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A
What have I told you? There's a company out there that has grown faster than chatgpt. How wild would that be? Well, that is the story of Lovable. We are lucky enough to have founder Anton Osika on this episode to break down their incredible growth. Now, this is a company that has grown to a hundred million in ARR in less than eight months with only forty plus employees. And Anton breaks down how he thinks Lovable is going to change the way we think about software. Lovable enables the 99% of people who cannot code to actually build apps. I go through a couple of ways that Lovable can help unlock value for marketers today. How should you be using Lovable? And Anton speaks about how people can make a great career in the AI world, make sure they are highly employable and sought after. All of this and more on this episode of marketing as the green Anton, thanks very much for coming on to the show. We have Anton Oika here, the famous founder of one of the fastest growing apps, I think maybe the fastest growing app of all time, Lovable. Very, very happy to have you on the show, Anton.
B
Likewise. It's great to meet you again, Kieran.
A
You've done a lot of speak in. I think a lot of people have gone through the story of Lovable and I know we have a certain amount of time here, so I wanted to kind of dive into some of the key points about Lovable to frame it for our audience. Now, Lovable is an app that allows you to build anything. I think you call it the last piece of software you'll ever need. There was a stat I want to kind of call out which you may have tweeted about, which I think is one of the most incredible stats of all time, which is like 2, 2.5 million sites were built in lovable in June. That's 10% of all new sites on the Internet that month. Maybe just start at the start. How did you end up on AI for coding? How did you end up in Lovable? Like, what was your path into building this company? And then we can kind of get into some of the ways Lovable is changing how we think about software today.
B
Sure. I mean, it's such a fun space to build in. And as you said, 10% of the size of the Internet, like, imagine all the creativity and humans that are excited to create something, something that is actually the driver behind that. It's not us being the driver behind those websites, but how it started was that I was CTO at the YC startup and the company was growing But I knew I wanted to do something more than E commerce enablement and optimization around that. So when the first versions of GPT came out, it became clear to me that this is going to continue to accelerate and we're going to be able to build very complex applications like systems on top of this, raw fundamental APIs. And I thought about exactly what to build. Over a few weekends, I hacked together something I called GPT Engineer, which was a similar premise. Like you play in English and then you get a working application running on your computer. I put this up on GitHub, which is really for developers, where they put their project. And then I woke up to thousands of people using this, creating videos about how to use it. And this really set the tone from that point. So this was two and a half years ago for many of the companies that are about letting AI create software. And I hadn't started a company around this at that point in time. But after thinking about what is the change you can do in the world around this topic, it became clear to me that developers, that is much less than 1% of the world's population. And what you can actually do now is you can create new type of Interface for the 99% who don't write code to be able to be part in this huge revolution. We've seen in basically tech companies being built on the back of software, engineers creating software. So that's what Loveable's mission is about, is to unlock the creativity and many of the best ideas which are among the 99% of people who don't write software code.
A
Yeah.
B
And then I started building company and we launched Lovable late November. And since then we have many millions of users. And I just saw this stat that we have 150,000 websites that are seeing a lot of real traffic that people successfully built with the custom domains and so on.
A
Yeah. And to kind of set the tone here, we first actually spoke when you, I think, had just launched GPT Engineer, because we covered GPT Engineer actually on this channel. We had played around with it, built a landing page. And that kind of sounds like a way back when story, like way back when it was GPT Engineer. That was last year. And so Lovable has like become Europe's fastest growing startup. You're over 100 million in ARR, 1.8 billion billionth valuation, like in eight months. And so what was the moment where you were like, oh, this is like different than I thought it would be. This is really growing beyond whatever I could have even imagined. Like, was there a Moment when you were like, this is something I had not expected. Or maybe you did expect it.
B
Yeah. So after the launch, we were growing, but I was still thinking we could grow much faster because this product is such a game changer. But when we launched Lovable, it was such a. Such a huge step up from anything else that was out there. But when I was still surprised was that it continued over many, many months, just continued to growing faster and faster. And that was a bit surreal. I didn't think it would be like this endless growth trajectory that we've been on to date. We're growing faster than ever the last few months.
