$1M to $100M ARR: What It ACTUALLY Takes to Scale

In 3 weeks we were doing $1 million in revenues, in 3 months we were already doing a couple of millions. Like, coding is not the issue anymore, it's not the challenge anymore, the question is: what are you going to build?

And I think that's what we're going to focus on a lot in the next few months, in the next few years. And I think every founder should ask themselves, kind of, like.

In this episode of NEW ECONOMIES, I'm interviewing Maor Shlomo, Founder of Base44, and Mark Tlusz, Chairman of Wix, and today they're revealing how to build a successful product and, more importantly, the key to scaling it.

Well, a lot of people ask me why it's called Base44. It was a side project, and then it started getting super viral, so I remember at some point looking at the amount of users on the platform and what they're building, and sometimes getting also, like, scared of it.

I used to wake up every 3 hours, every night, to make sure that the platform is up, because we didn't have monitoring back then, I didn't have nothing in place. Everything around that. I was doing, like, manual stuff and trying to power through this.

And I was starting to think, like, how am I going to scale this? There's really good, strong product-market fit. How am I now scaling to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues?

Wix acquired Base44 last year. How did you both meet?

There were a lot of rumors about this crazy guy starting a company, and it was a one-man show, and a number of us started getting messages from people who were giving us advice. "You should buy Base44." And I think when you start getting that level of noise around you, you have to pay attention, number 1.

I remember I didn't want to have any meetings because I didn't have time for meetings, but when Wix reached out, I was like, okay, this is going to be interesting. First, because I.

Mark and Maor, welcome to NEW ECONOMIES. Thank you so much for being here. I've been big fans of you both for so long, and wow, what a journey Wix and Base44 has had in, really, just the last 12 months.

So thank you so much for being here today, and what an episode we haven't stored for everyone.

Well, thanks for having us.

So it feels like the vibe coding space has changed so much in the last 12 months, but every company has a great origin story. Mark, why don't we begin with Wix? People know Wix, but I don't actually think they know the full origin story.

How did it all begin?

Yeah, I mean, look, Wix is now an incumbent and an old company,right? We're 20 years old. We started our journey, really, believing that we had to give people who were not technically very savvy the tools to be able to bring their identity and their businesses online.

And this started about 2006, 2007, so, you know, 20 years has been a long time. But we stay very much committed to the idea that the world is full of people who don't have technical skills but who want to build businesses and who want to have an identity online.

And so when we started, it was all about that. At the time, it looked like it was a drag-and-drop play. Then we rolled out some early AI products. As early as 2016, we had a product called Wix ADI.

You know, you kind of described what you wanted, and magically a website appeared. And so, you know, this notion that you had to be technical at the time to bring yourself online was the opportunity we chased 20 years ago,right?

And we've kind of gone full circle because with the acquisition of Base, it's again about, you know, how do you give people the tools who don't have technical skills,right? And so you see there's a pattern in what we've done at Wix, but, you know, just maybe a couple numbers.

We have, you know, 300 million users around the world. We're one of the biggest platforms out there. And, you know, websites are really just the tip of the iceberg. We're a full suite of products, from the identity, the website that you see, but then everything underneath, you know, to make sure that you have a secure, that you can take payments, that you can take meetings, really anything that you might need to run a business or anything like that is really part of the Wix package,right?

And so that's, in a nutshell, where we are. Of course, we're an Israeli company, proud of that, but we have offices in Ukraine as well, a big presence in the US. So that's, yeah, a bit where we come from.

Awesome. And you know, Maor, for Base44, I actually remember when you guys first launched, as I remember seeing this crazy product hunt page go super viral, and I think some people got a little confused. Is this just, like, filled with bots?

The origin story of Base44, why did you decide to go down this route of creating a vibe coding tool when back then you were actually one of the first?

When I started out, I knew back then that I wanted to get back to coding. I started my own company before that. I was the CEO of this company for the past 7 years or so, and then when I ended that gig and I wanted to get back to building products and started kind of, like, looking around and speaking to friends and family and, like, different organizations I was advising to, for many of them who needed something, like, technical or customized, it felt like a headache always.

Like, even as SaaSes progressed so much by then, it felt. I remember sitting down with my then-girlfriend, now wife, and she needed, like, a CRM for her business, like, something to just keep track of, like, the customers and the leads and the contacts and so on.

And we tried a bunch of the tools, like, the off-the-shelf or go-to SaaS products, and it didn't really work, and it wasn't clicking, and it was too complex, and it wasn't what she needed. Like, she's an artist, and she needed, like, to upload pictures per contact and stuff like that.

And back then, I remember thinking, I know AI can write the code for what she needs, and I know it can do it quite well. By now, it was GPT-4 back then. It's just, the code needs to run somewhere,right?

Like, I want to give her a tool to build tools. I mean, that's how Base44 kind of came to be, is, like, thinking about how cool would it be if we allow people to build their own tools. It started from building their own tools, later on, obviously, expanded to people building their own SaaS applications and a lot of other things, and games and stuff like that.

But the notion of software that builds software, I think, was in my mind for the past decade, and only recently I was, like, it clicked that I knew AI can write the code if we just build the infrastructure for this code to run so that we can give the LLMs an ability to access databases, integration, authentication mechanisms, analytics, and so on.

