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Text | Jin Lei Pine
Source: Qubit
There is only one person in the whole company, who can earn more than 14 million US dollars (more than 100 million yuan) every year.
This is not a fantasy, but a real thing that happened in real life.
The protagonist of the story is called Gary Brewer (referred to as “Gai Ge”), and the reason why he can attract money so fiercely is the website BuiltWith that he founded.
This website is also quite magical. One of the main things it does is to pick up what technologies other people’s websites use.
Many friends must sigh with emotion: “This is okay???”
Yes, it’s true, and Ge Ge’s website now has 2 million page views per month…
Make money by grilling technology
After we open Ge Ge’s website, a few bright big characters will come into view:
Discover what technology the website was created with.
Then enter “medium.com” (for example
, click “Find”, we can get a long list of technologies:
Based on this list, we can pinpoint the specific technology behind the Medium website, such as:
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A/B testing: using Optimizely
-
Search: using Algolia
-
Marketing Automation: Using ConvertKit
-
…
(There are so many technical objects involved, so I won’t list them one by one.)
So at this point, some friends have to ask: “How can you make money after picking up the technology?”
good question.
Ge Ge is actually playing with a set of “power of big data”.
The number of technologies that BuiltWith can detect has exceeded 61,105, and the number of websites covered worldwide is even more staggering – 673 million!
With such a huge amount of data in hand, Ge Ge can do more things.
For example, Ge Ge has made a “Internet Technology Development Trend”, you can view the technology trend data from 2000 to the present.
Taking “popular network technologies on Chinese websites” as an example, this page covers 28 sub-items including “marketing automation”, “e-commerce hosting solutions”, and “enterprise website management systems”.
Geiger will rank each technology used:
For example, in “Marketing Automation”, BuiltWith shows that the technology most used by Chinese websites comes from Baomitu.
Just click on it, and you can see exactly which sites are in use.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of BuiltWith’s capabilities.
With this data from Geiger, you can also mine more valuable information, such as showing which websites use shopping carts, analytics, hosting, etc.; filter by location, traffic, vertical, etc.
In this way, it is possible to tap potential customers, and then have a more comprehensive and thorough understanding and analysis of the market.
It is precisely because Ge Ge has created many ways to play with the data in his hands. If you search the Internet, you can see that many people are using the data of BuiltWith to make things happen:
And it is not only useful for market analysis, even Harvard, MIT and other universities will use Geiger’s data when doing academic research.
Finally, let’s talk about the main point – the issue of profitability.
While providing data and services, Geige also launched a membership system, with monthly fees ranging from $295 (about 2,130 yuan) to $995 (about 7,186 yuan).
If you buy a membership on an annual basis, the price will range from 21,300 yuan to 71,860 yuan.
And as we said just now, Ge Ge is fighting alone, which saves a lot of expenses such as “opening wages”.
Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why Ge Ge can attract so much money in a year.
…
So the next question is, how did Ge Ge think of this business?
Inspired by chance
Ge Ge created BuiltWith, and the process was quite interesting.
It all started in 2006, when Geiger attended an entrepreneurial conference in Sydney. It was at this conference that he understood two things:
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Anyone can start a business;
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He doesn’t like to deal with corporate systems and doesn’t like to sell products.
So in the next few months, Geiger tried to develop a variety of tools and products in his spare time. Although they all ended in failure, he still enjoyed the whole development process.
I have to insert a sentence here. As a senior programmer, his way of finding inspiration is naturally to check the source code of other websites.
(Finally the emperor pays off)
When Geiger was trying to find his next idea after several failures, he stumbled across a piece of code unique to Java, and he speculated that this website was built using this technology.
At this time, a sense of spirit (shang) suddenly appeared!
Wouldn’t it be cool to know what exact technologies each website uses?
And no similar idea existed at that time, and this field was still blank and in a state of being developed.
So Ge Ge started his “entrepreneurship” journey.
Web scraping, creating technical databases, translating code into specific technologies…
So BuiltWith was born, and it didn’t take long for the first official release, and it gained traffic immediately.
