This is really impressive.

I'm American but have Aussie PR and very familiar w/ the culture ... I agree, the cultural cringe in Australia is still really bad. I spend a lot of time online and in-person convincing Australians that whatever they happen to be whinging about Australia is actually far better than most anywhere else in the world.

Americans are the complete opposite, we refuse to accept that we aren't the greatest country in the world, an exceptional people guided by God himself to greatness (imagine that).

Two extremes. Both have their downsides and upsides, though.

Good for him. He should probably raise prices. Imagine how this type of information could increase conversion rates of certain types of sales. Instead of "Webinar - Learn about how AwesomeThirdPartySoftware" try "Webinar - Deploying AwesomeThirdPartySoftware in a Rails environment"

Yes, exactly. Or let's say I make middleware for a particular piece of software. I can use BuiltWith to find companies that might buy my middleware because they're using that software. Or when I'm choosing between adding support for Software X versus Software Y, I can ballpark the market size for each and factor that into my decision.

It's basically market research for me.

Hah, I am beating you to it...:)

It's getting more and more possible. Instagram, 10-13 employees at time of acquisition. Were 5 for most of the growth. WhatsApp 30 people 19bn.

Markus Frind

Correct! I didn't imply otherwise. For some reason the comments and down voters thought the worst when really I was commending him and making fun of myself for not realizing what an interesting little business could be made. Cynics!

And yet he's making a ton of money providing a service that no one else has found a way to provide his customers with.

There's a similar chrome extension that's pretty accurate called Wappalyzer: https://wappalyzer.com/

That we are, that we are.

Site reliability basically boils down to two things: Whether you build it right, and whether you actually spend enough on hosting (and on the right things). I have a client I've billed well into the 5 digits in pounds over the last year due to incidents that would never have occurred if they'd been willing to invest half of that in hardware upgrades, for example.

So I agree: It's so much down to priorities, and basically if your pager goes off all the time, you've likely prioritised wrong - it's false economy. Adding an extra server to get the capacity needed to prevent a total meltdown is likely going to be worth far less to you than the time and lost business those meltdowns are. And thankfully when you do things for yourself you get to make those choices.

I wasn't saying don't build a business. Rather, I'm saying to choose the business you get into wisely. I'm betting neither of your businesses are anything like infrastructure, hosting, etc.

I agree. I think one's circumstances and mindset also plays a huge role. Most people have come to believe they need a lot of money to get going and to be successful and this guy is proof of it that it does not have to be that way..

Agreed. But in the other hand, this also gives a false image of the startup world, to the people unfamiliar with it, where the vast majority of this kind of startup fail.

Stil a great piece to read, though. It reminds me of the Plenty Of Fish story: 1/2 guys team and a 7 figures revenue

Inspiring, yet makes me cry at the same time.

Yeah that feels clickbait-y and misleading

2-3k paying customers, minimum plan is $300/mo, 60% of customers are on higher plans.

"A few thousand" customers paying on average 0.4 * 300 + 0.4 * 500 + 0.2 * 1000 = $520 / month. If there are 2,000, then that's $1.04M. $1.2M doesn't sound unreasonable assuming slightly more than 2,000 paying customers.

Even better, there an option "this email is spam and should be reported".

You should paste the mails into the spamcop web interface. Hopefully it'll get mailchimp to shape up;

And it's this kind of reason which is why we can't use the Spamcop blocklists: They block way too much legitimate e-mail because they regularly end up blocking service providers due to actions of a few of their customers.

Seems I need to get into the spam business if it earns me this much dough.

In addition to the free version of the site, BuiltWith now has a SaaS-based membership model for users that want to take advantage of a number of services that the platform now provides around lead generation, sales intelligence, and market analysis. The most popular user case is a customer that uses curated data from BuiltWith as a lead list. For example, a business that has created a platform that allows businesses to send newsletters to customers may build a list of all companies in Australia using Campaign Monitor or Mailchimp to target for marketing activities.

Yeah, I really wish people would stop calling "lead generation" anything other than what it is. Spam.

You can easily obfuscate your email to web crawlers by generating the email text and link through javascript.

This is what many people like Cloudflare do.

My email is in plain text all over the internet and I get next to no spam. The worst spam I've ever dealt with was from the Princeton Review–a supposedly legitimate business–after taking an LSAT sample quiz online. They wouldn't leave me alone for years despite my best efforts.

In my experience they probably handle it based on the spam reports they get. They get feedback from all the major providers so if someone clicks the spam button they know.

If you import a huge list for spamming they will find out the first time you send out email and block your account.

