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Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

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Re: Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

#71

Post by runako »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #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.

> they bought the subscribers, funnel and team that built the business, not the code

This is strikingly similar to just about every tech acquisition in history. Buyers purchase the assets, potentially including part of the team, needed to produce a reproducible business outcome, however one defines those terms.

What is striking is how quickly the team was able to assemble a reproducible business outcome worth so much.

Re: Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

#72

Post by fidotron »

csomar wrote: post #57
fidotron wrote: post #31

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.

What's the game plan here? Buy every chatbot LLM SaaS?

Prior to the AI boom Wix had developed a niche in very small businesses with events and sales, where it has a lot of the tedious stuff around that in a state where you can no code it into place very fast.

The problems begin when you try to do things slightly different, and this is almost entirely down to the staggering levels of inconsistency in their core APIs. (Genuinely impressively so). Their business model relies on the useful pieces being opaque enough and irregular enough that you cannot move off without overcoming a big migration effort.

Consequently their interest will be in two areas: can they use LLMs to get people to use those existing modules and get locked in faster? Can they own the funnel of people using LLMs to attempt to create this sort of functionality for their existing market? This acquisition helps on both levels, so it makes perfect sense for them.

Re: Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

#74

Post by _fat_santa »

pc86 wrote: post #67
_fat_santa wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That has been my experience as well. My top comment talks about building an AI app, but that app is not being vibe coded. I know the article talk about how Base44 was entirely vibe coded but TBH i find that very hard to believe.

The other day I tried to legit vibe code for about an hour and Claude could barely build a weather app that used NWS data for me. Even with this toy weather app it collapsed a few features in, simply put the context windows of these AI tools is just not large enough. I think vibe coding _might_ be viable once context windows start growing into the 5-10M token range but even then I'm skeptical.

Re: Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

#75

Post by Retric »

cess11 wrote: post #39
bmiekre wrote: post #23

The reality is they paid for the subscribers, not the code. 250,000 sign ups is a lot. Sounds like they hit a real pocket, I would guess on LinkedIn ads/content. I can imagine a ton of non engineers who doom scroll LinkedIn would easily have signed up for a free account.

On average 320 dollars per line in that registry, over the next five years they'd only need to extract, on average, about five dollars per month from them to break even.

It’s the track record of 0-250k people in six months not just the current number of users. Presumably more people can be added fairly soon at minimal cost.

Also $25 million of that is essentially a retention bonus for the employees.

Re: Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

#76

Post by talkin »

pc86 wrote: post #69
wintermutestwin wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Backup/restore tends too look less important until it isn’t. ;)

Re: Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

#77

Post by steveBK123 »

Congrats to the team, but the media coverage is a bit silly here.

"Solo unicorn.. well, ok it was $80M not $1B.. and, sure ok it wasn't 1 guy, he had a team of 8.." LOL.

Guy lists himself as an "angel investor" and "Forbes 30 under 30" on his Linkedin, so clearly not his first rodeo and has good connections, likely a stronger ingredients than the tech.

So you know, not bad money, and I'd certainly take it. But doesn't seem like any step function change in ROI for startup founders due to LLMs here.

As others have pointed out, Wix bought the leads/client list.. not the tech.

Re: Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

#78

Post by wslh »

Sytten wrote: post #56
wslh wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only audit, but offensive security tools such as XBOW [1], backed by Sequoia and that finds and exploits vulnerabilities. I am on the waitlist though. [1] https://xbow.com/

Don't get your hopes up, I am in this market and most of it is not good. It is even doubtful that it is a step up from a regular scanner.

When I'm in skeptic mode like you, I still see all these projects as valuable contributions to general research in the field, even if they fail. My skepticism is mainly about the idea of an "all-knowing LLM" but I'm less skeptical about the value LLMs can provide when it comes to digesting large amounts of data and decision making. I was very impressed by the following news [1] but the people team is top notch.

[1] https://team-atlanta.github.io/blog/post-atl/

Re: Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

#79

Post by Jackpillar »

pc86 wrote: post #69
wintermutestwin wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

All of the existing WYSIWYG site builders are walled garden garbage.

Re: Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

#80

Post by cddotdotslash »

Fokamul wrote: post #6

As a "red teamer" ;-), I approve this message. Vibe coded apps? The more the merrier, guys.

This "AI will never replace _my_ job" attitude by security folks (and I say this as a security engineer myself) is insufferable. Yeah, there are likely lots of vulnerabilities getting vibe coded into apps right now. But AI is improving rapidly, and in a few years you'll likely look back wondering what happened to the job market. Adapt or don't, I suppose.
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