A
Yeah. I do think it's partly the kind of, you know, quote unquote magic, Right. Like, there's these products that come along that enable, you said, at 1% of the world can kind of code. My background is computer science. I was like an average coder and you want to create software for the other 99%. And I remember for GPT Engineer, I built a landing page. Now if I go into my Lovable, I have an app that's around 30,000 lines in code, right. And that's more code than I wrote in the four years I was at university.
B
Right.
A
I was like, really wondering I could have maybe stayed to be a developer if, like these kind of tools existed. Because I was a pretty average coder. And so for people like me, it gives me my creativity back, right. It enables me to be creative, enables me to build. And so I really want to dial into this, like. So when you think about, okay, 1% of the world, people like me used to go to college, we did computer science. Some of us did not go on to be great developers and went into marketing like me. But now the other 99% can all code, right? They can use tools like Lovable, they can build real apps. Like, the app that I built in Lovable is like real software that I'm going to be releasing for users. What are the implications of that? Like, do you think about that? Like, what are the implications for the world that everyone has a coding assistant and can bring ideas to life.
B
Yeah. Can I ask you what you built?
A
So I have built a writing tool, creative writing tool that is not out yet. It is like built, for the most part unlovable. And we have some other tools that we've kind of used as part of that.
B
Yeah. Is it like an AI?
A
It's an AI tool. I'm not trying to promote my product, but it's an inspiration tool. I think where most creative writing tools go wrong is they try to produce copy and paste tools. AI is not a thing you copy and paste. It's a great creative outlet. And so what it does is it makes it really easy to create inspirational nuggets for your audience and then you build upon that and create great content for them.
B
I love it. Look, so your question is how it's going to affect the world and what we're going to see is that people like yourself, like this is a really good idea and you're also good at marketing. Right. So you can build a successful business. And there are millions out there who have been held back by how difficult it is to find the capital, the time to get and understand how to code, or how difficult it is to learn that skill set. They're not going to be able to create real businesses. And it's a huge unlock in speed as well. So what used to take people like I spoke to someone at McKinsey recently spent six months on just getting the first version of a new tool they wanted to create for their business. Now they see it in three weeks with lovable. So we're going to see this explosion of good software tools. And like the first version I refer to often as like the first viable product. But if you iterate enough, I think we're going to reach millions and millions of lovable products built on top of Lovable. Yeah, for especially people who have maybe some skill set in terms of the distribution side of software products, there might be like an even larger unlock where I'm hearing people who used to have to work with engineers in marketing. It's been held back by engineering capacity and always have to communicate like PDFs, writing documents. They can just go, you can just take your idea of what marketing funnel or a new tool for improving your work and then build the whole thing yourself. Yeah, it really changes like the dynamics inside of large companies as well in the workplace.
A
Yeah, yeah. We had an offsite in San Francisco recently. It's our think big and we kind of pitch game changing ideas, the things that will really drive the company on the next five years. Now in a pre lovable or these kind of tools era, it's a lot of presentations and wireframes and it's kind of cool because there wasn't really presentations. I call it the transition from memo to demo. And like every presentation was a prototype, right? I had a prototype, everyone had a prototype. So you could use real software and kind of bring the idea to life. And I think that's part of the internal use case is you can prototype ideas much, much more rapidly.
B
Yep.
A
Real quick. We're giving you the ultimate guide on how you can use Lovable to turn your ideas into real web apps. This guide will show you how to build your own landing pages in less than 20 minutes, create your own Legion tools and test your campaign ideas, all by transforming your conversations into working web apps. Plus, MATG viewers get an exclusive code to get $25 off any plan. Get it right now. Grab it at the link in the description. Now let's get back to the show. The other thing about Lovable is it's not just a new tool that's allowing people to do new ways. I think you're growing the company in a very different way than traditional software companies are grown. So you have around about, I think, 45 employees, maybe more. Because I know you're growing much, much faster. But your revenue, that's insane. Like the amount of employees you have to revenue is probably, I don't know if any other company has achieved something like that. Can you talk to us a little bit about how you think maybe differently about building a company than a traditional CEO in a non AI native company? Like, are there some grounding principles you have that you think are fundamentally different than other CEOs?