We give it the tools, it would be able to compose great applications. It was a side project, which is, a lot of people ask me why it's called Base44, but this is, like, the short answer is that it wasn't ever supposed to be this serious project that it came to be.

And then it started getting super viral. So I think from early days, Base44 had this, like, very viral growth and great community around it. The first launch that we had, product hunt basically blocked us, and I remember asking them, like, during the day, I remember asking them, like, what happened?

It's like, it looks like it's a lot of bots. And I was like, no, like, search your LinkedIn for Base44, you'll see that, like, everybody is, like, posting about getting in and voting, and that the community around the product from the early days was very strong.

Yeah, and since then, it's been a great adventure.

What did the first 3 months look like? You went from 0 to, I think it was $1 million in annual current revenue. What did it look like from the user's point of view?

So growth happened very, very fast. In 3 weeks we were doing $1 million in revenues. In 3 months we were already doing a couple of millions. I was still by myself back then, so it was me trying to do everything from development to marketing to support to, to some degree, operations.

I remember at some point looking at the amount of users on the platform and what they're building and sometimes getting also, like, scared of it. I used to wake up every 3 hours, every night, to make sure that the platform is up, because we didn't have, like, monitoring back then.

I didn't have nothing in place,right? I knew how to write the code, but, like, everything around it, I was doing, like, manual stuff and trying to power through this. So on the one side, it was hectic. I would, like, shut down my calendar, no meetings at all, barely see friends, barely see family.

It's to work 17 hours a day. On the other side, it was, like, this magical, magical period. As they say, like, they always say, like, you don't, when you have product-market fit, like, you'll just feel it, like, it's like a gravity pull or something like that.

And that's what I felt back then, and it was, like, this very delicate thing that I didn't want to interrupt. So I kept doing the same motion by myself and trying to power through everything the business needed back then, a website, like, a way to charge customers, like, all of it.

Like, I'm looking at it back now, being very nostalgic, but in reality, it was super hectic.

And just to double-click, like, on the 24/7 and being, you know, super chaotic, I've read a story, I believe it was your brother, who was getting married and everything was going absolutely fine until a friend said, "You might want to check your platform."

What happened?

This is the worst story ever. This was around the time that I started understanding how big Base44 came to be and how serious are the projects that people are building on top of it. And again, it was also scary,right?

I saw, like, people hosting, like, very sensitive data and stuff like that. So in those few weeks, I kind of, like, hardened security and scale and made sure, like, everything is, like, mature enough to actually handle this, whatever it was, I don't remember, but, like, a few hundreds of thousands of users building all sorts of things.

So we were, it was my brother's wedding, it was during the photoshoot, and one of my friends from Boston sent me a WhatsApp saying, "Hey, I think Base44 was hacked. All of my site now has, like, crypto on it, and it's a very weird behavior, and I don't know what happened."

And I was, like, thinking to myself, "Ah, this is just perfect." Like, the only night in the year that I'm probably not available for Base44, it's like, it's going to happen this night. It's perfect. Somebody probably planned this out or something.

Anyway, I remember, like, throwing an excuse or something like that and then running to take my computer from my apartment. And I remember kind of, like, shaking because I know I have, like, 60 minutes to handle that before I'm actually doing the ceremony,right?

I'm getting them married, so. And I also had to kind of, like, do rehearsals and stuff like that, so I remember I have, like, 60 minutes. I need to get in there and find anything. And I was by myself, like, no teammates, so I was shaking.

I was digging deeper. I was like, "Please, God, don't make this, like, a hack or an actual breach or whatever." What actually happened is that this guy tried telling the LLM to create something. The LLM needed to install a package.

The package is called Crypto, so an error message jumped because it couldn't install this package. So he thought there's, like, crypto scammers kind of, like, hacked his application. But long story short, it was good, it was safe, but I remember I feel like this small, almost incident shortened my life by a few years.

That's crazy. That's a wild story. What's even wilder is you're a solo builder, and when a company gets to that type of magnitude, it becomes potentially a really good moment to partner with a company who can help you provide infrastructure.

Obviously, Maor Wix has been around for a long time, and to be honest, when I think of Wix, you kind of think of it as this legacy platform where you can go to it, you can build a website, you can get a domain, you know, how much innovation has actually been done over the last, you know, 20 years?

It hasn't been that much in the public eye,right? But then as soon as this amazing company comes along where you can potentially partner together, the opportunity potentially becomes super interesting. How did the opportunity come about for both of you to meet?

And just to set the context for the viewers, Wix acquired Base44 last year, and obviously it's gone on to go and do amazing things since. How did you both meet, and what were those conversations, Maor, you guys were having internally about this crazy little company also based in Israel?

Yeah, so, you know, like, everything good, there were a lot of rumors about this crazy guy starting a company, and he was a one-man show, and he was building this amazing product, and those were the rumors in our market.

And then a number of us started getting messages from people who were giving us advice. "You guys should buy this company. You should buy Base44," you know? And I think when you start getting that level of noise around you, you know, you have to pay attention, number one,right?

