You saw a very cool website, and while you were amazed, you also had some questions in your mind:
What technology is used to implement this website?
Australian guy Gary Brewer also had a similar problem, but he went a step further and created a website BuildWith. The core is very simple and tells you what technology a website was created using.
However, I never imagined that such a simple idea could actually generate an income of 14 million US dollars per year .
What’s even more surprising is that this company called BuildWith has no sales team, no customer support, and no engineers—except for founder Gary.
1
"Snooping" into the source code
Gary developed BuildWith purely by chance. He attended an entrepreneurial exchange meeting in 2006 and was eager to start a business. He developed several small tools, but they all failed.
One day, while he was browsing the web boredly, trying to get some inspiration from others, his technical error occurred again, and he couldn't help but open the source code of those websites to see what framework, language and technology these websites were written in. of.
PHP？Java？.NET? Windows? Linux ?
From the clues left in the source code of the web page, Gary excitedly deduced that this website was made in Java, and that one used PHP...
Suddenly he realized, why not make a website and automate this thing?
This will be very interesting!
As soon as he got going, Gary began to build his own crawler tools and databases, and began to study how to associate some "snippets" of web page source code with specific technologies.
This is not easy, because there are many technologies used on websites, and it is very technically challenging to find and identify them just through the source code of the web page.
The more technical challenges there are, the more excited Gary becomes. This is his interest!
In July 2007, the BuildWith website was officially launched.
The novel function quickly attracted everyone's attention, and it ranked first on the famous social sharing website Digg.
Even more fortunately, Gary met Raymond King, the founder of AboutUs, an open website that contains information on millions of company websites.
Raymond King liked Gray's BuildWith so much that he added a BuildWith link to each company's entry so that viewers could see what technology those company websites were built with.
Students who are familiar with the Google search engine can immediately think of what this means. Millions of web pages now point to BuildWith. As a result, BuildWith's ranking in the search results has skyrocketed, and BuildWith has grown crazily since then.
2
Part-time income $40,000 per month
BuildWith is completely Gary's interest. For four consecutive years, he worked on the website every night, constantly improving old functions and adding new ones. He never thought of commercialization in his mind, and he didn't think it could be done. make money.
But keen users quickly noticed the commercial value of BuildWith. One company developed a product to compete with MailChimp (an email marketing platform) and wanted to find potential customers, so it contacted Gary:
Can you help me find which websites are using MailChimp (an email marketing platform)? I'm willing to pay you!
Similar requirements include:
Can you give me a list of who is using WordPress in Australia? I'm willing to pay.
The money was delivered to his door, and Gary couldn't miss it.
So he began to provide such value-added services and easily earned US$40,000 a month.
At the same time, he was still working at a company, and someone suggested that he quit his day job and develop BuildWith full-time.
But the "conservative" Gary feels that the stability of BuildWith's income is still uncertain, and his current boss is quite good and he is very dependent on him. If he leaves, he will always feel embarrassed.
3
Maverick
As time goes by, BuildWith's influence grows. Customers find that using BuildWith can indeed make money for themselves, so they invest more money to purchase services from Gary.
Although the number of customers continues to increase, Gary insists on not using such things as customer service systems and CRM systems. He has noticed a trend: the more emails from customers, the lower the possibility of purchase conversion.
Really good customers don’t send emails, they buy directly!
For customers who do have questions, Gary answers within about 10 seconds with a link to his knowledge base.
If someone encounters a problem that they have never encountered before, Gary will write an article or make a 20-second short video to provide a solution. You can refer to this video for similar problems in the future.
Gary is working hard to automate all of BuildWith's work so that no employees are needed!
Gary was naturally favored by venture capital investors. During the hottest period, he received calls every week, but Gary ignored them and said it was a waste of time. He would rather develop new features.
This dogmatic persistence has made BuildWith a huge success:
Annual revenue reached $14 million
There are 2 million PVs per month. What’s even more impressive is that nearly 60% of the PVs are users typing the URL of BuildWith directly in the browser, and 36% are from searches, but there is no paid keyword.
4
A little inspiration
After reading the story of BuildWith, you may think: This website is not difficult, I can do this job too.
Yes, although there is an element of luck, the biggest inspiration BuildWith gives to programmers is that individual programmers can also make a lot of money using their own skills.
Market opportunities have always existed, the key is to dig them out and develop them at the right time.
Follow your interests, try more, and persist, maybe you will be the next lucky person!
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