B
It's a good question. I think a lot about the future. Much of the work that is not human facing is going to almost be instant and unlocked. So that means that you want individuals in the company that are really good at a bit of everything. I generally bet on people that have a high slope so that you can see that they're very, very good at learning new skills and do so rapidly, which I think works well in the age of AI where everything is changing very rapidly. But most importantly in how I think about building the company is to build a team of people that really care about what we're doing and obsess about how the team works together, our users, the product that we're building, and make sure we work better and better together every week. And people who are generally humble and nice, you want to be able to work with good at their job. Of course, that's how I think about building the company. And putting that team together is the most important job that I have.
A
Yeah, you mentioned an important trend there, which is do you see the way companies shift? Because you kind of mentioned that they're, that they're, you know, kind of generalists powered by AI. So like maybe a marketeer can do many jobs, a salesperson can do many jobs because of AI. And so the Specialist domain expertise is maybe not as important as it was, or, you know, how do you think about that specialization versus generalization because of AI? It's a good question.
B
Like, for building software products, it's very valuable to have the very, very deep expertise of, like, if you're building a very complex thing, which is a software product, if you do a change, how is it going to affect your users? How do you bring them? How do you develop a social product together with your users? And having seen that many times is very useful. But at the same time, marketing, for example, I think it's always changing. So marketing, in a sense, is being good at learning things rapidly and being creative. And what our tool that Lovable does is that it actually helps you to be more creative because you can move much faster from like an idea to a prototype or a website that you can put out to yourself like a marketing funnel, and you can get validation and you can go to the next idea and go to the next idea. So I think creativity actually becomes more important in this age.
A
Yeah. So if we're enabling many more people to be able to code with Lovable and make it much more easy. And one of the kind of cool things in Lovable is you're not just making it easy to code. Like, you are really building an internal app that allows you to bring ideas to the public much, much faster. So an example is I was talking about something in the podcast the next day, I wrote it and put it Live and Lovable on the domain. Like, I bought the domain of Lovable, I hosted it through Lovable, and it was live within actually, like five minutes. It was, like, incredible how fast it was. And so you're kind of like really building the entire ecosystem. But if we're making it much easier for, like, people to code and maybe code gets commoditized, I would love to hear your opinion on that. So, you know, coding becomes commoditized, and then do you believe that the actual real skill to learn is how you market, how you grow an audience, how you distribute that product? Because if we have an infinite number of products, some of them are still going to have to rise above the noise because the distribution part is still incredibly complex.
B
I think that building a really good product is still going to need a lot of obsession, understanding of your users and a lot, many, many rounds of iteration, so that doesn't go away. And it's not easy to build a really, really good product. And the expectations are increasing. But it is true that the distribution piece, without distribution, nothing matters on your product side. So every founder I recommend to find a way to either become really good product distribution, have a co founder that's really good at distribution in some sense and really understand one channel for distribution, be it sales or marketing. And it's never been easier to learn something than this year in 2025. I think with AI like all the good content that's out there. So I think it's always going to be a combination of marketing or sales and both and a really good product. And that's how businesses work.
A
Yeah, I think your point is taken in that there's a big difference between prototype and a minimal viable version and, and having a product that can scale to many, many users. I do think one of the things we see happening, we've talked about in this show is the amount of software and apps launching on this kind of trajectory and the amount of marketing channels is actually going down because like Google search is being disrupted, social is being heavily disrupted by AI because we have a lot of AI generated content saturated in those channels. And so I still think those two skills are going to be incredibly important. I'm curious to get your take because when we had talked first you were like super interested in the creator space. And I do think B2B will look more like B2C over time where you have creator led companies, you know, you have the audience and then you actually launch software because it's so much easier to do that. Like do you see that as a trend for software in that you have people today who are quote unquote creators, monetize that audience through affiliations or brand partnerships and now in the future could just use Lovable to build an app to monetize that audience.
