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

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

The funny thing is that base 44, for the first time in my life, was not trying to build the biggest thing ever. Me and my girlfriend, we were on a plane. I told her, hey, you know what, if we get to 1.5 million till the end of 2025, we're going to buy a nice car. And we got there in like four weeks.

I feel like the journey that you've been on over the last six months is kind of like the dream for a lot of founders. How long were you actually solo?

The first person started a month and a half acquisition. So I think it's a different ball game because even if you're solo, you're literally managing teams of AI's writing code. I don't think I've written a single line of HTML or JavaScript in the past three months.

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

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

Today my guest is Mayor Shlomo. This is a unique episode because I almost never have conversations with early stage founders. I made an exception because Mayor's journey is in many ways the dream for a lot of founders. Mayor started a company called Base44, which is essentially a more advanced wipe 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, Mayor shares exactly how he grew the product from zero to ten to hundred 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 solo 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 bootstrapped company. A big thank you to Noam Sehgal 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 Mayor 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 copilot that helps CPOs and product teams uncover business impact and act faster. It listens to your sales calls, support tickets, Churn reasons and Lost deal 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, Incidentio 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 ET 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 fieldwork, Descott 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 the answers you need to move confidently Mayor, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

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

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, 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 the 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 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 out of your head as possible.

Really the right time to kind of like reflect back.

Yeah, I think there's going to be many more times, but this is a really unique time. Let's start with a couple basics. Just what is base 44? For folks that aren't super familiar with the product that you built?

Base44 is an AI app building platform, meaning that you are able to use natural language to describe what you want to build an app, a game, a website or something like that, and then have AI coded for you. We're not the first ones doing that. I think it's a very crowded category, but I think basebally4 takes a very different approach, a very opinionated one, and one that users or users like to call it batteries included approach. Which means that for every app that you build in base 44, you already have built in included a database, integrations, user management, analytics without connecting third party services or bringing your API keys and so on. And I think it helps a lot when you're trying to scale a vibe coded application to be very complex and very functional. And so yeah, I think for most of the category nowadays they're doing a fantastic job. One with building react web apps like front end web apps. And then when a user needs some backend stuff, they have a great integration with Supabase. Supabase I think is the most common kind of like thing that most competitors use. 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 less strong than building everything full stack built in. And once we did that, and actually I engineered the endpoints and the SDKs and whatever to work well with LLMs. I think base 44 does a really good job with building very complex and functional real world applications.

Okay, I want to talk about the origin story of just like how you even realized that there was an opportunity here. Clearly it worked out. But before we get there, let me just share a couple stats about this journey to give people a sense of just how crazy this is and add anything I'm missing. So in six months you went from zero, basically nothing to selling this company for 80 million plus dollars to Wix. 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. You have something like 400,000 users right now. You're Solo founder. There are two different wars involved in the journey. You're based in Israel, so you have to deal with that. And we're going to talk about some of those stories. Any other stats that are worth sharing? Anything else that's important, high level before we get into the origin story?

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

Okay, I love that perspective. Okay, so how did this start?

There were two things I think that drove me to it. One, my girlfriend needed a website to capture leads. She has a small business, she's 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 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 like slightly more complicated than a website was actually a web app. I know models can do that. They just, they don't have the right infrastructure to do that. Like if I set up an infrastructure for like hey, here the leads go to the database. 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 notice like it's going to be super easy and she could do it on her own. And the other trigger, I was volunteering to help with this scouts organization here in Israel with like everything that has to do with like system and Software and back office systems that they needed. And, and back then, like it's a huge organization by the way, really huge, like tens of thousands of people and they have many as any other organization in the world that we're constantly 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 engineer. So they reach out to other agencies and agencies usually would quote them like a million bucks just to build something that I knew people could build. I was and still by the way, huge fan of tools like Retool for like the previous wave of like no code 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's 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 LLM has access to a database, maybe to another LLM to be like the app on top of AI, to have some user management, to have all those kind of things that it needs, but it can translate the user needs to actual code. And so those two were triggers back then. I started a company seven years ago called Explorium. Very different than base 44, very much like enterprise, top down sales in the data space. Very capital heavy. We raised $130 million. I was a CEO for seven years. Then when the October 7th war broke out, I went to reserves for almost a year and then when I came out, went to travel the world a bit just 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 exploring grew and grew and haven't had a chance for a while to do which is coding. Wanted to get back to building and get my hands dirty. And so I had those like given those experiences both with my partner, 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 going to be very, 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. 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. 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. And that's how base 44 started. They definitely, definitely didn't think it's gonna take off so fast, but, yep, that's pretty much about it.

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, one is clearly you were solving somebody's real problem, your own problem, helping your girlfriend build this website for her, and then working with the Scouts program in Israel, basically building them software. So I think that's a really important takeaway. You weren't just like, hey, maybe this will be useful to someone. It's every real problem and I want to solve it and nothing out there is good enough, so I'm going to build it myself. The other is, you said that you're having fun. Feels like that's an important element. Just like you should enjoy it. You shouldn't feel like it's some kind of drag.

You know what I feel like when I was a first timer? When I first started my first company, Exploring, I felt like many smart people told me those two very important truth is, like, build something that you would want to use all that you'll actually use, and make sure that throughout time you keep doing something that you really like. And so when you're first timer, or at least for myself, when I heard those kind of things, I was like, yeah, those are cliches. Business is always important. Let's increase revenue. Like, let's close more deals. And I feel 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 product and at the same time developing those two products for my girlfriend for the Scout, and later on also for other friends and family. And we'll get to that. That's how I got my first couple of users. But super important to build something that you use. You'll move forward so much faster, but also doing something that you love. I think I was the CEO of Exploring for seven years. It was such a fantastic experience. It had so many highs and lows, but 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. And I think that that gives a lot of power. Like it's, it's easier to work very hard when you're doing something you really like.

Let's follow that thread and talk about being a solo founder. 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. 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 people considering starting company on their own and also just how do you stay productive? How do you get stuff done as a solo founder using AI 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 sales team. Like you need to like spend your money on marketing. It's going to be very hard to try to sell to your company when you're on your own. Nobody knows if the product's going to stay there tomorrow. So I don't think it's like the right setting for every company. I feel like if you're building something that has the potential to be viral or to target the masses and so it doesn't really matter if you're like funded or not. It's just like build a great product that people will share. If you're able to do that and you're able to get out of like the escape velocity of getting to product market fit, then everything is better doing a solo bootstrap than the other way.

Around.

Even from a pure cold angle of the financial outcome. Obviously if you're able to bootstrap your business and again get out of the scape velocity, be profitable to some degree, then you'll likely generate a financial outcome that I think for most cases way better than any other thing. Second is so not specifically the solo, but the bootstopping thing less stressful, like you wake up in the morning as like if you're profitable. And I think there's like this term default alive. It's so much easier. I've done both. And the weight of 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 being bootstrapped like no other money except of yours in the business. And the business is growing and profitable I feel like can keep the energies up and I think I keep. One thing that I've learned from my previous company is energy is also important. Usually it's a marathon. For me it was a sprint. I thought it's going to be a marathon. But you want to do something that you like for years and years and if you're able to show up every day, then your chances kind of goes up immediately. But then there's a lot of downside and a lot of stressful moments during that one. Just keeping the self core up, keeping the servers up when you're solo, you don't have a DevOps team, you don't have Encore, you don't have anything. I think is really tough. I had a few accidents that, that really. I'm. I'm joking about that but I saying it to my friends like show them my life a bit with just like the stress. I had one funny now I look at it as a funny moment where I was at my brother's wedding and we were doing the photo shoots and I was actually the one actually was supposed to also do the ceremony and then doing the photo shoots. I have a friend from MIT calls me up and he's like, hey, somebody hacked into base 44 and it's like a crypto scam and you've got to take care of that because people are building apps on top of base 44 and they're putting the data inside and so on. And I remember hanging up the phone, I was like, okay, I'll take a look at it immediately. And I remember hanging up the phone and saying, I know it's karma. I know for a fact it's true. Somebody probably hacked into that because what are the chances that on the only night that I'm not able to open up a laptop and handle that, this is what happens. And so I threw out there some excuse and I have to go and practice what's the ceremony or something like that. Open up a laptop. Spent 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 a node js, like a JavaScript package has nothing to do with crypto. But obviously the user, not a technical user, saw this error of like hey, something cryptography or something like, that was sure that someone, like a crypto scam hacked into. Into the 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. Like, you handled that. In my previous company, my two co founders, we were really good friends, like, great friends. And even if one of us would mess up, then still would have someone to share it with and run jokes around and like, and just be there with someone. So when you're solo, it's hard. 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 everyone can build software, you have to go extremely fast on one side and on the other side, figure out marketing along the way and how to do that. And every time, I remember that every time I had this ceremony where I'd start the 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 to work on today, it 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 makes, like, a noise. Some of the users. I know there's, like, the feature that. That's in my head that I'm saying, oh, competition. Haven't thought about that. I have to build it, I have to put it out there to be in front of everything. And then it's like, what do I have? Like, what do I have to do today? And so at many different stages on base 44's journey, it was, I know I can, like, improve the product a lot, but I need to do some more marketing. Oh, I need to, like, I know this is not the bottleneck. I know people are, like, converting well, they're growing. Retention is looking good, and it's all about just, like, increasing the audience. Even though I know, like, I need, like, even though I want, I really want to work on the product. And so I think there's, like, this 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 high. Right. 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 for Example, so that I can use cancel for backend and base 44 for front end to write code really fast. And this was really important for me to keep trying to find out new ways of how to automate and increase the pace of building solo. Because if you're able to correct that, I feel like smaller teams with a lot of context nowadays can move faster. And the same goes also for marketing and for other tools where you want to automate as much as you can, especially when you're solo, because time is going to be the thing that kills your business if you're not managing it right.

