← Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth)
01:31:55
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- [00:00]
Lenny Rachitsky
You're ahead of growth at Lovable, on track to be the fastest or one of the fastest growing companies in history.
- [00:06]
Elena Verna
We're at over 200 million in AR at this point. We're 100 people large. The pace here is insane.
- [00:12]
Lenny Rachitsky
You said that you've had to throw out most of your growth playbook.
- [00:14]
Elena Verna
I feel like only 30 to 40% of what I've learned in the last 15 to 20 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 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 5% innovating on growth in my previous roles. Right Now I'm spending 95% innovating on growth and only 5% on optimization.
- [00:48]
Lenny Rachitsky
What do you find is actually moving the needle?
- [00:51]
Elena Verna
One of our biggest strategy is building in public and it's coupled with employee socials, founder led socials. Another one is giving your product away a lot. This is part of our growth system Secret sauce. You have to remove the barrier of entry. If somebody, one of our users, stands up and say, hey, I'm going to have a hackathon 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?
- [01:23]
Lenny Rachitsky
The trick is get more people to try it. Just ship things you can talk about.
- [01:26]
Elena Verna
The only way to create a word of mouth loop is just to blow their socks off.
- [01:31]
Lenny Rachitsky
Today my guest is Elena Verna, head of growth at Lovable. In under one year after launching with fewer than 100 people, Lovable hit 200 million ARR, which is one of, if not the fastest, ramp to 200 million ARR 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. 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 playbook has fundamentally changed for AI companies. What works now, what no longer works, and what has surprised her most about how Lovable grows. She also shares her advice about whether working at an AI company is right for you. Some incredibly interesting insights into Lovable's secret sauce for growth the unique ways they operate internally, their approach to building minimal Lovable products, also how they hire and.
- [02:28]
Podcast Sponsor/Host Voice
Also how product market fit as a.
- [02:31]
Lenny Rachitsky
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 of 19 incredible premium products, including a year free of lovable, replit, bolt, n8n, linear dev, and post Hoc Superhuman Descript, Whisper Flow, Perplexity Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, Chapier, D Mobin and Stripe Atlas. Head on over to Lenny'sNewLetter.com and click product Pass. With that, I bring you Elena Verna After a short word from our sponsors.
- [03:14]
Podcast Sponsor/Host Voice
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- [04:57]
Lenny Rachitsky
The result?
- [04:58]
Podcast Sponsor/Host Voice
Faster iteration and a shorter path from idea to implementation. Vercel built V0 for the builders who want to create at the moment of inspiration. Inspiration. If you can dream it, you can ship it. Visit vercel.comlenny to get started. That's vercel.comlenny.
- [05:19]
Lenny Rachitsky
Elena, thank you so much for being here and welcome back to the podcast.
- [05:25]
Elena Verna
Thank you for having me.
- [05:27]
Lenny Rachitsky
As you know this is a record fourth time back to the podcast. No one else has ever achieved this feat. I I feel like you're basically my co host now.
- [05:36]
Elena Verna
I love it. Thank you for inviting me back. I'm very proud record holder in this regard.
- [05:41]
Lenny Rachitsky
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 the fastest or one of the fastest growing companies in history depending on the metric that you track. 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 at Lovable.
- [06:08]
Elena Verna
So we are just a little bit over 1 years old since we launched. The company actually did exist as a GPT engineer before, but it officially launched in the third week of November last year in 2024. So for us we've hit over $200 million in annual recurring revenue before we even hit our one year mil since being launched, which is pretty incredible. Yulen actually have a really great blog post on how quickly it takes for companies usually to get to their first million ARR. 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 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 100 million in end of July and just four months later we were at 200 million. So seven months to, well maybe eight months to 100 million. Another four months to get to 200 million and from users too. We already have over 8 million users that have tried Lovable. We have, as you can imagine, to feed that 200 million hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers as well that are paying for us. So things are going great and we'll talk about why.
- [07:27]
Lenny Rachitsky
Okay. Absurd. I think people are getting used to these insane numbers and not long ago is like, okay, if you had a million ARR in a year, you're doing pretty well.
- [07:36]
Elena Verna
Yeah, yeah. I think still you're doing pretty well if you have a million ARR in one year. This is one of the once in a lifetime type of companies and the category, the way that it's evolving. So I want to make sure that people don't all of a sudden set this as a benchmark for success because it should never be in some categories. It might be even faster as we continue evolving technology, but I don't think that it's realistic to expect it out of your business that you're starting right now.
- [08:08]
Lenny Rachitsky
That is such an important point you're making there. It's so discouraging to founders to hear these stories of getting 200 million nut. And again, this is ARR. There's a lot of companies, especially in the data labeling space. I've had them all on the podcast that are 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 200 million a year is absurd.
- [08:37]
Elena Verna
Yeah, it is. It is absurd. I really want to make sure that people understand 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 how it's moving. So when you're setting yourself as a benchmark so you know which benchmarks you actually to use and whether lovable is the benchmark that you should be using.
- [08:56]
Lenny Rachitsky
Cool. I'm going to get into that next last question. Just I want to 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 are there $200 million being spent on lovable? Anything you can have about just like gift people confidence. This is real. This is going to last. This is a really durable business.
