Maor Shlomo: How Base44 hit $80M solo in six months

1. 0:00 – 8:16

   Introduction to Maor and Base44

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky0:00

      In six months, you went from zero, basically nothing, to selling this company for 80 million plus dollars to Wix.

   2. MSMaor Shlomo0:05

      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 gonna buy a nice car." And we got there in, like, four weeks.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky0:22

      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?

   4. MSMaor Shlomo0:29

      The first person started a month and a half before the acquisition, but I think it's a different ballgame because then you feel solo. You're literally managing teams of AIs, writing code. I don't think I've written a single line of HTML or JavaScript in the past three months.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky0:42

      You're competing against very well-funded companies, Lovable, Bolt, Replit, Vercel. How'd you get your first 10 users?

   6. MSMaor Shlomo0:47

      I started with three users, really close friends. I got them to sit down with me every other day around a table, and they would use the, the tool. They will try to build something, it will break. I'll take a look and then just build it for them. I'm not gonna try and scale anything before I know the users enjoy it, and the best metric to, to seeing them enjoying it is that they're starting to share it with someone.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:12

      Today my guest is Mayur Shlomo. This is a unique episode because I almost never have conversations with early stage founders. I made an exception because Mayur's journey is in many ways the dream for a lot of founders. Mayur started a company called Base44, which is essentially a more advanced by coding tool. Six months later, just a few weeks ago, he sold the company for $80 million to Wix. He's a solo founder. It was just him for most of those six months. He never raised any money. He bootstrapped it and built it purely off profits. When he launched it on Product Hunt, it got so much love that the Product Hunt algorithm thought that it was bots when it was really just people from all over the world wanting to support the product. In our conversation, Mayur shares exactly how he grew the product from zero to 10 to 100 to hundreds of thousands of users, his tech stack that allowed him to move so fast, tools that he uses to be super productive as a sole founder with severe ADHD, also the super important insight that everyone needs to hear about how he came up with the idea and then refined the idea, also just a bunch of common growth tactics that he tried that didn't work for him, and some key advice for anyone looking to start their own bootstrap company. A big thank you to Noam Segal and Amir Klein for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. With that, I bring you Mayur Shlomo. This episode is brought to you by Sauce. The way teams turn feedback into product impact is stuck in the past. Vague reports, static taxonomies, unactionable insights that don't move business metrics. The result? Churn, lost deals, missed growth. 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 real time. It then routes them to the right teams to turn signals into PRDs, prototypes, and even code that drives revenue, retention, and adoption. That's why whatnot, Linktree, Incident.io and Zip use Sauce. One enterprise uncovered a product gap that unlocked $16 million ARR, another caught a spiking issue and prevented millions in churn. You can too at sauce.app/lenny. Sauce, built for AI product teams. Don't get left behind. This episode is brought to you by Dscout. Design teams today are expected to move fast, but also to get it right. That's where Dscout comes in. Dscout is the all-in-one research platform built for modern product and design teams. Whether you're running usability tests, interviews, surveys, or in the wild field work, 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. No juggling tools, no chasing ghost participants. And with the industry's most trusted panel, plus AI powered analysis, your team gets clarity and confidence to build better without slowing down. So if you're ready to streamline your research, speed up decisions, and design with impact, head to dscout.com to learn more. That's D-S-C-O-U-T .com. The answers you need to move confidently. Mayur, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

   8. MSMaor Shlomo4:26

      I am so excited to do that. Thank you for having me, Lenny.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky4:29

      It's my pleasure. I don't actually do conversations like this often with early stage founders, but I'm really excited to be doing this because I feel like the journey that you've been on over the last six months is kind of like the dream for a lot of founders, uh, especially founders that don't want to build massive teams, that don't want to raise a ton of money. Basically, the journey you've been on is build a product, people loved it, it grew like crazy, you didn't raise any money, you sold it for $80 million, we'll talk about this, uh, six months in. And I know it's not all rainbows and butterflies and this amazing, you know, happy moment to moment all day, but I know it's a lot of hard work, but this is just what a lot of people want to achieve when they start a company. And you're just in the thick of it right now. Like you've just announced your acquisition, so I feel like this is a really unique point in time to extract as much wisdom-

   10. MSMaor Shlomo5:17

       Yeah.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky5:17

       ... out of your head as possible.

   12. MSMaor Shlomo5:18

       Really the right time to kind of like reflect back and, uh...

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky5:21

       Yeah, I think there's gonna be many more times, but this is a, a really unique time. Let's start with a couple basics. Just what is, what is Base44 for folks that aren't super familiar with the product that you built?

   14. MSMaor Shlomo5:30

       Base44 is an AI, AI app building platform, meaning that you are able to use natural language to describe what you want to build, an app, a game, um, a website or something like that, and then have AI code it for you. Um, we're not the first ones doing that. I think it's a very, uh, crowded category, but I think Base44 takes a very different approach, a very opinionated one, uh, for... And one that, that users, our users like to call it a batteries included approach, uh, which means that for every app that you build in Base44, you already have built in, included a database, integrations, user management, analytics...... um, without connecting third party services or bringing y- your API keys and so on. And I think it helps a lot when you're trying to scale a VIBE-coded application, uh, 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, um, some backend stuff, uh, they have a great integration with Supabase. Supabase, I think, is the most common kind of like thing that, that most competitors use. Um, 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, uh, less strong than building everything full stack built in. And once we did that and actually, uh, I engineered the, the end points and the SDKs and w- whatever to work well with LLMs, I think Base44 does a really good job with building very complex and functional real-world applications.

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky7:19

       Okay. Uh, 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. So in six months you went from zero, basically nothing, to selling this company for 80 million plus dollars to Wix. Uh, it took you three weeks to hit a million dollars ARR. You bootstrapped this business. I think you put in a few tens of thousands of shekels, not even US dollars.

   16. MSMaor Shlomo7:48

       (laughs)

   17. LRLenny Rachitsky7:48

       You have something like 400,000 users right now. You're a solo founder. Uh, there are two different wars involved in the journey. You're based in Israel, so you have to deal with that, and we're gonna talk about some of those stories. Any other stats that are worth sharing? Anything else that's important high level before we get into the origin story?

   18. MSMaor Shlomo8:04

       No, I don't think so. I think, uh, it- it... Like, looking back, it sounds, uh, insane, but mostly this is it.

   19. LRLenny Rachitsky8:12

       Okay (laughs) .

   20. MSMaor Shlomo8:14

       (laughs) .

   21. LRLenny Rachitsky8:15

       I love... (laughs) I love that perspective.

2. 8:16 – 14:55

   The origin story: how Base44 came to be

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky8:16

      Okay. So how did this start?