Okay, let me follow that thread. That's a really interesting topic. So what is in your stack of productivity for yourself? And then just that allowed you to build base 44 just like the tech stack of base 44. So you said cursor base 44. What else did you use day to day that helped you be more efficient?

So I have severe adhd and so it can also be like a superpower. But then you have to like first, the first thing you want to do is like make sure that your walk day looks like that you can be focused and that you get a lot of deep walk. And so I use a product called Rescue Time, which I really like, but I think there's like a bunch of other products, like shuts down every access to Twitter on LinkedIn and so on. This was really hard because I was starting to do this build in public, which turned out to work pretty well for base 44. And so every time you want to take a look at your post or see kind of how many likes and impressions and so on, but then you can't work on anything else. And so I had this first setup that really allowed me a certain set of software tools that I can use to manage kind of like deep work. Carousel has been awesome. Base44 not only did the work for the front end side, but also a lot of the business apps that I used well on top of base 44. So where I'd manage users and give credits and where I write content. And then I had this app where I kind of like at the start of the week would write some high level content ideas and then the base44 app will take it and break it down to kind of like something that sounds more like me for a LinkedIn post. And then I'd approve that and then it would break it down to like a Twitter post. And so I wrote things that were really customized to my process and what I wanted to do, which really helped But I think you can do that not only with baseball before, just you can Vibe code your way into, like, productivity tools that really fits what you want to do and what kind of like, the process for you looks like. And I had so again, for example, for my social post and so on, there's like a process that I would follow and maybe no one else would follow that. And so Vibe code, the custom app for that was really helpful.

Let me actually ask about that. That is super cool. So you built basically internal tools for yourself using base 44. People can use other tools potentially. So you built one that's like, help me craft a tweet. How does that actually look like? What is the input? That sounds really interesting.

So the way that I like to work is like, I would have those moments where I would have inspiration for, like, a piece of content, right? So the way I Google base 44, probably a different topic, but was a lot around building in public and growing an audience and speaking to my audience, which were fellow builders. So it was really easy. So a lot of that was like, around sharing on the base 44 journey. And then I'll 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, post for throughout the week, because you want to keep consistency and keep putting things out there. And then my process before the app was like, I'd go to ChatGPT. I'll write a very vague kind of structure or skeleton of a post and tell it like, hey, fix my writing, Improve my writing a bit. And then ChatGPT will spit out something that was too far off, too much, like too salesy, not my tone. And then I'll say, no, keep closer to the original. And we'll fight about that. And then remove the emojis, the hyphens look weird, and so on. And so, okay, I'll have now 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 put it out also in my Twitter account. So, okay, let's break it down to a Twitter thread. Now. You need to shorten the. Like, you need to make some adjustments to the content. And so I've taken this entire process, which I think was like, what was working for me, and just Vibe coded it up around it 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 it will speak just like me.

This might be a good plug for base 44. 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.

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 going to build the skeleton for what you need. And base 44 does a good job with this like understanding at least the big pieces. Okay, there's going to be an LLM writing the content is going to be this and that and so you don't have to write the entire spec. It's just like something like, hey, I want to build my own content generation AI powered tool. Here's my process currently 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 the entire category. Again, not only base 44, I feel like there's tons of tools doing a great job, but something I really like in base 44 is that because it's really easy to change the software. It's like you get this adaptive software as you improve your processes or maybe your processes change. It's like you adapt it. So like base44 got acquired by Wix two weeks ago and so now the process of like putting content out there looks a bit different. And so with just two prompts, you change it to support your new process, which is really fun.

That's a cool phrase. Adaptive software. I heard malleable software is another way to describe this. 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 bolt, Replit, V0vercel, cursor raised, I don't know, bazillion dollars at this point. I know you're not competing with Cursor directly. If you weren't going to 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, base 44 was like fairly profitable, much more 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 that. 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 like started building in public at around start of February and that's where it took off and then started like I think first dollar or like the, the first 10 or 100 bucks were towards March and then in May I already did close to 200k in profit. And so I think, I think either way there was like a room to compete. And even though it was small I was seeing that the users that come to me stick like that, come to base 44, stick with base 44. Even though they're very familiar with like the rest of the competition. The challenge was obviously making as much noise as the other folks. So you can see like the other vibe coding tools doing like a million dollars hackathons and so on and doing an awesome job on growth really. But I didn't have the resources so I tried finding ways to fight the fight. 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 like we had 3,000 teams just building some great do good 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 thought it's going to move. And at some point I figure it's going to be like, you see base 44 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 actually build some global scale, maybe lead the category, maybe win it. I felt like the best chances to do that is to partner up with wix. There's like plenty of reasons to that. We can touch on that later. But same DNA, same customer base, they know what they're doing, they're seeing and obviously very good connection with the entire management team over there. And so I feel like the acquisition partner up with wix, there's plenty of reasons to do that. We can touch on that later. But same DNA, same customer base, like they know what they're doing, they're seeing and Obviously very good connection with the entire management team over there. And so I feel like the acquisition, again being very honest, I felt like it's going to be a financial success either way. But the acquisition is like taking a stance and saying, you know what, let's play in the big league and, and let's punch down. Not only punch up when, when fighting in this very crowded space. And that's part of the reason why to get acquired.

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 happen long term. But it, if 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 love. 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.

Yeah, I think it's a bit different ball game right now. I was like, I was killed many times. Like I thought, how, how am I going to 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. But then throughout time I saw that I'm able to keep the pace, if not even have faster pace and have a different angle and it's not changing over time. So nobody's. And so I think it's a different ballgame because even if you're a very small team or even if you're solo, you're literally managing teams of AI's writing code. I don't think I've written a single line of HTML or JavaScript in the past three months. But still like the base 44 front end changes a lot because AI writes that. So yeah, if you have an interesting angle and you're able to move fast, I feel like money and funding is not necessarily the factor to win a category. And that's going to be like. And that's going to change even more drastically in future as LLMs get better. It's like people like 10x engineers would have way more impact. They're going to be 100x engineers because they're able to manage LLMs and it's not necessarily the team size nor the funding that would be able to win you a category.

What you Just shared is amazing that you haven't written any. You said JavaScript HTML in three months, which is half the lifetime of this company, which sold for $80 million and more potentially. It feels like now the big things you got to get right is kind of like at the beginning of figuring out what problems to solve 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.

And even distribution, I'm still learning that is like it's a even distribution nowadays. It's very different. And also in favor of like the solo. Not necessarily the solo, but like not necessarily that you're going to pull a lot of money on paid campaigns like base 44 goal with close to zero marketing budget. I spent like $2,000 on an influencer post that didn't really bring anything and then tried paid for like a couple of thousands of bucks. Didn't really work. And so everything was like organically and built in public. And so even distribution 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 a few months ago he was a restaurant manager and then he left and started like a SaaS company for managing invoices for restaurants. So this is a guy that has both distribution, obviously this is very local software and company but has distributions, has those connections but has a very deep domain knowledge. And now that the technical he has no like human coding are like very different in very different places. And so I think if like domain knowledge become or domain expertise and some again interesting take on a domain or a product or a category becomes like a key thing and then distribution, yeah, that's a hard one to get. But also world that's changing a lot.

Yeah. And I love that you did it with no funding. 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 want to be? I've gone through this myself where I was like, oh, this newsletter. I'm making a living off this writing one email a week. 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 the reason I do that is it 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. And I feel like some people are on it. I just don't need that. I'm good. I'm going to live in, I don't know, Fiji and just code and make 100, 300, 500k a year from this thing. But I feel like folks like you, like, there's more ambition and one way is raise a bunch of money. Another sell to a company that has a platform that you can build on.

Yeah, I emphasize with this a lot, but the funny thing is that, like, 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 my previous company, I was so, 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, remember I looked, kept looking like, hey, Stellium raised $100 million before Snowflake. This is insane. This is amazing. And so on. And I did that for seven years. Um, and I think base 44 is the first time that, like, I stopped and said, 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 going to become really big or not. 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. Like, if we get to $1.5 million in ARR till the end of 2025, we're going to buy a nice car. And we got there in like four weeks. And so it was the first time, like, saying, let's not try and build the biggest thing, let's just do something I really like and let's just build a product that I'm going to enjoy building. But then at some point, it 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 the big league and try to scale it.

That so aligns with my journey similarly. I'm like, I'm just going to do a newsletter. Life's going to be great. I'm not going to build. I called it my anti empire I don't want to build anything big. I'm just going to keep it chill project, Chill project, avoid getting a real job. That's what I called it and I think that is a really big insight. Some of the best stuff comes from not putting a bunch of pressure on yourself trying to build something huge and just following a poll following your interest. Following just that insight you have ends up being some of the best ideas come out of that and the biggest ideas.

I love it. I agree with that. Yeah.

This episode is brought to you by contentsquare, the analytics platform that helps companies build better digital experiences. Ever wonder why customers drop off before converting? Or why some pages perform better than others? Content Square takes the guesswork out of digital experiences 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 and just following a poll following your interest. Following just that insight you have ends up being some of the best ideas come out of that and the biggest ideas.

