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BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

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Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

#81

Post by proamdev123 »

sn0w_crash wrote: post #72
O__________O wrote: post #26

$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…

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.

Yeah, but if those things were outsourced that would support the “1 full time employee“ claim.

Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

#82

Post by rising-sky »

forte124 wrote: post #42
dangrossman wrote: post #32

Earlier 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.

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.

Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

#83

Post by Someone1234 »

woodruffw wrote: post #54

My website was built with such brand-name technologies as "HSTS" and "Viewport Meta"[1]. Hmm. I guess it's meant more for web applications that leak their implementation details or reference vendor resources, somehow? [1]: https://builtwith.com/yossarian.net

I can see that you're using PHP, on nginx/Ubuntu, hosted by Digital Ocean, and likely purchased your hostname via Google Domains. Your email is via Google Workspaces. That's pretty useful information.

Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

#84

Post by cyral »

yibberish wrote: post #41

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 programmed the computers?

Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

#85

Post by woodruffw »

Someone1234 wrote: post #83
woodruffw wrote: post #54

My website was built with such brand-name technologies as "HSTS" and "Viewport Meta"[1]. Hmm. I guess it's meant more for web applications that leak their implementation details or reference vendor resources, somehow? [1]: https://builtwith.com/yossarian.net

I can see that you're using PHP, on nginx/Ubuntu, hosted by Digital Ocean, and likely purchased your hostname via Google Domains. Your email is via Google Workspaces. That's pretty useful information.

I gave it away by responding to the other comment, but at least one of those is incorrect. Caveat emptor.

Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

#88

Post by collin128 »

cj wrote: post #2

Who are their major competitors? At that revenue number and with no innovation and no R&D (zero employees), seems like a no brainer for some smart hacker to replicate and provide the same service for less.

Datanyze raised a round of two of VC 6-7 years ago but I'm not sure what they're up to recently.

Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

#89

Post by prepend »

bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: post #17
screye wrote: post #9

Genuine question, outside of bragging rights, what advantage does this kind of PR have ? If you found a niche that no one else has turned into a race to the bottom yet, why would you want the world to know about it ? It's like Warren Buffet telling everyone what stocks he will be picking. Maybe if the startup was yet to gain traction, this would help get the word out. But from the sounds of it, it is already generati…

I think the only person who can answer that question is the founder. I would posit: if you had that much money what else can you buy besides bragging rights? This coverage wasn’t even bought as far as I can tell.

I would expect that if you had $14M revenue a year with no employees and no investors you would never hear a peep unless he wanted to hype for a sale.

Bragging rights are for chumps without millions in cash.

Re: BuiltWith: $14M ARR, no employees

#90

Post by brianwawok »

sn0w_crash wrote: post #72
O__________O wrote: post #26

$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…

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 due to product complexity), I could totally do this alone…

It’s amazing how lean you can be in SaaS if you must. Us bootstrappers know this.

So much if a modern enterprise is bloat.

You have how many DBAs? How many QA? Lol.

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