0:00
In six months, he went from zero, basically nothing to selling this company for 80 million plus dollars to Wix.
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0:05
The funny thing is that Base44 for the first time in my life was not trying to build the biggest thing ever.
0:10
Me and my girlfriend, we were on a plane.
0:10
I told her, "Hey, you know what? If we get to 1.
0:14
5 million until the end of 2025, we're going to buy a nice car," and we got there in four weeks.
0:22
I feel like the journey that you've been on over the last six months is like the dream for a lot of founders.
0:24
How long were you actually solo?
0:29
The first person started a month and a half before the acquisition, so I think it's a different ballgame because even if you're solo, you are literally managing teams of AI's writing code.
0:37
I don't think I've written a single line of HTML or JavaScript in the past three months.
0:42
You're competing against very well-funded companies, Lovable, Bolt, Replit, Vercel, and you get your first 10 users.
0:47
I started with three users, really close friends.
0:47
I got them to sit down with me every other day around the table and they would use that, the tool.
0:53
They'll try to build something, it'll break.
0:57
I'll take a look and then just build it for them.
0:57
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.
1:12
Today, my guest is Maor Shlomo.
1:12
This is a unique episode because I almost never have conversations with early stage founders.
1:17
I made an exception because Maor's journey is in many ways the dream for a lot of founders.
1:23
Maor started a company called Base44, which is essentially a more advanced vibe coding tool.
1:28
Six months later, just a few weeks ago, he sold the company for $80 million to Wix. He's a sole founder.
1:32
It was just him for most of those six months.
1:32
He never raised any money.
1:38
He bootstrapped it and built it purely off profits.
1:38
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.
1:47
In our conversation, Maor shares exactly how he grew the product from zero to 10 to 100 to hundreds of thousands of users.
1:57
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.
2:02
Also, the super important insight that everyone needs to hear about how he came up with the idea and then refine the idea.
2:08
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.
2:17
A big thank you to Noam Segal and Amir Klein for suggesting topics for this conversation.
2:22
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.
2:26
With that, I bring you Maor Shlomo.
2:33
This episode is brought to you by Sauce.
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4:11
The answers you need to move confidently.
4:22
Maor, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
4:26
I'm so excited to do that.
4:26
Thank you for having me, Lenny. It's my pleasure.
4:29
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.
4:44
Basically the journey you've been on is build a product. People loved it. It grew like crazy.
4:48
You didn't raise any money.
4:53
You sold it for $80 million, we'll talk about this six months in.
4:53
And I know it's not all rainbows and butterflies and this amazing 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.
5:10
You've just announced your acquisition.
5:10
So I feel like this is a really unique point in time to extract as much wisdom out of your head as possible.
5:18
Really the right time to reflect back.
5:21
Yeah, I think there's going to be many more times.
5:21
This is a really unique time.
5:23
Let's start with a couple of basics just what is Base44 for folks that aren't super familiar with the product that you built?
5:30
Base44 is an AI app building platform, meaning that you are 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 code it for you.
5:45
We're not the first ones doing that.
5:45
I think it's a very crowded category, but I think Base44 takes a very different approach, a very opinionated one for and one that users or users like to call it a batteries included approach, which means that for every app that you build in Base44, you already have built-in included database, integrations, user management, analytics without connecting third party services or bringing your API keys and so on.
6:12
And I think it helps a lot when you're trying to scale a vibe coded application to be very complex and very functional.
6:27
So yeah, I think for most of the category nowadays they're doing a fantastic job.
6:33
One with building React web apps like front-end web apps and then when a user needs some backend stuff, they have a great integration with Supabase.
6:40
Supabase I think is the most common thing that most competitors use.
6:46
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.
6:59
And once we did that, and actually I engineered the endpoints and the SDKs and whatever to work well with LLMs, I think Base44 does a really good job with building very complex and functional real world applications.
7:20
I want to talk about the origin story of just how you even realized that there was an opportunity here. Clearly it worked out.
7:24
But before we get there, let me just share a couple stats about this journey to give people a sense of just how crazy this is and add anything I'm missing.
7:32
So in six months you went from zero, basically nothing to selling this company for 80 million plus dollars to Wix, took you three weeks to hit a million dollars ARR, you bootstrapped this business.
7:42
I think you put in a few tens of thousands of shekels, not even US dollars.
7:48
You have something like 400,000 users right now. You're still a founder.
7:48
There are two different wars involved in the journey.
7:52
You're based in Israel, so you have to deal with that and we're going to talk about some of the stories.
7:56
Any other stats that are worth sharing?
8:00
Anything else that's important high level before we get into the origin story? No, I don't think so.
8:04
I think looking back, it sounds insane, but mostly this is it. I love that perspective.
8:15
Okay, so how did this start?
8:18
There were two things I think that drove me to it.
8:18
One, my girlfriend needed a website to capture leads.
8:25
She has a small business, she's an artist.
8:25
And I tried building that with one of the tools out there for website building, not an AI powered one.
8:33
And it was such a pain trying to do that one, designing with the drag and drop and everything and then things get messed up in mobile and you try again.
8:45
It's like and then how do you manage your data and so on.
8:45
And in my previous company, we dealt a lot with LLMs.
8:50
While I was doing that, I was like, "It doesn't any sense."
8:55
I know models can write the code to do exactly what I'm trying to do right now.
9:00
Build a website for my girlfriend or builds slightly more complicated than a website was actually a web app.
9:04
I know models can do that.
9:04
They don't have the right infrastructure to do that.
9:09
So if I set up an infrastructure for like, "Hey, here the leads go to the database like okay, you can write React code and it'll solve it and it'll be great from an SEO perspective and so on," then I'll notice like it's going to be super easy and she could do it on her own.
9:20
And the other trigger, I was volunteering to help with the Scouts organization here in Israel with everything that has to do with system and software and back office systems that they needed.
9:34
And back then, it's a huge organization by the way, really huge 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.
9:55
And so every time they needed to build something, they didn't have any internal devs, any software engineers.
10:00
So they reach out to other agencies and agencies usually would quote them like a million bucks just to build something that they knew people could build.
10:05
I was, and still by the way, a huge fan of tools like Retool for the previous wave of no-code tools, but then those tools were really more of low code tools.
10:20
You still needed to know some JavaScript, something to make them work to have the interruption.
10:25
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.
10:32
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 a database, maybe to another LLM to be 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.
10:56
So those two were triggers back then.
11:05
I started a company seven years ago called Explorium, very different than Base44, very much like enterprise top-down sales in the data space, very capital heavy. We raised $130 million.
11:19
I was a CEO for seven years.
11:19
Then when the October 7th wall broke out, I went to reserves for almost a year.
11:28
And then when I came out, I went to travel the world a bit just to take some time off and wanted to do what I was liked the most and I haven't had a chance because Explorium grew and grew and haven't had a chance for a while to do, which is coding.
11:41
I wanted to get back to building and get my hands dirty.
11:47
And so I had given those experiences both with my partner, my girlfriend, and also with the scouts.
11:54
I was like, "Let's take a shot at it and start the product that I know is going to be very fun to build."
11:59
And I think when you are approaching it this way and not the usual way of let's raise a ton of money and try to own the category, and I knew I'm always getting into a very crowded category.
12:11
I also knew that I have some different angle and some different take on the category, but when you're approaching it this way, there's not a lot to lose and I think it gives a lot of energy and that's how Base44 started.
12:29
I definitely didn't think it's going to take off so fast.
12:29
But yeah, that's pretty much about it.
12:37
Okay, I like that you don't take it for the work you did to help it take off so fast.
12:37
I'm excited to talk through that.
12:40
Just first a few maybe takeaways from what you just shared of how this idea emerged for folks that are looking for ideas.
12:45
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.
12:57
So I think that's a really important takeaway.
13:01
You weren't just like, "Hey, maybe this will be useful to someone."
13:04
It's a real problem and I want to solve it and nothing out there is good enough so I'm going to build it myself.
13:09
The other is you said that you're having fun feels like that's an important element, just like you should enjoy it.
13:13
You shouldn't feel like it's some kind of drag. You know what?
13:18
I feel like when I was a first timer, when I first started my first company, Explorium, it sounds like many smart people told me those two very important truths.
