Building a startup is a journey often painted with long hours, endless uncertainty, and the relentless pursuit of growth. Yet, every so often, a story emerges that defies conventional wisdom—a story of rapid success, bold decisions, and a solo founder who navigated it all without raising a dime in outside funding. This is exactly the story of Maor Shlomo, the founder of Base44, an AI-powered app builder that skyrocketed from zero to an $80 million acquisition by Wix in just six months.

In this comprehensive article, we dive deep into Maor’s inspiring journey—from the spark of the idea, through the grueling solo founder grind, to the explosive growth and eventual acquisition. Along the way, you’ll learn about his unique growth playbook, his AI-driven tech stack, productivity hacks tailored for a founder with severe ADHD, and invaluable lessons on product activation, bootstrapping, and building in public.

Whether you’re an aspiring solo founder, a bootstrapped entrepreneur, or simply fascinated by the new wave of AI-powered startups, Maor’s story offers a treasure trove of insights and actionable advice. Let’s explore every detail of this remarkable journey.

What is Base44? An AI App Builder with a “Batteries Included” Approach

Before we get into the story, it’s important to understand what Base44 actually is. Maor describes Base44 as “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 code it for you.”

While the category of AI-powered app builders is crowded, Base44 distinguishes itself with a very opinionated, “batteries included” approach. Unlike many competitors who rely heavily on third-party integrations such as Supabase for backend needs, Base44 builds everything full stack. Maor engineered the endpoints and SDKs specifically to work well with large language models (LLMs), enabling users to create complex, real-world applications that come with built-in database, user management, analytics, and integrations—all without the hassle of connecting external APIs or managing keys.

This fully integrated infrastructure makes Base44 particularly powerful for scaling “vibe coded” applications—apps built with the help of AI-driven code generation—allowing the creation of highly functional and complex software with ease.

The Origin Story: From Personal Frustration to a $80M Exit in Six Months

Maor’s journey with Base44 began with two very personal triggers:

  1. Helping His Girlfriend Build a Website: Maor’s girlfriend, an artist with a small business, needed a website to capture leads. Maor tried existing website builders, but the experience was frustrating—drag-and-drop interfaces that broke on mobile, complicated data management, and general clunkiness. Having previously worked with LLMs at his former company, Maor realized that AI models could write the exact code needed to build such a website or a slightly more complex web app, but the infrastructure to support this was missing.

  2. Volunteering with the Israeli Scouts Organization: Maor volunteered to help the Scouts with their software and back-office systems. This huge organization, with tens of thousands of members, had many software needs but no internal developers. They relied on agencies that quoted exorbitant prices, often around a million dollars, for software that Maor knew could be built more efficiently. This experience reinforced his belief that AI-powered tools could democratize app building for organizations with limited resources.

Before Base44, Maor had been CEO of Explorium, a data-focused enterprise startup that raised $130 million and operated for seven years. After serving in the Israeli reserves for almost a year due to war, he took some time off to travel and decided to return to what he loved most: coding and building products.

He recalls, “I wanted to get back to building and get my hands dirty… I was like, ‘Let’s take a shot at it and start the product that I know is going to be very fun to build.’” Importantly, Maor approached Base44 not with the goal of creating the biggest company ever, but simply to build something he enjoyed and that solved real problems.

Key Stats That Highlight the Journey’s Scale

  • Sold Base44 to Wix for $80 million after just six months.
  • Hit $1 million ARR within three weeks of launch.
  • Grew the user base to over 400,000 users.
  • Bootstrapped the company with only tens of thousands of shekels (Israeli currency), never raising outside funding.
  • Navigated two wars in Israel during the journey.
  • Remained a solo founder for most of the six months, hiring the first employee just a month and a half before acquisition.

Maor reflects, “Looking back, it sounds insane, but mostly this is it.”

Bootstrapping and Solo Founding: The Highs, Lows, and Lessons

Is Solo Founding Right for Everyone?

Maor is candid about the challenges and trade-offs of being a solo founder, especially when bootstrapping:

“One solo founder and specifically bootstrapping, I don’t think it’s suitable for every use case. If you’re building a B2B company, especially if you’re doing a B2 enterprise company, you’ll need to hire a salesperson or sales team. You need to spend your money on marketing. It’s going to be very hard to try to sell your company when you are on your own and nobody knows if the product’s going to stay there tomorrow.”

However, if you’re building a product that can go viral or target a broad audience, Maor believes solo bootstrapping can be a powerful approach:

“If you’re able to do that and you’re able to get out of 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 financial outcome, if you’re able to bootstrap your business and get out of the velocity and be profitable to some degree, then you’ll likely generate a financial outcome that’s way better than any other thing.”

The Psychological and Operational Challenges

Bootstrapping solo also comes with less stress related to investor expectations:

“You wake up in the morning and feel profitable. There’s 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—is heavy. Being bootstrap, with no other money except yours in the business and the business is profitable, I feel I can keep the energies up.”

