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Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash
- theHolyTrynity 1y ago8 people team does not look like "solo" at all
- shawabawa3 1y agoit's misleading, but it does say "solo-owned". Presumably those other 8 people didn't have any or much ownership of the company
- noosphr 1y agoReading the actual article reminds me of the old soviet joke: Q: Is it true that Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov from Moscow won a car in a lottery? A: In principle yes, but: 1). it wasn't Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov but Aleksander Aleksandrovich Aleksandrov; 2). he is not from Moscow but from Odessa; 3). it was not a car but a bicycle; 4). he didn't win it, but it was stolen from him.
- glimshe 1y agoGenius. Tell us a couple more old soviet jokes! It might be against the HN rules but maybe they will let it slide given the fascination for the Soviet Union here.
- Snuggly73 1y agoI can tell you a variation from Bulgaria (Soviet era joke as well). In the newspapers there were news that Bulgaria sent 8000 personal computers to Japan. On the next day, there was a slight correction published: 1. It wasn’t 8000. But 8000000 2. It wasn’t computers, but jars of marmalade 3. They weren’t sent to Japan, but returned back by Japan
- harvey9 1y agoPicture of a huge metal nut and bolt on a factory floor, caption: and in one step we fulfill our plan. I think anyone who was ever measured on LOC and Jira tickets can relate.
- uncircle 1y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42327376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42327376 also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_political_jokes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_political_jokes has some great ones
- trhway 1y agoIn a prison cell. - what is your sentence? - 25 years - what for? - for nothing. - you're lying. The sentence for nothing is 10 years. It seems Google Translate does pretty good job https://savok-name.translate.goog/anekdoty?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://savok-name.translate.goog/anekdoty?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr...
- simion314 1y agoIn Romania, a pig gave birth to two piglets. The farmer was disappointed and worried (since 2 is a very low number; a good number from a farmer's perspective would be between 8 and 12). So, he reported to his superior that there were 4 piglets. This superior also thought the number was not good enough, so he reported 6 to his superior. That person then reported 8 to his superior, and finally, the dictator Ceaușescu received the final number as 10. He decided that 2 of them would be exported, and the remaining 8 would be used to feed the people.
- bmacho 1y agoThe joke is that in reality Ceaușescu had decided to export 4, and the farmer got jailed/executed for hiding his piglets
- moralestapia 1y agoNo fun allowed. - HN rules.
- hobolobo 1y agoThis made me laugh. Reminded me of Tim Key's podcast on Daniil Kharms. If you can get it, it's well worth a listen: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03mndbk https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03mndbk
- mellosouls 1y agoRonald Reagan - Soviet Jokes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN3z3eSVG7A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN3z3eSVG7A
- hasbot 1y agoThis reminds me of Elon Musk, DOGE, and Trump. Where are all the Trump jokes?
- jan_Sate 1y agobwahahaha! How come that'd be a "yes" then? It's all wrong!
- v5v3 1y agoReading 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.
- Fokamul 1y agoAs a "red teamer" ;-), I approve this message. Vibe coded apps? The more the merrier, guys.
- Retr0id 1y agoDon't get too excited, there are vibe-security-audit platforms now too.
- andrewSC 1y agoI just got a little more excited ;)
- wslh 1y agoNot only audit, but offensive security tools such as XBOW [1], backed by Sequoia and that finds and exploits vulnerabilities. I am on the waitlist though. [1] https://xbow.com/ https://xbow.com/
- Sytten 1y agoDon't get your hopes up, I am in this market and most of it is not good. It is even doubtful that it is a step up from a regular scanner.
- wslh 1y agoWhen I'm in skeptic mode like you, I still see all these projects as valuable contributions to general research in the field, even if they fail. My skepticism is mainly about the idea of an "all-knowing LLM" but I'm less skeptical about the value LLMs can provide when it comes to digesting large amounts of data and decision making. I was very impressed by the following news [1] but the people team is top notch. [1] https://team-atlanta.github.io/blog/post-atl/ https://team-atlanta.github.io/blog/post-atl/
- cddotdotslash 1y agoThis "AI will never replace _my_ job" attitude by security folks (and I say this as a security engineer myself) is insufferable. Yeah, there are likely lots of vulnerabilities getting vibe coded into apps right now. But AI is improving rapidly, and in a few years you'll likely look back wondering what happened to the job market. Adapt or don't, I suppose.