Oh, I already did some of that. I've already killed about a dozen email addresses permanently, and anything sent to those triggers a black-list of the IP for an exponentially increasing amount of time.

If companies are going to spam me I'd rather they did use MailChimp. At least they handle unsubscribes properly and seem to actually honour them.

I worked on a large UK domain sellers mail platform for a couple of years and I'd definitely consider pretty much all marketing mail as spam. The landscape has been so destroyed by tricks that it's near impossible to tell if anyone actually wanted your mail.

Examples:-

a) Opt-in unchecked. These guys are "doing it right" except they usually have this box right next to a probably completely unnecessary TOS box that's also unchecked. Anyone who isn't paying attention will just check all the boxes to get to the next stage.

b) Opt-in checked by default. Fuckers.

c) Opt-out checked by default. Praying on folks that uncheck anything with "opt" into it.

d) Opt-out unchecked by default. Praying on folks not paying attention.

Basically the only way you're not a spammer is probably if signing up for mail is seperate from the sign up process. The problem is, I think this is a proven way to generate more revenue so companies are not going to stop fiddling with it.

Not necessarily...

Here are the CAN SPAM rules... . But following the law isn’t complicated. Here’s a rundown of CAN-SPAM’s main requirements:

Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message. Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message. Identify the message as an ad. The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement. Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations. Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests. Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.

1) Transactional email is Mandrill, not MailChimp. Different brands from the same company.

2) The only way to spam with MailChimp is to lie to MailChimp as you have to use the bulk/direct import. [e.g. There is a checkbox saying it was an opt-in only list, or at least there used to be]

Then any delivery service (online or real world) would be a spamming service.

Infrastructure is just the pipes, not the intent.

Report them to mailchimp here: http://mailchimp.com/contact/abuse/

I can't speak for them, but I've reported spam senders using other commercial senders and generally get an acknowledgement that it's looked into and they don't tolerate abuse.

+1 I wonder how many people just harvest whois info for email addresses

Providing a filtered email address without domain privacy is another option.

However, a domain needs to have a point of contact, in case of abuse or illegal activity. Domain privacy is a valid service, where the registrar serves as a proxy for you and hides your personal information from public view.

While you could argue that it should be included as a default service, the pricing of domains is almost entirely arbitrary anyway.

Have you reported them to MC?

Off topic: Kudos on a successful one man show! ...quite in the league of duckduckgo & SublimeText...

PS: I am also trying to do that at a smaller scale/success position as of now... :-)

Impressive, how does he collect all those information, must be a combination of active detection tools(nmap,etc) and http header analysis etc, and the fingerprint for all popular website software.

I tried google.com and google is using dotcms and webbaker for its own CMSes, interesting!

A recent episode of "Startups for the Rest of Us" mentioned BuiltWith and its new competitor DataNyze:

Rob [11:30]: There are two services I know that actually crawl websites and they can actually figure out what stuff is Built With. The first one is called builtwith.com and these are both SAS subscriptions and they’re not cheap but builtwith.com is the service that I know that several of the kind of outbound legion guys use and they’ll say, “Well, my competitor is X, Y, and Z and it’ll give you a list.” Now, Built With crawls certain amount of websites every so often. The second competitor is more expensive but they crawl daily. So they cannot only tell you who’s using what, they can tell you someone started a trial of this yesterday, like they just installed the code. So it’s much more powerful but they are more expensive. That service is called Data Nyze, it’s data, N-Y-Z-E.com, both of those if you’re willing to put down the money are going to be good services to find out who’s using your competitors and for full disclosure, I am a small angel investor in Data Nyze but I have seen and used the interfaces for both of those tools. So thanks for the question Ryan. - See more at: http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-249-f...

[1] http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-249-f...

Thank you for the kind and inspiring words!

You can get a job anytime if you're a good programmer. Give entrepreneurship a shot.

Interesting development. Thanks for pointing out.

20mm AUD / year gross.

For anyone looking to diy something similar without bothering with the hassle of running a crawler, check out http://commoncrawl.org

The article mentions enough figures that you can derive the figure yourself. 2-3k paying customers, plans are $300-1k/mo and the plan breakdown is hinted at.

How do you get from "unexplained" to "made up"?

True. I just figured it was unnecessarily conservative. He said, "Overheads would be significant," which I don't think is actually true. I agree with the general principle that it's a lot of money.

My experience has been different I guess. I run a small web-based business serving around 50,000 visitors a day. We don't do anything particularly bandwidth-intensive, but we spend less than $500/month on our server and bandwidth.

