Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo

Episode Date: July 6, 2025

Maor Shlomo is the founder of Base44, an AI-powered app builder that he bootstrapped to an over $80 million acquisition by Wix in just six months. As a solo founder (with severe ADHD), he hit $1 million ARR just three weeks after launch and grew the product to more than 400,000 users, all while navigating two wars in Israel and never raising a dollar of outside funding.What you’ll learn:1. The growth playbook that took Base44 from three friends to 400,000 users without spending any money on marketing2. How he hasn’t written a single line of front-end code in three months—and how to structure your code repository to make it easier for AI to write your code3. His AI productivity stack that allowed him to compete against heavily funded competitors4. Why being a solo founder in AI might be the ultimate advantage (and the wedding story that almost killed the business)5. The story of signing the $80M acquisition deal while war broke out with Iran6. How to identify when to sell vs. stay independent (and why Maor chose acquisition despite being highly profitable)7. The counterintuitive product decision that tripled activation by removing a “helpful” feature8. How building in public on LinkedIn drove more growth than any paid channel—Brought to you by:Sauce—Turn customer pain into product revenue: https://sauce.app/lennyDscout—The UX platform to capture insights at every stage: from ideation to production: https://www.dscout.com/Contentsquare—Create better digital experiences: https://contentsquare.com/lenny/—Transcript: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-base44-bootstrapped-startup-success-story-maor-shlomo—My biggest takeaways (for paid newsletter subscribers): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/i/167384119/my-biggest-takeaways-from-this-conversation—Where to find Maor Shlomo:• X: https://x.com/ms_base44• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maor-shlomo-1088b4144/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Maor and Base44(08:16) The origin story: how Base44 came to be(14:55) Bootstrapping and solo founding: challenges and insights(22:52) Productivity hacks and tech stack for solo founders(27:23) How to get started using Base44(28:47) Thoughts on raising money(34:05) Distribution in the age of AI(36:09) Ambition and goals(40:05) Growth strategies: from first users to thousands(51:32) Building in public(57:42) The solo founder journey(01:00:23) Community support(01:03:23) Hackathons and partnerships(01:06:42) The importance of velocity in product development(01:08:20) Technical stack and infrastructure insights(01:15:24) Activation lessons(01:18:19) The acquisition journey with Wix(01:25:14) Final thoughts and advice for founders—Referenced:• Base44: https://base44.com/• Retool: https://retool.com/• Tzofim: https://www.israelscouts.org/• Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/• RescueTime: https://www.rescuetime.com/• Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/• Wix: https://www.wix.com/• The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-rise-of-cursor-michael-truell• Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people | Anton Osika (CEO and co-founder): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-lovable-anton-osika• Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-bolt-eric-simons• Behind the product: Replit | Amjad Masad (co-founder and CEO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/behind-the-product-replit-amjad-masad• Everyone’s an engineer now: Inside v0’s mission to create a hundred million builders | Guillermo Rauch (founder and CEO of Vercel, creators of v0 and Next.js): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/everyones-an-engineer-now-guillermo-rauch• Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com• Yoav Orlev on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoav-orlev-4a044b72• WhatsApp: https://www.whatsapp.com/• Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/• Google: https://about.google/• MongoDB: https://www.mongodb.com/• Deloitte: https://www.deloitte.com/• Render: Render.com• Claude 4: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-4• Gemini: https://gemini.google.com/app• Cloudflare: https://www.cloudflare.com/—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [e-mail] may be an investor in the companies discussed. To hear more, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com

In six months, you went from zero, basically nothing to selling this company for 80 million plus dollars to weeks. The funny thing is that Base 44 for the first time in my life was not trying to build the biggest thing ever. Me and my girlfriend, we were on the plane. I told her, hey, you know what? If we get to $1.5 million until the end of 2025, we're going to buy a nice car. And we got there in like four weeks. I feel like the journey that you've been on over the last six months is kind of like the dream for a lot of founders. How long were you actually solo?

The first person started a month and a half before the acquisition. I think it's a different ballgame because even if you're solo, you're literally managing teams of AI's writing code. I don't think I've written a single line of HTML or JavaScript in the past three months. You're competing against very well-funded companies, lovable, bold, replet, Versailles. And you get your first 10 users. I started with three users, really close friends.

You got them to sit down with me every other day around the table, and they would use the tool. They will try to build something. It will break. I'll take a look and then just build it for them. I'm not going to try and scale anything before I know that users enjoy it. And the best metric to seeing them enjoying it is that they're starting to share it with someone. Today, my guest is Mayor Shlomo.

This is a unique episode because I almost never have conversations with early stage founders. I made an exception because Mayore's journey is in many ways the dream for a lot of founders. Mayore started a company called Base 44, which essentially, of more advanced vibe coding tool. Six months later, just a few weeks ago, he sold the company for $80 million to Wix. He's a solo founder. It was just him for most of those six months. He never raised any money. He bootstrapped it and built it purely off profits. When he launched it on Product Hunt, it got so much love that the Product Hunt algorithm thought that it was bots when it was really just people from all over the world wanting to support the product.

In our conversation, Mayor shares exactly how he grew the product from zero to 10 to 100 to hundreds of thousands of users, his tech stack that allowed him to move so fast, tools that he uses to be super productive as a sole founder with severe ADHD, also the super important insight that everyone needs to hear about how he came up with the idea and then refine the idea, also just a bunch of common growth tactics that he tried that didn't work for him, and some key advice for anyone looking to start their own bootstrapped company. A big thank you to Noam Segal and Amir Klein for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.

With that, I bring you Mayor Shlomo. This episode is brought to you by Sauce. The way teams turn feedback into product impact is stuck in the past. Vague reports, static taxonomies, unactionable insights that don't move business metrics. The result, turn, lost deals, misgrowth. Sauce is the AI product co-pilot that helps CPO's and product teams uncover business impact and act faster. It listens to your sales calls, support tickets, churn reasons, and lost deal, surfacing the biggest product issues and opportunities in real time. It then routes them to the right teams to turn signals into PRDs, prototypes, and even code that drives revenue retention and adoption.

That's why WhatNot, LinkTree, Incidentio, and Zip use Sauce. One enterprise uncovered a product app that unlocked $16 million AARR, another caught a spiking issue and prevented millions in churn. You can too at sauce.app slash Lenny. Sauce built for AI product teams. Don't get left behind. This episode is brought to you by Descout. Design teams today are expected to move fast, but also to get it right. That's where Descout comes in.

Descout is the all-in-one research platform built for modern product and design teams. Whether you're running usability tests, interviews, surveys, or in the wild fieldwork, D-Skot makes it easy to connect with real users and get real insights, fast. You can even test your Figma prototypes directly inside the platform. No juggling tools, no chasing ghost participants. And with the industry's most trusted panel plus AI-powered analysis, your team gets clarity and confidence to build better without slowing down. So if you're ready to streamline your research, speed of decisions, and design with impact, heads at D-S-cout.com to learn more. That's dsc-o-u-t-com. The answers you need to move confidently.

Mayor, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. I am so excited to do that. Thank you for having me, Lenny. It's my pleasure. I don't actually do conversations like this often with early stage founders, but I'm really excited to be doing this because I feel like the journey that you've been on over the last six months is kind of like the dream for a lot of founders,

especially founders that don't want to build massive teams, that don't want to raise a ton of money. Basically, the journey you've been on is build a product. People loved it. It grew like crazy. You didn't raise any money. You sold it for $80 million. We'll talk about this six months in. And I know it's not all rainbows and butterflies and this amazing, you know, happy moment to moment all day, but I know it's a lot of hard work. But this is just what a lot of people want to achieve when they start a company. And you're just in the thick of it right now. Like you've just announced your acquisition. So I feel like this is a really unique pointed time

to extract as much wisdom out of your head as possible. Really, that I timed to kind of like to reflect back. Yeah, I think there's going to be many more times. This is a really unique time. Let's start with a couple basics. Just what is Base 44 for folks that aren't super familiar with the product that you built? Base 44 is an AI app building platform, meaning that you're able to use natural language to describe what you want to build, an app, a game, a website, or something like that,

and then have AI coded for you. One of the first ones doing that, I think it's a very, crowded category. But I think Base 44 takes a very different approach, a very opinionated one. And one that users like to call it a battery-included approach, which means that for every app that you build in Base 44, you already have built-in included a database, integrations, user management, analytics, without connecting third-party services or bringing your API keys and so on.

