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Builtwith.com (one employee/founder and a part-time blogger) does an estimated $12M a year [1] assuming a 'few thousand' = 2000 paying customers. "the Basic at

Builtwith.com (one employee/founder and a part-time blogger) does an estimated $12M a year [1] assuming a 'few thousand' = 2000 paying customers. "the Basic at $299 per month for customers that want lists of sites mainly for the purpose of lead generation; Pro at $495 per month, suited more for users that work in an industry using a lot of A/B testing and comparison-type data; and Enterprise at $995 per month, which covers all bases and allows sales teams with multiple people to all use the platform at once. Brewer says that in terms of paying users on the platform there is a ‘few thousand’ and the split is about 40 percent Basic, 40 percent Pro and 20 percent Enterprise." Similar thread a while ago [2] 1: http://www.startupdaily.net/2015/09/builtwith-is-perhaps-one-of-australias-most-profitable-online-companies-and-has-zero-staff/ http://www.startupdaily.net/2015/09/builtwith-is-perhaps-one... 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12065355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12065355 Edit: specificity and formatting

shubhamjain 9y ago
It's incredulous that a person can single-handedly run a product as complex as that. Builtwith isn't a low-maintenance CRUD app, it's a beast. It crawls >100M websites, searches for thousands of signals, monitors their usage, finds lead information, and serves them to thousands of customers. The signals need to be constantly updated; crawler needs to handle tons of edge cases; and not to forget, you need to deal with people's issues. I am in utter disbelief one person can do everything, even if I account for being an automation freak.
- dhruvkar 9y ago
  I've marvelled at builtwith since I found out it existed. csallen, if you're reading this, get Gary Brewer to do an interview for IndieHackers.
  - king_kerr 9y ago
    Had no clue that was done by one person. Would definitely check that IH profile out if ever done.
  - csallen 9y ago
    I actually emailed Gary the week before I launched IH to try and get him on the site, but didn't get a response. I'll try reaching out again!
    - dhruvkar 9y ago
      awesome, looking forward to it!
- ccozan 9y ago
  What if the actual development was outsourced? My company does the same, it doesn't have a single employee, I outsource everything to different teams I have close relation. It just works, I do the business development and technical specifications, rest is handled by external teams.
  - kungito 9y ago
    Well if its outsourced is it really a single person company?
    - criddell 9y ago
      Is 100% of the equity owned by one person? Then I would say yes. Just because I hire somebody to clean my office, doesn't mean it's not a one-person company.
      - yellowapple 9y ago
        I personally disagree with that analogy (I'd consider the hiring of any additional labor to deviate from a company's "one person" state, custodial personnel included). I also disagree that equity is the only consideration for similar reasons (if I own 100% of the equity, but run an office with a receptionist and service desk and programmers, that's very obviously not "single person").
      - dwg 9y ago
        100% ownership does not imply no employees. Also, there's a difference between hiring software engineers, who will be engaging in activities related to your core business, and hiring someone to clean. If the owner does not, or is not able to build and maintain their software, some will consider this to not be a single person business (regardless of how the extra help is contracted).
      - jklein11 9y ago
        I work at a company that has 50 employees and 100% of the equity is still owned by 1 person. Is that a 1 person company?
- dsacco 9y ago