13:24
It's build something that you would want to use or that you'll actually use and make sure that throughout time you keep doing something that you really like.
13:38
And so when you first timer, or at least for myself when I hear those kind of things, I was like, "Yeah, those are cliches businesses is always important.
13:45
Let's increase revenue, let's close more deals."
13:52
And I feel like even though it sounds like a cliche, it's so much easier one building something that you'll actually use.
13:59
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 friends and Family. And we'll get to that.
14:12
That's how I got my first couple of users.
14:16
But super important to build something that you'll use, you'll move forward so much faster, but also doing something that you love.
14:20
I think I was the CEO of exploring for seven years.
14:28
It was such a fantastic experience.
14:28
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 scaling products and not necessarily being a CEO, managing sales, managing HR, managing, all those kind of things.
14:43
And I think that gives a lot of power.
14:49
It's easier to work very hard when you're doing something you really like.
14:55
Let's follow that thread and talk about being a solo founder.
14:55
I think this is something a lot of founders like it's hard to find a co-founder that out of the blue when you have an idea, YC famously doesn't like solo founders.
15:05
So I think there's a lot of power in what you've achieved.
15:10
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?
15:20
And also just how do you stay productive?
15:20
How do you get stuff done as a solo founder using AI?
15:25
One solo founder and specifically bootstrapping, I don't think it's suitable for every use case.
15:33
If you're building a B2B company, especially if you're doing a B to enterprise company, you'll need to hire a salesperson or sales team.
15:38
You need to spend your money on marketing.
15:38
It's going to be very hard to try to sell to your company when you are on your own and nobody knows if the product's going to stay there tomorrow.
15:48
So I don't think it's the right setting for every company.
15:53
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, you just build a great product that people will share.
16:05
If you're able to do that and you're able to get out of the escape velocity of getting to product market fit, then everything is better doing a solo bootstrap than the other way around.
16:18
One else, even from a pure cold angle of the financial outcome.
16:26
Obviously if you're able to bootstrap your business and again, get out of the [inaudible 00:16:32] velocity and be profitable to some degree, then you'll likely generate a financial outcome.
16:35
That's I think for most cases, way better than any other thing.
16:43
Second is not specifically the solo, but the bootstrapping thing less stressful.
16:43
You wake up in the morning as you feel profitable, and I think there's this term default alive. It's so much easier.
16:57
I've done both and the weight of raising so much fund, even if your investors are great, my investors were awesome and they were always supportive and so on.
17:04
But even so, I feel like being bootstrap, like no other money except of yours in the business and the business is going and profitable, I feel I can keep the energies up.
17:17
And I think one thing that I've learned from my previous company is energies are super important. Usually it's a marathon. For me, it was a sprint.
17:29
I thought it's going to be a marathon, but you want to do something that you like for years and years.
17:33
And if you're able to show up every day, your chances goes up immediately.
17:43
But then there's a lot of downside and a lot of stressful moments during that.
17:43
One, just keeping the self go up, keeping the servers up.
17:50
When you're solo, you don't have a DevOps team, you don't have on-call, you don't have anything I think is really tough.
18:00
I had a few accidents that really, I'm joking about that, but I was saying it to my friends, shorten my life a bit with just the stress.
18:06
I had 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 doing the photo shoots.
18:21
I have a friend from MIT calls me up and he's like, " Hey, somebody hacked into Base44 and it's like a crypto scam and you've got to take care of that because people are building apps on top of Base44 and they're putting the data inside and so on."
18:40
And I remember hanging up the phone, I was like, "Okay, I'll take a look at it immediately."
18:45
I remember hanging up the phone and saying, "It's karma.
18:53
I know for a fact it's true.
18:53
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."
19:05
And so I threw out there some excuse and I have to go and practice towards the ceremony or something like that, open up a laptop, spend two hours, two very scary hours of my life.
19:14
It ended up being just the LLM tried using a package called cryptography, which is a Node.
19:21
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 the app."
19:39
And so you have a lot of those moments that the whole thing is like you are not able to share it with anyone.
19:48
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. You handle that."
19:57
In my previous company, my two co-founders, we were really good friends, great friends.
20:04
And even if one of us would mess up, then still would have someone to share it with and run jokes around and just be there with someone.
20:10
So when you're solo, it's hard.
20:19
And then brutal prioritization, which is something you have to do because you have to keep up the pace of the product.
20:24
And obviously nowadays with AI and everyone can build software, 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.
20:37
And every time, I remember that every time I had this ceremony where I'd start a day and try look inside and ask myself, "What do I need to work on today and what do I want to work on today?"
20:53
So what I want to work on today, it was always like I want a code.
20:57
That's what I like to do.
20:57
Let's improve the product.
20:57
I know there's a bug that makes a noise, some of the users, I noticed the feature that's in my head that I'm saying, "Oh, competitions haven't thought about that. I have to build it.
21:10
I have to put it out there to be in front of everything."
21:15
And then it's like what do have to do today?
21:15
So at many different stages on Base44's journey, it was I know I can improve the product a lot, but I need to do some more marketing.
21:23
I know this is not the bottleneck.
21:30
I know people are converting well, they're growing, retention is looking good, and it's all about just increasing the audience, even though I really want to work on the product.
21:43
And so I think it is like this contact switching is hard.
21:43
And the last piece obviously is I was spending a lot of my time on making sure that my setup, like how I code, how I write content and so on is optimized and everything is automated.
22:01
And so I spent a lot of time thinking and agonizing about how to structure the code repository, for example, so that I can use [inaudible 00:22:14] for backend and Base44 for front-end to write light code really fast.
22:14
And this was really important for me to keep trying to find out new ways of how to automate and increase the pace of building solo.
22:29
Because if you're able to correct that, I feel like smaller teams with a lot of context nowadays can move faster.
22:35
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 the thing that kills your business if you're not managing it right.
22:53
Okay, let me follow that thread.
22:53
That's a really interesting topic.
22:56
So what is in your stack of productivity for yourself that allowed you to build Base44? ...
23:00
for yourself and then that allowed you to build Base44, just like the tech stack of Base44.
23:05
So you said Cursor, Base44.
23:05
What else did you use day-to-day that helped you be more efficient?
23:11
So I have severe ADHD, and so it can also be like a superpower.
23:11
But then you have to like, first, the first thing you want to do is make sure that your workday looks that you can be focused and that you get a lot of like deep work and so.
23:27
I use a product called RescueTime, which I really like, but I think there's a bunch of other products like shuts down every access to Twitter and LinkedIn and so on.
23:38
This was really hard because I was starting to do this build in public, which turned out to work pretty well for Base44.
23:45
And so every time you want to take a look at your post or see how many likes and impressions and so on, but then you can't work on anything else.
23:50
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.
24:05
[inaudible 00:24:12] has been awesome.
24:05
Base44, not only did the work for the front end side, but also a lot of the business apps that I used, well, on top of Base44, so where I'd manage users and give credits and where write content.
24:28
And then I had this app where I, kind of at the start of the week, would write some high-level content ideas.
24:34
And then the Base44 app will take it and break it down just to kind of 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.
24:44
And so I wrote things that were really customized to my process and what I wanted to do, which really helped.
24:51
But I think you can do that not only with Base44, where just you can vibe code your way into like productivity tools that really fits what you want to do and what the process for you looks like.
25:02
So again, for example for my social posts and so on, there's like a process that I would follow and maybe no one else would follow that.
25:14
And so vibe code, the custom apps for that, was really helpful.
25:21
Let me actually ask about that. That is super cool.
25:23
So you built basically internal tools for yourself using Base44.
25:23
People can use other tools potentially.
25:28
So you built one that's like, "Help me craft a tweet."
25:28
Well, how does that actually look? Like what is the input?
25:32
That sounds really interesting.
25:36
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, right?
25:42
So the way I grew Base44, and probably 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.
25:54
So a lot of that was like around sharing on the Base44 journey.
25:58
And then I'll have a process that I follow, is 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 the things out there.
26:15
And then my process before the app was like I'd go to ChatGPT, I'll write like a very vague kind of structure or skeleton of a post and tell it like, "Hey, fix my writing, improve my writing a bit."