I love it. I agree with that. Yeah.

Giving you real time insights into how users interact with your site or app. With AI powered analytics, automatic frustration detection, and clear visualizations, you'll know exactly what's working and what's holding your customers back. Whether you're optimizing an E Commerce checkout, refining a B2B lead flow, or improving a mobile app experience, ContentSquare pinpoints exactly what needs fixing and why ContentSquare powers better customer journeys across 1.3 million websites and apps. Discover the Insight. This episode is brought to you by Content Square, the analytics platform that helps companies build better digital experiences. Ever wonder why customers drop off before converting or why some pages perform better than others? Content Square takes the guesswork out of digital experiences you've been missing@contentquare.com Lenny let's talk about growth so here's what I want to do. I want to 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 hundred users? How'd you get the first thousand users? What are the levers used there? What are the tactics? So let's start with 10. How'd you get your Giving you real time insights into how users interact with your site or app. With AI powered analytics, automatic frustration detection, and clear visualizations, you'll know exactly what's working and what's holding your customers back. Whether you're optimizing an E Commerce checkout, refining a B2B lead flow or improving a mobile app experience. Content Square pinpoints exactly what needs fixing and why.

First 10 users just begging people close to me that I feel like that I have really good connections with to use it. I feel like there's no other way and maybe there are other ways but again I was very new to B2C like to consumerish type of product and so I grabbed. I started with even three users like really close friends, two of them back at the time I caught them in a part of their life when they were unemployed. So I was like hey why don't you try build a SaaS content square.

Powers better customer journeys across 1.3 million websites and apps discover the insight business.

Or something like that. And so three really close friends, well somehow I got them to sit down with me every other day around the table and they would use it's you've.

Been missing@contentquare.com Lenny let's talk about growth. So here's what I do. I want to 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 hundred users?

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 how'd you.

Get the first thousand users? What are the, the levers used there? What are the tactics? So let's start with 10. How'd you get your first.

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 a thousand users and then from there But I try to look at it as like milestones and so first I was like I'm not going to try and scale anything before 10 users just begging people close to me that I feel like that I have that I have really good connections with to use it. I feel like there's no other way and maybe there are other ways but again I was very new to B2C, know that users enjoy it and the best metric to seeing them enjoying it or at least making value out of it even if they're not enjoying because there are plenty of bugs and slowness and so on is that they're starting to share it with someone. So I haven't invested anything to consumer ish type of product and so I grabbed or I started with even three in marketing before, I felt like, okay, for the first three or five or ten users, 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 friends. At some point they started sharing it with their friends business or something like that. So three really close friends, 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 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 well, somehow I got them to sit down with and all liked it and started sharing it with that. And so once I started seeing that this works and we got to like 10 users where all my friends and then the 11th user or something like this start seeing people that don't really know me. That's why 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 with me every other day around the table and they would use the tool, they will try to build something, it will break. I'll take a look, I'll take a look at the logs, I'll go back, back to my computer, try to change it, push into production. And then 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 use those out, you will not be able to. And unless you have like a lot of money to invest in paid so that like it makes sense then, then it's very hard. I knew that I'm not gonna do that. It's like a product that I'm building. I want it to be profitable from the get go and not feeling bad for investors, just build it for them. I feel like plenty of people are lucky to find maybe too much money into your page and so on. And so I knew that it has to be viral at some point. I started starting a method that consistently works for your like 10, 100, a thousand users and then from there. But I try to look at it as like miles still look like it's viral. Then I did a very failed, very bad product on launch. But also now looking back and saying this is completely fine. And so first I was like, I'm not going to try and scale anything before. I feel like people 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 know that users enjoy it. And the best metric to seeing 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 point. I'm enjoying it, or at least making value out of it, even if they're not enjoying because there are plenty of bugs and slowness and product hunt, they thought that it's like plenty of bots. We won the first product of the day and the first product of the month is that they're starting to share it with someone. So I haven't invested anything the week but the different story. And so we got like 50 users and we in marketing before I felt like, okay, for the first three or five or ten, we got the first user to pay. This was an insane, an insane feeling because I'm like an entrepreneur coming for 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 friends. At some point, they started sharing it with their friends, AIs or trying to get a discount and so on. Obviously this user churned it like a few hours. 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 base 44 turned out later, Forex wasn't good back then, but from there I started seeing some very slow growth. So I got my first 50 and then 20 in its journey to be very viral. But back then it was like an okay product. People loved it. And I 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. Influence and all liked it and started sharing it with that. And so once I started seeing that this works and we got to like 10 users where all my friends and then they live in a post or paid or something like that. And then one of my friends was also a founder in a 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 trying to take a very different approach than user or something like that. Start seeing people that don't really know me. That's why 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 than the usual VC funded way. Why don't you show my content about that like beforehand? I feel like you're going to waste a lot of time and resources on just like having a very. At the end of day it's like you're going to have the same like your audience or builders, they're trying to build their own products or maybe even businesses and it will likely resonate with them. And so I started evolving though like you get users in and use those out, you will not be able to and unless you have sharing the journey on LinkedIn. And I remember like seeing posts like okay, there's this nice concept of building public and people get really interested and I think here in base 44 I had like this really nice synergy between they make a lot of money to invest in paid so that like it makes sense then. Then it's very hard. I knew that I'm not going to do that. It's like a product that I'm building. I wanted to be profitable from the get go and not feeling bad for investing building public. And also my audience was like builders, right? If I was like building, I don't know a product, I think too much money into your paid and so on. And so I knew that it has to be viral at some point I started starting tourneys and probably this wouldn't have made a lot of sense. Once I started like share it look like it's viral. Then I did a very failed very what I'm building in public and getting more users and improving their product tremendously. I was so lucky. Like the community around base 44 is nothing like I've ever seen. It's like so supportive. There's so much feedback and so for that product on launch. But also now looking back I'm saying this is completely fine. I feel like people sometimes treat their launches like product launches as like make it or break it for the company on the loop of improving the product. This is exactly how people say it should feel like. It's like people asking for features before you can actually build them. They're getting so excited. 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 about your product. The writing, the nicest things people have tried, like started writing like hey, you changed my life. I wanted to build. That's exactly what happened. And so first Product Hunt launch, I had those ideas throughout my life. I didn't have 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. We got like 50. I got like 15 new users, by the way. The second one broke Product Hunt. They thought there's like plenty of bots. We won the first product of the day and the first product of the month on top of base 44. Like they would write posts the week, but it's the different story. And so we got like 50 users. And I remember at some point a friend of mine reached out and he was like, dude, how much are you? Got the first user to pay. This was an insane and insane feeling because paying those people to write posts about Space44, I was like, I'm not paying anyone, honestly. And so what I did is I actually 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. I'm like an entrepreneur coming for 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. You'll get extra credits to build. And so those two, like build AIs or trying to get a discount and so on. Obviously this user churned in like a few hours. Clean, public and giving up credits worked extremely well. And that's how we got golf going.

Okay, let's pause there. That was awesome. How many users?

Forex wasn't good back then, but do.

You have at this point of the.

Journey, roughly, I think there was like two weeks between. No, a week between having like being on a pace of like 20 users a day. From there, I started seeing some very slow growth. So I got my first 50 and then 20 to seeing 4000 users coming to your product. Like new users left and then the other 30 started sharing it with like other users that were really good a day break the product. Like, it was hard scaling it. And then I tried a bunch of marketing things didn't work. Influencer post or paid or something like that. And then one of my friends was also a founder. Also. There's like some things I needed to learn while moving is like, oh, yeah, I wasn't a DevOps engineer. I don't know how to scale databases. I didn't know that a Virtual CPU would really come back at me when trying to scale and so on and again trying to be profitable. And so you try to use every free tier that you can, but then once you start scaling it's really bad. So yeah, I think 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 trying to take a very different approach than the usual VC funded way. Why don't you share content about that? Once I started sharing in public, it grew to a few thousands a day and then from there the credit thing did the rest. At the end of day it's like you're going to have the same. Your audience or builders, they're trying to build their own product.

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 that coming back to a lesson you.

Shared at the products or maybe even businesses and it will likely resonate with them.

And so I started beginning which is build for specific people. So initially it was build 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 sharing the journey on LinkedIn. And I remember like seeing posts like.

Okay, there's this building the things they need to use it. Which is really interesting because a lot of times the advice you get is.

Look nice concept of building public and people get really interested. And I think here in base 44 I had like this really nice synergy.

Between look for poll look for people with problems to solve, build in public.

And also my audience was like builders, right? If I was like building, I don't.

Know a product, 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.

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, turn is and probably this wouldn't have made a lot of sense once I started like sharing what I'm building in public and getting more users and improving their product tremendously. I was so lucky. Like the community around base 44 is especially these days where it's so much easier to build software. So the attention span for people to actually try out new software products is getting shorter and shorter. So yeah, pick a bunch of people that I don't know owe you something or have any reason to use your product when it is nothing like I've ever seen. It's like so supportive. There's so much feedback and so for bad build for them, be there physically. I remember that even when we passed 20k users, 50k users and 100k users, it was still very tough to get the right feedback. So I would bring like 20, 30 people in 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. They're getting so excited about your product. They're writing the nicest things. People have tried, 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 like an ability to do that or resources or money to pay for the. To like a room together. It's like almost like a focus group or a small hackathon. I'll do that every other week 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 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 on top of base 44. Like they would write posts. Something else that I don't really empathize with 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. I remember at some point a friend of mine reached out and he was like, dude, how much are you trying to do? It's like way more important. So you can have different types of people, but they're all trying to do the same thing, right? They're trying to build a tool.

