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Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

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Re: Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

#61

6 month old company (not solo; vibe coding means what here??) sold for 80M. Impressive still.

It's a product that offers a vibe coding service to users. You enter a text prompt for what you want to build (no-code), and it tries to build it. I don't know if these 8 people vibe coded the vibe coding product itself -- they may have. But in the title the reference to "vibe coder" refers to their product.

Isn't this what lovable and that tool provided by vercel?

Re: Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

#62
post #42

Anyone remotely familiar with Wix should not be surprised by this, or be happy that they are familiar with Wix. The maintainability of the output of your average vibe coder is going to enormously exceed that of your average Wix site. LLMs are a massive threat to their whole model which relies on increasing levels of esotericism.

I think the implication here is that the Wix platform sets the bar so low, that even a vibing LLM can surpass it. Companies like Squarespace set the bar much higher. Wix has always been a nightmare to use and customize.

>Companies like Squarespace set the bar much higher.

When I was evaluating user friendly web platforms for several non-profits, I ended up choosing Wix over Squarespace because Squarespace didn't provide backup>restore functionality. That's a pretty low bar...

Re: Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

#63

Does anyone know how start up or project like these are built from ground up? I have very very command of react and I can write rest api using spring or express.js. I know finger too about prompt engineering. What does it take to make something like this?

I'm currently building a similar app for my company. Apps like this are built pretty much entirely around prompting. The basic path is:

User Enters Prompt > Combine with Internal Prompt > Feed to AI > Return Results.

That's pretty much it but realize the "internal prompt" will take you months of work and refinement. There are many many tiny edge cases around using AI like this. One problem for example is you can tell the AI to return you it's data in a standard JSON object that you app can use, but if you set the temperature to high then the output will stop conforming. So you start having to do "pass-offs" between conversations with different temperatures.

And this is just one of a litany of issues around using AI like this. And really this is no different than a "traditional" SaaS app that doesn't use AI, I have a side project and that project has a litany of issues that must also be fixed.

Bottom line is building something like this is not any easier than building a traditional SaaS, just different flavors of problems.

Re: Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

#64

Does anyone know how start up or project like these are built from ground up? I have very very command of react and I can write rest api using spring or express.js. I know finger too about prompt engineering. What does it take to make something like this?

[flagged]

Re: Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

#65
Everyone focused on the "vibe-coded, solo-preneur in 6 months" headline is being tricked. First, the details show this is not a "hallucination" but a misrepresentation of the facts, aka a lie. Second - and far more important - Wix did not buy the code output of an LLM, which anyone could easily reproduce, they bought the subscribers, funnel and team that built the business, not the code.

Re: Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

#66

Does anyone know how start up or project like these are built from ground up? I have very very command of react and I can write rest api using spring or express.js. I know finger too about prompt engineering. What does it take to make something like this?

If you want the startup... You're on a site run by Y-Combinator, who help get startups up and running.

Re: Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

#67

Does anyone know how start up or project like these are built from ground up? I have very very command of react and I can write rest api using spring or express.js. I know finger too about prompt engineering. What does it take to make something like this?

I'm currently building a similar app for my company. Apps like this are built pretty much entirely around prompting. The basic path is: User Enters Prompt > Combine with Internal Prompt > Feed to AI > Return Results. That's pretty much it but realize the "internal prompt" will take you months of work and refinement. There are many many tiny edge cases around using AI like this. One problem for example is you can tell…

I have fun building tiny hobby apps using these AI tools - I built an HN version of Reddit Enhancement Suite where I can tag people, it tracks votes on comments/users, etc, in about 90 minutes using Bolt - but I've tried doing "real" apps and it always seems to collapse under its own weight after the second or third new feature beyond the initial framework.

Re: Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

#68
Wix sites are some of the worst on the web. Not their appearance, but the Wix backend and the way that each javascript loading subdomain is loaded serially rather that in parallel from the first. Crazy (normal) people using browsers that automatically execute arbitrary third party code on their computers don't notice this. But sane people that only allow javascript to run manually end up having to do something like 4-5 separate reloads of a Wix site to get it to even display text. For me that means when I see a wix site I just close the tab.

Maybe with a little bit of vibe coding they can fix their infrastructure. But I doubt it.

Re: Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

#69
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the implication here is that the Wix platform sets the bar so low, that even a vibing LLM can surpass it. Companies like Squarespace set the bar much higher. Wix has always been a nightmare to use and customize.

>Companies like Squarespace set the bar much higher. When I was evaluating user friendly web platforms for several non-profits, I ended up choosing Wix over Squarespace because Squarespace didn't provide backup>restore functionality. That's a pretty low bar...

Just because they didn't prioritize a feature that most of their users won't care about doesn't mean its a low bar, it just means you care about something they don't.

Re: Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

#70

Everyone focused on the "vibe-coded, solo-preneur in 6 months" headline is being tricked. First, the details show this is not a "hallucination" but a misrepresentation of the facts, aka a lie. Second - and far more important - Wix did not buy the code output of an LLM, which anyone could easily reproduce, they bought the subscribers, funnel and team that built the business, not the code.

This is the true value of any software-based business, not the code.
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