Demand for Astra is really unprecedented. We're pulling all the levers possible to sustain the demand, but I've not seen anything like it until now and we went through very steep growth before. Priority will always be to keep excellent service for existing users, but we might have to pause new Pro subscriptions for a bit if this continues.

Introducing S1, our new foundation model that learns from one example. It can be taught 10-minute long tasks that it has never seen before, from one video prompt without any fine-tuning. Watch S1 operate in real-time via in-context learning:

We just blew past $200M ARR at @Base44 5 months after hitting $100M. We've released Base 1 in between. i'm proud of the healthy business we're building, being the only platform to own its entire stack (backend, models, etc) - which also allows us to move fast and be creative. All credits go to a very special team that i'm having so much fun working with

The biggest opportunities right now: 1. build for solving loneliness (the more AI floods everything, the more people crave real human connection, IRL and small social) 2. build for agents that need to spend money (they're getting virtual cards and budgets, someone builds the spend controls, fraud protection, receipts) 3. build for people drowning in AI output (everyone generates infinite drafts now, the bottleneck moved to reviewing and choosing, build the judgment layer) 4. build for the burnout economy (everyone is expected to always be on and always optimizing, and the backlash toward rest, slowness, and enough is building) 5. build for verifying humans (deepfakes broke trust, every dating app, marketplace, and video call needs proof-of-human within 2 years) 6. build for the physical world (the trades, hardware, robots that AI is finally reaching) 7. build for the agent that answers the phone (every local business misses calls after 5pm, a voice agent that books the job is worth thousands a month) 8. build for the aging (70M+ boomers who want to stay healthy, sharp, and connected) 9. build for the LLM-search land grab (being the cited answer is the new SEO) 10. build for the newly automated (the paralegal, the analyst, the marketer whose job just changed and needs to reskill fast) 11. build for the seat-pricing collapse (software repricing from $50/seat to per-outcome, whoever nails outcome billing wins a category) 12. build for AI enablement (95% of businesses use nothing beyond ChatGPT, someone has to onboard the other 95%) 13. build for the agency everyone resents (businesses pay $1k/mo to agencies they hate, an agent that does 80% of it undercuts the model) 14. build for verticals on 2011 software (dentists, HOAs, contractors, all overdue for an AI-native rebuild) 15. build for reviving dead software (thousands of abandoned apps with real users, agents can maintain what a team couldn't, buy and revive) 16. build for markets too small to matter before (500 lobster fishermen was never worth a team, now it's a weekend and a real business) 17. build for agents hiring agents (a shadow economy is forming, it needs escrow, reputation, and dispute resolution for machines) 18. build for the anti-AI premium (as everything gets generated, human-made and analog become status symbols people pay up for) 19. build for distribution-first (anyone can build the product now, so the audience is the moat, media company first, product second) 20. build for the reinvention of college (what does an MBA even mean anymore) 21. build for a world with more free time than it knows what to do with (if AI takes the busywork, the question becomes what people do with the hours, and that's a civilization sized market) note: more trends/ideas @ideabrowser (free to sign up) 22. build for the return to the physical (screens fill with slop, people crave the real world, the hands-on, the local, the analog) 23. build for the caregiving wave. The population is aging fast, tens of millions are caring for parents, and the whole burden is landing on families with no support. 24. build for the longevity shift (people want to live to 100 healthy, and a whole industry is forming around actively managing your own biology) 25. build for the housing and rootlessness problem (people can't afford to settle down, and the whole idea of a stable home base is up for grabs) 26. build for spiritual hunger (as institutions hollow out, the need for meaning, ritual, and belonging is exploding into new forms) KEEP BUILDING

A great example of how @Base44 is changing the way businesses work: Two teenage brothers started Junk Teens with one truck. A few years later, they had turned a junk removal business into a company generating $3M a year, with eight trucks and dozens of employees. But as the company grew, running the operation through Notes didn’t cut it anymore. So one of their young employees, with no professional engineering background, built an internal app using Base44 and ChatGPT. The app tracks revenue per hour, closing rates and employee performance. Now the whole company uses it every day. Every business works differently. Eventually, every business needs software built around the way it actually runs. Read more about their story in @Entrepreneur. Link in comments.

it was fun talking to @ollieforsyth with my partner in crime @marktluszcz some of the things we talked through - the technical aspect of building is not a challenge anymore, now what? how do we leverage AI to not only build stuff, but also market, design, take product decisions… and generally - how we’re making @Base44 not just a builder, but a co-founder. other interesting stuff - Base 1 and why we trained our own model. you can listen to our conversation on the New Economy podcast

The SaaS bloodbath has been beyond brutal. Wix for more than any other. This company is doing $2.1BN in ARR and they are valued at $2.1BN. Like WTF. And, they have Base44, one of the leaders in vibe coding, now doing over $170M in ARR. What is going on? How is this being priced at $2.1BN? I sat down with @Avishai_ab and have shared the biggest lessons below. 1. How Public Markets Are Getting Both Wix and SaaS Wrong Public markets routinely misprice tech cycles, hyping vibe-coding startups while discounting core SaaS engines. They ignore the moat of enterprise trust. Giants like Salesforce win because institutions trust them with sensitive data, creating security and compliance barriers automated code projects cannot easily replicate. 2. Was the Buyback a Terrible Decision? Timing the stock market is a fool’s errand. If your balance sheet has cash and your team is focused on core products instead of distracting M&A, a buyback during a dip can be rational. Capital allocation should be judged over three years, not a three-month panic. 3. How Do You Keep Talent When Your Market Cap Is Cratering? Stop treating talent attrition as a failure. It can be a healthy refresh. Bull markets make companies forget that elite teams are forged by solving hard problems, not coasting. When market caps fall, protecting your top tier can uncover hidden stars and make room for a hungry new generation. 4. How Do the Business Models Compare Between Wix and Base44? Scaling newer AI platforms requires ruthless focus on unit economics over expensive, generic LLM usage. The margin breakthrough comes from fine-tuning and combining smaller, custom models to match top-tier performance. Within two years, infrastructure cost declines could make AI COGS a non-issue for platform margins. 5. Why Wix Customers Will Not Churn to Vibe-Coded Solutions Mainstream SMBs have neither the desire nor capacity to build their own tech stacks with automated coding tools. Seemingly simple workflows, like vertical business logic for a hair salon, are surprisingly complex. Even elite engineering teams struggle to rebuild them quickly, proving vertical SaaS remains highly defensible. 6. Why Teams of the Future Will Not Be as Small as People Think The idea that future tech giants will run on skeleton crews managing thousands of AI agents is overhyped. The ecosystem gives too much credit to standalone AI capabilities. On granular business workflows, models still stumble, which means dense, capable human teams remain essential. 7. I Would Be Terrified if I Were in University Today, and My Advice to Students Entering the workforce today is uncertain, but current LLMs will not instantly replace white-collar jobs. Today’s models are strong at reframing data, not deep reasoning, and still make frequent mistakes. True disruption to human capital likely requires two or three more major breakthroughs. (links below)