This guy's traffic would be considerably lower than ours I would think. Most of his resources are going to be going to the scanning effort. But that can run at a continuous rate around the clock, which is the most efficient way to utilize resources. And it doesn't need to be done completely quickly: it looks like he'd be fine completing a full scan in under a month. That shouldn't require particularly high-powered hardware.

So, I can't imagine this guy could possibly be spending more then $100k/month on hosting. Honestly I would be surprised if it was more than $10k. I was just trying to clear up what I saw as a misconception.

The number comes from the article author: https://twitter.com/StartupDailyANZ/status/64975823165332275...

basic income

yes.

socialism

no.

.. What used to take 100s of employees to accomplish can be done with a handful, and it's only going to get worse

IMHO this means we can do more now, so it's going to get _better_

I'm assuming GP is talking about "pictures", and not any of the other things Kodak does. It makes for a very stimulating sentence, though!

There's a huge difference between acquired wealth and inherited wealth. Don't consider luck is the only way to success just because it was yours.

Socialism might give you good feelings, but might as well make it harder for those who were not lucky like you and count on hard work instead.

That's inequality, one I'm more concerned with.

Absurd cherry picking of random companies. Vast majority of big enterprises employee thousands of people. The fact that, thanks to technology, one person can single-handedly create enormous value is a huge boon for society. And anyway these kinds of ventures support the jobs and business models of their customers.

The fact that the cost of starting a business and reaching a huge audience is now a tiny fraction of what it used to be benefits us all - now we all have opportunities that were impossible before.

Far from creating inequality technology is actually proving a huge leveller: look at how much wealth has been created in the developing world over the last couple of decades.

It is ironic that capitalism is in fact driving what you claim to desire: a fairer redistribution of wealth. That it's happening at a global level however, rather than confined to nation states, means that you, as a (presumably) US citizen, are losing out to the competition overseas. But what's wrong with that? Isn't that the socialist ideal - everybody equal?

Or is wealth redistribution only fair when it's people richer than you that have to share?

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...

There is definitely a legal way to send these emails in the USA.

Man, why would they do that? Sure-fire way to not get a recurring donation.

I can corroborate that: there's one high profile charity in Australia that refuses to remove me from their mailing lists (both email & postal), despite numerous unsubscribe requests (both through their software & direct requests). It's incredibly short-sighted. I have donated literally 100x as much to other charities that respect my requests, and I will never support that one charity again.

I'm in Australia, and this is exactly the case. Unfortunately 99% of the emails are from off-shore providers that don't give a damn about these rules. I've setup Thunderbird rules that manage to filter out most of them without me seeing them.

HN has become a tough crowd to please these days...

If folks demand a complete answer from me, then here is the super dull list of reasons I use BuiltWith:

1. I have clients that ask me to check out XY thing on a competitor site. A lot. 2. I'm curious about tools other people use so I can learn the tech and recommend for clients 3. When bidding on a project I need to check what platform it's on 4. Doing market research for a side project (assessing e-commerce sites in a particular niche)

That's it. Mundane, non-nefarious reasons.

Its not legally spam to send one on one b2b emails to prospects. The people using this successfully are writing custom emails using templates...a combo of buzzstream and builtwith with a thoughtful email sequence is not only legal, but surprisingly effective.

My opinion,FTW https://wappalyzer.com - same from AU

This. Also, in the age of webapps, I'm starting to find pieces of it becoming more unreliable. I tried to search what tech a company I'm thinking of applying for is using, and because the app itself is behind a login page it had no idea what JS framework was being used.

His business stops and someone else fills the void left by the company.

I'm taking a class on Business - being a programmer and it was a hard one to wrap my head around. Another common fallacy is 'Build and they will come'.

Yes, you can do it. But it doesn't mean that someone will pay for that

Apparently people are paying $1.2M/mo for that, so actually it kind of does mean that people will pay for it.

not a paying customer. Haven't tried those other tools.

I never used the site before. Tried it (checked for Zotonic) and I have to say the default color choice for the two lines on the chart is not very color blind friendly. It's not impossible but very hard for me to tell apart (black and some medium darkish blue). [in case the owner of the site reads HN which he very likely does]

He seems to be very down-to-earth: http://garybrewer.com/

But what about the bus factor?

Ask HN: Can anyone explain how does the underlying technology of a service like BuiltWith is working? I know reading source code and looking for JavaScript libraries is easy, but is that all there is to it?

I'm a co-founder of BuiltWith. It's doing well but not $1.2M revenue per month. Full details here: https://medium.com/@andrewjrogers/the-story-of-builtwith-e3b...