41–50 of 191 posts
the societal mistake is to regard this as 'wealth production'; it's not. this is rent. this is where creative productivity (arguably real actual wealth) goes to die.
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 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.
100% rent-based business. the computers do all the work, the owners just collect the money. the societal mistake is to regard this as 'wealth production'; it's not. this is rent. this is where creative productivity (arguably real actual wealth) goes to die.
$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…
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
I remember stumbling across this site years ago, thought it was neat, and never thought about it again. There's definitely a lot of untapped potential here. Could be so much bigger with marketing and R&D. A browser extension for example.
The BuiltWith browser extension was how I found out about them years ago.
I was under the impression that the extension is what enabled them to collect a big chunk of their data, at least initially.
100% rent-based business. the computers do all the work, the owners just collect the money. the societal mistake is to regard this as 'wealth production'; it's not. this is rent. this is where creative productivity (arguably real actual wealth) goes to die.
Who are they extracting rent from?
“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?
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…