YouSaid · the spoken record

Maor Shlomo

lines on the record: 100
first: 2025-07-06
most recent: 2025-07-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I don't know, a product or attorneys, then probably this wouldn't have made a lot of sense once I started sharing what I'm building in public and getting more users and improving their product tremendously. I was so lucky the community around Base 44 is nothing like I've ever seen. It's like so supportive. There's so much feedback and so form the loop of like improving the product. This is exactly like 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 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 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”
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
“Influence opposed, they'll pay, they'll something like that. And then one of my friends was also a founder in 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 like, you're trying to take a very different approach than the usual VC funded way. Why don't you share content about that? At the end of the 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 sharing the journey on LinkedIn. And I remember seeing posts like, okay, there's this nice concept of building public and people get really interested. And I think here in Base 44, we had like this really nice synergy between the building public and also my audience was like builders. If I was like building.”
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
“Would anyone pay for my product without meeting me, without looking me dead in the eyes or trying to get a discount and so on? Obviously, this usually chat only like a few hours before X wasn't good back then. But from there, I started seeing some very slow growth. So I got my first 50 and then 20 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.”
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
“Then I did a very failed, very bad product time launch. But also now looking back and saying, this is completely fine. I feel like people sometimes treat the 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. And that's exactly what happened. And so first product and launch, we got like 50. I got like 15 new users. By the way, the second one broke product and they thought there's like plenty of bots. We won the first product of the day and the first product of the month of the week. But it's a different story. And so we got like 50 users. And we got the first user to pay. This was an insane feeling because an entrepreneur coming for like the enterprise space, I was thinking that this is insane.”
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
“You're going to waste a lot of time and resources on just like having a very revolving dome. 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 it makes sense, 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 want it to be profitable from the get-go and not feeling bad for investing too much money into your paid and so on. And so I knew that it has to be viable. At some point, I started starting to look like it's viable.”
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
“To share it with someone. So I haven't invested anything in marketing before I felt like, okay, for the first three or five or ten friends, at some point, they started sharing that with their friends. Like you'd see, okay, there's like when you 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 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 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 beforehand, I feel 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
“So three really close friends where somehow I got them to sit down with me every other day around the table and they would use the tool. They would 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 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, 1,000 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 I know that users enjoy it. And the best metric to seeing them enjoying it, oh, 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'll start.”
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
“Just begging people close to me that I feel like I have really good connections with to use it. I feel like there's no other way. Maybe there are other ways. But again, I was very new to B2C, like to your consumer-ish type of product. And so I grabbed, well, I started with even three users, like really close friends. 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 business or something like 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
“I remember when me and my girlfriend got back from like the trip to Asia and we were on the plane. I told them, hey, you know what? 1.5 million. I don't remember why I said exactly this number. If we get to 1.5 million dollars 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 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 see in success and you see true positive impact on people, then you're saying, okay, you know what? Let's go for, let's play in the big league and try to scale it.”
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
“Yeah, I emphasize with this a lot, but the funny thing is that 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 let's raise the most amount of money, the least amount of time. I remember that I showed like I kept looking like, hey, exploding raised $100 million before Snowflake. This is insane. This is amazing. And I did that for seven years. And I think base 44 is the first time that 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 wins the category or not. I don't care if it's going to become really big or not.”
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
“Wester ones. So, this is a guy that has both distribution. Obviously, this is very local software and company, but has distributions, like has those connections, but has a very deep domain knowledge. And now that the technical, he has no human coding are very different places. And so I think if 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 how I want to get, but also all that's changing a lot.”
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
“And even distribution, I'm still learning that it's like it's even distribution nowadays, it's very different. And also in favor of the solo, not necessarily the solo, but not necessarily that you're going to pull a lot of money on paid campaigns. Base 44 go 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 thousand bucks didn't really work. And so everything was like organically and build in public. And so even distribution is very different. But yeah, if you have an interesting take on a domain, base 4 default 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.”
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
“I feel like money and funding is not necessarily the De facto to win a category. And that's going to be like, and that's going to change even more drastically in the future as LLMs get better, people, 10x engineers would have way more impact. There were going to be 100x engineers because they're able to manage ILMs and it's not necessarily the team size nor the funding that will be able to win you a category.”
