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.
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...)
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
If your competitors are not making money, you don't actually have to compete with them. Without revenue and growth and/or profit, that money is not an asset, but a time limit, after which they are done. Being well-funded does not make a competitor significant - only their actions and their product can do that.
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.
