Maor Shlomo
Founder of Base44, solo bootstrapped founder, now at Wix
Where to hear and read about Maor Shlomo1 episode or test
Maor Shlomo is an Israeli founder who built the AI app builder Base44 alone with no outside funding and sold it to Wix for $80M+ within six months. The lesson most worth taking is to build something you enjoy, wait until strangers share it, then put all your effort into the one channel that works.
Once you see something work, just double, triple down on that.
Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo
Maor Shlomo: the story and the lessons
1How Maor Shlomo came to build Base44
Shlomo came to Base44 after seven years running a capital-heavy company. He was CEO of Explorium for seven years. It sold to enterprises top-down and raised $130M.
After October 7 he spent almost a year in reserve duty, then travelled, and found he missed coding. He wanted something fun with little to lose.
He saw that models could write code but had nowhere to put it. With the right setup, leads go straight to a database, React code handles SEO, and the model gets user management and access to another LLM.
He saw Retool and the earlier no-code wave as really low code, since they still needed some JavaScript.
He built first for his girlfriend, the Scouts, friends and family. His girlfriend needed a lead-capture website and drag-and-drop tools kept breaking on mobile. The Scouts had no developers, and agencies quoted about a million dollars for simple internal software.
Building for several real people at once made progress much faster. As a first-time founder he had dismissed 'build what you use' as a cliche.
He stopped chasing the biggest outcome, and the product took off. On the flight back from Asia he promised his girlfriend a nice car at $1.5M ARR by the end of 2025. They hit it in about four weeks.
At Explorium he spent seven years racing to raise the most money fastest. Only after Base44 took off did he decide to play in the big league.
Base44 reached $1M ARR three weeks after launch on almost no money. It has about 400,000 users. He put in only a few tens of thousands of shekels, and two wars happened along the way.
The name came from his birthday, February 2nd. Base22 was available, so he doubled it to 44, which sounds like Base64, the encoding that Base44 echoes by turning natural language into software.
2How Shlomo grew Base44 to 400,000 users without paid marketing
He refused to scale marketing until strangers shared the product. He started with 3 friends. The 11th user, someone who did not know him, was his signal to launch and invest in marketing.
Earlier marketing, he says, just makes a revolving door of users coming in and leaving.
He sat with first users and fixed what broke on the spot. Three friends met him around a table every other day. He read the logs and rebuilt immediately. Even past 100K users he gathered 20 to 30 people in a room every other week.
He does not believe in MVPs, because attention spans for new software keep shrinking.
He built in public on LinkedIn and ignored every other channel. He shared honest good and bad news with numbers and charts, and pre-tested posts with friends from the target audience. He started from a few thousand connections left over from his earlier company.
Twitter was a waste of time, and even after his following there grew it did not convert. He notes it works because his audience was builders, and it would not suit a product for attorneys.
Paid influencers and ads brought him nothing. A roughly $2,000 influencer post and a few thousand dollars of paid ads did not work.
He wanted profit from day one, so the product had to be viral, not bought.
He paid users in credits to share what they built. Extra credits went to anyone who posted about their app or the process, even without mentioning Base44. Together with building in public, growth jumped from about 20 to 4,000 new users a day within a week.
Early on he granted credits by hand from emailed links, then automated it with an app and an LLM.
Shlomo treated launches as a tool, not a make-or-break moment. His first Product Hunt launch brought about 15 users and a paying customer who churned within hours. The second won product of the day, week and month.
Volume tripped Product Hunt's bot detection, so community members told support to check its algorithm. After the fix Base44 led second place by about 500 upvotes. His framing: "This is a tool for me to get to my next 30 users, my next 50 users."
A small charity hackathon became a growth engine. At about 5,000 to 10,000 users he ran a hackathon for good with a $5K prize paid from profits. It drew 3,000 teams, and Amazon, Google, MongoDB and Deloitte joined as sponsors.
It answered rivals' million-dollar hackathons, and partners opened offices worldwide for teams.
He shipped every other day and made each release a mini launch. His constant question was how to increase velocity, since it solves most product problems and doubles as marketing.
One commenter wrote that Base44 moved so fast they had to try it now. In his words: "Velocity eventually is a growth engine."
3How Shlomo builds an AI product as one person
He makes the LLM write as little code as possible. A high-level framework handles CRUD, authentication and the database, plus a good SDK, so the model writes only a thin feature layer. He spent 20 to 30% of his time making the repository LLM-friendly.