26:26
And then ChatGPT will spit out something that was like too far off, like too salesy, not my tone, and then I'll say, "No, keep closer to the original."
26:35
And we'll fight about that, and then like remove the emojis, the hyphens look weird and so on.
26:39
So okay, I'll have now my LinkedIn post, and I'll need to generate an image for that.
26:44
So I'll go to a different tool.
26:44
And then I'll take this LinkedIn post and now, okay, I need to put it out also in my Twitter account.
26:48
So okay, let's break it down to a Twitter thread.
26:53
Now you need to shorten there, like you need to make some adjustments to the content.
26:57
And so I've taken this entire process, which I think was 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 liked that I've written beforehand, so that in the next post it will speak just like me.
27:25
This might be a good plug for Base44.
27:25
So say someone were to go to Base44. com and try this out.
27:29
What would be a prompt you'd suggest, like how to get started building a tool like this?
27:33
Usually what I'll do is I'll write down...
27:33
I think LLMs nowadays do a very good job with like start vague.
27:40
It's going to build the skeleton for what you need, and Base44 does a good job with this, like understanding at least the big pieces.
27:44
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 write the entire spec.
27:49
It's just like something like, "Hey, I want to build my own content generation AI-powered tool.
27:54
Here's my process currently and my process is doing this.
28:00
And then LinkedIn and then Twitter, write something to support that and then form their iterate."
28:04
And also something that I really like with the entire category, again, not only Base44, I feel like there's tons of tools doing a great job, but something I really like in Base44 is that because it's really easy to change the software, it's like you get this adaptive software, is like as you improve your processes or maybe your processes change, it's like you adapt it.
28:25
So Base44 got acquired by Wix two weeks ago, and so now the process of putting content out there looks a bit different.
28:32
And so with just two prompts, you change it to support your new process, which is really fun.
28:41
That's a cool phrase, adaptive software.
28:44
I heard malleable software is another way to describe this.
28:48
I want to talk about growth, but a couple more things real quick.
28:48
This idea of bootstrapping, I'm curious.
28:51
So essentially you're competing against very well-funded companies, Lovable, Bolt, Replit, v0, Vercel, Cursor raised, I don't know, bazillion dollars at this point.
28:56
I know you're not competing with Cursor directly.
29:02
If you weren't going to be acquired by Wix, did you plan on raising money?
29:07
Do you think you had a chance staying bootstrapped, competing against the folks that everyone's, the more popular products today?
29:16
Base44 was very profitable, much more than what I thought.
29:16
So even if I wasn't getting acquired, I felt like I can make good money out of it.
29:25
It ended up like, I remember I had like a very failed ProductHunt launch at mid-January and then started writing some, like started building in public at around start of February and that's where it took off.
29:38
And then started, I think, first dollar or like the first 10 or 100 bucks towards March.
29:43
And then in May, I already did close to 200K in profit.
29:51
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, that come to Base44, stick with Base44, even though they're very familiar with the rest of the competition, the challenge was obviously making as much noise as data folks.
30:16
So you can see like data vibe coding tools doing like a million dollars hackathons and so on, and doing awesome job on growth, really.
30:28
But I didn't have the resources, so I tried finding ways to fight the fight.
30:33
I think we had a very successful hackathon 4Good, which found out to be a great growth engine and also did good in the world, which we had 3000 teams just building some great do-good apps.
30:47
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've thought it's going to move.
31:00
And at some point, I figured it's going to be, like you see Base44 grows and you start thinking, "Hey, this can really help people with their lives."
31:10
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.
31:19
I've been seeing people build like fantastic, awesome things.
31:24
And so I was like, "Let's go for the big one.
31:24
Let's try and actually build some global scale, maybe lead the category and maybe win it."
31:30
And I felt like the best chances to do that is to partner up with Wix.
31:37
There's plenty of reasons to that.
31:37
We can touch on that later.
31:41
But it's like same DNA, same customer base.
31:41
They know what they're doing, they're seeing and obviously like very good connection with the entire management team over there.
31:51
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?
32:02
Let's play in the big league and let's punch down, not only punch up when fighting in this very crowded space."
32:11
And that's part of the reason why to get acquired.
32:16
That was really insightful.
32:16
So part of what, part of I'm hearing is you could've stayed independent and made a really good income and built a really good business, at least for a while.
32:25
Who knows what would happen longterm?
32:27
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 enough people loved.
32:38
So I think that's a really interesting insight.
32:38
Like it's okay if there's a bazillion dollars in funding going to competitors.
32:41
There's a big market here.
32:46
Yeah, I think it's a bit different ballgame right now. I was scared many times.
32:46
Like I thought, "How am I going to go into this fight?"
32:51
Those companies are, one, some of the fastest-growing companies ever, again, they're great teams and very well-funded and a lot of money being poured into.
33:00
But then, throughout time I saw that I'm able to keep the pace, if not even have like a faster pace and have like a different angle and it's not changing over time so nobody is like...
33:13
And so I think it's a different ballgame because even if you're a very small team or even if you're solo, you're, literally, managing teams of AIs, like writing code.
33:26
I don't think I've written a single line of like HTML or JavaScript in the past three months, but still the Base44 front end changes a lot because AI writes that.
33:37
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 change even more drastically in the future.
33:52
As LLMs get better, it's like people, like 10X engineers would have way more impact.
33:58
They're going to be 100X engineers because they're able to manage LLMs.
34:02
And it's not necessarily the team size, nor the funding, that will be able to win you a category.
34:08
What you just shared 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.
34:16
It feels like now the big things you got to get right is kind of at the beginning, of figuring out what problems to solve and being really good at understanding where the gaps are.
34:25
And then it's distribution, marketing, getting people to be aware that you exist and give you a shot. Yeah.
34:33
And even distribution, I'm still learning that.
34:33
Even distribution nowadays it's very different and also in favor of the solo, not necessarily the solo, but it's like not necessarily that you're going to pull a lot of money on paid campaigns like a Base44 goal with close to zero marketing budget.
34:48
I spent like $2,000 on an influencer post that didn't really bring anything, and then tried paid for a couple of thousands of bucks, didn't really work.
35:02
And so everything was organically and built in public, and so even distribution is very different, but yeah, if you have an interesting take on end domain.
35:09
Base44's first user was one of my best friends, like we grew up together, and up to few months ago, he was a restaurant manager.
35:23
And then he left and started like a SaaS company for managing invoices for restaurants.
35:23
And 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, but has a very deep domain knowledge.
35:35
And now that the technical, he has no...
35:41
like human coding are very different in very different places.
35:49
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.
36:07
Yeah, and I love that you did it with no funding.
36:07
The other thought here, as you're 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?
36:15
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.
36:21
I could live really well just doing this."
36:26
But then I'm like, "Oh, why not do a podcast?
36:26
Why not do another podcast?
36:26
Why not do some other stuff?"
36:30
And the reason I do that is it just like it's boring to do something the same way forever, and there's this opportunity that's out there.
36:35
I'm like, "I should do that."
36:38
And I feel like some people are, "I just don't need that. I'm good.
36:38
I'm going to live in, I don't know, Fiji and just code it, make 100, 300, 500K a year from this thing."
36:48
But I feel like folks like you, there's more ambition, and one way is raise a bunch of money and then they sell to a company that has a platform that you can build on.
36:55
Yeah, I empathize with this a lot, but the funny thing is that Base44, for the first time in my life, was not trying to build the biggest thing ever.
37:06
So I remember when I started Explorium, my previous company, I was so hung up on like, "Let's raise the most amount of money in the least amount of time."
37:15
I remember that I showed like, now I looked, kept looking like, "Hey, Explorium raised $100 million before Snowflake. This is insane.
37:26
This is amazing," and so on.
37:26
And I did that for seven years, and I think Base44 is the first time, it's like I stopped and said, "You know what?
37:34
I just want to go back to do what I really love, which is just building a product."
37:39
I don't care like if it wins the category or not.
37:44
I don't care if it's going to become really big or not.
37:50
I remember 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.
37:57
5 million," I don't remember why I said exactly this number, like, "If we get to $1.
38:05
5 million in ARR till the end of 2025, we're going to buy a nice car."
38:11
And we got there in like four weeks.
