Maor Shlomo: prediction

Transcript context

…That's a cool phrase, adaptive software. I heard malleable software is another way to describe this. I want to talk about growth, but a couple more things real quick. This idea of bootstrapping, I'm curious. So essentially you're competing against very well-funded companies, Lovable, Bolt, Replit, v0, Vercel, Cursor raised, I don't know, bazillion dollars at this point. I know you're not competing with Cursor directly. If you weren't going to be acquired by Wix, did you plan on raising money? Do you think you had a chance staying bootstrapped, competing against the folks that everyone's, the more popular products today? Base44 was very profitable, much more than what I thought. So even if I wasn't getting acquired, I felt like I can make good money out of it. It ended up like, I remember I had like a very failed ProductHunt launch at mid-January and then started writing some, like started building in public at around start of February and that's where it took off. And then started, I think, first dollar or like the first 10 or 100 bucks towards March. And then in May, I already did close to 200K in profit. And so I think either way, there was like a room to compete, and even though it was small, I was seeing that the users that come to me stick, that come to Base44, stick with Base44, even though they're very familiar with the rest of the competition, the challenge was obviously making as much noise as data folks. So you can see like data vibe coding tools doing like a million dollars hackathons and so on, and doing awesome job on growth, really. But I didn't have the resources, so I tried finding ways to fight the fight. I think we had a very successful hackathon 4Good, which found out to be a great growth engine and also did good in the world, which we had 3000 teams just building some great do-good apps. But also, to be very honest, I think part of the reason to get acquired is because this market has been moving so fast, faster than anything I've seen, faster than what I've thought it's going to move. And at some point, I figured it's going to be, like you see Base44 grows and you start thinking, "Hey, this can really help people with their lives." This is like one of those software categories that, I'm saying that, I'm very not objective, but I feel like can really move the needle for a lot of people. I've been seeing people build like fantastic, awesome things. And so I was like, "Let's go for the big one. Let's try and actually build some global scale, maybe lead the category and maybe win it." And I felt like the best chances to do that is to partner up with Wix. There's plenty of reasons to that. We can touch on that later. But it's like same DNA, same customer base. They know what they're doing, they're seeing and obviously like very good connection with the entire management team over there. And so I feel like the acquisition, again being very honest, I felt like it's going to be a financial success either way, but the acquisition is like taking a stance and saying, "You know what? Let's play in the big league and let's punch down, not only punch up when fighting in this very crowded space." And that's part of the reason why to get acquired. That was really insightful. So part of what, part of I'm hearing is you could've stayed independent and made a really good income and built a really good business, at least for a while. Who knows what would happen longterm? But if as a solopreneur, as someone that's never raised money, you can make significant income doing something like this in a crowded space if you have something that people love, that enough people loved. So I think that's a really interesting insight. Like it's okay if there's a bazillion dollars in funding going to competitors. There's a big market here.…

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