The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth)

0:00 You're ahead of growth at Lovable, on track to be the fastest or one of the fastest growing companies in history. We're over two hundred million in AR. At this point, we're a hundred people large. The pace here is insane. You said that you've had to throw out most of your growth playbook. I feel like only thirty to forty percent of what I've learned in the last fifteen to twenty years of being in growth. Transfers here because we just need to invest in such bigger bets and innovate and create new growth loops here. Everybody and their mother is starting a vibe coding business nowadays, and we need to figure out how to be ahead of them. And to be ahead of them is not optimization of the problem, it's reinvention of the solution. I just feel like I usually spend maybe five. percent innovating on growth in my previous roles. Right now I'm spending ninety five percent innovating on growth and only five percent on optimization. What do you find is actually moving the needle? One of our biggest strategy is building in public and it's coupled with employee socials, founder led socials. And another one is giving your product away. Lot this is part of our growth secret sauce. You have to remove the barrier of entry. Somebody, one of our user stands up and say, Hey, I'm gonna have a acathon at my work on Lovable. Can you give us some free credits? to play with. Why would we prevent a person who wants to do all of the marketing and activating for us from using us? We're like, take it. How much do you need? The trick is get more people to try it, just ship things you can talk about. The only way to create a word of mouth loop is just to blow their socks off.

1:30 Today my guest is Elena Verna, head of growth at Lovable. In under one year after launching, with fewer than one hundred people Lovable hit two hundred million ARR Which is one of, if not the fastest ramp to two hundred million error in history, and growth is still accelerating. They've also recently raised a series B at a$6 billion valuation. So with that, there's a lot to learn about what Lovable has figured out about growth.

1:57 This is Elena's fourth visit to the podcast, a record. She is my favorite growth mind. And in our conversation, we talk about how the growth play book has fundamentally changed for AI companies. What works now, what no longer works, and what has surprised her most about how Lovable grows.

2:13 She also shares her advice about whether working at an AI company is right for you, some incredibly interesting insights into lovable secret sauce for growth. the unique ways they operate internally, their approach to building minimal, lovable products, also how they hire, and also how product market fit as a concept is no longer what it used to be, and how every company basically has to recapture product market fit every three months. This episode is incredibly tactical, and you will leave this conversation smarter on so many levels. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free.

2:51 Of nineteen incredible primium Products including a year free of Lovable Replit Bolt, N8N, Linear, Devin, Post Talk, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Drake Ash, Chappie R D, Mobbin, and Stripe Atlas. Head on over to Lenny's newsletter dot com and click product pass. With that I bring you Elena.

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5:19 Alena, thank you so much for being here and welcome back. To the podcast. Thank you for having me. As you know, this is uh a record fourth time back to the podcast. No one else has ever achieved this feat. I feel like you're uh you're basically my co host now. I love it. Thank you for inviting me back.

5:37 I'm very proud. record holder in this regard. What I love about you coming back each time is it feels like every time you come back you're just doing something even more epic and exciting. And so these days as we'll hear in the intro, you're ahead of growth at Lovable. Which no big deal on track to be uh the fastest or one of the fastest growing companies in history, uh, depending on the metric that you track.

5:58 Let's talk about just the scale and growth of Lovable to give people a sense of just how incredible this is. I'll share a bit of this in the intro, but just like what are some stats you can share about just how things are going in Lovable? So uh we are just a little bit over one year's old since we launched. Uh the company actually did exist as a GPT engineer before, but it officially launched in the third week of November last year in twenty twenty four. So uh for us, we've hit over two hundred million dollars in annual recurring revenue before we even hit our one year uh milestone since being launched, which was pretty incredible. U Lenny actually have really great um blog post on how quickly it takes for companies usually to get to their first million AR. And it's usually multiple years. So this is definitely a unicorn. I don't think this is a standard. There's a couple of things that Um

6:50 account for it and we can talk about it. And the growth is only accelerating. So it's compounding, which is great because we had our a hundred million in end of July. And just four months later we were at two hundred million. So seven months to well, maybe eight months to a hundred million. Another four months. to get to two hundred million. And from uh users too, we already have over eight million users um that have tried lovable.

7:15 We have as you can imagine to feed that two hundred million hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers. as well that are paying for us. Uh so things are Things are going great. And We'll talk about wine. Okay. Absurd. I think people are getting used to these insane numbers.

7:31 And not long ago is like Okay, if you had a million ARR in a year, you're pr doing pretty well. Yeah, yeah. I think it's still you're doing pretty well if you have a million AR in one year. This is uh This is one of the once in the lifetime type of uh companies and the category the way that it's evolving. So

7:49 А вона мишка да пин у сансет абсолют. It should never be. Um, in some categories it might be even faster and as we continue evolving technology, but I don't think that it's realistic to expect it um out of your business that you're starting right now. That is such an important point you're making there. It's so discouraging to founders to hear this these stories of okay, two hundred million nut. And again, this is ARR. There's a lot of companies

8:19 Especially in the data labeling space. I've had'em all on the podcast that are uh very fast growing, but they're not recurring revenue. There's also they pay out their people to do this data labeling. So the revenue numbers there don't really equate like recurring Two hundred million dollars. A year is

8:36 Absurd. Yeah, it is it is absurd. I really wanna make sure that people understand uh as we go through this episode as to why it's happening, because part of it is unlovable, part of it is just in the market and and how it's moving. So when you're setting yourself as a benchmark, uh, so you know which benchmarks you're actually to use and whether lovable is the benchmark that you should be using. Cool. I'm gonna get into that next. Last question just

8:59 I wanna see what you can share here. A lot of people look at these numbers. A lot of people are very skeptical. These are lasting durable numbers. Like who are these people? How is there two hundred million dollars being spent on lovable Anything you can have about just like gift people confidence this is real. This is gonna last. This is

9:16 a a really durable business. Well, I saw Stripe receipts, so it is real, as far as I'm concerned, um, unless Stripe dashboard is lying to us, but it is money deposited in the in our bank account. But uh let's talk about who's actually contributing to that number. We do have a really large use case of people uh starting their own companies on Lovable, so we call it a founder use case. Where somebody that is non-technical, that has never been able to code or create a piece of software, is now able to come in and actually build an app completely from scratch. And uh some of them are already monetizing it, some of it just using it for lead gen for other services or uh some physical goods, for example, that they're uh that they're selling. Some of them are just still building and uh we monetize on the act of building. So that progression of like building up to your product market fit takes quite a bit of time.

10:06 And even with Lovable, we're so much more efficient and effective compared to Hiring an engineer in terms of the price. But um it still takes time. Uh so we have a lot of founders, uh, whether it's B2C, where there's B2B, so consumer products, business products, e commerce, um, whatever it is. But on the other side, we have a lot of employees within companies using Lovable as well.

10:29 uh where they're building internal tools or they're building prototypes they're building landing pages. So um that is qua another use case that is very relevant and quite pr uh efficient for us. But then there is a hype and discovery that is happening as well. Because uh when I think about software, I think about it. I talked to John Cuddler actually, and uh he gave me this framework that is like completely stuck in my mind of Софтвер овось гос строкаблітиз стаж вот із пособо.

10:58 uh to actually create with this, then it needs to transition into value of how is it that am I gonna get value out of this? And then you can start thinking about scaling it. uh of which aspects of my life and my work uh the kinness actually go in. And we're right now very much in the capability stage with vibe coding because everybody's just exploring what can I do? And the beautiful thing here is that what you can do changes every month to three months. So I you constantly need to come back and you need to see what has changed. So a lot of people use it for personal reasons. and they I build myself uh apps tutoring apps for my kid so He has to answer questions in order to get some screen time accumulated for him.

11:39 I build my own portfolio. I see people doing wonderful things. My favorite story that I always say. Uh there's this um man that created a proposal on lovable. So his fiancee had to answer questions and like she had to complete this game and then at the end there was like this big reveal and he proposed to her. But people just unlock the most creative things that they build on lovable and that's where the revenue is coming from. The one piece that is working very well for us in terms of how our monetization model is set up and how it interjects with the your activation moment, which we can also cover But that is what's driving um that um both conversion and retention rates.

12:17 Let me ask you one question that's on people's minds, I imagine, as you talk about this. Just what is what does retention look like? Yeah. So retention uh really I look at it in two ways. Uh retention that it comes as a subscriber retention. Uh so how much meaning pay subscribers do we get and how many of them are we capable of renewing? There's also a very important aspect of it is how many of them can we expand? Because if you can get positive or above a hundred percent net dollar retention, which is super important metric for investors, if you don't know about net dollar retention, please read it up. That's like a superpower to get bigger multiple, if you can show an NGR that is over a hundred. And then there's actual engagement retention as well, because uh that is the leading indicator for how real paid retention is gonna look like. For paid retention, um, I know there is a so much on the market of

13:04 Oh, this is a high product and um it just it's a leaky bucket and it has really high churn rates. Although um I'm not I shouldn't share it's not public numbers for us to share actual retention, however, what I can say it's on par with benchmarks uh of other B2B SaaS products that I've ever worked at. And I worked with Miro, Dropbox, uh, SurveyMonkey, Netlify, um Amplitude and others. So Uh we Are we absolutely crushing with paid retention? Um no. Are we where most of the other companies are?