- [09:19]
Elena Verna
Well, I saw stripe receipts, so it is real as far as I'm concerned. Unless Stripe dashboard is lying to us. But it is money getting deposited in our bank account. But let's talk about who's actually contributing to that number. We do have a really large use case of people 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 some of them are already monetizing it, some of it just using it for Legion, for other services or some physical goods, for example, that they're, that they're selling, some of them are just still building and 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. And even with Lovable we're so much more efficient and effective compared to hiring an engineer in terms of the price. But it still takes time. So we have a lot of founders, whether it's B2C, whether there's B2B. So consumer products, business products, e commerce, whatever it is. But on the other side we have a lot of employees within companies using Lovable as well, where they're building internal tools or they're building prototypes, they're building landing pages. So that is another use case that is very relevant and quite efficient for us. But then there is a hype and discovery that is happening as well. Because when I think about software, I think about it. I talked to John Kotler actually and he gave me this framework that is completely stuck in my mind of software always goes through capabilities stage first, like what is possible to actually create with this? Then it needs to transition into value of how is it that am I going to get value out of this? And then you can start thinking about scaling it of which aspects of my life and my work the can this 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 you constantly need to come back and you need to see what has changed. So a lot of people use it for personal reasons. I build myself apps, tutoring apps for my kid, so he has to answer questions in order to get some screen time accumulated for him. I build my own portfolio. I see people doing wonderful things. My favorite story that I always say, there's this man that created a proposal on Lovable so his fiance had to answer questions and she had to complete this game. And then at the end there was 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 monetization model is set up and how it interjects with your activation moment, which we can also cover. But that is what's driving that both conversion and retention rates.
- [12:17]
Lenny Rachitsky
Let me ask you one question that's on people's minds, I imagine as you talk about this. Just what does retention look like?
- [12:22]
Elena Verna
Yeah, so retention really I look at it in two ways. Retention that it comes as a subscriber retention. So how much media pay subscribers do we get and how many of them are we capable of renewing? There's also very important aspect of it is how many of them can we expand? Because if you can get positive or above 100% 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 NDR that is over 100 and then there's actual engagement retention as well. Because that is the leading indicator for how your paid retention is going to look like. For paid retention, I know there is so much on the market of oh, this is a high product and it just, it's a leaky bucket and it has really high churn rates. Although 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 of other B2B SaaS products that I've ever worked at and I worked with Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey, Netlify, Amplitude and others. So are we absolutely crushing with paid retention? No. Are we where most of the other companies are? Yes. Our NDR is quite good because when people bill they want to buy more credits to build. So we're seeing really good 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 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.
- [14:04]
Lenny Rachitsky
That is incredibly interesting and optimistic to hear because of the growth rate. Rarely is growth rate this high and retention is on par with great companies.
- [14:16]
Elena Verna
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 products away, how can we 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. 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.
- [15:02]
Lenny Rachitsky
Let's talk about growth. Let's talk about what you've learned about growth in this space. 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 is growing incredibly well. This tells me there's a lot we can learn from what you've seen. So tell us what you're seeing, what's still working, what's not working, what you've learned about what it takes to drive growth at a company like Lovable.
- [15:28]
Elena Verna
Yeah, I would say that in any other role that I've come into before, I felt confident in about 80% 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 bunch of examples that fit in within that framework. So we just need to localize a solution and push. And it was quite productive in terms of getting a company those additional acquisition, conversion, engagement, monetization rates. So I felt very repetitive in a way, 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 doing the same job over and over again. When I started at Lovable, the one thing to me that was very clear is that this company was growing like crazy before I joined. So I want to 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 and removing barriers for growth, so we're not standing in our own way. But there's something more magical happening here that is not a pattern that have ever seen before. It's not a framework that I can even conceptualize 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 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 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 to enable as much of that as possible. But the company is moving. We're just hanging on to it as fast as possible and making sure that we're not going to hit a wall, so to speak, in front of us and that the wheels are greased and that all of the pieces are in place. It's like your race car framework that you have as well, that we're really just putting a lot of oil into it and figuring out what is our engine actually going to be that is going to take us forward. But when I'm thinking about the patterns here and what I have to unlearn, I feel like only 30 to 40% of what I've learned in the last 15 to 20 years of being in growth transfers here. And some of it is very straightforward. Okay, this is how you're going to do paid marketing. This is how you're going to do some of the habitual retention. Here's the free to pay, maybe monetization frameworks that still stand, but the rest of 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 beyond, which would I usually be focused on in a scaled business like this?
- [18:57]
Lenny Rachitsky
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.
- [19:07]
Elena Verna
Not worth it in growth? Most of the people spend most of the time optimizing existing user journeys. So 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 I can tweak the dials to get it done here. What I find is that optimizations are just not worth our time. 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 course the saying of like, more growth loops does not mean more growth. But at the same time 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 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 5%, maybe 10% if I'm lucky, innovating on growth in my roles, in my previous roles. Right Now I'm spending 95% innovating on growth and only 5% 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 they're, by definition they're innovative.
- [20:39]
Lenny Rachitsky
What I'm hearing here is new features, launching new features, new product 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.
- [20:51]
Elena Verna
Yeah. And for example, we on growth team launched 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. Shopify was open for integration with us. Let's go lean into it so people can by code their storefronts 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 enabled voice mode for people so they can actually chat with lovable using their voice as opposed to only having type. And that's also, it's a feature, it's a core product feature. But we're like, hey, it's going to help people to converse with lovable more. It's going to increase the engagement one Area that we've spent very little time in is activation. Because usually I spend majority of my time in activation because there's so many awareness things that need to happen and so many things that we need to smooth out experience for the users in order for them to get through that setup moment to aha moment to that habit loop. And here you're just interacting with agent. So 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 do anything? It's like our core team is responsible for activation. Now we're starting to move into doing agent work ourselves. So all of a sudden, growth team is not just doing product surfaces now we're doing agentic workflows 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.
- [22:35]
Lenny Rachitsky
Okay. That is also a very big deal. Every growth person that's ever been on this podcast, including you, always talks about the power of activation, just how much opportunity there is to get people to this aha moment. Realize how the value of this product that increases retention, it increases everything. And what you're saying here is you barely spend any time in activation because 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, optimize every step.
- [23:07]
Elena Verna
And our agent team spends night and day thinking about it. So I've never been at the company where core team think so much about activation, think so much about that first generation, think so much about reaching aha 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 experience all the time. But I feel a lot more at ease because everybody's thinking about it and everybody's working on 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. Agent needs to understand your intent better and think and reason behind it. So it improves the entire life cycle immediately, as opposed to having to only work on that first experience per se.
