells well enough

Seeing a pattern here, feels like an oversaturation of software and not enough physical assets to connect it to. Mostly people also get tired of shipping code all of the time. Thats why the naughty secret dream of a lot of devs is just to do a coffee shop or a non-automated bakery when retired :)

Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

#178

Post by kirso »

HWR_14 wrote: post #108
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…

> 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. I think the takeaway should be that the mid-2000s to now was the perfect timing to succeed as a bootstrap if you were going to. In 2040, with the same survivor bias, people will probably say th…

+ hindsight bias :) but you are totally right. Also it was harder to start a tech business and thats why many people didn't do it. Folks at Hot'or'Not had to literally borrow money to finance the servers which they had to go and provision physically.

There are apps that look like its 1999 and make 30k a month. Sure its not $15m and not the next google but opportunities are there. We are just pretty bad at recognising and solving problems that are outside of our bubble and that is where the saturation is. Your local plumber on the other hand...

Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

#180

Post by altdataseller »

vasco wrote: post #176
altdataseller wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All certainly true. My point isnt that its inpossible and that you shouldnt try, its just that it is much harder than it was in the past.

And my point is that, that is a weird way of looking at it, because _now_ it's also the easiest it'll ever be, what does it matter if it was easier in the past? The past is gone.

Grandfather was talking about how hard it was in the past, and i just commented on my experiences in the past. Of course looking at the past is not actionable, but I never intended to give actionable advice - just provide a comment

Also, saying it will be even harder in the future isnt exactly actionable or substantial advice either.

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