I think some of this people should remember the tool you're building is a specific kind of tool that helps you build things. And so these lessons don't necessarily apply in a lot of cases. You want to be really specific with icp because there's like one thing you accomplish.

Paying those people to write posts about Space44 is like, I'm not Paying anyone, honestly. And so what I did is I actually 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 this.

Thing versus this very horizontal product. I agree, but I think that's still very good to know because maybe for your product you hear all this advice, you need a very narrow focus. You got to have a very specific role in company size and all these things.

You'll get extra credits to build. And so those two like build.

You're like, okay, maybe not. Maybe your tool is something that a lot of people can use for a lot of 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 going to watch you. Your point about being there physically, I think is really interesting. Like don't just send it to them over email and and ask them how when it's like sit next to them and watch them use it and then keep making better. Then you tried this product launch. Another great lesson. You may fail on product hunt. That's okay. You still gain. Like you don't know. It sounds like you tripled your quadrupled your user base from 10 to 30.

Ish in public and giving up credits worked extremely well and that's how we got growth going.

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

I think there was like two weeks.

Between in a failed product launch. Product launch. 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. I think people generally don't want to be doing that kind of 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 everyone like it's no a.

Week between having like being on a pace of like 20 users a day.

Cringy. There's a lot of people 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 to seeing 4,000 users coming to your product like new users.

Do 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 a day.

Break the product like it was hard scaling it also just like some things I needed to learn while moving is like oh yeah.

What do you think you did that allowed that made people care? Is it like the small community already part of it is real in the tech scene. Like is that a big part of why you think it worked? Is there anything else that might be helpful to folks that are thinking about building in public and being successful as.

In a DevOps engineer? I don't know how to scale databases. I didn't know that the virtual CPU with the real successful there. 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? Yeah. So now that the acquisition story is getting crazy all over the world so getting a lot of followers come back at me when, when trying to scale and so on and again trying to be profitable from a bunch of like different, different social media platforms but. 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 in public it grew to start with LinkedIn. I think the fact that I was like the CEO of this company previously like had some people around me in my connection. So again you have to have like if you're writing to something that I told a friend a few weeks ago, a few thousands a day and then from there the credit thing like did the rest. Building public is great, right? And other like other.

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 coming back to a lesson you shared.

At the tunnels 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 write beginning which.

Is build for specific people. So initially it was build for yourself.

Building posts week over week and like you get 5 likes it's likely not going to change drastically. So and again I tried a bunch of things Influencer didn't work. Okay, I'll just put it aside for a second. Let's, let's see if I can for.

A girlfriend built for the Scouts program and then it was built for these like three friends just building it sitting.

With and find a channel that works. And so yeah I in for the building public. I was trying to be 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.

As honest as I could and just write the good, the bad. And I think also the fact that like I wasn't a venture like I wasn't a VC funded company. I didn't try looking the best or show hey look at my amazing metrics.

So like 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.

Make everything looks like really pink and really great and I'm the fastest growing whatever bootstrapped. Absolutely. Also like I don't know though I think 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 this is specific. Maybe paradigms are changing but there are some things that I don't believe in is like MVPs for my audience right. So my audience were builders and so I'm not sure that it it 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 spend for people to actually it works to any other product category. But yeah just being very realistic and doing post from the deepest like technical tech stack and how I optimize the LLMs to just sharing some some feelings or growth. People like to see numbers, people like to see charts and also even there even try out new software products is getting shorter and shorter. So yeah pick a bunch of people that I don't know owe you something or have any reason to use your product when when it's bad build for them be there physically in the building public. Like I would ask my friends beforehand that they knew that they were 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. It's the same thing. I remember that even when we passed 20k users, 50k users and 100k users it was okay.

This is really interesting. So being honest, really effective feels like there's like this underdog still very tough.

To get the right feedback. So I would bring like 20, 30.

People then I'm being a solo founder, not VC funded adds to it also just sharing really interesting learnings Things you've learned yourself that innately people find interesting because you didn't know this stuff. And also just like fun stats and grant charts and things like that. Building a tool on base 44 that.

Can help people to like a room together, almost like a focus group or a small hackathon. I'll do that every other week just to get feedback. And it was so much easier than any other thing. And it was the same thing that.

I tried tweets better. Also, I think it's important to know you had a network ahead of this. Like, you had people developing when we.

Were just like three users and five users.

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.

I don't think it was very big. I think it was like maybe a few thousand. And so, yeah, build it for them. They can come from different backgrounds. Again, something connections. Nowadays it's a few tens of thousands. But like, you start seeing something else that I don't really empathize with or deal with is like, you have to have like a certain icp. It's not. It's not necessarily about like the profile of a person, more of like, what engagement. And once you do that, especially when you like saying, okay, this is the channel that I'm gonna put, trying to do, it's like way more important. You can have different types of people, but on my way to them.

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

Yeah. Till this day, I think that for me, posting on Twitter was a waste of time. Trying to do the same thing, trying to build a tool.

I think some of this people should remember the tool you're building at some point.

Okay, I saw LinkedIn succeed and I was like, okay, let's do the same thing on Twitter.

Link is a specific kind of tool that helps you build things. And so these lessons don't necessarily apply. In a lot of cases. You want to be really specific with ICP because there's like one thing you.

Accomplish with 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 the highest away and it could be very different for different founders for different products. It could be Reddit, it could be.

Like open this thing versus this very horizontal product. I agree, but I think that's still very good to know because maybe for.

Your opening up a substack, like it could be very different things. For me, that's what worked. And like once you see product, you.

Hear all this advice. You need a very narrow focus. You got to have very specific role and company size and all these things.

Something will just double, triple down on that. Keep on like, don't try to spray and play. It doesn't work at this stage, at least for me.

That is really great advice. It aligns with what I often see with traditional growth engines. There's like SEO, there's pay, there's sales, there's virality, word of mouth. And usually you're like, okay, maybe not. Maybe your tool is something that a lot of people can use for a lot of 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 going to watch you. Your point about being there physically, I think is really interesting. Like don't just suddenly a company grows mostly through one. And LinkedIn, interestingly was your effective growth. Also, just this incentives piece is really interesting, a really cool tactic. So the tactic here is incentivizing people to share what they built on base 44 and they get credit to build more. I've never heard of that before. How do you actually do that? Do they send screenshots or something? How do they get credit? They leave it to them over email and and ask them how when it's like sit next to them and watch them use it and then keep making it better. Then you tried this product launch. Another great lesson. You may fail on Product Hunt. That's okay.

You still like early on they sent me emails and I would tag them.

Like you don't know. It sounds like you tripled. You quadrupled your user base from 10.

To 30 ish again with an app and an LLM. Support is a whole different topic that we can speak about for hours. How do you run support when you're solo, which is a huge topic. But I would say, hey, write a.

Post in a failed product launch. Product hunt launch. 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.

I think people 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. But yeah, because you couldn't really like connect it like that.

You really don't want to be doing that kind of stuff. The point you made about starting to.

Share it in public, social APIs and so on was hard. So I was like just send me the post.

I think it's really interesting. A lot of people post stuff on LinkedIn and everyone like it's. I know exactly what you mean. With the support challenges of being a solo person with a newsletter of a million people, I get endless little things just come up. I am really curious to hear you solve that. Let's not get into it 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.

So the first person started two months cringy.

There's a lot of people 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?

So a month and a half before the acquisition, so I was running mostly solo I think.

What do you think you did that allowed that made people care? Is it like the small community already part of in Israel and the tech scene, like is that a big part of why you think it worked? Is there anything else that might be helpful to folks that are thinking about building in public and being successful?

When, when he started I already knew that. That it's headed there to acquisition. Yeah. And also at some point like once I, I like, I like I saw that the chances, chances of this happening are close. So yeah I hired like the best people I know because I know that like I have nowadays successful there. 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? Yeah. So now that the acquisition story is getting crazy all over the world, so getting a lot of followers, few years if not more that like I want to build an awesome. Like I have to build this from a bunch of like different, different social media platforms but 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. Like let's literally take a bigger bet. That's where I started like bringing in people that I knew the best people that I knew to kind of like other with LinkedIn. I think the fact that I was like the CEO of this company previously had some people around me in my connection. So again you have to help me build that. Also the way the deal is structured, not that I can share a lot of details around us. Okay, there's the 80 mil that got published. That's the initial page if you're writing to something that is all different a few weeks ago. And then there's this airnote piece which is really interesting because I think they WIX structured the deal in a really win win situation. But then a lot of my coping building public is great, right? And other creation and a lot of the upside is actually based on that other than the 80 mil. And so I have both the financial interest also the personal interest in building this to be as big as possible. So the month before the acquisition I had the team starting to scale but also base 44 became more profitable that I could afford myself to bring in more people.

The first hire was that an engineer. What did they do?

Actually a product person channels can really work, but at some point you have to take a bet on one channel that you see it's working. So if you're writing posts week over week and you get 5 likes, it's likely not going to change drastically.

Whoa, like a product manager?

Yeah, well it's, it's someone who was. I've been so. And again I tried a bunch of things 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 pawns. He can write Python scripts, analyze things that we do. He can start implementing analytics into the product. So like a very technical product person that could wear many hats. That's what you want. When you were starting out, like at some point I was like his name is Yoav. Some point I was telling him hey, you have you take growth now. And it's like I haven't done growth. Influencer didn't work. Okay, just put it aside for a second. Let's. Let's see if I can anywhere, right? No, you take golf now. Like try and let's try new challenge. 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.

