Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash | Hacker News Reader

Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

techcrunch.com

131 pointsmyth_drannon117 comments

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.

Also, 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

Article claims all cash but sounds like probably with vesting for retention

To 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.

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.

This is the true value of any software-based business, not the code.

Yup. 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.

This 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.

Maybe 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?

More 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.

> they bought the subscribers, funnel and team that built the business, not the code

This is strikingly similar to just about every tech acquisition in history. Buyers purchase the assets, potentially including part of the team, needed to produce a reproducible business outcome, however one defines those terms.

What is striking is how quickly the team was able to assemble a reproducible business outcome worth so much.

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.

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.

The features that Maor was adding every 1-2 days were not novel, just new to base44?

Correct.

They weren't there, and then they were there.

Sahil did a thing: https://x.com/sahilypatel/status/1935745481898180991

Looks about right. see 6

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.

On 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.

It’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.

I 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.

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.

I 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.

> 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.

>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...

Just because they didn't prioritize a feature that most of their users won't care about doesn't mean its a low bar, it just means you care about something they don't.

Backup/restore tends too look less important until it isn’t. ;)

All of the existing WYSIWYG site builders are walled garden garbage.

What’s the best option if you’re a non-tech-savvy small business owner, you need a web presence, and you can’t afford to hire someone to do it for you?

If you can't hire someone overseas to make a website, probably run your business off a facebook/instagram page. A lot of small businesses around me do that.

I hate this response! Businesses that rely on shitty facebook crap don’t get my business. And hiring someone to make a brochureware website is a maintenance nightmare. Do you work with small businesses much?

I'm not advocating for it, I'm just saying what people in my community do.

Many of the best (and successful) restaurants near me don't have websites, for example.

In some places people run their businesses almost entirely through chat apps like whatsapp or wechat. Works great for businesses based around client relationships.

Isn’t that still walled-garden garbage, just without the WYSIWYG part?

If you're going to answer their question then why not suggest a solution that results in a website one controls, instead of some very basic "use facebook" suggestion. Facebook and other social media for a business are all good ideas, because as a business, eyeballs is what you want and that means putting up your presence wherever they're found in a way that's relevant to you.

However, any self respecting business owner planning for a stable long-term presence should absolutely also have their own website, and have it made to be as independent, simple and easy to maintain as possible in the context of its technical needs.

And how does one do that if one has neither web development skills nor a budget to hire a dev? What WYSIWYG tool would you use? All of the simple static site tools I know of require at least HTML and CSS knowledge.

I honestly don't quite know, but i'm going to research this more carefully and comment back, because it's something I need too, especially if I can keep my site easy but at the same time outside the clutches of some walled garden platform of total service, and total underlying control.

As someone who was responsible for setting up brochureware sites that non technical users needed to be able to edit, these site builders were the only option I could find. Taking over a shitty WP site that was built with a hodgepodge of plugins (that were mostly dead) was a nightmare and a different flavor of walled garden.

I went with Wix, as it was the best of the builders, but it is still totally crap. I do not understand why web tech has moved so slowly in this area.

What??? It is trivially easy to mess up a website in a builder like this. I am reasonably technical and I have to restore many times when making structural edits.

This isn't a good analysis of the value here.

My dad has a Shopify site. He'll sometimes accidentally break his theme by making simple modifications in the editor, and it's not obvious why. Maybe a missing quotation mark or a wrongly nested closing tag. He usually had to revert it or even ask for help.

99% of the things he wants to change about his Shopify site would be better done by asking an LLM to change the template for him.

Frankly, I don't want to be editing HTML by hand to make simple edits, either. I just get Cursor or Claude to do it. If I were using a platform like Shopify or Wix where I don't have the templates sitting in my filesystem, I'd like an LLM integration there too.

Almost all of us have an LLM integrated into our code editor, yet when people want to integrate an LLM into the workflows of non-software-devs, suddenly there's cynicism.

> Companies like Squarespace set the bar much higher. Wix has always been a nightmare to use and customize.

Funny - with a non-profit I help out I was so frustrated with our Squarespace site that I ended up replacing it with a custom site I vibe-knocked out in less than a day.

Better design, faster performance, integrated into mailchimp and volunteer backend, better donation flow also integrated, custom page type templates, better cms (sanity), hosted for free now etc. etc.

Having a semi-decent developer crack open Cursor / Claude Code and spend a day just building _really_ is a threat to all of the hosted website and CMS providers. I'd definitely include Wordpress in that too.

What's the game plan here? Buy every chatbot LLM SaaS?

Prior to the AI boom Wix had developed a niche in very small businesses with events and sales, where it has a lot of the tedious stuff around that in a state where you can no code it into place very fast.