- [24:00]
Lenny Rachitsky
And what you're not saying is don't care about that experience. It's the Team building that is already obsessed with making that activation experience better and better.
- [24:08]
Elena Verna
Exactly. I love that because that's the core product functionality at this point. And before people would spend more time building deeper features or deeper use cases or trying to improve some platform functionality. And now the core team, they're obsessed about that first experience because that is core product.
- [24:29]
Lenny Rachitsky
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. I think this connects really deeply with the new features. Launch new features. Say Antonio is just like, hey, check out this cool new thing. Check out our growth numbers. Is that a big growth lever too?
- [24:46]
Elena Verna
Yeah. So one of our biggest strategy is building in public. Building in public. And it's coupled with employee socials, founder led socials. For sure. This is difficult for larger companies, but when you're smaller and you still have a little bit more narrative control with, with everybody on your team, plus you have so much more trust within your organization of where people are going to say the right things because they understand what actually has happened. 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 3, 2, 1 like tier ones are going to happen as big moments that we're going to really rally as a company behind and it's gonna be something that is meant to step, function, change our product market fit and 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 as fantastic resurrection strategy because people like, oh, there's more things here, like I need to go check it out. It also works as great re engagement 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 shipped now? 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 prioritize all of the things that we're shipping. But it's interesting because I've 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 boost, so to speak, in the race car model that then go out and they fundamentally create a step function change in that product market fit as a whole. And 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.
- [27:07]
Lenny Rachitsky
Sounds stressful. This reminds me, I had Gaurav, he's the CEO of Mirage, used to be called Captions, which is a really successful AI video company startup. And they have a policy of you ship a marketable feature every week. That's how their company operates. And it's the same thing. It's just ship things you can talk about.
- [27:28]
Elena Verna
Velocity of shipping is our number one core value in development teams. So we do anything and everything to just keep it going up, up, up and into the right. And by the way, this is also means that everybody has a little bit of marketer within them. We have very lean product organization. We actually lean on our engineers to do a lot of product work. We call them product engineers and 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 autonomy, a lot of agency that needs to happen with this type of velocity. Because marketing team, otherwise you have to have enormous marketing team to staff that. So it has to come with some roles and responsibilities, redefinition on the team as well.
- [28:14]
Lenny Rachitsky
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?
- [28:21]
Elena Verna
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 hire the most 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 yeah, you still have your product marketers, you still have your channel managers, 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 messaging and you can have it for years and create all of the campaigns around it. Now you have it for three months and then the product changes. So the cycles here are really really short. And 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 can have to have enormous marketing team in order to support it all. But at the same time, channels in which marketing right now works, I think are changing quite a bit. And 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 has been very clear to me that when you're talking about organic strategy, if you. Marketing organic strategy, if you asked me that five years ago, I would have said that's SEO, it's search engine optimization. Go on Google. That's your 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 influencer marketing. And across all of the social platforms, that is my organic, which is balance kind of 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 it? What are they, 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 all about social, no matter how B2B you are, because that's where eyeballs are at.
- [30:44]
Lenny Rachitsky
That is fascinating. And so when you talk about socials, what are you finding is most helpful? Is it Twitter, slash x? Is it LinkedIn? Is it YouTube? TikTok?
- [30:52]
Elena Verna
Instagram for founder socials? Our employee socials X and LinkedIn are fantastic sources, especially for B2B because that's where all of the B2B people are at. But you cannot just have ChatGPT right your copy and post it. You need to show personality, like there needs to be humanity that it goes through it and it's not natural for everybody. And it feels very awkward sometimes to start. 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. And for that you need to be vulnerable. You need to be authentic, obviously, but you just need to be yourself so that corporate scrubbing has to completely fall off, which is obviously gonna pull in as the company scales. But at least at the beginning that is your chance to stand out and then your customers posting about you. So that word of mouth of 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, 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 sites, to me that is very much organic. If you're in a consumer, then Instagram, TikTok are very much a go as well.
- [32:35]
Lenny Rachitsky
So here it's the CEO clearly is an important variable in this them in this case Anton just tweeting, here's what's going on. Lovable, here's how fast it's growing. Here's something we've learned. We had the CEO of Gamma 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 leverage. And your point here is, okay, so it's the CEO, but then it's also how do you get your customers to share things on socials? And then there's a paid influencer sort of component.
- [33:01]
Elena Verna
Yes, 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. 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. That is a mentality internally. If it's not lovable, we're not going to ship it. And the best way to fix a bug at Lovable is to say this is not lovable and everybody just jumps on it to fix it right there. And then sprints, no sprints. It doesn't matter. It's getting fixed right now. So from that perspective, we kind of have that culture already embedded as part of our brand and as part of our name, which helps us a lot. But that's the point is that you feel that brand through every interaction. 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 that is unique. It has personality behind it. So we put all of the brand work actually into our product. When you think about lovable people, think about a brand. We don't have a brand marketing team yet. So it's all just through product interactions and some of those building and public moments of the people behind those product interactions. That is our strategy. And then there's influencer marketing. Interestingly enough, influencer marketing is 10 times bigger for us than paid social. So, yeah, we do some paid social as well, and it's working decently. It's quite expensive from payback period. 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 from the beginning. Lovable and 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, and 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 bytecoding is, but you watch 10 seconds of it and you go, that's new. Let me go give it a try.
- [35:19]
Podcast Sponsor/Host Voice
Who would have thought that ahead of.
- [35:21]
Lenny Rachitsky
Growth, who is traditionally seen as like, data metrics, spreadsheets, drive KPIs is like, okay, how do we make this more lovable? How do we add more moments of delight?
- [35:31]
Elena Verna
I know my joke is like, at the end of my lovable journey, whenever, hopefully never comes to an end. But at the end, I'll be like, growth brand person here. Hi, my name is Elena. I do brand now, but I actually see it as part of growth strategy to make sure that that brand shines through every single interaction. And I always talk to my team about it because that is one big lever in our growth story.
