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

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
In six months, you went from zero, basically nothing, to selling this company for 80 million plus dollars to Wix.

**Maor Shlomo** (0:05)
The funny thing is that Base44, 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 gonna buy an iScout. And we got there in like four weeks.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:22)
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?

**Maor Shlomo** (0:29)
The first person started a month and a half before the acquisition. I think it's a different ballgame because even if you're solo, you're literally managing teams of three guys writing code. I don't think I've written a single line of HTML or JavaScript in the past three months.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:42)
You're competing against very well-funded companies, Lovable, Bolt, Replit, Vercel, and you get your first 10 users.

**Maor Shlomo** (0:47)
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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:11)
Today, my guest is Maor Shlomo. This is a unique episode because I almost never have conversations with early stage founders. I made an exception because Maor's journey is in many ways the dream for a lot of founders. Maor started a company called Base44, 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 sole 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, Maor shares exactly how he grew the product from to 10 to 100 to hundreds of thousands of users, his tech stack that allowed him to move so fast, the tools that he uses to be super productive as a sole 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, and some key advice for anyone looking to start their own bootstrap 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 Maor 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 results turn lost deals, misgrowth. Sauce is the AI product co-pilot that helps CPOs and product teams uncover business impact and act faster. It listens to your sales calls, support tickets, churn reasons, and lost deals 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 at sauce.app slash Lenny. Sauce built for AI product teams. Don't get left behind. This episode is brought to you by D.Scout. Design teams today are expected to move fast, but also to get it right. That's where D.Scout comes in. D.Scout 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 field work, D.Scout 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 of decisions, and design with impact, head to dscout.com to learn more. That's dscout.com, the answers you need to move confidently.