Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo

[00:00] In six months, you went from zero, basically nothing, to selling this company for $80 million plus to Wix. The funny thing is that Base44, for the first time in my life, was not trying to build the biggest thing ever. Me and my girlfriend, we were on a plane. I told her, hey, you know what, if we get to $1.5 million till 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 [00:30] 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, Bolt, Replit, Vercel. How'd you get your first 10 users? I started with three users, really close friends. 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 [01:00] 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. [01:11] Today my guest is Mayore 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 Base44, which is essentially a more advanced vibe coding tool.

Six months later, just a few weeks ago, he sold the company for 80 million dollars to Wix. [01:34] 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. [01:49] In our conversation, Mayor shares exactly how he grew the product from zero to ten to hundreds to hundreds of thousands of users.

[01:57] 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, also the super important insight that everyone needs to hear about how he came up with the idea and then refined the idea. [02:11] 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 bootstrap company. [02:19] A big thank you to Noam Sehgal and Amir Klein for suggesting topics for this conversation.

[02:24] If you enjoyed this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. [02:29] with that [02:30] I bring you Mayor Shlomo. [02:32] 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 CPOs and product teams uncover business impact and act faster. It listens to your sales calls, support tickets, churn reasons, and lost deals, surfacing the biggest product issues and opportunities in

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Whether you're running usability tests, interviews, surveys, or in-the-wild fieldwork, dScout makes it easy to connect with real users and get real insights fast. You can even test your Figma prototypes directly inside the platform. [03:58] 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, head to com to learn more. That's com. The answers you need to move confidently. [04:22] 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. [04:29] It's my pleasure. I don't actually do conversations like this often. [04:33] with early stage founders [04:35] But I'm really excited to be doing this because I feel like the journey that you've been on [04:39] over the last six months is kind of like the dream for a lot of founders. [04:43] Especially founders that don't want to build massive teams, that don't want to raise a [04:47] Basically, the journey you've been on is build a product, [04:50] 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. [04:58] and [04:59] 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. [05:05] 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... [05:14] a really unique point in time to extract as much wisdom out of your head as possible.

Really the right time to kind of like reflect back. Yeah, I think there's gonna be many more times. This is a really unique time. Let's start with a couple basics. Just what is Base44 for folks that aren't super familiar with the product that you built? [05:30] 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, [05:40] a website or something like that, and then have AI code it for you. One of the first ones doing that, I think it's a very [05:50] a crowded category [05:52] But I think Base44 takes a very different approach, a very opinionated one.

[05:56] for and one that that users or users like to call it a batteries 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. [06:13] without connecting third-party services or bringing your API keys and so on. [06:19] And I think it helps a lot when you're trying to scale a Vibe-coded application to [06:25] 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 front-end web apps.

And then when a user needs some back-end stuff, [06:41] They have a great integration with Superbase. Superbase, I think, is the most common. [06:47] kind of like thing that most competitors use. [06:51] And honestly, all of them are doing a great job with the integration, but as the nature of an integration, [06:56] 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, [07:11] I think Base44 does a really good job with building very complex and functional [07:17] real-world applications.

[07:19] Okay, I want to talk about the origin story of just like how you even realized that there was an opportunity here. Clearly it worked out. 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. [07:32] So, in six months, you went from zero, basically nothing, to selling this company for 80 million plus dollars to Wix. [07:38] It took you three weeks to hit a million dollars ARR. [07:41] You bootstrapped this business, I think you put in a few tens of thousands of shekels, not even US dollars.

[07:48] You have something like 400,000 users right now. You're a sole founder. [07:51] 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 the stories. [07:59] Any other stats that are worth sharing? Anything else that's important high level before we get into the origin story? [08:03] I don't think so. I think... Looking back, it sounds... [08:10] insane, but mostly this is it. [08:12] I love that perspective. Okay. So how did this start? There were two things I think that drove me to it.

One, [08:22] My girlfriend needed a website to capture leads. She has a small business. She's an artist. [08:30] And I tried building that with 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 then how do you manage your data and so on. And in my previous company, we dealt a lot with LLMs. [08:52] And while I was doing that, I was like, it doesn't make any sense.

I know models can write. [08:57] the code, [08:58] 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 others can do that. They just don't have the right infrastructure to do that. It's like if I set up an infrastructure for like, hey, here are the leads, go to the database, like you can write the act code and it will serve it and it will be great from an SEO perspective and so on.

