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$1M ARR in 3 Weeks. $150M ARR One Year Later
Description
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Maor Shlomo, founder of Base44, and Mark Tluszcz, Chairman at Wix, join NEW ECONOMIES to unpack the fastest-moving acquisition story in vibe coding: a solo founder who hit $1M in annualized revenue three weeks after launch, sold Base44 to Wix for $80M within months, and grew the business from roughly $3M to $150M in annualized revenue in the year since the deal closed.
Maor walks through the origin story — building a tool for his now-wife’s CRM problem, wanting to give non-technical people a way to build tools rather than just websites — and the operational chaos that followed, including running the platform solo with no monitoring and fielding a security scare in the middle of his brother’s wedding.
Mark also explains why Wix, twenty years into believing non-technical people deserve real building tools, saw Base44 not as a bolt-on but as the natural extension of what Wix had been doing since 2006.
Throughout the episode, we get into why owning the full stack — front end, back end, and now the model layer — was non-negotiable for both companies, culminating in the release of Base 1, Base44’s own fine-tuned model for building web applications, and why Maor thinks the real bottleneck has already shifted from writing code to making good product decisions: as coding stops being the constraint, taste, distribution, and the judgment to know what’s worth building become the differentiators.
We also cover the coming wave of vibe-coded enterprise tools, why “verticalized” models beat horizontal ones for this category, and the emerging idea of Base44 acting less like a coding assistant and more like a co-founder.
We close on where Maor and Mark think the next big opportunities sit — re-humanizing technology through live events and the “off planet opportunity” (space) opened up by the SpaceX IPO — and who each of them would want on their board, landing, unexpectedly, on…
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Timestamps
(0:00) Meet Maor Shlomo & Mark Tluszcz(2:00) The Origin of Wix(4:07) The Base44 Founding Story(7:30) $1M in Revenue in Just 3 Weeks(9:23) The Craziest Base44 Story(12:08) Why Wix Acquired Base44(20:42) Launching Base44's AI Model