And so that was the first step, is like, okay, all this noise is happening out there, and clearly something magical is going on. And as we dug into that, we realized that Base44, you know, in our mind, really was a very natural extension of what Wix does.

I mean, an unbelievable extension in the sense of it's all about no code, it's all about dealing with people who are not technical, and it's all about giving you the tools to build whatever you want to build,right? No restrictions.

And, you know, we had pioneered that with websites, and we had built the entire backend, and all of a sudden, you know, he was able to do this as a one-man show. And when you start looking at these things and you say, "If the sky is the limit, there is no sky," because there is no limit with Base44.

You can do anything. And so trying to figure out a way to do this together without scaring him was the first conversation,right? It's like, "Here's this big mammoth," Wix shows up and says, "Hey, dude, you know, we want to buy you."

Yeah, that's not going to work out too well,right? And so for us, it was all about, you know, getting to know Maor, but also kind of saying to him, "You know, you've got a couple paths. You can build this on your own.

We can figure out a way to partner up. Or maybe, you know, you can join our family and you'll get all the stuff that you don't want to do kind of as part of it, a lot of the backend stuff and payment stuff and these kind of things, and you can just go ahead and build this thing out."

And that really was the first conversation we started having with him. And, you know, we were very fortunate after that that Maor saw that as an opportunity, you know, and said, "Yeah, I kind of buy into that,"right? And I think a year later, you know, he can talk about it, but I think a year later, I think it played out as we both had hoped,right?

Which is, you know, we let him operate himself with his team. Remember, we bought him, how many employees, Maor, was there when we bought you? Like, 10?

Five.

Ish? Five,right? So, you know, nowadays there are, you know, several hundred employees working in that group. But we also knew at Wix that one of the problems of being an incumbent is, you know, you get used to doing things a certain way, and we felt, "Hey, could we also use Base44 and all that energy he has to bring that back into Wix and shake up the tree at Wix,"right?

Because, you know, things can change. You don't have to keep building things the same way. And that also has worked out just fabulously for us,right? It's like that energy that they have and that they cultivate through that culture at Base44 is helping us redefine the Wix culture, you know?

So it's really gone full circle.

And Maor, when you saw these guys, you know, come along, was it, "What do you guys want?"

Back then, when the conversation started, actually, it was, again, no employees. We hired them only during the negotiations, like, before the. So it wasn't like, I remember I didn't want to have any meetings because I didn't have time for meetings, but when Wix reached out, I was like, "Okay, this is going to be interesting."

First, because I felt like the missing piece, I didn't know it was headed towards an acquisition. Like, I was thinking about this now, looking back, I was like, I was kind of naive on what this meeting's going to be, but it felt like the team is, like, at first it's like, you know, it's like dating,right?

The team is genuinely interested in what you're doing. We're operating in very parallel fields. For me, it was like, "Hey, this is the company that does marketing best to my audience,"right? To the consumer, to, like, the people who are building stuff.

They're doing websites, I'm doing applications, but they know how to do this piece of marketing that I was starting to think, like, how I'm going to scale this. Like, I felt like, "Okay, there's this really good, strong product-market fit.

How am I now scaling to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues?" And Wix was, for me, kind of, like, the best company in the space that I was doing. Like, their marketing was always fantastic, their brand, whatever they did.

So I came to this meeting, actually, from, like, an ocean of, "I don't know, I'm going to learn, and maybe, maybe I'm going to convince them to do a partnership." And we had a good first meeting, very good chemistry, and then another one and another one, and at the end of the third one, I think, Neer, the president of Wix, was like, "Hey, you know, Avishai, the CEO of Wix, is really good with steaks.

Like, they like meat. They like, so you should go." And then, yeah, I think, like, Mark said, I don't think it was pressure more than, like, Avishai and the team and the Wix's team knew that, like, theright thing for us is to partner.

Long story short, it was 100% theright choice,right? We can see eventually, kind of, like, I remember Avishai and I in the middle of the night in his house, like, looking at, like, this whiteboard and writing three scenarios,right? Either I'm going to keep on doing this nice, bootstrapped, all-by-myself thing, or I'm going to raise a lot of money, a lot of vissi money, and go this path that I've known historically, like I did this before, or I'm going to partner up with Wix.

And I remember, like, surfacing my concerns is like, "Hey, I'm afraid I have, like, this magical thing here that if I'll make this, like, a big company thing, then we'll hurt it and it will not be able to go in the same momentum."

And Avishai told me, "You know what? Like, I think we'll be able to come up with this structure slash type of sub-company where, for the things that areright for you, to lean on the mothership on Wix in support, in operations, in, like, building a team fast, in whatever, all those kind of things, finance, then lean on Wix."

And in the other places that that's, like, theright thing is to stay this lean, fast-moving company, like, that's, like, that's what you should do, and that's how we're going to structure it. And I didn't know Avishai well, so I was kind of skeptical, but gut feeling, it felt really good.

And after many years being, not many, but, like, for the past decade being in the startups world, eventually gut feeling is the best signal that you have. And that's basically how we've built it,right? Now the company is, like, in some places, it's moving super fast,right?

The product team is still very small. There's not a lot of engineers, especially when you compare it to, like, the revenues that we're doing. But in other places, and in a good way, we're operating like a very mature company.