Yet, the solo founder life is far from easy:

  • All the operational burdens fall on you: “You don’t have a DevOps team, on-call support, or anyone to share the load. I had a few accidents that really, I joke about it, but I was saying it to my friends, shortened my life a bit with just the stress.”
  • Example: The Wedding Crisis
    Maor shares a harrowing story from his brother’s wedding day:

    “I was supposed to do the ceremony and also be in photo shoots. Suddenly, a friend from MIT calls me: ‘Somebody hacked into Base44 and it’s a crypto scam.’ I had to drop everything and spend two very scary hours fixing it remotely. It turned out to be a false alarm—the error came from a Node.js package called ‘cryptography,’ which confused a non-technical user. But that moment, where I couldn’t share the burden with anyone, was brutal.”

  • Constant prioritization battles: Maor describes the daily tension between wanting to code and improve the product versus needing to focus on marketing and growth.

    “Every time I had this ceremony where I’d start a day and ask myself, ‘What do I need to work on today and what do I want to work on today?’ I want to code, fix bugs, add features. But what I need to do is grow the audience. That contact switching is hard.”

  • Optimizing for speed and automation:
    Maor spent significant time structuring the code repository and automating workflows to let AI write as much code as possible, increasing his solo productivity.

Productivity Hacks for a Solo Founder with Severe ADHD

Maor’s ADHD could have been a roadblock but became a superpower when managed correctly:

“The first thing you want to do is make sure your workday allows for deep focus. I use RescueTime to block distractions like Twitter and LinkedIn, which was hard because I was building in public and wanted to check my posts.”

He built internal tools on Base44 for himself, including a content management system that helped him plan, write, and post social media content efficiently:

  • He would draft vague ideas and use AI to expand and refine them into LinkedIn posts.
  • The system could then generate Twitter threads based on the same content.
  • The AI learned Maor’s tone by analyzing previous posts, making the output feel authentic.

Maor explains:

“I wrote some high-level content ideas at the start of the week. The Base44 app would break it down into posts that sounded like me, then I’d approve them. This sped up my content creation massively.”

This approach of building custom productivity tools to fit his unique workflow exemplifies how AI and automation can empower solo founders to punch above their weight.

Growth Playbook: From First Users to Hundreds of Thousands

Getting the First 10 Users: Begging Friends, Sitting Together, and Iterating

Maor’s initial users were close friends—three of them, to be exact. Two were unemployed at the time, so he convinced them to build SaaS businesses using Base44.

“I got them to sit down with me every other day around the table. They’d try to build something, it’d break, I’d check the logs, fix it, and push updates. I wasn’t trying to scale anything before I knew they enjoyed it.”

The key metric for Maor wasn’t just usage but whether these users started sharing Base44 with others:

“Once they started sharing it with their friends, even at low percentages, I knew I was onto something.”

Product Hunt Launches: Failure, Breakthrough, and Viral Growth

  • First Product Hunt Launch:
    It was “very failed” but still brought about 15 new users and the first paying customer.

    “That was insane to me—someone paying without meeting me or negotiating. The user churned quickly, but it was a milestone.”

  • Second Product Hunt Launch:
    This launch “broke Product Hunt.” The algorithm suspected bots due to the volume of votes from real users. Eventually, Base44 won Product Hunt’s first product of the day and month, with a 500-vote lead over the second place.

Building in Public and Leveraging Community

A friend encouraged Maor to share the journey of building Base44 as a solo founder, especially since it was a different approach from typical VC-funded startups.

“I started sharing on LinkedIn—being honest about the good, the bad, and the ugly. I wasn’t trying to look the best or hide any flaws.”

The community response was overwhelming:

“The Base44 community is nothing like I’ve ever seen—so supportive, giving tons of feedback. People started writing, ‘You changed my life. I had ideas but no resources or skills to build them.’”

Incentivizing Sharing with Credits

To encourage viral growth, Maor ran a program where users who shared their Base44-built apps on social media received extra credits to build more apps.

“Early on, users sent me emails with links to their posts, and I’d manually give them credits. Later I automated this process.”

This tactic leveraged word of mouth and social proof, turning users into advocates.

Hackathon for Good: Driving Growth and Impact

At around 5,000-10,000 users, Maor launched a hackathon focused on building apps for social good, with a $5,000 prize funded from Base44’s profits.

“We had 3,000 teams participate, making it the largest ‘4good’ hackathon so far. It attracted sponsorships from Amazon, Google, MongoDB, Deloitte, and others.”

The hackathon had dual benefits:

  • Growth: The event spread Base44’s name widely.
  • Impact: Participants built apps with meaningful social value, like a game to help an Alzheimer’s patient recognize family members.

Growth Lessons: Velocity and Authenticity

Maor emphasizes the importance of velocity—rapid product iteration and frequent updates—as a growth engine:

“People get attached when they see new features every few days. It makes them say, ‘It’s moving so fast, I have to try it now.’ Velocity solves many product and marketing problems.”

He also stresses that being authentic and transparent in building in public helped build trust and engagement.