38:11
And so it was the first time of like saying, "Let's not try and build the biggest thing.
38:16
Let's just do something I really like, and let's just build a product that I'm going to enjoy building."
38:26
But then at some point, it got to be very, very successful, and I think it comes with like once you're seeing success and you're seeing like true positive impact on people, then you're saying, "Okay, you know what?
38:35
Let's go for the, like, let's play the big league, and try to scale it."
38:41
That so aligns with my journey.
38:41
Similarly, I'm just going to do a newsletter, life's going to be great, I'm not going to build, I'm not..."
38:47
I called it my anti-empire.
38:49
I don't want to build anything big.
38:49
I'm just going to keep it chill, project chill, project avoid getting a real job.
38:54
That's what I called it.
38:54
And I think that is a really big insight.
38:59
Some of the best stuff comes from not putting a bunch of pressure on yourself, trying to build something huge, and just following a pull, following your interest, 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 agree with that, yeah.
39:16
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Discover the insights you've been missing at contentsquare. com/lenny. Let's talk about growth.
40:06
So here's what I want to do.
40:06
I want to talk through just how you got the first users of Base44.
40:09
So I'm thinking maybe how'd you get like the first 10 users?
40:14
How'd you get the first 100 users?
40:14
How'd you get the first 1000 users?
40:17
What are the levers used there? What are the tactics? So let's start with 10.
40:21
How'd you get your first 10 users?
40:24
Just begging people close to me that I feel like that they have really good connections with to use it.
40:32
I feel like there's no other way.
40:32
And maybe there are other ways, but, again, I was very new to like B2C, like to consumerish-type of product.
40:43
And so I grabbed, well, I started with even three users, like really close friends.
40:43
Two of them back at the time, I caught them in a part of their life where they were unemployed.
40:53
So I was like, "Hey, why don't you try build a SaaS business or something like that?"
40:58
So three really close friends.
40:58
Well, somehow I got them to sit down with me every other day around the table, and they would use the tool.
41:07
They will try to build something, it will break.
41:12
I'll take a look, 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.
41:21
I feel like plenty of people are lucky to find maybe a method that consistently works for your like 10, 100, 1000 users, and then from there.
41:28
But I try to look at it as like milestones.
41:36
And so, first, I was like, "I'm not going to try and scale anything before I know that users enjoy it."
41:44
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.
41:53
So I haven't invested anything in marketing before I felt like, "Okay, for the first three or five or 10 friends."
41:59
At some point, they started sharing it with their friends.
42:06
They're like you'd see, okay, there's one new users today and then two new users today and so on.
42:12
So once it started happening, even on very low percentages because Base44 turned out later in its journey to be very viral, but back then, it was like an okay product.
42:23
People loved it and all liked it and started sharing it with that.
42:28
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 this started 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.
42:44
Because if you try to do it beforehand, I feel like you're going to waste a lot of time and resources on just having a very revolving door.
42:54
Like you get users in and users out, you not be able to.
42:54
And unless you have a lot of money to invest in paid so that it makes sense, then it's very hard.
43:04
I knew that I'm not going to do that.
43:04
It's like a product that I'm building.
43:04
I want it to be profitable from the get-go and not feeling bad for investing too much money into paid and so on.
43:08
And so I knew that it has to be viral.
43:13
At some point, I saw it's starting to look like it's viral.
43:18
Then I did a very failed, very bad ProductHunt launch, but also now looking back and saying, "This is completely fine."
43:26
I feel like people sometimes treat their launches, like product launches as like make it or break it for the company.
43:31
This wasn't the case for me.
43:35
I was like, "This is a tool for me to get to my next 30 users, my next 50 users."
43:41
And that's exactly what happened.
43:41
And so first ProductHunt launch, we got like 50, I got like 15 new users.
43:47
By the way, the second one broke ProductHunt.
43:47
They thought that there's like plenty of bots.
43:52
We won the first product of the day and the first product of the month, of the week, but it's a different story.
43:56
And so we got like 50 users, and we got the first user to pay.
44:02
This was an insane feeling because I'm an entrepreneur coming from like the enterprise space.
44:09
I was thinking that this is insane.
44:09
Why would anyone pay for my product without meeting me, without looking me dead in the eyes or trying to get a discount and so on?
44:21
Obviously, this user churned in like a few hours, the product wasn't good back then.
44:21
But from there, I started seeing some very slow growth.
44:30
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.
44:41
And then I tried a bunch of marketing things, didn't work, influencer post or paid or something like that.
44:46
And then one of my friends was also a founder, in a different space, told me, "Hey, you know what?
44:53
I think it's really cool that you're building it on your own and that you're trying to like take a very different approach than the usual VC-funded way.
45:03
Why don't you share content about that?
45:03
At the end of the day, it's like you're going to have the same, like your audience or builders, they're trying to build their own products or maybe even businesses, and it will likely resonate with them."
45:16
And so I started sharing the journey on LinkedIn, and I remember seeing posts like, "Okay, there's this nice concept of build in public, and people get really interested."
45:27
And I think here in Base44, we had this really nice synergy between the build in public and also my audience was like builders, right?
45:34
If I was building, I don't know, a product to attorneys, and probably this wouldn't have made a lot of sense.
45:46
Once I started sharing what I'm building in public and then getting more users and improving their product tremendously, I was so lucky.
45:52
The community around Base44 is nothing like I've ever seen. It's so supportive.
45:57
There's so much feedback and so- [inaudible 00:46:00] is so supportive, there's so much feedback.
46:01
And so from the loop of improving the product, this is exactly how people say it should feel like is like people asking for features before you can actually build them.
46:11
They're getting so excited about your product.
46:15
They're writing the nicest things.
46:15
People have started writing like, "Hey, you changed my life. I wanted to build.
46:19
I had those ideas throughout my life.
46:19
I didn't have an ability to do that or resources or money to pay for developers."
46:25
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 Base44. They would write posts.
46:41
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 Base44?"
46:47
I was like, "I'm not paying anymore, honestly."
46:52
So what I did is actually I did this program inside Base44 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 Base44, if you share it in social, you'll get extra credits to build."
47:02
So those two, build in public and giving out credits worked extremely well and that's how we got growth going. Okay, let's pause there. That was awesome.
47:17
How many users do you have at this point of the journey roughly?
47:22
I think there was two weeks between...
47:22
no, a week between being on a pace of 20 users a day to seeing 4,000 users come into your product, like new users a day, break the product. It was hard scaling it.
47:40
Also, just some things I needed to learn while moving.
47:40
It's like, yeah, I wasn't a DevOps engineer.
47:47
I don't know how to scale databases.
47:47
I didn't know that the virtual CPU would really come back at me when trying to scale and so on.
47:50
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 [inaudible 00:48:04].
48:02
So, yeah, I think once I started sharing in public it grew to a few thousands a day and then [inaudible 00:48:14] the credit thing did the rest.
48:16
Okay, so this is kind of the whole journey.
48:16
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.
48:20
The first is right at the beginning, coming back to a lesson you shared at the beginning, which is build for specific people.
48:28
So initially it was build for yourself, build for your girlfriend, build for the Scouts program, and then it was built for these 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 pull, look for people with problems to solve.
48:46
You almost went the opposite.
48:46
You're like, "Use my product. I need you as a favor.
48:51
Use my product and help me make it better." Absolutely.
48:56
Also, I don't know though.
48:56
Absolutely. Also, I don't know though. I think maybe paradigms are changing, but there are some things that I don't believe in is MVPs, 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
49:13
so much easier to build software, so the attention span for people to actually try out new software 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, be there physically. I remember that even when we passed 20K users, 50K users and 100K users, it was still
49:31
I remember that even when we passed 20K users, 50K users and 100K users, it was still very tough to get the right feedback.
49:38
So I would bring 20, 30 people to a room together, almost like a focus group or a small hackathon.
49:46
I'll do that every other week, just to get feedback, and it was so much easier than any other thing.
49:51
It was the same thing that I tried developing when we were just three users and five users.
49:55
So, yeah, build it for them.
49:55
They can come from different backgrounds.
50:01
Again, something else that I don't really empathize with or agree with is you have to have a certain ICP.
50:07
It's not necessarily about the profile of a person.