[09:20] Then I'll notice like it's going to be super easy and she can do it on her own. And the other trigger... [09:27] 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. [09:40] And back then, it's a huge organization, by the way, really huge, like tens of thousands of people. [09:48] And they have many, as any other organization in the world that we're currently living at, has many software needs. [09:55] And so every time they needed to build something, they didn't have any internal devs, any software engineer.

So they'd reach out to other agencies and agencies usually would quote them like a million bucks. [10:05] just to build something that I knew people could build. [10:08] I was and still, by the way, a huge fan of tools like Retool, [10:12] for like the previous wave of like no code [10:18] tools, but then those tools were really more of like low code tools. I still needed to know some JavaScript, something to make them work, to have the interaction right. [10:28] And again, also back then I was like... [10:30] I know for the software and systems that they want to build, [10:34] I know it could be done, it's just, [10:36] Elements 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. [10:44] The right infrastructure so that the LLM has access to 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. [11:00] And so those two were Twiggers. [11:03] Back then, I started a company seven years ago called Explorium, very different than Base44, very much like enterprise top-down sales in the data space. [11:15] Very capital heavy, we raised $130 million.

I was a CEO for seven years. [11:21] Then when the October 7th floor broke out, I went to reserves for almost a year. [11:29] 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 liked the most. And I have it at a chance because exploring grew and grew. [11:41] I haven't had a chance for a while to do, which is coding. I wanted to get back to building and get my hands dirty. [11:48] And so [11:49] I had those, like, given those experiences both with my partner, my girlfriend, and also with the scouts.

[11:56] 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. [12:02] And I think when you're approaching it this way and like... [12:05] Not the usual way of like, let's raise a ton of money and try to own the category. [12:11] And I knew I was getting into a very crowded category. I also knew that I have like some... [12:16] some different angle and some different take on the category [12:19] Um... [12:20] But when you're approaching it this way, there's not a lot to lose.

I think it gives a lot of energy. [12:26] And that's how base 44 started. They definitely didn't think it's going to take off so fast. [12:34] Um... [12:35] But yep, that's pretty much about it. [12:37] okay i like that you don't take good for the work you did to help it take off so fast i'm excited to talk through that [12:42] Just first, a few maybe takeaways from what you just shared. [12:44] of how this idea merged for folks that are looking for ideas. [12:48] One is clearly we're solving somebody's real problem, your own problem.

[12:53] helping your girlfriend build this [12:55] this website for her and then working with this the scouts program in Israel basically building them software so [13:01] So I think that's a really important takeaway. You weren't just like, hey, maybe this will be useful to someone. It's [13:05] I have a real problem and I want to solve it and nothing out there is good enough, so I'm going to build it myself. [13:10] The other is you said that you're having fun. Feels like that's an important element, just like [13:14] You should enjoy it.

You shouldn't feel like it's some kind of drag. [13:17] You know what? I feel like in... [13:20] Like when I was a first timer, when I first started my first company exploring myself, many smart people told me, [13:28] Those two... [13:29] Very important truth is like 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. And so when you're a first timer or at least for myself... [13:43] 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. [13:51] Um, [13:52] And I feel like those are, even though it sounds like a cliche, [13:57] It's so much easier one [13:59] Building something that you'll actually use so I actually tried solving both problems like I was I [14:05] building the product and at the same time developing those two products for my girlfriend, for the scout, [14:11] And later on, also for other friends and family, and we'll get to that. That's how I got my first couple of users.

[14:17] But super important to build something that you use, you'll move forward so much faster. [14:22] but also doing something that you love. [14:26] I was the CEO of Experian for seven years. It was such a fantastic experience. It had so many highs and lows. But at some point, it grew. [14:35] 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... [14:41] like being a CEO, managing sales, managing HR, managing all those kind of things. [14:46] And I think that gives a lot of power.

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. [14:58] I think this is something a lot of founders... [15:00] It's hard to find a co-founder that, out of the blue, when you have an idea, YC famously doesn't like... [15:07] So I think there's a lot of power in what you've achieved. [15:11] 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? [15:23] as a sole founder using AI. [15:25] One solo founder and specifically bootstrapping [15:29] It's not for like, I don't think it's suitable for every use case. Right. If you're building like a B2B company, especially if you're like doing a B2 enterprise company, like [15:38] You'll need to hire a salesperson or a sales team. You 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 is going to stay there. [15:50] tomorrow so I don't think it's like a [15:52] the right setting for every company. I feel like if you're building something that has the potential to be viral, [15:59] or to target the masses. And so it doesn't really matter if you're like funded or not. You 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 fit. [16:14] then everything is better doing a solo bootstrap than the other way around.