And I think it helps a lot when you're trying to scale a vibe-coded application to be very complex and very functional. And so, yeah, I think for most of the category nowadays, they're doing a fantastic job, one, with building React Web Apps, like Fonten Web Apps. And then when a user needs some backend stuff, they have a great integration with Superbase. Superbase, I think is the most common kind of like thing that most competitors use. And honestly, all of them are doing a great job with the integration, but as the nature of an integration, I think it's potentially slightly less strong than building everything full stack built in. And once we did that, and actually I engineered the endpoints and the SDKs and whatever to work well with LLMs,

I think Base 44 does a really good job with building very complex and functional real-world applications. Okay, I want to talk about the origin story of just like how you even realize that there was an opportunity here. Clearly, it worked out. But before we get there, let me just share a couple of stats about this journey to give people a sense of just how crazy this is and add anything I'm missing. So in six months, you went from zero, basically nothing to selling this company for $80 million plus dollars to Wix. It took you three weeks to hit a million dollars, you bootstrapped this business. I think you put in a few tens of thousands of shekels, not even U.S. dollars. You have something like 400,000. and users right now, your sole founder. There are two different wars involved in the journey. You're based in Israel. So you have to deal with that, and we're going to talk about some of those stories. Any other stats that are worth sharing anything else that's important, high level, before we get into the origin story?

No, I don't think so. I think it's like looking back, it sounds insane, but mostly this is it. Okay. I love that perspective. Okay. So how did this start? There were two things I think that drove me to it. One, my girlfriend needed like a website to capture leaves.

She has like a small business. She's like an artist. And I tried building that with like one of the tools out there for website building, not an AI powered one. And it was such a pain trying to do that. One, kind of like designing with the drag and drop and everything. And then things get messed up in mobile and you try again. And it's like, then how do you manage your data and so?

and in my previous company, we dealt a lot with our limbs. And while I was doing that, I was like, it doesn't make any sense. I know models can write the code to do exactly what I'm trying to do right now, like build a website for my girlfriend or build, like, slightly more complicated

than a website was actually a web app. I know models can do that. They just don't have the right infrastructure to do that. So like, if I set up an infrastructure for like, hey, here, the leads, go to the database. Like, you can write React code and it will serve it, and it would be great from an SEO perspective and so on.

Then I'll notice like, it's going to be super easy and she can do it on her own. And the other trigger, I was volunteering to help with the Scouts organization here in Israel, with like everything that has to do with like a system and software and back office systems that they needed. And back then, like, it's a huge organization, by the way, really huge, like tens of thousands of people. And they have many, as any other organization in the world that we're constantly living at, has many software needs. And so every time they needed to build something, they didn't have any internal devs, you know, any software engineer. So they reach out to other agencies. And agencies usually would quote them like a million bucks just to build something that I knew people could build.

I was, and still, by the way, a huge fan of tools like Retool for like the previous wave of like no code. tools, but then those tools were really more of like low-code tools, right? You still needed to know some JavaScript, something to make them work to have the interaction right. And again, also back then I was like, I know for the software and systems that they want to build, I know it could be done. It's just LLMs can write that and we can really empower the organization to build all the different tools that they want. Just give it the right setting, the right infrastructure so that LLM has access to you a database, maybe to another LLM to build the app on top of AI, to have some user management, to have all those kind of things that it needs, but it can translate

the user needs to actual code. So those two were triggers. Back then, I started a company seven years ago called Explorium, very different than Base 44, very much like enterprise, top-down sales in the data space. very capital heavy, we raised $130 million. I was a CEO for seven years. Then when the October 7th wall broke out, I went to Reserves for like almost a year. And then when I came out, it went to travel the world a bit just to take some time off

and wanted to do what I was like what I liked the most and I haven't had a chance because exploring grew and grew and haven't had a chance for a while to do, which is coding, wanted to get back to building and get my hands dirty. And so I had those, like, given those experiences both with my partner, my girlfriend and also with the scouts, I was like, let's take a shot at it and start the product that I know is going to be very, very fun to build. And I think when you're approaching it this way and, like, not the usual way of, like, let's raise a ton of money and try to own the category.

And I knew I was getting into a very crowded category. I also knew that I have like some different angle and some different take on the category. But when you're approaching you this way, there's not a lot to lose. I think it gives a lot of energy. And that's how Base 44 started. It definitely didn't think it's going to take off so fast. But yep, that's pretty much about it.

Okay, I like that you don't take it for the work you did to help it take off so fast. I'm excited to talk through that. Just first a few maybe takeaways from what you do. just shared of how this idea emerged for folks that are looking for ideas. One is clearly we're solving somebody's real problem, your own problem, helping your girlfriend build this website for her, and then working with the scouts program in Israel, basically building them software. So I think that's a really important takeaway. You weren't just like, hey, maybe this will be useful to someone. It's every real problem. I want to solve it. And nothing out there is good enough.

So I'm going to build it myself. The other is, you said that you're having fun. It feels like that's an important element just like you should enjoy it you shouldn't feel like it's some kind of drag you know what I feel like in like when I was a first timer when I first started my my first company exploring I felt like many smart people told me those two very important truth is like build something that that you would want to use all that you'll actually use and make sure that throughout time you keep doing something that you really like and so when you're first timer or at least for myself when I heard those kind of things, I was like, yeah, those are cliches. Business is always important.

Let's increase revenue. Like, let's close more deals. And I feel like, like, those are, even though it sounds like a cliche, it's so much easier. One, building something that you'll actually use. So I actually tried solving both problems. Like, I was building the product and at the same time developing those two products for my girlfriend for the scout. and later on also for other friends and family

and we'll get to that that's how I got kind of like my first couple of users but super important to build something that you'll use you'll move forward so much faster but also doing something that you love. I think I was the CEO of Explorium for seven years it was such a fantastic experience. It had so many highs and lows

but at some point it grew and it took me too much time to realize that what I really like doing is just building products and scamming products and not necessarily like being a CEO, managing sales, managing HR, managing all those kind of things. And I think that gives a lot of power. Like, it's easier to work very hard when you're doing something you really like. Let's follow that thread and talk about being a solo founder.

I think this is something a lot of founders, like, you know, it's hard to find a co-founder that out of the blue when you have an idea, Y.C. famously, doesn't like solo founders. So I think there's a lot of power in which you've achieved. So let me just ask you, first of all, any, I guess, lessons about being a solo founder that you think would be helpful for other people considering starting a company on their own? And also just how do you stay productive?

How do you get stuff done as a solo founder using AI? One solo founder and specifically bootstripping, it's not for, like, I don't think it's doable for every use case. If you're building like a B2B company, especially if you're like doing a B2 enterprise company, You'll need to hire a salesperson or sales team. You'll need to spend your money on marketing. It's going to be very hard to try to sell to your company when you're on your own.

Nobody knows if the product's going to stay there tomorrow. So I don't think it's like the right setting for every company. I feel like if you're building something that has the potential to be viral or to target the masses, and so it doesn't really matter if you're funded or not. It's just like build a great product that people will share. If you're able to do that and you're able to get out of like the escape velocity of getting to product market feed, then everything is better doing a solo bootstrap than that way around. One else, like even from a pure cold angle of like the financial outcome,

obviously if you're able to bootstrap your business and again get out of like the escape velocity, be profitable to some degree, then you likely generate a financial outcome. that's, I think, for most cases, way better than any other thing. Second is so, not specifically the solo, but the bootstopping thing. Less stressful. Like, you wake up in the morning as like if you're profitable and there's like, I think there's like this term default alive. It's so much easier.

I've done both. And the weight of raising so much fun, even if your investors are great. And my investors were awesome and they were always supportive. or on. But even so, I feel like being bootstrap, like no other money except of yours in the business and the business is growing and profitable, I feel like can keep the energies up. And I think I keep like one thing that I've learned from my previous company is like energy is also important. Usually it's a marathon. For me, it was a sprint. I thought it's going to be a marathon. But you want to do something that you like for years and years. And if you're able to show up

every day, then your chances kind of like goes up immediately. But then there's like a lot of a lot of downside and a lot of stressful moments doing that. One, just keeping the self-core up, keeping the servers up when you're solo, you don't have a DevOps team, you don't have on call, you don't have anything. I think it's really tough. I had a few accidents that really I'm joking about that by saying to my friends. like shorten my life a bit with just like the stress. I had the one funny, now I look at it as a funny moment where I was at my brother's wedding

and we were doing the photo shoots and I was actually the one actually was supposed to also do the ceremony. And then during the photo shoots, I have a friend from MIT calls me up and he's like, hey, somebody hacked into Base 44 and it's like a crypto scam. And you've got to take care of that because people are building apps on top of Base 44 and they're putting the data inside and so on. And I remember hanging up the phone. I was like, okay, I'll take a look at it immediately. I remember hanging up the phone and saying, I know why it's such, it's karma.