- [35:59]
Lenny Rachitsky
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, 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 got to get right.
- [36:14]
Elena Verna
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. 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 the products. But the way to stand out in the super crowded category is 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, that people want to interact with, not just utility of it, because cost of software is coming down so much to develop that we now can actually invest into emotional feelings of that software as opposed to only just focus on creating the utility out of it. So to me, I love this move because I hate nothing more than going to software that is just so painful to use that I lose some brain cells as I'm interacting with it versus software that I feel I get energy out of. And for lovable for me, I cannot wait on some of the projects that I have to go and vibe code myself. That's the highlight of my day. And I just like, I don't. I bring in my daughter and I'm like, let's go do this. Like what do you think that needs to be done? Because I just get so much energy out of doing it. And that is the feeling you cannot create by looking at it as a utility problem.
- [37:42]
Lenny Rachitsky
The way I think about it, the way what you're describing is it's almost table stakes have increased and now it's so easy to build. Now the big differentiator is experience, design, delight.
- [37:52]
Elena Verna
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 about the engineering, so to speak, utility. And you have to think through every single interaction of does this communicate our brand or not?
- [38:09]
Lenny Rachitsky
So along those lines, I want to come back to something you talked about, which is launching new features is a huge growth lever. Kind of the big question there is just how do you maintain quality and cohesiveness as all these people are empowered to ship stuff? Is there anything there you've seen that works well to help avoid just the Frankenstein product? Just endless features that you want to tweet about?
- [38:28]
Elena Verna
Yeah. One part of it is not something that you can codify, but it's the type of people that you hire that are going to 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 to grow with. And what do I mean by that best talent? It's not that somebody who has been at really large companies or somebody that has really 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 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 grow. 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? And then the second piece is that 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 other specialties, 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. I gonna own it from all the way from start to fin. Those are very important, something that we screen for and something that we look for in our culture. And then you just see what you want to do is up to you. So there's very little supervision that happens on the ground. Now we all have goals in some of the big launches that we're all marching towards, but some of the work that is completely up to developers, up to 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 get through it. We are not here to just win.
- [40:58]
Lenny Rachitsky
All the time 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?
- [41:10]
Elena Verna
Yes, especially recruit in Stockholm. I mean, the main office here is in Stockholm. We're asking a lot of people to relocate, which is a no small feed. Now some of it is makes it easy because of how much hype we created around our product. People want to come work for us. They're reaching out to us. They're saying, I love what you're doing. I want to join it so that we have a cheat code to it. Because most of the time when we reach out to somebody, they say, yeah, I would love to explore. So building that product that is highly lovable also creates a really great recruiting brand for you as well. So make sure that there's like multiple benefits to that. But second of all, we do a lot of trials for people. So trial work to see them in action. A work trial to see them in action for a couple of days. We pay them as part of the work trial. We have some probation periods that we start people on because this company is not for everybody. As I said in the podcast in the beginning, the pace here is insane. I went on vacation for the first time, so I've been here for six months. I went on vacation for 10 days. I came back. I felt like I needed to onboard from the beginning. 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. That pace 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. We can create clarity out of chaos because it is absolutely chaotic otherwise. And if we start to look for people that can explain it to us, that's the only way that we can succeed.
- [43:07]
Lenny Rachitsky
The way you describe 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 so fast in three days?
- [43:15]
Elena Verna
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
- [43:17]
Lenny Rachitsky
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 an AI Startup trying to think about, hey, shoot, how do we grow faster? What is lovable figured out? So feels like number one is just 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 there's much money going to this space. There's no tide pushing it forward and it won't work.
- [43:46]
Elena Verna
I call it minimum lovable product. Like it shouldn't be minimum viable product anymore. Viability is left in back in 2010s. Now it's minimal lovable product. That's the only thing that matters.
- [44:00]
Lenny Rachitsky
I love how these AI tools are letting us, you know, like PMs have always had these. What are they? Smoke door test or like, what's the term? Just like or it's not a real product. Painted door.
- [44:11]
Elena Verna
Painted door. There it is.
- [44:12]
Lenny Rachitsky
Yeah. 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.
- [44:19]
Elena Verna
Yeah, well, it's. The feedback cycle is just completely collapsed. You can go from idea to some product 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 a couple of weeks to bycode it to the point to where because we also. 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 too. So we, 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. Before it would just take so many more steps from user research to the design sprints to prioritizing on engineering roadmap to build something minimal and viable to actually test to the long testing cycles. Now it's just like boom, let's go. 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.
- [45:19]
Lenny Rachitsky
I saw you Launch this on LinkedIn. To me it looked like a full product launch. It is interesting to hear. This is just a sort of prototype.
- [45:27]
Elena Verna
Yeah. Minimum level.
- [45:30]
Lenny Rachitsky
Okay, I got to 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?
- [45:39]
Elena Verna
Great question. This is A new job role that is actually popping up here and there. It's absolutely fascinating to watch this development because I see Vibe coding as a skill being added to a lot of job descriptions for designers, for product managers, for marketers, which I think is a really interesting shift. Finally Excel can move over like we have a new skill to add that is super empowering and not three years old, but Vibe code or so. His name is Lazar and he actually was chief of staff in his previous role. So he's not technical at all. He's self taught in technical aspects of it. But he was very early on in the Vibe coding wave so he learned a lot about it. He was user of all of the Vibe coding tools, lovable included. And 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 woman only hackathon. She builds. I Vibe coded the first version of that site and submission process for applications and then other people came in and started building on top of it. But I Vibe coded but then 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 want to test in the market with our own products. So we connected on social and I'm like, can you like, would you join us? And he joined us for sponsors part time, bringing so much value. For example, we partnered with Shopify and he created a bunch of Shopify Lovable templates by Coded for us. And it's been so helpful to have somebody like that that is just like pushing all of these things out. And he's an absolute expert. So he's teaching us all too of what is possible with Lovable because he's on the cutting edge of constantly pushing it to the limit. So I really enjoy having that role, which I've never had before in my life and in my team.