- oblio 1y agoYou, too, can get rich quick using vibe coding/GenAI! The machine never stops! Probably it never sleeps, too.
- rwmj 1y agoOr at least you can grab some PR for a regular start up with 8 people.
- MichaelZuo 1y agoThat 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
- mgaunard 1y agoAI is overhyped and overvalued.
- loloquwowndueo 1y agoDon Draper : sell me this pen. Intern: it has a built-in MCP server.
- voidhorse 1y agoIs it, though? Is it impressive to find monetary success for a competing platform in an already crowded space in an age in which the entire software industry is driven by buzzwords and hype, or is it more impressive to solve a novel technical problem?
- poulpy123 1y agoSelling something at $80M at only six months old is very impressive. I wasn't even able to stand up at this age
- voidhorse 1y agoNot to mention he's in a single parent household
- stavros 1y agoAll these stories are just the parents doing these things anyway, the baby is just there for the karma.
- rapnie 1y agoWas a vibrant vibe rant.
- uncircle 1y agoTo be fair, six month olds are very good at vibing. They can't do much more than that, apart from sleeping and expelling waste.
- tialaramex 1y agoThey do make an impressively loud noise. Piercing yet high volume.
- andybak 1y agoIt'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?
- d--b 1y agoProbably a bit of everything. It’s good enough, it’s got a growing user base, it’s already there. It is likely profitable. And probably wix can afford it. Also the founder possibly spent a bunch of his own money it. I mean he hired 7 people already.
- soco 1y agoFor us in the back, what is a vibe coding platform anyway? I know and use Claude, if that helps anchoring.
- gchamonlive 1y agoIt's something that frustrates developers, spits out terrible pull requests and only fixes bugs by introducing new and exciting ones. But it's something that you can put in your company's portfolio to attract VC capital. It's a terrible tool that makes a lot of money for the corporation.
- 1y ago
- bmiekre 1y agoThe 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.
- cess11 1y agoOn average 320 dollars per line in that registry, over the next five years they'd only need to extract, on average, about five dollars per month from them to break even.
- Retric 1y agoIt’s the track record of 0-250k people in six months not just the current number of users. Presumably more people can be added fairly soon at minimal cost. Also $25 million of that is essentially a retention bonus for the employees.
- tomgs 1y agoI can say, at least from looking at it from up close, that it doesn't seem like paid ads did the trick here. It was a community play, all along. Don't have proof, but the discord community and the WhatsApp groups tell a decent story. See my other comment in this thread for more comments.
- fellatio 1y ago6 month old company (not solo; vibe coding means what here??) sold for 80M. Impressive still.
- stavros 1y ago> vibe coding means what here It means you tell the product what you want and it gives you the code.
- kylecazar 1y agoIt's a product that offers a vibe coding service to users. You enter a text prompt for what you want to build (no-code), and it tries to build it. I don't know if these 8 people vibe coded the vibe coding product itself -- they may have. But in the title the reference to "vibe coder" refers to their product.
- mattfrommars 1y agoIsn't this what lovable and that tool provided by vercel?
- fidotron 1y agoAnyone 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.
- cj 1y agoI think the implication here is that the Wix platform sets the bar so low, that even a vibing LLM can surpass it. Companies like Squarespace set the bar much higher. Wix has always been a nightmare to use and customize.
- fidotron 1y ago> I think the implication here is that the Wix platform sets the bar so low, that even a vibing LLM can surpass it. I'm not implying anything! Wix is clearly actively designed to be that way.
- wintermutestwin 1y ago>Companies like Squarespace set the bar much higher. When I was evaluating user friendly web platforms for several non-profits, I ended up choosing Wix over Squarespace because Squarespace didn't provide backup>restore functionality. That's a pretty low bar...
- tomgs 1y agoI helped out in their recent hackathon - https://base4good.com/ 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.
- throwacct 1y agoWe'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.
- 11101010001100 1y ago
- wslh 1y agoHas anyone had experience developing with it? In what scenarios does it work well, and where does it fall short?
- mattfrommars 1y agoDoes 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?
- _fat_santa 1y agoI'm currently building a similar app for my company. Apps like this are built pretty much entirely around prompting. The basic path is: User Enters Prompt > Combine with Internal Prompt > Feed to AI > Return Results. That's pretty much it but realize the "internal prompt" will take you months of work and refinement. There are many many tiny edge cases around using AI like this. One problem for example is you can tell the AI to return you it's data in a standard JSON object that you app can use, but if you set the temperature to high then the output will stop conforming. So you start having to do "pass-offs" between conversations with different temperatures. And this is just one of a litany of issues around using AI like this. And really this is no different than a "traditional" SaaS app that doesn't use AI, I have a side project and that project has a litany of issues that must also be fixed. Bottom line is building something like this is not any easier than building a traditional SaaS, just different flavors of problems.