13:36 Yes, our NDR is quite good because when people bill, they want to buy more credits to bill. So uh we're seeing really good uh revenue retention. But we're honestly more focused right now on engagement retention than even paid retention because our North Star. Is just to get as much usage as possible and uh we will fix and tune our monetization model afterwards. So engagement retention, I would say, is a by far bigger priority focus for us at the moment. That is incredibly uh interesting and optimistic to hear because of the growth rate. Uh rarely is growth rate this high and retention is on par with great companies.

14:15 Yeah, and I'll just say too, which is a little bit maybe counterintuitive to would be to a lot of companies, we don't optimize for revenue. At all. In fact, internally we have a lot of discussions about How can we give more product away? How can we uh reduce our revenue growth rate by just getting more paid subscribers, more users using Lovable to just get bigger share of the market. So our revenue is an outcome of us just trying to get more people through the door, not us trying to optimize for revenue per user or to get them to monetize at the higher rate.

14:51 So there's like a very interesting path here where by actually focusing on the inputs like you should it translates to a good output, but we don't look at that output as something that we're trying to grow. Let's talk about growth. Let's talk about what you've learned about growth in this space.

15:07 You had this post online where you said that you've had to throw out Most of your growth playbook. This is a huge deal. You've led growth a lot of really successful companies. Lovable's growing incredibly well. Uh this tells me there's a lot we can learn from what you've seen.

15:21 So tell us what you're seeing, what's still working, what's not working, what you've uh learn about what it takes to drive growth at a company like Lovable. Yeah, I would say that in any other role that I've come into before Uh I felt confident in about eighty percent of the patterns that I can bring to that role. meaning that I can identify inputs, understand which framework kind of applies, I know a lunch of examples that fit in within that framework. So we just need to localize a solution and push.

15:49 And it was quite productive in terms of getting a company those additional acquisition, conversion, engagement monetization rates. So um I I felt very repetitive in a way um after some time because I feel like I'm just coming in and copy pasting, copy pasting. And although every single company loves to say that they have unique problems at the end of the day, all of the problems were very similar. And I felt like I was like doing the same job over and over again. When I started at Lovable, the one thing to me that was very clear. Іззапані

16:19 was growing like crazy before I joined. So I wanna make sure that There's not that much value on what I have even added today because this company is on a tear. And yes, we're rounding the edges to and removing barriers for growth. Uh so We're not standing in our own way, but uh there's something more magical happening here that is not A pattern that I've ever seen before. It's not a framework that I can even conceptualize um in my head. And plus it's a new category that I've never seen, or I've never been in a company that is in the new emerging category that hits fast moving water so quickly. And that's the difference because when you're usually trying to create a new category, it takes years. I know it's every marketer's dream to create a new category, but it takes decades often to like really to really get that much hype and adoption around it.

17:12 Versus with vibe coding, this has seemed to have happened really quickly. It's like it's hit the nerve with the market. So yes, we're at the right place, we're at the right time, but we're also in really fast moving waters. And um the demand that is coming to us, like we need to capture it mostly, we don't need to generate a lot of it yet. But at the same time, it comes with a really big downfalls of we're not in control of a lot of our growth. I mean, let's be honest about it. There's so much incredible word of mouth that is happening, and we're trying to grow that, but uh to enable as much of that as possible. But um it's The company is moving. We're just like hanging on to it as fast as possible and making sure that the we're like not gonna hit. A wall, so to speak, in front of us, and that the wheels are greest.

17:59 And that all of the pieces are in place is like your race car framework that you have as well. the like we're we're really just putting a lot of oil into it, uh and um figuring out What is our engine actually gonna be that is gonna take us forward? But uh when I'm thinking about the patterns here and what I have to unlearn, I feel like only thirty to forty percent. of what I've learned in the last fifteen to twenty years of being in growth.

18:24 Transfers here. And uh some of it is very straightforward, okay, this is how you're gonna do paid marketing, this is how you're gonna do some of the habitual retention, here's the free to pay c maybe uh monetization uh frameworks that still stand. But the rest of it, um Ah, seriously, it doesn't feel like it even matters anymore. Because we just need to invest in such bigger bets and innovate and create new growth loops here, as opposed to trying to optimize it to the moon and be and beyond, uh, which would I usually be focused on in a scale business like this.

18:57 Let's follow those threads. So what is it that no longer is worth it in this bucket of just like let's not spend any time on this thing? And then what do you find is actually moving the needle? Not worth it. In growth, uh, most of the people spend most of the time optimizing existing user journeys. So um you already have maybe some of your growth loops that you understand that you try to optimize, or you just know, hey, there's big drop offs from acquisition to activation. Let me go figure out how to I can tweak the dials to get it done. Here, what I find is that um optimizations are just not worth our time.

19:31 So a lot of the times my growth team actually ends up working on new features or just standing up new growth loops one after another. And yes, there's of of course the saying of like more gross loops does not mean more growth, but at the same time, then the market is moving so quickly. You need to stand up a bunch of initiatives to capture it because it's perishable. Or we also have so much competition. We're not Alone here, so we can't ignore that there's

20:01 Everybody and their mother is starting a vibe coding business nowadays, and we need to figure out how to be ahead of them. And to be ahead of them is not optimization of the problem, it's reinvention of the solution. So I just feel like I usually spend maybe five percent, maybe ten percent if I'm lucky, innovating on growth. In my roles, in my previous roles. Right now I'm spending ninety-five percent innovating on growth and only five percent on optimization. And most of my frameworks are on optimization because it's really hard to come up with frameworks for innovation. Because By default.

20:35 They're by definition they're innovative. What I'm hearing here is Uh, new features, launching new features, l new products is one of the bigger growth levers versus like you have a bunch of cool stuff make it more Make it easier to use increase activation, reduce friction, things like that. Yeah, and for example, um we on Growth Team launched uh

20:56 Integration with Shopify to enable e commerce use case. Because we're like, hey, there's already people trying to come in and do it. Um, Shopify was open for integration with us. Let's go lean into it so people can by code their storefronts. Uh that came out of growth. That usually would never come out of growth. Like why would growth team ever invest into a core product integration? Or we um enable voice mode for people so they can actually chat with Lovable using their voice as opposed to only having type. And um

21:25 That's also it's a feature, it's a core product feature, but we're like, hey, it's gonna help people to converse with lovable more. It's gonna increase the engagement. One area that we've spent very little time in is activation. Cause usually I spend majority of my time in activation because there's so many awareness things that need to happen and uh so many things that Uh we uh we need to like smooth out experience for the users in order for them to get through that setup moment to a hard moment to that habit loop. And here you're just interacting with agent. So uh we at the beginning were like the agent team that we have here is working a lot on it. Like why would we go in there and and and do anything? It's like our core team is responsible for oxidation. Now we're starting to move into doing agent work ourselves. So all of a sudden growth team is not just doing

22:12 product surfaces, now we're doing a gentic workflows an and codifying agent instructions In order for customers to activate better. So the work fundamentally I feel like has gotten deeper into product and deeper into actual core product functionality as opposed to just being a smoothing surface on the outer layers. Okay, that is also a very big deal.

22:37 Every growth person that's ever been on this podcast, including you, always talks about the power of activation. Just the how much opportunity there is constant to get people to this aha moment, realize how well the value of this product That increases tension, it increases everything. And what you're saying here is you barely spend any time on activation. Because

22:54 In a company like Lovable. There's a prompt, you give it what you want. it generates a thing and that's basically all it is. And so the impact is to make that agent better at that thing versus micro optimizer every step. And our agent team.

23:08 Spends night and day thinking about it. So I've never been at the campany workout. Think so much about activation, think so much about that first generation, think so much about reaching a hard moment. So it's more weaved in into DNA of the overall company, which takes the pressure off of me to only have to focus on it. Because otherwise, yeah, I would be in that in that experience all the time. But I feel a lot more at ease because everybody's thinking about it and everybody's working on making kick making agents better. And agent, the beauty of it is it doesn't matter if it's actually first generation or if it's your nth generation. It just needs to be a better generation. Agents need to understand your intent better. and think and reason behind it. So it like improves the entire life cycle immediately, as opposed to having to only work on that first experience, per se.

23:59 And what you're not saying is don't care about that. Experience it's the team building that is already f obsessed with making the activation experience better, better. I I love that because I that's the core product functionality at this point. And Before I people would spend more time building deeper features or deeper use cases or trying to um improve some platform functionality. And now the core team

24:25 They're obsessed about That first experience because that is core product. Another lever that I've noticed, especially with lovable, and I'm seeing it more and more in social media is just Founders. Telling you what's going on.

24:36 I think this connects really deeply with the new features. Launch new features say Anton. is just like, Hey, check out this cool new thing, check out our growth numbers. Is that a big growth level too? Yeah, so One of our biggest strategy is uh building in public. Uh building in public and it's coupled with employee socials, founder led socials for sure.