I know for a fact it's true. Somebody probably hacked into that because what are the chances that on the only night that I'm not able to open up a laptop and handle that? this is what happens and so I threw out there some excuse and like I have to go and like practice towards a ceremony or something like that

open up a laptop spend two hours to very scary hours of my life it ended up being just the LLM tried using a package called cryptography which is like a no JS

like a JavaScript package has nothing to do with crypto but obviously the user not a technical user saw this error of like, hey, something cryptography or something like that was sure someone like a crypto scam hacked into their app. And so you have a lot of those moments that the whole thing is like you're not able to share it with anyone, share the burden even or the stress or put anyone on top of it and say, hey, you know what? I'm out for today.

Like you handled that in my previous company. My two co-founders, we were really good friends. Like great friends. And even if one of us would mess up, then still would have someone to share it with and run jokes around and just beat up with someone. So when you're solo, it's hard. And then brutal prioritization, which is something you have to do

because you have to keep up the pace of the product. And obviously nowadays with AI and everyone can deal software, like you have to go extremely fast on one side and on the other side figure out marketing along the way and how to do that and every time I remember that every time I had this ceremony where I'd start a day and try to look inside and ask myself what do I need to work on today and what do I want to work on today? So what I want to work on today was always like I want to code. Like that's what I like to do.

Let's improve the product. I know there's like a bug that makes like a noise some of the users. I know there's like the feature that's in my head that I'm saying, oh, competition haven't thought about that. I have to build it. I have to put it out there to be in front of everything. And then it's like, what do I have, like, what do I have to do today? And so at many different stages on base 44's journey, it was,

I know I can improve the product a lot, but I need to do some more marketing. Oh, I need to. like I know this is not the battle lake. I know people are like converting well. They're growing. Retention is looking good. And it's all about just like increasing the audience. Even though I know like I need to like even though I want to work on the product.

And so I think it's like this contact switching is hard. Yeah. And the last piece obviously is I was spending a lot of my time on making sure that my setup, like how I code. higher write content and so on is optimized and everything is automated. So I spent a lot of time thinking and agonizing about how to structure the code repository, for example, so that I can use cursor for backend and base 44 for front end to write like code really fast.

And this was like really important for me to keep kind of like trying to find out new ways of like how to automate and increase the pace of like building solo. Because if you're able to correct that, like smaller teams with a lot of context nowadays can move faster. And the same goes also for marketing, and for other tools where you want to automate as much as you can,

especially when you're solo, because time is going to be like the thing that kills your business if you're not managing it right. Okay, let me follow that thread. That's a really interesting topic. So what is in your stack of product? for yourself and then just that allowed you to build base 44 just like the tech stack of base 44. So you said cursor base 44. What else did you use day to day that helped you be more efficient?

So I have severe ADHD. And so it's it can also be like a superpower, but then you have to like first that the first thing you wanted to like make sure that your workday looks like that you can be focused and that you get like a lot of like deep. work. And so I use a product called Rescue Time, which I really like, but I think there's like a bunch of other products, like shuts down every access to Twitter and LinkedIn and so on. This was really hard because I was starting to like do this building public, which turned out to work pretty well for Base 44.

And so every time one is like, take a look at your post or see kind of like how many likes and like impressions and so on. But then like you can't work on anything else. And so I had this first setup that really allowed me a certain set of software tools that I can use to manage kind of deep work. Cursar has been awesome. Base 44 not only did like the work for the front end side, but also a lot of like the business apps that I used were on top of base 44. So we're at manage users and give credits and and write content. And then like I had this app where I kind of like at the start of the week would write some like high level content ideas.

And then the base 44 app will take it and break it down to kind of like something that sounds more like me for a LinkedIn post. And then I'd approve that. And then it would break it down to like a Twitter post. And so I wrote things that were like really customized to my process and what I wanted to do. which really helped. I think you can do that not only with Baseport before, you can vibe code your way

into productivity tools that really fits what you want to do and what kind of like the process for you looks like. And I had, so again, for example, for my social post and so on, there's like a process that I would follow and maybe no one else would follow that.

And so vibe code, the custom art for that was really helpful. Let me actually ask about that. that is super cool. So you built basically internal tools for yourself using base 44. People can use other tools potentially. So you built one that's like help me craft a tweet. How does that actually look like what is the input that sounds really interesting? So the way that I like to work is like I would have those moments where I would have inspiration for like a piece of content. So the way I grew base 44 probably a different topic

but was a lot around building in public and growing an audience. and speaking to my audience, which were fellow builders. So it was really easy. So a lot of that was like around sharing on like the Base 44 journey. And then I'll have a process that I'll follow. It's like I'll write down before that on a piece of paper like some ideas that I had for like post for throughout the week. Because you want to keep consistency and keep putting like that things out there. And then my process before the app was like I'd go to chat, GPT, I'll write like a very vague kind of like a structure.

a skeleton of a post and tell it like, hey, fix my writing, improve my writing a bit, and then chat GPT will spit out something that was like too far off, too much, like too salesy, not my tone, and then I'll say, no, keep closer to the original and we'll fight about that, and then, like,

remove the emojis, the hyphens look weird, and so on and so, okay, I'll have now my LinkedIn post, and I'll need to generate an image for that, so I'll go to a different tool. And then I'll take this LinkedIn post, and now, okay, I need to, like, put it out also in my Twitter account, So, okay, let's break it down to a Twitter thread. Now, you need to shorten the, like, you need to make some adjustments to the content.

And so I've taken this entire process, which I think was like what was working for me, and just vibe-coded it up around it to help me speed it up. And then made sure that the LLM inside the app was using my own tone of voice and was saving the previous posts to understand how it looks like, like what are the posts that I really like that I've written beforehand, so that in the next post it will speak just like me. This might be a good plug for Base44. So like say someone to go to Base44.com and try this out.

What would be a prompt you'd suggest? Like how they get started building a tool like this? Usually what I'll do is I'll write down. I think LLMs nowadays do a very good job with like Start Vague. It's going to build the skeleton for what you need. And Base 44 does a good job with us, like understanding at least the big pieces. Okay, there's going to be an LLM writing the content is going to be this and that. And so you don't have to like write the entire spec.

It's just like something like, hey, I want to build my own content generation, AI powered tool. Here's my process currently. And my process is doing this. And then LinkedIn and then Twitter write something to support that. And then from their iterate. And also something that I really like with the entire category. Again, not only Base 44.

I feel like there's tons of tools doing a great job. But something I really like in Base 44 is that like you can, because it's really easy to change the software, it's like you get this adaptive software as you improve your processes or maybe your processes change it's like you adapt it so like Base 44 got acquired by weeks

two weeks ago and so now the process of like putting content out looks a bit different and so with just two prompts like you change it to support your new process which is really fun. That's a cool phrase, adaptive software. I heard malleable software

is another way to describe this. I want to talk about growth but a couple more things real quick. this idea of bootstrapping. I'm curious. So essentially you're competing against very well-funded companies, lovable, bolt, replet, V-Zero, Versal, Cursor, raised, I don't know, a bazillion dollars at this point. I know you're not competing with Cursor directly. If you weren't going to be acquired by Wix, did you think, did you plan on raising money? Do you think you had a chance staying bootstrap, competing against the folks that everyone's, you know, the more popular products today?

Base 44 was like very profitable much more than what I thought so even if like even if I wasn't getting acquired I thought like I can make put money out of that it ended up like I remember we

I had like a very failed product hunt lunch at like mid-January and then started writing some like started building in public at around start of February and that's where he took off and then started like I think first dollar or like the

the first 10 or 100 bucks were towards March. And then in May, I already did close to 200k in profit. And so I think either way there was like a room to compete. And even though it was small, I was seeing that the users that come to me stick, like that come to Base 44, stick with Base 44, even though they're very familiar with like,

the rest of the competition. The challenge was obviously making as much noise as the other folks. So you can see like the other vibe coding tools doing like a million dollars, hackathons and so on doing an awesome job on growth, really. But I didn't have the resources. So I tried finding ways to fight the fight. I think we had a very successful hackathon for good, which turned out to be a great growth engine.

and also did good in the world, which is like we had 3,000 teams just building some great, do-good apps. But also, to be very honest, I think part of the reason to get acquired is because this market has been moving so fast, faster than anything I've seen,

faster than what I thought is going to move. And at some point, I figure it's going to be, like, you see Base 44 grows and you start thinking, hey, this can really help people with their lives. Like this is like one of those software categories that I'm saying that I'm very not objective, but I feel like can really move the needle for a lot of people. I've been seeing people build like fantastic, awesome things.

