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Maor Shlomo

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2025-07-06
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2025-07-06
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  1. “Right 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 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”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Another one's like base 44 is going to do the same in code natural language into software. And I was like, okay, clicks, let's go with it. It's good that it's memorable, the number in the name, but there's no real very sophisticated reason behind”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Like really the stupidest, probably reason that you hear it for a name behind a product. So again, Base photo was not intended to be like a very large scale, like the global phenomena that it's becoming right now. I wanted to have based 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. So I started seeing like I think it was Cloudflare. I don't remember even what domain provider was that it 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 45 is like, I like the sound of it. It's almost like bass 64 and for the never didn't meet. It was like, okay, base 64 is one way to encode data from one type.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “That's the biggest thing. 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 a really life-changing just starting out something that you really like. 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 she wants 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.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Think that's really crucial. And I feel like in the last few months, I've also met plenty of really great and friendly CEOs, even from the Israeli ecosystem, for public companies, right? Weeks and minded.com and ETO and so on. And they're all like obviously they have to do a lot of different things. And being CEOs of public companies, like you have to manage a lot of things, a lot of logistics and I don't know bureaucracy. they all have Not talk to it 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. I think that's critical.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Just make sure that at least 50% of your time on the parts of you that you really like and that you're really good at, you know, there's like this plenty of ways of saying that and different diagrams that they show you is like what you're good at, 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 you're doing the thing that you Genie said, like your genius zone or whatever they call it. And also fun because that's what keeps you up like showing up every day and it's unbelievably Than being a very talented person, a very skilled person, but doing things that you either don't like. And it's fine. Like everybody does things they don't like. And in every job, there's those places, but keep yourself in the zone of genius.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So, first before getting to the negative advice, if there's like the only thing that I would say really, if there's anyone from the Base 44s community that's actually listening to this, I am so grateful. Like this community has been so... And many times I'm saying, okay, maybe I did this right and that right, but it's hard for me to think about what I did. 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. Julie, I'm hoping to solve everyone better. What not to do? Yeah, does plenty.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And I was like, okay, just send it out for signatures. We said Thursday night. And then Loyoles was saying, yeah, we agreed on everything, but we still need to kind of like change the wording and so on. And we're very tired. We're not going to do it the right way. Let's wake up tomorrow morning and do that. And I remember going to sleep. And then 4 a.m. waking up is like this announcement like, hey, a wall bulk out between Iran and Nizel. And I was like, again, this is so classic. I'm sure that the dealer will like, I'm not, I wasn't sure. I can't believe this is happening. It's such, it's such an insane turn of events, but everything went fine from there. We woke up the next morning and signed the PayPal. Yeah, it was, as I said before, it was definitely the least Boeing month that I had in my life.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So I was trying to not. I wasn't nervous throughout the process, but this is 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 Page 44 was like a very old company with like a lot of baggage. It's like there's no legal, there's no, like, it was very easy. The due diligence process was very fast. 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 to Thursday night. It's 2 a.m. We stopped fighting over small details and the lawyers have agreed to everything.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Like in dating when you're in the first couple of dates, you don't want to show too much interest because then it's. 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 fine. Obviously, I wanted it to walk out. Yeah. And the last thing they think is... Don't know if it's suitable for everyone, but I'm very happy with the structure of the deal, with the air note piece, because I feel like it Still show up every day to walk, and it's been only two weeks, but two weeks are going to be like that for years. 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 disappeal. I love that.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “And I think also being a person is going to be fun to work with is the key, especially 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 place, and this is not easy to get to this position, but the best position to negotiate 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...”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “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. 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 in 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 is 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.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “On the acquisition path, and Avishai, 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. Remember meeting him for a few nights of like just eating some steaks and just chatting about how to goal base 44 and just literally just getting there to get an advice.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “First, because of the Israeli ecosystem Also, folks were building websites with base44, and so it's kind of like the same thing, and obviously it looks as an incredible product for building websites, but a different approach from LOM is now definitely getting there. So I got the management team. Like Weeks' management team is so friendly. And such great guys. And I remember sitting there in the first sentence that was first thing that Abhishai, the CEO told me is like, hey, everybody's been saying that we should buy you. Maybe it's at least worth the talk and we're here to help. And I think early on we've explored, like at least in my mind, 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 an acquisition.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Weeks reached out. I think back then there was like a lot of folks from the community. Well, posting saying, hey, we should definitely buy base 4 before it gets too big or something like that. Even though we're not playing or competing in the same category, but it was clearly going to be.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Later on, pop up the features that you want to actually put there so that they can be like the right product for your users.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “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 it this way. The conversions to get to the aha moment were not super high. And also not super, 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. If you have like a stage in the middle, it makes the surprise slightly less surprising. 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 home moment. Sometimes there's a price to that. Make sure it's not too big, but sometimes there's a price to that because at least when you're building B2C and it's all new to me because I'm not coming from the 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 form there okay.