50:07
More of what they're trying to do is way more important.
50:14
So you can have different types of people, but they're all trying to do the same thing.
50:18
They're trying to build a tool.
50:22
I think some of those 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.
50:29
In a lot of cases you want to be really specific with ICP, because there's one thing you accomplish with this thing versus this very horizontal product. I agree.
50:39
But I think that's still very good to know.
50:39
Because maybe for your product you hear all this advice, you need a very narrow focus, you got to have a very specific role and company size and all these things, and you're like, "Okay, maybe not.
50:48
Maybe [inaudible 00:50:49] is something that a lot of people can use for a lot of different reasons.
50:51
Don't worry about that too much."
50:51
Okay, so step one, shared it with friends, a few friends, forced them to use it. "Please use this. I'm going to watch you."
50:56
Your point about being there physically, I think, is really interesting.
51:01
Like, don't just send it to them over email and ask them how it went.
51:04
It's like sit next to them and watch them use it and then keep making it better.
51:09
Then you tried this product at launch. Another great lesson.
51:13
You may fail on product end. That's okay. I don't know.
51:13
It sounds like you tripled your- Yeah. ...
51:18
quadrupled your user base from 10 to 30-ish in a failed product at launch. Yeah.
51:24
You also said you've tried paid, which didn't work.
51:24
You tried influencer marketing, didn't work.
51:28
So, basically, all the paid stuff didn't work. But that's great lesson.
51:28
I think people generally don't want to be doing that kind of stuff.
51:33
The point you made about starting to share it in public, I think, is really interesting.
51:37
A lot of people post stuff on LinkedIn and it's cringey.
51:44
There's a lot of people building in public. Who cares? What are you building? I don't know.
51:44
I don't care about what you're building.
51:48
What is it you think stood out about the way you approached it that is it this tool you built that tells you how to post really viral stuff?
51:51
What do you think you did that made people care?
51:56
Is it the small community you're already a part of in Israel and the tech scene?
52:01
Is that a big part of why you think it worked?
52:01
Is there anything else that might be helpful to folks that are thinking about building in public and being successful there? So first a disclaimer.
52:08
I feel like I had some very small, not audience, but I had plenty of LinkedIn connections before.
52:12
So everything started from LinkedIn, right? It was LinkedIn, okay. 'Til this day. Great.
52:18
Yeah, so now that the acquisition story is getting crazy all over the world, so getting a lot of followers from a bunch of different social media platforms.
52:23
But it started with LinkedIn.
52:30
I think the fact that I was the CEO of this company previously had some people around me in my connection.
52:38
So, again, you have to have, if you're writing to something that it's [inaudible 00:52:44] a few weeks ago, building public is great.
52:44
Other channels can really work, but at some point you have to take a bet on one channel that you see it's working.
52:53
So if you're writing posts week over week and you get five likes, it's likely not going to change drastically.
52:58
Again, I tried a bunch of things. Influencer didn't work.
53:06
Okay, just put it aside for a second.
53:11
Let's see if I can find a channel that works.
53:11
For the build in public, I was trying to be as honest as I could and just write the good, the bad.
53:18
I think also the fact that I wasn't a VC-funded company, I didn't try looking the best or show, "Hey, look at my amazing metrics," or make everything looks really [inaudible 00:53:37] and really great and I'm the fastest going whatever bootstrap 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.
53:44
Again, this is specifically for my audience.
53:50
My audience were builders and so I'm not sure that it works to any other product category.
53:57
But, yeah, just being very realistic and doing posts from the deepest technical tech stack and how I optimize the LLMs to just sharing some feelings or growth.
54:04
People like to see numbers, people like to see charts.
54:13
Also, even there, even in the building public, I would ask my friends beforehand that they knew that they were the target, like, "What do you think of this post? Is it interesting? Is it not?
54:22
Do you see value out of that?"
54:27
It's almost like a product that you're releasing out there. It's the same thing.
54:33
Okay, this is really interesting.
54:33
So being honest, really effective.
54:33
It feels like there's this underdog element of being a sole founder, not VC-funded adds to it.
54:37
Also, just sharing really interesting learnings, things you've learned yourself that innately people find interesting, because you didn't know this stuff.
54:47
Also, just fun stats and [inaudible 00:54:52] charts and things like that, building a tool on Base44 that can help you make these tweets better.
54:52
Also, I think it's important to note you had a network ahead of this.
54:57
You had people, you had followers, you had connections.
55:03
It wasn't starting from zero.
55:03
What's a rough sense of just, I don't know how large your network was, what's a way to think about that so folks are like, "Oh, wow, I'm nowhere near that"?
55:13
I don't think it was very big.
55:13
I think it was maybe a few thousand connections.
55:13
Nowadays, it's a few tens of thousands.
55:20
But you start seeing some engagement and once you do that, especially when like you're saying, "Okay, this is the channel that I'm going to put all my weight on."
55:31
Okay, that's a really important point too.
55:31
It wasn't like cross post to Twitter and Instagram, all these things.
55:35
It's pick one and just nail that.
55:39
Yeah, 'til this day I think that for me posting on Twitter was a waste of time.
55:44
At some point I saw LinkedIn succeed and I was like, "Okay, let's do the same thing on Twitter."
55:48
Now I have a better following on Twitter, but it didn't really work.
55:52
So I was spending a lot of time where from LinkedIn I saw the highest ROI.
56:01
And it could be very different for different founders for different products.
56:05
It could be Reddit, it could be opening up a Substack.
56:05
It could be very different things.
56:11
For me that's what worked.
56:11
Once you see something work, just double, triple down on that. Keep on.
56:17
Don't try just pray and pray.
56:17
It doesn't work at this stage.
56:17
At least for me [inaudible 00:56:20].
56:20
That is really great advice.
56:20
It aligns with what I often see with traditional growth engines.
56:25
There's like SEO, there's pay, there's sales, there's reality, word of mouth, and usually a company grows mostly through one, and LinkedIn interestingly was your vector of growth.
56:33
Also, just this incentives piece is really interesting, a really cool tactic.
56:38
So the tactic here is incentivizing people to share what they built on Base44 and they get credit to build more.
56:42
I've never heard of that before.
56:42
How do you actually do that?
56:48
Do they send screenshots or something?
56:48
How do they get credit for- Literally early on they sent me emails and I would take them, again, with an app and an LLM.
56:52
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 they would send...
57:05
I would say, "Hey, write a post, paste the link back, send me an email with the link and I'll give you credits."
57:14
So at some point I automated that because I couldn't really manage the whole thing.
57:20
But, yeah, because you couldn't really connect to the social APIs and so on. It was hard.
57:25
So i was like, " Just send me the post."
57:31
I know exactly what you mean with the support challenges of being a solo person.
57:34
With a newsletter of a million people, I get endless little things just come up.
57:34
I am really curious to hear you solve... Let's not get into it.
57:39
In terms of being solo, actually, I haven't asked this yet, how long were you actually solo?
57:42
When did you actually hire your first second person into the journey of the six months?
57:51
The first person started two months ago, so a month-and-a-half before the acquisition.
57:51
So I was running mostly solo, I think.
57:56
But when he started I already knew that it's headed there then. To acquisition? Yeah.
58:05
Also, at some point, once I started, the chances of this happening might grow, so I hired the best people I know because I knew that I have now these few years, if not more, that I have to build this to be really big and I need the right people around me.
58:22
It's not anymore about let's try and be as profitable and as fun as possible.
58:30
It was like let's literally take a bigger bet.
58:35
That's where I started bringing in the best people that I knew to help me build that.
58:44
Also, the way the deal is structured, not that I can share a lot of details around this, like, okay, there's the 80 mil that got published, that's the initial payment, and then there's this [inaudible 00:58:57] piece, which is really interesting, because I think that Wix structured the deal in a really win-win situation, but then a lot of my compensation and a lot of the upside is actually based on that other than the 80 mil.
59:10
So I have both the financial interest, also the personal interest in building this to be as big as possible.
59:16
So the month before the acquisition I had the team starting to scale.
59:22
But also Base44 became more profitable that I could afford myself to bring in more people.
59:28
The first hire, was that an engineer? What'd they do?
