A lot of the stuff is automated at this point. Datasets are pulled automatically and website scrapers have been built for 15+ years.

Gary Brewer probably just maintains the system by himself these days.

With 0 employees, why have the office with all the desks in the background in the picture at the top of the page.

It’s pretty clear there are other people doing something, whether they are called “employees” or not.

The photo at the top is almost 10 years old, and was from when BW still had a cofounder. It doesn't any more. He probably doesn't have that office any more.

Dude you are doing a lot of PR work in this thread

That's likely because this is a blast from the past.

Someone mentioned [0] his HN handle up-thread [1] and linked to his complaint in 2015 about spam from BuiltWith [2] where the founder responded with an apology and a way to remove his site from their index.

Once I understood that value of BuiltWith myself, I absolutely felt the same way about Dan's characterisation of BuiltWith as "brilliantly simple and profitable".

0: He likely found about via an email notification from a neat tool he made for just this purpose http://hnreplies.com

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33185733

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10316060

Yeah I'm wondering why Dan is replying to so many of these comments. I don't get it :P

Not sure why you'd think that. I right clicked on the photo and did an image search which showed it's from an interview in 2013.

it's actually very much feasible nowadays with all the cloud computing solutions. Cheap too. You don't need an army of developers for maintenance, a single system architect can manage huge projects if designed correctly.

Gary does that.

0 employees doesn’t mean 0 contractors or 0 agencies on contract.

The article also actually mentions that some people are hired to write content for the blog.

Sure they may just be contractors, but at that point it seems not impressive to have "0 employees".