   2. MSMaor Shlomo8:18

      There were two things, I think, that drove me to it. One, my girlfriend needed, like, a website to capture leads. She has, like, a small business. Uh, she's, like, an artist. And I tried building that with, like, one of the tools out there for website building, not an AI-powered one, and it was such a pain trying to do that. One, kind of like designing with the drag-and-drop and everything, and then things get messed up in mobile and you try again. It's like... And then how do you manage your data and so on? And, and, and in my previous company, we dealt a lot with LLMs, and when... While I was doing that I was like, "It doesn't make any sense. I know models can write the code to do exactly what I'm trying to do right now, like build a website for my girlfriend or build s- like, slightly more complicated than a website, was actually a web app." Um, I know models can do that, they just, they don't have the right infrastructure to do that. So like, if I set up an infrastructure for like, "Hey, here are the leads, go to the database," uh, like, "Okay, you can write React code and it will serve it and it will be great from an SEO perspective," and so on, then I'll know that, like, it's gonna be super easy and she can do it on, on her own. And the other trigger, I was volunteering to help with the Scouts organization here in Israel, um, with, like, everything that has to do with, like, uh, system and software and then... and back office systems that, that they needed. And, and back then the, like... It's a huge organization, by the way, really huge, like tens of thousands of people. Um, and they have many... As, as any other organization in the world that we're currently living at, has many software needs. And so every time they needed to build something, they didn't have any internal devs, you know, any software engineers, so they'd 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. I was, and still by the way, a huge fan of tools like Retool for like, uh, the previous, uh, wave of, like, no-code, uh, tools. But then those tools were really more of like low-code tools, right? You still needed to know some JavaScript, something to make them work to have the interaction right. And again, also back then I was like, "I know for the software and systems that they want to build, I know it could be done, it 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 the LLM has access to a database, maybe to another LLM to build like the, the app on top of AI, uh, 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." Um, so those two were triggers. Back then, um, I started a company seven years ago called Explorium. Very different than Base44, very much like enterprise top-down sales, uh, in the data space. Uh, very capital heavy. We raised 130 million dollars. I was the CEO for seven years. Uh, then when the October 7th war, uh, broke out, I went to reserves for like almost a year. And then when I came out, went to travel the world a bit just to, to take some time off, and wanted to do what I was like... what I liked the most and I haven't had a chance because Explorium grew and grew, uh, and haven't had a chance for a while to do, which is, uh, coding (laughs) . Wanted to get back to building and get my hands dirty. And so I had those, like... Given those experiences, both with my, my partner and my girlfriend, and also with the Scouts, I was like, "Let's take a shot at it and start the product that I know is gonna be ve- very fun to build." And I think when you're approaching it this way and, like, not the usual way of like, "Let's raise a ton of money and try to own the category," uh, and I knew I was getting into a very crowded category. I also knew that I have, like, some-... some different angle and some different take on the category. Um, but when you're approaching it this way, it's like there's not a lot to lose, and I think it gives a lot of energy. Um, and that's how Base44 started. It definitely (laughs) definitely didn't think it's gonna take off so fast. Um, but yeah, that's pretty much about it.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky12:37

      Okay. I like that you don't take credit for the work you did to help it take off so fast. I'm excited to talk through that. Just first a few maybe takeaways from what you just shared of how this idea emerged, for folks that are looking for ideas. Uh, one is clearly you were solving somebody's real problem, your own problem, helping your girlfriend build this, this, uh, website for her, and then working with this, uh, the Scouts program in Israel, basically building them software. So, so I think that's a really important takeaway. You weren't just like, "Hey, maybe this will be useful to someone." It's, "I have a real problem and you- I wanna solve it, and nothing out there is good enough, so I'm gonna build it myself." Uh, the other is you said that you were having fun. Feels like that's an important element, just, like, you should enjoy it. You shouldn't feel like it's s- some kind of drag.

   4. MSMaor Shlomo13:18

      You know what? I feel like in, like, when I was a first-timer, when I first, uh, well, started my, my first company, Exploding, I felt like, um, many smart people told me those two very important truth. Uh, it was like, build something that, 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, when I heard those kind of things, I was like, "Yeah, those are cliches. Business is alwa- is always important. Let's increase revenue. Like, let's close more deals." Um, and I feel like, like those are, even though it sounds like a cliche, it's so much easier, one, building something that you'll actually use. So I actually tried solving both problems. Like, I was building the, the product and at the same time developing those, those two products for my girlfriend for the Scouts, uh, and later on also for other friends and family, and we'll get to that. That's how I got kinda, like, my first couple of users. But super important to build something that you'll use. You'll move forward so much faster, uh, by also doing something that you love. I think I was the CEO of Exploding for seven years. It was such a fantastic experience. It had so many highs and lows. But at some po- 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, like, being a CEO, managing sales, managing HR, managing all those kind of things. Um, and I think that, that gives a lot of power. Like, it's, it's easier to work very hard, uh, when you're doing something you really like.

3. 14:55 – 22:52

   Bootstrapping and solo founding: challenges and insights

   1. MSMaor Shlomo14:55

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky14:55

      Let's follow that thread and talk about being a solo founder. I think this is something a lot of founders like. You know, it's hard to find a co-founder that, out of the blue, when you have an idea. Uh, YC famously doesn't like solo founders. So I think there's a lot of power in what you've achieved. So let me just ask you, first of all, any, I guess, lessons about being a solo founder that you think would be helpful for other fee- people considering starting a company on their own? And also, just how do you stay productive? How do you get stuff done as a solo founder using AI?

   3. MSMaor Shlomo15:25

      One, solo founder and specifically bootstrapping, 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, you'll need to hire a salesperson or a sales team. Like, you'll need to, like, spend your money on marketing. It's gonna be very hard to try to sell to a company when you're on your own and nobody knows if the product's gonna stay there tomorrow. So, I don't think it's, like, uh, the right setting for every company. I feel, I feel like if you're building something that has the potential to be viral, uh, 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, of getting to product market feet, then everything is better doing, uh, solo bootstrap than, than the other way around. One also, like, even from a pure cold angle of, like, the financial outcome, obviously if you're able to bootstrap your business and, and, and again, get out of, like, the escape velocity, be profitable to some degree, then you'll likely generate a financial outcome that's, I think, for most cases, way better than, than any other, any other thing. Second is so, not specifically the solo, but the bootstrapping thing, less stressful. Like, you wake up in the morning as like if you're profitable, and, and there's like, I think there's, like, this term, uh, default alive. It's so much easier. I've done both. And the weight of, uh, raising so much fund, even if your investors are great, and my investors were awesome, and they were always supportive and so on. But even so, I feel like, uh, being bootstrapped, like, no other money except of yours in the business, and the b- and the business is growing and, and, and profitable, I feel like can, can keep the energies up. And I think I keep, like, one thing that I've learned from my previous company is, like, energies are super important. Usually it's a marathon. For me it was a sprint. I thought it's gonna be a marathon. But you wanna do something that you like for years and years, and if you ab- if you're able to show up every day, then your, your chances kind of, like, goes up immediately. Um, but then there's, like, a lot of, a lot of downside and a lot of stressful moments doing that. Um, one, just keeping the software 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. I had a few accidents that, that really, um, I'm joking about that by saying to my friends, like, shortened my life a bit with just, like, the stress. Um, I had one funny, now I look at it as a funny moment, where, um, I was at my brother's wedding, and we were doing the photo shoots-And I was actually the one, actually who 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 Base44, um, 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." And I remember, like, hanging up the ph... I was like, "Okay, I'll take a look at it immediately." And I remember hanging up the phone and saying, "I know my such... it's, it's karma. I know for a fact it's true. Somebody probably hacked into that, because what other, uh, are the chances that, on the only night that I'm not able to open up a laptop and handle that, uh, this is what happens." Um, and so I, I, I threw out there some excuse and like, "I have to go and, like, practice towards the ceremony," or something like that. Open up the laptop, spend two hours, two very scary hours of my life. It ended up being just the LLM tried using a package called Cryptography, which is like an, a Node.js, like a JavaScript package. Has nothing to do with crypto, but obviously the, the user, not a technical user, saw this error of like, hey, something cryptography or something like that was shown to someone, like a crypto scam hacked into, into their app. And so you have a lot of those, like, moments that the whole thing is, like, you're not able to share it with anyone, share the burden even, or the stress, or put anyone on top of it and say, "Hey, you know what? I'm out for today, y- like, you handle that." In my previous company, my two co-founders, we were really good friends, like great friends, and even if, um, one of us would mess up, then still would have someone to share it with and run jokes around and, like, and, and just be there with someone. So when you're solo, it's hard. Um, and then brutal prioritization, which is something you have to do, because you have to keep up the pace of the product. And obviously nowadays with AI and, like, everyone can build software, like, you have to go extremely fast on one side, and on the other side figure out marketing along the way, and, and how to do that. And every time, I remember that every time I had this, uh, ceremony where I'd start a day and try to look inside and ask myself, "What do I need to work on today and what do I want to work on today?" So what I want, wanted to work on today was always like, "I want to code." Like, "That's what I like to do. Let's improve the product." I know there's, like, a bug that, that, uh, uh, makes, like, a noise on the users. I know there's, like, the feature that, that's in my head and I'm saying, "Oh, competition haven't thought about that. I have to build it. I have to put it out, uh, to be in front of everything." And then it was like, "What do I have, like, what do I have to do today?" And so at many different stages on, on Base44's journey it was, "I know I can, like, improve the product a lot, but I need to do some more marketing," or, "I need to, like, I know this is not a bottleneck. I know people are, like, converting well, they're growing, retention is looking good, uh, and it's all about just, like, increasing the audience, even though I know, like, I need t- but even though I want, I really want to work on the product." And so I think it is like this. Uh, context switching is hard. Yeah, and the last piece obviously is I was spending a lot of my time on making sure that my setup, like how I code, how I write content and so on, is optimized and everything is automated. And so I spent a lot of time thinking and agonizing about how to structure the code repository, uh, for example, so that I can use a Cursor for backend and Base44 for frontend to write, like, code really fast. Um, s- and this was, like, really important for me to keep kind of like trying to find out new ways of, like, how to automate and increase the pace of, like, building solo. Because if you're able to crack that, I feel like smaller teams with a lot of context nowadays can, can move faster. And the same goes also for marketing, is like... and, and for, for other tools where you want to automate as much as you can, especially when you're solo because time is gonna be like the, uh, the thing that kills your business if, if you're not

