If anyone has a source that’s the founder saying this, please reply with a link.
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This tweet appears to be the source of the legend:
>> “BuiltWith is an amazing site that I use regularly. But it's also an amazing business. 1 fulltime employee. $14m a year in revenue. [...] Disclaimer: I do not know 100% if this is true.”
Source:
He was supposedly making $14M/yr seven years ago too.
and dangrossman was complaining about the spam back then too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10316060
>> There are three levels of pricing for the paid service, 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.
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And here’s link to the current pricing:
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And link to the founder’s comments on HN:
I'm not saying it's true or not, but the math works. You're (roughly) calculating MRR, not ARR.
A lot of people don’t realize what “$14mm ARR” means. The contract, accounting and legal work alone would require a couple of people.
Not to mention Infrastructure, monitoring, QA, etc - all that good stuff.
It costs money to generate revenue.
No doubt they work with contractors and freelancers. The article even says they have "a few people to write content for the blog".
I have 0 accountants (pay CPA yearly for tax work). 0 lawyers. 0 devops. 0 QA. 0 monitoring . 0 HR.
I do have : 3 devs (if I include myself) 3 support (tickets) 2 other supporting roles
If I coded 100% myself (which I have in the past and could in the future, it would just mean less new features) and had a way to not answer tickets (like the OP story it sounds like due to product complexity), I could totally do this alone…
It’s amazing how lean you can be in SaaS if you must. Us bootstrappers know this.
So much if a modern enterprise is bloat.
You have how many DBAs? How many QA? Lol.
At $600 an hour you can likely do all your legal work in 0-10 hours a year.
If you had a way to not answer tickets, that means you would not offer support to customers, so likely a lot less customers would be interested to pay you. You don’t get to 14 millions by cheaping out that way.
He has a low support required product. But I can 100% imagine making a product without much support required, and running it. Tis not hard.