9 ms·
One founder, zero staff, making $1.2M in monthly recurring revenue
- pavornyoh 11y agoThis is really impressive.
- cylinder 11y agoDidn't know BuiltWith was Aussie.
- fit2rule 11y agoDoes it matter? When an Aussie says "this was built by an Australian", they're really saying "Australia, the underdog nation, produced something that would normally be associated with 'them out there' and we should be 'proud' of it" .. in order for that congratulation to work, Australia has to be an underdog nation, and by association, Australians too. It reeks of jingoism every time we see an article in an Australian media organization about Australians 'making it on the world stage', and just induces cringe, imho. (Disclaimer: Australian living in Europe) I've never seen any positive response to this kind of pitch: its always "oh, those Australians think they're so poor, and congratulate themselves at the drop of a hat" .. I think its one of those activities that doesn't have the desired effect, at all ..
- cylinder 11y agoI'm American but have Aussie PR and very familiar w/ the culture ... I agree, the cultural cringe in Australia is still really bad. I spend a lot of time online and in-person convincing Australians that whatever they happen to be whinging about Australia is actually far better than most anywhere else in the world. Americans are the complete opposite, we refuse to accept that we aren't the greatest country in the world, an exceptional people guided by God himself to greatness (imagine that). Two extremes. Both have their downsides and upsides, though.
- philip1209 11y agoGood for him. He should probably raise prices. Imagine how this type of information could increase conversion rates of certain types of sales. Instead of "Webinar - Learn about how AwesomeThirdPartySoftware" try "Webinar - Deploying AwesomeThirdPartySoftware in a Rails environment"
- allochthon 11y ago> "I started getting requests from users wanting niche data,” says Brewer. “For example, I was being asked if I could put together a list of sites in Australia using a CDN or that were using Magento for their ecommerce stores. Everyone asking was saying they would be willing to pay for it." Sounds a little sketchy, like people looking for vulnerable software.
- soccerdave 11y agoI would imagine more along the lines of targeting users of competing products to try to get them to switch to yours instead.
- flashman 11y agoYes, exactly. Or let's say I make middleware for a particular piece of software. I can use BuiltWith to find companies that might buy my middleware because they're using that software. Or when I'm choosing between adding support for Software X versus Software Y, I can ballpark the market size for each and factor that into my decision. It's basically market research for me.
- ph0rque 11y agoThis gives me a new bucket list item: be the first (or at least a) Solo Founder Unicorn(TM)
- spullara 11y agoHilarious. This was one of the first jobs I ran on the 200 machine hadoop cluster with the webmap on in 2006 when I joined Yahoo. It took an hour to run.
- codingdave 11y agoYet he makes millions from it. So this proves that it isn't the idea that matters, but the execution?
- spullara 11y agoCorrect! I didn't imply otherwise. For some reason the comments and down voters thought the worst when really I was commending him and making fun of myself for not realizing what an interesting little business could be made. Cynics!
- mistermann 11y agoAnd yet he's making a ton of money providing a service that no one else has found a way to provide his customers with.
- valgaze 11y agoThere's a similar chrome extension that's pretty accurate called Wappalyzer: https://wappalyzer.com/ https://wappalyzer.com/
- otto_ortega 11y agoMy life long dream. Running an one-man SaaS business. ='(
- keyle 11y agoWe've all been there. And we're still all grinding.
- ermterm 11y agoThat we are, that we are.
- fizx 11y agoThe dream depends on your pager schedule ;)
- jasonkester 11y agoThis is the most common "made up fear" that people use to convince themselves not to build a business. It is not real. I run two separate profitable SaaS business. Between them, I average about one crisis per year that has me VPN'ing into the box the moment I hear about it. Other, more routine, non-site-has-been-down-a all-night events can wait until after coffee, until tomorrow, or until Monday, depending on what I'm up to at the moment. It's one of the upsides of running your own show, getting to decide what to make a priority rather than having somebody else on the other end of your pager with a vastly different view of the value of your time
- vidarh 11y agoSite reliability basically boils down to two things: Whether you build it right, and whether you actually spend enough on hosting (and on the right things). I have a client I've billed well into the 5 digits in pounds over the last year due to incidents that would never have occurred if they'd been willing to invest half of that in hardware upgrades, for example. So I agree: It's so much down to priorities, and basically if your pager goes off all the time, you've likely prioritised wrong - it's false economy. Adding an extra server to get the capacity needed to prevent a total meltdown is likely going to be worth far less to you than the time and lost business those meltdowns are. And thankfully when you do things for yourself you get to make those choices.
- codingdave 11y agoThis is the kind of story I love - it goes to show that you do not need massive capital, teams, and infrastructure to succeed. You just need a good idea, some luck, and the willingness to follow it down a path. Nicely done.