We're very efficient. The finance, the operations, our support and customer care organization, stuff like that, that there was no chance we could have built it so fast without being part of Wix.

I feel like these moments all happen for a good reason, and it's almost timing has so much to do with it,right? There are two points here. One, since the acquisition, from numbers you can share, I think roughly it was about $150 million annual current revenue Base44 is now doing, give or take.

And the second part is some super exciting news you guys announced a couple days ago, which perhaps you couldn't have done if you didn't have this with Wix, is you've just launched your own AI model, the first vibe coding tool to do that.

So here's how I look at this from a bigger picture, also related to the acquisition,right? There's something really magical about vibe coding or about software that builds software, which is, like, you give a lot of people kind of, like, this awesome capability that they constantly heard of,right?

It's like, they always had, like, this crazy idea that they wanted to build, or they wanted someone else to build for them, but they didn't have the resources or the developers or whatever. And so when I was, like, in this junction of what we're going to do and this partnering with Wix, theright choice, I was like, "Okay, I want to scale this to as many people as possible."

This is eventually the outcome that I'm optimizing for. And I think every founder should ask themselves, kind of, like, what the outcome that they're optimizing for. And so as part of that, so it allowed us to go very fast.

Yeah, the revenues, I think the previous quarter we published 150, and when we got sold, it was maybe 3 or 4, so we did almost, like, 50x in a year. And now this scale, actually, and the data and traffic allows us to do even more ambitious things, like building our own model that's going to be expert in web applications.

And all of it is, like, again, some of it, I do believe it's, like, luck or destiny or whatever in terms of timing, because doing it, like, a few months before or a few months later, I think we would have yielded a very different outcome.

Look, let me add this a little bit, because I think our own LLM is a seminal moment for the company,right? And it reflects, again, much of how we think of things at Wix, which is you absolutely need to own the entire tech stack,right?

Because when you own the entire tech stack, you're dependent on no one. And so as much as at Wix we own the whole backend, well, the thing that also attracted us early on in our discussion with Maor was he absolutely wanted to have his own backend.

There's a popular backend that competitors use,right? And so we felt, no, no, no, we need to own the full tech stack, and he had that vision. And so, you know, having our own model was just a matter of time, because if you own the frontend and you own the backend, then you absolutely need to own that middleware,right, of how you deliver that service.

And so the tech stack piece was so important,right, in doing that. And the benefits, of course, of that is also significant cost savings,right? Because, as you know, a lot of these large language models are excessively expensive today. Those companies are being slightly bullies around how they handle, you know, people using their models.

And our perspective was, you know, again, in line with what we always said, we cannot be dependent on somebody else. And I think, you know, how this is playing out is proving, I think, it's theright thing. And so it's also going to be a much better model, because it's going to be a model that is specifically built for application building, using all the data that we've been able to get for over a year.

So a lot of benefits in doing this. It really is a seminal moment for Wix and, of course, for Base44.

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Now, back to today's episode. When I saw the news a couple days ago, honestly, I didn't see this coming. I thought somebody's going to do it at some point. It's just a question of who and when. When did you all start to think about the opportunity of actually creating your own AI model, and how long did it take you to build from start to finish?

For Base44, it's like, we've known for a while now that we're going to go about it. We just thought it was going to come very, like, much later in the journey. So the strategy was, like, scale and grow as fast as possible, gain market share, gain data that's going to be valuable later on.

And at some point, when it makes sense, like, build your own model. It's going to improve the efficiency of the company. If you have enough data, it will likely be better than anything else. But being very honest, I thought it was going to be, like, a year or two down the line.

And then a couple of things changed. One, open-source models became super good lately and very efficient. So you get, like, open-source models that are now the same level as frontier models, and that's a good base to start from,right?

We post-trained and fine-tuned, like, the open-source, those open-source models to get to base one. And we couldn't have done this without open-source moving so fast and so far ahead. And second is we've grown quite fast, and so we got to this scale already.

And when we looked at our data, we're like, oh, there's actually, like, millions of data pointsright now that we can use to optimize base one for our specific use case, for what customers are searching for, not only to be, by the way, a good implementer of code, but to be actually, like, a trusted co-founder to our users.

It's kind of, like, what we're trying to align its behavior to is, like, get really good at product decisions,right? The design decisions, those things that, like, a general coding model, like, they will write code, like, very good, very efficiently, but not necessarily make theright decisions for you.

And especially for our audience, which is not the developers, or not necessarily the developers, but, like, people who are building by using natural language, but, like, pure natural language, like, no, hey, you should write the code here or there, whatever.

I think this becomes crucial that they have, like, this co-founder next to them that's able to take theright decisions. And so I think it was a few months in the making, but in the past few weeks, we had some breakthroughs.

And again, I'll give a lot of credit to open-source, which I think, I think we're going to see more companies do that. The companies that are reaching scale at some scale of data, again, for me, it felt like the natural choice to go with, like, now base one, or I don't know if base one, but maybe base two is going to be, like, frontier level at half the cost for our users.