24:57 Uh this is difficult for larger companies, but when you're smaller and you still have a little bit more narrative control uh with uh with everybody on your team. Plus you have so much more trust within your organization of where people are gonna say the right things because they understand what actually has happened. Uh that ability to Just really quickly deliver the message to the market becomes really important. Now we still do the big launches, so we still have everything tiered into tier.

25:25 Three, two, one, like tier ones are gonna happen as like big moments that we're gonna really rally as a company behind. And it's gonna be something that um is meant to step function change our product market fit. And uh we're gonna do a bunch of activities behind it. But at the same time, what's really important to us is to maintain noise in the market. And that noise in the market happens by us shipping every day, every other day, multiple times per day, and just talking about it constantly. Interestingly enough, it's actually works with fantastic resurrection strategy because people are like, Oh. There is more things here, like I need to go check it out.

26:03 It also works as great reengagement strategy, so instead of sending newsletters. to say like here's the market trends or here's the user stories. Like people are like literally logging into their social to see like okay what has lovable shift now? It's like what what what is the change. So it's interesting to them to see. Because from the time that they voice their opinion on what needs to happen to actual delivery is so short, so they feel heard. And they are heard because that's how we uh prioritize all of the things that we're shipping. But it's interesting because

26:32 I never been in a company that Tries to maintain so much just shipping velocity. to maintain certain amount of noise. That it feels like the product is alive. It's changing every single week. And then there's like these big amplifications, turbo boosts, so to speak, in the race car model. uh that then go uh go out and they fundamentally create a step function change in that product market fit as a whole. And uh

26:58 That is a retention strategy I can get behind any day and all day. I only hope that we can maintain it as we continue scaling. Sounds stressful. This reminds me I had uh G Garov. He's the C of uh Mirage. He used to be called Captions. Which is a really successful AI video company. startup and they have a policy of you ship a

27:20 uh marketable feature every week. Mm-hmm. That's how their company operates. And it it's the same thing. It's just ship things you can talk about. Velocity of shipping is our number one core value in development team. So we do anything and everything to just keep it going up, up, up and um into the right. And by the way This is also means that everybody is a little has a little bit of marketer within them. This is uh we have very lean product organization. We actually lean on our engineers uh to do a lot of product work. We call them product engineers.

27:49 Uh and uh they have to go and they have to announce the thing that they've shipped. It doesn't just funnel through marketing. So there's a lot of uh autonomy, a lot of agency that needs to happen with this with this type of velocity because marketing team, otherwise you have to have like enormous marketing team to staff that so it has to come with some roles and responsibilities, uh redefinition on the team as well. Let's talk about marketing. That's something else you've written about is just marketing is changing in a big way their role in growth. How does marketing play a role in all of this?

28:20 On one side, marketing channels are changing, on the other side, marketing's involvement into everything that product does is changing. And then number three, I think even marketing organizations in terms of where they're hire the most um are changing as a result as well. So I'll talk about second one first, just because we just talked about shipping, and that is um Yeah, you still have your product marketers, you still have your channel managers, um, but they focus more on the big things and the narratives, although it's difficult because the narrative even changes all the time as these functionalities come through. Usually you can come up with a positioning and the messaging and you can have it for years and and create all of the campaigns around it. Now you have it for three months and then the product changes so like the cycles here are really uh really short and uh for smaller changes, because cycles are so short, they spend so much time actually focusing on it as they should, that some of these smaller changes just cannot be supported by marketing. You have to delegate it to your product and engineering team to do their own marketing, because otherwise, again, you're gonna have to have enormous marketing team in order to support it all.

29:27 But at the same time, channels in which marketing right now works, I think are changing quite a bit. And um not enough people I feel like are freaking out and talking about it as opposed to like moving just in the same direction over and over again. And the changes that I'm seeing is that It is very has been very clear to me that when you're talking about organic strategy, if you marketing organic strategy. If you ask me that

29:51 Five years ago, I would have said that's SEO. It's search engine optimization, go on Google, that's the organic marketing strategy. If you ask me what's the organic marketing strategy right now, to me, it's all about social. Which is what is my CEO posting? What is my team posting? What is my LinkedIn, what is my creator economy doing in influencer marketing. And um across all of the social platforms. That is my organic, which is balance kinda paid to be fair. But when I think about organic, there is still a lot of that word of mouth. What are my users posting on social? What are they talking about and what are they uh what are they sharing? Which is like a mind shift because I've been always, especially in B2B, so focused on search. And now I feel like it's been completely pushed even further into consumerization territory, and it has become

30:39 All about social no matter How beautibee you are. Because that's where eyeballs are at. That is fascinating. And so when you talk about socials, what are you finding is most helpful that

30:49 Twitter slash X, is it LinkedIn, is it YouTube, TikTok, Instagram? For founder socials, uh we employ socialists, um, X and LinkedIn are fantastic sources, um, especially for B2B, because that's where all of the B B2B people are at. But You cannot just have Chad GPC write your copy and post it. You need to show personality. Like there needs to be humanity fall uh that it goes through it. And it's not natural for everybody, and it feels very awkward sometimes to start. Uh, but It's important to people to see who's building the company because there's so much competition now on functionality, so they can rally behind a team. So they want to have a team that they want to win.

31:32 And for that you need to be vulnerable, you need to be authentic, obviously, but you just need to be yourself. So like that corporate scrubbing has to completely fall off. Which um Is obviously gonna pull in as as the company scales, but at least at the beginning that is a your chance to stand out.

31:52 And then your customers posting about you. So that word of mouth of uh really creating a product. that creates something for customers that is worth talking about. It gives them stories that they want to share that feels empowering to them to tell to others like they're unlocking a secret, like they feel proud of what they have created.

32:14 Which what we focus a lot on lovable on to have that feeling of oh my gosh, I have superpowers now, and I can't wait to tell others. I cannot wait to show others what is happening. So on both of those sides to me that is very much organic. If you're in a consumer, then Instagram, TikTok. Are very much a goal as well. So here it's uh the CO clearly is an important uh variable in this them. In this case Anton just tweeting, here's what's going on, Lovable Bull, here's how fast it's growing, here's something we've learned.

32:44 Uh we had the C of Gamma uh on recently grant, and he's exactly the same thing, just sharing a bunch of lessons, journey building in public, a big part of the growth level. And your point here is okay, so it's the CO, but then it's also how do you get your customers to Share things on socials. And then there's a paid uh influencer sort of component. Yes, uh the customer is difficult one. That's a word of mouth loop that you need to stand up. The only way to create a word of mouth loop is just to blow their socks off. when they actually experience your product.

33:13 We have a really almost unfair advantage because our product is called Lovable. So by default, we're trying to create an absolute lovable experiences. Like that is a mentality internally. If it's not lovable, we're not gonna ship it. So uh and the best way to fix a bug at lovable is to say this is not lovable, like when everybody just like jumps on it, uh to fix it right there and then. Sprints no sprints, it doesn't matter. It's getting fixed right now. So uh from that perspective. We kinda have that culture already embedded as part of our brand and as part of our name, which helps us a lot.

33:48 But that's The point is that you feel that brand through every interaction. Uh, I talk to my designer all the time. How can we add more love marks into the product? How can we prioritize more unique interactions, the little elements that Make up that feeling of This product is speaking to me. It's like it feels something like that is unique. It has personality.

34:07 uh behind it. So We put all of the brand work actually into our product. When you think about lovable thing people think about a brand, but we don't have a brand marketing team yet. So it's all just through product interactions and some of those building in public moments of the people behind. uh those product interactions um that is our strategy. And then there's influencer marketing.

34:30 Interestingly enough, influencer marketing is ten times bigger for us than paid social. So yeah, we do some paid social as well. Um and It's working decently. It's quite expensive from payback period. Um we're still optimizing it. As I said, we're pretty early on in all of these channels, but influencer marketing is something that has worked uh from the beginning. A lovable and uh reason behind it is that. Influencer marketing, especially on the socials, it gives you an opportunity to have a little video and interaction. And lovable is all about seeing like oh my gosh, this is what I can do.

35:02 And uh this is possible. So that drives people to go and try it themselves. So that's why social works very well for us because it's not really a written value proposition, like nobody knows what white coding is, but you watch ten seconds of it and you go, Whoo. That's new. Let me go give it a try. Who would have thought that ahead of growth Who is traditionally seen as like data metric spreadsheets, drive KPIs is like

35:27 Okay, how do we make this more laughable? How do we add more moments of delight? I don't know. My my my joke is like at the end of my lovable Journey whenever hopefully never comes to an end, but but at the end I'll be like a growth brand person. Here, here. Hi, my name is Elena. I do brand now. But I I actually see it as part of growth strategy to make sure that that brand shines.

35:49 through every single interaction um and I always talk to my team about it because That is. one big lever in our girl story. Yeah, so I think that's a really important point to highlight. The reason lovable is growing so fast is it is A product people love. You've made something people want.

