Love the concept. I once owned SiteCrunch.com and had a similar idea as BuiltWith in 2013. It was one of many ideas I had, but didn't find validation. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees
181–190 of 191 posts
Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees
#182No employees, except for some content writers. Soooooo.... They have employees?
Contractors aren't employees.
I suppose that is technically true but I didn't see it mentioned. Either way I feel its disingenuous. The article is another one of those hustle worship pieces. Trying to make you feel inadequate if you haven't single handedly started a multi million dollar startup alone by the time you are 30 you are a failure. Employees? Contractors? who cares don't need'em either way what kind of loser gets ....help.
Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees
#183Earlier 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.
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…
No lawyer or bookkeeper is a terrible idea. But they don't need to be FTEs.
Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://builtwith.com/plans
Right. But how does the advertising part work and why is it so effective?
They don't sell advertising, they sell data. Primarily, leads for sales teams. If you want to start a new payment processing service, you subscribe to BuiltWith and they'll give you the contact info of the decision makers at the top 10,000 websites that use Stripe or whatever competitor you choose.
Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees
#185Out 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.
https://github.com/wappalyzer/wappalyzer You’re welcome to help out. :)
Oh cool, will take a look. Thanks!
Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees
#186Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees
#187I am surprised Google is their customer. Why would google be a customer when it has all information about all the websites on internet?
Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees
#188It reports so many technology used for "x.com". If you look at the source of "x.com" its just one single letter.
How does it deduce the technologies used or is it bug?
Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Care to share what kinds of things you've built or are currently building?
For the past year and a half, I've been focused on just one side project: a privacy-friendly personal finance simulator that doesn't ask to link your accounts (projectionlab.com), can run Monte Carlo simulations in your browser, and keeps your data client-side unless you choose otherwise.
This is really cool, dude. Keep at it!
Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. But how does the advertising part work and why is it so effective?
They don't sell advertising, they sell data. Primarily, leads for sales teams. If you want to start a new payment processing service, you subscribe to BuiltWith and they'll give you the contact info of the decision makers at the top 10,000 websites that use Stripe or whatever competitor you choose.
Got it, my follow-up question is, how is it acceptable for customers to have their data to be freely sold as "leads" to random 3rd party companies? Is it in the BuiltWith terms or something?