- pavornyoh 11y agoI agree. I think one's circumstances and mindset also plays a huge role. Most people have come to believe they need a lot of money to get going and to be successful and this guy is proof of it that it does not have to be that way..
- agopaul 11y agoAgreed. But in the other hand, this also gives a false image of the startup world, to the people unfamiliar with it, where the vast majority of this kind of startup fail. Stil a great piece to read, though. It reminds me of the Plenty Of Fish story: 1/2 guys team and a 7 figures revenue
- msie 11y agoInspiring, yet makes me cry at the same time.
- keyle 11y agoWhere does the $1.2M figure comes from?
- personjerry 11y agoYeah that feels clickbait-y and misleading
- prawn 11y ago2-3k paying customers, minimum plan is $300/mo, 60% of customers are on higher plans.
- aetherson 11y ago"A few thousand" customers paying on average 0.4 * 300 + 0.4 * 500 + 0.2 * 1000 = $520 / month. If there are 2,000, then that's $1.04M. $1.2M doesn't sound unreasonable assuming slightly more than 2,000 paying customers.
- dangrossman 11y agoI get so much spam from this site. Nearly every day, I get 4 copies of a bunch of spam trying to sell me Shopify inventory management, Shopify store marketing, Shopify product feed management, Shopify shipping services, etc. Why Shopify? Because there's a script tag on my sites with the word "shopify" in it. I don't run any Shopify stores. Why 4 copies of every mail? Because I have 4 sites with that tag. BuiltWith sells my contact info in their list of "Shopify websites", which these people toss into MailChimp and spam away, despite the fact that unsolicited mailings are a ToS violation there and everywhere else. I know BuiltWith is the source since one of them named their MailChimp list "BuiltWith Shopify US". It's a brilliantly simple and profitable site that I wish I had come up with, but the fact that the business model they ended up at is basically "harvested e-mail vendor for spam" kinda sucks.
- 0x0 11y agoYou should paste the mails into the spamcop web interface. Hopefully it'll get mailchimp to shape up; that's what I do every time (in addition to clicking the mailchimp unsubscribe form and choosing "i never signed up for this list")
- sandstrom 11y agoEven better, there an option "this email is spam and should be reported".
- vidarh 11y ago> You should paste the mails into the spamcop web interface. Hopefully it'll get mailchimp to shape up; And it's this kind of reason which is why we can't use the Spamcop blocklists: They block way too much legitimate e-mail because they regularly end up blocking service providers due to actions of a few of their customers.
- forgottenacc56 11y agoSeems I need to get into the spam business if it earns me this much dough.
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- ausjke 11y agoImpressive, how does he collect all those information, must be a combination of active detection tools(nmap,etc) and http header analysis etc, and the fingerprint for all popular website software. I tried google.com and google is using dotcms and webbaker for its own CMSes, interesting!
- tacon 11y agoA recent episode of "Startups for the Rest of Us" mentioned BuiltWith and its new competitor DataNyze: Rob [11:30]: There are two services I know that actually crawl websites and they can actually figure out what stuff is Built With. The first one is called builtwith.com and these are both SAS subscriptions and they’re not cheap but builtwith.com is the service that I know that several of the kind of outbound legion guys use and they’ll say, “Well, my competitor is X, Y, and Z and it’ll give you a list.” Now, Built With crawls certain amount of websites every so often. The second competitor is more expensive but they crawl daily. So they cannot only tell you who’s using what, they can tell you someone started a trial of this yesterday, like they just installed the code. So it’s much more powerful but they are more expensive. That service is called Data Nyze, it’s data, N-Y-Z-E.com, both of those if you’re willing to put down the money are going to be good services to find out who’s using your competitors and for full disclosure, I am a small angel investor in Data Nyze but I have seen and used the interfaces for both of those tools. So thanks for the question Ryan. - See more at: http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-249-finding-your-competitors-customers-pre-validating-a-wordpress-plugin-how-to-hire-a-cto-and-more-listener-questions http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-249-f... [1] http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-249-finding-your-competitors-customers-pre-validating-a-wordpress-plugin-how-to-hire-a-cto-and-more-listener-questions http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-249-f...
- curiousjorge 11y agodamn...I am so awe-struck, I was going to apply to some jobs today but then I read this article and I'm so overwhelmed with inspiration that I'm just going to keep pushing. Keep pushing after years of mediocrity, I'm not going to give up. Gary Brewer. His name is Gary. He showed me it is possible. Builtwith is a standing fact. Fight club exists irl.
- pavornyoh 11y ago@Curiousjorge.. Never, Never quit - Winston Churchill. And he also said when you are going through hell, you keep going.
- curiousjorge 11y agoThank you for the kind and inspiring words!