36:06 And the word of mouth spreads because it's something that blows people's socks off, as you said. So it feels like That's the first thing you gotta get right. Yes, well the first thing you have to get right is you have to be at the right place at the right time and you have to be in fast moving waters. Like let's not discount how fast this category is exploding on its own. So this cannot happen in every single category that you're starting to build a product. But the way to stand out in the supercrowded categories to create experiences that speak to people. That I think is something that a lot of people deprioritize because they still prioritize functionality. over humanity within software. And I think that we're actually moving to the new era of software that needs to feel human.

36:46 That people want to interact with, not just utility of it, because cost of software is coming down so much to develop. Да ви науки ібст інту емоционал філ. А в да софтве а за постю они фокус он критин до утиліті. out of it, so to me it's uh It's a

37:07 I I I love this move because I I hate nothing more than going to software that is just like so painful to use that I lose some brain cells. uh as I'm interacting with it versus software that I feel I get energy out of, and for lovable for me, like I cannot wait. On some of the projects that I have to go and by code myself, like that's the highlight of my day. And I just like I don't I I I bring in my daughter and I'm like, Let's go do this. Like, what do you think that needs to be done?'Cause I just get so much energy out of doing it. And um that is the feeling you cannot

37:38 create by looking at it as a utility. Problem. The way I think about it, the way w what you're describing is it's almost table stakes have r increased and now it's so easy to build. Now the big differentiator is experience design delight. Exactly. And it has to translate through every single interaction. So Your designer has to be one of your first hires now in startups. It's not just

38:00 About the the engineering, so to speak, utility. And you have to think through every single interaction of does this communicate our brand? Or not. So along those lines I wanna come back to something you talked about, which is

38:11 Launching new features is a huge growth lever. Kind of the Big question there's just how do you maintain quality and cohesiveness. as all these people are empowered to ship stuff. Is there anything though there you've seen that works well to Help.

38:24 Avoid just the Frankenstein product, just endless features that you want to tweet about. Yeah. One part of it is not something that you can codify, but it's the type of people that you hire that are gonna go and ship these things. We at Lovable try to hire the absolute best talent available out there that we can bring in and that we can source and that we can attract uh to grow with. And what I w do I mean by that best talent. Um, it's not that somebody who has been at really large companies or somebody that has really

38:52 Uh, done a lot of logos or has big success stories behind them. It's somebody who is extremely passionate about their job. It's their hobby. They love to work. They have fire in their belly. This is not a paycheck for them. They want to do this for some ulterior reason. This is the biggest opportunity of their life. So this is global maximum against. Any other opportunities that are in front of them at the moment. So that's very important for us. We want people to come and do their absolute best work. At lovable. It's very important. And you can

39:23 Feel it in this office. People are wired up, they are so high on How can we make this better? How can we deliver more to our customers? And that's very different compared to usually how companies Girl, we're like, Okay, yeah, the check, check, check, they fit the skill set, let's bring them in, but is that passion, is that fire behind it.

39:45 And then uh the second piece is that um we Work really hard on just addressing what's the success here looks like. What is it that we're building, what use cases are we building for? And then because we hire these people that Are so passionate about it. The other two skills, by the way, that are super important is high agency and high autonomy. I can figure out things that are tangential to me. That I don't need

40:08 other specialty, so to speak. Like I don't need a marketer to go launch something. I can go figure it out. And I have high agency. I can go do it myself. Um I'm gonna own it from all the way from start to finish. Uh, those are very important, something that we screen for and something that we look for in our culture. And then uh you just See What you want to do is up to you.

40:30 So there's very little supervision that happens on the ground. Um now we all have uh goals in like some of the big launches that we're all marching towards. But some of the work um that is completely up to developers, up to uh marketers or whatever, what is it that they want to do? So There has to be that enablement of go try things, and because of our velocity, if you fail, it's not a big deal. We'll just pivot, we'll go we'll get we'll get through it. We are not here to just win all the time.

40:59 On the hiring of these incredible people. As we all know, it's very hard to hire. People these days, especially the best. What have you seen Lovable does differently or does well that helps them recruit the best? Yes, and especially recruit in Stockholm. I mean the main office here is in Stockholm. We're asking a lot of people to relocate, uh, which is a no small feat.

41:18 Now some of it is um makes it easy because of how much hype we created around our product. People want to come work for us. I there's um they're reaching out to us. They're saying, I I love what you're doing, I wanna join it. Uh so That we have a cheat code to it because like we have most of the time when we reach out to somebody they say yeah. I would love to explore. So uh building that product that is highly lovable also creates a really great recruiting brand for you as well. So make sure that

41:47 They're Multiple benefits to that. But uh second of all We do a lot of trials. Uh for people, so trial work to see them in traction. Mm-hmm. A work trial to see them in action for a couple of days. We pay them as part of the work trial.

42:01 We have uh some probation periods that we start people on uh because this is company is not for everybody. As I started said in the podcast in the in the beginning. The pace here is insane. I went on vacation. Uh for the first time. So I've been here for six months. I went on vacation um for ten days. I came back, I felt like I needed to onboard from the beginning. I

42:24 Everything changed. And when I'm in it, I feel like it's an evolution, but the fact that just being gone for 10 days, it feels like a complete revolution in the company. It's that piece is just not for everybody. And that's okay because I'm very firm believer that there's different cultures and different environments that the best fit for different personalities and different people. So we try to be very upfront with how Things are and how chaotic they are. And we prioritize people that don't look for clarity, but can create clarity out of chaos. Because um It is

42:58 Absolutely chaotic. Otherwise, and if we start to look for people that can explain it uh to us, that's the only way that we can succeed. The way you described going on vacation and feeling very different, it feels like when you don't see your kid for a few days and they're just like completely different. You're like, How did you grow up so fast in three days? Exactly. Exactly. Let me try to summarize the growth levers that you're finding is are working. And I'm trying to think about this from the perspective of Uh an AI startup trying to think about hey, sh shoot, how do we grow faster? What is lovable figure out?

43:29 So feels like number one is just Uh build something lovable, something that blows people's socks off. But also in a market that is growing. that people want to pay money for. Like you can build something lovable that nobody actually cares about, that that there'sn't much money going to the space. There's no the tide pushing it forward and it won't work.

43:46 I call it minimum lovable product. Like it shouldn't be minimum viable product anymore. Viability is left. Yeah, Back in tw twenty tense. Now it's minimal lovable product. That's the only thing that matters. I love how these AI tools are letting us you know, like PMs have always had these um

44:03 sort of a s uh smoke door test or like what's the term just like Or it's not a real product. Uh Painted door. Painted door, there it is. Yeah, and that and it's like okay, we just have a landing page, there's nothing there. And now AI makes it easier to do that and it's like more full featured. Yeah, well it's the feedback cycle is just completely collapsed. You can go from idea to

44:24 Some product uh that is functioning to user feedback within a day, if you want to. I mean, depending on how fast that you want to run or how complex the product is. For missions it took us couple of weeks to by code it to the point to where because we also cre um I have a full time vibe coder on my team. He's amazing. So like he he wanted to create videos, like he did a bunch of designs for it, uh too. So We He he took him a couple of weeks, we're testing it now, and then we'll put it in the product. But it's a completely different development life cycle.

44:54 Before uh it would just take so many more steps uh from user research to uh the design sprints uh to prioritizing an engineering roadmap to build something minimal and min and viable to actually test to the little long testing cycles. Now it's just like boom, let's go. Uh it's taken us Could have taken us a day, we just decided to take a couple of weeks to get all of the video pieces correct. I saw you launch list on LinkedIn. I to me it looked like a a full product launch.

45:23 Uh it is interesting to hear. This is just uh Sort of prototype. Yeah, I better produce it. Minimum lovable part. Okay, uh I gotta ask, you have this you said you had a full time vibe coder. What the heck is this? Is this like an engineer, is this something else? What is a full time vibe coder?

45:38 Great question. This is a new job role that is actually popping up here and there. Uh it's absolutely fascinating to watch uh this development because I see vibe coding as a skill being added to a lot of job descriptions for designers, for product managers, uh for marketers, which I think is a really interesting shift. Finally, Excel can move over and like we have a new skill to add that is um super empowering and and I'm not three years old. But uh five code or so uh his name is Lazar, and he I actually was chief of staff in his previous, so he's not technical at all. He's self-taught uh in technic aspects of it, but he was very early on in the vibe coding wave, so he learned a lot about it. He was um user of all of the vibe coding tools, all included.