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 can find a channel that works and so yeah for the building public I was trying to be as honest as I could and just write the good the bad and I think also the fact that like I wasn't eventual like it wasn't a VC.

So first you just grabbed a bunch of friends use this product use that.

To learn what to build utility funded company. I didn't try looking the best or show hey look at my amazing metrics.

So I 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. How many users that drive that Was that like a huge inflection that second Product Hunt launch?

The thing is things happen so fast that I make everything look really pink and really great and I'm the fastest growing whatever bootstrapped 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 this is specifically didn't really implement any data stuff like this. I don't really know how many users is borrowed but I remember, I remember first like the the community around base 44 again is like one of the most incredible communities that I've seen. It's a very strong one and like the whole entire like the writing so that they for my audience right so my audience were builders and so I'm not sure that it works to any other product category. But yeah just being very realistic and doing all were very excited about the product tank launch and I was like let's skyrocket base 44 and then post from the deepest like technical tech stack and how I optimize the LLMs to just sharing some feelings or growth. People like to I wake up and I see the weirdest things like base 44 is not even in the top 10 and I was like I know for a fact there's like a thousand people already voted by the time it was noon and noon in Israel. Right Very early on it's like I see numbers people like to see charts and also even there even if people write I see more posts on LinkedIn saying people in the building public like I would ask my friends beforehand that they knew that they were the target. Like what do you think of this post? People should vote to base 44 and they actually see up votes. And so till this day, I don't really know what happened. So I. One of the community reached out to the support team for product. Is it interesting? Is it not? Do you see value out of that? And it's almost like a product that you're releasing out there. It's the same thing. Tant and saying you guys should check out your algorithm because something is not right. Just Even look at LinkedIn's Search for Base 44 product hunt, you'll see this many posts.

Okay, this is really interesting. So being honest, really effective feels like there's like this underdog element.

I know. Like, you know what? You lied. We fixed it. And then we jumped to like the first place. We were like 500 upvotes. The Delta was 500 uploads from the second place.

Oh my God, I've never seen that.

Yeah, so it was, it was fun.

Also seeing kind of like the minimum, being a solo founder, not VC funded adds to it. Also just sharing really interesting learnings, things you've learned yourself that I'm innately people find interesting because you didn't know this stuff. And also just like fun stats and grant charts and things like that. Building a tool on base 44 that.

Can help the community, really for this.

Speaking of community, was that all in WhatsApp? Where'd you manage this community?

WhatsApp is a tweet's better.

Also, I think it's important to note you had a network ahead of this. Like, you had people.

Surprisingly really good tool to get feedback from the community. Obviously, like, it's not a great deal for the, like, the community has gone so fast. So it blew past like a thousand or two thousand.

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.

I don't think it was very big. I think it was like maybe a few thousand, five thousand. I don't remember what's the limit on WhatsApp. But till this day, like the WhatsApp community, which was like very early on, is such a great place to get feedback. 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's like bugs, because people write like really fast and they can see connections. Nowadays it's a few tens of thousands, but like you start seeing something that. But obviously at some point we tell engagement. And once you do that, especially when you like saying, okay, this is the channel that I'm going to put all, like all my weight on.

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

Onto like moving scalable solutions like discord, Reddit. Yeah, those, those things. And then just keep on sending product updates via email.

Okay, there's another couple levers I've read about and then I'm going to move on to a different topic. One is this hackathon you mentioned that helped you grow.

Yeah. Till this day, I think that like posting, for me, posting on Twitter was, was a waste of time, become more aware.

The other is you did a bunch of partnerships, which is really rare for a company of your size. So just talk about those and what that did to the business.

At one point, one of the things I really liked about Building Base 44 is that I saw people doing like building apps that were really like at some point, like, Okay, 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 the highest away and it could be very incredibly positive and like doing really good in the world. And so and it's, I think something really interesting right now in Vibe, different for different founders for different products. It could be Reddit, it could be like open coding in general is like once you actually scale software, you can also scale the impact the software does. So you can have like nonprofits build themselves tools. You can have people that build apps for education and neglecting 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 spray and play. It doesn't work at this stage, at least for me.

Not that is really great advice. It aligns with what I offered.

Domains that didn't really have budget because there was like no business. And once you open this up 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 5000ish tendency with traditional growth engines. There's like SEO, there's pay, there's sales, there's reality, word of mouth and usually 10,000 ish users.

And so I said, okay, you know what, let's do a hackathon where we open up for everybody to build apps that do good in the world.

A company grows mostly through one. 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 built on base 44 and they get credit to build more.

I had no budget back then, so I was like, okay, this is going to be a 5k hackathon. Like the price is going to be.

5K and it was your own money you were going to give away?

Yeah, it was like the profits that base 44 did at the same time at that time. And then a lot of people started registering and a lot of teams. It ended up being free.

I've never heard of that before. How do you actually do that? Do they send screenshots or something? How do they get credit?

They literally like early on they sent me emails and I would take thousand teams, some like really big. I think like the largest. I think it's the largest for good hackathon so far. And then started getting them again with the, with an app and an LLM. Like there's, there's 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 sponsor requests, because it went all over social. And all of a sudden I found myself with a very nice, back then, smaller business. Partnering up with Amazon, with Google, with MongoDB, with Deloitte, with really great companies that one after another stood behind a huge topic, but they would send, I would say, hey, write a post on this hackathon, which was so fun. Those are awesome teams, like the ones that we partner up with. They open up their offices across the globe to have like teams be there. And the prices went obviously very high. I think this will likely be one of the top moments in my career. Paste the link back, send me an email with the link and I'll give you credits. And so at some point I automated that because I couldn't really manage the whole thing. But yeah, because you couldn't really connect to the social APIs. And so it was hard. So I was like, send me the post. It was very, very empowering. People built a lot of interesting things. I remember this.

I know exactly what you mean with the support. Challenges of being A solo person with a newsletter of a million people.

I get person building a tool for Glenn Mao is an Alzheimer. Like, she has Alzheimer's. And building an app which is essentially a game to help the grandmother to memorize our family members with photos and names and so many interesting and great and impactful applications.

Endless little things just come up. I am really curious to hear you solve that. Let's not get into it 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 second person into the journey of the Six months.

So the first person started two months ago.

I love that there's benefits to the hackathon route, which other vibe coding tools are taking.

So a month and a half before the acquisition. So I was running mostly solo, I.

Think, like, 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 benefits. Okay. Before we move on from growth, is there anything else that's worth mentioning that worked really well or just like they think when.

When he started, I already knew that. That it's headed.

There's an acquisition that people think will work and just didn't work for you that you didn't already mention the last piece.

But people talk about that a lot. Yeah. And also at some point, like, once I saw that the chances of this happening grow. So is that Velocity eventually is a growth engine. So part of building in public is you want to put content out there that people really like to see. Yeah. I hired the best people I know because I know that I have nowadays. So we joked about it, but it's really true. People like to see charts and they like to see numbers and it gets them attached to this project. If they are saying, oh, I wonder what's going to be profit next week, Few years, if not more that like, I want to build an awesome. Like, I have to build this. Or I wonder, like, how much money is losing? How can you optimize and like that they get attached to that. And I think also Velocity is to some degree the same thing. It could 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. Like, let's literally take a bigger bet. That's because if your product evolves really fast and you're putting features out there like every other day. I started like bringing in people that I knew. The best people that I knew to kind of like people get attached to that and people like I remember people commenting on my post saying you know what? Like it's moving so fast, I have to try it now. And so this is part of it. Like velocity solves for helped me build that. Also like the, the way the deal is structured. So many things like most of my thoughts when and still I can share a lot of details around this. Like okay there's like the 80 mil that got published. That's the initial pain when running base 44 was like how do we increase velocity? How do we increase velocity? And then there's this air node piece which is really interesting because I think they weak structured. It's going to solve every product problem we have or most of them. It's going to solve some of your marketing challenges if you're smart about it and you're putting the content out there and you you making everything like a mini launch. So I feel like that was also a great growth to deal in a really win win situation. But then a lot of my coping.

That is a really good point. Clearly everyone in the space is understands this as well. I want to 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 and love like the upside is actually based on that like other than the 80 mil and so I have both the financial interest also the personal interest in like building this.

So get as geeky as you want. Just like what are the tools and infrastructure used to build base 44 be.

As big as possible. So in the month before the acquisition I had the team starting to scale but also base 44 like became more profitable that I could afford myself to bring in more people. Render.com oh my God. This is. 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. Holy. Like this is. This was so much fun to work with and still is. Like I remember in my previous company we had like large teams of DevOps building processes for us to push to production. So when did the, the first hire.

Was that an engineer? What did they do? Actually a product person, like a product manager?

Yeah. Well it's, it's someone who was. I, 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 LookupCom is like how does it call? Like this. It's a cloud. It's like a very like built on top of aws. You have a bunch of easy to manage processes and easy to mistakes and fix the prompts. You can write python scripts, analyze things that we do, set up web apps and scale them and so on.

And it's just render. It's not like a fancy version of render.

He can start implementing analytics into the product. So like a very technical product. Person that could wear many hats. That's what you want when you will.

Start the word render.com.

Oh yeah, I just looked it up.

Okay, cool.