4. 22:52 – 27:23

   Productivity hacks and tech stack for solo founders

   1. MSMaor Shlomo22:52

      managing it right.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky22:53

      Okay, let me follow that thread. That's a really interesting topic. Uh, so what is in your stack of productivity for yourself and then just that allowed you to build Base44, just like the tech stack of Base44? So you said Cursor, Base44. What else did you use day to day that helped you be more efficient?

   3. MSMaor Shlomo23:11

      So I have severe ADHD. (laughs) And so it's, it, it can also be like a superpower, but then you have to like first... the, the first thing you want to do is, like, make sure that your, your workday looks like, uh, like that, that you can be focused and that you get, like, a lot of, like, deep work. And so I use a product called RescueTime, which I really like, but I think there's, like, a bunch of other products, like shuts down every access to Twitter and LinkedIn and so on. This was really hard because I was starting to like, uh, do this build in public, which turned out to work pretty well for Base44, and so every time when is like take a look at your post or see kind of like how many likes and, uh, like impressions and so on, but then, like, you can't work on anything else. And so, uh, I had this first setup that, that really, p- like allowed me a certain set of softwares, software tools that I can use to manage kind of like deep work. Um, Cursor has been awesome. Base44, not only did like the work for the frontend 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, and where I write content and then, like, I had this app where I kind of like at the start of the week would write-... uh, some, like, high-level content ideas, and then the- the Base44 app will take it and break it down to s- kind of like something that sounds more like me, uh, for a LinkedIn post, and then I'd- I'd improve that and then it would break it down to, like, a Twitter post. And so I wrote things that were- were, like, really customized to my process in what I wanted to do, which really helped. But I think you can do that not only with Base44, just c- you can vibe code your way into, like, productivity tools that really fits what you want to do and- and what kind of, like, the process for you looks like. And I had for... So again, for example, for my, uh, uh, social posts and so on, there's, like, a process that I would follow and maybe no one else would- would- would follow that. And so VibeCode, the custom app for that, was really- was really helpful.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky25:21

      Let me actually ask about that. That is super cool. So you built basically internal tools for yourself using Base44, people can use other tools potentially, so you built one that's like, "Help me craft a tweet." W- how does that actually look like? What is the input? Th- that sounds really interesting.

   5. MSMaor Shlomo25:36

      So the way that I- I like to work is, like, I would have those, uh, moments where I would have inspiration for, like, a piece of content, right? So the way I grew Base44, probably a different topic, but was a lot around building in public and growing an audience, um, and speaking to my audience were, which were fellow builders, so it was really easy. So a lot of that was, like, around sharing on, like, the Base44 journey. Um, and then I would 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, posts for throughout the week, bec- because you want to keep consistency and keep put- putting, like, good things out there. And then my process before the app was, like, I'd go to ChatGPT, I'll write, like, a very vague kind of like, uh, structure or skeleton of a post and tell it like, "Hey, uh, fix my writing, improve my writing a bit," and then ChatGPT will spit out something that was, like, too far off, too much... like two cells in 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. It's 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 I need to shorten the, like, it's- 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, um, and just vibe coded an app around it, uh, to help me speed it up and then made sure that the LLM inside the app was using my own tone of voice and was saving the previous posts to understand how it looks like, like, what are the posts that I really like that I've written beforehand so that in the next post

5. 27:23 – 28:47

   How to get started using Base44

   1. MSMaor Shlomo27:23

      it will speak just like me.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky27:25

      Th- this might be a good plug for Base44. So, like, say someone were to go to Base44.com and try this out, what would be a prompt you'd suggest? Like, how they get started building a tool like this.

   3. MSMaor Shlomo27:33

      Usually what I'll do is I'll write down... I think LLMs nowadays do a very good job with, like, start vague, it's gonna build a skeleton for what you need, and Base44 does a good job with this, like, understanding at least the big pieces. Okay, there's gonna be an LLM writing the content, there's gonna 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, uh, here's my process currently, and my process is doing this and then LinkedIn and then Twitter. Write something to support that," and then from there iterate. And also something that I really like with- 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, you can... because it's really easy to change the software, it's like you get this adaptive software that's like, as you improve your processes or maybe your processes change, uh, it's like you adapt it. So like Base44 got acquired by Wix, um, two weeks ago, and so now the process of like putting content out there looks a bit different. And so with, like, just two prompts, I could change it to support your new process, which is really fun.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky28:41

      That's a cool phrase, adaptive software. Uh, I heard malleable software is another way to describe this.

6. 28:47 – 34:05

   Thoughts on raising money

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky28:47

      Let me... I want to talk about growth, but a couple more things real quick. This idea of bootstrapping, I'm curious, so essentially you're competing against very well-funded companies, Lovable Bull, Replit, v0, Vercel, uh, 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 gonna be acquired by Wix, did you think... 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 products today?

   2. MSMaor Shlomo29:16

      Base44 was, like, very profitable, much more than- than what I thought. So even if, like... even if I wasn't getting acquired, I felt like I can make good money out of it. It ended up, like, I remember we... I- I had, like, a very failed product hunt launch at, like, mid-January and then started writing some, uh... like, started building in public at around start of February and that's when it took off. And then started, like, I think first dollar or, like, the- the first 10 or 100 bucks were towards, um, March. And then in May, I already did, uh, s- close to 200K in profit. Um, and so I think... uh, I think either way there was, like, room to compete and even though it was small, I was seeing that the f- the users that come to me stick. Like, they'd come to Base44, stick with Base44 even though they're very familiar with, like, the rest of the competition. The challenge was obviously making as much noise (laughs) as the other folks. Uh, so you can see, like, the other vibe coding tools doing, like, a million dollars, uh, hackathons and so on and they're doing an awesome job on their growth really, uh, but I didn't have the resources, so...I tried finding ways to fight the fight. Uh, I think we had a very successful Hackathon for Good, which turned out to be a great growth engine and also did good in the world, which was like, we had 3,000 teams just building some great, uh, do good, uh, apps. But also, to be very honest, I think part of the reason to get acquired is because this market has been moving so fast, faster than anything I've seen, faster than what I f- I thought it's gonna move. And at some point, I feel like it's gonna be, like you see Base44 grows and you start thinking, "Hey, this can really help people with their lives." Like this, this is like one of those software categories that I'm saying that I'm very not objective, but I feel like can really move the needle for a lot of people. I've been seeing people build, like fantastic, awesome things, and so I was like, "Let's go for the, like the big one. Let's try and, and actually build some global scale, maybe lead the category, maybe win it." I felt like the best chances to do that is to, uh, partner up with Wix. There's like plenty of reasons to 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, and obviously like very good connection with, with the entire management team over there. And so I f- I feel like the acquisition, again, being very honest, I felt like it's gonna be a financial success either way, but the acquisition is like taking a stance and saying, "You know what? Let's, let's, let's play in the big league and, and let's, uh, punch down, not only punch up, uh, when, when fighting in this very crowded space." Uh, and that's part of the reason why to get acquired.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky32:16

      That was really insightful. So part of the... 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've happened long term? Uh, but it... If a... 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... So I think that's a really interesting insight. Like, it's okay if there's a bazillion dollars in funding going to competitors. There's a lot of... There's a big market here.