B
Yeah, it's a good question. I think consumers want to buy from are people they know and trust and creators are someone that you know and trust. So you do have a huge advantage on that side if you're a creator like yourself, that people know like how you think and it's easy to digest interesting information from you than from someone that I've never seen before. Right. So that's something worth investing in. But you don't have to play that game. In a sense, you can play other games as well and be very successful.
A
Yeah, I suspect like one of the things our audience will be really curious on. We have a ton of founders, but marketeers as well.
B
Yeah.
A
And you are a founder of a company that has free marketing. You have like real, real virality, like the truest sense of virality where lovable is everywhere. Without you having to do a lot. Right. Because you just have a great product and it's really the kind of again, I do think there's this like real thing which is the magic of the tool allows you to do something that was never before possible. So you have free marketing. What do you want from marketing? Like when you kind of step back, what could great marketing do for Lovable? Like what, how do you think about that?
B
I think it's mostly about amplifying the word of mouth, which is like the absolutely largest channel for everything in a customer acquisition. So that is about letting people be equipped to spread the word of how lovable is best use. Like it lets you build simple websites in the five minutes as you did Kieran, but it also lets you do much more. It lets you build like what you need in software engineering genius for in the past and being able to letting the community that's out there show that A lot of people love running lovable events because it's so fun to have see people create for the With Lovable for the first time, it's probably one of the biggest parts then it's always important to bring your users with you as you evolve the product. And I think having been good at product marketing and running, doing launches and explaining what's changing and how this affects the capabilities is one function of marketing. There's also now that we have large companies, a lot of Fortune 500 companies using lovable at large contracts, everything that comes with enterprise marketing. And then I mean there's the more technical side of how we engage with our users that are like with emails and other touch points I think people call growth marketing. Yeah, it's all the functions that I'm looking to become not like world class on. We're focusing on making the product better, but we're looking to expand the team and doing all of these things really, really well.
A
Yeah, I think like having someone who can really foster the community and continue to build that. I, I think there's so much scope for you guys to do like cool brand stunts. I know I was, I had this one, we were doing a podcast episode of like fun brand stunts and one of the ones we were going to do for Lovable is again it's just a certain time period you do this for, but you would set up a cloud kitchen but instead of ordering food, you would order software and you would have people. Instead of like uber Eats, you would have lovable eats. And so for a two week period you could actually order lovable eats which would be your Partners, and they could come to anywhere and build software and you could film it all and they would build the software in five minutes. I think that kind of stuff. There's so many cool ways you could bring lovable to life. The other one I'll just give you, which is like, one of the ones I think would be really cool for you all is on Scribe now. But like, SlideShare used to have so many of the original pitch decks. They're so interesting, right? They always get a ton of tractions. They have millions of views. The original pitch deck for Airbnb, the original pitch deck for Dropbox. Like, one of the cool things about lovable is you could go back through time and instead of doing the pitch deck, you would have done the minimal viable version. And so you could have a creator whose only channel is doing the original minimal viable version. All live doing lovable, like, so the original Airbnb do the original pitch deck. I want to just quickly show you this. I do want our marketers to have.
B
To pay you for these ideas.
A
No, no, no. These are all free, Anton. I, I. These are all free for you. This is all I do, is think of ideas. So if you want more, I've got more.
B
If there's anyone out there that want to help make this come to life, please reach out to me or Elena or if you want to forward it to me.