  I used to work at a very small company (3 people, including myself) that brought in about $4 million per year. The entire software and infrastructure, including a custom web scraping stack and data analysis pipeline, was written and maintained by one developer. The other person was sort of a business development type - no technical input. It probably wasn't quite as advanced as BuiltWith (scale-wise), but it was similarly impressive how much output was crunched by one developer. I learned a lot from him.
  - natdempk 9y ago
    Could you elaborate on some of the things you learned from him? I'm interested in people that seem to be almost ruthlessly effective and competent.
- cosmie 9y ago
  FWIW, it appears that at least some of the ancillary functions get done by other people. According to [1], social media marketing and accounting are two that he doesn't handle personally. > I am in utter disbelief one person can do everything, even if I account for being an automation freak. As someone who works in data acquisition, and someone who has evaluated BuiltWith along with other providers of tech install data, I can get a rough idea of how it stays as a one-man shop. Whether deliberate or not, the more hairy type of signal analysis tends to be missing from BuiltWith's dataset. Unless it's exposed via DNS or direct webpage code, BuiltWith doesn't detect it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it keeps it maintainable. Especially because you can use your historical data to identify changes in signals and be able to reactively update them as they change instead of use resources to proactively monitor all of them manually. But it limits it to a "public web facing" tech install base. You can greatly expand this by including secondary signals like parsing SEC files and job postings and whatnot, which will capture a lot of non web facing technologies. But those are a lot more complicated signals that require a lot of filtering/processing to reliably leverage, and would likely grow beyond a one-man shop like BuiltWith. Salesforce is a classic example of this. It's generally an internally focused software, but if you use Partner Portals or Web2Lead forms, it'll be exposed publicly. Builtwith[2] identifies 12.1k live sites using it and 30k historical sites using it. HGData[3], which provides similar data but uses a wider range of signals, can identify 92k sites/companies currently using it. > crawler needs to handle tons of edge cases Not particularly. If rendering the page, sure. But when doing pattern recognition within the source code itself, edge cases that'd bork rendering are mostly moot. I'm not at all disparaging BuiltWith - it's a solid product for what it is and a bargain for the price charged. But it's also a very limited product which, when destructured, hints at a lot of decisions made with the intention of being maintainable as a one-man shop. In the space it occupies, it also has a really solid pricing model if you can get by with using the limited dataset it provides. But if you need visibility into any internal software or tools or hardware, it has much more limited use. [1] http://www.hostingadvice.com/blog/builtwith-more-than-how-websites-are-made/ http://www.hostingadvice.com/blog/builtwith-more-than-how-we...
  - cosmie 9y ago
    Just noticed I forgot to add in my [2] and [3]. [2] https://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Salesforce https://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Salesforce [3] https://discovery.hgdata.com/product/salesforce-com-crm https://discovery.hgdata.com/product/salesforce-com-crm
cheechie 9y ago
I don't know much about marketing but could someone ELI5 what BuiltWith.com does?
- jbonniwell 9y ago
  My understanding is that it scans websites to determine what kind of technologies are being used (which hosting service, email providers, javascript libraries, analytics, etc) This can be useful for market research, to see what technologies are being used and by whom. It could also be used as a lead generation tool. Example: If I am creating a new email list tool, I could find websites (via builtwith) that are using a competitor and send cold email with specific comparisons between my new service and their current one, or asking what they like/dislike about their current tool.