   4. MSMaor Shlomo32:46

      Yeah, I think it's a bit different ballgame right now that I was like... I was scared many times, like I wa- I thought, "How, how am I gonna go, go into the fight?" Those companies are, one, some of the fastest growing companies ever. Again, they're, like great teams and very well funded, and a lot of money being poured into. Um, but then, like throughout time, I saw that I'm able to keep the pace, if not even have the, like, uh, faster pace and have like a different angle. And, and it's not changing over time, so like, nobody's like... And so I think it's a different ballgame because even like if you are various, a very small team or even if you're solo, like you'll, you'll literally managing like teams of AIs, like writing code. I don't think I've written a single line of like HTML or JavaScript in the past three months, but still like the Base44 front end changes a lot because, uh, AI writes that. So yeah, if you, if you have an interesting angle and you're able to move fast, I feel like money and funding is not necessarily the, the factor to win a category. And that's gonna be like... And, and that's gonna change even more drastically in future. As LLMs get better, as like people, like 10X engineers would have way more impact, there are gonna be a 100X engineers because they're able to manage I-LLMs. And it's not necessarily the team size nor the funding,

7. 34:05 – 36:09

   Distribution in the age of AI

   1. MSMaor Shlomo34:05

      uh, that, that will be able to win you a category.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky34:08

      What you just shared is amazing, that you've haven't written any, you said JavaScript or HTML in three months, which is half the lifetime of this company, which sold for $80 million and, and more potentially. It feels like now the big things you gotta get right is kind of like at the beginning of figuring out what problems to solve and being really good at understanding where the gaps are, and then it's distribution, marketing, getting people to be aware that you exist and give you a shot.

   3. MSMaor Shlomo34:32

      Yeah. And even distribution, I'm still learning that. It's like it's, uh... Even distribution nowadays is very different, and, and also in favor of like the solo... Not necessarily the solo, but like not necessarily that you're gonna pour a lot of money on paid campaigns. Like, uh, Base44 grew with close to zero marketing budget. We spent like, uh, uh, $2,000 on an influencer post that didn't really bring anything and then tried paid for like a couple of thousands of bucks. Um, didn't really work. And so everything was like organically and built in public. And so even distribution is, is very different. But yeah, if you have an interesting take on a domain... 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. Um, and then he left and started like a SaaS company for managing invoices for restaurants. And so this is a guy that has both distribution... Obviously, this is very local, like software and company, uh, but has distributions, like has those connections, but has a very deep domain knowledge. And now that like the technical he has no... Like, h- he... Him and coding are like very different in... They're very different places. Um, and so I think if like domain knowledge become... Or, or domain expertise and some, again, interesting take on a domain or, or a product or a category becomes like a key thing. And then distribution, yeah, that's a hard one to get, uh, but also world is changing a lot.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky36:07

      Yeah. And I, I love that you did it with no funding.

8. 36:09 – 40:05

   Ambition and goals

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky36:09

      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 wanna be. I've gone through this myself where I was like, "Oh, this newsletter, this... I'm making a living off this, writing one email a week. Uh, I could do... Live really well just doing this." But then I'm like, "Oh, why not do a podcast? Why not do another podcast? Why not do some other stuff?" And I... The reason I do that is that just like it gets boring to do something the same way forever, and there's this opportunity that's out there. I'm like, "I should do that." Uh, and I feel like some people are on a, "I just don't need that. I'm good. I'm gonna live in-"... I don't know, Fiji and just code and make $100, $300, $500K a year from this thing. But I feel like folks like you, like there's more ambition, and one way is raise a bunch of money and either sell to a company that has a platform that you can build on.

   2. MSMaor Shlomo36:55

      Yeah. I emphasize w- with this a lot, but the funny thing is that like Base 44 for the first time in my life was not trying to build the biggest thing ever. So I remember like when I started exploring with my previous company, I was so, um, 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 I looked, kept looking, like, "Hey, uh, Explorium raised $100 million before Snowflake. This is insane, this is amazing," and so on. Um, and I did that for seven years, um, and I think Base 44 is the first time that like they stopped and said, "Do you know what? I just want to go back to do what I really love, which is just building a product. I don't care if it, like, if it wins the category or not, I don't care if it's gonna become really big or not." Um, I remember when we, when, 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, if we get to $1.5 million..." I don't remember why I said exactly this number, but like, "If we get to $1.5 million in ARR, uh, till the end of 2025, uh, we're gonna buy a nice car." Uh, and we got there in like four weeks, and so it was the first time of like saying let's not try and build the biggest thing. Let's just do something we really like, um, and let's just build a product that I'm gonna enjoy building. But then at some point you've 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? Let's go for the, like, let's play in the big league, um, and try to scale it."

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky38:41

      That, uh, so aligns with my journey. I, similarly, I'm like, "I'm just gonna do a newsletter, life's gonna be great, I'm not gonna build..." I'm not... I, I called it my anti-Empire. "I don't wanna build anything big, I'm just gonna keep it chill." Project Chill, Project Avoid Getting A Real Job, is what I called it. (laughs) 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, uh, and just following a pull, following your interests, following, uh, just that insight you have. Ends up being some of the best ideas come out of that, and the biggest ideas.

   4. MSMaor Shlomo39:13

      I love it. I agree with that, yeah.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky39:16

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9. 40:05 – 51:32

   Growth strategies: from first users to thousands

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky40:06

      Let's talk about growth. So here's what I want to do. I wanna talk through just how you got the first users of Base 44. So I'm thinking maybe how'd you get, like, the first 10 users? How'd you get the first 100 users? How'd you get the first 1000 users? What are the, the levers used there? What are the tactics? So let's start with 10. How'd you get your first 10 users?