Less generated code means fewer mistakes and less context to carry between prompts. He has not written a line of HTML or JavaScript in three months.
He uses plain JavaScript and one repo because models handle them better. The front end is JSX, not TypeScript, and front and back end share a repository so the AI sees both. The back end is Python.
The server has held under heavy traffic and attempted DDoS.
He routes each prompt to the model best suited for it. Claude writes the first app and the UI. Gemini handles hard algorithms and bug loops. Heavy models plan a change and small fast ones like Flash or o4-mini patch the file.
A pipeline reads each prompt and picks the model. He says it has worked pretty well.
He chose a simple stack and a batteries-included product. Render, which sits on AWS, replaced the DevOps teams his last company needed. MongoDB suits vibe coding because LLMs keep changing the data schema.
Every Base44 app ships with a database, integrations, user management and analytics, so users never bring API keys. He thinks stitching in Supabase-style integrations is slightly weaker than full stack.
He removed a helpful step because it delayed the aha moment. Base44 used to generate user flows, like a mini PRD, for approval before building. Apps were better but fewer users reached the aha moment, so he cut it. The description credits this with tripling activation.
The aha is "Holy shit, it actually understood me." In consumer products he aims for one to three minutes to get there, then adds depth.
He builds his own work tools with Base44. One app turns his rough weekly ideas into a LinkedIn post in his voice, then a Twitter post after approval. Another manages users and credits.
It replaced a loop of ChatGPT rewrites, tone fights and a separate image tool. When his process changed after the Wix deal, two prompts updated the app.
4How Shlomo works as a solo bootstrapped founder
He says solo and bootstrapped fits viral consumer products, not enterprise. Enterprise needs salespeople and marketing spend, and buyers doubt a vendor run by one person. A product people share does not depend on funding once it reaches escape velocity.
He calls being profitable 'default alive', which keeps stress low and energy up for the long run.
Being alone meant carrying every outage and priority himself. At his brother's wedding a friend said Base44 had been hacked by a crypto scam, and he spent two scary hours on his laptop.
It was only the LLM using a Node.js package named cryptography, which a non-technical user mistook for an attack. At Explorium his two co-founders shared that kind of burden.
He protects deep work with blockers because of severe ADHD. RescueTime shuts off Twitter and LinkedIn during work blocks. Building in public tempted him to check likes and impressions.
Each day he asked what he needed to work on and what he wanted to work on. He wanted to code, but often the need was marketing.
His first hire was a technical generalist, only a month and a half before the deal. Joav could read LLM logs, write Python analysis scripts and add analytics. Shlomo then handed him growth though he had never done it.
Once a deal looked likely, he hired the best people he knew. "A very technical product person that could wear many hats, that's what you want when you're starting out."
Sudden growth broke Base44 because he was not a DevOps engineer. He did not know how to scale databases, and virtual CPU limits caught him by surprise. He had used every free tier to stay profitable, and they stopped working at scale.
He advises spending at least half your time on work you love. Public-company CEOs he met, including at Wix and monday.com, still spend a major part of their job on what they love, like product design.
He prefers building and scaling products to managing sales and HR as a CEO. "Make sure that at least 50% of your time you work on the parts of you that you really like and that you're really good at."
5How Shlomo sold Base44 to Wix
He sold from strength, since staying independent was a real option. Base44 made close to $200K in profit in May alone. He sold because the market moves faster than anything he had seen and he wanted a chance to lead the category.
Wix offered the same DNA and customer base. He wanted to punch down, not only punch up in a crowded space.
Wix approached him after community members said it should buy Base44. CEO Avishai opened by saying everyone told them to buy him, so a talk was worth it. It began as a partnership idea, not an acquisition path.
Shlomo spent a few nights eating steaks with Avishai and asking for advice on growing Base44.
He negotiated best by being fine with not selling. He compares it to early dating: don't show too much interest. He told himself it would be amazing either way, though he wanted it to work.
"The best position to negotiate such a deal is to be also very fine with the other path of not getting acquired." For a small team, he says, the buyer also needs chemistry with the founders.
He tied his pay to future results to keep a personal stake. The published $80M was an initial payment, with further upside tied to performance. He says this makes him feel a stake and show up every day.
Diligence was fast because the company had no legal baggage.
The signing slipped when war broke out between Iran and Israel. They set a Thursday night deadline, but at 2:00 AM the lawyers still had wording to change. At 4:00 AM news of the war arrived, and they signed the next morning.
He calls it the least boring month of his life.
