Here's a story that sounds made up.
A 31-year-old engineer returns from military duty during a war. Six months later, he sells his startup for $80 million in cash.
No venture capital. No massive team. No Silicon Valley connections.
This is Maor Shlomo's story. And it's not about luck.
It started with a problem he couldn't ignore.
During the war, Maor volunteered to help a nonprofit. They needed a simple system to manage volunteers and internal operations.
The quotes they received from development agencies were over a million dollars. Delivery timelines were measured in months. And all of it for something that felt like it should take a week.
Maor had built complex systems before. He'd worked in Israeli military intelligence, where reliability matters more than elegance. He'd co-founded and run a data analytics company that raised over $125 million. He understood how tech worked.
Which is exactly why the situation frustrated him.
It wasn't that the tools didn't exist. It's that the friction hadn't been removed.
The people who needed software the most still couldn't afford to build it.
After he returned from service, he couldn't let the problem go.
Here's what's interesting about Maor's approach: He has severe ADHD. But ADHD often creates hyperfocus on problems that feel urgent and solvable.
While others debated enterprise features, Maor obsessed over friction.
He began building something on his own—not a company, just a tool. A project to explore a simple idea: what if creating software was less about learning to code, and more about being able to describe what you needed?
Tools like ChatGPT could explain code. But they couldn't ship products.
Maor started building something that could.
He called it Base44.
By January 2025, he had something working. You could type in a description of an app a booking tool, a feedback form, a small portal and the platform would generate a fully functioning product. Frontend, backend, hosting, authentication. All handled automatically.
It wasn't perfect. But it worked.
And more importantly, it reduced the time between idea and execution to almost nothing.
Three weeks after launch, he had 10,000 users. A few months later, that number had grown to over 250,000. In May, the platform earned $189,000 in profit.
He hadn't raised a cent. He hadn't hired a large team. He just focused on one thing: removing the unnecessary.
The opportunity isn't always in creating something new. It's often in making something that already exists feel effortless.
In June, Wix acquired Base44 for $80 million in cash.
It was because Maor had built something that proved what the next phase of software could look like.
You don't need to understand how a database works. You just need to know what kind of information you want to store.
The rest should be handled for you.
This story isn't about artificial intelligence.
It's about clear thinking.
Maor didn't try to change the world. He just tried to fix something that didn't make sense—and kept going until the fix became useful to more people than he expected.
We can't know which ideas will work. But we can recognize when we're solving a real problem that real people face every day.
In hindsight, it looks fast. But speed was never the goal.
Focus was.
And that made all the difference.
Read next: Achieve More by Doing Less
3 Rules of Slow Productivity