46:26 And uh when I was coming into the role, I'm like I have so many projects that I will vibe code myself. So I run this uh woman only hackathon she builds, I vibe coded the first version of that site and like and submission process for applications. And then other people came in and started building on top of it, but I vibe coded, but then like I don't have enough time sometimes because I need to run around and I want to push out so many different initiatives that I wanna test in the market with our own products. So um we connected on social, and can you like would you join us? And he joined us first uh part time. I make you bringing so much value. For example, we

47:04 partnered with Shopify and he created a bunch of Shopify lovable templates. uh by coded for us. And it's been so helpful uh to have somebody like that that is just like pushing all all of these things out. And he's an absolute expert. So he's teaching us all too of what is possible was lovable because he's on the cutting edge of constantly pushing it to the limit. So I I really enjoy having that role, which I've never had before in my life and in my team. Uh I'm not surprised. I've

47:33 I've never heard of this role before as a real full time job. Do you think this is a thing people will start hiring for at non By coding companies. So I vibe code myself. So like I would put that as even as a skill on my s uh on my resume. Now it took me a while to figure out. By the way, like Everybody is like, Oh, you just go and like it and it all happens out of magically. It takes you a couple of iterations, couple of projects until like you know, okay, this is

47:56 This is how I need to translate it, how I need to think about it. But for me, it's when I started scaling of what I want to vibe code. That's where his value really came in. Because I'm like, Okay, I understand what is possible, I know what needs to be achieved. And some of these apps I want to be almost full blown built, uh, because they're not gonna get incorporated into the product anytime soon. They don't need to be. I'll just link to them from uh from our header, so to speak. And uh he really accelerated that velocity for me. So once you get into by coding and you see its value within your organization, leaning into somebody like that just accelerates your velocity because it is like an engineer. Uh on your team.

48:34 is just they're not to me his his part his part technical, but he they can be non technical if they're really good. That is fascinating. This episode is brought to you by Persona, the verified identity platform helping organizations onboard users, fight fraud, and build trust. We talk a lot on this podcast about the amazing advances in AI, but this can be a double edged sword. For every wow moment, there are fraudsters using the same tech to wreak havoc, laundering money, taking over employee identities, and impersonating businesses.

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49:44 Thanks again to Persona for sponsoring this episode. Let me kinda go back to summarize just real quick the growth levers. I wanna move in a somewhat different direction. So things that help. Lovable growth one is just build something in my that blows your socks off. As you said.

49:57 Uh I love these phrases out here. The second is uh Make noise in the market. And the way that Lovable does this The CO's tweeting constantly. you build something that blows people's socks off so that they share

50:09 Things on socials themselves. Plus this influencer marketing component. And just this idea of building in public. It's been really helpful. This point about activation being kind of

50:19 uh embedded within the product team of the AI. Experien of the A agent, essentially. So it's essentially not the growth team thinking about activation, it's the product team that is building the AI magic that is obsessed with activation. And it feels like those are the main the main growth levers.

50:35 Is there anything else that I missed? Community. I think community is really important here because I you need to bring people together as they're exploring these capabilities. And as they're seeing what's possible, so they can bounce off each other and they can help each other out. So I would say community also amplifies that word of mouth. It amplifies all of the social posting, it it amplifies retention mechanisms for you as well. But community has been a huge part of lovable success as well. And that's something that was started very early on. It runs on Discord, so it's nothing fancy. It's not like we build anything completely from scratch for ourselves. Um and it has

51:12 hundreds of thousands of members and it's um it's very lively. We have community managers. That are Making sure that all of the questions get answered and the right groups are being created. We have an incredible ambassador program now as well.

51:26 of people uh doing it. So I would say community here again of really making software more human. Is very important role. Now now obviously not everybody can build a community, but maybe at least plugging in into somebody's community is uh quite important as well. And then there's another one, unless you have a question on community. Oh, keep going. Another one is uh giving your product away.

51:51 lot And for AI products, it may feel counterintuitive because they're so costly. Every single interaction within the eye product costs company something. There's an LLM pass through cost а дари с камин

52:05 And a lot of especially traditional tech companies I see are gating AI immediately behind a paywall. Because uh they're sitting on a really cush um high margin profile. And the moment that you start giving AI away for free. You like cutting into those uh margins. With a like a knife through the butter. Now at the same time, AI being so new and the capabilities being so new, you have to remove the barrier of entry. You have to give a lot of your product away for free.

52:36 But by the way, I don't just mean premium. Freemium to me is just like a baseline. If you're in the new category, you need to let people explore a what it is for free and get that initial wow moment. It's not a ha moment, by the way. It doesn't need to be a ha moment anymore. It just needs to be a wow moment. And for lovable is that first preview generation after your first prompt. Even though it's absolutely not gonna be complete thing of what you want to build. But you just go This is possible. Like I had no idea. I want to keep building. And it becomes an addictive exercise. But we also give so many of our lovable credits away to every event, to every hackathon. If you want to host a lovable hackathon, we will sponsor it and give all of the participants credits away for free.

53:19 So we give them away as candy and we uh basically track them over our LLM costs on freemium and giveaways as our marketing costs. And it doesn't go into our Uh Something we need to reduce. uh to make our margins better.

53:34 It goes into this is something that we need to spend more in because this is part of our growth secret sauce. Okay. I want to hear more about the Growth Secret Sauce. That is extremely interesting. Uh I haven't heard of that as a strategy and I can see why this makes sense. If the strategy is blow people's socks off. So they could tell their friends, post on all the socials. The trick is get more people to try it.

53:55 And so this is in And it's such a new crazy thing. Like, why would I pay money? Why would I even go take the effort to like Try to sign up for an account if I don't know what this is, I don't know what I'm doing with it. So I could see how this loop goes

54:07 Faster and faster by Giving it away. Exactly. And Again, this is very uncomfortable sometimes for companies that A either used to really it AI companies have lower profile of margins. That's absolutely true.

54:20 We to find an AI company with eighty and ninety percent margin profile is absolutely impossible. Let's be real. We're all sitting somewhere in the Forty percent uh or so. Which is a lot smaller. So any time that you look at those AI costs as your cost center, that's when you're in trouble. You fundamentally have to flip the script and say, I need to expose to people what is possible, and I need to remove the monetization friction out of it. Because if you don't, nobody's ever gonna try it, or you're gonna be very easily overtaken by a competitor that will give it away.

54:53 And let's face it, once you hook people, they're more likely gonna stay with you. So you obviously have to still work on the retention strategy there. But if you can have like for our case, Somebody one of our user stands up and say hey I'm gonna have a Hackathon at my work on Lovable. Can you give

55:10 us all some free credits to play with. Why would we prevent a person who wants to do all of the marketing and activating job for us? in their company. From using us. Of course. We're like Take it. How much do you need?

55:24 How much would you like? We will sponsor it all. We will give you anything that you need. So we're really leaning into people that are wanting to show this magic to those around you and empowering them as much as possible. And um that is something that is actually applies to every single product. And I agree, this is not a growth strategy that I've ever applied in my life on like giving product away as much as possible, but it is something that uh is more and more becoming Of something that I see that is absolutely non negotiable. But I'm feeling is like The more mind blowing it is, the more you should give it away for free. Yeah. Especially in a competitive market where everyone is, you know, it's hard. There's like so many companies trying to do this thing.

56:02 And so Um So it's almost like the better you are, the more you should give it away. Right. Right. And this also explains why uh so much V C money has to be raised for these sorts of companies because this is not cheap. Like you said, you're paying all these foundational models a lot of money. Yes and no. Uh because I'm only gonna say no is because

56:20 So take a look at Lovable. We're two over two hundred million in AR. At this point, we're a hundred people large. So our headcount count costs are very let me just make sure people hear that. Two hundred millionaire, I didn't realize a hundred people work at Lovable. Yes, and six months ago we had thirty people working at Lovable. So we triple. So for us it's a really big deal. We tripled our company size. Uh we're gonna quadruple it by the end of yeah, I know. We're big boy and girls now. But for for for perspective of the headcount costs, it's minimal. So we have very little in that going on.

56:55 We are not spending a lot on paid marketing, so we're not a big paid marketing driver. Yeah, we're spending on influencer marketing, but it's not majority of our growth. It's uh low double digits, uh to to be fair, because it's it's not why we're successful. It's amplifying our success and it's helping us reach new audiences. Uh, we don't have really large sales team. We have only a couple of sales folks, um, and they're just starting to ramp up their enterprise efforts. So we don't have like really big enterprise demand gen costs as well. So From that perspective, if you like look at the equation and you say, Well, okay, if you're not gonna do a lot of paid marketing, if you're not gonna do a lot of sales, because we're really only working on hand raisers of people that are saying right now that they wanna buy lovable. Then where is

57:38 Like you don't have they cost so you can spend it on product. And that is the beautiful part because you're not when we're giving our product away to our customers, we're not competing with other Companies in that space. Because they're just gonna use Lovable in their hackathon, we're on their own. And we're not comp we're we're not competing on AdWords or like in paid Google.

57:59 Where everybody's buying real estate for eyeballs. So from that perspective, is I think about it more as a shift. Where we spend and cost, and on sлі, it's more efficient way. to do paid marketing almost in a sense. I because of the cost per eyeball that we get there is quite a bit lower compared to if we were trying to compute it on the Google.

