Base44’s Founder, Maor Shlomo on How Vibe Coding Will Kill SaaS

... from all things in the industry, (beeping) I think the margins are the least thing that I'm worried about.

Base44 is the story of one entrepreneur who went from an idea to millions in revenue and selling to Wix for $80 million. Today, Mayhew joins me in the hot seat.

We're taking into consideration that the prices of model will go down towards zero. Me personally, I don't believe we'll hit a speed bump. I don't think also we'll hit the wall with, like, movements of LLMs. Even with existing models, we're only scratching the surface of economic value that you can create. If one person team can get sold for $80 million without people, it means that you'll be able to do a lot more stuff (beeping) with less people.

Ready to go? (upbeat music) Mayhew, it is great to have you on the show, dude. I've been so looking forward to this one. I am, I'm a fan of Base44. What a fricking journey. Thank you for joining me.

Thank you for having me. I'm a fan of 20VC.

Dude, that's very, very kind. Listen, ego flattery will get you everywhere, and I'm-

(laughs)

... very, I'm very susceptible to it. I was chatting to Michael Eisenberg before this show, and he said, "Dude, you've gotta start with, like, acquired for like 80 million bucks. Why did you decide to sell before we get to anything else?"

So I started Base44 as a bootstrap business after doing a very capital heavy one, which we'll probably get to in a bit. And it started honestly just for fun. Uh, just I wanted to get back to coding. Everything, I felt like everything in the software industry was changing. Um, loved the fact that, like, with LLMs now, we can do so much more. And so it started just for fun, and then the traction was insane. And I started getting to, like, you see like 10,000 users, 100,000 users. And then, then, like, the business was very profitable, and so I stood in this junction of either I'm continuing doing this alone bootstrap thing, uh, which I might get eaten by, uh, companies that are raising, like, shit ton of money.

Mm-hmm.

Or, um, I should raise a lot of funds and go very aggressive and try to build this on my own. And the third one is, like, get into a company that could be, like, a parent company, um, and try to find something that, uh, is, like, can, can harmonize with the business and actually push it forward. So I remember when I started having the conversations with Wix, I was very worried, and I was like, "I'm not gonna sell." And I remember telling Avishay, like, the CEO of Wix, uh, I was telling him, "If Cursor was, was sold to Microsoft, probably there won't be any Cursor today." The fact that they were, uh, independent and they could build a business, uh, by themselves how they wanted, uh, without kind of like the corporate stuff has gotten them through. And then we had many late night chats, um, where, one, I understood that Wix, for a lot of reasons that many who know, know Wix, uh, could understand and I'm happy to tell about, uh, is a perfect match 'cause we're targeting the same audience. It's the same spirit. Um, the marketing team is the absolute, in my opinion, very, in my very not objective eyes, is the best in the market. Uh, they're just aggressive. They're creative. They're absolutely awesome. Um, and if we can structure it in a way where the company itself, the product team stays lean, small, and startup-y like, but all the other stuff, uh, we can benefit from the monster that is Wix. For example, the, the support and customer care, the marketing stuff, the thing that you don't really want to build, like the legal and operation stuff, um, then this could be a lot of fun. And we structured a great deal, um, and I think to me, it was like, okay, we have a shot at actually building something that matters. And so I said, for an actual shot of taking this from this, uh, low few 100,000 users to something that might, if we work hard throughout the years, actually move the needle for a lot of people, that might actually be a thing that people speak about as, "Hey, this actually made an impact on the world," it was either I raise a lot of money and a lot of funding, or I go and join Wix, uh, that basically triples my, uh, chances at actually building something special.