🚀 3.2.1. Solopreneur & 100 Bots ::: Atomic Scaling

A solo founder sold his 6-month-old AI startup for $80M. Instead of 50 employees, he ran 100 AI agents around the clock. That’s what Maor Shlomo did with Base44—built solo, sold to Wix for $80M+. Atomic Scaling is doing more with less. Here’s how.

3 Ideas from Me

I. Your First Hire Should Be a Bot.

Maor didn’t hire developers. He deployed them. 90% of his codebase was AI-generated. He orchestrated a “team” of AI tools to ship new features every other day. Result: insane velocity, built in public, viral adoption. Atomic Scaling principle: replace headcount with systems. Stay small. Scale output, not payroll.

II. Build for Fun, Serve Your People.

Maor Shlomo wasn't just chasing an exit; he was building something he genuinely enjoyed. He said, "I was like let's take a shot at it, and start the product that I know is going to be very very fun to build."

This passion was deeply intertwined with serving people he knew and understood, a concept we can call the BRAW Framework: Build for Fun: What problem are you genuinely excited to solve? Relate to: Who do you deeply understand and empathize with? Access to: Who can you easily reach and get feedback from? Willing to Serve: Who are you willing to go the extra mile for, even for free initially? Maor first user: his girlfriend, an artist. Second user: his childhood best friend, a restaurant owner.

III. $80M per Employee Is the New Metric.

Forget $1M per employee. Try $80M. This is the ultimate efficiency metric. Actually, out of 80M$ exit, 20M$ go to 6 employees hired 30 days before the exit. In Atomic Scaling, we call them EPIC employees!

2 Quotes from Others

I.

“The funny thing is that with Base44, for the first time in my life, I was not trying to build the biggest thing ever.” — Maor Shlomo, Founder of Base44

II.

“It doesn’t matter if I failed. At least I passed the concept on to others. Even if I don’t succeed, someone will succeed.” —Jack Ma, Founder of Alibaba

1 Action for You

What must be human? What can be automated or delegated to AI? How would you run this business if you couldn’t hire anyone? Sketch it. Do it. Have fun!

Let's Play,

Ludovic Bodin

3x Entrepreneur, 2x Unicorn Investor, 1x IPO. Founder of BOBIC Generational Wealth and Author of Atomic Scaling

P.S. Atomic Scaling = I help founders and teams shift into TTHG mode—“Tiny Team, Huge Growth”. We have a cohort of Atomic Scalers starting on July 25th. ​Want to know more:​ reply TTHG to this email.

If this made you think, share it with one founder who needs to hear it. If you want to dig more into ​Maor Shlomo story and learning, watch this​.

WHAT THEY ARE SAYING: 

"I want all the golden nuggets I can to help founders raise less or avoid VCs entirely. Atomic Scaling by Ludovic Bodin has some killer actionable ideas in it.” — Chris Tottman, Founding General Partner of NOTION.vc ($1B AUM) & "The Million Dollar ARR Club"