Show notes
Subscribe to stay ahead of technology trends. Never miss future editions.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.WATCH NOW: $1M ARR IN 3 WEEKSThroughout 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… Watch or listen now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and XDownload the transcriptTimestamps(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(30:07) Why You Should Own the Stack(32:33) How We Update AI Models(34:18) What's Still Missing for AI Builders?(39:36) The State of Vibe Coding(47:40) Tech Predictions from Maor & MarkOur notes from this conversation* Coding stopped being the bottleneck. What to build is.Base44 hit $1M in annualized revenue three weeks after launch, then a couple million within three months — solo, with no funding. Maor’s line: “coding is not the issue anymore. The question is what are you going to build.” That’s the thesis for the next few years, not just the next few months.* Why Base44 and Wix teamed-up Wix approached Base44 because a “crazy guy” running a one-man show kept generating enough noise that people started telling Mark’s team to buy him. Nir Zohar, Wix’s President, sealed the vibe over steak; the real decision came later, with Maor and Avishai Abrahami (CEO and Founder at Wix) at a whiteboard in the middle of the night, mapping three paths: stay bootstrapped, raise a lot of money, or partner with Wix. Maor’s real hesitation wasn’t valuation — it was fear of scaling the “magic” too fast and killing the thing that made it work. Avishai’s answer was structural, not financial: lean on Wix for the boring infrastructure, stay lean and move fast everywhere else.* Owning the front and back end obligates you to own the middleware too.Base44’s release of Base 1 — its own fine-tuned model for building web applications — wasn’t a marketing move, it was the logical endpoint of a stack Wix and Base44 already owned end to end. Mark’s framing: If you own the front end and the back end, you eventually have to own how you deliver the service between them, or you’re dependent on someone else’s pricing and roadmap.* Scale generates the training data that makes owning a model worth it.Two things moved Base44’s model timeline up by a year or more: open-source models reaching frontier-adjacent quality, and Base44’s own traffic generating millions of usable data points. The lesson generalizes — building your own model only makes sense once you have the volume to fine-tune it well, not before.* The next differentiator isn’t code quality — it’s taste.Horizontal coding models are good at many things. Base44’s bet is that a model trained specifically on what makes a good product decision — not just working code — becomes a durable edge as raw code generation becomes commoditized across every vibe coding platform.* Distribution, not creation, is the unsolved problem for builders.Mark’s read on the ecosystem: Plenty of products get built, very few get used, because building well and marketing well are different skills. Base44’s answer is a beta “distribution layer” that uses its own context on each app — B2B or consumer, local or global — to recommend a growth playbook, not just more features.* Vibe coding is quietly eating enterprise software, not just side projects.The skepticism about production-readiness a year ago has given way to real adoption: internal tools, dashboards, and niche SaaS products built by domain experts with zero developers on staff. Maor’s example — a former restaurant manager building an invoicing tool for local restaurants — is the shape of a much larger shift in who gets to start a software business.* Nobody has visibility past about three months, and that’s the honest answer.Maor won’t pretend to forecast a year out — internal roadmaps only run two or three months because the ground moves that fast. What he will say: Frontier-model costs keep compressing, open source keeps closing the gap, and the category itself is widening past web apps into games, slide decks, and design — anywhere code can define an output.* Building in public is now a distribution channel, not a personality quirk.Maor’s early growth came from documenting the numbers, the features, and the struggles publicly every day, not from a marketing budget. His conclusion for founders generally: Storytelling and audience-building are becoming as valuable a skill as the product itself, especially for anyone starting without capital.* A board doesn’t need people like you. It needs people who aren’t.Mark’s operating principle for Wix’s board — deliberately including outsiders like the CEO of Manchester City for a completely different read on marketing and culture — showed up again when asked who they’d add next: both landed on the same instinct, that the highest-leverage addition is someone who understands modern culture and storytelling, not another operator who thinks like they do.LinksFollow Ollie on X - https://x.com/ollieforsythFollow Maor on X - https://x.com/MaorShlomoFollow Mark on X - https://x.com/marktluszczVisit Base44 - http://base44.comVisit Wix - http://wix.comPrevious episodes include If you enjoyed this episode, help sustain our work by clicking ❤️ and 🔄 at the top of this post.…..Brought to you by Harmonic Get full access to NEW ECONOMIES at www.neweconomies.co/subscribe