58:20 So Yes and no to your statement because it actually does not deteriorate margin profile. We just Shifting of where we're spending it. That is an incredibly important point you're making there. So it's not

58:33 Like uh you're generating an incredible amount of revenue. Uh so there is money uh available to spend and what you're saying is Because it's been spreading through word of mouth mostly. You're not spending tons of money on salespeople. You're not spending tons of money on paid ads. This is just uh an amazing way to get more people

58:52 to use it. So it's kind of like a marketing cost. This is product led growth. Yeah. To the max. Supercharged. Yes, because you're literally using your product. To drive that awareness by giving it away to the agents in your ecosystem that will do that distribution for you. So fascinating. What a What a wild world we're living in.

59:15 Free stuff for everyone. Yes. Yes, I mean it's great for consumers. This is like great time to be a consumer. You have so many options, like everybody's throwing themselves at you, giving your product away for free. So it's great to be in the market right now. I think it's the the power should be with consumer always, but with software, power has not been with consumer previously, because we were forced to use towards some solutions because of Either how they were chosen for us or what was available in the market, and now that supply is almost infinite.

59:44 The demand Um from the consumers can be very picky. And The one that

59:50 Sir's the best will win. And I think again, it's important to highlight this is not some kind of V C subsidized bubble ish sort of thing. Like there is a lot of money being generated. that you uh are spending to help it grow faster. It's not like some kind of We're just raising more money to give away more money. Like you're actually making your own money. It's not driving. It's not driven by B C money. I I can't. I c I can't comment on the specific margin details for us, uh, but at the same time The money that we're raising on BCs for future development.

1:00:17 And hardening our business. Uh not because we will not be able to survive without it. Awesome. Okay, great segue to I want to talk about product market fit in competition. You have this really interesting post that I don't think people uh grasp yet Which is that product market fit is no longer this like

1:00:33 We've done it. Product market fit. We're up and to the right. Now we just grow, grow, grow. Now we hire salespeople, it's gonna be great. Uh you've written that Just probably mark if it is no longer this like you've done it and you're good. It's this endless fight to keep it. Talk about what you're seeing there.

1:00:48 So I'll first start with uh what I've felt at least before when people were talking about product market fit. That yeah, obviously always product market fit is an evolving, but the rate of that evolution was measured in years. Um what is it that you need the next product market fit step function change, which often was called second horizon or third horizon. Sometimes five, ten years, sometimes even longer, that you need to that you depending on how good your and hardy your initial product market fit was. But you'd spend years scaling the original product market fit. It was like blitz growth stage. Marketing sales growth was very important. Um, that you just try to get it to as many people as possible. And then once you have saturation or the cost to getting to the marginal people becomes too high, you start thinking, okay, what else can I offer? to help me reach additional people or sell more to existing users that I already have.

1:01:39 And again, the main point here is it would take years to get to that stage where it became a question that you had to face um really hard. Face to face. Now it's three months. And all of a sudden you have to face that question again, and it's happening because of two things, in my opinion. Number one in AI technology of what LM is capable of doing. changes still very rapidly with new model release. With each new model release. So I think we're gonna

1:02:10 h I think will stabilize at some point and it'll gonna become more marginal, but it we're not there yet. So every Three months or so. Every single AI LLM provider creates a step function change in what is possible with that. L M. And when you have this new possibility in just the underlying technology that opens up in front of you.

1:02:30 Then it creates another ceiling of what is possible to build on top of it. And tricky piece here is that it's not enough to just wait for that technology to get better and then start building on top. You have to build beforehand to like make a bet. And then the t the A L L M to catch up because when that model releases, you already need to have that functionality available. So that piece is I've never been in a company where

1:02:56 the the fundamental capabilities are still changing so rapidly. And that's the product part. So the product can leap to the new expectations. But Let's not talk about the market part as well. Consumer expectations have never changed this fast before. What we expected Chad GPT to be able to do and answer and how we wanted it to talk to us. Eight months ago versus now is night and day.

1:03:22 And like the deep thinking mode and uh the like the how how how deeply it can go into answering questions and what is capable of being uh building on top of it. So consumer perception has never changed this fast, too. Is he's this unprecedented time of a consumer's all sudden like in the month saying oh it's not doing this yet. Like I'm bouncing. Before again, consumer perceptions would be years to take. It's actually technology would sometimes be able to already address it, but consumer perception has not not been changed yet. So it would take a long time. So we're like in this really weird part where both product and market is shifting so rapidly. That every three months I feel like we have to recapture our product market fit. And not just recapture on the same

1:04:06 technology and with same customers, it's both of those pieces of the equation. Change every three months. And it's terrifying in the way, it's also very confusing in the way because We're two hundred million dollar company, and we're not solely focused on marketing and sales. because we still have to recapture our product market fit. And you know that the team that finds your product market fit is very different than the team that usually scales your company, yet we have to find the team that is capable of doing both.

1:04:35 on ongoing basis now I think every A company is in on this product market fit treadmill. Хопфолі да треміл спіт слоздем. If not, I think we're gonna come up with like crazy things of what this L L M and AI will be able to do if it's gonna continue at this cusp.

1:04:52 But um it's a weird place to be in because every three months We have to throttle on our skiing ефорts. And just Reinvent? And then scale again, but it's like short.

1:05:04 blitz of growth, not these long, year long commitments. What makes this very real is just this week. Apparently OpenAI had this whole code red. Moment where Even though open AI by far the leading

1:05:18 AI assistant over almost a billion I think monthly active users like basically synonymous with AI around the world. With Gemini three launching, their market share just started to dip really quickly. I think they lost like six something percent. In like a week. And

1:05:34 So even open AI, like chat GPT, the original, the one that everyone uses constantly is is is in danger. It's like nobody's nobody's future is bulletproof yet. And Ten years ago, if you ask me if a two hundred million dollar company was at risk in losing product market fit in the next three months, if it's experiencing ten percent month over month growth, I would have said you're crazy.

1:05:56 And now that's the reality that we live in. And I I I don't know. I It's fascinating to World and what a time to be alive. What a time to be alive. And uh Very stressful, but the prize at the end is massive. That's the you know, that's why this is worth doing.

1:06:11 Uh not just you know monetarily, but just the impact it's gonna have on the world, the way we people build and ship and load. Exactly. The ceiling of what is possible has been raised so massively that we haven't even Too closest to even see it, I believe. So I think that that's the exciting part of it. The way I've seen you r right about this product market fit challenge is

1:06:32 the traditional approaches, you have these like core users that are using it, happy with it, and then you expand to the adjacent users and expand to the next And you're basically just trying to recapture that same core constantly and don't even have time to go adjacent. Yeah, I Bengali wrote a really wonderful article it was many years ago at this point on the Jascent User Theory, and that your product market fit expansion, when you're in the growth stages, the biggest opportunity for you to go after is this what he called the Jascent User, which are just outside of your core user. They have uh somewhat similar needs, but maybe they're in different geo, maybe they have slightly different use case, slightly different needs.

1:07:09 And your biggest way to continue growing a product market fit without having to go to next horizon is to capture those um that next Next next group of users. The interesting piece here of how I relate to it, we still have the core users. And by the way, those core users are mostly pioneers right now that are excited by the capabilities. Then there's latent majority that is Filled with adjacent users. And the issue right now, which I'm actually quite worried about us like as a category, is that We're constantly focusing on recapturing the pioneers.

1:07:39 We don't have time to go after adjacent users. А найворід о ветне біля гап. In the space. Where we actually gonna alienate the latent majority because we're so hyper focused on just staying top of mind and tap top of capabilities on the pioneers, but I don't know the right answer here because without the pioneers.

1:08:01 they'll think you need pioneers for a latent majority to follow. But if you take pioneers and you take them too far. Into capabilities. Will latent majority never be able to catch up? Maybe this is a fruitless

1:08:15 concern, but it's just like something that I think about because at this stage we should be working on adjacent users and and I would argue maybe Open the Eye definitely started have uh to do that with It's how many people they have on their platform, but not most of the other AI companies. I completely see what you're thinking there. Like a brand could just become known as that's just for like startups and prototyping and it's not for serious work. Yeah. Or it's like it's for just like for it's for techies.

1:08:42 It's like protect people. It's like it never actually enters The people Uh outside of our little bubble that we live in. We kind of touched on this a little bit of just like working in AI, working on AI companies.

1:08:55 Uh. Challenging, stressful, lot of work. What's your advice for folks that Or thinking about should I join a lovable. Should I join a cursor? Should I just go work it in Google Microsoft? You know, not not for the not to throw them under the bus or anything, but just although Google very, very successful now, I know.

