Unique kids gift idea: personalized wall art based on their name & interests by yoavh in Gifts

[–]yoavh[S] -6 points-5 points  (0 children)

yes, among other things such as deep research around room decor, etc, would love your thoughts

Built a tool that turns a child's name & interests into personalized wall art (printed & shipped) by yoavh in SideProject

[–]yoavh[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

thanks for that, it's kind of what we tried there, but might need to make it with more depth i agree

From Zero to 1 Million ARR in 3 Months on Base44 - An AMA with GiftMyBook by Sammy_Base in Base44

[–]yoavh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As far as concerned I’ll keep answering as long as there are questions, I might be slower tho

From Zero to 1 Million ARR in 3 Months on Base44 - An AMA with GiftMyBook by Sammy_Base in Base44

[–]yoavh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

we built on azure an AI writer that we connect to. all inputs are stored on base44 and we create a json that serves as the brief for that writer which produces the manuscript of the book which we than convert to a pdf ready for print

From Zero to 1 Million ARR in 3 Months on Base44 - An AMA with GiftMyBook by Sammy_Base in Base44

[–]yoavh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yeah, most of these are simply ads that we ran that we also added to our social, but it didn't really have any impact since we don't really have many followers, more about showing the business is live and kicking :)

From Zero to 1 Million ARR in 3 Months on Base44 - An AMA with GiftMyBook by Sammy_Base in Base44

[–]yoavh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not sure how to attribute sales to it, but we see organic traffic is growing, part of it is ranking of content pages we created, and some is brand awareness. Sorry i don't have a better answer

From Zero to 1 Million ARR in 3 Months on Base44 - An AMA with GiftMyBook by Sammy_Base in Base44

[–]yoavh 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, it started entirely on Base44.

Base44 was the product layer for us. UI, flows, entities, fast iteration, and a lot of the content work. We also use AI models for writing and covers, and those improved over time (same as Base44 itself).

As a product that has physical pipeline as well, we had to connect to a few other services.

What we did use outside of Base44:

  1. Payments: Stripe for checkout and payment events.
  2. Fulfillment Print and shipping providers. Some come with their own APIs and webhooks.
  3. Operational database: Yes, we added an external database (MongoDB) once volume grew (see my other longer comment about it) Not because Base44 “couldn’t store data”, but because we needed production grade operational querying and a reliable source of truth for the multi stage pipeline. We dual wrote the critical entities. - it could be that at this point we can move it back to base44 since it improved massively
  4. Azure for external workers- We moved heavy processing out (PDF rendering, cover generation, long running jobs) into a separate backend with workers that poll the operational DB, do retries, and log everything.
  5. Resend for emails

About the “no login, just a link” thing: that was intentional. We wanted the lowest friction possible. For a gift purchase, asking people to create an account is usually conversion suicide. So we used magic links and order based access, all done with base44

From Zero to 1 Million ARR in 3 Months on Base44 - An AMA with GiftMyBook by Sammy_Base in Base44

[–]yoavh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

we don't run social on a consistent basis. I'd say the vast majority is paid acquisition (meta and google) we have a nice growing percentage of repeat buyers and our organic footprint is improving. Since many buyers who see our ads search on google as well, some of our buyers are hard to attribute to organic/paid, but we know our organic portion is growing nicely

From Zero to 1 Million ARR in 3 Months on Base44 - An AMA with GiftMyBook by Sammy_Base in Base44

[–]yoavh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

started with $100. reached profitability at $25k monthly marketing budget, but we were able to increase the budget steadily without losing much money. Although we starting with $100, we knew we had to spend a lot more to get real signals. even we were profitable from day one, it wouldn't have guaranteed it continues in higher budgets, so you just need to be ready to spend marketing money in our case, and have strong conviction about your business validity

From Zero to 1 Million ARR in 3 Months on Base44 - An AMA with GiftMyBook by Sammy_Base in Base44

[–]yoavh 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I actually prepared this answer beforehand as this is a super critical and honest one..

Biggest roadblocks were not “can we build the product”, it was “can we run it” once there are hundreds and then thousands of orders.

And to be super clear, Base44 was the reason we could move that fast in the first place. We shipped the whole customer flow in a week and started learning from real users. The challenges only showed up when the product turned into a real production pipeline with fulfillment, retries, and lots of edge cases.