I think even today, base one is, like, probably very close to frontier level at half the cost in terms of credits of what we're offering our customers. And I think at some point, when you're skilled enough, if you have the talent and you're ambitious enough, it's definitely, it makes sense.

It's just theright choice.

I think what, you know, if I can jump in here, this is also about really understanding your user base or your audience,right? And, you know, one of the things we did really well early at Wix was all about having the most beautiful designs,right?

Because, and we were really good at that. It took us time to get really good at that. But we realized early on that a normal user, you know, as easy as our tools might be,right, you still had anxiety about fonts and colors,right?

Like, I want to build, how do I do this,right? And from that moment on, we began doing a lot of things in the Wix product to help you make that decision,right? And so one of the things that Maor did was really the first company to do it is you would go in and prompt and say, build me this app or whatever.

But then it would say, hey, do you want some suggestions,right, how you might improve your app? And they were the first to do it,right? Nobody else had done this before. And this is really all about understanding your audience.

And by way of giving you an example, I have an app that I've built for myself, which is, I like to think of these things as micro-agents to help my life better,right? And so one of my moments of anxiety is I go to a restaurant, I look at the wine list, and I'm like, shit, I don't know which one to pick,right?

So, and that probably happens to many, many, many, many people,right? And so I built my app where I just take a picture of the menu,right, and it will make recommendations to me. But over time, Base44 has come back to me and said, hey, you might want to add this feature, or you might want to add this, or might consider this.

And this is all about, you know, knowing what I'm trying to do with it. And I think that's one of the genius that Maor has brought with him, is this idea that everything you do is only good if it satisfies your audience and makes that experience better.

And this is all about verticalization versus just being a horizontal model,right? These horizontal models are good at many things. They're great at nothing. And I think ultimately you have to be great at something to be a great company.

And he's certainly building that, and you can see it every time, you know? Every time I open, you know, the Base44 product, there's something new. I'm like, yeah, that makes complete sense.

It's all about tasteright. I kind of feel with many of these other vibe coding tools, you can build the product or tool you want, but if it doesn't understand the type of taste the creator or builder is trying to accomplish, then it becomes difficult long-term.

By having your own AI model, which perhaps you update once every few months, that potentially changes everything.

Yeah, and that's part of, like, owning every layer in the stack, I think. So if you think about this, Base44 by now has a lot of traffic and sees a lot of apps, like tens of millions of applications.

And leveraging this data to make our users successful is probably the smartest move that we can do. And the way to do that is to put it inside a model. Teaching a model on, like, what are theright product decisions that later on we can use, we can see in the metrics.

It's like, what are your apps that applications are getting usage and revenues and momentum versus, like, what are applications that are not? I think this is, like, one of our biggest challenges. And if we do so, then we'll have this model that has proprietary knowledge of what is good taste,right, and how to help our users be very successful.

Because when, again, it's been said before many, many times, but it's true, when building is not, like, coding is not the issue anymore. It's not a challenge anymore. The question is, what are you going to build? And I think that's what we're going to focus on a lot in the next few months, in the next few years.

Not only what you're going to build, how you're going to distribute that, and stuff like that. But yeah, a model feels like theright move, owning this part of the stack, and then iterating from here fast. And being ambitious about, like, we're aiming to build the best model in the world to do web applications.

It's not going to be an easy task,right? Like, the labs, like the models that are coming out of the big frontier closed-source labs are great. And we'll still, like, a decent amount of our traffic is routed to the closed-source models.

It's going to take time until we'll get this model to be better and cheaper and faster than the closed-source ones. But I feel like we're on theright track.

How do you think about updating the model with new releases? I was speaking to a few founders about this on the show over the last few months. It's almost like the iPhone,right? Back in the day, you'd have a new iPhone every 12 months.

But with these AI models, it feels like it's every six weeks. Is that something you're thinking about also?

So we're setting now the infrastructure to kind of, like, get updated checkpoints because the way it works, essentially, is the more traffic it sees, the more data we have to train it on. So that's how, like, in reinforcement learning, there's today's the literature and the kind of, like, the science of it has progressed so much that you're able to constantly get a stream of feedback and of samples that you can train the model on.

So I can tell you that, like, what we're where we want to be is basically do daily checkpoint updates. It's going to take time until we get there. And we'll have to see that it makes sense from a compute perspective, that it makes sense as, like, the updates are, like, not just super small incremental ones and do it, like, once a week or once a month.

But I don't think we'll do, like, two updates a year. I don't think that's what we'll be. Again, given and a big large disclaimer is that, like, we're only taking the first baby steps here and learning along the way.

But the tools we have and how we're setting things up, just from a reinforcement learning perspective, is, like, to give regular updates so that it constantly trains and getting better and better and better.

It's super exciting. Mark, what do you think is missing from this whole ecosystem of products for builders? You know, I feel today we've progressed so much in just in the last 12 or 18 months,right? But actually what builders probably need next is help with distribution.

Yep.

Opportunity?

Yeah, I mean, you know, and you've probably seen some of the data out there,right? Which is a lot of products are being built, but when you actually look at the usage of those products, there's not tons of usage.

Because at the end of the day, you know, the notion that I can build easy is fine, but not everybody's a great product person,right? And so now I can replace the code, but do I really have product genius in me?