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “First, when a few months ago, more than that, when base 44 started before actually implementing your app, so you'd 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, DLM would fill before even writing code, it would first generate user flows. Like almost like a PRD or like, but something that's more digestible to folks who have 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, 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 have to click OK, and then it will generate the app.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “One interesting thing that I learned that I think was counterintuitive to me because you always want to build the best product out of for your users. But sometimes it contradicts the aha moment or how fast can you get users to do that?”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, well, all of those tools basically for chaos, all the vibe coding tools, I use the same paradigm or I don't know if you call it method, which is like you have the heavy guns, which is usually either Claude4 or Gemini. And then Claude 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 KSO does that based for like so writing like only the chunk of code that needs to be implemented and 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.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I don't think you also have this. I wish they, I think there's like maybe an auto option for it, but in base 44 was like when us as Ass.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “The LLM that actually writes code in base 44, I use a mix of different models for different tasks. So Cloud4, for example, does a really nice job with first the initial poem, 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 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.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Besides that, so my stack is like the backend is in Python. 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 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. Python is just a very great language to do that. Another maybe interesting take is because many of the The new ops and products are being built to some degree around LLMs. So, one of the things that I use is”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “because it's code, but make it so that it doesn't need to spit out too many tokens. And obviously everything that has to do with rule set does one controversial take for me working with LLMs is don't use TypeScript. Use plain JavaScript, use JS6, it's easier for model to write code this way, so the font end for base 44 for the platform I mean is built in JSX, not TypeScript. 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, it does this really well. And another thing that worked really well working with AI is a lot, like try to push as much as possible in the same repository, instead separating 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.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “LLM suitable, so by the way, those are concepts that I also implemented in base 44, but one thing that I kept doing is I tried making the LLM write as least code as possible, like when you're trying to implement a feature, try to get to a place where it can implement the feature entirely without you writing code, but the LLM would write codes as possible. Because then when the LLM tried to, like when the AI tries to implement the entire feature from Skatch, 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 a very high level, very opinionated infrastructure, like code infrastructure, right? It takes care of like the entire thing when you build a new feature. It takes care of like the entire 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 by the way, this is also true for base 44s.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “So, this is like everything that has to do with Infastalk Show. I managed both the website, the platform, and applications. Based for the four is like a complex ecosystem. You have the user applications that have to be isolated and separated from the platform that has to be isolated and separated from the website. It's like a whole thing. Mongody B 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 use those LLMs don't always understand what the user is trying to send. So they keep changing the data schema. And they feel like this has been the right choice. Obviously Kelsey, but again, I was spending 20, 30% of my time just optimizing for making the whole repository.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “render.com oh my god this is uh 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 um holy like this is this was so much fun to work with and still is like uh i remember i mean my previous company we had like large teams of devops building processes for us to push to production so rendo.com is like um How does it call like this? It's a cloud I was like, it's like a very build on top of AWS, you have a bunch of easy to manage processes and easy to start up web apps and scale them and so on.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Is part of its velocity solved for so many things. Like, most of my thoughts and still when running base 44 is like, how do we increase? So I feel like that was also a great goal tool.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Last piece, but people talk about that a lot is that velocity eventually is a growth engine. So part of like building in public is you want to put content out there that people would like to see. 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're saying, oh, I wonder what's going to be profit next week. Or I wonder how much money is losing and how can you optimize and they get attached to that. And I think also velocity is to some degree the same thing 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 commenting on my post saying, you know what? It's moving so fast. I have to try it now. And so.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “I think this will likely be one of the top moments in my career. It was very, very empowering. People built a lot of interesting things. I remember this. Person building a tool for grandma was in Alzheimer's, 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 like so many. Interesting and great and impactful applications.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Yeah, it was like the profits that I think the base for the same time. And then a lot of people started registering and a lot of teams. It ended up being 3,000 teams. So like really big. I think the largest, I think it's the largest four good hackathon so far. Started getting 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 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. Like the ones that we partner up with, they opened up their offices across the globe to have teams be there and the prizes went obviously very high.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Eldion, like we were at the 5,000 ish, 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. 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.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “At one point, one of the things I really liked about building base 44 is that I saw people doing building apps that were really incredibly positive and doing really good in the world. Think something really interesting right now in Vibe 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 have people that build apps for education and neglected domains that didn't really have budget because there was like no business our idle. 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”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “What's up is a surprisingly really good tool to get feedback from the community. Obviously, it's not a great deal for the community is going so fast. So it's blue past a thousand or two thousand or five thousand. I don't even remember what's the limit on WhatsApp. But till this day, the WhatsApp community, which was very early on, is such a great place to get feedback. It's also even oddly enough, it was 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 I can see that. Obviously, at some point, we turn to more scalable solutions, like Discord, Red Yeah, those things, and then just keep on sending product updates via email.