Yeah, so this is like everything that has to do with infrastructure. I manage both the website, the platform and applications itself. Because base 44 is like a complex ecosystem. You have that user applications that have to be isolated and separated from the platform, that has to be isolated and separated from the websites. Like cutting out. Like at some point I was like his name is Yoav. At some point I was telling him, hey Yoav, you take growth now. And it's like I haven't done growth a whole, a whole thing. MongoDB is really good when you vibe coding, especially when you're building a vibe coding platform because schemas change a lot and it's not necessarily like use anywhere, right? No, you take goals now like try and let's try new challenge. Let those LLMs don't always understand what the user is trying to send. So they keep changing the data schema, those kind of things. So you want to bring in someone that at least the field style that can do many different things.

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.

And I feel like this has been the right choice. Obviously Kelcer, but again I was spending 20, 30% of my time just optimizing for making the whole repository LLM suitable. So by the way, this is so.

First you just grabbed a bunch of friends use this product, use 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 concept that.

I also implemented in base 44. But one thing that I kept doing.

Is launch that was like you said broke the product hunt algorithm. How many users that drive was that? Like a huge influx.

I tried making The LLM write as least code as possible like when it's trying to implement a feature that try to get to a place where it.

Can implement that second product at launch.

The thing is like things happen so fast that I implement the feature entirely without you writing code but the LLM would write as least goes up didn't really implement any like data stuff like this. I don't really know how many, how many users it bought but I remember possible because then when the LLM tried to like when the AI tries to like implement the entire feature from scratch, there are more places where you 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 I remember feels like the community around base 44 again is like one of the most very high level, very opinionated infrastructure like code credible communities that I've seen is a very strong one. And like the whole entire like the writing so the infrastructure, right it takes care of like the entire thing. When you build a new fall we're very excited about the product hunt launch and I was like let's skyrocket based for the fall and 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. I wake up and I see the weirdest things like base 44 is not even in the token. And by the way this is Also true for base 44 is like provide LLM with a really good infrastructure and SDK and have the LLM like the LM still has the flexibility 10 and I was like I know for a fact there's like thousand to write the entire feature because it's code but make it so that it doesn't need to spit out too many tokens. People already voted by the time it was noon and noon in Israel, right? Very early on it's like I see people, right? I see more posts on LinkedIn saying people and obviously everything that has to do with rule set does one controversial take all should vote to base 44 and they actually see up votes. And so till this day I don't really know what happened. For Me Working with LLMs is don't use TypeScript, use plain JavaScript, use JSX. It's easier for models to write code this way. So the front end for so I one of the community reached out to the support team for product base 44 for the platform. I mean, it's built in JSX, not TypeScript tant and saying you guys should like check out your algorithm because 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 I feel like this has been working well. Part of the reason why I haven't written a single line of HTML or JavaScript in the past. Like, Jesse does this really well. And another thing that works really well working with AI is. I know, like, you know what, you're right. We fixed it and then we jumped to like the first place a lot. Like try to push as much as possible in the same repository in self accept, like 500 upvotes. The Delta was 500 upvotes from the second place.

Oh my God, I've never seen that.

Yeah, so it was fun also seeing the community rally for this, creating the front end and the back end. It's easier to give the context to the AI of both. What's in the backend, what's in the front end, besides that. So my stack is like the backend is in Python.

Speaking of community, was that all in WhatsApp? Where'd you manage this community?

WhatsApp is. I feel like people can be very judgmental about that in terms of performance. I haven't gotten into performance issues and there's like a lot of, a lot of traffic to base 44. And every now and then people try to DDoS base 44 and still the server holds. And so I feel like if you're building it the right way, surprisingly really good tool to get feedback from the community. Obviously, like, it's not a great deal for the, like, the community has gone so fast. So it blew past like a thousand or two thousand or five thousand. I don't even remember what's the limit on WhatsApp. But till this day, like the WhatsApp Python is just a very great language to do that. Another maybe interesting take is this community, which was like very early on, is such a great place to get feedback. There's many of the new apps and products 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 base 44, 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 you get a very complex, very complex problem. It's also even oldly enough when it first started out, it was my best place to find out if the product is up, if there was slowness, if there was bugs, because people write really fast and can see that. But obviously at some point we turn to like more scalable solutions like Discord, Reddit. We need to figure out an algorithm or cloudfall got stuck in some bug loop which happens a lot when you write code. So I have this pipeline that tries to figure out the user prompt and then route it to the right LLM which I feel like has been working pretty well.

Wow, that was extremely interesting.

Yeah those things and then just keep on sending product updates via email.

Okay, there's another couple levers I've read about and in this routing does this. Is this what you do within cursor or you do this within base 44 based on what the person's working on. And I'm going to move on to a different topic. One is this hackathon you mentioned that helped you grow and become more aware. The other is you did a bunch of partnerships which is really rare for a company of your size.

Base 44. Yeah. I don't think yourself has this. I wish they. I think there's like maybe an auto option for. But in base 44 is like when.

Users ask that's awesome.

I first try to analyze what they're asking and then figure out what's the vital them to use.

That is so cool. So it's just Claude and Gemini. Those are the two they use for base 44.

Yeah.

Well just talk about those and what that did to the business.

At one point. One of the things I really liked about Building Base 44 is that I saw people doing like building apps that were really like incredibly positive and like doing really good in the world. And so and it's I think something really interesting right now in Vibe. All of those tools, base 44, Koch, all the vibe coding tools. I use the same paradigm or I don't know if you call it or method which is like you have the heavy guns which is usually either Claude for or Gemini and then Cloud 4 and Gemini usually create a high level solution or high level kind of like what changes do you want to make. 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 create files. So not writing all of the file from scratch every time cursor does that base for like so writing like the only the chunk of code that needs to be implemented in high level. Then you get like smaller, faster models like Flash or follow mini from opening. Have people that build apps for education and neglected domains that didn't really have budget because there was like no business or idle and one CI to implement to kind of like to patch the code inside the file.

Okay, one very tactical question and a completely different direction. Product question activation. Getting people to an aha moment feels like something that is core to retention. Something that comes up a lot on this podcast. Is there anything you learned about getting that right? Anything.

You open this up 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 5000ish thing you.

Did that was really successful in getting people to see the value of base 44 really quickly. And in that start sharing it, using.

It 10,000 ish users. And so I said, okay, you know what, let's do a hackathon where we open up for everybody to build apps that do good in the world. Here's one interesting thing that I learned that I think was counterintuitive to me because you always want to build the best product out there for your users, but sometimes it contradicts the aha moment or how fast can you get users to do that. So first I had no budget back then, so I was like, okay, this is going to be a 5k hackathon. Like the price is going to be.

5K and it was your own money you were going to give away.

Yeah, it was like the profits that base 44 did at the same time at that time. And then a lot of people started registering and a lot of teams. It ended up being three a few months ago. More than that, when base 44 started, before actually implementing your app, so you would say something like, hey, create a task management app. And before implementing that, because a lot of times you get this 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 teams. So like really big. I think like the largest. I think it's the largest 4Good hackathon so far. And then started getting great user flows. Like almost like a prd but something that's more digestible to folks who have like are not coming from the space. So it will generate user flows, it will show it to you like, hey, you want to create a task? And then you could say, yeah, so 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 runs sponsor requests. Because it went all over social and all of a sudden I found myself with a very nice back then like smaller business sensio and then it click OK and then it will generate the app. This was actually something I ditched because too many users even though it was good for them and it was the right product decision to do that because you'll create like better apps doing this way. But the conversions to get to the AHA moment were not super high and also like not super like. I think one of the key to the Aha moment in the partnering up with Amazon, with Google, with MongoDB, with Deloitte, like with really great companies that one after another stood behind this hackathon which was so fun. Those are awesome teams type coding world or at least in base 44 is like holy shit. It actually understood me. And you see the ones that we partner up with, they open up their offices across the globe to have teams see the app. And if you have like a stage in the middle it makes the surprise like slightly less surprising. So I think I ditched that. And that was a nice lesson that I don't know actually how to define the right way. But it's like get your users as fast as possible to their home moment. Sometimes there's a probably there and the prices went obviously very high. I think this is this will likely be one of the top moments in my career I stood that make sure it's not too big. But sometimes there applies to that because at least was very, very empowering. Like people built a lot of like interesting things. I remember this 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 person building a tool for grandma was an and how the attention span is so low really. So you want to get there in like a minute or two or three. And then from there okay later on ramp up the features that you want to actually put there so that it can be like the right product for your users.

That was an awesome insight. Thank you for sharing that. That's actually something that I think will help a lot of people.

Okay Alzheimer like she has Alzheimer's. And building an app which is essentially a game to help the grandmother to memorize family members with photos and names and so many interesting and great and impactful applications.

I love that there's benefits to the hackathon route, which other vibe coding tools are taking. Final topic, I want to talk about the acquisition process. Founders often look at this as like the dream. Oh my God, I sold my company millions of dollars. But I know it's always stressful and hectic and wild and you know, the work only begins. You know, you know, you're not like, I'm off. You have to keep building this thing. So first of all, just had the acquisition conversation start.

Weeks reached out. I think back then, 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 benefits.

It was like a lot of folks from the community, well, posting saying, hey, we should definitely buy base 44 before it gets too big or something like that. Even though, like, okay, before we move.

On from growth, is there anything else that's worth mentioning that worked really well? Or just like they think that people think will work and just didn't work for you that you didn't already mention the last piece.

But people talk about that a lot. Well, not playing or competing in the same category, but it was clearly why.

Were they recommending Wicked? What was just the connection there is.