- suyash 11y agoYou can get a job anytime if you're a good programmer. Give entrepreneurship a shot.
- keyle 11y agoIf he gets paid mostly in USD and he's Australian, he's laughing his way to the islands at the moment... 0.70 AUDUSD.
- hiou 11y agoFor anyone looking to diy something similar without bothering with the hassle of running a crawler, check out http://commoncrawl.org http://commoncrawl.org
- fearless 11y agoThe $1.2M revenue number looks completely made up by the article submitter. The article makes no mention of this or any other specific monthly revenue number. I would expect a service like this to have very high churn as people export a list and leave, so the actual recurring revenue is likely much, much lower.
- prawn 11y agoThe article mentions enough figures that you can derive the figure yourself. 2-3k paying customers, plans are $300-1k/mo and the plan breakdown is hinted at.
- forgottenacc56 11y agoHow do you get from "unexplained" to "made up"?
- cpayne 11y agoThe article says the platform has a ‘few thousand’ users. Let's be conservative and say 2000. 40% of basic at $295 = $236k 40% of pro at $295 = $396k 20% of basic at $295 = $398k Equals $1.03M. PER MONTH! With one staff (I think the zero staff is a stretch) Overheads would be significant, but still, let's say they are 90%. He is still earning $100k per month profit. Not a bad business...
- tempestn 11y agoWhy do you figure overhead would be anywhere near 90%? It sounds like he's basically automatically scraping this info, and it doesn't need to be done at any particularly fast rate. He's probably leasing a single dedicated server for a few hundred dollars a month and working from home. I expect his overhead is near zero.
- personjerry 11y agoI think he was just being conservative to make a point, that EVEN at 90% he'd be making a LOT of money.
- pyrrhotech 11y agoMore and more examples of how the money is going to fewer and fewer hands and workers are less and less needed. This is why we need Socialism and a basic income. Kodak's 140k employees vs. Instagram's 30 odd. Snapchat $15B valuation for 330 employees. Now this guy has made (and runs) a $100 million business singlehandedly... What used to take 100s of employees to accomplish can be done with a handful, and it's only going to get worse as tools get more sophisticated and automation more widespread. It's great for GDP overall, we just need the government to enforce that society's success can be shared among all people and not just a handful of lucky ones.
- kobayashi 11y ago>basic income yes. >socialism no.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- robzyb 11y ago> Vote with your dollars then. Usually that is said in the context of economics or capitalism. I've never heard it apply to actual politics before. Its almost scary in the context of actual politics.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- avodonosov 11y ago> .. What used to take 100s of employees to accomplish can be done with a handful, and it's only going to get worse IMHO this means we can do more now, so it's going to get _better_
- branchan 11y agoWait, were you comparing Kodak's product portfolio with Instagram's?
- mb_72 11y agoFrom the article: "The most popular user case is a customer that uses curated data from BuiltWith as a lead list." How would I generously try and interpret this as NOT providing a list of email addresses to spam? I have lost track of the number of emails we've received via my businesses 'sales@xxx' address stating "this is not spam, because we've targeted you for a particular reason". Rubbish!
- mehwoot 11y ago"this is not spam, because we've targeted you for a particular reason" Indeed. Not sure about your country, but in mine, any non solicited commercial offer via email is spam and is illegal.
- davemel37 11y agohttps://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can... There is definitely a legal way to send these emails in the USA.
- tajen 11y agoIn Australia, I once tried to oppose from receiving mail (traditional mail) from charities at my workplace. It started when I donated to one of them, but I don't want my employer to be aware of my political opinions and I had mentionned it in the "comments" box. Turns out charities are allowed to send unsollicited mail repeatedly even after my opposition.
- sspiff 11y agoMan, why would they do that? Sure-fire way to not get a recurring donation.
- SyneRyder 11y agoI can corroborate that: there's one high profile charity in Australia that refuses to remove me from their mailing lists (both email & postal), despite numerous unsubscribe requests (both through their software & direct requests). It's incredibly short-sighted. I have donated literally 100x as much to other charities that respect my requests, and I will never support that one charity again.
- rwhitman 11y agoI started doing some research, found my way to BuiltWith and have wound up using it pretty regularly now. It's one of those tools I'd never have thought I needed until I became dependent on it. I had no idea how much time I was wasting poking around various websites' html source looking for the tech being used. Very cool to see that its an automated single founder saas success story. Always inspiring to hear stuff like this
- tempestn 11y agoWhy do you regularly need to know what technology various websites are built with?
- rwhitman 11y agoVery mundane reasons, I assure you
- SmellyGeekBoy 11y agoNot sure why you were downvoted for this. I mainly use it out of curiosity as well. It's very occasionally useful as a sales tool ("Hey, look, your competitors are all using Magento so you should too!") but I'd be lying if I said I used it that way on anything like a regular basis.