1:09:10 Maybe less AI focused company. I really believe that there's Different you need to understand what's the environment that is right for you. Just please understand that AI companies are very hectic at the moment. They're very unstable by definition of the product market fit treadmill. about that distribution of how they're actually distributed to the market really changing about how product Is even being developed in the first place. So if you are very comfortable in being in that messy middle and uh really comfortable of

1:09:40 converting chaos into clarity for you and those around you, then yeah, AI Company is a wonderful place for you to really absorb new skill sets right now. Because I even before joining Lovable, when I kept seeing AI, I'm like my gosh, like I'm so tired of seeing AI everywhere. Is it really changing the world? Like is it really changing the way people work? And when I was um I was a Dropbox before, and yeah, we would use AI here and there, and I would use Chad GPT. I've never used AI there the way I use AI. At Lovable and the things that I'm capable of accomplishing at Lovable. And I don't know if I've ever would have made that leap so fast unless I joined Lovable. If I would have just read or listened about it, it's just different compared to being surrounded by people where it's expectation. It's not

1:10:26 like a nice to have or something that somebody's asking you to do. This is just how you get things done. And you have to think about everything of like what can AI do here versus where do I add value? Versus like in the traditional sense of work is like I start with my own value. And then I augmented with AI. And here like the mindset has completely sh uh shifted. Now I don't think AI is replacing everybody's jobs. So like please don't like don't look at it as a as as that cliche saying. I actually Often call AI as like average intelligence that helps me get the platform up. And then I add my human thinking and my human creativity on top of it to get it to the next level. But at least I can get this base level done with AI really freaking quickly. So from that perspective, I think if you want to leapfrog on what it means to be AI native employee.

1:11:16 And how to use all of these AI tools, you should go to AI company. But if you know that you superpower is in more structure, in more definition, in a really high specialty of things, because in the I companies they're all fairly small, so you'll have to generalize quite a bit. I and have a lot of ownership all of areas that you usually maybe not have ownership over. then you shouldn't join it because AI companies will evolve.

1:11:42 to be more stable too. So it's just a matter of time on where you can join. So I would just urge people to look at their superpowers and the type of environments that really speak to them so they can feel happy because this Can lead to burnout. for wrong type of personalities very quickly. Yeah. My sense is

1:12:02 If you want work life balance, don't join one of these companies because that's just not the way they're work. Uh If I'd go that far. I mean, I have family, I have two kids. I feel like I have a very good work life balance. Uh, but I put in boundaries for myself. Like I know when I need time off. I need because I know when my brain starts to overheat, so to speak. Uh, but I I also know that work is my hobby and it's my passion and I will

1:12:27 This is the best work of my life that I'm doing right now. There's no other place that I'd rather be. А да тобі. So I think that you just need to be more careful about setting your own boundaries that you know you need. But um I mean let's face it, I don't think anybody has work life balance, regardless of what company that they work at. Even that Google

1:12:47 Or like Microsoft or any of the others, I think everybody is Freaking out. and running as fast as they can. It's just they are running it in different structures.

1:12:58 I'm really glad you said that and corrected me there. That it is possible to work at a company one of if not the fastest growing company in history, it actually uh have work like balance to get sleep to spend time with your kids and family. You just have to protect it.

1:13:12 Uh rushlessly. But you also need to be realistic with how much ізpected out of you. And you need to feel confident that you'll be able to deliver it. And by the way, you won't be able to deliver it unless you use AI in many aspects. of your work life. So that's like the piece that helps you actually get to hit those expectations of outcomes. That you need to do and the velocity.

1:13:34 But um I'm I'm very protective of my personal time with kids. Like why did I have children? If I'm not gonna spend time with them. So like those are part of the non negotiables um that's I bring along with me in every single work. For people that maybe have trouble setting boundaries or just not good at this, anything, what do you what works for you? Is it just Is it as easy just telling people, here's where I need to leave? What do you what's what advice do you have for people to set boundaries like that?

1:13:58 So first of all, I would not think about it as a work life balance. There's no such thing as balance. So balance feels like oh I have enough time for everything. I don't have enough time for anything. But I prioritize my family. And some Moments are prioritized work in other moments. And I don't try to balance the two. I go where I'm needed and where I go, and I feel like I'm not gonna regret the choices.

1:14:20 That I'm making today. So I'm constantly trying to put myself in the future and say, Will I resent myself if I make this choice right now? And if the answer is yes, I don't make that choice. And sometimes I have to say no to Anton and say, like, I can't make it, or I won't be there. I need to be here with my family. Or like today I need to cancel my day. My kid is sick and he needs me. And I need to be I need to take him to the doctor. So I think that just making in the moment more like in every day but sometimes in the hour decisions to me works better. Than trying to balance something that is completely unachievable and it feels overwhelming to even think about. But I prioritize this in my sleep.

1:14:58 Uh my health, my work out schedule, my kids, my family, my husband and just my downtime because I know that I'm most creative once I have separation from work because then I come in with like all cylinder spiring and I have so many more ideas about it. So to me, it's actually part of doing my best work is to take time off. That is really great advice. I wanna touch on what it's like to work at Lovable because it feels like Lovable is at the cutting edge of what working at product is gonna be. So you mentioned a little bit about how you're always talking to AI asking questions.

1:15:33 Is there any any other kind of anecdotes of just w How people operate at lovable. That is really unique or weird or funny or interesting. That might be helpful for people.

1:15:42 To try in their company. Yeah, I mean we use Lovable at Lovable a lot. Like all of our internal tools are built on Lovables. Uh we actually have our first hackathon on Lovable happening next week, uh where we're gonna uh entire company is just gonna take full day to We prototype everything unlovable. So our spec. Yeah, we do still have a written spec, but it always accompanied by a lovable prototype uh that everybody can interact with and uh to click around with and provide feedback and everybody f pun bunches in and also like does some edits if they have any better ideas. So I uh create blocks on Lovable.

1:16:20 So for example, we need to make some pricing changes, um or pricing page changes. I take a screenshot of our pricing page, I go to lovable, I say recreate this pricing page, make these changes. And then I send that to my engineering team saying, Hey, this is what I want to happen. And then like they take it from there. So we just you And Chat GPT I use a lot for brainstorming, especially the deep thinking mode. I love it. It takes a long time, but it's so worth it. Uh sometimes

1:16:46 Yeah. Has crazy ideas, sometimes it does like sometimes I was like, yeah, this is like nothing new to me. So it's not interesting, but it like it gets me thinking and it gets me look at the different angles. And um lots of um I use granola a lot, for example, because to me super helpful to get AI summaries of the meetings. And it's very powerful for me. I use Whisperflow a lot because I feel like I have no time to type anymore. So I just like talk to my phone and talk to my laptop.

1:17:13 all the time, uh, in order to do it. But we're even thinking about all of the customer support automations uh that are done through AI. How do we um every single aspect of Войду is question is ask what can the AI do here first.

1:17:29 And then how we can add ourselves into the equation. But lovable for us, uh having unlimited credits at lovable. Is it? pretty awesome perk, I have to say. Like I sometimes have to pinch myself. I'm like I get paid to vibecode. I feel like that engineer or that vibecode engineer, he's he's like actually. Yeah, my dream job. I want his job. I feel like I yeah, I I got into the wrong line of profession here.

1:17:54 Oh man. Okay. Uh is there anything else about Lovable? Cause the what I think about actually I interviewed the perplexity founders back in the day years ago, and they shared like before we talked to anyone. For advice. We first asked Chat GPT. It and I was just like, That is the most insane thing I've ever heard. How couldn't you possibly work that way? And now that's how everyone works.

1:18:13 And so I'm curious just I don't know, like how I don't know how Anton works. Is there anyone else that just like way in the future of here's how things might be? So for me especially for product and growth, um and even marketing at some point it's in some capacity. When I have an idea in my head it like it sounds so freaking cool. And sometimes I can even like I put it in paper and I was like oh this is like we like we need to do it. And then like I go and try to vibe code it and I'm like oh This like I don't see the magic anymore. Like or I can't like I can't envision it.

1:18:42 Anymore. Yeah, yeah, and like there's more, there's more. So to me it's actually has helped really complete the ideation process for me quite a bit. Because then I actually try to go and build it. And it breaks down some of the elements of what's important, what's not. So it's taking

1:18:59 Me on product development lifecycle so much further down. And then it creates a much better communication vehicle with my engineers, too, because Like I then can tell them exactly what's important, what not. So to me it's been great because sometimes we envision things that are so much better than the reality. And before until it hands us off to design. Like we would never be a like designers would do it for us and try to make it awesome, versus I often stop my ideas in

1:19:27 tracks super early on. without pushing it forward versus other times I might have pushed it too. W for too far too long even through design. to or even like pitching to leadership. And uh I find that very powerful because it calibrates me really quickly.

1:19:44 Awesome. Okay. Last question. I'm gonna talk about something that you've written about that is a really Uh, I think it's a really important topic, something that we should surface is You wrote this post called I'm Worried About Women in Tech. Talk what you're seeing here, what you're noticing, what you think might be going in the wrong direction. Yeah, there's actually conflicting data points about how um woman

1:20:04 You're talking about women, right? Yeah, yeah. Uh, there's conflicting data points about uh how women are keeping up with AI technology and wave, because there's a bunch of reports that has been done. that show massive gap between women adopting AI versus men adopting AI, which points the story that um menages like widening the gap uh of uh like accessibility for technology and Whoever's adopting AI right now is getting paid the most, gets the most opportunities. I mean, we're seeing like insane aqua hires right now where

1:20:36 People are getting paid more for their talent than for the companies that they've created. And that's like a really interesting trend that is occurring. And a lot of it is fueled on um on this wave of AI. And women are not really present there, like if you can think about like one. million dollar aqua hire that has been in the news that is a woman. Like I can't think of one. If you look at AI companies and their CEOs, uh most of it is men. If you if you look at the company's composition of um In the I companies, it's mostly men. To me, this really came to the head of when I came to lovable and I'm like, it's pink, it's purple, brand, it's a heart, it's lovable. I'm like, I'm sure this is where it's fifty fifty men versus woman.

