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 eighty million plus dollars to Wix. The funny thing is that base forty four for the first time in my life. Was not trying to build the biggest thing ever. Me and my guestfriend, we were on a plane. I told her, Hey, you know what? If we get to one point five million till the end of twenty twenty five, we're gonna buy a nice crowd. 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 before the acquisition. So I think it's a different ball game because even if you feel solo, you're literally managing teams of AIs writing code. I don't think I've written a single line of HTML or JavaScript in the past three months. You're competing against very well funded companies. Lovable, bolt, replet, verso. How'd you get your first ten users? I started with three users. Really close friends. But you got them to sit down with me every other day around the table and they would use the the tool. They will try to build something. It will break. I'll take a look and then just build it for them. I'm not gonna try and scale anything. Before I know that users enjoy it, and and the best metric to to seeing them enjoying it is that they're starting to share it with someone.

Today my guest is Major 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. Mior started a company called Base 44, which is essentially a more advanced vibe 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 the 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 soul founder with severe ADHD. Also, the super important insight that everyone needs to hear about how he came up with the idea and then refine the idea. Also just a bunch of common growth tactics that he tried that didn't work for him.

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