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
“Yeah, I think it's a bit different ballgame right now. I was scared many times. I thought, how am I going to go into the fight? Those companies won some of the fastest-growing companies ever. Again, they're 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 the faster pace and have a different angle. And it's not changing over time. So nobody's like, and so I think it's a different ballgame because even if a very small team or even if you're solo, like you'll literally managing teams of AIs like writing code, I don't think I've written a single line of like HTML or JavaScript in the past three months, but still 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.”
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
“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 let's punch down, not only punch up when fighting in this very crowded space. And that's part of the reason why to get acquired.”
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
“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 self-talk 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 fantastic, awesome things. And so I was like, let's go for the big one. Let's try and actually build some global scale, maybe lead the category and maybe win it. I felt like the best chances to do that is to... Partners up with weeks. There's like plenty of reasons to that. We can touch on that later, but same DNA, same customer base, like they know what they're doing. And obviously, very good connection with the entire management team over there. And so I feel like the 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
“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 faster than anything I've seen. Faster than what I thought is going to move. And at some point, I figure it's 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
“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 they'd come to base 44, stick with base 44, even though they're very familiar with 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.”
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 was like very profitable, much more than what I thought. So even if I wasn't getting acquired, I thought I can make good money out of that. It ended up like, I remember, I... Had a very failed product and launch at like mid January and then started writing some 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 first 10 or 100 bucks towards March. And then in May, I already did close to 200K in profit. And so I think”
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
“Updates. So, like, based on the forego acquired by weeks two weeks ago, and so now the process of 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.”
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
“Usually, what I'll do is I'll write down. I think LLMs nowadays do a very good job with start vague. It's going to build the skeleton for what you need. And base44 does a good job with us, like understanding at least the big pieces. Okay, there's going to be an LLM writing the content. There's 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. He does my process currently. And my process is doing this. And then LinkedIn and then Twitter writes 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 like you can, because it's really easy to change the software, it's like you get this adaptive software. It's like as you improve your processes or maybe your processor change, it's like you adapt.”
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
“Fix my writing, improve my writing a bit, and then ChatGPT will spell out something that was too far off, too much, like too salesy, not my tone. And then I'll say, no, keep close up to the original and we'll fight about that. And then like move the emojis, the hyphens look weird and so on. 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 there like it's 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 post to understand how it looks like, like what are the posts I really like that I've written.”
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
“The way that I like to walk is like I would have those moments where I have inspiration for like a piece of content, right? So the way I Google-based 44, probably 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 around sharing on the base 44 journey. I'll have a process that Othello is like I'll write down before that on a piece of paper some ideas that I had for like post for throughout the week because you want to keep consistency and keep putting like things out there and then my process before the app was like I'd go to chat GPT I'll write like a very vague structure or skeleton of a post and tell it like hey”
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
“So, again, for example, for my social post and so on, there's like a post that I would follow and maybe no one else would follow that. And so VibeCode, the custom app for that, was really helpful.”
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
“KOC Silas being awesome. Base 44, not only do you like to work for the front end side, but also a lot of the business apps that I used, well, on top of base 44. So we're going to manage users and give credits and 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 base 44 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 productivity tools that really fits what you want to do and what kind of like the process for you looks like. And I had”
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
“So, I have severe ADHD. And so it can also be like a superpower, but then you have to first thing you want to do is make sure that your warp day looks like that you can be focused and that you get like 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 and LinkedIn and so on this was really hard because I was starting to like do this build in public which turned out to work pretty well for base 44 and so every time you want to like take a look at your post or see like how many likes and like impressions and so on but then like you can't work on anything else and so Had this first setup that Philip allowed me a skeleton set of software tools that I can use to manage deep woke.”
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
“I was spending a lot of my time on making sure that my setup How I code, how I write 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 cancer for backend and base 44 for Frontex to write code really fast. And this was like really important for me to keep trying to find out new ways of how to automate and increase the pace of like building solo. Because if you're able to correct that or if you're like smaller teams with a lot of context nowadays can move faster. And the same goes also for marketing is like and for other tools. Well, you want to automate as much as you can, especially when you're solo, because time is going to be like the thing that kills your business if you're not managing it right.”
