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You're listening to a founder who made one hundred eighty-nine thousand dollars in profit in May, then sold his company to Wix for eighty million.

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Written by Dee-aygo Ferrahro on Promptway.

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The lawyers finished the Base forty-four paperwork on a Thursday night.

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The signing was set for Friday morning.

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That same Friday morning, the war with Iran broke out.

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Mayor Shlohmo signed anyway.

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That detail is the

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whole

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story

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in miniature.

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A guy in Israel, between reserve duty call-ups, sells a company he started as a side project, and the missiles

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are

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a

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scheduling

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problem.

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The setup Shlomo was not a kid with a dream and a laptop.

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He

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had

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already

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co-founded

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Explorium,

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a

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data

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analytics

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company

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that

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raised

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a

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total

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of

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one

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hundred twenty seven million dollars, capped by a seventy five million

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dollars

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Series

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C led by Insight Partners, per TechCrunch.

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He left, did reserve duty after October 7, and came back restless.

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Base forty-four started because his girlfriend needed a website for her art business and he was helping the Israeli Scouts with some software.

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He kept hitting the same wall.

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As he told CEO Insider, "Both times I realized, 'L L Ms should be able to build this.'" So he built the thing that builds the thing.

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Base forty-four turns a plain-English prompt into a working web app, database and login and all.

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No code.

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The moment something worked Here is where the numbers start, and they are silly.

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He told his girlfriend that if they hit one point five million dollars in annual recurring revenue by the end of twenty twenty five, they would buy a nice car.

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They hit it in four weeks.

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He said this out loud on Lenny's Podcast, the same place he confirmed he hit one million dollars annual recurring revenue three weeks after launch and grew to more than four hundred thousand users without spending money on marketing.

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Ten thousand users showed up in the first three weeks.

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By the six-month mark he was reportedly at two hundred fifty thousand users, per TechCrunch.

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Then the profit number.

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In May twenty twenty five, Base forty-four made one hundred eighty nine thousand dollars in profit.

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Not revenue, profit.

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Shlomo posted it himself on LinkedIn, and the figure got passed around the founder world fast.

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"Base forty-four ended up making one hundred eighty nine thousand dollars profit in May and today got acquired by Wix for eighty million dollars..." @PrivatEquityGuy on X Per Calcalist, "Shlomo reported that the company had generated a profit of one hundred eighty nine thousand dollars, nearly double his initial forecast of one hundred thousand dollars." I want to flag what that profit survived, because it is the part that almost broke him.

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The moment something almost broke Base forty-four calls large language models to generate full apps in real time.

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Every single request costs money.

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In May, model calls were eighty nine percent of Base forty-four's total spend, according to a detailed breakdown via thirty six K R of his public posts.

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That is a business where the cost of goods sold tries to eat you alive.

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Shlomo's fix was unglamorous.

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He moved off OpenAI's A P I to cheaper routes through AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex, and Anthropic, chasing cost-per-performance.

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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.

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He leaned on Cursor and Claude for development.

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He said on Lenny's that he had not written a line of front-end code in three months.

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The AI wrote it.

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He architected.

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The verdict, with the asterisks In June twenty twenty five, Wix bought Base forty-four for eighty million dollars in cash, with earn-outs running through twenty twenty nine.

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

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First, "solo" is doing heavy lifting.

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Wix confirmed to TechCrunch that Base forty-four had eight employees at the sale, and twenty five million dollars of the eighty million dollars was a retention pool for them.

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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.

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Second, the Explorium history matters more than the takes admit.

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A first-time nobody does not get a warm introduction to Wix's CEO.

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Shlomo was already known in Israeli tech, he was named to Forbes Israel's 30 Under 30 in twenty twenty, and that network is a real input that you cannot copy by using Cursor.

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Third, and this is the uncomfortable one for anyone treating the eighty million dollars as the moral of the story.

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The acquisition has been rough on the acquirer.

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Base forty-four hit one hundred million dollars annual recurring revenue nine months after the deal, per Calcalist, which is genuinely wild growth.

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But Calcalist also reports Wix's stock has lost nearly half its value in twenty twenty six, and that Base forty-four's compute and marketing costs are a heavy drag on the company that bought it.

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The thing grows beautifully and bleeds cash at the same time.

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Both are true.

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For Shlomo personally, it kept paying.

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Calcalist reports he is set to receive another ninety million dollars if milestones hit, on top of the headline price.

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So what is the actual lesson here.

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It is not "quit and vibe-code an eighty million dollars exit by Friday." It is narrower and more useful.

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He picked a problem he personally had, twice.

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He shipped while it was embarrassing and broke often.

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He watched real users in real time and removed friction.

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And he understood his cost structure cold, which is the part most AI founders wave away until the G P U bill arrives and the math stops working.

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He told Lenny something that has stuck with me.

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The best product feedback at five million dollars annual recurring revenue was the same as at one hundred fifty million dollars annual recurring revenue.

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People close to you, who feel comfortable telling you the truth.

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The tooling changed.

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That part did not.

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That's the story.

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You'll find every source linked at the end of the article.

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Thanks for listening, on Promptway.