   2. MSMaor Shlomo40:24

      Just begging people close to me that I feel like that I have, uh, that I have really good connections with, uh, to use it. I feel like there's no other way. Maybe there are other ways, but, um, again, I was very new to, like, uh, B2C, like, to consumerish type of products, and so I grabbed... Well, I started with even three users. It's like really close friends. Two of them back at the time I caught them in, like, a part of their life where they were unemployed, so I was like, "Hey, why don't you try build a SaaS business or something like that?" And so three really close friends, um, were... Somehow I got them to sit down with me every other day around the table, and they would use the, 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 just build it for them. I feel like plenty of people are lucky to find maybe a method that consistently works for your, like, 10, 100, 1000, uh, users and then from there, but I try to look at it as, like, milestones. And so first I was like, "I'm not gonna try and scale anything before I know that, uh, users enjoy it." And, and the best metric to, to seeing them enjoying it or, 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, with someone. So I haven't invested anything in marketing before I felt like, okay, for the first three or five or 10 friends, at some point, they started sharing it with their friends. Like, v- 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, uh, Base 44 turned out later in its journey to be very viral, but back then, it was like an okay product. People loved it and, and, or liked it, and started sharing it with their friends. And so once I started seeing that this works, uh, and we got to, like, 10 users who are all my friends and then, and then the 11th user or something like this, start seeing people that don't really know me, that's when I knew, okay, now it's time to invest in marketing or try to launch this thing or try to, like, get more people to use it because if you try to do it beforehand, I feel like you're gonna waste a lot of time and resources on just, like, having a very revolving door. Like, you get users in and users out, you will not be able to, to... And unless you have, like, a lot of money to invest in paid...... so that, like, it makes sense, then, then it's, uh, very hot. I knew that I'm not gonna do that, so like, the 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 page and so on. And so I knew that it has to be viable. At some point, I saw that it's starting to look like it's viable. Then I did a very failed (laughs) very bad, uh, Product Hunt launch. Uh, but also now looking back and saying, "This is completely fine." I feel like people som- sometimes treat their launches, like product launches as like make it or break it for the company. This wasn't the case for me. I was like, "This is a tool for me to get to my next 30 users, my next 50 users," and that's exactly what happened. And so first Product Hunt launch, we got like 50, I got like 15 new users. By the way, the second one broke Product Hunt. They thought that there's like plenty of bots. We won the first product of the day and the first product of the month, of the week, but it's a different story. Um, and so we got like 50 users and we got the first user to pay. This was an insane, an insane feeling because I'm a, like an entrepreneur coming from like the enterprise space. I was thinking that this is insane. Why would anyone pay for my product without meeting me, without like looking me dead in the eyes or trying to get a discount and so on? Obviously, this user churned in like a few hours (laughs) 'cause the product wasn't good back then. Um, but 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, like other users that were really good and then I tried a bunch of marketing things, didn't work. Uh, influencer post or paid or something like that and then one of my friends, uh, was also a founder in a different, different space told me, "Hey, you know what? I think it's really cool that you're building it on your own and that you're like, you're trying to, like take a very different approach than, than the usual VC-funded way. Why don't you share, like content about that? Like, uh, the end of the day it's like you're gonna have this, this same, like your audience are builders. They're trying to build their own products or, or maybe even businesses and it will likely resonate with them." And so I started sharing the journey on, uh, LinkedIn and I remember like seeing posts where like, okay, there's this nice concept of building public and people get really interested and I think here in Base 44 we had like this really nice, uh, synergy between the build in public and also my audience was like builders, right? If I was like building, I don't know, a product to attorneys, then probably this wouldn't (laughs) , wouldn't have made a lot of sense. Once I started like sharing, uh, what I'm building in public and getting more users and improving their product tremendously, I was so lucky like, the, the community around Base 44 is, is nothing like I've ever seen. It's like so supportive. There was so much feedback. And so from there, the loop of like improving the product, this is exactly like how, how people say it should feel like is like people asking for features before you can actually build them and they're getting so excited about your product. They're writing the nicest things. People have tri- like started writing like, "Hey, you changed my life. I wanted to build. I had that, like those ideas throughout my life. I didn't have a, like an, an ability to do that or resources or money to pay for developers." And then the other thing that I did, it worked really well is I've noticed that people really like sharing what they're building, uh, on top of Base 44, like they would write posts. I remember at some point a friend of mine reached out and he was like, uh, "Dude, how much are you paying those people to, to like write posts about Space 44?" And I was like, "I'm not paying anyone honestly." And so what I did is I actually, I, I did this program inside Base 44 saying, "Hey, if you share just about the process of building the app or the app itself, it doesn't even have to be about Base 44, if you share it in social, you'll get extra credits to build." And so those two, um, like build in public and giving out credits worked extremely well. Um, and that's how we got growth going.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky47:17

      Okay. Let's pause there. That was awesome. Uh, how many users do you have at this point of the journey roughly?

   4. MSMaor Shlomo47:23

      I think there was like two weeks between... No, a week between having like being on a pace of like 20 users a day to seeing, uh, 4,000 users come into your product, like new users a day.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky47:37

      Hmm.

   6. MSMaor Shlomo47:38

      Um, break the product, like it was hard scaling it. Also just like some things I needed to learn, uh, while moving was like, okay, 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, when trying to scale and so on. Um, and again, trying to be profitable and so you, you try to use every free tier that you can, but then once you start scaling, it's really bad. So yeah, I think once I started sharing, uh, in public, it grew to a few thousands-

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky48:12

      Okay.

   8. MSMaor Shlomo48:12

      ... a day and then from there, the credit thing like did the rest.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky48:16

      Hmm. Okay. So this is kind of like the whole journey. I know there's a few other elements I want to touch on, but let me point out a few things that stood out to me that I think might be helpful to folks. The first is right at the beginning, the coming back to a lesson you shared at the beginning, which is build for specific people. So initially it was built for yourself, built for your girlfriend, built for the scouts program and then it was built for these like three friends, just building it, sitting with them, uh, building the things they need to use it, which is really interesting because a lot of times the advice you get is look for, look for pull, look for people with problems to solve. Uh, like you almost went the opposite, like you're like, "Use my product. I need you as a favor. Use my product and help me make it better."

   10. MSMaor Shlomo48:56

       Absolutely. Also, like I don't know though, I think maybe paradigms are changing, but there's some things that I don't believe in is like-... 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 so much easier to build software. So the attention span for people to actually try out new software products is- is- is getting shorter and shorter. So yeah, pick a bunch of people that, I don't know, owe you something or- or have any reason to use your product when- when it's bad. Build for them. Be there physically. I remember that even when we passed, uh, 20K users, uh, 50K users and 100K users, it was, uh, still very tough to get the right feedback. So I would bring like 20, 30 people to like a room together. It was like la- almost like a focus group or a small hackathon. I'll do that every other week, um, just to get feedback and it was so much easier than any other thing and it was the same thing that I tried developing when we were just like three users and five users. And so yeah, build it for them. They can come from different backgrounds. Again, something else that I don't really empathize with or- or agree with is like, you have to have like a certain ICP. It's not a- it's not necessarily about like the profile of a person. More of like what they're trying to do is like way more important. 'Cause you can have different types of people but all trying to do the same thing, right? They're trying to build a tool.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky50:22

       Think some of this, people should em- remember the tool you're building is a specific kinda tool that helps you build things. And so these lessons don't necessarily apply. Uh, in a lot of cases, you wants-

   12. MSMaor Shlomo50:33

       Yeah.

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky50:33

       ... to be really specific with ICP 'cause there's like one thing you accomplish with this thing-

   14. MSMaor Shlomo50:36

       I agree.

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky50:36

       ... versus this very horizontal product.

   16. MSMaor Shlomo50:38

       I agree.

   17. LRLenny Rachitsky50:39

       But I think that's still very good to know 'cause maybe for your product, you hear all this advice. "You need a very narrow focus. You gotta have a very specific role and company size," and all these things. And you're like, okay, maybe not. Maybe if your tool is something that a lotta people can use for a lotta different reasons, don't worry about that too much. Okay, so step one, shared it with friends, a few friends. Like, forced them to use it. "Please use this." "I'm gonna watch you." Your point about being there physically, I think is really interesting. Like, don't just send it to them over email and s- 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 Hunt launch. Another great lesson. You may fail on Product Hunt. That's okay. You still gained like... You know, it sounds like you tripled-

   18. MSMaor Shlomo51:17

       Yeah.

   19. LRLenny Rachitsky51:17

       ... or quadrupled your user base from 10 to 30-ish-

   20. MSMaor Shlomo51:21

       (laughs)

   21. LRLenny Rachitsky51:21

       ... in- in a failed product launch, Product Hunt launch.

   22. MSMaor Shlomo51:23

       Yeah.