- rwhitman 11y agoHN has become a tough crowd to please these days... If folks demand a complete answer from me, then here is the super dull list of reasons I use BuiltWith: 1. I have clients that ask me to check out XY thing on a competitor site. A lot. 2. I'm curious about tools other people use so I can learn the tech and recommend for clients 3. When bidding on a project I need to check what platform it's on 4. Doing market research for a side project (assessing e-commerce sites in a particular niche) That's it. Mundane, non-nefarious reasons.
- Asbostos 11y agoHow do his clients manage to spam the sites they find? Are they breaking spam laws or finding a way around them? It's common to send spam from countries without anti-spam laws but surely a lot of companies using this service will be in the US, etc.
- davemel37 11y agoIts not legally spam to send one on one b2b emails to prospects. The people using this successfully are writing custom emails using templates...a combo of buzzstream and builtwith with a thoughtful email sequence is not only legal, but surprisingly effective.
- hieudang9 11y agoMy opinion,FTW https://wappalyzer.com https://wappalyzer.com - same from AU
- Drdrdrq 11y agoSo what happens if the sole author / maintainer gets hit by a bus? I don't see the fact that there are no employees as a bragging point, I see a major business liability. Other than that, good for him. :-)
- tonyedgecombe 11y agoIt's hardly a mission critical service though.
- nstart 11y agoThis. Also, in the age of webapps, I'm starting to find pieces of it becoming more unreliable. I tried to search what tech a company I'm thinking of applying for is using, and because the app itself is behind a login page it had no idea what JS framework was being used.
- randyrand 11y agoHis business stops and someone else fills the void left by the company.
- downandout 11y agoSo let me get this straight. I can put together a list of footprints for various pieces of server software. Then I can send a web crawler out and record which sites have which footprints, and sprinkle in some whois data so that people can spam them. This generates $1.2M/mo? Something is wrong with this picture.
- TimJRobinson 11y agoIt's a hard lesson for engineers to learn: Business viability and profitability is based on demand, not technical challenge.
- suyash 11y agoI'm taking a class on Business - being a programmer and it was a hard one to wrap my head around. Another common fallacy is 'Build and they will come'.
- gedrap 11y ago> I can put together a list of footprints for various pieces of server software. Yes, you can do it. But it doesn't mean that someone will pay for that. People don't pay money just because your technical solution is challenging, they don't care about it. The only thing the users care is whether it gives something (e.g. saves time, provides entertainment, etc).
- downandout 11y ago> Yes, you can do it. But it doesn't mean that someone will pay for that Apparently people are paying $1.2M/mo for that, so actually it kind of does mean that people will pay for it.
- davemel37 11y agoI use this as a competitive research tool for digital advertising. Being able to tell which ad tags are running on a competitors site always impresses clients and prospects. I never used it for prospecting, but companies like leadfuze use it to build targeted outreach campaigns that work pretty well. All in all, i love builtwith and use their chrome extension daily.
- kriro 11y agoAs someone who knows very little about the internet ad business in general this sounds interesting. Would you mind sharing how you do this in abstract terms? Do you just enter the site and check the "Advertising" section or is there more to it?
- davemel37 11y agoI use the chrome extension and when im on the site i can open a drop down menu with everything running on the site. I look for tag managers, ad exchanges, retargeting tags, data reseller tags, ad tech tags, etc... With one glance i can usually tell how sophisticated of a media buyer they are and if they seem eager to experiment with new ad offerings. (i.e. lots of small and obscure ad services or expensive data+programmatic exchanges like chango, etc...)
- firstworldman 11y agoUnsure whether you're saying that you're a paying customer or not, but if so do you see a value above what something like Ghostery or Wappalyzer can tell you for free?
- davemel37 11y agonot a paying customer. Haven't tried those other tools.
- kriro 11y agoI never used the site before. Tried it (checked for Zotonic) and I have to say the default color choice for the two lines on the chart is not very color blind friendly. It's not impossible but very hard for me to tell apart (black and some medium darkish blue). [in case the owner of the site reads HN which he very likely does]
- mherrmann 11y agoHe seems to be very down-to-earth: http://garybrewer.com/ http://garybrewer.com/
- Grue3 11y agoBut what about the bus factor?
- suyash 11y agoAsk HN: Can anyone explain how does the underlying technology of a service like BuiltWith is working? I know reading source code and looking for JavaScript libraries is easy, but is that all there is to it?
- andrew-rogers 11y agoI'm a co-founder of BuiltWith. It's doing well but not $1.2M revenue per month. Full details here: https://medium.com/@andrewjrogers/the-story-of-builtwith-e3bbc17c239f https://medium.com/@andrewjrogers/the-story-of-builtwith-e3b...