He Made $189,000 in Profit in a Single Month, Then Sold the Whole Thing to Wix for $80 Million. Six Months In.

The lawyers finished the Base44 paperwork on a Thursday night. The signing was set for Friday morning. That same Friday morning, the war with Iran broke out. Maor Shlomo signed anyway.

That detail is the whole story in miniature. A guy in Israel, between reserve duty call-ups, sells a company he started as a side project, and the missiles are a scheduling problem.

The setup

Shlomo was not a kid with a dream and a laptop. He had already co-founded Explorium, a data analytics company that raised a total of $127 million, capped by a $75 million Series C led by Insight Partners, per TechCrunch. He left, did reserve duty after October 7, and came back restless.

Base44 started because his girlfriend needed a website for her art business and he was helping the Israeli Scouts with some software. He kept hitting the same wall. As he told CEO Insider, "Both times I realized, 'LLMs should be able to build this.'"

So he built the thing that builds the thing. Base44 turns a plain-English prompt into a working web app, database and login and all. No code.

The moment something worked

Here is where the numbers start, and they are silly.

He told his girlfriend that if they hit $1.5M in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2025, they would buy a nice car. They hit it in four weeks. He said this out loud on Lenny's Podcast, the same place he confirmed he hit $1 million ARR three weeks after launch and grew to more than 400,000 users without spending money on marketing.

Ten thousand users showed up in the first three weeks. By the six-month mark he was reportedly at 250,000 users, per TechCrunch.

Then the profit number. In May 2025, Base44 made $189,000 in profit. Not revenue, profit. Shlomo posted it himself on LinkedIn, and the figure got passed around the founder world fast.

"Base44 ended up making $189K profit in May and today got acquired by Wix for $80m..."

@PrivatEquityGuy on X

Per Calcalist, "Shlomo reported that the company had generated a profit of $189,000, nearly double his initial forecast of $100,000." I want to flag what that profit survived, because it is the part that almost broke him.

The moment something almost broke

Base44 calls large language models to generate full apps in real time. Every single request costs money. In May, model calls were 89% of Base44's total spend, according to a detailed breakdown via 36Kr of his public posts.

That is a business where the cost of goods sold tries to eat you alive. Shlomo's fix was unglamorous. He moved off OpenAI's API to cheaper routes through AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex, and Anthropic, chasing cost-per-performance. He also stopped charging users for failed outputs, which sounds generous until you realize a model that keeps making mistakes just burns more tokens on his dime.

He leaned on Cursor and Claude for development. He said on Lenny's that he had not written a line of front-end code in three months. The AI wrote it. He architected.

The verdict, with the asterisks

In June 2025, Wix bought Base44 for $80 million in cash, with earn-outs running through 2029.

Now the honesty section, because the clean version of this story is a lie of omission.

First, "solo" is doing heavy lifting. Wix confirmed to TechCrunch that Base44 had eight employees at the sale, and $25 million of the $80 million was a retention pool for them. Shlomo ran it alone for most of the six months and hired his first employee about six weeks before the deal, but the word "solo" on the marketing materials is a stretch by the finish line.

Second, the Explorium history matters more than the takes admit. A first-time nobody does not get a warm introduction to Wix's CEO. Shlomo was already known in Israeli tech, he was named to Forbes Israel's 30 Under 30 in 2020, and that network is a real input that you cannot copy by using Cursor.

Third, and this is the uncomfortable one for anyone treating the $80 million as the moral of the story. The acquisition has been rough on the acquirer. Base44 hit $100 million ARR nine months after the deal, per Calcalist, which is genuinely wild growth. But Calcalist also reports Wix's stock has lost nearly half its value in 2026, and that Base44's compute and marketing costs are a heavy drag on the company that bought it. The thing grows beautifully and bleeds cash at the same time. Both are true.

For Shlomo personally, it kept paying. Calcalist reports he is set to receive another $90 million if milestones hit, on top of the headline price.

So what is the actual lesson here. It is not "quit and vibe-code an $80 million exit by Friday." It is narrower and more useful. He picked a problem he personally had, twice. He shipped while it was embarrassing and broke often. He watched real users in real time and removed friction. And he understood his cost structure cold, which is the part most AI founders wave away until the GPU bill arrives and the math stops working.

He told Lenny something that has stuck with me. The best product feedback at $5M ARR was the same as at $150M ARR. People close to you, who feel comfortable telling you the truth. The tooling changed. That part did not.

Sources

• Lenny's Podcast / Newsletter, Maor Shlomo interview
• TechCrunch, Wix acquires Base44
• LinkedIn, Shlomo on $189K May profit
• Calcalist, Base44 hits $100M ARR
• Calcalist, Shlomo $90M milestone payout
• Calcalist, Base44 booming, Wix collapsing
• 36Kr, cost breakdown
• CEO Insider interview
• X, PrivatEquityGuy citing the $189K post