HN Reader

Everyone focused on the "vibe-coded, solo-preneur in 6 months" headline is being tricked. First, the details show this is not a "hallucination" but a misrepresentation of the facts, aka a lie. Second - and far more important - Wix did not buy the code output of an LLM, which anyone could easily reproduce, they bought the subscribers, funnel and team that built the business, not the code.

I helped out in their recent hackathon - https://base4good.com/ - mentoring folks on the app, and I also admin one of the user groups.

I am not a paid member of the team, just an admirer who wanted to get closer to the action. This felt right to me from the first moment, and I'm happy I had a small part in the journey.

I met Maor (the founder of base44) and team and had beers with them. Good people.

--

Let me clarify a few things:

1. I don't know exactly how much vibe coding went into building base44 itself. I can attest that Maor's rate of releasing features was absolutely insane - I'm talking major updates every 1-2 days. I assume he's good with Cursor and the like. He's also very, very decisive on what to build and what not to build. Aggressive, even, I would say.

2. Maor had, for the majority of the life of this, no team. The employees joined way after base had customers. Most of what Base is was built by Maor, with 1-2 close friends helping cut out everything that wasn't relevant or wasn't great (so I'm told).

3. It's a different take on lovable/bolt etc. No one argues this.

4. Maor opted to include the db within the platform, rather than enable persistence externally. This really made the output great, and made fixing cross-application things very easy.

5. To me, base44 is PHP. It's a bit ugly, but it works, easy to explain to people, and once you get a hang of it it's a great hammer. It's not going to win the space race anytime soon, but it'll build you a house.

6. Base has resolve with AI functionality, which is far superior to anything I've seen outside of an IDE. It just works.

--

To folks trying to win the AI race by building exceptional technology on the bleeding edge, good on you. I don't think Base is that.

I think Maor symbolizes something different: we're in the fast-grab era.

Big cos are not able to build killer AI apps at the rate they're expected to, which means they're circling around looking for what they can snatch with money/equity.

My take?

Build AI things that just work for a specific use case. Release them fast. Make people fall in love with them because they "do AI" for the use case.

Some bigco is flying close by, trying to build it but failing. Be there for the purchase.

6 month old company (not solo; vibe coding means what here??) sold for 80M. Impressive still.

If you are interested in what kind of company gets acquired for big bucks with a tiny product, can I say "micro product"?, and with few staff... look no further than Tegic, and their T9 product. 30 staff, ~$630M acquisition (today's dollars), back in 1999. I'd love to know how many LOC it was. I'd imagine it would still hold some kind of record for most $ per LOC.

I’m confused.

Is this a vibe coded product

Or a product that helps you vibe code.

Or both?

They can’t have 8 of them vibe coding. And if it isn’t vibe coded then this has FA to do with a one person AI unicorn.

Coming from someone who doesn't really love the product.. nor wix. but the snark in the comments is insane.

Basically everyone in the israeli tech community know about this guy because he pretty much shared everything about his journey from the moment he started. One of the most genuine and no-bs entrepreneurs i've ever seen (and israel has it's fair share of grifters).

Yes, he really did basically built everything by himself. Yes, he did manage to build a huge client list worth a lot of money, in just 6 months. Yes, he was previously a founder (without an exit). Yes, there were a few (very recently hired) employees.

This is one of the rarest solo-founder exit stories in the world. dumb-founded by negativity.

I find it pretty cool. Even if it's simple to do the same with Cursor, but then deploying it somewhere and all the ceremonies.

I quickly built a retirement calculator, two prompts and deploy. https://app--future-focus-dd96b32f.base44.app/

It’s probably all fabricated and lies when it comes to Israel

8 people team does not look like "solo" at all

Selling something at $80M at only six months old is very impressive. I wasn't even able to stand up at this age

Wix sites are some of the worst on the web. Not their appearance, but the Wix backend and the way that each javascript loading subdomain is loaded serially rather that in parallel from the first. Crazy (normal) people using browsers that automatically execute arbitrary third party code on their computers don't notice this. But sane people that only allow javascript to run manually end up having to do something like 4-5 separate reloads of a Wix site to get it to even display text. For me that means when I see a wix site I just close the tab.

Maybe with a little bit of vibe coding they can fix their infrastructure. But I doubt it.

Congrats to the team, but the media coverage is a bit silly here.

"Solo unicorn.. well, ok it was $80M not $1B.. and, sure ok it wasn't 1 guy, he had a team of 8.." LOL.

Guy lists himself as an "angel investor" and "Forbes 30 under 30" on his Linkedin, so clearly not his first rodeo and has good connections, likely a stronger ingredients than the tech.

So you know, not bad money, and I'd certainly take it. But doesn't seem like any step function change in ROI for startup founders due to LLMs here.

As others have pointed out, Wix bought the leads/client list.. not the tech.

The reality is they paid for the subscribers, not the code. 250,000 sign ups is a lot. Sounds like they hit a real pocket, I would guess on LinkedIn ads/content. I can imagine a ton of non engineers who doom scroll LinkedIn would easily have signed up for a free account.

As a "red teamer" ;-), I approve this message. Vibe coded apps? The more the merrier, guys.

Does anyone know how start up or project like these are built from ground up? I have very very command of react and I can write rest api using spring or express.js. I know finger too about prompt engineering. What does it take to make something like this?

Landing page is excellent, esp the video; gets straight to the point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFzQF_Ik_-g

https://base44.com/

This post's headline should've been: "100% bootstrapped solo founder sells for $80M in 6 months"

Anyone remotely familiar with Wix should not be surprised by this, or be happy that they are familiar with Wix.

The maintainability of the output of your average vibe coder is going to enormously exceed that of your average Wix site. LLMs are a massive threat to their whole model which relies on increasing levels of esotericism.

Has anyone had experience developing with it? In what scenarios does it work well, and where does it fall short?

You, too, can get rich quick using vibe coding/GenAI!

The machine never stops! Probably it never sleeps, too.

Their website doesn’t even have a single “built with base44” example?

We're still in the "gold rush" era: The guy and his team sold a company that sells "shovels" in a crowded market. Good for him for capitalizing on this.

Reading that, a successful serial entrepreneur with the money to boot strap a start up, did so.

Good luck to him but the 'vibe coded' angle is just his expensive PR team at work I would say.

It's a wrapper for Claude. What's the moat here? Why this and not one of a dozen similar products? Why not reproduce from scratch? $80M would buy you a decent development team and it doesn't seem like these kind of apps are hard to make.

Is there something especially good about Base44? Or are they paying for the user base or the time to market advantage?

Althought Base44 seems to be a wrapper on ChatGpt but output is far superior. I tried "adminLTE port to React" via both; Chatgpt gave me a very barebone stuff besides the dashboard page, which had mild functionality. However, Base44 provided me with a fully functional app.

Edit: Just learnt from comments, they used Claude and not ChatGpt.

That is pretty impressive considering even the hottest startups barely reach $100 million in implied valuation within 6 months, let alone cash value.

And that’s with far more stacked teams with far better credentials e.g. Perplexity