And so I was like, let's go for the big one. Let's try and actually build some global scale, maybe lead the category, maybe win it. And I felt like the best chances to do that is to partner up with weeks. There's like plenty of reasons to do that. We can touch on that later. but same DNA, same customer base, like they know what they're doing, they're seeing, and obviously, like, very good connection with the entire management team over there. And so I feel like the acquisition, again, being very honest, I felt like it's going to be

a financial success either way, but the acquisition is like taking a stance and saying, you know what, let's play in the big league and let's punch down, not only punch up when fighting in this very crowded space. And that's part of the reason why you get acquired. That was really insightful. So part of what I'm hearing is you could have stayed independent and made a really good income and built a really good business. At least for a while, who knows what would have happened long term.

But if as a solopreneur, as someone that's never raised money, you can make significant income doing something like this in a crowded space if you have something that people love that didn't have people love. So I think that's a really interesting insight. Like it's okay if there's a bazillion dollars in funding going to competitors. There's a big market here. Yeah, I think it's a bit different ballgame right now. I was like I was scared many times.

Like I thought how am I going to the fight? Those companies are won some of the fastest growing companies ever. Again, they're like great teams and very well funded and a lot of money being poured into. But then like throughout time I saw that I'm able to keep the pace if not even have the like a faster pace and have like a different angle and and it's not changing over time so like nobody's like and so I think it's a different ballgame because even like if you're very a very small till or even if you're solo like you're you're literally managing like teams of AI's like writing code I don't think I've written a single line of like HTML or JavaScript in the past

three months but still like the base 44 font end changes a lot because AI writes that so yeah if you have an interesting angle and you're able to move fast, I feel like money and funding is not necessarily the factor to win a category. And that's going to be like, and that's going to change even more drastically in future. As LLMs get better, it's like people, like 10 X engineers would have way more impact. They're going to be 100x engineers because they're able to manage ILMs

and it's not necessarily the team size, no, the funding that would be able to win you a category. What you just heard is amazing that you haven't written any, you said JavaScript HTML in three months, which is half the lifetime of this company, which sold for $80 million and more potentially. It feels like now the big things you got to get right is kind of like at the beginning of figuring out what problems to solve and being really good at understanding where the gaps are. And then it's distribution, marketing, getting people to be aware that you exist and give you a shot. Yeah. And even distribution, I'm still learning that. It's like even distribution, nowadays, it's very different. And also in favor of like the solo, not necessarily the solo,

but not necessarily that you're going to pull a lot of money on paid campaigns. Like a base 44 group with close to zero marketing budget. I spent like $2,000 on an influencer post that didn't really bring anything and then tried paid for like a couple of thousands of bucks. Didn't really work. And so everything was like organically and building public. And so even this is very different. But yeah, if you have an interesting take on a domain, Base 44's first user was one of my best friends. Like, we grew up together.

And up to a few months ago, he was a restaurant manager. And then he left and started like a SaaS company for managing invoices for restaurants. So this is a guy that has both distribution. Obviously, this is very local, like software and company. But has distributions, like has those connections. has those connections, but has a very deep domain knowledge. And now that, like, the technical, he has no, like, human coding are, like, very different

in very different places. And so I think if, like, domain knowledge become, or domain expertise and some, again, interesting take on a domain or a product or a category becomes, like, a key thing. And then distribution, yeah, that's a hard one to get, but also all that's changing a lot. Yeah, and I love that you did it with no funding. The other thought here as you were talking is it feels like you could have kept doing this and made money and lived a great life, but there's this question of how ambitious do you want to be.

I've gone through this myself where I was like, oh, this newsletter is I'm making a living off this writing one email a week. I could live really well just doing this. But then I'm like, oh, why not do a podcast? Why not do another podcast? Why not do some other stuff? And the reason I do that is it just like it's kept boring to do something the same way forever. and there's this opportunity that's out there.

I'm like, I should do that. And I feel like some people are on it. I just don't need that. I'm good. I'm going to live in, I don't know, DGN just code and make 100, 300, 500K a year from this thing. But I feel like folks like you, like there's more ambition.

And one way is raise a bunch of money, another sell to a company that has a platform that you can build on. Yeah. I emphasize with this a lot, but the funny thing is that like base 44 for the first time in my life was not trying to build the biggest thing

ever. So I remember like when I started Explorium my previous company, I was so like so hung up on like, let's raise the most amount of money in the least amount of time. I remember that I showed like, remember that I kept looking like, hey, Explorium raised $100 million before Snowflake. This is insane. This is amazing and so on. And I did that for seven years. And I think Bay 34 is the first time. that like I stopped and said, you know what, I just want to go back to do what I really love, which is just building a product. I don't care if it, like, if it wins the category or not. I don't care if it's going to become really big or not. I remember when we, when me and my girlfriend got back from like the trip to Asia and we were on the plane, I told her, hey, you know what? If we get to $1.5 million, I don't remember why I said exactly this number.

So if we get to $1.5 million in the error until the end of 2025, we're going to buy a nice car. And we got there in like four weeks. And so it was the first time of like saying let's not try and build the biggest thing. Let's just do something I really like and let's just build a product that I'm going to enjoy building. But then at some point it got to be very, very successful. I think it comes with like once you're seeing success and you think like true positive impact on people, and you're saying, okay, you know what, let's go for the, like, let's play in the big league and try to scale it. That so aligns with my journey.

Similarly, I'm just going to do a newsletter. Life's going to be great. I'm not going to build. I call it my anti-empirate. I don't want to build anything big. I'm just going to keep a chill. Project chill, project before getting a real job. That's what I called it.

And I think that is a really big insight. Some of the best stuff comes from not putting a bunch of pressure on yourself trying to build something huge. And just following a poll, following your interests, following just that insight you have, ends up being some of the best ideas come out of that and the biggest ideas. I love it. I get it with that, yeah. This episode is brought to you by Content Square,

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Content Square powers better customer journeys across 1.3 million websites and apps. Discover the insights you've been missing at Contentsquare.com slash lenin. Let's talk about growth. So here's what I'm going to do. I want to talk through just how you got the first users of Base 44. So I'm thinking maybe how'd you get like the first 10 users?

How'd you get the first 100 users? How'd you get the first 1,000 users? What are the levers used there? What are the tactics? So let's start with 10. How did you get your first 10 users? Just begging people close to me that I feel like that I have really good connections with. to use it, I feel like there's no other way.

Maybe there are other ways, but again, I was very new to like B2C, like to consumerish type of product. And so I grabbed, well, I started with even three users, like really close friends. Two of them back at the time, I caught them in like a part of their life where they were unemployed. So I was like, hey, why don't you try build a SaaS business or something like that? and so three really close friends where somehow I got them to sit down with me every other day

around the table and they would use the tool they will try to build something it will break I'll take a look at the logs I'll go back to my computer try to change it push into production and then just build it for them I feel like plenty of people are lucky to find

maybe a method that consistently works for your like 10, 100, 100, 1,000 users and then from there. But I try to look at it as like milestones. And so first I was like, I'm not going to try and scale anything before I know that users enjoy it. And the best metric to seeing them enjoying it or at least making value out of it, even if they're not enjoying because there are plenty of bugs and slowness and so on, is that they're

starting to share it with someone. So I haven't invested anything in marketing before I felt like, okay, for the first three or five or ten friends, at some point they started sharing it with their friends. Like you'd see, okay, there's like one new users today and then two new users today and so on. So once it started happening, even on very low percentages, because Base 44 turned out later in its journey to be very viral. But back then it was like an okay product. people loved it and or liked it and started sharing it with that. And so once I started seeing that this works and we got to like 10 users, where all my friends and then the 11th user or something like that starts seeing people

that don't really know me, that's why I knew, okay, now it's time to invest in marketing or try to launch this thing or try to get more people to use it. Because if you try to do it beforehand, I feel like you're going to waste a lot of time and resources on just like having a very revolving door. Like you get users in and users out. You will not be able to do. And unless you have like a lot of money to invest in paid so that like it makes sense, then then it's very hard.

I knew that I'm not going to do that. It's like a product that I'm building. I want it to be profitable from the get go and not feeling bad for investing too much money into your paid and so on. And so I knew that it has to be viral. At some point I sort of starting to look like it's viral. Then I did a very failed. very bad product hunt lunch.

But also now looking back and saying, this is completely fine. I feel like people sometimes treat their lunches, like product launches as like make it or break it for the company. This wasn't the case for me. I was like, this is a tool for me to get to my next 30 users, my next 50 users. And that's exactly what happened.