And this is what Maor was talking about before, is how do we bring product genius into it so that the product is great? Because if you're not a great product person and you just tell it what to build, it'll build what you tell it,right?

And then the second thing is, how do you promote it,right? And so, again, we learned this lesson in Wix,right? And so we have many, many, many, many different ways we help our users to promote their website, to get traffic, and these kind of things.

And ultimately, once you get past, you know, this building phase, it's all going to be about how do you provide that extra service, you know, to your users as well, to be able to be relevant and build products.

But there's always going to be an 80-20 rule,right? I mean, it's just most of the apps are just not going to be great, and most of the apps are going to be what they are. And at the end, people who have great marketing savvy will also understand how to promote things.

But we'll have to build those things into the product for sure. I agree. Also, like, I think about it in a way as, like, a decent portion of the applications being built are not ones that are being built to see a huge amount of traffic or usage or whatever.

And that's completely fine,right? Like, Mark has his own personal app to do, like, wine choosing and so on. And we have internally a whole product that we've built to help us manage the tasks of our developers' team. And that shouldn't be, like, something that now we're marketing this.

So this is, like, a great use case, and that's fine. For the other portion of apps that are looking to gain momentum, usage, revenues, and so on, I'll give a quick spoiler. We're now testing with some beta users our new kind of, like, distribution section of the product, which is basically helping you, once you've built an app, what's theright playbooks for you to grow this app.

And it makes sense because one, Base44 knows your business really well because it sees the application. It already has, like, this built-in context of whether the application is a B2B SaaS or not, whether it's local or it's global, and so on.

And then what we're trying to do is, like, implement best practices together with plenty of integrations to different advertising engines and so on. And this is also where the Wix's infrastructure is becoming so valuable because Wix, for a while now, has been kind of, like, an awesome product.

Actually, Base44's first website was built on top of Wix, and the first ads that I was running were through Wix's kind of, like, integration with Google Ads. So we've built a lot of, like, the previous knowledge and infrastructure from Wix.

But we're promoting now, and we're testing in beta with some users, kind of, like, having your almost, like, CMO as part of your application and basing it again on the very intimate context that Base44 has with your business and with your product to help you market it better.

So it's going to be interesting.

That's really exciting. I mean, that's what every founder and builder needs,right? And creator. They need help with distribution. They need help around how to actually, like, think like a product person or think like a founder. Hopefully, if the app does really well, they need then, obviously, support on how to build their team.

And so it's almost like a CMO, but it's also like a co-founder as well at the same time, which many of these builders don't have.

Yeah, I agree. Because that's also where it's headed,right? It's like, at some point, like, we're measuring, for example, internally, it's like, how many prompts does a user, like, need to actually get his request kind of, like, implemented,right? And so when we started out, it was like an average of, like, we'll need three prompts to, like, you'll tell it to implement something, and then, no, it wasn't what I meant, or it's not looking good, or it's broken, or, yeah, you did it well, but you delivered a whole different thing.

And now it's, like, getting closer to, like, being it's not yet there. It's getting closer to being the perfect implementer. And so for many of the prompts that you nowadays to get, like, exactly what you meant. And so this is, like, it feels like this is going to be a done deal, a solved problem.

And from here is, like, what would our users actually need? They'll need to distribute. They'll need to, like, take theright product decisions, design decisions, and so on, get theright data and analytics. And so we're building a lot of that.

That's super awesome. You know, zoning out on this whole vibe coding space, I feel that it changes basically every month, not every quarter. It changes every month,right? And probably inside the company of you guys, it really changes every day.

What does the state of vibe coding look like in the next six months and 12 months, if we have some predictions?

You'll be surprised at, like, how much lack of visibility, not visibility. It's like, it's very hard to think six months into the future. I can tell you how the next three months are going to play out becauseright now, things are just moving that fast.

We don't even have, like, roadmaps for, like, six months or 12 months. It's like, because also, kind of, like, internally, our engineering team is, like, operating so fast that, like, when we have, like, this big thing that we're going to invest in, that's usually, like, two months, three months out, and that's it.

And, like, you're done with it and move forward. So I think to some degree, it will resemble what I said. I think, one, building the thing is going to be super easy, and it's going to be super fast and super efficient.

That's an important thing,right? Right now, if you want to build something, like, fast, you'll need to pay for it a lot because you want to get, like, the frontier models that are, like, they ain't going to be cheap.

And if you want them for every prompt, it's not going to be easy. And I think looking into the future is, like, open source is accelerating a lot. I can see what's going on with the models. Like, the prompting itself is, like, that's going to become easier, more efficient, faster, which is good to all of most of, like, the industry.

Especially for us, it's like, where we want to be is, like, we want to host, like, what we're doing eventually is, like, hosting the applications, giving it theright tools, almost like being the AWS for vibe coded applications because we're giving them the different services.

So it's good for us, the more that we can give our users the ability to just iterate more and prompt and so on. I think it will start going to a place where the AI gives you the ideas and directions.

This is, like, what keeps me up at night is, like, how do we create the tools to give our users the ideas on what to implement, how to distribute, kind of, like, everything, kind of, like, on what to do with their idea.