[16:19] Why not? [16:21] even from a [16:22] pure cold angle of like the financial outcome [16:26] Obviously, if you're able to bootstop your business and [16:29] and again, get out of the escape velocity, be profitable to some degree, then you'll likely generate a financial outcome that's, I think, [16:38] for most cases way better than any other thing. [16:42] Second is so [16:45] Not specifically the solo but the boot stopping thing. [16:48] less stressful, like you wake up in the morning as like, you feel profitable. And there's like, I think there's like this term default alive.

[16:56] It's so much easier. I've done both. [16:59] and the weight of raising so much fund [17:03] Even if your investors are great, and my investors were awesome and they were always supportive and so on, [17:07] But even so, [17:09] I feel like being bootstrap, like no other money except of yours in the business and the business is growing and... [17:18] profitable. [17:19] I feel I can keep the energies up. And I think I keep... One thing that I've learned from my previous company is energies are super important. [17:27] Usually it's a marathon.

For me it was a sprint. I thought it was 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, [17:36] then you'll feel chances, kind of like... [17:39] goes up immediately. [17:43] But then there's a lot of downsides and a lot of stressful moments during that. [17:50] 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 is really tough.

[18:01] A few accidents that really I'm joking about that, but I was saying it to my friends like, show them my life a bit with just like the stress. I had the one funny, now I look at it as a funny moment where [18:14] Um, [18:15] I was at my brother's wedding and we were doing the photo shoots [18:20] 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. [18:35] 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. And I remember like hanging up the phone, I was like, okay, I'll take a look at it immediately. I remember hanging up the phone and saying... [18:49] I know... [18:51] 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, [19:00] Only night that I'm not able to open up a laptop and handle that, this is what happens.

[19:07] And so I threw out there some excuse and I have to go and practice towards the ceremony or something like that. [19:15] open up a laptop, spend two hours, two very scary hours of my life. It ended up being [19:22] Just the LLM. [19:23] tried using a package called cryptography, which is like a js, like a JavaScript package, has nothing to do with crypto. [19:32] But obviously the user, not the technical user, saw this error of like, hey, something cryptography or something like that was sure that someone like a crypto scam hacked into you.

[19:42] into the app. [19:43] And so you have a lot of those situations [19:45] moments that... [19:48] 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 handle that. [19:59] In my previous company, my two co-founders, we were really good friends. [20:04] like great friends and even if the [20:07] one of us would mess up, then still would have someone to share it with and run jokes around and just beat it with someone.

So when you're solo, it's hard. [20:16] Um... [20:18] Thank you. [20:19] And then brutal prioritization, which is something you have to do because you have to... [20:25] keep up the pace of the product. And obviously nowadays with AI and like everyone can deal software, like you have to go extremely fast. [20:34] on one side and on the other side, figure out marketing along the way. [20:38] and how to do that and every time [20:41] I remember that every time I had this ceremony where I'd start the day and try to [20:48] look inside and ask myself...

[20:50] What do I need to work on today? [20:52] And what do I want to work on today? So what I want to work on today was always like I want to code. [20:57] Like, that's what I like to do. Let's improve the product. I know there's like a bug that that makes like a noise some of the users. I know there's like the feature that 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? [21:27] I know this is not a battle. I know people are converting well, they're growing, retention is looking good. [21:35] And it's all about just like increasing the audience, even though I know like I need to, like, even though I want, I didn't want to work on the product. And so... [21:44] I think it is like this context switching is hard. [21:48] Yeah, and the last piece obviously is... [21:51] I was spending a lot of my time...

[21:54] on making sure that my setup [21:57] like how I code, how I write content and so on is optimized and everything is automated. And so I spent a lot of time [22:06] thinking and agonizing about how to structure the code repository. [22:10] For example, so that I can use... [22:13] uh, cancel for backend and base 44 for frontend to write like code really fast. [22:19] Um... [22:21] And this was like really important for me to keep kind of like [22:24] 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, I should like, [22:33] smaller teams with a lot of contacts nowadays can move faster. And the same goes also for marketing and for other tools. [22:42] 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. [22:53] Okay, let me follow that thread. That's a really interesting topic. So, [22:57] What is in your stack of productivity? [23:00] for yourself and then just that allowed you to build base 44 just like the tech stack of base 44.