That Velocity eventually is a growth engine. So first because of the Israeli, like the Israeli ecosystem.

Got it.

But also folks were building websites with base 44. And so it's part of building in public is you want to put content out there that people really like to sound like the same thing. And obviously WIX is. Yeah, obviously WIX is an incredible product for building websites, but a different approach from LLMs. It's now definitely getting there. And so we joked about it, but it's really true. People like to see charts and they like to see numbers and it gets them attached to this project if they are saying, oh, I wonder what's going to be profit next week. And so I got there, the management team, like wix's management team is so friendly and such great guys. And I remember sitting there and the first that or I wonder like, how much money is losing and how can you optimize? And like that they get attached to that. I think the first sentence that was first thing that I wish I, the CEO told me is like, and I think also Velocity is to some degree the same thing. Hey, everybody's been saying that we should buy you. Maybe at least it's worth the talk. Because if your product evolves really fast and you're putting features out there like every other day People get attached to that and people like Etsan, we're here to help and I think early on we've explored at least in my mind it's like, yeah, it seems like that's a great team to work with. They're definitely in the same space. There's a lot I can benefit from partnering up together. So it wasn't clearly enough. I remember people commenting on my post saying, you know what, it's moving so fast. Position like on the acquisition, I have to try it now. And so this is part of it. Like velocity solves for so many things. Like most of my thoughts when institution path And Vishai the CEO is like a very seasoned village when running base 44 is like, how do we increase velocity? How do we increase velocity? Very experienced and helped a lot of entrepreneurs in the B2C space and specifically in Israel to kind of go and succeed. And so remember meeting him for a few nights of just eating some steaks and just chatting about how to go base 44 and just literally just getting there to get an advice. And so at some point we saw first that we have great chemistry both with him and with the rest of the team, which I think is really, really crucial, especially if they're buying solo. Like this is a very unique case, but especially if they're buying like a small team. I think it's going to solve every product problem you have or most of them. It's going to solve some of your marketing challenges if you're smart about it and you're putting the content out there and you making everything like a mini launch. So I feel like that was also a great growth tool.

That is a really good point. Clearly everyone in the space understands this as well.

Crucial for the buyer to make sure or to feel like they're going to have really good connection and chemistry with the founders, with the key people. Because eventually it's like I remember one of the key reasons where we were debating together whether I should join WIX or not. One of the key things that we've put on the table is oh yeah, and it's going to be a lot of fun working together. And I think also being a person is going to be fun to work with is the key. Especially if you're, if you're not like a 500 people company that someone's buying. If you're like a big company and it doesn't really matter like you're buying the operations, you're buying the product. If you're a small company, they're just starting out and Getting some great momentum.

I want to 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?

You have to be a person that people would love to like, want to work with for the next few years. And so this was critical. I think the best, like the best.

So get as geeky as you want. Just like what are the tools and infrastructure used to build base 44 base.

And this is not easy to get to. To this position, but the best position to render dot com. Oh my God. This is. I like the. Honestly, they're not paying me anything. Oh she. It's such a jail. Or even to get there is to be also very fine with the other path of not getting acquired. In some ways it's like, it's weird but it's like it's like in dating when you, when you're in the first couple of dates you don't want to show too much interest because then it's I think also I was in a position that I was saying, hey, if it works out, it's going to be amazing and if not, it's going to be amazing. It's going to be either way fun. Obviously I wish I would have invested or anything. I don't think I ever spoke to someone senior there. I wanted it to work out. Yeah. And the last thing I think is holy. Like this is. This was so much fun to work with and still is. Like I don't know if it's suitable for everyone but I'm very happy with the structure of the deal with the AirNote piece because I feel like it's still. I still my previous company, we had like large teams of DevOps building processes for us to push to production. Sorendo.com is like how does it call? Like this show up every day to work and it's been only two weeks but feel like it's going to be like that for years and like I have personal investment in the business and its success. So it's really. I feel like it's better than just selling the business and just spending the next few years and wanting to disappear.

I love that part of the deal. You could be a billionaire if it does well enough. I don't know the deal but in theory. Let me ask. So I know a part of the story also is that when you were signing the deal the. The war with Iran Basically broke out tell that story.

So I was trying to not. I wasn't. It's a cloud. I was like, it's like a very like built on top of aws. You have a bunch of easy, easy to manage processes and easy to like start up web apps and scale them and so on.

And it's just render. It's not like a fancy version of render. It's the word render.com?

Oh yeah, I just looked it up.

Okay, cool. Yeah.

So this is like everything that has to do with infrastructure throughout the process. But this is like a huge deal for me. Right. It's going to change my life, probably will change my kid's life. And when we kicked off the process, we wanted it to be fast also. It's like, it's not like baseball. Default was like a very old company with like a lot of baggage. Like there's no legal, there's no, like, it was very easy. The due diligence process was very fast. And I remember us saying to the, to the lawyers and to our great, like two films that we work with is like, until, until Thursday night. That's it. We're signing Thursday night. No matter what we do, let's do it. Like, let's wrap it up and make sure that we're aligning to sign Thursday night. And we get till Thursday night. It's 2am Talk show and manage both the website, the platform and applications itself. Because basically we stopped fighting over like small details. And the lawyers have agreed to everything. Base 44 is like a complex ecosystem. You have that user applications that have to be isolated and separated from the platform, that has to be isolated and separated from the websites, like a thing. And I was like, okay, just send it out for signatures. We said Thursday night. And then lawyers were saying, yeah, we agreed on everything, but we still need to kind of change the wording and so on. And we're very tired. Like we're not going to do it the right way. Let's wake up tomorrow morning a whole thing and do that. And I remember us like, I'm not going to sleep. And then 4am waking up, it's like this announcement like, hey, a world broke out between Iran and Israel. I was like, again, this is so classic. I'm sure that the dealer will like, I'm not. I wasn't sure. I was like, holy, I can't believe this is happening. It's such an insane turn of events. But everything went fine from there. We woke up the next morning and MongoDB is really good. When you're vibe coding, especially when you're building a vibe coding platform because 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, sign the papers. Yeah it was as I said before, it was definitely the least boring month that they had in my life.

I was just thinking back to exactly that phrase that you shared. Oh man. There's just so many parts of the story that are so interesting. It's a hero's journey and I feel.

Like this, this has been the right choice obviously Kelser story in so many ways.

Mayor, is there, is there anything else that you want to leave listeners with anything that we didn't touch on? Maybe just last piece of a nugget of advice for founders that are trying to be on the start on this journey are on this journey they think might be helpful to them.

So first before getting to the to the negative advice if there's like the only thing that I would say really if there's anyone but again I was spending 20, 30% of my time just optimizing for making the whole repository LLM suitable. So by the way, this is the base44 community that's actually listening to this. I am so grateful. Like this community has been so supportive and many times I'm saying okay, maybe I did this right and that right. But I, I don't. It's hard for me to think about what I did. Those are concepts that I also implemented in in base 44. But one thing that I kept doing it so many things right to get like this community behind the product and so I'm so grateful for the community. So if everyone's listening really I'm hoping that to serve everyone better what not to do. Yeah, there's plenty. Don't just make sure that list is I tried making the LLM write as least code as possible. 50% of your time you work on the parts of you that you really like and that you're really good at. Like when you're trying to implement a feature that try to get to a place where it can implement the feature entirely without you writing code. But the LLM would write as least goes up that you know there's like this plenty ways of saying that and different diagrams that they show you is like what you're good at what what you want to do, what's fun for you, what's energizing, what's not. I think 50% of it should Be in like this sweet spot of possible. Because then when the LLM try to like when the AI tries to like implement the entire, you're doing the thing that you're genius at, like your genius zone or whatever they call it. And they're also fun because that's what keeps you up like showing up every day. And it's unbelievably different than being a very talented person and a very skilled person, but doing things that you either don't like and it's fine. Everybody does things that they don't like and in every job there's those places. But keep your future from scratch. There are more places where you can make mistakes or get confused. There are more things that you need solved in the zone of genius. Um, I think that's really crucial, it's to save in the context when you ask it for a follow up prompt or something like that. And so I built and I feel like in the last few months I've also met plenty of like very high level, very opinionated infrastructure like code really great and friendly CEOs even from the Israeli ecosystem, like for, for public companies, right. Wix and minded.com and ito and so on. And they're all infrastructure, right? It takes care of like the entire thing when you build a new like obviously they have to do a lot of different things and being CEOs of public companies, like you have to like manage a lot of things, a lot of logistics and I don't know, bureaucracy. But they all have not tactic like major or to some degree major. Part of their job is doing something that they really like and they're really good at. It's like whether it's like product design, whether it's like building a marketing machine or something like that, which takes care of like the entire like 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 I think that's critical. Yeah, that's the biggest thing. And by the way, this is also true for base 44s. Like provide LLM with a really good. And also it's like, and you probably hear this nowadays on every podcast, but it's the best time to build and it can be really life changing. Just start infrastructure and SDK and have the LLM. Like the LM still has the flexibility pulling out something that you really like. Where I feel like we're at the age, at the start of an age is going to be bigger than the revolution that the Internet did obviously. I think now it's becoming clearer to anyone and so just building what you want is becoming so much easier. Just do it. Do something that you like. I think it's going to be from a lot of chances it's going to be life changing and if not, at least you'll have very little regret in the future.

Mayor I'm going to skip the lighting round but I'm going to give you.

Because it's to write the entire feature because it's code but make it so.