And so get the user to be this visionary that's going to sit or set the stage for something awesome to be built, but then have Base44, and I'm assuming other tools will do the same eventually, is, like, give you the ideas, show you kind of, like, you'd wake up in the morning and a model will send you an email.

It's like, hey, I had an idea during the night. Here's, like, a version or a feature that I've implemented for you. Check this out. And if you'd like to, like, I'm going to merge this into the main branch.

Yes. And I think also from a market perspective, more and more tools inside the enterprise are going to be converted to vibe coded applications. And I know it still has some question marks, not as many as it used to be when I said it, like, six months ago.

But it is so much more efficient to build your own tools and internal applications and enterprise software. You'll get something that's more customized to your needs. You'll get something that's leaner. And I feel like enterprises are now grasping this, and the adoption we're seeing in enterprise is very good when it started out with, like, a lot of skepticism around how production can it be?

Can it actually serve the enterprise and so on? The more time progresses, the more I understand that too many things are going to fall into the category of vibe coding,right? So we see users today are, like, they're doing things that are not only applications.

Like, they're doing slides. They're doing games. They're going to do designs. It's like, you can define a lot of things with code,right? And if you have, like, thisright infrastructure that models can code given users' requests, then it's going to do a whole lot of different things.

So it's going to be interesting to see where are the vibe coding platforms going to expand into. You can see for us, we're going to release kind of, like, Base44 for games. We've done Base44 for mobile applications. There's, like, slides.

There's plenty of different things because code is basically kind of, like, this universal building block for a lot of other tasks and a lot of other knowledge tasks and enterprise tasks and so on.

I think our audience is also very much still an early adopter audience in the concepts of it. The idea that if I could speak to a friend and say, you can invent anything you want, they're like, yeah, really?

So I think the audience is going to grow much faster. And so it's going to catch up to the capabilities that we have, you know? And on a personal level, you know, we're going to have a series of agents that may change over time or not.

And maybe you'll build an agent for a specific event, like for the World Cup,right? I was very frustrated when the World Cup started. I had to go look at a newspaper, when is the next match and everything. And then in two minutes, I built myself an agent on Base44, and it sends me a WhatsApp message every morning at 7:00.

I get yesterday's results, and I get today's games,right? And this is an ephemeral agent that I've built that disappears at the end of the World Cup. But I think most of my friends would not know you can do that.

And so I think there's going to be a general sense around AI, generally speaking, is going to fuel, of course, consumption for our type of products. So it's both things,right? Our product has to evolve, but so does the market have to evolve to some extent.

We're educating it, but we're not the only ones, which in this case is a good thing.

Last thing I'll say is that, and building on what Mark said, but I feel like also the economy is going to change. I feel like it's happeningright now in terms of, like, we're seeing many builders and many small businesses and many small SaaS players being built on Base44.

And a good example for that is, like, one of my best friends used to be a restaurant manager. Now left his job to start an invoice management SaaS application for restaurants, selling in, like, the cities and the local cities in Israel.

And I think this is, like, a good example of, like, hey, there's a business. Now, if you were to think of, like, such a startup three years ago, it wouldn't make any sense because you'll need some funding to build the application and to maintain that so that you can hire, like, developers,right?

And so it wouldn't make any sense because the app itself is targeting a very niche market in a very local market. But nowadays, like, you've broken this barrier, and you allowed, like, such a person with domain knowledge, but no, like, dev knowledge to actually build.

Then I think it's like we're seeing many small players that are making a good living out of, like, building applications. And those applications and SaaS tools and so on, they don't have to be, like, billions of dollars in valuation or, like, hundreds of millions of dollars raised.

It's not the typical VC path. It's just, like, the economy is going to be, like, many small tools that have either they have unique data or unique take on the market. They're leveraging some domain expertise of the owner to create a valuable tool for a certain niche.

And you're seeing some of the builders today who are even 14, 15, 16. They're creating amazing apps. And some are making, like, millions of dollars in revenue. I mean, Mark also. I mean, you know, you created an app for your wine list.

If I had any more time, I'd actually package it properly and put it out there. And I'm sure I could make money with it,right? Because it's just so good. And it's a pain point that I have in my life.

I have many friends who have the same pain point. So that's the point of business. You can build anything you want that you can just imagine a little bit. And if you want to make a living out of it, you probably can.

What trends are you guys excited about outside of vibe coding in general?

I think there's a trend now to build big companies that do rollups, which I think is very interesting. It's like taking some niche industries or industries that haven't been changed a lot by AI and then starting to buy small players to get distribution and then completely overhaul and completely change them from within using AI.

I think it's an interesting trend. Andright now, I'm seeing kind of, like, this market grab in some places. You can see it in, like, the boutique shops of, like, accountants and CFOs as a service and stuff like that.

And you can see it even in, like, small players that are doing, like, pension funds and so on. And so I feel like this is going to be an interesting trend to see how it plays out. New inference players, I feel like, are going to change the world because if you make inference super cheap for extremely smart models, then it just opens up entirely new opportunities.

Even for us, like, inside Base44, it's like, I asked the team, like, how would our product be different if tomorrow we'll have a basically zero-cost model, very smart that does, like, 2,000 tokens per second? What would we change?

