The untold story of Base44’s founder, Maor Shlomo and the journey to the first 1-person unicorn on the Lean AI Leaderboard.
Yesterday, I got on a founder-to-founder call with him to hear the personal story behind this incredible exit, and how he managed to do this all by himself (he only hired his first employee last month).
Before Base44, he had already built a traditional startup that raised $125M and employed 100 people.
He knew how the old game worked: the fundraising circus and complex team management.
So he decided to do it differently.
While every AI startup raised large VC rounds, hired engineers and built MVPs for months, Maor built solo with AI as his entire team.
But his secret insight was that AI should write as little boilerplate as possible and only focus on the unique business logic (that's how Base44 stood out).
He used AI to write 90% of his frontend and 50% of his backend code.
Then he did something that would give most CTOs nightmares.
He pushed code to production every day without any code reviews, branches, or unit tests.
While competitors spent weeks planning, he was shipping faster than they could debate database architecture.
That’s how he quickly built something his well-funded competitors couldn't match: A truly batteries-included platform where complete non-technical users could build working applications.
The results were insane: 250K+ users, $189K profit in May and $3.5M ARR in under 6 months.
But it wasn’t all roses. He burned thousands on paid ads, which was a disaster.
So he took a leap most founders wouldn’t dare. He started posting his failures on LinkedIn (using a tool for content he built in Base44).
He shared the strategies that flopped and the embarrassing mistakes he made.
His audience was hooked and the posts hit 100K+ views. He monetized the attention by creating a viral flywheel.
Users got platform credits for posting about what they built with Base44, turning every customer into a marketing engine.
It worked like magic. The Israeli tech community couldn’t stop talking about him.
That’s when Wix approached him with an offer of $80M upfront + much larger earnout amount.
---
This is the first company from the Lean AI Leaderboard to be acquired and I'm excited about what this means for the future.
His advice for Lean AI founders:
1. Only build something that genuinely excites you
2. Spend 35% of your time optimizing AI tools and automation. The rest on execution
3. Find one distribution channel that works and go all in
4. Products get copied easily, so product thinking and differentiation become critical
There’s a lot more to his story than I could fit here.
If you want to know how he runs everything with AI, how he differentiated, how he automated his growth flywheel, share this post and subscribe to my Substack to get full access.
👇 Link in first comment
This post was originally shared by on Linkedin.