1:21:20 And uh although we don't collect this information, but just like thro third party um Uh autofill or s if we saw it's like twenty percent at most. And I'm like, what is happening? Not again. Why is this again not being adopted by a woman? And uh obviously I don't know all of the answers. Um I think that this is early on that we can shortcut it. And by the way, I also don't want to put this as a indication that men are to blame.

1:21:47 Because I think men are doing wonderful job really spearheading the horizons and showing us what's possible and like leading the charge. Ам, що фрайда су мені вмен ар стак на лайтн мальоріті. That is just not catching up. And my worry is that it's gonna affect the hireable talent. It's gonna g step us back again in the composition of the workplace, of the diversity. And maybe it matters, maybe it doesn't, like whichever side that you s sit on, but I think that there is a r

1:22:15 It's if needs to be built for everybody in the world, and for that it needs to be built by a representative sample. of uh people that are behind the product as well. So I I I just find it fascinating that even when the barrier to building

1:22:30 has been lowered. Uh where's like you don't need computer science degree, which I appreciate. There's not that many women that are getting. We're still seeing the gaping. Um gap on the adoption between genders. Which is just is I I I I I don't know. There's like something very frustrating about that.

1:22:50 Yeah, the thing that struck with me with from your post is There has been a lot of progress being made in that last decade. And now AI's just kinda turning it all back, turning it all around. Hopefully not. I think that we're early on enough that we can bridge the gap. I think Sometimes

1:23:07 Uh woman just need space. And ability to discover it. I and uh that's what we're doing at Lovable. We have this initiative uh she builds where we have collect we have create a hackathon for women only. And we give them unlimited access to Lovable for 48 hours and um they come together as a community and they build together. And there's like beautiful things that start to come out of it, which I've never anticipated before. But so many women in that hackathon for us built. help for their with their elderly parents or with their kids or with the household or for their church group or for the b the kids basketball team solutions.

1:23:43 Шив хайпер локал, хайпер релевант. very needed for what they need in their life and something that was never been able to build before because of how expensive software was, because it was never gonna become potentially a hundred million dollar companies. But It also doesn't need to be anymore. So I just wanna bring women to build more and vibe code more, so we can have more diversity in software that is even created because I think that we all have a unique take on what problems that we can solve. And I want everybody's voices to be heard. I'll give the URL for she builds.

1:24:19 I pulled it up while you're talking. She builds dot levelable.app. And we bite coded on lovable. Is there a minimum viable product. Minimal lovable product. There it is. So when is this happening? Is it december fifteenth, eighteenth, so it's Yeah, we have it. We're running it constantly, so our next cohort um starts um December fifteenth, but we're gonna have more. We're planning a massive one on International Women's Day. So that's the one that if you can't come join us.

1:24:48 Awesome. I don't know if you s okay, so some glimmer of hope I don't know if you saw this tweet where I tagged you the other day, or maybe it was this today. I was looking at my most recent podcast video Performance. And the top four are All women.

1:25:01 And they're all AI. oriented and they're above Stuart Butterfields, founder of Slack, above Yamas, CL Grand. So Maybe a glimmer of hope. Yeah, absolutely. I think there's lots of glimmers of hope. I think we can just all lean in.

1:25:14 And make sure that nobody is left behind in this wave. And uh that's not to stop people that are marching ahead. This is just to open up opportunities for everybody around us. Awesome, and we'll link to that post if people want to. Get a

1:25:27 Deeper perspective, what you're seeing. Alina, is there anything else that you wanted to share? Is there anything else you wanna remind people of before we get to our one question lightning round. I guess the only other thing that I will share uh is for AI companies when it comes to hiring. It's i really interesting also the

1:25:47 kind of the shift in the type of personas that end up being hired that I see For me at least it's quite different compared to anywhere uh that I worked before. And that is uh there's this narrative going in the market always that like new hires sorry, new grads have no jobs in the market left because all of the entry level jobs are automated. I actually think that's quite false because new grads, especially AI native new grads, so it's Very important for kids that are entering into the w I shouldn't say kids, young adults that are entering into

1:26:20 uh the workforce that they really know AI, which is there's another like really big issue that our schools are not teaching AI. uh students. So this is like something else that we need to fix as a as a category because otherwise we're literally setting up our uh young for s for a complete failure. But I Think it's incredible to see some of those new graduates come in and what they're capable of doing. I have um

1:26:45 We have multiple new graduates at Lovable that are working, and I learned so much from them. And you need to obviously have the right atmosphere where people with experience like uh old guard like me. That can look at the new garden. Take really hear them and see them and really change the way that I operate based on how they do things. So uh

1:27:07 Make sure that you bring some of that fresh talent that doesn't understand. Any of the baggage that we came from And that can really look at the future in technology and what can unlock from a completely new lens. So Highly recommend

1:27:21 putting those into your team as Ec little fireballs that are gonna be sometimes hard to contain. We can start the best. the best initiatives for you forward. And then um it's also interesting that there's a really high demand for uh ex founders. Now for like those people that are truly have a lot of agency and um high autonomy.

1:27:42 So instead of just having people that have been working in the corporate world, the failed startup founders are now hot demand for a lot of these AI companies. So like these personas that we traditionally would not Prioritized. in companies uh to to hire are now becoming the hottest commodity and the highest going talent, which is I think is fascinating and like the wonderful thing. that is changing the how uh the culture inside operates.

1:28:08 That is really interesting and really empowering. Just this idea that we're going to be able to do Uh if you need grad, uh there's hope. You're not you're not gonna be out of ground. Absolutely, absolutely. And you may have an advantage. Yeah. You you do have it you have to lead with that. That's the thing. Like you have to lead with the things that you can you are capable of achieving knowing that what you have with AI.

1:28:25 because that is a lot of people, especially in traditional tech or in more traditional companies, they're looking for somebody to show them. Because it's really hard to figure it out on your own. Uh versus coming in and seeing and then Copying. Well, Elena, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Because it's your fourth time, I'm not gonna ask you all the questions I always ask you, so I'm just gonna ask you one question.

1:28:45 So Lovable is based in Stockholm, Sweden. I'm curious just like what are you what's something you love about Stockholm that you weren't expecting? Is there like a food, a restaurant, I don't know, something? Well you always have to say Swedish meatballs. I mean, I've never liked meatballs before uh so uh like and now it's I it's so good here. It's so good. So like every time One of my meals here throughout the day uh involves it. But I actually really love the Yeah. They're like they're they're I don't know, they're so They just taste different and never. Swedish meatballs. Well

1:29:20 I have been to IKE here because that is a Swedish company too. It like reminded me of uh in person Amazon. It was like absolute incredible. IKEA is like next level. But uh food food I guess Swedish meatballs for sure. I honestly how clean the city is. Like it's it's kind of incredible. architecture, like everything is so built out. Picture perfect. Like it's on the card. I don't know. It's uh it's different compared to like most of the large cities that I've been at, that a little bit more worn down.

1:29:49 So fun. Make me want to visit it get some people. Okay. Good tip. Okay. Uh Two file questions, where can folks find you online if they wanna reach out, maybe learn more, and how can listeners be useful to you? Yes, please find me online, uh on LinkedIn. Uh please feel free to follow me. Always engage on my post if you wanna engage with me because that's um the place that I always talk to people. I have my newsletter as well. Um That um

1:30:20 baby baby steps compared to what Lenny has, but it's alenaverna.com. I also try to that's where I post most of my findings that that I experience at my work. So if you want to continue seeing how my thinking evolves or what are the patterns that I noticed, that's where to find me. And how to be useful to me, um really pressure test my thinking because So many things are changing right now. I'm honestly not even sure myself of what is a pattern versus what is just the data point. So I'd love to just engage in as many conversations as possible and hear your opinions because that will help us as an industry just understand what is actually happening and makes more sense out of this whole thing. I'm just gonna double click on your newsletter. Definitely subscribe to it. It's incredibly good. Everything we talked about here.

1:31:04 uh Elena has written about in her newsletter in in large part and goes even deeper. It's just ElenaVernet dot com. If you're like reading this on your podcast app or your TV, you could just look at her name and just type it dot com and you'll find it and subscribe and you'll be really happy. Elena, thank you so much for being here. This was amazing. Everything I wanted to be. Thank you for sharing. I know you have Like that. A lot of work to do. So I appreciate you making time for this and for joining us.

1:31:26 Thank you for having me. Really appreciate you. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show.

1:31:48 at Lennyspodcast dot com. See you in the next episode.

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