And let's start gearing up towards this opportunity as just the market efficiency, I feel like, is pushing us there. But I feel like this is going to impact so many other industries, allowing models, like, very efficiently to think and think and think and work and think and work and kind of, like, do it, like, much faster than any human can probably do.

And so this is also an interesting thing. I can't wait to see how it plays out.

So I spend a lot of time thinking about how we become humans again,right? In that, you know, the internet and AI has essentially dehumanized us in our relationships with other humans,right? You can walk into any family, and we're not watching movies together anymore.

Everybody's on their own iPad watching their very specific content that they want. And, you know, I'm not saying that's a bad thing. It's just not great for families or for friends and things like this. And so I think there's a huge playright now on people who can build companies where you can actually bring people together in events.

And so that can be sporting events or concerts or whatever. So I think rehumanizing humans is a very big theme of how I think about it, and I get excited about those types of things. And, of course, the other one is the off-planet opportunity,right?

The SpaceX IPO marks a very new chapter for all of us. If you think about it, in 1994 or 1996, there's an American company called Netscape that went public. It was the first browser,right? And that really made the internet accessible to non-techy people.

I could actually go and actually surf the internet. And that marked 30 years of really great growth and opportunities with the internet. I think the SpaceX IPO will be remembered a bit like that for space,right? So rehumanizing space, I think those are really big, big opportunities we should all be really thinking about.

I agree on the rehumanizing of people. You know, like sporting, there's this company called Hyrox, which you might know of. These guys started, I think, 2017, $140 plus million a year they generate by just making sports fun again.

I went to, like, a dinner with other creators, VCs' founders the other day. Honestly, I hadn't done it in six or eight months. It was so nice to actually just, like, see other people. And it's just important for humanity in general.

If you guys were to have one person join your board tomorrow, who would it be and what would you like to learn from them?

We have at Wix a tremendous board, and we've built this board up over time. And when you think about boards, it's really all about just being able to get people from different perspectives who have different views of what you would want to do.

And so, you know, if I'd say, you know, we have, for instance, the CEO of Manchester City. You might argue, what the hell is, you know, a football guy doing on the board of a tech company? Well, he's a fantastic marketer and just really has a completely different perspective on life around things.

And so I think it's really finding the person that you want. And I won't give names or anything like that because I'm obviously discussing with a number of peopleright now. But I think you'd want somebody that shares your values.

And in our case, that can bring just left-field thinking,right, to this. Boards of public companies or boards of smaller companies like Base44, you just need different thinkers to be around you,right? Like, I'm not interested in having somebody else like me.

Like, I know myself. I don't need another Mark there,right? I just need very different thinkers. And I think that's very helpful for everybody.

I'll add on that. When I started Base44, and I kind of, like, was looking at ways kind of, like, how I'm going to market this. And I remember trying a bunch of things. It didn't really work. And at some point, I consulted with a friend of mine who said, you know what?

You should, like, you're doing it by yourself. That's pretty cool. It's probably going to resonate with your audience. You should do this, like, building public thing, which is, like, and that's how I started,right? I was, like, the underdog that didn't raise any cash.

And it was, like, starting out. And I was, like, every day putting stories out there of what I'm going through, the numbers, how it looks like, the new features, what I'm seeing from the community, the users, and so on.

And it created, like, this very strong early brand and community. And that's when I finally understood kind of, like, the power of, like, a good brand and a good way to tell a story because up until then, I was doing, like, mostly enterprise.

That was my previous company's, like, top-down heavy enterprise deal. So not a lot of weight on, like, doing good storytelling and brand. And I think this is going to become so valuable in the future, being a good storyteller, knowing how to build an audience around you.

Like, I would build on top of what Mark said, and I would say I would probably go to either this is going to sound like it's going to sound like cheap, but it's not, to either, like, a good influencer storyteller, a good persona, either a singer or something like that that is nowadays very connected to the young audience, the people who are entering the market, and work with them to build Base44 as this brand that people want to connect with and how we're telling our stories and how we're kind of, like, reaching our audience because, again, I feel like this is such a powerful tool today.

I'll give you a name since he's talking about exactly the person I've been thinking about,right? And so if I could bring somebody on board, it would be Pharrell Williams. And when you spend time with Pharrell Williams, you don't have to spend a lot of time for him to be able to explain something in a way that is, you're like, wow, you know, he didn't know the context particularly well before, but he really was able to distill this and to tell a story.

And so that type of person,right, who understands also modern culture,right? These are the type of people I think that you should have access to, at least maybe, maybe not on your board. But if I had to give one name, you know, he'd be a guy like, yeah, man, that would be a very interesting person to have on our board.

Guys, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for your time. What an awesome story. And it feels like this is just day one. And let's come back in a year's time, 365 days, and see how things have progressed.

Thanks for giving us the opportunity to tell the story of Base44. And, you know, it is a rocket ship with a fantastic guy running the company. And, you know, product vision is everything here. And so thanks. We're just proud to be able to tell this story.

You see how excited we are about where he's taking this. I think it's just another chapter in how we give the world the tools to build anything they dream.

Thanks for having us here. Thank you so much. It's been fun.

Thank you.