And so first product hunt launch, we got like 50. I got like 15 new users. By the way, the second one broke product. They thought there's like plenty of bots. We won the first product of the day and the first product of the month of the week. But it's a different story. And so we got like 50 users and we got the first user to pay.

This was an insane feeling because I'm like an entrepreneur coming for like the enterprise space. I was thinking that this is insane. Why would anyone pay for my product without meeting me without like looking me dead in the eyes or trying to get a discount and so on? Obviously, this user churned in like a few hours because the product wasn't good back then. But from there, I started seeing some very slow goal. So I got my first 50 and then 20 left. And then the other 30 started sharing it with like other users that were really good.

And then I tried a bunch of marketing things. Didn't work. Influencer post or paid or something like that. And then one of my friends was also a founder, a different space, told me, hey, you know what? I think it's really cool that you're building it on your own and that you're like, you're trying to like take a very different approach than the usual VC funded way. Why don't you share my content about that?

Like the end of day, it's like you're going to have this same, like your audience are builders. They're trying to build their own products or maybe even businesses and it will likely resonate with them. And so I started sharing the journey on LinkedIn. And I remember seeing posts like, okay, there's this nice concept of building public. And people get really interested. And I think here in Base 44, I had like this really nice synergy between the building public. And also my audience was like builders.

If I was like building, I don't know, a product to attorneys. And probably this wouldn't have made a lot of sense. once I started like sharing what I'm building in public and getting more users and improving their product tremendously, I was so lucky like the community around Base 44 is nothing like I've ever seen. It's like so supportive. There's so much feedback. And so from the loop of like improving the product, this is exactly like how people say it should feel like. It's like people asking for features before you can actually build them.

they're getting so excited about your product. They're writing the nicest things people have started writing like, hey, you changed my life. I wanted to build. I had those ideas throughout my life. I didn't have like an ability to do that or resources or money to pay for developers. And then the other thing that I did, it worked really well is I've noticed that people really like sharing what they're building on top of Base 44.

Like they would write posts. I remember at some point a friend of mine reached out and he was like, dude, how much are you paying those people to write posts about Base 44? I'm like, I'm not paying anyone honestly. And so what I did is I actually

did this program inside Base 44 saying, hey, if you share just about the process of building the app or the app itself, it doesn't even have to be about Base 44. If you share it in social, you'll get extra credits to build. And so those two like building public and giving

our credits worked extremely well. And that's how we got growth going. Okay, let's pause there. That was awesome. How many users do you have at this point of the journey, roughly? I think there was like two weeks between, no, a week between having, like being on a pace of like 20 users a day to seeing 4,000 users coming to your product, like new users a day, break the product. like it was hard scaling it.

Also, just like some things I needed to learn while moving. It's like, oh, yeah, I wasn't a DevOps engineer. I don't know how to scale databases. I didn't know that a virtual CPU would really come back at me when trying to scale and so on. And again, trying to be profitable. And so you try to use every free tier that you can. But then once you start scaling, it's really bad. So yeah, I think once I started sharing in public,

it grew to a few thousands a day and then formed the credit thing, like, did the rest. Okay, so this is kind of like the whole journey. I know there's a few other elements I want to touch on, but let me point out a few things that stood out to me that I think might be helpful to folks. The first is right at the beginning, coming back to a lesson you shared at the beginning,

which is build for specific people. So initially it was built for yourself, built for your girlfriend, built for the Scouts program. And then it was built for these, like, three friends, just building it, sitting with them, building the things they need to use it, which is really interesting because a lot of times

the advice you get is look for, look for pull, look for people with problems to solve. Like you almost went the opposite. Like you're like, use my product. I need you as a favor. Use my product and help me make it better.

Absolutely. Also, like, I don't know. I think maybe paradigms are changing, but there are some things that I don't believe in. It's like MVP's first and foremost. is like if you're building something that people will not be able to use or is not good enough, especially these days where it's so much easier to build softer. So the attention span for people to actually try out new soft-to products is getting shorter and shorter.

So yeah, pick a bunch of people that, I don't know, owe you something or have any reason to use your product when it's bad. Build for them, bidder physically. I remember that even when we passed 20K users, 50K users and 100K users, it was still very tough to get the right feedback. So I would bring like 20, 30 people to like a room together, almost like a focus group or a small hackathon. I'll do that every other week just to get feedback. And it was so much easier than any other thing.

And it was the same thing that I tried developing when we were just like three users and five users. And so, yeah, build it for them. They can come from different backgrounds. Again, something else that I don't really empathize with or what we agree with is like you have to have like a certain ICP. It's not necessarily about like the profile of a person, more of like what they're trying to do.

It's like way more important. You can have different types of people, but they're all trying to do the same thing. Like they're trying to build a tool. I think some of this people should remember. The tool you're building is a specific kind of tool that helps you build things. And so these lessons don't necessarily apply. And a lot of cases you want to be really specific with ICP

because there's like one thing you accomplish. with this thing versus this very horizontal product. I agree. But I think that's still very good to know because maybe for your product, you hear all this advice. You need a very narrow focus. You got to have a very specific role in company size and all these things. You're like, okay, maybe not.

Maybe if your tool is something that a lot of people can use for a lot of different reasons, don't worry about that too much. Okay, so step one shared it with the friends, a few friends, like forced them to use it. Please use this. I'm going to watch you. You're pointed by being there physically. I think it's really interesting.

Like, don't just send it to them over email. and ask them how it went, it's like sit next to them and watch them use it and then keep making it better. Then you tried this product out launch. Another great lesson. You may fail on Product Hunt. That's okay.

You still gain like, you don't know, it sounds like you tripled, you quadrupled your user base from 10 to 30-ish in a failed product launch, product on launch. You also said you've tried paid, which didn't work. You tried influencer marketing didn't work.

So basically all the paid stuff didn't work. But that's great. Great lesson. I think people generally don't want to be doing that kind of stuff. The point you made about starting to share it in public, I think is really interesting. A lot of people post stuff on LinkedIn and everyone, like, it's cringy. There's a lot of people building in public. Who cares?

What do you build? I don't know. I don't care about what you're building. What is it you think stood out about the way you approached it? Is it this tool you built that tells you how to post really viral stuff? What do you think you did that allowed, that made people care? Is it like the small community already part of it, part of it? Israel in the tech scene?

Like, is that a big part of why I think it worked? Is there anything else that might be helpful to be helpful to be? folks that are thinking about building in public and being successful there. So first a disclaimer, I feel like I had some very small, not audience, but like I had plenty of like LinkedIn connections before. And so everything started from LinkedIn. It was LinkedIn. Okay.

Great. Yeah. So now that acquisition story is getting crazy all over the world. So getting a lot of followers from a bunch of like different, different social media platforms. But started with LinkedIn. I think the fact that I was like the CEO of this company. previously had some people around me in my connections. So again, you have to have like, if you're writing to like something that I told a friend a few weeks ago,

building public is great. Right. But and other other like other channels can really work. But at some point you have to like take a bet on one channel that you see it's working. So like if you're writing posts week over week and like you get five likes, it's likely not going to change drastically. And again, I tried a bunch of things. Influenza didn't work. Okay, just put it aside for a second.

Let's see if I can find a channel that works. And so, yeah, for the building public, I was trying to be as honest as I could and just right the good, the bad. And I think also the fact that it wasn't a venture, like it wasn't a VC-funded company. I didn't try looking the best or show, hey, look at my amazing metrics.

so like make everything looks like really pink and really great and I'm the fastest going whatever bootstrapped company in the world. I think just writing really about the good, the bad, and the ugly and just being very realistic and sharing the learnings along the way. Again, this is specifically for my audience, right? So my audience were builders. And so I'm not sure that it works to any other product category. But yeah, just being very realistic and doing post from the. deepest, like, technical tax tech and how I optimize their limbs to just sharing some, some feelings or growth.

People like to see numbers. People like to see charts. And also, even there, even in the building public, like, I would ask my friends beforehand that I knew that they were the target. Like, what do you think of this post? Is it interesting? Is it not? Like, do you get, do you see value out of that?

And it's like almost like a product that you're releasing out there. It's the same thing. Okay, this is really interesting. So being honest, really effective, feels like there's like this underdog element of being a sole founder, not VC-funded, adds to it. Also, just sharing really interesting learnings,

things you've learned yourself that I'm innately people find interesting because you didn't know this stuff. And also just like fun stats and graph charts and things like that. Building a tool on Base 44 that can help you make these tweets better. Also, I think it's unfortunate,

you had a network ahead of this, like you had people, you had followers, you had connections, it wasn't like starting from zero. What's like a rough sense of just like, I don't know, how larger network was? What's like a way to think about that? So folks are like, oh, wow, I'm nowhere near that. I don't think it was very big. I think it was like maybe a few thousand connections.