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
“Like a noise some of the users. I know there's like the feature 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 home marketing. Oh, I need to like I know this is not the bottleneck. I know people are like converting Will, 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 didn't 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”
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
“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, like 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 do I want to work on today? It was always like, I want a code. Like, that's what I like to do. Let's improve the product. I know there's like a bug 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
“How things 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.”
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
“And so I flew out those excuse, and like, I have to go and practice for the ceremony or something like that, open up a laptop, spend two hours to 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 the technical user, saw this error of like, hey, something cryptography or something like that was sure that someone like a crypto scam hacked into the app. And so you have a lot of those moments 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
“And it's like a crypto schem, 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 like 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. No way, it's such 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”
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
“Then there's like a lot of downside and a lot of stressful moments doing that. One, just keeping the self-corrupt, keeping the servers up when you're solo, you don't have a DevOps team, you don't have on-call, you don't have anything. I think it's really tough. I had a few accidents that really I'm joking about that, but I was saying it to my friends, like, show them my life a bit with just like the stress. Had the one sunny now I look at it as a funny moment where. 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.”
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
“Bing bootstop 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 like one thing that I've learned from my previous company is like energy is also pretty important. Usually some marathon for me was a sprint I thought it's going to be a marathon, but you want to do something that you like for eels and eels and if you're able to show up every day, then your chances kind of like goes up immediately.”
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
“And everything is better doing a solo boot slop 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 scale velocity be possible to some degree, then you'll likely generate a financial outcome that's, 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 there's like 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”
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
“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 doing a B2 enterprise company, you'll need to hire a salesperson or sales team. Like, you need to 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 and 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. You just build a great product that people will share. If you're able to do that and you're able to get out of the escape velocity of getting to product market fit.”
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
“And family, and we'll get to that. That's how I got kind of like 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. Was the CEO of Experience 7 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 scamming products and not necessarily like being a CEO, managing sales, managing HR, managing all those kind of things. And I think that gives a lot of power. It's easier to walk very hard when you're doing something really 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
“Know what? I feel like when I was a Phil Steiner, when I started my first company exploring, I felt like many smaller people told me those two very important truths 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 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 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 scouts. And later on also for other.”
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
“And that's how Base 44 started. They definitely didn't think it's going to take off so fast Yep, that's pretty much about it.”
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
“When you travel the world a bit just to take some time off and wanted to do what I was and I have it at a chance because exploring Gul and Gul 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 even 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 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. I think it gives a lot of energy.”
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
“LMs 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 build 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. Those two Will Triggers Back then I started a company seven years ago called Exploreum very different than baseball before, 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 October 7th Wall broke out, I went to reserves for like almost a year. And then when I came out,”
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
“And back then, 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 currently living at has many software needs. And so every time they needed to build something, they didn't have any internal devs, any software engineer. So they reached out to other agencies. And agencies usually would quote them like a million bucks just to build something that they knew people could build. I was and still, by the way, a huge fan of tools like Retool for the previous wave of 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 interruption 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.”
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
“The database. You can write react code and it will solve it, and it will be great for an SEO perspective and so on. Then I'll note as it's going to be super easy and she can do it on her own. And the other trigger. I was volunteering to help with the scouts organization here in Israel, with like everything that has to do with system and software and back office systems that they needed.”
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
“Were two things I think that drove me to it one, my girlfriend had like a website to capture leaves. She has like a small business. She's like 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 in my previous company, we dealt a lot with LLMs. And when 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 slightly more complicated than a website was actually a web app. I know models can do that. They don't have the right infrastructure to do that. So like if I set up an infrastructure for like, hey, here are the leads go.”
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
“And honestly, all of them are doing a great job with the integration, but there's 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.”
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
“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 Superbase, Superbase, I think, is the most common thing that most competitors use.”
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 is an AI app building platform, meaning that you're able to use natural language to describe what you want to build an app, a game. Website or something like that, and then heavy I coded it for you. One of the first ones doing that, I think it's a very crowded category. But I think Baseball 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.”
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
“I started with three users, very close friends, but you got them to sit down with me every other day around the table, and they would use the tool. They would 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 the best metric is to seeing them enjoying it is that they're starting to share it with someone.”
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
“The first person started a month and a half before the acquisition. So I think it's a different ballgame 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.”
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
“The funny thing is the 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 the 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.”
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