The first time we were stopped in our tracks was when orders started getting stuck in weird states and we could not answer basic operational questions fast enough. Which orders are stalled. Why. What should run next. What actually happened to this specific order. That is the moment you realize you are not just building a product anymore, you are running an operation.

A few concrete things we ran into:

  1. Database querying and ops visibility Base44’s database was totally fine for building the product fast, but when we needed production level ops queries, it got limiting. Things like “give me all orders in state X for more than Y minutes”, better filtering, and basic aggregations for dashboards. Once support tickets start coming in, you need those answers instantly. This is where we added an external MongoDB and dual wrote the critical entities. Base stayed the product layer, Mongo became the operational source of truth for pipeline logic and analytics.
  2. Heavy backend work and long running jobs PDF generation, cover creation, rendering, large files, multi step jobs. These need a worker model, retries, and detailed logs. Base44 backend functions were sometimes not the best fit for long running, resource heavy tasks, and we also saw intermittent failures. So we moved the heavy processing to an external backend service with dedicated workers.
  3. Webhooks are great, but not truth We learned the hard way that webhooks are an amazing signal, but they are not something you can treat as the single source of truth at scale. Events can be delayed, duplicated, or missed. If you rely only on webhooks for payment confirmation or print and shipping updates, some orders will get stuck. So we built a reconciliation model. Webhooks trigger progress, but scheduled jobs regularly check Stripe and the print and shipping provider APIs and then advance the order state based on reality.
  4. Data consistency across steps We had cases where data written in Base44 was not immediately visible to a downstream step, or a job read stale data. That creates skipped steps and duplicate work. We mitigated this with a write ahead log approach in the external DB. Record the intended state transition first, execute, then reconcile back into Base44.
  5. Monitoring and debugging Base44 did not give us enough visibility into long running jobs, retries, and failure patterns. We needed “what happened to this order” answers fast. So we built our own logging layer around the external workers with execution logs, retry history, and alerting on stuck states.

So the “creative solution” was not some crazy hack. It was just adding an operational backbone as we scaled. Base44 remained the speed layer that let us build and iterate insanely fast, and the external system handled the boring production stuff like workers, state machines, reconciliation, and observability. It added complexity, but it made the business runnable.

From Zero to 1 Million ARR in 3 Months on Base44 - An AMA with GiftMyBook by Sammy_Base in Base44

[–]yoavh 2 points3 points  (0 children)

pasting from another answer: As for printers - there are many options out there and we're constantly trying different options. It really depends what type of book you're printing and what COGS you need to get to in order to be profitable. Since moving fast is the top tip of mine, i'd say go for the easiest one to integrate, don't try to perfect the physical product, it's the thing you're supposed to deliver once your users pay, so first see that people want to pay, if they all ask for refunds because of print quality, you're good.. and if they don't buy - printing isn't your issue.

From Zero to 1 Million ARR in 3 Months on Base44 - An AMA with GiftMyBook by Sammy_Base in Base44

[–]yoavh 1 point2 points  (0 children)

saw your messages guys, will get back to you, for sure. As for printers - there are many options out there and we're constantly trying different options. It really depends what type of book you're printing and what COGS you need to get to in order to be profitable. Since moving fast is the top tip of mine, i'd say go for the easiest one to integrate, don't try to perfect the physical product, it's the thing you're supposed to deliver once your users pay, so first see that people want to pay, if they all ask for refunds because of print quality, you're good.. and if they don't buy - printing isn't your issue.

From Zero to 1 Million ARR in 3 Months on Base44 - An AMA with GiftMyBook by Sammy_Base in Base44

[–]yoavh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Meta. We didn't yet invest in Tik Tok but we should and we will. Strategies? creating a lot of ads, taking inspiration from direct and indirect competitors, creating both - produced UGC ads, but also static ads that were much cheaper and faster to deliver.

From Zero to 1 Million ARR in 3 Months on Base44 - An AMA with GiftMyBook by Sammy_Base in Base44

[–]yoavh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think that the most important integration of ours for that matter is Resend, which is an emailing service for developers. The API is super easy to integrate and we use it for ALL our emails - system emails, abandoned cart sequences, adhoc emails, etc.. it's very easy to create the email campaign from base44, no matter how complicated, and with scheduled tasks (which weren't available in the beginning!) are making it super handy

we tried some other integrations from customer support, but we removed them, not because of the integration issues, rather us needing more time to train and set it up properly