Nowadays it's tens of thousands. But like he starts seeing some engagement. And once you do that, especially when you're like saying, okay, this is the channel that I'm going to put all like all my. wait. Okay, that's a really important point too. It wasn't like cross-post to Twitter and Instagram all these things. It's pick one and just nail that. Yeah, till this day, I think that like posting, for me, posting on Twitter was was a waste of time. At some point like, okay, I saw LinkedIn succeeded and I was like, okay, let's do the same thing on Twitter. Now I have like a better

following on Twitter, but yeah, like it was, it didn't really work. So I was spending a lot of time where like from LinkedIn, I saw like the highest ROI. And it could be very different for different founders, for different products. It could be Reddit. It could be like opening up a substack. Like it could be very different things. For me, that's what worked. And like once you see something world, just double, triple down on that.

Keep on like, don't try to spray and pray. It doesn't work at this stage. This for me, no. That is really great advice. It aligns with what I often see with traditional growth engines. There's like SEO. There's pay. There's sales.

there's virality word or their mouth. And usually a company grows mostly through one. And LinkedIn, interestingly, was your effector of growth. Also, just this incentives piece is really interesting, a really cool tactic. So the tactic here is incentivizing people to share what they built on Base 44, and they get credit to build more. I've never heard of that before. How do they actually do that?

Do they send screenshots or something? How do they get credit? They literally, like, early on, they sent me emails, and I would take them again with an app and an LLM like there's support is a whole different topic that we can speak about for hours like how do you run support when you're solo which is a huge topic but like they would send

I would say hey write a post paste the link back send me an email with like the link and and like and I'll give you credits and so at some point they automated that because I couldn't really manage like the whole thing but yeah because you can't really manage the whole thing But yeah, because you couldn't really like connect you like the social APIs and so

it was hard. So it's like, just send me the post. I know exactly what you mean with the support challenge as being a solo person with the newsletter of a million people. I get endless little things just come up. I am really curious to hear you solve that. Let's not get into it. In terms of being solo, actually I haven't asked us yet.

How long were you actually solo? When did you actually hire your first second person into the journey of the six months? So the first person started two months ago. a month and a half before the acquisition. So I was running mostly solo. I think when he started, I already knew that it's headed there. To acquisition.

Yeah. And also at some point, like once I saw that the chances of this happening right grows. So yeah, I hired like the best people I know because I know that like I have now these few years, if not more,

that like I want to, build an awesome, like I have to build this to be really big and I need the right people around me. And it's not anymore about like, let's try and be as profitable and as fun as possible. It's like, let's literally take a bigger bet. And that's where I started like bringing in people that I knew, the best people that I knew to kind of help me build that. Also like the way the deal is structured, not that I can share a lot of details around us. like, okay, there's like the 80 mil that got published, that's the initial payment.

And then there's this error piece, which is really interesting because I think the weak structure the deal in a really win-win situation. But then a lot of my compensation and a lot of like the upside is actually based on that other than the 80 mil. And so I have

both the financial interest, also the personal interest and like building this to be as big as possible. So in the month before the acquisition, I had the team starting to scale. But also basically, if it became more profitable that I could afford myself to bring in more people. The first hire was that an engineer? What would they do?

Actually, a product person. Whoa. Like a product manager? Yeah, well, it's someone who has, I've been working with a lot, and he's like a check of all trade, so he can go into, like, LLM logs and look at, like, mistakes and fix the prompts. He can write Python scripts to analyze things that we do. he can start implementing analytics into the product. So like a very technical product person

that could wear many hats. That's what you want when you were starting out. Like at some point I was like, his name is you have. At some point I was telling you, hey, you have, you take growth now. And it's like, I haven't done growth anywhere. Right?

No, you take growth now. Like try and let's try new challenge. Let's try those kind of thing. So you want to bring in someone that at least the feel style that can do many different things. Okay, that's really interesting. Let's finish talking about growth. And let me share stuff you've shared already about what work.

And then there's a few more things I read that you did that. I'm curious how big of a deal they were. So first, you just grabbed a bunch of friends, use this product, use that to learn what to build. You tried product hunt. Sort of effective early stages. It ended up being really effective. Then you had another launch that was like you said broke the product hunt algorithm.

How many users that drive? Was that like a huge influxion that second product hunt launch? The thing is, like, things happen so fast that I didn't really implement any, like, data and stuff like this. I don't really know how many users is brought, but I remember, I remember at first, like, the community around Base 44. Again, it's like one of the most incredible communities that I've seen. It's a very strong one and, like, they're all in, like, the writing. So they all were very excited about the product hunt launch. And there was like, let's skyrocket Base 44.

and then I wake up and I see the weirdest things like Base 44 is not even in the top 10. And I was like, I know for the fact there's like a thousand people already voted by the time it was noon. And noon in Israel, right, very early on. I see people right. I see more posts on LinkedIn saying people should vote to Base 44 than I actually see up votes. And so till this day, I don't really know what happened. So one of the community reached out to the support team for Productant and saying, you guys should like check out your algorithm because something is not right.

Like just even look at LinkedIn's like Salesforce Base 44 Product Hunt like you'll see these many posts. And they're like, you know what? You're right. We fixed it. And then we jumped to like the first place. We were like 500 for uploads. The Delta was 500 uploads from the second place.

Oh my God. I've never seen that. Yeah. So it was fun also seeing kind of like the community rally for this. Speaking of community, was that all in WhatsApp? Where did you manage this community? WhatsApp is a surprisingly really good tool to get feedback from the community. Obviously, like, it's not a great deal for the, like the community is going so fast. So it blew past like 1,000 or 2,000 or 5.

I don't remember what's the limit on WhatsApp. But till this day, like the WhatsApp, community, which was like very early on, is such a great place to get feedback. It's also even only enough, it was when it first started out, it was my best place to find out if the product is up, if there's like slowness, if there's like bugs, because people write like really fast and they can see that. But obviously at some point we turn to like more scalable solutions like Discord, Reddit, Yeah, those things.

And then just keep on sending product updates via email. Okay. There's another couple levers I've read about, and then I'm going to move on to a different topic. One is this hackathon you mentioned that helped you grow and become aware. The other is you did a bunch of partnerships, which is really rare for a company of your size. So just talk about those and what that did to the business.

At one point, one of the things I really liked about building Base 44 is that I saw people doing like building apps that were really like incredibly positive and like doing really good in the world. And so and then it's I think something really interesting right now in Vibe coding in general is like once you actually scale software, you can also scale the impact the software does. So you can have like non-profits, build themselves tools. You can have people that build apps for education and neglected domains that didn't really have. budget because there was like no business our idol and once you open this up and make it super cheap to create software then it's becoming and so I wanted and this was like early on like we were

at the 5,000-ish 10,000-ish users and so I said okay you know what let's do a hackathon where we open up for everybody to build like apps that do good in the world if I had no budget back now so I was like okay, this is going to be a 5K hackathon, like the price is going to be 5K. And it was your own money you were going to give away. Yeah, it was like the profits that I think it was based 4-4 did at the same

at that time. And then a lot of people started registering and a lot of teams. It ended up being 3,000 teams. So like really big. I think like the largest I think it's the largest four good hackathon so far. And then

started getting sponsor requests because it went all over social and all of a sudden I found myself with a very nice, back then, like, smaller business partnering up with Amazon, with Google, with MongoDB, with Deloitte, with really great companies that one after another stood behind this hackathon, which was so fun.

Those are awesome teams, like the ones that we partner up with. they opened up their offices, a course of globe, to have, like, teams be there, and the prizes went obviously very high. I think this is, this will likely be one of the top moments in my career. It was very, very empowering. But, like, people built a lot of, like, interesting things. I remember this person building a tool for a grandmouse and Alzheimer's, like, she has Alzheimer's.

and like building an app, which is essentially a game to help the grandmother to memorize our family members with, like, photos and names and like so many interesting and great and impactful applications. I love that there's benefits to the hackathon route, which other vibe coding tools are taking, not just growth, but also just good feelings. And just building community and seeing what people are doing, like meeting people, excited about what you're building. so many side benefits. Okay, before we move on from growth, is there anything else that's worth mentioning that worked really well or just like that people think will work

and just didn't work for you that you didn't already mention? The last piece, but people talk about that a lot, is that velocity eventually is a growth engine. So part of building in public is you want to put content out there that people really like to see.