He bets that small, fast teams will beat big funded ones. He expects 10X engineers to become 100X engineers by managing LLMs, so team size and funding will not decide who wins a category.
His own edge was a different angle and a pace that did not slow over time. He was scared many times before seeing he could keep pace with funded teams.
Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo
A solo founder explains how he grew an AI app builder to 400,000 users with no paid marketing, using hands-on early users, building in public on LinkedIn and credit incentives. The result is $1M ARR three weeks after launch and an $80M+ acquisition by Wix within six months, with no outside funding.
Shlomo came to Base44 after seven years running a capital-heavy company. He was CEO of Explorium for seven years. It sold to enterprises top-down and raised $130M.
After October 7 he spent almost a year in reserve duty, then travelled, and found he missed coding. He wanted something fun with little to lose.
He saw that models could write code but had nowhere to put it. With the right setup, leads go straight to a database, React code handles SEO, and the model gets user management and access to another LLM.
He saw Retool and the earlier no-code wave as really low code, since they still needed some JavaScript.
He built first for his girlfriend, the Scouts, friends and family. His girlfriend needed a lead-capture website and drag-and-drop tools kept breaking on mobile. The Scouts had no developers, and agencies quoted about a million dollars for simple internal software.
Building for several real people at once made progress much faster. As a first-time founder he had dismissed 'build what you use' as a cliche.
He stopped chasing the biggest outcome, and the product took off. On the flight back from Asia he promised his girlfriend a nice car at $1.5M ARR by the end of 2025. They hit it in about four weeks.
At Explorium he spent seven years racing to raise the most money fastest. Only after Base44 took off did he decide to play in the big league.
Base44 reached $1M ARR three weeks after launch on almost no money. It has about 400,000 users. He put in only a few tens of thousands of shekels, and two wars happened along the way.
The name came from his birthday, February 2nd. Base22 was available, so he doubled it to 44, which sounds like Base64, the encoding that Base44 echoes by turning natural language into software.
He refused to scale marketing until strangers shared the product. He started with 3 friends. The 11th user, someone who did not know him, was his signal to launch and invest in marketing.
Earlier marketing, he says, just makes a revolving door of users coming in and leaving.
He sat with first users and fixed what broke on the spot. Three friends met him around a table every other day. He read the logs and rebuilt immediately. Even past 100K users he gathered 20 to 30 people in a room every other week.
He does not believe in MVPs, because attention spans for new software keep shrinking.
He built in public on LinkedIn and ignored every other channel. He shared honest good and bad news with numbers and charts, and pre-tested posts with friends from the target audience. He started from a few thousand connections left over from his earlier company.
Twitter was a waste of time, and even after his following there grew it did not convert. He notes it works because his audience was builders, and it would not suit a product for attorneys.
Paid influencers and ads brought him nothing. A roughly $2,000 influencer post and a few thousand dollars of paid ads did not work.
He wanted profit from day one, so the product had to be viral, not bought.
He paid users in credits to share what they built. Extra credits went to anyone who posted about their app or the process, even without mentioning Base44. Together with building in public, growth jumped from about 20 to 4,000 new users a day within a week.
Early on he granted credits by hand from emailed links, then automated it with an app and an LLM.
Shlomo treated launches as a tool, not a make-or-break moment. His first Product Hunt launch brought about 15 users and a paying customer who churned within hours. The second won product of the day, week and month.
Volume tripped Product Hunt's bot detection, so community members told support to check its algorithm. After the fix Base44 led second place by about 500 upvotes. His framing: "This is a tool for me to get to my next 30 users, my next 50 users."
A small charity hackathon became a growth engine. At about 5,000 to 10,000 users he ran a hackathon for good with a $5K prize paid from profits. It drew 3,000 teams, and Amazon, Google, MongoDB and Deloitte joined as sponsors.
It answered rivals' million-dollar hackathons, and partners opened offices worldwide for teams.
He shipped every other day and made each release a mini launch. His constant question was how to increase velocity, since it solves most product problems and doubles as marketing.
One commenter wrote that Base44 moved so fast they had to try it now. In his words: "Velocity eventually is a growth engine."
He makes the LLM write as little code as possible. A high-level framework handles CRUD, authentication and the database, plus a good SDK, so the model writes only a thin feature layer. He spent 20 to 30% of his time making the repository LLM-friendly.
Less generated code means fewer mistakes and less context to carry between prompts. He has not written a line of HTML or JavaScript in three months.