- [47:31]
Lenny Rachitsky
I'm not surprised. 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 vibe coding companies?
- [47:41]
Elena Verna
So I Vibe code myself. So like I would put that as even as a skill on my resume now. It took me a while to figure out by the way, like everybody's like, oh, you just go in like it and it all happens automatically. It takes you a couple of iterations, couple of projects until like you know, okay, 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 wipe 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 because they're not going to get incorporated into the product anytime soon. They don't need to be. I'll just link to them from our header, so to speak. And he really accelerated that velocity for me. So once you get into bytecoding and you see its value within your organization, leaning into somebody like that just accelerates your velocity because it is like an engineer on your team. It's just they're not. To me he's part technical, but they can be non technical if they're really good.
- [48:40]
Lenny Rachitsky
That is fascinating.
- [48:42]
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- [49:47]
Lenny Rachitsky
Let me kind of go back to summarize just real quick the growth levers. I want to move in a somewhat different direction. So things that help lovable grow. One is just build something in mind that blows your socks off. As you said, I love these phrases out here. The second is make noise in the market. And the way that Lovable does this, the CEO's tweeting constantly, you build something that blows people's socks off so that they share things on socials themselves. Plus this influencer marketing component and just this idea of building in public has been really helpful. This point about activation being kind of embedded within the product team of the AI experience of the AI 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 growth levers. Is there anything else that I missed?
- [50:38]
Elena Verna
Community. I think community is really important here because 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 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. And it has hundreds of thousands of members and 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 incredible ambassador program now as well of people doing it. So I would say community here again of really making software more human is very important role. Now, obviously not everybody can build a community, but maybe at least plugging in into somebody's community is quite important as well. And then there's another one. Unless you have a question on community.
- [51:46]
Lenny Rachitsky
No, keep going.
- [51:48]
Elena Verna
Another one is giving your product away a lot. And for AI products it may feel counterintuitive because they're so costly. Every single interaction with an AI product costs companies something. There's an LLM pass through cost that is coming through. And a lot of especially traditional tech companies I see are gating AI immediately behind a paywall because they're sitting on a really cush high margin profile. And the moment that you start giving AI away for free, you cutting into those margins 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. 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 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 aha 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 going to 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. So we give them away as candy and we basically track them over our LLM costs on freemium and giveaways as our marketing costs. And it doesn't go into our something we need to reduce to make our margins better. It goes into this is something that we need to spend more in because this is part of our growth secret sauce.
- [53:41]
Lenny Rachitsky
Okay, I want to hear more about the growth secret sauce. That is extremely interesting. 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. And so this is. And, 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 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 faster and faster by giving it away.
- [54:10]
Elena Verna
Exactly. And again, this is very uncomfortable sometimes for companies that a either used to really AI companies have lower profile of margins. That's absolutely true. To find an AI company with 80, 90% margin profile is absolutely impossible. Let's be real, we're all sitting somewhere in the 40% 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 of what is possible and I need to remove the monetization friction out of it. Because if you don't, nobody's ever going to try it or you're going to be very easily overtaken by a competitor that will give it away. And let's face it, once you hook people, they're more likely going to stay with you. So you obviously have to still work on the retention strategy there. But if you can have like for our case, if somebody, one of our users stands up and say, hey, I'm going to have a hackathon at my work on lovable, can you give 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? 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 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 is more and more becoming of something that I see that is absolutely non negotiable.
- [55:52]
Lenny Rachitsky
What I'm feeling is like the more mind blowing it is, the more you should give it away for free.
- [55:56]
Elena Verna
Yeah.
- [55:57]
Lenny Rachitsky
Especially in a competitive market where everyone is, you know, it's hard. There's like so many companies trying to do this thing and so, so it's almost like the better you are, the more you should give it away.
- [56:07]
Elena Verna
Right, right.
- [56:08]
Lenny Rachitsky
And this also explains why so much VC 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.
- [56:16]
Elena Verna
Yes and no. I'm only going to say no is because. So take a look at lovable. We're over 200 million in AR at this point. We're 100 people large, so our headcount count costs are very low.
- [56:29]
Lenny Rachitsky
Wait, wait, wait, wait. Let me just make sure people hear that. 200 million ARR. I didn't realize 100 people work at Lovable.
- [56:36]
Elena Verna
Yes, and six months ago we had 30 people working at Lovable. So we tripled. So for us it's a really big deal. We tripled our company size. We're going to tackle it by the end of. Yeah, I know we're big boy and girls now, but for perspective of the headcount cost, it's minimal. So we have very little in that going on. 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 low double digits to be fair. Because it's not why we're successful. It's amplifying our success and it's helping us reach new audiences. We don't have really large sales team. We have only a couple sales folks 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 going to do a lot of paid marketing, if you're not going to do a lot of sales, because we're really only working on hand raisers of people that are saying right now that they want to buy Lovable then whereas you don't have big costs so you can spend it on products. 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 going to use Lovable in their hackathon or on their own. And we're not competing on AdWords or like in paid Google where everybody's buying real estate for eyeballs. So from that perspective, it's just, I think about it more as a shift of where we spend and cost and honestly it's more efficient way to do paid marketing almost in a sense because of the cost per eyeball that we get there is quite a bit lower compared to if we were trying to compete it on Google. So yes and no to your statement because it actually does not deteriorate margin profile. We're just shifting of where we're spending it.
- [58:31]
Lenny Rachitsky
That is an incredibly important point you're making there. So it's not like you're generating an incredible amount of revenue. So there is money 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 an amazing way to get more people to use it. So it's kind of like a marketing cost.
- [58:55]
Elena Verna
This is product led growth.
- [58:57]
Lenny Rachitsky
Yeah, supercharged.
- [58:58]
Elena Verna
The max. Supercharged, yes. Because you 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.
- [59:11]
Lenny Rachitsky
So fascinating. What a wild world we're living in. Free stuff for everyone.