And so we joked about it, but it's really true. Like, people like to see charts. and they like to see numbers. And it gets them attached to like this project if they're saying, oh, I wonder what's going to be perfect next week. Or I wonder like how much money is losing. How can you optimize and like that they get attached to that?

And I think also velocity is to some begin the same thing. Because if your product evolves really fast and you're putting features out there like every other day, people get attached to that. And people like like, it's, I really. remember I remember people commenting on my post saying, you know what, like it's moving so fast, I have to try it now. And so this is part of this. Like velocity solves for so many things.

Like most of my thoughts are when, and still are when running Base 44 is like, how do we increase velocity? How do we increase velocity? It's going to solve every product problem we have, or most of them, it's going to solve some of your marketing challenges. If you're smart about it and you're putting the content out, and you're making everything like a mini launch. So I feel like that was also a great growth tool. That is a really good point. Clearly everyone in the spaces understands this as well.

I want to talk about the acquisition piece, but a couple quick questions that have been on my mind. One is just what is the tech stack that you built on? Because I think a lot of founders are like, what the hell do I build on? What will help me move fast? So get as geeky as you want, just like what are the tools and infrastructure used to build base 44?

Render.com, oh my God, this is a, I like the, honestly, they're not paying me anything. I wish I would have invested or anything. I don't think I ever spoke to someone senior there. Holy, like, this is, this was so much fun to work with and still is. Like, I remember, anyway, I mean, my previous company, we had, like, large teams of DevOps, building processes for us to push to production. So render.com is like, how does it call like this? It's a cloud. I was like, yeah, it's like a very, like built on top of AWS, you have a bunch of easy, easy to manage processors and easy to like start up web ups and scale them and someone.

It's just render. It's not like a fancy version of render. It's the word render.com. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I just looked it up. Okay. Cool.

Yeah. So this is like everything that has to do with infrastructure. I manage both the website, the platform, and the applications itself because based for, basically, basically, for the first, like a complex. ecosystem. You have that user applications that have to be isolated and separated from the platform that has to be isolated and separated from the websites, like a whole thing.

MongoDB is really good when you're vibe coding, especially when you're building a vibe coding platform because schemas change a lot and it's not necessarily like users, LLMs don't always understand what the user is trying to send so they keep changing the data schema and I feel like this has been a right choice.

Obviously, Kielser, but again, I was spending 20, 30% of my time just optimizing for making the whole repository LLM suitable. So by the way, those are concepts that I also implemented in Base 44, but one thing that I kept doing is I tried making the LLM write as least code as possible. like when you're trying to implement a feature that try to get to a place where it can implement the feature entirely without you writing code

but that the LLM would write as least causes possible because then when the LLM try to like when the AI tries to like implement the entire feature from scratch there are more places where you can make mistakes or get confused there are more things that he needs to save in the context when you ask it for a follow up prompt

or something like that and so I built a very high level very opinionated infrastructure, like code infrastructure, right? It takes care of like the entire thing. When you build a new feature, it takes care of like the entire, like the crowd, the authentication, the database, like everything that has to do with that. So that when you ask the LLM to implement a new thing, it writes very little code. And by the way, this is also true for Base 44 is like,

provide the LLM with a really good infrastructure and SDK and have the LLM, like, the LM still has the flexibility. to write the entire feature because it's code, but make it so that it doesn't need you to speed out too many tokens. And obviously, everything that has to do with rule set, does one controversial take for me working with LLMs is don't use TypeScript, use plain JavaScript, use JSX. It's easier for models to write code this way.

so the front end for base 44 for the platform i mean um is built in jrcx not typescript and i feel like this has been working well part of the reason why i haven't written a single line of an html or javascript in the past like jesse does this really well um and another thing that worked really well working with the i is a lot like try to push as much as possible in the same repository instead of separating the front end and the backhand, it's easier to give like the context to the AI of like both what's in the backend, what's in the front end. Besides that, so my stack is like the backend is in Python.

I feel like people can be very judgmental about that. In terms of performance, I haven't gotten into performance issues and there's like a lot of traffic to base 44 and every now and then people try to dedos base 44 and still the server holds. So I feel like if you're building it the right way, Python is just a very great language to do that. Another maybe interesting take is because many of the new apps and products that are being built to some degree around LLMs.

So one of the things that I use is for the LLM that actually writes code in Base 44, I use a mix of different models for different tasks. So Cloud 4, for example, does a really nice job with first the initial pump, like writing the app from scratch. Then everything that has to do with UI is just fantastic. Like, design is great. But then, for example, Gemina is really good when you get a very complex problem or like very complex problem. Or we need to figure out an algorithm. Or Cloud 4 got stuck in some bug loop, which happens.

out when you vibe code. So I have this pipeline that tries to figure out the user prompt and then route it to the right LLM, which I feel like has been working pretty well. Wow, that was extremely interesting. In this routing, is this what you do within cursor or you do this within Base 44 based on what the person's working on? Base 44, yeah. I don't think yourself has this.

I wish they, I think there's like maybe an auto option. for a, but in Base 44, it's like when users ask. That's awesome. I first try to analyze what they're asking and then figure out what's the right all of them to use. That is so cool. So it's just Clod and Gemini. Those are the two they use for Base 44. Yeah.

Well, all of those tools, Base 44, Kerser, all the vibe coding tools, I use the same paradigm or I don't know if you call it a method, which is like you have the heavy guns, which is usually either Claude 4 or Gemini. and then CloudForre and Gemini usually create a high-level solution or high-level kind of like what changes do you want to make to the file? So not writing all of the file from scratch every time. Kerrself does that based on the fault, so writing like only the chunk of code that needs to be implemented and high-level,

then you get like smaller, faster models like Flash or 4-Omini from OpenEI to implement to kind of like to patch the code inside there. there's filed. Okay. One very tactical question in a completely different direction product question. Activation, getting people to an aha moment, feels like something that is core to retention, something that comes up a lot

on this podcast. Is there anything you learned about getting that right? Anything you did that was really successful in getting people to see the value of Base 44 really quickly and in that, start sharing it, using it? Here's one interesting thing that I learned that I think was counterintuitive to me, because you always want to build the best product out there for your users,

but sometimes it contradicts the aha moment or how fast can you get users to do that. So first, when a few months ago, more than that, when Base 44 started, before actually implementing your app, so you'd say something like, hey, create a task management app. And before implementing that, because a lot of times you get this not super clear request from the user.

I'd show the user like the LLM would first, before even writing code, it would first generate user flows, like almost like a PRD or like, but something that's more digestible to folks who have, like, are not coming from the space. So it will generate user flows.

It will show it to you like, hey, you want to create a task. And then you could say, yeah, so maybe I want to add some files and stuff like that. So it will show you, you what it's going to generate to make sure that you understand you and then it clearly okay and then it

will generate the app. This was actually something I ditched because too many users, even though it was good for them and it was the right product decision to do that because you'll create better apps doing this way. But the conversions to like get to the aha moment were not super high. And also like not super like I think one of the key to the aha moment in the vibe coding world or at least in base 44 is like holy shit like it actually understood me and you see the app and if you have like a stage in the middle it makes a surprise like slightly less surprising so I think I ditched that and that was a nice lesson that I don't know actually how to define the right way but it's like get your users as fast as possible to the aha moment sometimes there's a price to that

Make sure it's not too big, but sometimes there applies to that because at least when you're building B2C, and it's all new to me because I'm not coming from the space, but at least when you're building B2C, like the attention span is so low, really. So you want to get there in like a minute or two or three. And then from there, okay, later on, ramp up the features that you want to actually put there so that it can be like the right product for your users. That was an awesome insight. Thank you for sharing that.

That's actually something that I think will help a lot of people. Okay, final topic. I want to talk about the acquisition process. Founders often look at this as like the dream. Oh my God, I sold my company millions of dollars, but I know it's always stressful and hectic and wild. And, you know, the work only begins. You know, you're not like I'm off.

You have to keep building this thing. So first of all, I just had the acquisition conversation start. Weeks reached out. I think back then there's like a lot of folks from the community. were posting saying, hey, Wix should definitely buy Base 44 before it gets too big or something like that. Even though, like, we're not playing or competing in the same category, but it was clearly it's going to be...