59:31
Actually, a product person. Whoa. Like a product manager? Yeah.
59:35
Well, it's someone who I've been working with a lot and he is like a jack of all trades.
59:35
He can go into LLM logs and look at mistakes and fix the points.
59:42
He can write Python scripts to analyze things that we do.
59:49
He can start implementing analytics into the product.
59:49
A very technical product person that could wear many hats, that's what you want when you're starting out. His name is Joav.
1:00:02
At some point, I was telling him, "Hey, Joav, you take growth now."
1:00:09
And he was like, "I haven't done growth anywhere. Right?"
1:00:09
"No, you take growth now.
1:00:14
Try and let's try a new challenge.
1:00:14
Let's try those kind of things."
1:00:14
So you want to bring in someone that at least the [inaudible 01:00:21] that can do many different things.
1:00:23
Okay, that's really interesting.
1:00:23
Let's finish talking about growth and let me share stuff you've shared already about what worked and then there's a few more things I read that you did that I'm curious how big of a deal they were.
1:00:31
First, you just grabbed a bunch of friends, used this product, used that to learn what to build, you tried Product Hunt, sort of effective early stages.
1:00:40
It ended up being really effective.
1:00:40
Then you had another launch that was, like you said, broke with the Product Hunt Algorithm.
1:00:48
How many users did that drive?
1:00:48
Was that a huge inflection, that second Product Hunt launch?
1:00:52
The thing is things happened so fast that I didn't really implement any data for stuff like this.
1:00:59
I don't really know how many users it's bought, but I remember first the community around Base44, again, is one of the most incredible communities that I've seen. It's a very strong one.
1:01:07
And the whole entire [inaudible 01:01:14].
1:01:13
So they all were very excited about the Product Hunt launch and I was like, "Let's skyrocket Base44."
1:01:16
And then I wake up and I see the weirdest things, like Base44 is not even in the top 10.
1:01:24
And I was like, "I know for a fact there's a thousand people already voted by the time it was noon."
1:01:30
And noon in Israel, very early on, was like I see people write, I see more posts on LinkedIn saying people should vote to Base44 vote then they actually see upvotes.
1:01:43
So 'til this day I don't really know what happened.
1:01:49
One of the community reached out to the support team for Product Hunt and saying, "You guys should check out your algorithm because something is not right."
1:01:55
Just even look at LinkedIn, search Base44 Product Hunt, you'll see this many posts. Like, you know what? You're right. We fixed it.
1:02:06
And then we jumped to the first place.
1:02:06
We were like 500 for upvotes.
1:02:10
The delta was 500 up uploads from the second place. My god. I've never seen that.
1:02:18
Yeah, so it was fun also seeing the community really for this.
1:02:26
Speaking of community, was that all in WhatsApp?
1:02:26
Where do you manage this community?
1:02:29
WhatsApp is a surprisingly really good tool to get feedback from the community.
1:02:29
Obviously, it's not a great tool for the...
1:02:36
The community is going so fast.
1:02:36
It blew past 1,000 or 2,000 or 5,000.
1:02:42
I don't even remember what's the limit on WhatsApp.
1:02:42
But 'til this day, the WhatsApp community, which was very early on is such a great place to get feedback, it's also even only enough, when it first started out, it was my best place to find out if the product is up, if there's slowness, if there's bugs because people write really fast and I can see that.
1:03:05
But, obviously, at some point we turn to more scalable solutions, like Discord, Reddit, those things, and then just keep on sending product updates via email. Okay.
1:03:24
There's another couple levers I've read about and then I'm going to move on to a different topic.
1:03:27
One is this hackathon you mentioned that helped you grow and become more aware.
1:03:32
The other is you did a bunch of partnerships, which is really rare for a company of your size.
1:03:37
So just talk about those and what that did to the business.
1:03:41
At one point, one of the things I really liked about building Base44 is that I saw people building apps that were really incredibly positive and doing really good in the world.
1:03:52
I think something really interesting right now in vibe coding in general is once you actually scale software, you can also scale the impact the software does.
1:04:03
So you can have nonprofits build themselves tools, you can have people that build apps for education and neglected domains that didn't really have budget because there was no business [inaudible 01:04:18].
1:04:16
And once you opened this up and make it super cheap to create software, then it's becoming. And this was early on.
1:04:20
We were at the 5,000- ish, 10,000-ish users.
1:04:30
And so I said, "Okay, well you know what?
1:04:30
Let's do a hackathon where we open up for everybody to build apps that do good in the world."
1:04:37
I had no budget back then, so I was like, "Okay, this is going to be a 5K hackathon.
1:04:44
The price is going to be 5K."
1:04:50
And it was your own money you were going to give away?.
1:04:52
Yeah, it was the profits that [inaudible 01:04:55] Base44 did at the same at that time.
1:04:52
And then a lot of people started registering and a lot of teams.
1:04:58
It ended up being 3,000 teams. So really big.
1:05:04
I think it's the largest 4good hackathon so far.
1:05:04
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, 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.
1:05:38
The ones that we partnered up with, they opened up their offices across of the globe to have teams be there.
1:05:44
And the prices went obviously very high.
1:05:52
I think this will likely be one of the top moments in my career.
1:05:52
It was very, very empowering, but people built a lot of interesting things.
1:05:59
I remember this person building a tool for her grandma with Alzheimer, she has Alzheimer's, and building an app, which is essentially a game to help the grandmother to memorize her family members with photos and names, and so many interesting and great and impactful applications.
1:06:26
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.
1:06:39
Okay, before we move on from growth, is there anything else that's worth mentioning that worked really well or just that people think will work and just didn't work for you that you didn't already mention?
1:06:52
The last piece, but people talk about that a lot, is that velocity eventually is a growth engine.
1:07:00
Part of building in public is you want to put content out there that people really like to see.
1:07:05
So we joked about it, but it's really true.
1:07:05
People like to see charts and they like to see numbers.
1:07:09
It gets them attached to this project if they are saying, "Oh, I wonder what's going to be profit next week," or "I wonder how much money is it losing and how can you optimize," and like they get attached to that.
1:07:20
I think, also, velocity is to some degree the same thing, because if your product evolves really fast and you're putting features out there every other day, people get attached to that .
1:07:33
I remember people commenting on my posts saying, "You know what?
1:07:43
It's moving so fast, I have to try it now."
1:07:47
So this is part of this velocity solves for so many things.
1:07:47
Most of my thoughts, and still are, when running Base44 is how do we increase velocity?
1:07:55
How do we increase velocity?
1:08:01
It's going to solve every product problem we have or most of them.
1:08:01
It's going to solve some of your marketing challenges if you're smart about it and you're putting the content out there and you're making everything like a mini launch.
1:08:09
So I feel like that was also a great growth tool.
1:08:16
That is a really good point.
1:08:16
Clearly everyone in the space understands this as well.
1:08:16
I want to talk about the acquisition piece, but a couple of quick questions that have been on my mind.
1:08:22
One is just what is the tech stack that you built on?
1:08:26
Because I think a lot of founders are like, What the hell do I build on?
1:08:30
What will help me move fast?"
1:08:30
So get as geeky as you want.
1:08:34
Just what are the tools and infrastructure used to build Base44? Render. com, oh, my God.
1:08:39
Honestly, they're not paying me anything.
1:08:39
I wish I would've invested or anything.
1:08:45
I don't think I ever spoke to someone senior there. Holy.
1:08:45
This was so much fun to work with and still is.
1:08:52
I mean, my previous company, we had large teams of DevOps building processes for us to push to production. So render. com is like- ...
1:09:04
DevOps building processes for us to push the production. So Render.
1:09:04
com is like, how is it called? Just it's a cloud.
1:09:06
I was like, yeah, it's like a very build on top of AWS.
1:09:06
You have a bunch of easy to manage processes and easy to start up web apps and scale them and so on. And it's just Render.
1:09:20
It's not a fancy version of Render, it's the word Render. com? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just looked it up. Okay, cool. Yeah.
1:09:27
So this is everything that has to do with infrastructure and manage both the website, the platform, and the applications itself.
1:09:33
Because Base44 is a complex ecosystem.
1:09:33
You have that user applications that have to be isolated and separated from the platform that has to be isolated and separated from the website. It's a whole thing.
