$14 Million a Year Website with Zero Employees

BuiltWith is an app that reveals the technologies used by any website 👀

Just enter a URL and it will tell you the exact frameworks, analytics tools, advertising platforms etc. that the site uses. (Here’s the info for ebizfacts.com)

According to a recent profile, this simple idea turned into a hugely successful business for founder Gary Brewer…

• $14 million in annual recurring revenue 💰
• 2 million monthly pageviews, all organic traffic
• Zero employees

Gary attended a startup conference in Sydney way back in 2006 and had two big takeaways…

1. Anyone can start a business
2. He disliked corporate politics and pitching products

Gary spent the next few months building small side projects while working a full-time job. Though the projects ultimately failed, he enjoyed the experience.

While researching ideas, Gary would analyze other websites by looking at their source code. He noticed he could identify certain technologies based on the code 🧐

This sparked the idea for BuiltWith: a site that would reveal the tech stack behind any website. The domain was somehow still available, so Gary got to work building his database of web technologies.

He officially launched BuiltWith and immediately got traction 📈

One of the key moments was when Gary met Raymond King of AboutUs, “an internet domain directory containing information about millions of businesses.”

Raymond loved the idea and added BuiltWith links to every website profile on his site. This resulted in millions of backlinks and growth in traffic 🚀

The free version of BuiltWith shows what tech your competitors use and the paid version is a database of potential customers and leads. You can find every website using specific keywords, tech, location, spending, etc.

For example, a company with a WordPress alternative can use BuiltWith to identify sites using WordPress and pitch them 😎

This is likely why over 50% of BuiltWith’s traffic is direct: companies go straight there to gain a competitive advantage.

In the early 2010s, Andrew Rogers came on as co-founder.

He writes….

I met a very softly spoken Gary Brewer. He was a solo founder that still had a full time job, BuiltWith was a side project that he’d worked on all evening…

I only really needed one simple question answered, were people paying….

…..turns out he had revenue, $40k/month. I had to check this a few times, not $4k, $40k. I suggested he quit his day job and go full time but he was nervous about how stable the revenue would prove to be and he had a good boss that relied on him who he felt a sense of obligation to.

Crazy to me that Gary was earning $40k/month and was still nervous about quitting his day job 🙈

Anyway, Andrew went on to handle the sales side of business and noted…

I was trying to implement systems for a 50 person company on a 1 person business. We didn’t need a CRM to track leads or sales. Good customers didn’t email, they just bought. After 3-4 emails, the probability of a sale dropped to zero.

In the end…

Andrew eventually left the company while remaining as an advisor. And BuiltWith is now completely run by Gary (with some content folks for the blog)

No sales team, no customer support, no engineers.

It’s a completely automated and fully functional business generating tens of millions of dollars a year.