At the same time, Geiger didn’t forget to promote himself, publishing an exclusive report on the creation of his BuiltWith via ReadWriteWeb.
(The effect was not bad), and it dominated the list of the most popular social sharing sites at that time.
This is just a small fire, and BuiltWith is still after this.
By chance, Geiger and AboutUs founder Raymond King met.
AboutUs is an Internet domain name directory that contains millions of corporate information
After Ge Ge showed Ray BuiltWith, the two hit it off.
A BuiltWith.com link was then added to each record in the AboutUs index, providing BuiltWith information about each business.
At the same time, these tens of thousands of backlinks have brought a huge amount of traffic to BuiltWith.
(Go on the road, go on the road)
Ge Ge is responsible for the core business alone
However, many netizens should be curious, “What is this person’s company like, can it work?”
Ge Ge told us with practical actions, it really can! Not only can, but also earn more than one billion a year.
In fact, in addition to Ge Ge, BuiltWith had a previous co-founder: Andrew Rogers, and the current co-founder on the official website still has his name.
However, after they “partnered for a period of time”, Ge Ge felt that the company was better alone.
Andrew became the co-founder of BuiltWith in early 2010, and before that, managed an old startup with more than 50 people.
Because Andrew was very interested in BuiltWith, he persuaded Geiger to let him join. He wanted to rely on his experience to strengthen BuiltWith and turn it into a more mature system.
His ideal plan is like this: add a sales system, set up a customer relationship management system to track leads, and set various indicators.
But Andrew gradually realized that these so-called “systematic operation management” were of no use to BuiltWith.
As mentioned earlier, the main job of BuiltWith is to dig up the technology stacks used by various companies. Ge Ge believes that its users come naturally, that is to say, if there is a need, buy it, if there is no need to buy it, those tedious marketing processes Naturally you can save.
In this way, Geiger can handle the rest of the workload by himself. He has three positions of founder, chief developer and customer support team, and he can handle it with ease.
He allocates specific hours of the day for specific tasks, and if he encounters specific troubles, he solves it all at once.
For example, Geiger will make a 20s video tutorial to help a few customers who have questions answer their questions.
Another example is that it takes a lot of time to deal with unsubscribing. Although the focus was more on how to prevent people from unsubscribing, now he resets it to make it easier to unsubscribe:
That way I have less work to do and more time for more fun things like making new tools.
That is to say, although BuiltWith does not have a decent team, it has been automated and does not need any sales team, engineers, etc.
In the end Andrew (wittily) left, though he remained in the advisory role.
It is worth mentioning that before Andrew asked to become a co-founder, Geiger had a full-time job, and he used his spare time to run BuiltWith.
After Andrew joined, Ge Ge quit his original job and devoted himself to BuiltWith.
However, some people suspect that Ge Ge’s “one-person company” is just a publicity stunt:
If he has no other employees, why does he have a bunch of computers and desks? Will he switch from one seat to another?
(Here, this is the picture)
In fact, the “one-person company” mentioned here needs to add a qualifier: core business.
In addition to the core business, there will be a few employees who handle things Gego doesn’t like much, such as accounting and marketing.
One More Thing
Regarding the fact that Ge Ge earns more than 100 million yuan per year for one company, many netizens directly call it awesome!
Some netizens also tested their own website with BuiltWith:
It even correctly detected that I used Shutterstock footage.
However, some netizens said that Ge Ge is catching up with a good time, when software tools were hot:
But it’s been great to be able to hold on to it so far.
In fact, in addition to BuiltWith, Ge Ge has also come up with three tools.
In the first 3 months of creating BuiltWith, Geiger created GENNIT, an online web code generation tool with the aim of generating high-quality manageable code for online designers’ projects.
After creating BuiltWith, Ge Ge didn’t have any spare time, and successively came up with Twitlinks and TwitTruth, which were used to aggregate celebrity accounts and technology news links (but they were closed in 2012).
Reference link:
[1] https://ift.tt/FCsXH7Y
[2] https://ift.tt/9ZugASt
[3] https://ift.tt/FcjtSyI
[4] https://ift.tt/MG7awU3
[5] https://ift.tt/BUuYJyG
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