1:09:51
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 users.
1:09:54
LLMs don't always understand what the user is trying to send, so they keep changing the data schema.
1:10:07
And I feel like this has been the right choice.
1:10:07
Obviously Kelso, but again, I was spending 20, 30% of my time just optimizing for making the whole repository LLM suitable.
1:10:14
By the way, those are concepts that I also implemented in Base44, but one thing that I kept doing is I tried making the LLM write as least code as possible.
1:10:31
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 codes as possible.
1:10:43
Because then, when the AI tries to implement the entire feature from scratch, there are more places where you can make mistakes or get confused.
1:10:56
There are more things that it needs to save in the context when you ask it for a follow- up prompt or something like that.
1:11:00
And so I built a very high level, very opinionated infrastructure like code infrastructure.
1:11:07
It takes care of the entire thing.
1:11:07
When you build a new feature, it takes off the entire, the CRUD, the authentication, the database, everything that has to do with that so that when you ask the LLM to implement a new thing, it writes very little code.
1:11:23
And by the way, this is also true for Base44 is provide LLM with a really good infrastructure and SDK. And have the LLM...
1:11:29
The LLM still has the flexibility to write the entire feature because it's code, but make it so that it doesn't need to spit out too many tokens.
1:11:35
And obviously, everything that has to do with rule set does one.
1:11:42
Controversial take for me working with LLMs is don't use TypeScript, use plain JavaScript, use JSX.
1:11:51
It's easier for models to write code this way.
1:12:00
So the front end for Base44 for the platform, I mean is built in JSX, not TypeScript.
1:12:07
And I feel like this has been working well.
1:12:07
Part of the reason why I haven't written a single line of HTML or JavaScript in the past, just it does this really well.
1:12:20
And another thing that works really well working with AI is try to push as much as possible in the same repository itself.
1:12:27
Like separating the front end and the backend, it's easier to give the context to the AI of both what's in the backend, what's in the front end.
1:12:41
Besides that, so my stack is the back end is in Python.
1:12:41
I feel like people can be very judgmental about that.
1:12:49
In terms of performance, I haven't gotten into performance issues.
1:12:54
And there's a lot of traffic to Base44.
1:12:54
And every now and then people try to DDoS Base44 and still the server holds.
1:13:00
And so I feel like if you're building it the right way, Python is just a very great language to do that.
1:13:06
And another maybe interesting take is because there's many of the new apps and products that are being built to some degree around LLMs.
1:13:20
So one of the things that I use is for the LLM that actually writes code in Base44, I use a mix of different models for different tasks.
1:13:27
So Cloud Four, for example, does a really nice job with first the initial prompt, writing the app from scratch.
1:13:34
Then everything that has to do with UI is just fantastic. Design is great.
1:13:39
But then for example, Gemini is really good when you get a very complex problem or we need to figure out an algorithm or Cloud Four got stuck in some bug loop, which happens a lot when you write code.
1:13:55
And 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.
1:14:10
Wow, that was extremely interesting.
1:14:10
In this routing, is this what you do within Cursor or you do this within Base44 based on what the person's working on? Base44. Yeah. Oh wow, okay.
1:14:20
I don't think Cursor has this. I wish they...
1:14:20
I think there's maybe an auto option for it, but in Base44 it's like when users ask- Wow. That's awesome. ...
1:14:30
I just try to analyze what they're asking and then figure out what's the right LLM to use. That is so cool.
1:14:34
So it's just Claude and Gemini, those are the two they use for Base44? Yeah.
1:14:40
Well, all of those tools, Base44, Kelso, all the right coding tools, I use the same paradigm or I don't know if you call it or method, which is you have the heavy guns, which is usually either Cloud Four or Gemini.
1:14:51
And then Cloud Four and Gemini usually create a high-level solution or high-level what changes do you want to make to the file?
1:14:57
So not writing all of the file from scratch every time. Kelso does that, Base44.
1:15:04
So writing only the chunk of code that needs to be implemented and high-level, then you get smaller, faster models like Flash, or o4-mini from OpenAI to implement to patch the code inside this file. Okay.
1:15:25
One very tactical question in a completely different direction, product question.
1:15:28
Activation, getting people to an aha moment feels like something that is core to retention.
1:15:35
Something that comes up a lot on this podcast.
1:15:35
Is there anything you learned about getting that right?
1:15:40
Anything you did that was really successful in getting people to see the value of Base44 really quickly?
1:15:44
And in that, start sharing it, using it?
1:15:49
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.
1:16:04
So, first when a few months ago or more than that, when Base44 started before actually implementing your app, so you would say something like, "Hey, create a task management app."
1:16:18
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.
1:16:29
Almost like a PRD, but something that's more digestible to folks who are not coming from the space.
1:16:40
So it will generate user flows, it'll show it to you like, "Hey, you want to create a task?"
1:16:45
And then you could say, "Hey, yeah, so maybe I want to add some files and stuff like that."
1:16:45
So it will show you what it's going to generate to make sure that it understands you.
1:16:50
And then you click okay and then it will generate the app.
1:16:55
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 it this way, but the conversions to get to the aha moment were not super high. And also not super...
1:17:16
I think one of the key to the aha moment in the vibe coding world, or at least in Base44, is like, "Holy shit, it actually understood me." And they see the app.
1:17:26
And if you have a stage in the middle, it makes it slightly less surprising.
1:17:32
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.
1:17:40
Sometimes there was a price to that, make sure it's not too big.
1:17:46
But sometimes there are a price 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 BTC, the attention span is so low, really.
1:17:56
So you want to get there in a minute or two or three.
1:18:03
And then from there, okay, later on, ramp up the features that you want to actually put there so that it can be the right product for your users.
1:18:15
That was an awesome insight.
1:18:15
Thank you for sharing that.
1:18:15
That's actually something that I think will help a lot of people. Okay, final topic.
1:18:19
I want to talk about the acquisition process.
1:18:19
Founders often look at this as the dream.
1:18:24
"Oh my god, I can sell my company millions of dollars," but I know it's always stressful and hectic and wild and the work only begins. You are not like a moth.
1:18:29
You have to keep building this thing.
1:18:36
So first of all, just how'd the acquisition conversation start? Wix reached out.
1:18:41
I think back then there was a lot of folks from the community were posting saying, "Hey, Wix should definitely buy Base44 before it gets too big," or something like that, even though we're not playing or competing in the same category, but it was clearly it's going to be- Why were they recommending Wix?
1:18:58
What was just the connection there?
1:19:01
First because of the Israeli ecosystem. Got it.
1:19:06
But also folks were building websites with Base44 and so it's the same thing. Got it. Okay. Makes sense. Yeah.
1:19:14
Obviously Wix is an incredible product for building websites, but a different approach from LLMs.
1:19:19
It's now definitely getting there. And so I got there.
1:19:19
The management team, Wix's management team is so friendly and such great guys.
1:19:25
And I remember sitting there and I think the first sentence, the first thing that Avishai the CEO told me is like, "Hey, everybody's been saying that we should buy you.
1:19:40
Maybe it's least worth the talk and we're here to help."
1:19:47
And I think early on we explored, at least in my mind it's like, "Yeah, it seems like that's a great team to work with.
1:19:55
They're definitely in the same space.
1:19:55
There's a lot I can benefit from partnering up together."
1:19:59
So it wasn't clearly an acquisition on the acquisition path.
1:19:59
And Avishai, the CEO is a very seasoned, very experienced and helped a lot of entrepreneurs in the B2C space and specifically in Israel to go and succeed.
1:20:15
And so I remember meeting him for a few nights of just eating some steaks and just chatting about how to grow Base44 and just literally just getting there to get an advice.
1:20:32
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...
1:20:44
This is a very unique case, but especially if they're buying 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 and chemistry with the founders, with the key people because eventually it's like I remember one of the key reasons where we were debating together whether I should join Wix or not.
1:21:07
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."
1:21:13
And I think also being a person that's going to be fun to work with is a key, especially if you are not a 500 people company that someone's buying.
1:21:27
They feel like a big company and it doesn't really matter.
1:21:27
You're buying the operations, you're buying the product.
1:21:30
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...
1:21:35
Want to work with for the next few years.
