
One founder, zero staff, making $1.2M in monthly recurring revenue - nreece
http://www.startupdaily.net/2015/09/builtwith-is-perhaps-one-of-australias-most-profitable-online-companies-and-has-zero-staff/
======
dangrossman
I 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.

~~~
Animats
_" 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 was modded down a few months back for calling MailChimp a spamming service.
Well, now we know they are. "Transactional e-mail delivery". Yeah, right.

~~~
mfjordvald
I don't think even MailChimp claims to be for transactional emails as they
specifically have a separate product for that called Mandrill.

MailChimp is 100% intended for marketing emails. Though I'm sure they at least
try to have their customers not be spammers.

~~~
downandout
Mailchimp allows direct import of email addresses, rather than requiring a new
opt-in through their platform as some similar services do. Direct list import
= spam = more revenue for MailChimp.

~~~
wukerplank
While this may be abused by spammers, it's also a tool for legitimate users
who want to transition to MailChimp with their existing subscribers.

~~~
hellweaver666
I used to work for a company that had built up it's subscriber list over 10
years, we tried moving to a few other services but didn't get very far because
they required actual physical proof that the user had opted-in to our mailing
list, which we couldn't do (because nothing other than the email was ever
logged). The only way to do it would have been to "resubscribe" all of the
users to the new provider and hope they chose to opt in again. This likely
would have lost us a significant percentage of our mailing list. There was no
such requirement from Mailchimp, so you can guess who got our business.

~~~
puredemo
How would you prove an opt-in, even if you had more info than just the email
address? I mean, would a timestamp column suffice? What did they expect to see
exactly?

~~~
mfjordvald
In my experience they probably handle it based on the spam reports they get.
They get feedback from all the major providers so if someone clicks the spam
button they know.

If you import a huge list for spamming they will find out the first time you
send out email and block your account.

------
mb_72
From 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
_" 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.

~~~
tajen
In 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.

~~~
SyneRyder
I 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.

------
codingdave
This 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
I 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..

------
fearless
The $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.

~~~
cpayne
The 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
Why 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
I think he was just being conservative to make a point, that EVEN at 90% he'd
be making a LOT of money.

~~~
tempestn
True. I just figured it was unnecessarily conservative. He said, "Overheads
would be significant," which I don't think is actually true. I agree with the
general principle that it's a lot of money.

------
otto_ortega
My life long dream. Running an one-man SaaS business. ='(

~~~
keyle
We've all been there. And we're still all grinding.

~~~
ermterm
That we are, that we are.

------
andrew-rogers
I'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-e3b...](https://medium.com/@andrewjrogers/the-story-of-
builtwith-e3bbc17c239f)

------
rwhitman
I 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
Why do you regularly need to know what technology various websites are built
with?

~~~
rwhitman
Very mundane reasons, I assure you

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Not 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
HN 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.

------
davemel37
I 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
As 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
I 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
Unsure 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
not a paying customer. Haven't tried those other tools.

------
downandout
So 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
It's a hard lesson for engineers to learn: Business viability and
profitability is based on demand, not technical challenge.

~~~
suyash
I'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'.

------
tacon
A 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-f...](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)

[1]
[http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-249-f...](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)

------
keyle
If he gets paid mostly in USD and he's Australian, he's laughing his way to
the islands at the moment... 0.70 AUDUSD.

~~~
eru
That just means the AUD is no longer so crazy overvalued. Just look at the
BigMac index.

~~~
vacri
As of July, the big mac index had the AUD at 20% undervalued

[http://www.economist.com/content/big-mac-
index](http://www.economist.com/content/big-mac-index)

~~~
eru
Interesting development. Thanks for pointing out.

------
ph0rque
This gives me a new bucket list item: be the first (or at least a) Solo
Founder Unicorn(TM)

~~~
tdylan
It's getting more and more possible. Instagram, 10-13 employees at time of
acquisition. Were 5 for most of the growth. WhatsApp 30 people 19bn.

------
philip1209
Good 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"

------
mherrmann
He seems to be very down-to-earth:
[http://garybrewer.com/](http://garybrewer.com/)

------
Asbostos
How 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
Its 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.

------
Drdrdrq
So 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
It's hardly a mission critical service though.

~~~
nstart
This. 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.

------
ausjke
Impressive, 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!

------
msie
Inspiring, yet makes me cry at the same time.

------
suyash
Ask 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?

------
valgaze
There's a similar chrome extension that's pretty accurate called Wappalyzer:
[https://wappalyzer.com/](https://wappalyzer.com/)

------
keyle
Where does the $1.2M figure comes from?

~~~
aetherson
"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.

------
kriro
I 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]

------
hieudang9
My opinion,FTW [https://wappalyzer.com](https://wappalyzer.com) \- same from
AU

------
cylinder
Didn't know BuiltWith was Aussie.

~~~
fit2rule
Does 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
I'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.

------
Grue3
But what about the bus factor?

------
pavornyoh
This is really impressive.

------
pyrrhotech
More 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.

~~~
branchan
Wait, were you comparing Kodak's product portfolio with Instagram's?

~~~
leesalminen
I'm assuming GP is talking about "pictures", and not any of the other things
Kodak does. It makes for a very stimulating sentence, though!

------
hiou
For anyone looking to diy something similar without bothering with the hassle
of running a crawler, check out
[http://commoncrawl.org](http://commoncrawl.org)

------
curiousjorge
damn...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
@Curiousjorge.. Never, Never quit - Winston Churchill. And he also said when
you are going through hell, you keep going.

~~~
curiousjorge
Thank you for the kind and inspiring words!

------
spullara
Hilarious. 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
Yet he makes millions from it. So this proves that it isn't the idea that
matters, but the execution?

~~~
spullara
Correct! 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!

------
allochthon
> "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
I would imagine more along the lines of targeting users of competing products
to try to get them to switch to yours instead.

~~~
flashman
Yes, 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.