shubhamjain 9y ago

It's incredulous that a person can single-handedly run a product as complex as that. Builtwith isn't a low-maintenance CRUD app, it's a beast. It crawls >100M websites, searches for thousands of signals, monitors their usage, finds lead information, and serves them to thousands of customers. The signals need to be constantly updated; crawler needs to handle tons of edge cases; and not to forget, you need to deal with people's issues. I am in utter disbelief one person can do everything, even if I account for being an automation freak.

dhruvkar 9y ago
I've marvelled at builtwith since I found out it existed. csallen, if you're reading this, get Gary Brewer to do an interview for IndieHackers.
- king_kerr 9y ago
  Had no clue that was done by one person. Would definitely check that IH profile out if ever done.
- csallen 9y ago
  I actually emailed Gary the week before I launched IH to try and get him on the site, but didn't get a response. I'll try reaching out again!
  - dhruvkar 9y ago
    awesome, looking forward to it!
ccozan 9y ago
What if the actual development was outsourced? My company does the same, it doesn't have a single employee, I outsource everything to different teams I have close relation. It just works, I do the business development and technical specifications, rest is handled by external teams.
- kungito 9y ago
  Well if its outsourced is it really a single person company?
  - criddell 9y ago
    Is 100% of the equity owned by one person? Then I would say yes. Just because I hire somebody to clean my office, doesn't mean it's not a one-person company.
    - yellowapple 9y ago
      I personally disagree with that analogy (I'd consider the hiring of any additional labor to deviate from a company's "one person" state, custodial personnel included). I also disagree that equity is the only consideration for similar reasons (if I own 100% of the equity, but run an office with a receptionist and service desk and programmers, that's very obviously not "single person").
    - dwg 9y ago
      100% ownership does not imply no employees. Also, there's a difference between hiring software engineers, who will be engaging in activities related to your core business, and hiring someone to clean. If the owner does not, or is not able to build and maintain their software, some will consider this to not be a single person business (regardless of how the extra help is contracted).
    - jklein11 9y ago
      I work at a company that has 50 employees and 100% of the equity is still owned by 1 person. Is that a 1 person company?
dsacco 9y ago
I used to work at a very small company (3 people, including myself) that brought in about $4 million per year. The entire software and infrastructure, including a custom web scraping stack and data analysis pipeline, was written and maintained by one developer. The other person was sort of a business development type - no technical input. It probably wasn't quite as advanced as BuiltWith (scale-wise), but it was similarly impressive how much output was crunched by one developer. I learned a lot from him.
- natdempk 9y ago
  Could you elaborate on some of the things you learned from him? I'm interested in people that seem to be almost ruthlessly effective and competent.
cosmie 9y ago
FWIW, it appears that at least some of the ancillary functions get done by other people. According to [1], social media marketing and accounting are two that he doesn't handle personally. > I am in utter disbelief one person can do everything, even if I account for being an automation freak. As someone who works in data acquisition, and someone who has evaluated BuiltWith along with other providers of tech install data, I can get a rough idea of how it stays as a one-man shop. Whether deliberate or not, the more hairy type of signal analysis tends to be missing from BuiltWith's dataset. Unless it's exposed via DNS or direct webpage code, BuiltWith doesn't detect it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it keeps it maintainable. Especially because you can use your historical data to identify changes in signals and be able to reactively update them as they change instead of use resources to proactively monitor all of them manually. But it limits it to a "public web facing" tech install base. You can greatly expand this by including secondary signals like parsing SEC files and job postings and whatnot, which will capture a lot of non web facing technologies. But those are a lot more complicated signals that require a lot of filtering/processing to reliably leverage, and would likely grow beyond a one-man shop like BuiltWith. Salesforce is a classic example of this. It's generally an internally focused software, but if you use Partner Portals or Web2Lead forms, it'll be exposed publicly. Builtwith[2] identifies 12.1k live sites using it and 30k historical sites using it. HGData[3], which provides similar data but uses a wider range of signals, can identify 92k sites/companies currently using it. > crawler needs to handle tons of edge cases Not particularly. If rendering the page, sure. But when doing pattern recognition within the source code itself, edge cases that'd bork rendering are mostly moot. I'm not at all disparaging BuiltWith - it's a solid product for what it is and a bargain for the price charged. But it's also a very limited product which, when destructured, hints at a lot of decisions made with the intention of being maintainable as a one-man shop. In the space it occupies, it also has a really solid pricing model if you can get by with using the limited dataset it provides. But if you need visibility into any internal software or tools or hardware, it has much more limited use. [1] http://www.hostingadvice.com/blog/builtwith-more-than-how-websites-are-made/ http://www.hostingadvice.com/blog/builtwith-more-than-how-we...
- cosmie 9y ago
  Just noticed I forgot to add in my [2] and [3]. [2] https://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Salesforce https://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Salesforce [3] https://discovery.hgdata.com/product/salesforce-com-crm https://discovery.hgdata.com/product/salesforce-com-crm

cheechie 9y ago

I don't know much about marketing but could someone ELI5 what BuiltWith.com does?

jbonniwell 9y ago
My understanding is that it scans websites to determine what kind of technologies are being used (which hosting service, email providers, javascript libraries, analytics, etc) This can be useful for market research, to see what technologies are being used and by whom. It could also be used as a lead generation tool. Example: If I am creating a new email list tool, I could find websites (via builtwith) that are using a competitor and send cold email with specific comparisons between my new service and their current one, or asking what they like/dislike about their current tool.