So you said cursor [23:07] Base 44. [23:08] 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. But then you have to like first, the first thing you want to do is like make sure that your work day looks like, like that you can be focused and that you get like a lot of like deep work. And so I have a product called Rescue Time, which I really like, but I think there's like a bunch of other products like

[23:35] shuts down every access to Twitter and LinkedIn and so on. This was really hard because I was starting to like do this build in public, which turned out to work pretty well for base 44. And so every time you want to like, [23:49] 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. [23:57] Uh... [23:58] I had this Phil set up that [24:01] really allowed me a certain set of software tools that I can use to manage deep work.

[24:09] Um... [24:11] Kerosil has been awesome. [24:13] Base44 not only did like to work for the front-end side, but also a lot of like the business apps that I used were on top of Base44. So where I'd manage users and give credits and write content. And then like I had this app where I kind of like at the start of the week would write... [24:32] 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 LinkedIn posts.

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 [24:50] my process and what I wanted to do. [24:52] which really helped. But I think you can do that not only with BaseballD4, you can vibe code your way [24:59] into productivity tools that really fits what [25:02] you want to do and what the process for you looks like. For example, for my [25:09] social posts and so on. There's like a process that I would follow and maybe no one else would follow that.

And so Vibecode, the custom app for that. [25:19] 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. [25:32] How does that actually look? What is the input? That sounds really interesting. [25:35] 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? So the way I grew Base44, probably a different topic, but...

[25:47] 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 Base44 journey. [26:00] Um... [26:02] And then I'll have a process that I'll follow. I'll write down before that on a piece of paper some ideas that I had for post, for throughout the week. Because you want to keep consistency and keep putting good things out there. [26:16] My process before the app was like, I'd go to ChetGPT, I'll write like a very vague, kind of like a structure or skeleton of a post and tell it like, hey...

[26:25] fix my writing, improve my writing a bit, and then ChatGPT will spit out something that [26:30] 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 so okay i'll have now my my 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

[26:55] 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. [27:04] and just vibe coded it up around it. [27:08] to help me speed it up and then made sure that the LLM inside the app [27:13] was using my own tone of voice and was saving the previous post 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 were to go to com and try this out. What would be a prompt you'd suggest? Like how they get started building a tool like this? [27:33] Usually what I'll do is I'll... [27:36] 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 base44 does a good job with this, like understanding at least the big pieces. Okay, there's going to be an LLM writing the content, there's 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. [28:00] and my process is doing this and then LinkedIn and then Twitter, write something to support that and then from there iterate. [28:07] And also something that I really like with [28:10] 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, like, [28:17] you can, because it's really easy to change the software, [28:20] It's like you get this adaptive software.

It's like as you improve your processes or maybe your processes change, [28:27] It's like you adapt it. So like Base44 got acquired by Wix two weeks ago and so [28:33] Now the process of putting content out there looks a bit different. And so with just two prompts, I could 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. [28:47] 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. [28:56] Lovable, Bold, Replit, V0, Vercel, 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, [29:05] going to be acquired by Wix? Did you plan on raising money? Do you think you had a chance, staying bootstrapped, competing against the folks that everyone's, you know, the more popular [29:15] products today. [29:16] Base44 was like... [29:18] very profitable much more than what I thought so even if like [29:23] Even if I wasn't getting acquired, I thought I could put money out of it.

[29:27] It ended up late. And remember we... [29:31] I had like a very failed product launch at like mid-January and then [29:36] started writing some like started building in public at around start of February and that's where he took off and [29:42] And then started like I think first dollar or like the first 10 or 100 bucks were towards March. [29:50] And then in May, I already did close to 200k in profit. [29:56] And so [29:57] I think... [30:00] I think either way there was like a wolf. [30:03] to compete.

And even though it was small, I was seeing that the users that come to me stick, like, that come to Base44, stick with Base44, even though they're very familiar with, like, [30:15] the rest of the competition. The challenge was obviously [30:18] making [30:19] 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 and doing an awesome job on growth really. [30:31] But I didn't have the resources, so I tried finding ways to fight the fight.