- [59:16]
Elena Verna
Yes, yes. I mean it's great for consumers. This is a 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 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. The demand from the Consumers can be very picky and the one that serves the best will win.
- [59:52]
Lenny Rachitsky
And I think again, it's important to highlight this is not some kind of VC subsidized bubble ish sort of thing. Like there is a lot of money being generated that you 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 VC money.
- [60:08]
Elena Verna
Obviously it helps. I can't comment on specific margin details for us, but at the same time the money that we're raising on VC is for future development and hardening our business, not because we will not be able to survive without it.
- [60:22]
Lenny Rachitsky
Awesome. Okay, great segue to I want to talk about product market fit and competition. You have this really interesting post that I don't think people grasp yet, which is that product market fit is no longer this like we've done it product market fit and we're up and to the right now we just grow, grow, grow. Now we hire salespeople. It's going to be great. You've written that just product market fit 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.
- [60:49]
Elena Verna
So I'll first start with 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 thing, but the rate of that evolution was measured in years. 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'd need 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 that you just tried 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? 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 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 LLM is capable of doing changes still very rapidly with new model releases, with each new model release. So I think we're gonna, I think we'll stabilize at some point and it's gonna become more marginal, but if 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 LLM. And when you have this new possibility in just the underlying technology that opens up in front of you, then it creates another ceiling of what is possible to build on top of it. And the 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 that's the LLM 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 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 ChatGPT 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 and the deep thinking mode and how deeply it can go into answering questions and what is capable of building on top of it. So consumer perception has never changed this fast too. It's this unprecedented time of consumers all of a sudden like in a 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 technology and with same customers. It's both of those pieces of the equation change every three months. And it's terrifying in a way. It's also very confusing in a way because we're $200 million 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 on ongoing basis. Now I think every AI company is on this product market fit treadmill. Hopefully that treadmill speed slows down. If not, I think we're going to come up with like crazy things of what this LLM and AI will be able to do if it's going to continue at this customer. But it's a weird place to be in because every three months we have to throttle on our scaling efforts and just reinvent and then scale again. But it's like short blitz of growth, not these long year long commitments.
- [65:08]
Lenny Rachitsky
What makes this very real is just this week, apparently OpenAI had this whole code red moment where even though OpenAI, by far the leading AI assistant over almost a billion, I think monthly active users like basically synonymous with AI around the world, with Gemini 3 launching, their market share just started to dip really quickly. I think they lost like 6 something percent in like a week. And so even OpenAI, like ChatGPT, the original, the one that everyone uses constantly, is in danger.
- [65:40]
Elena Verna
It's like nobody's future is bulletproof yet. And 10 years ago if you asked me if a $200 million company was at risk in losing product market fit in the next three months, if it's experiencing 10% month over month growth, I would have said you're crazy. And now that's the reality that we live in. And I don't know, it's fascinating to world and what a time to be alive.
- [66:04]
Lenny Rachitsky
What a time to be alive and very stressful. But the prize at the end is massive. That's, you know, that's why this is worth doing not just monetarily, but just the impact it's going to have on the world. The way we people build and ship.
- [66:17]
Elena Verna
Exactly, exactly. The ceiling of what is possible has been raised so massively that we haven't even became too closest to even see it. I believe so. I think that that's the exciting part of it.
- [66:29]
Lenny Rachitsky
The way I've seen you write about this product market fit challenge is 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.
- [66:44]
Elena Verna
Yeah. Bengali wrote a really wonderful article, it was many years ago at this point on adjacent user theory and that your product market fit expansion. When you're in no growth stages, the biggest opportunity for you to go after is this, what he called adjacent user, which are just outside of your core user. They have somewhat similar needs, but maybe they're in different geo, maybe they have slightly different use cases, slightly different needs. And your biggest way to continue growing your product market fit without having to go to the next horizon is to capture those that 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. We don't have time to go after adjacent users and I'm worried of whether there's going to be a gap in the space where we actually going to alienate the latent majority because we're so hyper focused on just staying top of mind and top of capabilities on the pioneers. But I don't know the right answer here because without the pioneers 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 concern, but it's just something that I think about because at this stage we should be working on adjacent users and I would argue maybe OpenAI definitely started to do that with how many people they have on their platform, but not most of the other AI companies.
- [68:31]
Lenny Rachitsky
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.
- [68:38]
Elena Verna
Yeah. Or it's like it's for, just like it's for techies, it's like for tech people. It's like it never actually enters the people outside of our little bubble that we live in.
- [68:50]
Lenny Rachitsky
We kind of touched on this a little bit of just like working in AI, working on AI companies, challenging, stressful, a lot of work. What's your advice for folks that are thinking about should I join a lovable, should I join a cursor, Should I just go work at Google Micro? You know, not to throw them under the bus or anything but just although Google very, very successful in a, I know maybe less AI focused company, I.
- [69:13]
Elena Verna
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 that product market fit treadmill about that distribution of how they're actually distribute 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 really comfortable of 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 even before joining Lovable, when I kept seeing AI, I'm like, my gosh, I'm so tired of seeing AI everywhere. Is it really changing the world? Is it really changing the way people work? And when I was at Dropbox before and yeah, we would use AI here and there and I would use ChatGPT. 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. Just different compared to be surrounded by people where it's expectation, it's not 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 augment it with AI. And here the mindset is completely shifted now. I don't think AI is replacing everybody's job. So please don't look at it as a. As that cliche saying. I actually often call AI as 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 a native employee and how to use all of these AI tools, you should go to AI Company. But if you know that your superpower is in more structure, in more definition, in really high specialty of things. Because in the AI companies, they're all fairly small, so you'll have to generalize quite a bit 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 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.
- [72:00]
Lenny Rachitsky
Yeah. My sense is if you want work life balance, don't join one of these companies because that's just not the way they work.