Tech Stack and AI-Driven Development

Infrastructure and Platform

  • Render.com: Maor praises Render as a cloud platform that simplified deployment and scaling without a large DevOps team.

    “Render.com is like a very easy-to-manage cloud built on AWS. It handles the website, platform, and user apps, which need to be isolated and separated.”

  • MongoDB: Chosen for its flexibility, especially since vibe coding apps often have changing schemas.

    “Schemas change a lot because LLMs don’t always understand what the user wants to send. MongoDB was the right choice.”

Code Repository and AI Integration

Maor spent 20-30% of his time optimizing the code repository to be AI-friendly:

“I tried to make the LLM write as little code as possible. The less code it writes, the fewer mistakes or confusion it can cause.”

He built a high-level, opinionated infrastructure that automates CRUD operations, authentication, and database management, so AI only needs to write minimal feature-specific code.

Language Choices

Interestingly, Maor advises against TypeScript for AI-generated front-end code:

“Don’t use TypeScript; use plain JavaScript and JSX. It’s easier for models to write code this way.”

The Base44 front end is built in JSX, and Maor mentions he hasn’t written a single line of HTML or JavaScript in three months, relying on AI for front-end development.

AI Model Pipeline

Maor uses a combination of LLMs for different tasks within Base44:

  • Claude 4 (Anthropic): Great for initial app generation and UI design.
  • Gemini (Google): Handles complex algorithmic problems or bugs.
  • Smaller models (Flash, OpenAI’s o4-mini): Used for patching and smaller code changes.

He routes user prompts dynamically to the best model for the job, a system unique to Base44.

Product Activation: The Counterintuitive Decision That Tripled Conversion

A critical insight Maor shares is about the “aha moment” — the point where users realize Base44 understands their needs and can deliver value quickly.

Initially, Base44 showed users generated user flows before building the app, akin to a digestible product requirements document (PRD). This was intended to clarify what the AI would build.

However, this slowed down activation:

“Too many users dropped off because the aha moment was delayed. The real aha is when they say, ‘Holy shit, it actually understood me’ and see the app directly.”

Maor ditched the user flow preview to get users to the app faster, even though it meant less upfront clarity. The lesson? Sometimes, optimizing for speed to value beats building the “perfect” product flow.

The Acquisition by Wix: Chemistry, Timing, and a War

How the Acquisition Conversation Began

Wix reached out after community members suggested they acquire Base44, seeing the synergy between website builders and AI-powered app builders.

Maor recalls:

“The Wix management team is incredibly friendly. The CEO, Avishai, told me, ‘Everyone’s been saying you should buy Base44. Maybe it’s worth talking.’ We had great chemistry, which is crucial when a small company is acquired.”

Negotiation Mindset

Maor emphasizes the importance of being comfortable with both outcomes—acquisition or independence:

“It’s like dating—you don’t want to show too much interest early on. I was fine either way. That put me in the best position to negotiate.”

The deal included an upfront $80 million payment plus an earnout, aligning Maor’s incentives with Base44’s continued success.

Signing Amidst Geopolitical Turmoil

In a dramatic twist, the acquisition was signed just as war broke out between Iran and Israel:

“We aimed to sign by Thursday night. At 00:00, the war was announced. It was surreal. But the next morning, we signed the papers.”

This added a layer of complexity and stress, but the deal closed smoothly.

Final Advice and Reflections

Maor closes with heartfelt advice for founders:

“Make sure at least 50% of your time is spent on things you love and are good at. That sweet spot keeps you energized and showing up every day. It’s unbelievably different than doing things you don’t like, even if you’re talented.”

He also encourages founders to seize the moment:

“It’s the best time to build. The revolution happening now with AI is bigger than the internet revolution. Just do something you like. It can be life-changing, and if not, you’ll have little regret.”

The Name “Base44”

In a lighthearted moment, Maor reveals the origin of the name:

“I wanted ‘Base’ because it felt like the base for building software. Base.com wasn’t available. My birthday is 2/2, so I doubled it to 44. It sounded like Base64, which is a nerdy encoding standard. So Base44 felt right—it’s encoding natural language into software.”

Conclusion: A Blueprint for the Modern Solo Founder

Maor Shlomo’s journey with Base44 is a masterclass in how a solo founder can leverage AI, bootstrapping, and authentic community building to create massive impact in record time. His story challenges traditional startup dogma around funding, team size, and growth tactics, shining a light on a new path forward in the AI era.

From building for real users and iterating alongside friends, to harnessing AI for both product and personal productivity, to navigating the highs and lows of solo founding in a turbulent geopolitical context, Maor’s experience offers invaluable lessons for founders everywhere.

If you’re inspired to start your own AI-powered venture, or simply want to learn from one of the fastest, most remarkable bootstrapped startup stories in recent memory, Base44’s story is a must-study. And as Maor says, “Just do something you like.”

For more information or to try Base44 yourself, visit base44.com.

You can follow Maor Shlomo on:

This article is based on the in-depth interview with Maor Shlomo on Lenny’s Podcast, July 2025.