The Story of BuiltWith | Hacker News Reader

The Story of BuiltWith

medium.com

88 pointstortilla25 comments

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.

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

datanyze, not sure the funding

similarweb, $40m funding

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?

I think they use DNS data to estimate the amount of traffic.

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

http://support.similarweb.com/customer/en/portal/articles/13...

I'm the founder of Datanyze.

We raised $2M in funding so far, but we are bigger than BW (and I'm sure SimilarTech) in terms of revenue.

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.

Andrew: What programming language is BuiltWith written in?

http://builtwith.com/BuiltWith.com

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.

That's the whole purpose of the service :) https://builtwith.com/builtwith.com

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...

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.

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

"Realized", and they accidentally a word.

In Australia, "realised" is the preferred spelling.

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.

It's not so cut and dried

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?

Thanks, corrected the later.

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