- [72:07]
Elena Verna
I don't know 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. But I put in boundaries for myself. Like I know when I need time off because I know when my brain starts to overheat, so to speak. But I also know that work is my hobby and it's my passion and I will. This is the best work of my life that I'm doing right now. There's no other place that I'd rather be than to be here. So I think that you just need to be more careful about setting your own boundaries that you know you need. But I mean, let's face it, I don't think anybody has work life balance. Regardless of a company that they work at. Even at Google or Microsoft or any of the others. I think everybody is freaking out and running as fast as they can. It's just they're running it in different structures.
- [72:58]
Lenny Rachitsky
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, and actually have work life balance to get sleep, to spend time with your kids and family, you just have.
- [73:12]
Elena Verna
To protect it ruthlessly. But you also need to be realistic with how much is expected 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. But I'm very protective of my personal time with kids. Like why did I have children if I'm not going to spend time with them? So those are part of the non negotiables that I bring along with me in every single work.
- [73:48]
Lenny Rachitsky
For people that maybe have trouble setting boundaries or just not good at this anything. What works for you? Is it as easy just telling people? Here's where you need to leave. What advice do you have for people to set boundaries like that?
- [73:59]
Elena Verna
So first of all, I would not think about it as a work life balance. There's no such thing as balance or balance. Feels like, oh, I have enough time for everything. I don't have enough Time for anything. But I prioritize my family in some moments, I prioritize 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 that I'm making today. So I'm constantly trying to put myself in the future and say, well, 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, even 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, my health, my workout 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 cylinders firing 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.
- [75:18]
Lenny Rachitsky
That is really great advice. I want to 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 going to be. So you mentioned a little bit about how you're always talking to AI, asking questions. Is there any other kind of anecdotes of just how people operate at Lovable that is really unique or weird or funny or interesting that might be helpful for people to try in their company.
- [75:43]
Elena Verna
Yeah, I mean, we use Lovable at Lovable a lot. Like, all of our internal tools are built on Lovables. We actually have our first hackathon on Lovable happening next. Next week where we're gonna entire company is just gonna take full day to vibe code and see what we actually have happened. We prototype everything unlovable. So our specs, yeah, we do still have a written spec, but it always accompanied by a lovable prototype that everybody can interact with and to click around with and provide feedback. And everybody bunches in and also like, does some edits if they have any better ideas. So I create mocks on Lovable. So for example, we need to make some pricing changes. A pricing page changes. I take a screenshot of our pricing page. I go to Lovable as I 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. And chatgpt. 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. Sometimes it has crazy ideas, sometimes it does. Like, sometimes it was like, yeah, this is like nothing new to me. So it's not interesting. But it gets me thinking and it gets me look at the different angles and lots of. I use granola a lot, for example, because to me it's super helpful to get AI summaries of the meetings and it's very powerful for me. I use whisper flow 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 all the time in order to do it. But we're even thinking about all of the customer support automations that are done through AI. How do we. Every single aspect of what we do is question is asked, what can AI do here first? And then how we can add ourselves into the equation. But Lovable, for us, having unlimited credits at Lovable is a pretty awesome perk, I have to say. I sometimes have to pinch myself. I'm like, I give page to Vibe Code. It looks so fun.
- [77:45]
Lenny Rachitsky
I feel like that engineer, that Vibe Code engineer, he's. He's like, actually he is my dream job.
- [77:49]
Elena Verna
I want his job. I feel like I, yeah, I, I got into the wrong line of profession here.
- [77:55]
Lenny Rachitsky
Oh man. Okay. Is there anything else about Lovable? Because 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 ChatGPT it and I was just like, that is. Is the most insane thing I've ever heard. How couldn't you possibly work that way? And now that's how everyone works. And so I'm curious, just I don't know, like how. I don't know how Anton works. Is there anyone else that's just like way in the future of here's how things might be.
- [78:20]
Elena Verna
So for me, especially for product and growth and even marketing at some point 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, ah, this is like, like, we need to do it. And then I go and try to bytecode it and I'm like, oh, I don't see the magic anymore, or I can't envision it anymore. Or sometimes I'm like, yeah, yeah. And 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 me on product development life cycle so much further down. And then it creates a much better communication vehicle with my engineers too, because 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, we would never be like, designers would do it for us and try to make it awesome. Versus I often stop my ideas in tracks super early on without pushing it forward. Versus other times I might have pushed it too, for too far, too long, even through design Q. Or even like pitching to leadership. And I find that very powerful because it calibrates me really quickly.
- [79:44]
Lenny Rachitsky
Awesome. Okay, last question. I want to talk about something that you've written about that is really. 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 about what you're seeing here, what you're noticing, what you think might be going in the wrong direction.
- [80:00]
Elena Verna
Yeah, there's actually conflicting data points about how women. You're talking about women, right?
- [80:06]
Lenny Rachitsky
Yeah.
- [80:06]
Elena Verna
Women in tech.
- [80:07]
Lenny Rachitsky
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [80:07]
Elena Verna
There's conflicting data points about 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 manages widening the gap of accessibility for technology. And whoever's adopting AI right now is getting paid the most, gets the most opportunities. I mean, we're seeing insane aqua hires right now where 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 this wave of AI and women are not really present there. Like, if you can think about like $1 million 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, most of it is men. If you, if you look at the company's composition of. In AI 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, sure this is where it's 50, 50 men versus woman. And although we don't collect this information, but just like through third party autofill we saw it's like 20% at most. And I'm like, what is happening? Not again. Why is this again not being adopted by women? And obviously I don't know all of the answers. 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 because I think men are doing wonderful job really spearheading the horizons and showing us what's possible and like leading the charge. I'm just afraid that so many women are stuck in that latent majority that is just not catching up. And my worry is that it's gonna affect the hireable talent, it's gonna 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 sit on. But I think that there is a. It needs to be built for everybody in the world. And for that it needs to be built by a representative sample of people that are behind the product as well. So I just find it fascinating that even when the barrier to building has been lowered, 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 gap on the adoption between genders, which is just, I don't know, there's like something very frustrating about that.