I think we had a very successful... [30:40] Hackathon for Good, which turned out to be a great growth engine. [30:44] And I also did good in the world, which is like we had 3,000 teams just building some [30:49] great do-good apps but also to be very honest I think part of the reason to get acquired is [30:56] is because this market has been moving so fast, faster than anything I've seen, faster than what I thought is going to move. [31:04] And at some point, I feel it's going to be [31:07] Like, [31:08] you see Base44 grows and you start thinking, hey, this can really help people with their lives.

Like this... [31:13] This is like one of those self-taught categories that [31:16] 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. [31:24] And so I was like, let's go for the big one. Let's try and actually build some global skill, maybe lead the category, maybe win it. And I felt like the best chances to do that is to... [31:36] partner up with Wix. There's like plenty of reasons to do that.

We can we can touch on that later. But like same DNA, same customer base, like they know what they're doing, they're seeing and obviously like very good connection with with the entire management team over there. [31:51] And so I feel like the acquisition... [31:55] Again, being very honest, I felt like it's going to be a financial success either way. [31:59] But the acquisition is like taking a stance and saying, [32:02] You know what? [32:04] Let's play in the big league and let's punch down, not only punch up when fighting in this very crowded space, [32:13] And that's part of the reason why to get acquired.

[32:16] 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 it's [32:28] As a solopreneur, as someone that's never raised money, you can... [32:33] make significant income doing something like this in a crowded space [32:36] if you have something that people love that enough people love. So I think that's a really interesting insight. Like, it's OK if there's a bazillion [32:42] 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 scared many times. I thought, how am I going to go into the fight? Those companies are one, some of the fastest growing companies ever. [32:57] Again, they're great teams and very well-funded and a lot of money being poured into you. [33:04] Like for a 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. [33:16] 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 [33:25] teams of AI is like writing code. I don't think I've written a single line of like [33:29] HTML or JavaScript in the past three months, but still like that base 44 font and changes a lot because [33:35] AI writes that so yeah if you have an interesting angle and you're able to move fast [33:41] I feel like... [33:42] Money and funding is not necessarily the...

[33:46] de facto to win a category [33:49] And that's going to change even more drastically in the future. As LLMs get better, people [33:56] like, [33:56] 10x engineers would have way more impact. There are going to be 100x engineers because they're able to manage... [34:01] Isla Lamson is not necessarily the team size, no, the funding [34:05] That will be able to win you a category. What you just shared is amazing that you haven't written any JavaScript or 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. [34:25] 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. [34:33] And even distribution, I'm still learning that. Even distribution nowadays is very different. And also in favor of the solo... [34:42] Not necessarily the solo, but not necessarily that you're going to pull a lot of money on paid campaigns.

Like Base44 goal... [34:50] with close to zero marketing budget. I spent like a [34:54] $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. [35:05] and building public. [35:07] Even distribution is very different. But yeah, if you have an... [35:10] interesting take on a domain [35:13] Base44's first user was one of my best friends. Like, we grew up together. And up to... [35:20] few months ago he was a restaurant manager and then he left and started like a sas company for managing invalices for restaurants so [35:29] This is a guy that has both distribution.

Obviously, this is very local. [35:33] like software and company, but has distributions, like has those connections, but has a very deep [35:39] domain knowledge and now that like the technical he has no [35:43] Bye. [35:44] Human coding are very different places. I think if domain knowledge become, or domain expertise, and some interesting take on a domain, [35:56] or a product or a category becomes like a key thing and then distribution [36:02] Yeah. [36:02] That's a hard one to get, but also the world is changing a lot. [36:06] Yeah, and I love that you did it with no funding.

The other thought here as you're talking is it feels like [36:12] You could have kept doing this and made money and lived a great life. [36:15] 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, I'm making a living off this writing one email a week. [36:23] I could live really well just doing this. [36:26] But then I'm like, oh, why not do a podcast? Why not do another podcast? Why not do some other stuff? [36:30] And the reason I do that is that it just like it's just boring to do something the same way forever.

[36:35] And there's this opportunity that's out there. I'm like, I should do that. [36:38] And I feel like [36:39] Some people are on it. I just don't need that. I'm good. I'm going to live in, I don't know, Fiji and just code and 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, 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 Base44 for the first time in my life was not trying to build the biggest thing ever. So I remember like when I started exploring my previous company, [37:10] I was so... [37:11] Um... [37:13] 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, I remember that I kept looking like, hey, Explorium raised $100 million before Snowflake. This is insane. This is amazing and so on. [37:28] and [37:29] And I did that for seven years.