He uses plain JavaScript and one repo because models handle them better. The front end is JSX, not TypeScript, and front and back end share a repository so the AI sees both. The back end is Python.
The server has held under heavy traffic and attempted DDoS.
He routes each prompt to the model best suited for it. Claude writes the first app and the UI. Gemini handles hard algorithms and bug loops. Heavy models plan a change and small fast ones like Flash or o4-mini patch the file.
A pipeline reads each prompt and picks the model. He says it has worked pretty well.
He chose a simple stack and a batteries-included product. Render, which sits on AWS, replaced the DevOps teams his last company needed. MongoDB suits vibe coding because LLMs keep changing the data schema.
Every Base44 app ships with a database, integrations, user management and analytics, so users never bring API keys. He thinks stitching in Supabase-style integrations is slightly weaker than full stack.
He removed a helpful step because it delayed the aha moment. Base44 used to generate user flows, like a mini PRD, for approval before building. Apps were better but fewer users reached the aha moment, so he cut it. The description credits this with tripling activation.
The aha is "Holy shit, it actually understood me." In consumer products he aims for one to three minutes to get there, then adds depth.
He builds his own work tools with Base44. One app turns his rough weekly ideas into a LinkedIn post in his voice, then a Twitter post after approval. Another manages users and credits.
It replaced a loop of ChatGPT rewrites, tone fights and a separate image tool. When his process changed after the Wix deal, two prompts updated the app.
He says solo and bootstrapped fits viral consumer products, not enterprise. Enterprise needs salespeople and marketing spend, and buyers doubt a vendor run by one person. A product people share does not depend on funding once it reaches escape velocity.
He calls being profitable 'default alive', which keeps stress low and energy up for the long run.
Being alone meant carrying every outage and priority himself. At his brother's wedding a friend said Base44 had been hacked by a crypto scam, and he spent two scary hours on his laptop.
It was only the LLM using a Node.js package named cryptography, which a non-technical user mistook for an attack. At Explorium his two co-founders shared that kind of burden.
He protects deep work with blockers because of severe ADHD. RescueTime shuts off Twitter and LinkedIn during work blocks. Building in public tempted him to check likes and impressions.
Each day he asked what he needed to work on and what he wanted to work on. He wanted to code, but often the need was marketing.
His first hire was a technical generalist, only a month and a half before the deal. Joav could read LLM logs, write Python analysis scripts and add analytics. Shlomo then handed him growth though he had never done it.
Once a deal looked likely, he hired the best people he knew. "A very technical product person that could wear many hats, that's what you want when you're starting out."
Sudden growth broke Base44 because he was not a DevOps engineer. He did not know how to scale databases, and virtual CPU limits caught him by surprise. He had used every free tier to stay profitable, and they stopped working at scale.
He advises spending at least half your time on work you love. Public-company CEOs he met, including at Wix and monday.com, still spend a major part of their job on what they love, like product design.
He prefers building and scaling products to managing sales and HR as a CEO. "Make sure that at least 50% of your time you work on the parts of you that you really like and that you're really good at."
He sold from strength, since staying independent was a real option. Base44 made close to $200K in profit in May alone. He sold because the market moves faster than anything he had seen and he wanted a chance to lead the category.
Wix offered the same DNA and customer base. He wanted to punch down, not only punch up in a crowded space.
Wix approached him after community members said it should buy Base44. CEO Avishai opened by saying everyone told them to buy him, so a talk was worth it. It began as a partnership idea, not an acquisition path.
Shlomo spent a few nights eating steaks with Avishai and asking for advice on growing Base44.
He negotiated best by being fine with not selling. He compares it to early dating: don't show too much interest. He told himself it would be amazing either way, though he wanted it to work.
"The best position to negotiate such a deal is to be also very fine with the other path of not getting acquired." For a small team, he says, the buyer also needs chemistry with the founders.
He tied his pay to future results to keep a personal stake. The published $80M was an initial payment, with further upside tied to performance. He says this makes him feel a stake and show up every day.
Diligence was fast because the company had no legal baggage.
The signing slipped when war broke out between Iran and Israel. They set a Thursday night deadline, but at 2:00 AM the lawyers still had wording to change. At 4:00 AM news of the war arrived, and they signed the next morning.
He calls it the least boring month of his life.
He bets that small, fast teams will beat big funded ones. He expects 10X engineers to become 100X engineers by managing LLMs, so team size and funding will not decide who wins a category.
His own edge was a different angle and a pace that did not slow over time. He was scared many times before seeing he could keep pace with funded teams.