Base44

Mayor Shlomo didn't set out to build the next unicorn. After seven years as CEO of Explorium (a $130M-raised enterprise data startup), he wanted to get back to what he loved: coding. Two problems collided with his LLM expertise to create Base44. First, his girlfriend needed a simple website for her art business, but existing drag-and-drop builders were painful and lacked proper backend infrastructure. Second, while volunteering with the Israeli Scouts organization—a massive non-profit with tens of thousands of members—he watched them pay agencies millions for software that LLMs could clearly generate if given the right scaffolding. "I know models can write the code to do exactly what I'm trying to do," Mayor realized. "They just don't have the right infrastructure."

Mayor started with three close friends as beta users. Rather than blast emails or cold-call, he made them sit down with him every other day at a table. They'd try to build something, it would break, and he'd dive into the logs, fix it, and push to production. No MVP philosophy here—just obsessive focus on making the product work for real people doing real work. He built Base44 with what would become his core insight: unlike competitors who integrated with Superbase, Base44 baked in a full "batteries-included" stack—database, user management, analytics, integrations—all optimized for AI to write functional, complex applications. By late February 2025 (about a month in), he started "building in public" on LinkedIn, sharing his solo founder journey and philosophy of shipping fast without VC funding. This resonated with his audience: other builders.

Base44's first product launch was "very failed," Mayor admits, but it landed 50 users and one paying customer—shocking to him after spending years in enterprise sales. That early user churned within hours (the product wasn't ready), but it proved people would pay. Growth stayed slow until Mayor took his friend's advice: "Your audience is builders. Share your journey." He began posting about building Base44 without funding, competing against well-funded rivals like Lovable and Cursor. Simultaneously, he noticed users loved sharing what they built with Base44. So he created a simple incentive: extra credits for sharing your build process or finished app on social media. The combination of authentic building-in-public content and peer-to-peer sharing created a flywheel. Within weeks of going viral on Product Hunt (Product Hunt's algorithm suspected bots—there were so many real users)—he went from ~20 daily sign-ups to 4,000 daily sign-ups. In four weeks, Base44 hit $1.5M ARR, a number Mayor had casually mentioned to his girlfriend as a fun goal ("We'll buy a nice car").

Mayor tried influencer posts ($2,000, didn't work) and paid ads ($2,000, didn't work). What actually worked was virality and community. He ran "Hackathon for Good," organizing 3,000 teams to build do-good apps on Base44, which drove both growth and social impact. He built custom tools inside Base44 itself—an app that broke down his weekly content ideas into LinkedIn posts, tweets, and styled images, using his tone of voice. This meta use case (using Base44 to build tools for growing Base44) became powerful proof of the platform's potential. As a solo founder with severe ADHD, he also obsessed over productivity: Rescue Time to block social media during deep work, Cursor for AI-assisted coding, and Base44-built internal tools for everything else. The hard part: keeping servers up at 3 AM, scaling databases he didn't understand, and handling the stress of a crypto-scam false alarm at his brother's wedding. But the upside of bootstrapping (no investor pressure, pure profitability) kept energy high.

Six months in, Base44 had 400,000 users, strong retention, and a thriving community. Rather than keep bootstrapping indefinitely, Mayor pivoted from "not trying to build the biggest thing" to actually going for it. The market was moving so fast, and he saw genuine impact—people building apps they'd dreamed of for years. He acquired by Wix ($80M+), a strategic fit: same DNA, same customer base, same vision of democratizing app creation at scale. Mayor hadn't written a line of HTML or JavaScript in three months, outsourcing all code to AI while he managed product vision, community, and growth. As his own statement perfectly captures: "If you have an interesting angle and you're able to move fast, funding isn't necessarily the factor to win a category."