A
I just want to show marketers, like, one use case you should think about for lovable. And again, this is an idea, a minimal, viable idea, because this took me five minutes, literally five minutes. And so again, this is for lovable. And so what I did was I did perplexity to basically research and create different Personas for lovable. Like, who uses lovable? And then based on one of Those Personas, had ChatGPT craft a product idea and then build a lead magnet. So traditionally, marketers, Anton, would create these things called lead magnets. So lead magnets are, I go to a blog or I go to a website, and there's like a content thing to download, like a white paper, or there's a slide deck or there's a template. Now what I think happens is, is all of those content powered experiences become code powered experiences. Because to your point, now marketers can code with lovable. And so this is an example of a little lead magnet. I use lovable just for, you know, just for fun, because you're here. But basically what it would do is it creates an ROI calculator. So it's basically showing the user how much you can Save coding through Lovable and building it yourself versus going through a traditional agency. So you can just go build the calculator. You can say, hey, I was going to actually build like this book a service. And then you could basically say, well, I was, I needed these elements in my booking service.
B
Yeah.
A
And then I would continue and I would say I wanted the market ready launch. That's what they want the agency to do. So it's doing some like theoretical numbers here to like calculate what you need to actually build that app. And then it basically says, hey, you would have saved like this amount of money with Lovable, right? Yeah, it's trying to take in your credit model and then basically if you want to get the detailed breakdown, you can sign up. And so for marketeers, I think this is a way to think about how you can use Lovable straight away, which is you have these static born things that you give away today. All of that stuff can be built with interactive code. And to your point, I think that's why, you know, your marketing team can actually teach your different Personas how to integrate this into their life 100%.
B
I love that you showed how you can use it yourself. I know with your marketing Emily, who says like what you're saying here like this never access to engineers and it's a new Aladdin's world. So she's built a lot of different things like the sales training platforms and similar things to what you're saying there. What you showed us right now. What do you think, Kieran, is the mindset that marketers should have around using AI tools like Lovable? Is there anything you've seen in terms of who is successful now over the last few years, months or last year?
A
I think there's people who just have builder DNA even in marketing. And builder DNA for me is they are in the weeds, they are deeply curious and they are deeply iterative. And so to your point, right, like it would take me prior history, I want to build an ROI calculator for my company. I want someone to come there and they show them the value of my company. What do I need to do as a marketer? I need to go and like cry for help for the engineering team who are trying to build product to help me. Maybe I have a couple of engineers on the marketing team. You know what they're doing? They're fixing and all the bugs on the website. And so I'm stuck doing the same stuff. I have to do a static PDF. It's a white paper. Here's like all the Calculations, you can download it now. If I'm a real builder and I have that deep curiosity and I'm tenacious now I can just go use Lovable. And the cool thing is I don't just have to do one version of the ROI calculator. This is kind of the other thing I tell marketers is we've been so dependent upon tools that we have to create one thing for thousands and thousands and thousands of people. And because of that it gets quite generic. Now I can create a ROI calculator for like small groups of my customers or my prospects. Like I can create a hundred ROI calculators and they're all slightly different based upon who that customer is or who that potential customer is because it's so much easier for me to do that. And so I think we can actually tailor these experiences much more through apps like Lovable and I think these tools. I did a write up on the future of marketing and I talked about the fact that the future of marketing you have to create co parent experiences through tools like Lovable and bring your ideas to life in more creative and interactive ways. And to me it's going to be part and parcel of your marketing tech stack like Lovable. These kind of tools, you have to actually use them to actually go attract customers because customers will expect more and more value in terms of what you give them.
B
Yeah, I think every human is like a builder at heart. And that, yeah, unleashing that agency is, is what we want to contribute to. But to be able to do job well or start a business, just leaning into that and building, creating a lot of things is a wonderful takeaway. The creativity often comes from leaning into like trying things and then you become more creative. I'm asking you questions now, but do you think that marketing teams should organize themselves differently given that you can do much more with less these days?
A
Yeah, it's kind of where we started, which I agree, which is within functions you need like a coder to build a real proper tool. And maybe they can do more because they have AI. But when marketing, marketing is a very unique team. In engineering you have developers.
B
Yeah.