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “And I was like, I know full factors like a thousand people already voted by the time it was noon and noon in Israel, right? Very early on. I see people write. I see more posts on LinkedIn saying people should vote to base 44 and I actually see app votes. And so till this day, I don't really know what happened. So one of the community reached out to the support team for Productant and saying, you guys should check out your algorithm because something is not right. Just even look at LinkedIn's like search for base 44 product and like you'll see this many posts. I know like, you know what you write, 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.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Thing is, like things happen so fast that I didn't really implement any data stuff like this. I don't really know how many users it's bought, but I remember first like the community around Base 44 again is like one of the most incredible communities that I've seen. It's a very strong one the whole so that they all were very excited about the product hunt launch and I was like let's skyrocket based for the phone. Then I wake up and I see the weirdest things like base for the phone is not even in the top 10”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Yeah, well, it's someone who has been working with a lot, and he's like a check of all trade, so he can go into LLM logs and look at mistakes and fix the pawns. He can write Python scripts to 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're starting out. At some point, I was like, his name is Yov. At some point, I was telling him, hey, you have you take growth now. And it's like, I haven't done growth anywhere, right? No, you take growth now. Like, try and try new challenges. Those kind of things. So you want to bring in someone that at least the feel style that can do many different things.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Best people that I knew to kind of like help me build that. Also, the way the deal is captured, not that I can share a lot of details on this, like, okay, there's the 80 mil that got published, that's the initial payment, and then there's this Earnote piece, which is really interesting because I think they weak structure the deal in a really win-win situation. But then a lot of my compensation and a lot of like 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 basically for became more profitable that I could afford myself to bring in more people.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Acquisition. Yeah. And also at some point, once I saw that the chances of this happening grow. So yeah, I hired like the best people I know because I know that like I have now this Few eels, if not more, that like I want to build an awesome, like I have to build this 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. And that's why I started bringing in people that I knew.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “So the fifth person started two months ago, so a month and a half before the acquisition. So I was running mostly solo. I think when he started, I already knew that it's headed bell.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “They literally, like early on, they sent me emails and I would tag them again with an app and an LLM's support is a whole different topic that we can speak about for hours. How do you run support when you're solo which is? Huge topic, but like they would send, I would say, hey, write a post, 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 it's like, just send me the post.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Yeah, till this day, I think that posting for me, posting on Twitter was a waste of time. At some point, okay, I saw LinkedIn succeeded and I was like, okay, let's do the same thing on Twitter. Now I have a better following on Twitter. But yeah, it didn't really work. So I was spending a lot of time where from LinkedIn, I saw the highest away. And it could be very different for different founders, for different products. It could be Reddit. It could be like opening opening up a sub stack. Like it could be very different things. For me, that's what worked. And like once you see something world, just double, triple down on that, keep on like, don't try to spray and pray. It doesn't work at this stage, at least for me, no.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “I don't think it was very big. I think it was like maybe a few thousand connections. Nowadays, it's tens of thousands. But he started seeing some engagement. And once you do that, especially when you're saying, okay, this is the channel that I'm going to put all my”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Very realistic and doing posts from the deepest technical tech stack and how I optimize the OLMs to just sharing some feelings or growth. People like to see numbers, people like to see charts. And also even in the building public, I would ask my friends beforehand that I knew that they were the target. Like, what do you think of this post? Is it interesting? Is it not? Like, 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.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “And again, I tried a bunch of things influencer didn't work. Okay, just put it aside for a second. Let's see if I 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 I wasn't a VC funded company. I didn't try looking the best or show, hey, look at my amazing metrics. So make everything look really pink and really great. And I'm the fastest going 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 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...”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “So, first a disclaimer, I feel like I had some very small, not audience, but like I had plenty of LinkedIn connections before. And so everything started from LinkedIn, LinkedIn, okay? Great. Yeah, so now that the acquisition is always getting crazy all over the world, so getting a lot of followers from a bunch of different social media platforms. But started with LinkTin, 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 have like, if you're writing to something that I told a friend a few weeks ago. Building public is great, right? And other 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.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “That I tried developing when we were just live three, it was in five users. And so, yeah, build it for them. They can come from different backgrounds. Again, something else that I don't really empathize with or agree with is like you have to have a certain ICP. It's not necessarily about the profile of a person, more of like what they're trying to do. It's like way more reports. You can have different types of people, but they're all trying to do the same thing. They're trying to build a tool.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Absolutely. Also, Know though. I think maybe paradigms are changing, but there are 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, 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's bad, build for them be them 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 to like a room together, 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.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Think there was like two weeks between now, a week between having like being on a pace of like 20 users a day to seeing 4,000 users come into your product, like new users a day. Break the potnack like it was outscaling it also, just like some things I needed to learn while moving. It's 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 three 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 a few thousands. And then formed on the credit thing, like did the rest.”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Really like showing what they're building on top of base 44. They would write posts. I remember at some point a friend of mine reached out and he was like, dude, how much are you paying those people to write posts about space for the funds? 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 shell just about the process of building the app or the app itself, it doesn't even have to be about base 44. If you shell it in social, you'll get extra credits to build. And so those two, like build in public and giving up credits worked extremely well. That's how we got golf going”

    2025-07-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Solo founder, $80M exit, 6 months: The Base44 bootstrapped startup success story | Maor Shlomo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source