Nov 24, 2025, 10:09 AM ETInterview, Fireside Chat

Base44’s Founder, Maor Shlomo on How Vibe Coding Will Kill SaaS

Base44, a solo-founder bootstrap business, was sold to Wix for $80 million.
The acquisition was structured to keep the Base44 product team lean and startup-focused while leveraging Wix's infrastructure for support, marketing, legal, and operations.
Mayol declined raising venture capital or staying independent, viewing the acquisition as the optimal path to scale the business impact.
Post-acquisition, Base44 has reportedly grown to over $100 million in annual revenue.
The deal includes financial incentives tied to future revenue targets and milestones, protecting the founder's upside.
Mayol expresses no regret regarding the sale, noting that vertical integration with a major platform triples the chances of building a category-defining product.
Wix was selected over other potential acquirers due to shared target audiences, a matching aggressive spirit, and an industry-leading marketing team.

Mayol predicts the "vibe coding" category (AI-generated software) will become the largest software category, eventually eclipsing traditional CRMs, support systems, and project management tools.
The future of software involves "liquid" applications where code becomes user-owned, customizable, and free from "one-size-fits-all" feature bloat.
Traditional SaaS companies with weak moats (e.g., front-end tools on top of standard databases) are likely to be eliminated, while massive incumbents like Salesforce may survive by adapting their platforms.
The time-to-copy for software features has compressed from years to weeks due to AI advancements.
Model pricing is expected to trend toward zero, fundamentally changing business economics and margin structures.
The competitive landscape is expected to remain non-consolidated, with multiple players securing niches rather than a single "winner-takes-all" outcome.
Investment focus is shifting toward "zero to ten" revenue growth trajectories within the first year as a marker of viability.

Base44 differentiates itself by building a vertically integrated platform with a built-in backend (database, user management, auth, analytics) rather than relying on third-party services like Supabase.
The platform targets complex, functional applications and organizational tools rather than simple marketing websites or landing pages.
Base44 aims to eliminate the need for users to view or edit code, focusing on a prompt-only workflow that can build millions of lines of code.
Internal metrics track user success via sentiment analysis of chat interactions rather than just bug counts or deployment rates.
Competitors like Cursor and Cognition focus on the developer community (code visibility), whereas Base44 focuses on non-technical users.
Base44 is actively integrating scheduled tasks and AI agents (e.g., WhatsApp/Slack integrations) to expand the complexity of buildable software.
The company utilizes a multi-model strategy to manage costs and performance, routing simple tasks to cheaper open-source models and complex tasks to frontier models.

Mayol considers the LLM market dynamics distinct from cloud computing due to the ease of switching providers (potentially via a single code change), creating volatile revenue shifts.
Google is viewed as the most likely entity to dominate the AI coding market if it wins the model race due to its control over the full stack (models, cloud, data, integrations).
Mayol prefers investing in or partnering with Anthropic over OpenAI, citing faster iteration speeds and a stronger B2B focus.
He advises investors to prioritize businesses with vertical integration and infrastructure moats over those relying solely on prompting layers, which are easily commoditized.
Mayol believes Wix is currently undervalued compared to recent valuations of startups like Lovable and Replit.
The "moat" in the AI coding category is defined by the ability to handle complex, real-world use cases requiring deep integration layers, not just the ability to generate simple front-ends.

Base44 was originally built to solve a specific pain point for Mayol's wife (a tattoo artist) who needed a lean, customized CRM that existing drag-and-drop tools failed to provide.
Mayol's investment thesis for early-stage AI startups prioritizes "healthy businesses" with sustainable margins and vertical integration over rapid growth alone.
He advises aspiring builders to start by creating tools to solve their own personal problems to ensure product-market fit.
The ideal development mindset for AI tools involves rapid iteration and the willingness to discard code quickly, as AI allows for near-instant reversion and rebuilding.
Mayol suggests that non-technical users should avoid over-planning and instead use high-level prompts to let the AI generate initial drafts, then refine from there.
He argues that the "winner-takes-all" venture capital model is becoming less applicable in the AI sector due to the sheer size of the emerging market.
Mayol believes the emotional toll of scaling a platform is underestimated, having experienced significant stress during early infrastructure failures that the community eventually recovered from.
For personal life, he advises partners to select individuals with identical mindsets and work ethics to ensure mutual empathy for the sacrifices required by entrepreneurship.