   23. LRLenny Rachitsky51:24

       Uh, you also said you've tried paid, which didn't work. You tried influencer marketing, didn't work. So basically all the paid stuff didn't work. But that's great. Great lesson.

10. 51:32 – 57:42

    Building in public

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky51:32

       I think people generally don't wanna be doing that kinda stuff. The point you made about starting to share it in public I think is really interesting. A lot of people post stuff on LinkedIn and they'll ever... And like it's cringey, there's a lotta people, "You should building in public." Who cares? What are you building? I don't know. I don't care about what you're building. What is it you think stood out about the way you approached it that... Is it this tool you built that tells you how to post really viral stuff? (laughs) Uh, what do you think you did that allowed, that made people care? Is it like the small community you're already a part of in Israel and the tech scene? Like, is that a big part of why I think it worked? Is there anything else that might be helpful to folks that are thinking about building in public and being successful there?

    2. MSMaor Shlomo52:08

       So first, a disclaimer. I feel like I had some very small, not audience, but like I had plenty of like LinkedIn connections before. And so everything started from LinkedIn, right?

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky52:17

       It was LinkedIn. Okay.

    4. MSMaor Shlomo52:18

       Til this day.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky52:18

       Great.

    6. MSMaor Shlomo52:18

       Yeah. So now that the acquisition story is- is getting crazy all over the world, so getting a lot of followers from a d- bunch of like different, different, uh, uh, social media platforms. But it started with LinkedIn, I think the fact that I was like the CEO of this company, um, previously like had some people around me in my connections. So again, you have to have like if you're writing to... Like, something that I told a friend few weeks ago, build in public is great, right? But- but- and- and other- other like other channels can really work, but at some point you have to like take a bet on one channel that you see it's working. So like if you're writing posts week over week and like you get five likes, it's likely not gonna change drastically. Um, so... And again, I tried a bunch of things. Uh, influencer didn't work. Okay, I'll just put it aside for a second. Let's- let's see if I can find a channel that works. And so yeah, I- in- for the build in public, I was trying to be as honest as I could and- and just write the good, the bad. And I think the also the fact that like I wasn't a venture... Like I wasn't a- a VC-funded company. I didn't try looking the best or show, "Hey, look at my amazing metrics." Or like make everything looks like really pink and really great and, "I'm the fastest growing, 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. Again, the- this is specifically for my audience, right? So my audience were builders and so I'm not sure that it- it- it works to any other product category. But yeah, just being very realistic and doing post on the deepest, like technical tech stack and how I optimized LLMs to just sharing some, uh, some feelings or growth. People like to see numbers. People like to see charts. And also even there, even in the build in public, like I would ask my friends beforehand that I knew that they were the- the target, like, "What do you think of this post? Is it interesting? Is it not?" Like, "Do you get- do you see value out of that?" And it's like almost like a product that you're releasing out there. (laughs) It's the same thing.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky54:33

       Okay. This is really interesting. So being- being honest, really effective. Feels like there's like this underdog element of being a sole founder, not VC funded adds to it. Also just sharing really interesting learnings, things you've learned yourself that, um, innately people find interesting 'cause you didn't know this stuff. Uh-

    8. MSMaor Shlomo54:49

       Yeah.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky54:49

       ... and also just like fun stats and Gantt charts and things like that. Building a tool on Base44 that can help you make-

    10. MSMaor Shlomo54:55

        (laughs)

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky54:55

        ... these tweets better. Also there, I think it's important to note, you had a network a- ahead of this. Like you had people, you had followers, you had connections. It wasn't like starting from zero. What's like a rough sense of just like, I don't know, how large your network was? What's like a-... way to think about that, so folks are like, "Oh, wow, I'm nowhere near that."

    12. MSMaor Shlomo55:13

        I don't think it was very big. Um, I think it was, like, maybe a few thousand connections. Uh, nowadays it's a few tens of thousands. But, like, you start seeing some engagement and, and once you do that, especially when you l- like, you're saying, "Okay, this is the channel that I'm gonna put all, like, all my weight on."

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky55:31

        Okay, that's a really important point too. It wasn't like, "Put cross post to Twitter and Instagram, all these things." It's, "Pick one and just nail that."

    14. MSMaor Shlomo55:39

        Yeah. Till this day, I think that, like, posting... For me, posting on Twitter was, was a waste of time. I, at some point, like, okay, I s- I saw LinkedIn succeed and I was like, "Okay, let's do the same thing on Twitter." Now I have, like, a better following on Twitter, but, yeah, like, it was... It didn't really work. So I was spending a lot of time where, like, from LinkedIn I saw, like, uh, the l- the l- the highest . And it could be very different for different founders, for different products. It could be Reddit, it could be, like, uh, opening m- opening up a Substack. Like, it could be very different things. For me, that's what worked. And like, once you see something work, just double, triple down on that. Keep on, like... Don't try to just pray and pray. It doesn't work at this stage. At least for me, no.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky56:21

        That is really great advice. It aligns with what I often see with traditional growth engines us-... There's like SEO, there's pay, there's sales, there's virality, word of mouth. And usually a company grows mostly through one.

    16. MSMaor Shlomo56:32

        Yeah.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky56:32

        And LinkedIn, interestingly, was your vector of growth. Also, just this incentives piece is really interesting, a really cool tactic. So the tactic here is incentivizing people to share what they've built on Base44 and they get credit to build more. I've never heard of that before. Ho- how do you actually do that? Do they send screenshots or something? How do they get credit for this?

    18. MSMaor Shlomo56:51

        They actually... They literally, like, early on, they sent me emails and I would tag them, again with the, with an app and an LLM like this. This support is a whole different topic that we can speak about for hours. Like, how do you run support when you're solo, which is a huge topic. But, like, they would send... Um, I would say, "Hey, write a post. Um, paste the link back, send me an email with, like, the link and, and, like, and I'll give you credits." And so at some point I automated that because I couldn't really manage, like, the, the whole thing. Uh, but yeah, 'cause you couldn't really, like, connect it to, like, the, the social APIs and so on, which was hard. So I was like, "Just send me the post."

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky57:31

        I, I know exactly what you mean with the support challenges of being a solo person. With a newsletter, a million people, I get endless... Little things just come up. I, I am really curious to hear you solve it. Let's not get into it.

11. 57:42 – 1:00:23

    The solo founder journey

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky57:42

       In terms of being solo, actually I haven't asked this yet, how long were you actually solo? When did you actually hire your first, first, second person into the journey of the six months?

    2. MSMaor Shlomo57:51

       So the first person started two month ago, so a month and a half before the acquisition. So I was running mostly solo. I think but, like, when, when he started, I already knew that, that it's headed there.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky58:03

       The acquisition?

    4. MSMaor Shlomo58:04

       Um, yeah. And also at some point, like, once I, I, like, I, like, I saw that the changes, chances of this happening, where I grow, so yeah, I hired, like, the best people I know 'cause I knew that, like, I have now these, um, few years, if not more, that, like, I wanna build an awesome... Like, I have to build this to be really big and I need the right people around me. And it's not anymore about, like, let's try and be as profitable and as fun as possible. It's like, let's literally take a bigger bet. Um, that's where I started, like, bringing in people that I knew, um, the best people that I knew to kind of, like, help me build that. Also, like, the, the way the deal is structured, as m-... Not that I can share a lot of details around this. Like, okay, there's, like, the, the 80 mil that got published as the initial payment, and then there's this earn-out piece, which is really interesting because I think they... We structured the deal in a really win-win situation. Um, but then a lot of my compensation and a lot of, like, the upside is actually based on that, uh, other than the 80 mil. And so I have both the financial interest, also the personal interest in, like, building this to be as big as possible. So, in the month before the acquisition, uh, I had the team starting to scale. But also basically for, like, became more profitable that I could afford myself to bring in more people.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky59:28

       And the first hire, was that an engineer? What, what'd they do?

