
The Story of BuiltWith - tortilla
https://medium.com/@andrewjrogers/the-story-of-builtwith-e3bbc17c239f
======
alexanderb
Great story! Being a solopreneur myself, I still don't understand it.. Looks
like a BuiltWith is a classical "You build, they come" example? No marketing,
no validation or customer development. Can we call it "big luck", then? I'm
really interested to hear about early days and motivation of founder to run
it.

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gkop
I was hoping the article would cover what happened to UnderTheSite.com and how
it came to redirect to BuiltWith.

UnderTheSite was built so that members of the community could contribute
fingerprints to detect previously undetected technologies. This seemed to work
pretty well and had the advantage that it was one click to see the code of the
fingerprint responsible for detecting that technology in order to debug false
positives.

I'm not surprised BuiltWith would diminish the story of how they profited from
volunteers' work without compensating the volunteers, but it does strike me as
lacking class that they completely remove this part of their story.

Also it would be nice to have a better sense of "Why could this idea _not_
succeed as an open source project?" (Eg., in an alternate history where
UnderTheSite did not sell out to BuiltWith...)

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onion2k
_Gary’s take on metrics was that if it didn’t change his behaviour it was only
a distraction._

The problem with that line of thinking is that it only works in hindsight. You
need metrics to know what you're doing right as much as what you're doing
wrong.

~~~
andrew-rogers
I agree in principle but BuiltWith is quite different to most
startups/business which warrants different behaviours. It's good to know what
you're doing wrong but it still has to past the "does it change my behaviour
test".

Significant flow of ideas and feedback of which only a few are executed.

~~~
onion2k
Metrics that don't change your behaviour _are_ a distraction, but you can't
know which metrics fall in to that category unless you gather as much as
possible. To paraphrase John Wanamaker's famous line about advertising, "Half
the metrics you gather won't change your behaviour; the trouble is you don't
know which half."

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encoderer
HN has a Xerox machine effect and I'd guess a copy machine or two will be
silenced by this post. Not so much the revenue numbers as the comments about
copycats.

~~~
x0x0
there are already 2 well funded competitors. Regardless of whether it's a good
business model or not for a solo/small company, you probably can't compete
with businesses that don't have to make money for many years.

~~~
alecsmart1
Can you please let me know which these two competitors are?

~~~
x0x0
datanyze, not sure the funding

similarweb, $40m funding

~~~
martin-adams
Just looked at similar web and tested 3 sites I work with. They are pretty
accurate on their traffic estimates. Anyone know how that is calculated?

~~~
iwillreply
Estimated using samples gathered with analytics through third-party browser
plugins.

[http://support.similarweb.com/customer/en/portal/articles/13...](http://support.similarweb.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1384438-how-
does-similarweb-calculate-estimated-visits-)

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svtechwriter
Andrew: What programming language is BuiltWith written in?

~~~
tortilla
[http://builtwith.com/BuiltWith.com](http://builtwith.com/BuiltWith.com)

~~~
svtechwriter
It’s not that obvious. The site tells you what technologies a site uses—not
which programming language. ASP.NET includes a lot of languages.

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rrtwo
How does BuiltWith decides which sites to crawl? assuming it is too complex to
crawl everything.

And how is the data/queries being sold without compromising it...

~~~
nedwin
I believe that they started via user submission of URLs to crawl. I used to
submit tons of sites that I was curious about and eventually got their Chrome
browser extension so I could find out the tech behind a site by clicking that
little button.

Not sure if this is how they scaled out to the volume of sites they now cover.

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DiabloD3
"Whilst running Anchor I realised that we could accurately the which hosting
companies"

"Realized", and they accidentally a word.

~~~
infosecau
In Australia, "realised" is the preferred spelling.

~~~
imron
Not so much the preferred spelling, rather the correct spelling. Source: Am
Australian.

It's also the correct spelling in the land that invented the English language.

~~~
kibibu
It's not so cut and dried

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling)

I'm Australian and I prefer using the Z, otherwise what's the point of having
the bloody letter in the first place?