That approaching midnight your time I want to make sure you get some sleep. I'm going to ask you one question, something I meant to ask earlier but.

I that he doesn't need you to sleep. Spit out too many tokens and obviously everything that has to do with rule set does one controversial take.

Base 44. What is that about? Why did you call it base 44?

This is the most like really the stupidest probably reason that you hear for me working with LLMs is don't use TypeScript for a name behind a product. So again, base 44 was not intended to be like a very large scale, like the global phenomena that it's becoming right now. I wanted to have Base in the name because I felt like that's going to be the base of where people is going to start build software or solve their pins and so on. And obviously back then base.com wasn't available and I didn't have money to buy like a very fancy domain. Use plain JavaScript, use JSX. It's easier for models to. So I started seeing like I think it was Cloudflare. I don't remember even what domain provider was write code this way. So the front end for base 44 for the platform, I mean is built in JSX, not TypeScript. That started showing me some numbers. My date of birth is February 2nd and so base 22 wasn't available and say okay, let's double it. And then base 44 is like I like the sound of it. It's almost like base 64 and I feel like this has been working well. Part of the reason why I haven't written a single line of Ride the nerd in me. It was like, okay, base 64 is one way to encode data from one type to another and base 44 is going to do the same. It's like encode natural language into software. And I was like, okay, it clicks, let's go with it. It's good that it's memorable. HTML or JavaScript in the past, like just it does this really well, the number in the name but there's no real, very sophisticated reason behind it.

That is an amazing story. I love it.

And another thing that works really well working with AI is try to push as much as possible in the same repository in self accepted.

I love that you like base 64 was cool but I guess there's a reason 44 could be cool and it's not even base 42. There's all these like numbers around there that people know and it's like not 44.

Creating the front end and the backend, it's easier to give like the contest context to the AI.

Double my birthday. Sort of like 64. That's amazing. It worked. I guess. I don't know. Maybe it shows you the power of how a name doesn't necessarily make a huge deal. Interestingly, a recent podcast episode is about how name can make a big deal. So there's both sides to it. Mayor, this was incredible. Thank you so much for doing this. Congratulations on the outcome. I know this is just the beginning. I know the product is only going to get better.

Like both. What's in the backend, what's in the front end? Besides that.

What a fun place to be. Hope you get some sleep. Two final questions. Where can folks check out what you're building? Is it just base44.com anything else they should know? And how can listeners be useful to you?

So my stack is like the backend is in Python. I feel like people can be very judgmental about that in terms of performance. I haven't just tried it out. I think we're at a place where people really love the product and for every user that we get, it turns out to be two or four later on because they're sharing it. So just try it out. Gotten into performance issues and there's like a lot of base4.com and build something that you like and if you have a bit more time, just leave feedback so that we can make it better.

Amazing. Mehor, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you Lenny.

Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating.

A lot of traffic to base 44 and every now and then people try to DDoS base 44 and seeing or.

Leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.

Still the server holds and so I feel like if you're building it the right Way.

You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show@lenny's.

Podcast.Com Python is just a very great language to do that. Another maybe interesting take is because.

See you in the next episode.

There's many of the new apps and products 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 base 44, 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 you get a very complex, very complex problem or you need to figure out an algorithm or cloudfall got stuck in some bug loop, which happens a lot when you write code. So I have this pipeline that tries to figure out the user prompt and then route it to the right LLM, which I feel like has been working pretty well.

Wow, that was extremely interesting. In this routing, is this what you do within Cursor or you do this within base 44 based on what the person's working on?

Base 44? Yeah, I don't think Elsa has this. I wish they. I think there's like maybe an auto option for like. But in base 44 is like when users ask.

That's awesome.

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

That is so cool. So it's just Claude and Gemini. Those are the two they use for base 44.

Yeah. Well all of those tools, base 44 Kose, all the vibe coding tools. I use the same paradigm or I don't know if you call it or method, which is like you have the heavy guns which is usually either Claude 4 or Gemini and then Cloud 4 and Gemini usually create a high level 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 base for like so writing like the only the chunk of code that needs to be implemented in high level. Then you get like smaller faster models like Flash or follow Mini from OpenAI to implement to kind of like to patch the code inside the file.

Okay, one very tactical question in a completely different direction. Product question activation. Getting people to an aha moment feels like something that 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 base 44 really quickly. And in that, start sharing it, using it.

Here's one interesting thing that I learned that I think was counterintuitive to me because you always want to build the best product out there for your users, but sometimes it contradicts the Aha moment or how fast can you get users to do that. So first when a few months ago or more than that, when base 44 started, before actually implementing your app, so you would say something like, hey, create a task management app. And before implementing that, because a lot of times you get this not super clear requests from the user and show the user, like the LLM would first, before even writing code, it would first generate user flows, like almost like a prd, but something that's more digestible to folks who are not coming from the space. So it will generate user flows, it will show it to you like, hey, you want to create a task? And then you could say, yeah, so 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 ok and then it will generate the app. This was actually something I ditched because too many users, even though it was good for them, and it was the right product decision to do that because you'll create better apps doing this way. But the conversions to get to the Aha moment were not super high and also not super like. I think one of the key to the Aha moment in the vibe coding world, or at least in base 44, 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. So I think I ditched that and that was a nice lesson 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 how moment. Sometimes there's a price to that, make sure it's not too big. But sometimes that applies 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, so you want to get there in like a minute or two or three, and then from there, okay, later on, ramp up the features that you want to actually put there so that it can be like the right product for your.

User that was an awesome insight. Thank you for sharing that. That's actually something that I think will help a lot of people. Okay, final topic. I want to talk about the acquisition process. Founders often look at this as like the dream. Oh, my God, I sold my company millions of dollars. But I know it's always stressful and hectic and wild and, you know, the work only begins, you know, you know, you're not like, I'm off. You have to keep building this thing. So first of all, just have the acquisition conversation start weeks reached out.

I think back then there's like a lot of folks from the community were posting saying, hey, we should definitely buy base 44 before it gets too big or something like that, even though, like, we're not playing or competing in the same category.

But it was clearly, why were they recommending wix? What was just the connection there?

First because of the Israeli, like the Israeli ecosystem.

Got it.

But also folks were building websites with base 44. And so it's kind of like the same thing. Yeah, obviously wix is an incredible product for building websites, but a different approach from LLMs. It's now definitely getting there. And so I got there. The management team, like wix's management team is so friendly and such great guys. And I remember sitting there and the first, I think the first sentence that was first thing that Avishai, the CEO told me is like, hey, everybody's been saying that we should buy you. Maybe at least it's worth the talk. And we're here to help. And I think early on we explored like, at least in my mind, it's like, yeah, it seems like those are. That's. That's a great team to work with. They're definitely in the same space. There's a lot I can benefit from partnering up together. So it wasn't clearly an acquisition, like on the acquisition path. And Vishai, the CEO is like a very seasoned, very experienced and helped a lot of entrepreneurs in the B2C space and specifically in Israel to kind of go and succeed. And so remember meeting him for a few nights of like, just eating some steaks and just chatting about how to go base 44 and just literally just getting there to get an advice. And so at some point we saw first that we have great chemistry both with him and with the rest of the team, which I think is really, really crucial, especially if they're buying a solo. Like, this is a very unique case, but especially if they're buying like a small team, I think it's crucial for the buyer to make sure or to feel like they're going to have really good connection and chemistry with the founders, with the key people. Because eventually it's like I remember like the key. One of the key reasons where we were like debating together whether I should join WIX or not is like one of the key things that we've put on the table is oh yeah, and it's going to be a lot of fun working together. And I think also being a person is going to be fun to work with is the key. Especially if you're, if you're not like a 500 people company that someone's buying. If you're like a big company and it doesn't really matter like you're buying the operations, you're buying the product. If you're a small company, they're just starting out and getting some great momentum. You have to be a person that people would love to like, want to work with for the next few years. And so this was critical. I think the best, like the best place and this is not easy to get to, to this position but the best position to negotiate such a deal or even to get there is to be also very fine with the other path of not getting acquired. In some ways it's like, it's weird, but it's like, it's like in dating when you, when you're in the first couple of dates you don't want to show too much interest because then it's I think also I was in a position that I was saying hey, if it works out it's going to be amazing and if not, it's going to be amazing. It's going to be either, either way fun. Obviously I wanted it to work out.

Yeah.

And the last thing I think is I don't know if it's suitable for everyone but I'm very happy with the structure of the deal with the AirNote piece because I feel like it's still, I still show up every day to walk and, and it's been only two weeks but I feel like it's going to be like that for years and like I have a personal investment in the business and its success. So it's really. I feel like it's better than just selling the business and just spending the next few years and wanting to disappear.

I love that part of the deal. You could be a billionaire if it does well enough. I don't know the deal, but in theory. Let me ask. So I know a part of the story also is that when you were signing the deal the war with Iran basically broke out tell that story.

So I was trying to not. I wasn't nervous throughout the process but this like, this is like a huge deal for me. Right. It's going to change my life, probably will change my kids life. And when we kicked off the process, we wanted it to be fast also. It's like it's not like base 44 was like a very old company with like a lot of baggage. Like there's no legal, there's no, like it was very easy. The due diligence process was very fast. And, and I remember us saying to the lawyers and to our great two films that we work with, it's like until Thursday night, that's it. We're signing Thursday night. No matter what we do, let's do it. Let's wrap it up and make sure that we're aligning to sign Thursday night. And we get till Thursday night. It's 2am we stopped fighting over small details and the lawyers have agreed.