A
In sales you have sales people. And they kind of go in a linear path, you know, sdr, bdr, account executive. In marketing you actually have a collection of small little teams. You all are just in the kind of wider marketing ecosystem and they all have like different domain expertise. So like a product marketer has very specific domain expertise in product marketing. A brand marketer has like very specific expertise on like brand campaigns, performance marketing, all These different teams are very niche and they all have these domain expertise in their thing. And I think what AI is going to allow you to do is just break marketing into storytellers and you're telling stories about the product, you're telling stories about how the product changes the world. So you're a creative storyteller enabled by AI and you can just do all of those roles that used to be many, many different roles in the past. And then you have marketers who are very engineer led and they can actually integrate AI across the customer journey, right across how you do paid, across how you do AI engine optimization. And so I do think you can now have AI marketing generalists who are really in this pod structure and they can do like end to end marketing. They don't have to hand off to this person head not because the problem with growing a company and you luckily might not have not experienced this yet because you're still small even though you're huge in terms of valuation, is the more domain expertise you bring in, the more siloing. It's all of the comms hand over to this person, hand off to this person, hand off to this person and that's what really slows you down.
B
Makes sense. So you said storytelling and technical is also the most important things. And if you think about businesses building their products on lovable and us in an opinionated way taking care of more of the analytics, how do you track what users understand, what users are doing, how to unlock more value, run A B tests, optimize the website for discoverability on search? What do you think is going to be the hardest on the technical side for us to like solve as a live product lifecycle platform that does everything when that market all the marketing needs.
A
Yeah, for the marketing needs I think it's going to be the marketer's ability to do distribution. Right. It's not just your ability to bring that idea to life. It's only valuable to the marketer if they can actually get eyeballs on it. And so the more you can help the marketer deeply integrate the way they distribute that into the product, the more successful the marketers are going to be because they could build something and then it gets no visitors and no traction and anything. Well, that was a kind of waste of my time. I think there's like this really interesting arbitrage opportunity where we are still in this small early adopter phase. Even though when you look at the growth of your company and some others, it's like off the walls how fast things are going but it still is early adopters. So really, if you're listening to this podcast and you are now starting to use Lovable, you should feel excited because you are in the early adopter stage and you're going to be one of the first marketeers to do things for your audience using a tool like Lovable versus what you've done in the past, which is create a PDF. Right. And I think this is the moment to take advantage of that. Because at some point using Lovable to do this will just become best practice. And when things are best practice, then you're forced to just optimize things, try to get incremental improvements.
B
Yeah, I think you nailed it. I know a CMO that's running a CMO and she's obsessed with Lovable. Built the event website, of course, on Lovable. And if you're an early adopter today with our tool specifically, there is so much you need to still learn. Because if you're not an engineer and you're using Lovable, you learn so rapidly. You don't have to learn it to code, but you need to learn a bit of like, how things come together. And if you invest in doing that today, you're going to have a huge advantage over the coming months in your velocity of building things.
A
Yeah. I'll give you one other quick use case for Lovable and particular for Marketeers. It can easily integrate marketing into the Marketeer's data stream sources. We were even looking at this. You can create personal websites, again based upon the data you have about a cohort of users. So let's say I create a little segment of users and These users are CFOs at a certain company and they have these certain problems and these certain likes and dislikes. And then I can like feed that into my prompt and Lovable and I can create the micro site based upon that data. That again speaks to what I think is going to happen, which is today a lot of marketing is done broad based marketing because we have to do that because of the way things work. Whereas I think tomorrow marketing is done at the real granular. Why call them micro audiences? Like today we do segmentation and it's like broad based. You're a company of this size, you're this role title, you're in this country. That's basically what we do. We say like, you all like the same stuff, here's the same stuff. Whereas now with tools like Lovable, I can just get so much more customized and I can create more of those things because it's so Much easier to create. Right. Lovable. And I think that's going to happen as well. One last thing, if you don't mind, Anton, just in terms of talent, right?
B
Yeah.