Why were they recommending Wix? What was just the connection there? First, because of the Israeli ecosystem. Got it. But also, folks were building websites with Base 44, and so it's kind of like the same thing. And obviously Wix has... Yeah, obviously Wix is...

is an incredible product for building websites, but a different approach from LRAMS. It's now definitely getting there. And so I got there. The management team, like Wix's management team is so friendly and such great guys. And I remember sitting there

and I think the first sentence that the first thing that Avishari the CEO told me is like, hey, everybody's been saying that we should buy you. Maybe it's least it worth the talk and we'll hear to help. and I think early on we've explored like at least in my mind's like yeah it seems like those are that's a great team to work with they're definitely in the same space there's a lot I can benefit from partnering up together so it wasn't

clearly an acquisition like on the acquisition path and Avishai the CEO is like a very seasoned very experienced and helped a lot of entrepreneurs in the B2C space and specifically in Israel to kind of go and succeed. And so I remember meeting him for a few nights of like just eating some steaks and just chatting about how to goal base 44 and just literally just getting there to get an advice. And so at some point we saw first that we have great chemistry, both with him and with the rest of the team. which I think is really, really crucial, especially if they're buying a solo.

This is a very unique case, but especially if they're buying like a small team, I think it's crucial for the buyer to make sure or to feel like they're going to have really good connection in chemistry with the founders, with the key people. Because eventually it's like, I remember like one of the key reasons where we were like debating together whether I should join weeks or not. like one of the key things that we've put on the table is, oh yeah, and it's going to be a lot of fun working together. And I think also being a person that's going to be fun to work with is the key, especially if you're

not like a 500 people company that someone is buying. If you're like a big company, it doesn't really matter, like you're buying the operations, you're buying the product. If you're a small company, they're just starting out and getting some great momentum, you have to be a person that people would love to, like, want you work with for the next three years. And so this was critical. I think the best, like the best place,

and this is not easy to get to this position, but the best position to negotiate such a jail or even to get there is to be also very fine with the other path of not getting acquired. In some ways, it's like it's weird, but it's like, it's like in dating. When you're in the first couple of dates, you don't want to show too much interest

because then it's... I think also I was in a position that I was saying, hey, if it works out, it's going to be amazing. And if not, it's going to be amazing. It's going to be either way fun. Obviously, I wanted it to work out. Yeah, and the last thing I think is... I don't know if it's suitable for everyone,

but I'm very happy with the structure of the deal with the airnought piece because I feel like it's still I still show up every day to work and it's been only two weeks

but I feel like it's going to be like that for years and like I have a personal investment in the business and it's success so it's really

I feel like it's better than just selling the business and just spending the next few years and wanting to disappear I love that part of the deal you could be a billionaire

if it doesn't. well enough. I don't know the deals, but in theory. Let me ask, so I know a part of the story also is that when you were signing the deal, the war with Iran basically broke out. Tell that story. So I was trying to not, I wasn't nervous throughout the process, but this is like a huge deal for me, right? It's going to change my life. Probably will change my kids' life. And when we kicked off the process, we wanted it to be fair. Also, it's not like Base 44 was like a very old company

with like a lot of baggage. It's like there's no legal, there's no, like it was very easy. The diligence process was very fast. And I remember I saying to the lawyers and to our great kind of like two films that we work with. It's like until

Thursday night, that's it. We're signing Thursday night. No matter what we do, let's do it. Like let's wrap it up and make sure that we're aligning to sign Thursday night. And we get till Thursday night at 2 a.m. We stopped fighting over like small details. And the lawyers have agreed to everything.

And I was like, okay, just send it out for signatures. We said Thursday night. And then lawyers were saying, yeah, we agreed on everything, but we still need to kind of change the wording and so on. And we're very tired. Like, we're not going to do it the right way. Let's wake up tomorrow morning and do that. And I remember us like, I'm not going to sleep.

and then 4 a.m. working office like this announcement like, hey, a walkout between Iran and Israel. And I was like, again, this is so classic. I'm sure that the deal was like, I'm not, like, I wasn't sure. I was like, holy, I can't believe this is happening. It's such an insane turn of events. But everything went fine from there. We woke up the next morning and signed the papers. Yeah, it was, as I said before, it was definitely the least bowing month that they had in my life. I was just thinking back to exactly that phrase that you shared. Oh, man, there's just so many parts of the story that are so interesting. It's a hero's journey story in so many ways.

Bayor, is there anything else that you want to leave listeners with, anything that we didn't touch on? maybe just last piece of a negative advice for founders that are trying to be on a start on this journey or on this journey that you think might be helpful to them. So first before getting to the negative advice, if there's like the only thing that I would say, really, if there's anyone from the base 44s community that's actually listening to this, I am so grateful. Like this community has been so supportive. and many times I'm saying

okay maybe I did this right and that right but I don't know it's hard for me to think about what I did so many things right to get like this community behind the product and so I'm so grateful for the community so if everyone's listening really I'm hoping to serve everyone better

what not to do yeah there's plenty don't just make sure that at least 50% of your time, you work on the parts of you that you really like and that you're really good at. You know, there's like there's plenty ways of saying that in different diagrams that they show you as like what you're good at, what you want to do, what's fun for you, what's energizing, what's not.

I think 50% of it should be in like this sweet spot of you're doing the thing that your genius have, like your genius zone or whatever they call it. And they're so fun because that's what keeps you up, like showing up every day. and it's unbelievably different than being a very talented person, a very skilled person, but doing things that you either don't like. And it's fine. Everybody does things that they don't like. And in every job, there's like those places.

But keep yourself in the zone of genius. I think that's really crucial. And I feel like in the last few months, I've also met plenty of really great. and friendly CEOs, even from the Israeli ecosystem, like for public companies, right? Weeks and Mindadoccom and Ito and so on. And they're all, like, obviously they have to do a lot of different things. And being CEOs of public companies, like you have to, like, manage a lot of things, a lot of logistics and, I don't know, bureaucracy.

But they all have not tactic, like major or to some degree, major part of their job is doing something that they really like and they're really good at. Whether it's like product design, whether it's like building a marketing machine or something like that, or I think that's critical. Yeah, that's the biggest thing. And also it's like, and you probably hear this nowadays on every podcast,

but it's the best time to build. And it can be a really life-changing, just starting out something that you really like. I feel like we're at the start of an age is going to be bigger than the, revolution that the internet did. Obviously, I think now it's becoming clearer to anyone. And so just building what she wants, becoming so much easier, just do it, do something that you like. I think it's going to be for a lot of chances, it's going to be life-changing. And if not,

at least you'll have a very little regret in the future. Mayor, I'm going to skip the lighting round, but I'm going to give you, because it's approaching midnight your time. I want to make sure you get some sleep. I'm going to ask you one question. There's something I meant to ask earlier here, but I didn't. Base 44, what is, what is that about? Why did you call it Base 44? This is the most, like, really the stupidest probably reason that you hear for a name behind

a product. So, again, Base 44 was not intended to be, like, a very large scale, like the global phenomena that it's becoming right now. I wanted to have base in the name, because if you. felt like that's going to be the base of where people is going to start build software or software paints and so on. And obviously back then, base.com wasn't available and I didn't have money to buy like a very fancy domain. So I started seeing like, I think it was Cloudflare. I don't remember even what domain provider was that it started showing me some numbers. My date of birth is

February 2nd. And so base 22 wasn't available and I say, okay, let's double it. And then Base 44, I was like, I like the sound of it. It's almost like base 64. And for, for, uh, the nerd in a minute was like, okay, base 64 is one way to encode, uh, data from, from one type to another. And it's like, Base 44 is going to do the same. It's like encode natural language into software. And I was like, okay, clicks.

Let's go with it. Um, it's good that it's memorable, the number in the name, but there's no real, like, very sophisticated reason behind it. That has an amazing story. I love that you, like, Base 64 was cool, but I guess there's a reason 44 could be cool. And it's not even Base 42. There's all these, like, numbers around there that people know. And it's like, no, 44.

Double my birthday, sort of like 64. That's amazing. It worked. I guess, I don't know. Maybe shows you the power of how a name doesn't necessarily make a huge deal. Interestingly, a recent podcast episode is about how name can make a big deal. deal. So there's both sides to it. Mayor, this was incredible. Thank you so much for doing this. Congratulations on the outcome. I know this is just the beginning. I know the product is only getting

you get better. What a fun place to be. Hope you get some sleep. Two final questions. Where can folks check out all your building? Is it just base 44.com? Anything else they should know? And how can listeners be useful to you? Just try it out. I think we're at a place where people really love the product. And for every user that we get, it turns out to be two or four later on because they're sharing it. So just try it out, Base44.com, and build something that you like. And if you have a bit more time, just leave feedback so that we can make it better. Amazing. Mayore, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you, Lenny. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com. See you in the next episode.