The problems begin when you try to do things slightly different, and this is almost entirely down to the staggering levels of inconsistency in their core APIs. (Genuinely impressively so). Their business model relies on the useful pieces being opaque enough and irregular enough that you cannot move off without overcoming a big migration effort.

Consequently their interest will be in two areas: can they use LLMs to get people to use those existing modules and get locked in faster? Can they own the funnel of people using LLMs to attempt to create this sort of functionality for their existing market? This acquisition helps on both levels, so it makes perfect sense for them.

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

Don't get too excited, there are vibe-security-audit platforms now too.

I just got a little more excited ;)

Not 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/

Don'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.

When 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/

This "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.

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/

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

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

Or at least you can grab some PR for a regular start up with 8 people.

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?

Probably 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.

>It is likely profitable

From the article

> the company was profitable, generating $189,000 in profit in May even after covering high LLM token costs, which he also documented publicly.

Still a crazy multiplier even if we do not assume accounting shenanigans.

For us in the back, what is a vibe coding platform anyway? I know and use Claude, if that helps anchoring.

It'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.

Sorry about the pretentious other reply.

The real answer is that vibe coding is what people are calling it when you just give prompts to an llm and it writes the code for you. So a vibe coding platform is just an app built around that purpose. A conversation window with a a bot that writes code for you, with a bunch of integrations so that it can do things like databases and auth.

Probably would have been quicker to Google it than to ask here though to be honest :>

I could but look at the answers I got - do you think a google would have given the same? I'm much happier this way.

It’s a tool that lets anyone create and deploy functional software (usually web-based) by writing prompts in plain English. Usually they are UI “wrappers” for leading AI models (usually Claude). The platforms also usually include online development environments and integrations (for databases, etc).

Examples include Bolt.new, lovable, mgx.dev, google AI studio... Vercel and Replit also have popular platforms. Google AI studio also counts, here. There are probably dozens more.

I think it's sort of like those no-code style things like powerautomate and wsiwyg editors - it removes the pesky syntax and understanding bits of code while still giving you a custom app result. Except here it replaces drag and drop or flow diagram style editing with 'ai prompts' and then the AI does the code - making it more powerful (although with less control).

I'd guess in a platform they probably pre-prompt it with a context and rules on top of that so users don't have to say things like 'make sure AWS keys are not in the code' and 'users should be authorised for only their data' etc, and give it tools to use to make standard features.

No idea what the end result of the finished apps is though.

> what is a vibe coding platform anyway?

Right now they're something that lets all of those "I have an idea for an app" people actually make the app themselves.

In a few years, they might be much more than that.

LLM chatbot with a VM. The front-end is a file explorer with a preview window. Kind of like bolt.

They do not work, from my experience; or the experience of people using them: https://github.com/stackblitz/bolt.new/issues

As far as I can tell it is one of those low code or no code platforms, only it uses Claude as the interface instead of the usual.

How the deal was brokered is not mentioned. Nor are any personal connections.

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

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

https://base44.com/

Impressive. I've never seen a website with such low-fps janky scrolling.

This 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.

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

> vibe coding means what here

It means you tell the product what you want and it gives you the code.

It'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.

Isn't this what lovable and that tool provided by vercel?

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

AI is overhyped and overvalued.

Don Draper : sell me this pen. Intern: it has a built-in MCP server.

Is 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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Welcome 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.

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

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?

I'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.

I 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.

That 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.

Not exactly true, with structured outputs you can specify what it must conform to.

If you want the startup... You're on a site run by Y-Combinator, who help get startups up and running.

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 says he had a team of 8 developers, I guess those were his coding agents.

You misunderstood I think, the product is a vibe coding platform.

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

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

Not to mention he's in a single parent household

All these stories are just the parents doing these things anyway, the baby is just there for the karma.

Was a vibrant vibe rant.

To be fair, six month olds are very good at vibing. They can't do much more than that, apart from sleeping and expelling waste.

They do make an impressively loud noise. Piercing yet high volume.

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

it's misleading, but it does say "solo-owned". Presumably those other 8 people didn't have any or much ownership of the company

Reading 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.

Genius. 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.

I 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

Picture 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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42327376

also

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_political_jokes has some great ones

  In 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...

In 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.

The joke is that in reality Ceaușescu had decided to export 4, and the farmer got jailed/executed for hiding his piglets

No fun allowed.

- HN rules.

This 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

Ronald Reagan - Soviet Jokes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN3z3eSVG7A

This reminds me of Elon Musk, DOGE, and Trump. Where are all the Trump jokes?

bwahahaha! How come that'd be a "yes" then? It's all wrong!

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com