[37:33] And [37:34] I think base 44 is the first time that I stopped and said, [37:38] I just want to go back to do what I really love. [37:41] which is just building a product. I don't care if it wins the category or not. I don't care if it's going to become really big or not. [37:48] Um... [37:49] I remember when we... [37:51] When me and my girlfriend got back from the trip to Asia, [37:56] And we were on the plane. I told her, "Hey, you know what? If we get [38:01] to 1.5 million.

I don't remember why I said exactly this number. If we get to 1.5 million, [38:07] million dollars in ARR till the end of 2025. [38:11] We're going to buy a nice car. And we got there in like four weeks. And so it was the first time for like saying... [38:18] Let's not try and build the biggest thing. Let's just do something I really like. [38:22] 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 see success and you see like true positive impact on people, then you're saying, okay, you know what?

[38:36] Let's play in the big league and try to scale it. [38:41] 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 called it my anti-empire. I don't want to build anything big. I'm just going to keep it chill. [38:53] Project Chill, Project Avoid 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.

[39:04] and just following a poll, following your interests, following [39:07] Just that insight you have ends up being some of the best ideas come out of that and the biggest ideas. [39:13] I love it. I agree with that, yeah. [39:15] This episode is brought to you by ContentSquare, the analytics platform that helps companies build better digital experiences. Ever wonder why customers drop off before converting? Or why some pages perform better than others? ContentSquare takes the guesswork out of digital experiences, giving you real-time insights into how users interact with your site or app.

With AI-powered analytics, automatic frustration detection, and clear visualizations, you'll know exactly what's working and what's holding your customers back. [39:45] Whether you're optimizing an ecommerce checkout, refining a B2B leak flow, or improving a mobile app experience, ContentSquare pinpoints exactly what needs fixing and why. [39:54] Content Square powers better customer journeys across 1.3 million websites and apps. Discover the insights you've been missing at com slash Lenny. [40:06] Let's talk about growth. So here's what I want to do. I want to talk through just how you got [40:10] 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 hundred users how'd you get the first thousand users [40:18] What are the levers used there?

What are the tactics? So let's start with 10. How did you get your first 10 users? [40:24] Just begging people close to me that I feel like that I have... [40:28] that they have really good connections with. [40:31] to use it. I feel like there's no other way. Maybe there are other ways, but [40:37] Again, I was very new to B2C, to consumerish. [40:42] type of product. And so I grabbed, well, I started with even three [40:46] users, like really close friends. [40:49] Two of them back at the time I caught them in like a part of their life when they were unemployed.

[40:54] So I was like, "Hey, why don't you try to build a SaaS?" [40:57] business or something like that. [40:59] 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. I'll take a look at the logs. I'll go back to my computer, try to change it, push into production and then. [41:19] Just build it for them. I feel like plenty of people are lucky to find...

[41:24] Maybe a method that consistently works for your like 10, 100, 1000 users and then from there. [41:33] 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. [41:43] that users enjoy it and the best magic 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.

[42:00] Before I shot like, okay, for the first three or five or ten friends, [42:05] 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 [42:18] Base 44 turned out later [42:21] in its journey to be very viral but back then it was like an okay product people loved it and and all liked it and started sharing it with that and so once [42:31] I started seeing that this works and we got to like 10 users.

We were all my friends and then the 11th user or something like this, started seeing people that don't really know me. [42:41] 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 having a very revolving door. You get users in and users out. You will not be able to. And unless you have a lot of money to invest in paid...

[43:02] I saw that it makes sense, 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 saw that it's starting to look like it's viral. [43:18] Then... [43:20] I did a very failed, very bad product on launch. But also now looking back, I'm saying this is completely fine.

I feel like people... [43:29] sometimes treat their launchers like product launchers as like make it or break it for the company. [43:34] This wasn't the case for me. I was like, this is a tool for me to get to my next... [43:39] 30 users, my next 50 users. And that's exactly what happened. And so first product launch, we got like 50, I got like [redacted address], the second one, [43:50] broke product hunt, they thought there was like plenty of bots. We won the first product of the day and the first product of the week, but it's a different story.

And so we got like 50 users and we got the first user to pay. [44:04] This was an insane feeling because I'm an entrepreneur coming for the enterprise space. [44:12] 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? [44:21] Obviously, this user churned in a few hours because the product wasn't good back then. [44:27] But [44:29] From there, I started seeing some very slow growth. So I got my first 50 and then 20 left.

