Keep pulling the thread on Maor Shlomo.
Base44 was acquired by Wix for an initial payment of over $80 million just six months after its inception.
Base44 reached a $1.5 million ARR run rate within four weeks of launching, significantly exceeding its founder's goal of hitting that target by the end of 2025.
Base44 was entirely bootstrapped, built off its own profits without any external venture capital funding.
Base44 implemented a growth program that offered users extra credits to build on the platform if they shared their app or the building process on social media.
Base44 uses a multi-model LLM pipeline that routes user prompts to the most suitable model for the task, using Claude for initial app creation and Gemini for complex algorithmic problems.
In May, Base44 generated close to $200,000 in profit.
The acquisition deal for Base44 by Wix includes an initial payment of $80 million plus a significant earn-out component to align long-term incentives.
Base44 operated as a solo-founder company for most of its existence, with the first employee joining only a month and a half before the acquisition by Wix.
Mayor Shlomo predicts that as LLMs improve, "10x engineers" will become "100x engineers" by managing teams of AIs, making team size and funding less critical for winning a market category.
Base44's infrastructure is built on Render.com, which the founder praised for its ease of use in managing and scaling web applications.
Base44 uses MongoDB as its database, chosen because its flexible schema is well-suited for AI-generated code where data structures change frequently.
Mayor Shlomo advises using plain JavaScript (JSX) instead of TypeScript for code generation with LLMs, as he found models write JSX more reliably.