1:21:41
And so this was critical.
1:21:41
I think the best place, and this is not easy to get to, to this position, but the best position to negotiate such a deal or even to get there is to be also very fine with the other path of not getting acquired.
1:21:56
In some ways it's weird, but it's like in dating.
1:22:06
When you're in the first couple of dates, you don't want to show too much interest because then it's...
1:22:10
I think also I was in a position that I was saying, "Hey, if it works out, it's going to be amazing.
1:22:16
And if not, it's going to be amazing.
1:22:16
It's going to be either way fun."
1:22:20
Obviously I wanted it to work out. Yeah.
1:22:20
And the last thing they 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 Airnote piece because I feel like it's still, I show up every day to work and it's been only two weeks, but feel like it's going to be like that for years.
1:22:40
And like I have a personal investment in the business and its success.
1:22:47
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.
1:22:59
I love that part of the deal.
1:22:59
You could be a billionaire if it does well enough.
1:22:59
I don't know the deals, but in theory.
1:23:04
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.
1:23:16
So I was trying to not...
1:23:16
I wasn't nervous throughout the process, but this is a huge deal for me.
1:23:22
It's going to change my life, probably will change my kid's life.
1:23:22
And when we kicked off the process, we wanted it to be fast.
1:23:29
Also, it's not like Base 44 was a very old company with a lot of baggage.
1:23:36
There's no legal, it was very easy.
1:23:36
The due diligence process was very fast.
1:23:42
And I remember us saying to the lawyers and to our great institutions that we work with, it was, "Until Thursday night, that's it.
1:23:49
We're signing Thursday night.
1:23:49
No matter what we do, let's do it.
1:23:55
Let's wrap it up and make sure that we're aligning to sign Thursday night."
1:23:55
And we get till Thursday night, it's 2:00 AM.
1:24:00
We stopped fighting over small details and the lawyers have agreed to everything.
1:24:09
I was like, "Okay, just send it out for signatures. We said Thursday night."
1:24:16
And then lawyers were saying, "Yeah, we agreed on everything but we still need to change the wording and so on." And we were very tired.
1:24:22
I was like, "We're not going to do it the right way.
1:24:25
Let's wake up tomorrow morning and do that."
1:24:25
And I remember us, I remember going to sleep and then 4:00 AM was this announcement like, "Hey, a war broke out between Iran and Israel."
1:24:30
I was like, again, this is so classic.
1:24:38
I'm sure that the dealer...
1:24:38
I wasn't sure, I was like, "Holy...
1:24:45
I can't believe this is happening.
1:24:45
It's such an insane turn of events."
1:24:45
But everything went fine from there.
1:24:50
We woke up the next morning and signed the papers.
1:24:50
Yeah, as I said before, it was definitely the least boring month that I had in my life.
1:25:04
I was just thinking back to exactly that phrase that you shared. Oh, man.
1:25:04
There's just so many parts of the story that are so interesting.
1:25:09
It's a hero's journey story in so many ways.
1:25:09
Maor, is there anything else that you want to leave listeners with?
1:25:16
Anything that we didn't touch on?
1:25:23
Maybe just last piece of a negative advice for founders that are trying to start on this journey or on this journey that you think might be helpful to them?
1:25:32
First, before getting to the negative advice, the only thing that I would say really, if there's anyone from the Base44's community that's actually listening to this, I am so grateful.
1:25:39
This community has been so supportive.
1:25:46
And many times I'm saying, "Okay, maybe I did this right and that right," but it's hard for me to think about what I did so many things right to get this community behind the product.
1:26:00
And so I'm so grateful for the community.
1:26:00
So if everyone's listening, really, I'm hoping to serve everyone better. What not to do? Yeah, there's plenty.
1:26:06
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.
1:26:23
There's plenty of ways of saying that and different diagrams that they show you as what you're good at, what you want to do, what's fun for you, what's energizing, what's not.
1:26:33
I think 50% of it should be in this sweet spot of you are doing the thing that you are genius at, your genius zone or whatever they call it.
1:26:38
And they're also fun because that's what keeps you up, showing up every day.
1:26:45
And it's unbelievably different than being a very talented person and a very skilled person, but doing things that you either don't like. And it's fine.
1:26:57
Everybody does things that they don't like.
1:26:57
And in every job there's those places, but keep yourself in the zone of genius.
1:27:02
I think that's really crucial.
1:27:11
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 for public companies, like Wix and Mindy. com and Ito and so on.
1:27:25
Obviously, they have to do a lot of different things and being CEOs of public companies, you have to manage a lot of things, a lot of logistics and I don't know, bureaucracy, but they all have a major, or to some degree major part of their job is doing something that they really like and they're really good at.
1:27:47
It's whether it's product design, whether it's building a marketing machine or something like that, or I think that's critical.
1:27:58
Yeah, that's the biggest thing.
1:27:58
And also it's like, and you probably hear this nowadays on every podcast, but it's the best time to build.
1:28:05
And it can be really life-changing, just starting out something that you really like.
1:28:10
Well, I feel like we're at the start of an age is going to be bigger than the revolution that the internet did obviously.
1:28:17
I think now it's becoming clearer to anyone.
1:28:21
And so just building what you want is becoming so much easier. Just do it.
1:28:27
Do something that you like.
1:28:27
I think it's going to be from a lot of chance, it's going to be life-changing.
1:28:31
And if not, at least you'll have very little regret in the future.
1:28:36
Maor, I'm going to skip the lighting round, but I'm going to give you...
1:28:38
Because approaching midnight your time, I want to make sure he gets some sleep.
1:28:41
I'm going to ask you one question.
1:28:41
There's something I meant to ask earlier, but I didn't.
1:28:44
Base44, what is that about?
1:28:44
Why did you call it Base44?
1:28:51
This is the most really the stupidest probably reason that you hear for a name behind a product.
1:28:59
So again, Base44 was not intended to be a very large scale, the global phenomena that it's becoming right now.
1:29:08
I wanted to have base in the name because I felt like that's going to be the base of where people's going to start build software or solve their pains and so on.
1:29:18
And obviously back then Base.
1:29:18
com wasn't available and I didn't have money to buy a very fancy domain.
1:29:24
So I started seeing, I think it was Cloudflare, I don't remember even what domain provider was that.
1:29:29
It started showing me some numbers.
1:29:29
My date of birth is February 2nd, and so Base22 available and say, "Okay, let's double it."
1:29:36
And then Base44 was like, "I like the sound of it.
1:29:43
It's almost like Base64."
1:29:43
And for the nerd in me it was like, "Okay, Base64 is one way to encode data from one type to another."
1:29:50
And it's like Base44 is going to do the same.
1:29:57
It's like encode natural language into software.
1:29:57
And I was like, "Okay," to Wix, "Let's go with it."
1:30:02
It's good that it's memorable, the number in the name, but there's no real very sophisticated reason behind it.
1:30:13
That is an amazing story.
1:30:13
I love that you were like, "Base64 was cool, but I guess there's a reason 44 could be cool."
1:30:19
And it's not even Base42.
1:30:19
There's always 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.
1:30:32
I don't know, maybe it shows you the power of how a name doesn't necessarily make a huge deal.
1:30:35
Interestingly, a recent podcast episode is about how a name can make a big deal so there's both sides to it.
1:30:40
Maor, this was incredible.
1:30:40
Thank you so much for doing this.
1:30:45
Congratulations on the outcome.
1:30:45
I know this is just the beginning.
1:30:45
I know the product is only going to get better. What a fun place to be. Hope you get some sleep. Two final questions.
1:30:54
Where can folks check out what you're building? Is it just Base44. com?
1:30:56
Anything else they should know?
1:30:56
And how can listeners be useful to you? Just try it out.
1:31:00
I think we're at a place where people really love the product.
1:31:00
And for every user that we get, it turns out to be two or four later on because they're sharing it.
1:31:05
So just try it out, base44.
1:31:11
com, and build something that you like.
1:31:11
And if you have a bit more time, just leave feedback so that we can make it better. Amazing.
1:31:19
Maor, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Lenny. Bye, everyone.
1:31:23
Thank you so much for listening.
1:31:23
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1:31:29
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1:31:35
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1:31:40
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