- pc86 1y agoI have fun building tiny hobby apps using these AI tools - I built an HN version of Reddit Enhancement Suite where I can tag people, it tracks votes on comments/users, etc, in about 90 minutes using Bolt - but I've tried doing "real" apps and it always seems to collapse under its own weight after the second or third new feature beyond the initial framework.
- _fat_santa 1y agoThat has been my experience as well. My top comment talks about building an AI app, but that app is not being vibe coded. I know the article talk about how Base44 was entirely vibe coded but TBH i find that very hard to believe. The other day I tried to legit vibe code for about an hour and Claude could barely build a weather app that used NWS data for me. Even with this toy weather app it collapsed a few features in, simply put the context windows of these AI tools is just not large enough. I think vibe coding _might_ be viable once context windows start growing into the 5-10M token range but even then I'm skeptical.
- skeeter2020 1y agoEveryone 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.
- billy99k 1y agoThis is the true value of any software-based business, not the code.
- disgruntledphd2 1y agoYup. Always worth looking at goodwill on accounting statements post these acquisitions and thinking about how that is often the actual value of a software/tech business.
- reaperducer 1y agoThis is the true value of any software-based business, not the code. A pithy statement that is like candy to VC ears, but falls down if you think about it even a little. Nobody is going to buy Adobe for its client list.
- jplrssn 1y agoMaybe not for the client list, but possibly for the team. How much would the code of say Photoshop be worth if the entire Photoshop team were to leave and set up a competing business?
- CaveTech 1y agoMore than the team with no product. There's a huge difference between large entrenched businesses and early-stage startups. Turnover in large corporations is huge, the team has turned over multiple times already, they can do so again. An early stage company that barely has any code? Yes, in that case, it's the team that matters because they haven't fulfilled the vision yet.
- superkuh 1y agoWix 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- steveBK123 1y agoCongrats 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.
- pavlov 1y agoAlso, Wix bought this guy with an impressive track record. There might be an earn-out that's not being discussed. The article mentions that $25M is a retention bonus for those eight employees. (About $3M each — a nice bonus by any standard, but not insane for SV + AI. Presumably that's Wix stock, not cash.) So the purchase price might be made up of components something like this: - $30M for the client list - $25M retention bonus to employees, with standard RSU vesting - $25M for the founder, with earn-out goals over four years
- michaelscott 1y agoArticle claims all cash but sounds like probably with vesting for retention
- scrollaway 1y agoTo be an angel investor you can open a wefunder account and yolo some cash on some startups. Forbes 30u30 is a PR thing that simply requires some cash and a bit of charisma. Neither of these are signals :) It looks like there are much stronger different signals out there for this guy.
- throwacct 1y agoWe'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.
- myth_drannon 1y agoI 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/ https://app--future-focus-dd96b32f.base44.app/
- mellosouls 1y agoLanding page is excellent, esp the video; gets straight to the point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFzQF_Ik_-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFzQF_Ik_-g https://base44.com/ https://base44.com/
- recursive 1y agoImpressive. I've never seen a website with such low-fps janky scrolling.
- soared 1y agoThis website design was created by a guy on hn in March/April of last year and I’ve seen it copied so many times, I even copied it myself. Can’t find the name of the site unfortunately but it’s absolutely unmistakable.
- danr4 1y agoComing 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.
- southernplaces7 1y agoWelcome to HN, where even completely decent things often get denigrated, shitted upon with unsubstantiated assumptions, flagged, downvoted and criticized pointlessly just because. To be fair, this site also has lots of wonderful posts and many excellent or at least thought-provoking comments, which is why I still visit frequently.
- nickdothutton 1y agoIf 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.
- jonplackett 1y agoI’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.
- soared 1y agoTheir website doesn’t even have a single “built with base44” example?
- umrashrf 1y agoIt’s probably all fabricated and lies when it comes to Israel
- jim_inont 1y ago[dead]
- tk90 1y agoThis post's headline should've been: "100% bootstrapped solo founder sells for $80M in 6 months"
- mandeepj 1y agoAlthought 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.
- jim_inont 1y ago[dead]