    6. MSMaor Shlomo59:31

       Actually a product person. Uh-

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky59:33

       Whoa, like a product manager?

    8. MSMaor Shlomo59:35

       Yeah. Well, it's, it's someone who has... I, I've, I've been working with a lot and he's, like, a jack of all trades, so he can go into, like, LLM logs and look at, like, mistakes and fix the prompts. He can write, uh, Python scripts or analyze things that we do. Uh, he can start implementing analytics into the product. So, like, a very technical, uh, product person that can wear many hats. That's what you want when you were starting out. Like, at, at some point I was like... His name is Yov. Um, some point I was telling him, "Hey, Yov, uh, you take growth now." And he's like, "I haven't done growth anywhere, right?" "Uh, no, you take growth now. Like, try and, and let's, let's try new challenge. Let, let's try..." Those kind of things. So you want to bring in someone that at least the field style that can do many different things.

12. 1:00:23 – 1:03:23

    Community support

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:23

       Okay. That's really interesting. 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. So 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. It was... Ended up being really effective. Then you had another launch that was like you said, broke the Product Hunt algorithm. H- how many users did that drive? Did that... Was that, like, a huge inflection, that second Product Hunt launch?

    2. MSMaor Shlomo1:00:52

       The thing is, like, things happen so fast that I didn't really implement any, like, data (laughs) and like, stuff like this. I don't really know how many, how many users it brought, but I remember... I remember first, like, the, the community around Base44 again is, like, one of the most incredible communities that I've seen. It's a very strong one and they're all int-... Like, they're writing. So the- they all were very excited about the Product Hunt launch and I was like, "Let's skyrocket, uh, Base44." And then I wake up and I see the weirdest things, like Base44 is not even in the top 10.Um, and I was like, "I know for a fact there's, like, 1,000 people already voted by the time it was noon," uh, and noon in Israel, right, very early on. It's like, I see people, right? I see more posts on LinkedIn saying, "People should vote to Base44," than I actually see upvotes. Um, and so till this day, I don't really know what happened. So I... One of the community reached out to the support team, uh, for Product Hunt, um, saying, "You guys should, like, check out your algorithm 'cause something is not right. Like, just even look at LinkedIn's. Like, search for Base44, Product Hunt. Like, you'll see this many posts." And they were like, "You know what? You're right. We fixed it," and then we jumped to, like, the first place. We were, like, 500 for upvotes, uh, in... The delta was 500 upvotes from the second place.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:15

       Oh my God. (laughs)

    4. MSMaor Shlomo1:02:16

       Um-

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:16

       I've never seen that.

    6. MSMaor Shlomo1:02:18

       Yeah. So it was, it was fun also seeing kind of, like, the, the community rally, uh, for, for this.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:26

       Speaking of community, did... Was that all on WhatsApp? Where'd you manage this community?

    8. MSMaor Shlomo1:02:29

       WhatsApp is, is a surprisingly really good tool to get feedback from the community. Obviously, like, it's not a great tool for the... Like, the community is growing s- so fast. So it blew past, like, a 1,000 or 2,000 or 5,000. I don't even remember what's the limit on WhatsApp. Uh, but till this day, like, the WhatsApp community, uh, which was, like, very early on, is such a great place to get feedback. Um, it's also even oddly enough, it was when, when it first started out, it was my best place to find out if the product is up, if there was, like, slowness, if there was, like, bugs. 'Cause people write, like, really fast and then they can see that. Um, but obviously at some point we turned to, like, more, uh, more scalable solutions, like Discord, Reddit, um, yeah, those, those things. Um, and then just keep on sending product updates

13. 1:03:23 – 1:06:42

    Hackathons and partnerships

    1. MSMaor Shlomo1:03:23

       via email.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:24

       Okay. There's another couple levers I read about, and then I'm gonna move on to a different topic. One is this hackathon you mentioned that helped you grow and, and be- become more aware. Uh, the other is you did a bunch of partnerships, which is really rare for a company (laughs) of your size. So just talk about those and, and what that did to the business.

    3. MSMaor Shlomo1:03:41

       At one point, one of the things I really liked about building Base44 is that I saw people doing, like, building apps that were really, like, uh, incredibly positive and, like, doing really good in the world. And so and, and it's... I think something really interesting right now in Vibe coding in general is, like, once you actually scale software, you can also scale the impact the software does. So you can have, like, non-profits build themselves tools. You can have people that, uh, build apps for education and neglected domains that they didn't really have budget because there was, like, no business .......................... And once you open this app and make it super cheap to create software, then it's becoming... And so I wanted... And this was, like, early on. Like, we were at the 5,000-ish, 10,000-ish users. Um, and so I said, "Okay, well you know what? Let's do a hackathon, uh, where we open up for everybody to build, like, apps that do good in the world." Um, (laughs) remember I had no budget back then, so I was like, "Okay, this is gonna be a 5K hackathon. Like, the prize is gonna be 5K."

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:50

       And that was your own money you were gonna give away?

    5. MSMaor Shlomo1:04:51

       Yeah, it was like the profits that, that ............................ At the same... At that time. And then a lot of people started registering and, and a lot of teams. Uh, it ended up being 3,000 teams. Uh, so, like, really big. I think, like, the largest... I think it's the largest for-good hackathon, uh, so far. And then started getting, um, sponsor requests because it went all over social, and all of a sudden I found myself with a very, like, nice, back then, like, smaller business partnering up with Amazon, with Google, with MongoDB, with Deloitte. Like, with really great companies, uh, that, that one after another, uh, stood behind this, um, hackathon, which was so, so fun. Like, the... Those are awesome teams. Like, the ones that we partner up with, they opened up their offices across the globe to have, like, teams, um, be there, and, and the prizes went obviously very high. Um, I think this is, this will likely be one of the, the top moments in my career. Uh, was very, very empowering. But, like, people built a lot of, like, interesting things. I remember this person building a tool for his grandma who's in- in Hal- Alzheimer, um... Like, she has Alzheimer's. And, and, like, building an a- an app which is essentially a game to help the grandmother to memorize, uh, family members with, like, photos and names, and, like, so many interesting and great and impactful applications.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:26

       I love that there's benefits to the hackathon route, which other Vibe coding tools are taking. Uh, 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, so many side

14. 1:06:42 – 1:08:20

    The importance of velocity in product development

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:42

       benefits. Okay, before we move on from growth, is there anything else that's worth mentioning that worked really well, or just, like, that you think, that people think will work and just didn't work for you that d- you didn't already mention?

    2. MSMaor Shlomo1:06:52

       The last piece, but people talk about that a lot, is that, um, velocity eventually is a growth engine. So, uh, like, part of, like, building in public is you wanna put content out there that people will like to see. And so we joked about it, but it's really true. Like, people like to see charts and they like to see numbers, and it gets them attached to, like, this project if they are saying, "Oh, I wonder what's gonna be profit next week," or, "I wonder, like, how much money is it losing and how can you optimize?" And, like, the- they get attached to that. Um, and 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, like, every other day, people get attached to that. And, and, people like, uh, like, it's... I remember, I remember people commenting on my post saying, "You know what? Like, it's moving so fast, I have to try it now." Um, and so this is part of this. Like, velocity solves, uh, for so many things. Like, most of my thoughts, uh, when... and still are when running Base44, is like, "How do we increase velocity? How do we increase velocity?" It's gonna solve every product problem you have, or most of them. It's gonna solve some of your marketing challenges. If you're smart about it and, and you're putting the content out there, and you, you're making everything like a mini launch. Uh, so I feel like that was also a great, uh, growth too.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:16

       That is a really good point. Uh, clearly everyone in the spaces (laughs)

15. 1:08:20 – 1:15:24

    Technical stack and infrastructure insights

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:20

       has, understands this as well. I wanna talk about the acquisition piece, but a couple quick questions that have been on my mind. One is just, what is the tech stack that you built on? Because I think a lot of founders are like, "What the hell do I build on? How do I... What will help me move fast?" So get as geeky as you want, just, like, what are the tools and infrastructure used to build Base44?