- [82:51]
Lenny Rachitsky
Yeah, the thing that struck with me from your post is there has been a lot of progress being made in the last decade and now AI is just kind of turning it all back, turning it all around.
- [83:00]
Elena Verna
Hopefully not. I think that we're early on enough that we can bridge the gap. I think sometimes women just need space and ability to discover it. And that's what we're doing. At Lovable, we have this initiative she builds where we have collect. We create a hackathon for women only and we give them unlimited access to lovable for 48 hours. And 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 build help with their elderly parents or with their kids or with the household or for their church group or for the kids basketball team. Solutions should have hyper local, hyper relevant, 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 would never gonna become potentially a hundred million dollar companies. But it also doesn't need to be anymore. So I just want to 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.
- [84:17]
Lenny Rachitsky
I'll give the URL for SheBuilds. I pulled it up while you're talking. Shebuilds Lovable app.
- [84:23]
Elena Verna
We bytecoded unlovable. Is there a minimum viable product?
- [84:27]
Lenny Rachitsky
Minimal lovable products.
- [84:28]
Elena Verna
Minimal lovable products.
- [84:30]
Lenny Rachitsky
There it is. So when is this happening? Is this December 15th, 18th. So it's.
- [84:33]
Elena Verna
Yeah, we have it. We're running it constantly. So our next cohort starts December 15th, 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 come join us.
- [84:48]
Lenny Rachitsky
Awesome. I don't know if you. 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 the same today. I was looking at my most recent podcast video performance and the top four are all women and they're all AI oriented and they're above Stuart Butterfield, founder of Slack, above Gamma's CEO of Grant. So maybe a glimmer of hope.
- [85:10]
Elena Verna
Yeah, absolutely. I think there's lots of glimmers of hope. I think we can just all lean in and make sure that nobody is left behind in this wave. And that's not to stop people that are marching ahead. This is just to open up opportunities for everybody around us.
- [85:25]
Lenny Rachitsky
Awesome. And we'll link to that post if people want to get a deeper perspective what you're seeing. Elena, is there anything else that you wanted to share? Is there anything else you want to remind people of before we get to our one question lightning round?
- [85:38]
Elena Verna
I guess the only other thing that I will share is for AI companies when it comes to hiring. It's really interesting also the 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 that I've worked before. And that is 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, I shouldn't say kids, young adults that are entering into the workforce that they really know AI, which is there's another like really big issue that our schools are not teaching AI 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 young for a complete failure. But I, I think it's incredible to see some of those new graduates come in and what they're capable of doing. 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 old guard like me that can look at the new guard and really hear them and see them and really change the way that I operate based on how they do things. So 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 putting those into your team as little fireballs that are going to be sometimes hard to contain but can start the best initiatives for you forward. And then it's also interesting that there's a really high demand for ex founders now for like those people that are truly have a lot of agency and high autonomy. 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 prioritize in companies to hire are now becoming the hottest commodity and the highest going talent which is I think is fascinating. And it's like the wonderful thing that is changing how the culture inside operates.
- [88:09]
Lenny Rachitsky
That is really interesting and really empowering. Just this idea that if you need grad, there's hope. You're not going to be out of a job.
- [88:15]
Elena Verna
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [88:15]
Lenny Rachitsky
And you might have an advantage.
- [88:18]
Elena Verna
You have to lead with that. That's the thing. You have to lead with the things that you are capable of achieving, knowing what you have with AI 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 versus coming in and seeing and then copying.
- [88:37]
Lenny Rachitsky
Well, Elena, with that we reached our very exciting lightning round. Because it's your fourth time, I'm not going to ask you all the questions I always ask you, so I'm just going to ask you one question. So Lovable is based in Stockholm, Sweden. I'm curious, just like, what do 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.
- [88:55]
Elena Verna
Well, you always have to say Swedish meatballs. I mean, I've never liked meatballs before. So like. And now it's. It's so good here. It's so good. So like every time one of my meals here throughout the day 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.
- [89:16]
Lenny Rachitsky
And it's not like the ikea. It's not like the IKEA Swedish meatball.
- [89:20]
Elena Verna
Well, I have been to IKEA here because that is a Swedish company too. It like reminded me of in person, Amazon. It was like absolutely incredible. IKEA here is like next level. But food, food, Swedish meatballs for sure. Honestly, how clean the city is. Like, it's. It's kind of incredible. The architecture, like, everything is so built out. It's like picture perfect. Like it's on the card. I don't know, it's. It's different compared to like most of the large cities that I've been at. That a little bit more worn down, so fun.
- [89:50]
Lenny Rachitsky
Makes me want to visit, get some meatballs.
- [89:54]
Elena Verna
Do it during the summer, otherwise the daylight here is really, really tight during the winter.
- [89:59]
Lenny Rachitsky
Okay, good tip. Okay, two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out, maybe learn more? And how can listeners be useful to you?
- [90:06]
Elena Verna
Yes, please find me online on LinkedIn. Please feel free to follow me. Always engage on my posts if you want to engage with me, because that's the place that I always talk to people. I have my newsletter as well that I'm baby steps compared to what Lenny has, but it's elenaverna.com I also try to. That's where I post most of my findings that I experience at my work. So if you want to continue seeing how my thinking evolves or what the patterns that I noticed that's where to find me and how to be useful to me. 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 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.
- [90:59]
Lenny Rachitsky
I'm just going to double click on your newsletter. Definitely subscribe to it. It's incredibly good. Everything we've talked about here Elena has written about in her newsletter in large part and goes even deeper. It's just Elena Vernon.com if you're like reading this on your podcast app or YouTube, you could just look at her name and just typeit.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 a lot of work to do, so I appreciate you making time for this and for joining us.
- [91:27]
Elena Verna
Thank you for having me. Really appreciate you.
- [91:29]
Lenny Rachitsky
Bye everyone.
- [91:31]
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