And then the other 30 started sharing it with other users that were really good. [44:41] And then I tried a bunch of marketing things [44:43] Didn't walk. [44:45] influencer post or paid or something like that and then [44:49] One of my friends was also a founder in a different place. [44:54] Different space told me, hey, you know what? I think it's really cool that you're building it on your own. [44:59] and that you're trying to take a very different approach than the usual VC-funded way, why don't you share... [45:06] like content about that, like [45:08] At the end of the day, it's like you're going to have the 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. [45:18] And so I started sharing the journey on LinkedIn. And I remember seeing posts like, okay, there's this nice concept of building public. [45:27] and people get really interested. [45:29] And I think here in base 44, I had like this really nice... [45:33] synergy between [45:35] They're building public and also my audience was like builders. [45:39] If I was building a product to attorneys, then probably this wouldn't have made a lot of sense.

Once I started sharing what I'm building in public and getting more users and improving their product tremendously, I was so lucky. The community around Base44 is nothing like I've ever seen. It's so supportive. There's so much feedback. And so... [46:03] From the loop of improving the product, this is exactly how people say it should feel. 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.

[46:22] I had those ideas throughout my life. I didn't have an ability to do that or resources or money to pay for developers. [46:30] And then the other thing that I did that worked really well is [46:34] I've noticed that people really like sharing what they're building, [46:38] on top of base 44, they would write posts [46:41] I remember at some point a friend of mine reached out and he was like, [46:45] "Dude, how much are you paying those people to write posts about Base44?" I was like, "I'm not paying anyone, honestly."

And so what I did is I actually 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." [47:06] And so those two [47:08] like building public and giving up credits. [47:12] worked extremely well. And that's how we got growth going. [47:17] Okay, let's pause there. That was awesome. How many users do you have at this point of the journey, roughly?

[47:22] I think there was like two weeks between... No, a week... [47:26] between being on a pace of 20 users a day [47:31] to seeing 4,000 users come into your product, like new users a day, [47:37] break the product like it was hard scaling it [47:42] Also, there's some things I needed to learn [47:45] while moving is 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 [48:06] Once I started sharing... [48:08] In public, it grew to a few thousands a day. [48:13] and then from the other credit thing, like the rest. OK, 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.

[48:24] 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 build for yourself, build for your girlfriend, build for the Scouts program. [48:34] And then it was built for these three friends. [48:37] just building it, sitting with them, uh, [48:39] building the things they need to use it, which is really interesting because a lot of times the advice you get is look for [48:44] Look for poll... [48:45] Look for people [48:47] with problems to solve, [48:49] 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 [48:55] make it better.

Absolutely. [48:57] Also, like... [48:58] Thank you. [48:59] I don't know though, I think maybe paradigms are changing, but there are some things that I don't believe in. [49:05] 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 software. So the attention span for people to actually try out new software products is getting shorter and shorter. So [49:21] Yeah, pick a bunch of people. [49:23] that [49:24] I don't know, owe you something or have any reason to use your product when it's bad.

[49:29] build for them, be there physically, [49:32] I remember that even when we passed 20K users, 50K users, and 100K users, it was still very [49:39] tough to get the right feedback. So I would bring like 20, 30 people to like a room together. It's like almost like a focus group or a small hackathon. I'll do that every other week. [49:49] just to get feedback and it was so much easier than any other thing and it was the same [49:54] thing that I tried developing when we were just like three users and five users.

[49:58] And so, yeah, build it for them. They can come from different backgrounds. [50:02] Again, something else that I don't really... [50:05] empathize with or agree with is like you have to have like a certain [50:09] ICP, it's not necessarily about the profile of a person, more of what they're trying to do. [50:15] It's like way more important. You can have different types of people, but they're all trying to do the same thing. They're trying to build a tool. I think some of those people should remember the tool you're building is a specific kind of tool that helps you build things.

[50:28] And so these lessons don't necessarily apply. [50:31] In 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... [50:40] 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. [50:47] 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, [50:51] Don't worry about that too much.

Okay, so... [50:54] Step one, shared it with friends, a few friends, like forced them to use it. Please use this. I'm going to watch you. Your point about being there physically, I think is really interesting. [51:03] Like don't just send it to them over email. [51:05] 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 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 hunt launch.

Yeah.