I joined the chat as well, but if Hendrik is here - we'd love to have you on the channel (https://youtube.com/@WithMultiplesAI). This will make for one hell of an episode, I think.
I helped out in their recent hackathon - https://base4good.com/ - mentoring folks on the app, and I also admin one of the user groups.
I am not a paid member of the team, just an admirer who wanted to get closer to the action. This felt right to me from the first moment, and I'm happy I had a small part in the journey.
I met Maor (the founder of base44) and team and had beers with them. Good people.
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Let me clarify a few things:
1. I don't know exactly how much vibe coding went into building base44 itself. I can attest that Maor's rate of releasing features was absolutely insane - I'm talking major updates every 1-2 days. I assume he's good with Cursor and the like. He's also very, very decisive on what to build and what not to build. Aggressive, even, I would say.
2. Maor had, for the majority of the life of this, no team. The employees joined way after base had customers. Most of what Base is was built by Maor, with 1-2 close friends helping cut out everything that wasn't relevant or wasn't great (so I'm told).
3. It's a different take on lovable/bolt etc. No one argues this.
4. Maor opted to include the db within the platform, rather than enable persistence externally. This really made the output great, and made fixing cross-application things very easy.
5. To me, base44 is PHP. It's a bit ugly, but it works, easy to explain to people, and once you get a hang of it it's a great hammer. It's not going to win the space race anytime soon, but it'll build you a house.
6. Base has resolve with AI functionality, which is far superior to anything I've seen outside of an IDE. It just works.
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To folks trying to win the AI race by building exceptional technology on the bleeding edge, good on you. I don't think Base is that.
I think Maor symbolizes something different: we're in the fast-grab era.
Big cos are not able to build killer AI apps at the rate they're expected to, which means they're circling around looking for what they can snatch with money/equity.
My take?
Build AI things that just work for a specific use case. Release them fast. Make people fall in love with them because they "do AI" for the use case.
Some bigco is flying close by, trying to build it but failing. Be there for the purchase.
Email: LinkedIn should be fine. If you search for it my email is also there.
I'm an engineer turned marketer, former devrel and VP Marketing.
I've spent a while in consulting, and considering (as in: still contemplating) joining a build again. Looking to join (as a co-founder or early founding team) companies that:
1. are working on something that makes a real impact in the physical world
2. are working on something that is highly technical (not traditional B2B SaaS or B2C)
I'm very good at making early-stage companies look like Series B companies, and making sure they say the right things when talking to the people they sell stuff to.
> 6. Reputation / Brand: Building a strong reputation often directly boosts sales, and AI is likely to make the brand-building process easier in surprising ways. Having a brand with a rich history can also be an advantage, given you consistently keep working on it and maintain its value over time.
Email: LinkedIn should be fine. If you search for it my email is also there.
I'm an engineer turned marketer, former devrel and VP Marketing.
I've spent a while in consulting, and considering (as in: still contemplating) joining a build again. Looking to join (as a co-founder or early founding team) companies that:
1. are working on something that that makes a real impact in the physical world
2. are working on something that is highly technical (not traditional B2B SaaS or B2C)
I'm very good at making early-stage companies look like Series B companies, and making sure they say the right things when talking to the people they sell stuff to.
So I do GTM and work a lot with marketing websites for companies with long sales processes.
The company mentioned there, Supercreator, funnily has a CRM - which is not just some funky AI chatbot thingie, but a proper enterprise thing that people use when doing sales.
It looks like they're treating creators and the "agencies" (whatever that means) as what we would potentially call "SMBs", and sell this CRM thing to them to manage their "customers", which I assume are the fans or subscribers or whatever on the OF side of things.
This is insanely interesting to me. Look at the website - you have a "request a demo" section (which is super enterprise B2B), look at the menu, it's like an enterprise SaaS website.
Very cool, thanks for sharing! I have writing work on the side for engineers, if you know any. Great way to get your writing skills going while getting paid to play with tech.
I actually started at DevRel and quickly understood that if you swap writing blog posts for writing whitepapers and website copy, you can easily make significantly more money.
Also, better and more understood KPIs - if I made this really good solution diagram and slapped it on a one-pager that I templated, and then the AE sent it to a customer and it made a sale move 1.2x faster, that's tangible results.
And the numbers don't even have to be insane; I remember building a dashboard as a head of DevRel that was made entirely out of vanity metrics. Today, I don't even make dashboards anymore - the results of my sales collateral are simply evident by the pipeline moving forward.
Also, I'm sorry to say, but so many DevRels are primadonnas - they won't go on sales calls, but they'll go to conferences. If they don't go to a conference every month, then they're not "getting what they came here for". Demand generation is beneath them, since "I don't look at leads, I'm building a community". Bleh.
Much better to work with people - as cutthroat as they may be - who push me to create better content that drives results.
Also led me to creating my first productized service - https://syntaxcinema.dev - and that's been going very well for me recently.
@TomGranot pretty much everywhere else except here.