[O__________O]

$14M ARR appears to be urban legend.

If anyone has a source that’s the founder saying this, please reply with a link.

___________

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:

- https://twitter.com/thesamparr/status/1257819248484745216

[datalopers]

https://www.startupdaily.net/advice/builtwith-is-perhaps-one...

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

[O__________O]

Thanks, here’s the specific text that is the basis for $14M ARR, which includes a “[founder] says” in the text:

>> 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.

_______

And here’s link to the current pricing:

https://builtwith.com/plans

________

And link to the founder’s comments on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=garazy

[snorkel]

Based on the price card posted on the website, assuming there’s 4000 active paying customers each paying $300/month, that gets you to $14M/year

[h0l0cube]

Off by an order of magnitude - 1.2M

[gkoberger]

$300 * 12 months * 4,000 customers = $14M

I'm not saying it's true or not, but the math works. You're (roughly) calculating MRR, not ARR.

[h0l0cube]

My bad

[rossriley]

Don't forget to multiply by 12 for yearly revenue.

[sn0w_crash]

I agree this sounds suspect.

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.

[brianwawok]

I mean, I run a startup not doing that much worse.

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.

[psaux]

That might be SAAS. The other side of the coin is not the same. You do a multi year multi million dollar deal with a fortune 100, don’t expect 0 lawyers, 0 CPA’s.

[codingdave]

You hire a lawyer for that specific work. At $14M ARR, you can afford to hire one when needed. They don't have to be a full-time employee. Same goes for accounting or any other operational staffing. Part-time or project-based contracting works great for such things.

[brianwawok]

Right, it would be insane to have a full time lawyer (or HR or Monitoring or DevOps) at that size.

At $600 an hour you can likely do all your legal work in 0-10 hours a year.

[jeromegv]

So you are 8 people. Quite a lot different than a single person.

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.

[speleding]

I run a SaaS, quite similar numbers to the parent. Depending on the complexity of your support tickets, it's pretty easy to outsource to part-time freelancers. I just pick up the tickets that they flag as too difficult for them. (Edit: we're still quite some ways off $14M, but I could see it scale there without changing the structure much)

[brianwawok]

Right, its a different product though.

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.

[formerkrogemp]

More like you end up with minimal staffing a la floqast for example.

[p1necone]

Dev and devops shouldn't be separate people anyway. If your devops person isn't also working on the product you're doing it wrong (in my only slightly educated opinion).

[HWR_14]

There is a literal order of magnitude difference between a SaaS product generating $14MM AAR/employee and your situation.

[riskneutral]

No lawyer or bookkeeper is a terrible idea. But they don't need to be FTEs.

[sbarre]

My bet is employees here refers to full-time salaried employees.

No doubt they work with contractors and freelancers. The article even says they have "a few people to write content for the blog".

[tomschwiha]

Those need to be managed, I would definitely hire someone to manage and to load off stress yourself.

[eloff]

Get one of those people to manage the group. You call it the lead role, and pay them sightly more. You don't need a dedicated manager.

[proamdev123]

Yeah, but if those things were outsourced that would support the “1 full time employee“ claim.

[princevegeta89]

Can someone tldr on how the site makes money? I read the linked article quickly and still confused what the revenue model is. Thanks!

[selcuka]

https://builtwith.com/plans

[princevegeta89]

Right. But how does the advertising part work and why is it so effective?

[dangrossman]

They don't sell advertising, they sell data. Primarily, leads for sales teams. If you want to start a new payment processing service, you subscribe to BuiltWith and they'll give you the contact info of the decision makers at the top 10,000 websites that use Stripe or whatever competitor you choose.

[princevegeta89]

Got it, my follow-up question is, how is it acceptable for customers to have their data to be freely sold as "leads" to random 3rd party companies? Is it in the BuiltWith terms or something?

[dangrossman]

They're crawling and packaging already public information. If you don't want anyone to know you're the CEO of StartupCorp and your email is [e-mail], don't put that on your LinkedIn and the footer of your website. The business value is in the convenience of the packaging, not in revealing secrets or something.