A
One of the things you're incredibly good at is how you attract talent. You obsess over talent. One of the things you have talked about is trying to hire teenagers like you're hiring really young folks. Owen McCabe from Intercom also recently talked about the fact he thought AI was going to be more suited for younger people because it's just natively how they do things. Can you maybe think just end with that part? Like, if you're not a teenager and you're not natively AI, what should I be doing to make sure that in the future a founder like you would still want to hire me?
B
I definitely don't try to hire teenagers generally, so I don't think it matters a lot. Like, stay very, very curious. I think that's a very important part of learning the skills necessary. Staying curious, experimental, have a strong bias to try things out and always take a lot of actions. Not wait. I think the demo memo is one of the ways of speaking about how I think people should be acting. Take action, try things, go out there, validate your ideas, and just doing that is going to be very helpful. And that's very important part of the culture of what team we're putting together at Lovable.
A
Awesome. I totally agree. I think the number one skill you can have right now is curiosity. If you have a curious mind, like Kip always says, AI is a bazooka for the curious mind. I think if you have a curious mind, if you're tenacious, if you're incredibly proactive, like, I think one of the things in Lovable, I suspect your team is very autonomous as well. And I think you have to be much more autonomous, much more proactive, and deeply, deeply curious. Anton, this was amazing. I know you have at least thousands and thousands of people asking you to come on their show, and so I do appreciate you spending this amount of time for us because I know you're super busy over in San Fran. You're trying to grow this business, and so we appreciate it.
B
Yeah. I've been wanting to sit down with you for, like, before. Lovable, even here. So happy we got around to it, and I'm looking forward to talk to you soon again.
A
Thanks, Anna.
Episode: The Startup Letting 99% of People Build Apps Without Code
Date: September 2, 2025
Host: HubSpot Media (Kipp Bodnar & Kieran Flanagan)
Guest: Anton Osika, Founder of Lovable
This episode dives deep into the meteoric rise of Lovable, the app that's democratizing software creation by letting anyone—regardless of coding skill—build real, production-ready apps. Hosts Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan interview Anton Osika, the founder of Lovable, who breaks down their unique growth story, the implications of no-code AI for business and society, and practical strategies for marketers. The conversation explores how Lovable is changing the technological playing field, company-building principles in the AI era, new paradigms in marketing, and the future skills required to thrive.
Background and Genesis ([02:10], Anton Osika)
Growth Milestones ([04:09], Anton)
Unexpected Virality ([05:09], Anton)
"It was such a huge step up from anything else that was out there. ...It continued over many, many months, just continued to growing faster and faster. That was a bit surreal."
— Anton Osika [05:09]
"Now, the other 99% can all code… The app that I built in Lovable is like real software that I'm going to be releasing for users."
— Kieran Flanagan [06:03]
"Much of the work that is not human facing is going to almost be instant and unlocked... you want individuals... really good at a bit of everything."
— Anton Osika [10:36]
Distribution vs. Product ([13:49], Anton)
Creator-Led Productization ([15:57], Kieran & Anton)
Virality and Free Marketing ([16:34], Anton & Kieran)
"Marketing... is mostly about amplifying the word of mouth, which is like the absolutely largest channel for everything in customer acquisition.”
— Anton Osika [17:03]
"I think we can actually tailor these experiences much more through apps like Lovable... and bring your ideas to life in more creative and interactive ways."
— Kieran Flanagan [23:27]
"You can now have AI marketing generalists who are really in this pod structure and they can do like end to end marketing. They don't have to hand off to this person..."
— Kieran Flanagan [25:03]
"Stay very, very curious... have a strong bias to try things out and always take a lot of actions. Not wait. I think the demo memo is one of the ways of speaking about how I think people should be acting.”
— Anton Osika [30:26]
For marketers:
If you’re not experimenting with AI-enabled no-code tools like Lovable, you risk falling behind. The opportunity is vast for those willing to break old patterns and build, test, and distribute at breakneck speed. The days of begging engineering for a landing page are over—if you’re curious, the future is yours to build.