$1M ARR in 3 Weeks. $150M ARR One Year Later

BIG IDEAS BY NEW ECONOMIES

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$1M ARR in 3 Weeks. $150M ARR One Year Later

The solo founder behind Base44 explains how he hit $1M ARR in 3 weeks, sold to Wix for $80M, and helped scale the business to $150M ARR.

Ollie Forsyth

Jul 21, 2026

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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.

WATCH NOW: $1M ARR IN 3 WEEKS

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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NEW ECONOMIES Maor Shlomo (Base44) & Mark Tluszcz (Wix)

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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
(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 & Mark

Our 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.