How a Founder Sold His 1-Person AI Startup for 9 Figures in 6 months
Base 44 is the first company from the Lean AI leaderboard to get a 9-figure acquisition
A founder just sold his 1-person company for 9 figures ($80M upfront + more in earn-out) without splitting a dime.
This is the untold story of Base44's founder, Maor Shlomo:
Before building Base44, Maor had already built a traditional startup, Explorium, that raised $125M and employed 100 people.
He knew exactly how the old game worked: the fundraising circus, complex team management and equity dilution.
But then everything changed when the war hit Israel. Maor had to leave Explorium to serve in the Israeli army reserves.
So when he returned, he wanted to do it differently this time. He wanted to build something that was lean and profitable, and something that would give him control.
It was during the same time that his girlfriend needed a website for her business.
He tried all the famous ‘no-code’ tools in the market, and every single one of them turned out to be a complete nightmare.
He would move one image, and the entire mobile layout would get destroyed. He would add a button, and everything would shift unpredictably.
He was frustrated because there had to be a better way.
That frustration became the foundation of his $80+ million idea, which is now known as Base44.
But it was not easy building in a saturated space.
Hundreds of companies were fighting for the same customers. The bigger players had massive funding and traction.
Every week, another well-funded no-code platform launched with millions in backing and aggressive marketing campaigns. The competition was brutal and seemed impossible to break through.
Most founders would have looked at this landscape and run the other way, but Maor saw it as validation that the problem was real and that everyone else was solving it wrong (none of them solved for zero technical experience)
While his competitors were raising large VC rounds, hiring engineers, and building MVPs for months, Maor started building solo in his apartment with AI as his entire dev team.
But his approach to coding with AI was completely different. He believed that AI should write as little boilerplate as possible and only focus on the unique business logic. That's how he built so quickly, and how Base44 was so good.
He used AI to write 90% of his frontend and 50% of his backend code (He thinks Claude is the best coding model in the market right now, with Gemini 2.5 being a close second).
Then he did something that would give most CTOs nightmares.
He pushed code straight to production every single day without any code reviews, branches, or unit tests. He just did some end-to-end tests that he wrote using AI, but that was it.
While competitors spent weeks in planning meetings debating microservices architecture and database schemas, he was already shipping the next feature.
His military experience had taught him the power of moving fast and light while competitors were bogged down in bureaucracy.
The speed difference was absolutely staggering. Traditional teams would spend days coordinating deployments. Maor was pushing updates while having his morning coffee.
In a market where everyone was fighting for attention with the same basic features, speed, and understanding of the problem (users with zero technical experience needed something good) became his unfair advantage.
That's how he quickly built something his well-funded competitors couldn't match.
A truly batteries-included platform where complete non-technical users could build working applications without touching a single line of code.
No API keys to manage. No databases to configure. No technical knowledge required whatsoever.
While competitors were building platforms for developers or semi-technical users, Maor went after the massive market everyone else was ignoring: complete beginners who just wanted things to work.
The results were insane: 250K+ users, $189K profit in May alone, and $3.5M ARR in under 6 months.
All with zero employees until literally last month before the acquisition.
But this wasn't all roses. He burned thousands in traditional marketing, which was a complete disaster.
In such a noisy, competitive market, his voice got completely drowned out.
He tried paid influencers who promised massive reach but delivered crickets. He tried Meta ads, which burned through his budget with zero conversions. He even tried Twitter marketing, but it did not help.
Everything that was working for his competitors was completely worthless for him. With so many well-funded players spending millions on marketing, breaking through seemed impossible.
That's when a co-founder of another Israeli company pulled him aside and told him something that would change everything.
The founder said he thought it was really special that Maor was building everything alone: handling the development, the marketing, the networking, all by himself. He suggested that maybe Maor should start telling his story around that unique approach.
That conversation changed everything. He took a leap most founders would never dare. He started posting his failures (the real and ugly stuff) on LinkedIn with ruthless transparency.
It was not the polished success stories everyone expects, but the raw, unfiltered truth.
He candidly shared the strategies that flopped and the embarrassing mistakes he made.
In a market full of fake success stories and inflated metrics, his brutal honesty cut through the noise like a knife.
His audience was completely hooked, and the posts began to hit 100K-200K views.
Maor realized he needed to post consistently to maintain momentum, but creating engaging LinkedIn content every day was eating up massive amounts of time he should have been spending on building the product.
So he did what any resourceful founder would do: he built a tool inside Base44 specifically to help him generate LinkedIn content.
The tool would analyze his past successful posts, understand his voice and style, and help him create new content that matched his authentic tone while saving hours of writing time.
Every post he published was essentially a live demo of what Base44 could do.
The vulnerability was magnetic. Comments poured in from founders sharing their own disasters. The posts started going viral because they were brutally real and authentic.
That’s when Maor monetized the attention by creating a viral flywheel that was pure genius.
Users got platform credits for posting about what they built with Base44, turning every customer into a marketing engine.
Suddenly, every customer became a walking advertisement for the platform.
His customers were essentially demonstrating how Base44 worked, and they did a wonderful job with live examples.
Every customer success story generated new customers organically.
The flywheel spun faster and faster until it became completely unstoppable.
It worked like magic. Unlike traditional marketing, it was completely organic, authentic, and incredibly profitable.
The Israeli tech community couldn't stop talking about this solo founder who was outmaneuvering well-funded teams with nothing but AI tools and brilliant execution.
Competitors began studying his approach, and the industry took notice.
That's when Wix approached him with an offer: $80 million upfront payment and performance bonuses that could potentially exceed the initial amount.
And guess what, all of this happened in just a 6-month timeline.
This is the first company from the Lean AI Leaderboard to be acquired, and I'm genuinely excited about what this means for the future of startup building and venture capital.
Beyond the milestone itself, his advice for other lean AI founders is gold:
Only build something that genuinely excites you every morning.
Spend 30 to 40% of your time optimizing AI tools and automation. The rest goes to core business execution.
Find one distribution channel that works and go all in.
Products will become easy to copy, so genuine product thinking and differentiation become critical.
Be someone that potential acquirers want to work with. Trust and cultural fit matter when betting on lean teams.
The old entrepreneurship rules are completely dead.
You no longer need co-founders, large teams, or venture funding.
All you need is a laptop, the right AI tools, the discipline to use them effectively every day and a distribution channel.