    2. MSMaor Shlomo1:08:39

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

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:20

       Hmm, and it's just Render, it's not like a fancy version of Render. It's the word render.com.

    4. MSMaor Shlomo1:09:24

       Oh, yeah. (laughs) Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:26

       I, I just looked it up. Okay, cool.

    6. MSMaor Shlomo1:09:27

       Yeah. So this is, like, everything that has to do with infrastructure. I managed, uh, both the website, the platform, and the applications itself. Because Base fo- Base44 is like a complex ecosystem. You have the, the user applications that have to be isolated and separated from the platform, that has to be isolated and separated from the websites. Like, a whole, a whole thing. Um, MongoDB is really good when you're vibe coding, especially when you're building a vibe coding platform, because, uh, schemas change a lot. And it's not necessarily like users... LLMs don't always understand what the user is trying to send, so they keep changing the data schema. Um, and I feel like this, this has been the right choice. Obviously ............................ But again, I was spending 20, 30% of my time just optimizing for making the whole repository, uh, LLM suitable. So, uh, by the way, this- those are concepts that I also implemented in, in Base44. But one thing that I kept doing is, I tried making the LLM write as least code as possible. Like, when you're trying to implement a feature that, that... Try to get to a place where it can implement the feature entirely without you writing code, but the, the LLM would write least codes, uh, as least codes as possible. Because then when the LLM try to... Like, when the AI tries to, like, implement the entire feature from scratch, there are more places where it can make mistakes or get confused. 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. And so, I built a very high level, very opinionated infrastructure, like code infrastructure, right? It takes care of, like, the entire thing. When you build a new feature, it takes care of, like, the entire... Like, the, the crud, the authentication, the database. Like, everything that has to do with that, so that when you ask the LLM to implement a new thing, it writes very little code. And by the way, this is also true for Base44, is like provide LLM with a really good infrastructure and SDK, and have the LLM... Like, the LLM still has the flexibility to write the entire feature because it's code, but make it so that, uh, that it doesn't need to, to spit out too many tokens. And obviously, everything that has to do with rule set. There's one, uh, uh, controversial take, uh, for me working with LLMs is, uh, don't use TypeScript. (laughs) Use plain JavaScript. Use JSX. Uh, it's easier for models to write code this way. So the front end for Base44 for the platform, I mean, um, is built in JSX, not TypeScript. And I feel like this has been working well. Uh, part of the reason why I haven't written a single line of, uh, HTML or, or JavaScript in the past. Like, just it does this really well. Um, and another thing that worked really well working with AI is a lot... Like, try to push as much as possible in the same repository, uh, instead of, like, separating the front end and the back end. It's easier to give, like, the contest- context to the, to the AI of like, both what's in the back end, what's in the front end. Um, besides that... So my stack is like, the back end is in Python. I feel like people can be very judgmental about that. (laughs) In terms of performance, I haven't gotten into performance issues and there's, like, a lot of, a lot of traffic to Base44, and every now and then people try to DDoS Ba- Base44 and still the server holds. And so I feel like if you're building it the right way, uh, Python is just a very great language to do that. Another maybe interesting take is, uh, 'cause, 'cause many of the, the, the new apps and products are build, being, are being built to some degree around LLMs. So one of the things that I use is for the LLM that actually writes code in Base44, I use, I use a mix of different models for different tasks. So Claude 4, for example, does a really nice job with-... first the initial prompt, like writing the app from scratch. Then everything that has to do with UI is just fantastic, like design is great. But then for example, Gemini is really good when, when you get a very complex, uh, or, or like very complex problem or we need to figure out an algorithm, or Claude 4.0 got stuck in some bug loop, which happens a lot when you vibe code. Um, and so I have this pipeline that tries to figure out the user prompt and then, um, route it to the right LLM, uh, which I feel like has been working pretty well.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:10

       Wow, that was, uh, extremely interesting. Uh, in this routing, does this... is this what you do within Cursor, or you do this within Base44 based on what the person's working on?

    8. MSMaor Shlomo1:14:19

       Base44, yeah.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:20

       Oh, wow. Okay.

    10. MSMaor Shlomo1:14:20

        I don't think Cursor has this. Uh, I wish they... I think there's like maybe an, an, an auto-option fully, but, uh, in Base44 it's like when users ask-

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:29

        Wow. That's awesome.

    12. MSMaor Shlomo1:14:30

        ... uh, it first try to analyze what they're asking and then figure out what's the right LLM to use.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:34

        That is so cool. So it's just Claude and Gemini, those are the two they use for Base44?

    14. MSMaor Shlomo1:14:40

        Yeah. Well, all of those tools, Base44, Cursor, all the vibe coding tools, I use the same, uh, paradigm, or I don't know if you call it a method, which is like you have the heavy guns, which is usually either Claude 4.0 or Gemini. And then Claude 4.0 and Gemini usually, um, create a high-level, uh, solution or high level kind of like what changes do you want to make to the file? So not writing all of the file from scratch every time. Cursor does that Base44 like, uh, and so writing like the... only the chunk of code that needs to be implemented in high level. Then you, you get like smaller, faster models, like Flash or 4o-mini from, from OpenAI, to implement, to kind of like, uh, to patch the code inside

16. 1:15:24 – 1:18:19

    Activation lessons

    1. MSMaor Shlomo1:15:24

       the, the file.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:25

       Okay. One very tactical question in a completely different direction, uh, product question. Activation, getting people to an aha moment feels like something that, uh, is core to retention. Something that comes up a lot on this podcast. Is there anything you learned about getting that right? Anything you did that was really successful in getting people to see the value of Base44 really quickly and, and in that start sharing it, using it?

    3. MSMaor Shlomo1:15:49

       Here's one interesting thing that, that I learned that I think, uh, was counterintuitive to me, because you always like, you always want to build the best product out there for your users. Uh, but sometimes it contradicts the aha moment or how fast can you get users to do that. So first when, when I was like... when a few months ago, more than that, when Base44 started, before actually implementing your app, so you would say something like, "Hey, create a, a task management app." And before implementing that, because a lot of times you get this, uh, 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, uh, user flows. Like almost like a PRD or like, but something that's more digestible to folks who have, like are not coming from, from to space. Uh, so it will generate user flows, it will show it to you like, "Hey, you want to create a, a task." And then you could, you could say, uh, "Yeah. Yeah. So may- maybe I want to add some files," and stuff like that. So it will show you what it's going to generate to make sure that it understands you, and then you click okay, and then it will generate the app. This was actually something I ditched because too many users, um, even though it was good for them and it was the right product decision to do that, because you'll, you'll create like better apps doing this way, but the conversions to like get to the aha moment, uh, were not super high. And also like, not super like... I think one of the, the key to the aha moment in the vibe coding world, or at least in Base44, is like, "Holy shit. Like, it actually understood me," and you see the app. And if you have like a stage in the middle, it makes the surprise like slightly less surprising. And so I think I ditched that, and that was a, uh, nice lesson that, that I don't know actually how to define the right way, but it's like get your users as fast as possible to the aha moment. Sometimes there's a price to that, make sure it's not too big, but sometimes there are price to that because at least when you're building B2C... And it's all new to me because I'm not coming from this space, but at least when you're building B2C, like the attention span is so low. Really. Uh, so you want to get there in like a minute or two or three, uh, and then from there, okay, later on, ramp up the features that you wanna, you wanna actually put there, so that it can be like the right product for, for your users.

Episode duration: 1:31:50