20VC: Lovable on Hitting $17.5M in ARR in 3 Months | Adding $2.1M ARR Every Week | Hitting 85% Day 30 Retention: Better than ChatGPT | The Story of Europe's Fastest Scaling Company with Anton Osika

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) Episode with Anton Osika of Lovable

Podcast Information:

• Title: The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
• Host: Harry Stebbings
• Guest: Anton Osika, Founder and CEO of Lovable
• Episode Title: "Lovable on Hitting $17.5M in ARR in 3 Months | Adding $2.1M ARR Every Week | Hitting 85% Day 30 Retention: Better than ChatGPT | The Story of Europe's Fastest Scaling Company"
• Release Date: March 5, 2025

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1. Introduction to Anton Osika and Lovable

Harry Stebbings introduces Anton Osika, the founder and CEO of Lovable, heralded as Europe's fastest-growing startup. Lovable specializes in transforming ideas into fully functional apps within seconds using simple prompts. The company boasts remarkable achievements, including scaling to $17.5 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) within three months, adding $2.1 million in ARR weekly, and maintaining an impressive 85% day 30 retention rate—surpassing even ChatGPT.

Notable Quote:

• Anton Osika [00:07]: "We have month one retention that's better than ChatGPT's month one retention on paying customers."

2. Anton’s Journey Before Lovable

Anton reflects on his prior venture, Depict, where rapid scaling was also a key focus. He underscores the importance of high-potential, often junior talent and the pitfalls of overextending by saying yes to too many opportunities without sufficient focus.

Notable Quote:

• Anton Osika [04:42]: "We said yes to too many things at Depict and we didn't take this one thing that we could do 10 times better than anyone else."

3. Building the Product: From GPT Engineer to Lovable

Anton recounts the genesis of Lovable, initially conceived as GPT Engineer—a side project inspired by the advent of ChatGPT. During an engagement trip, he envisioned integrating large language models in a loop to perform complex, agentic tasks, leading to the creation of a functional Snake game in a caffeine-fueled weekend session.

Notable Quote:

• Anton Osika [09:49]: "There was a fraction of people, some people that come in and they just flip up their credit card because they want to try, they want to learn, which is a rational thing to do."

4. Growth and Scaling: From Launch to Explosive Growth

Lovable officially launched on November 21, 2024, following a year-long development period filled with iterative previews and user feedback loops. The launch was met with rapid adoption, leading to growth rates that soared from $1 million to $2 million ARR per week. Anton explains the technical challenges faced during this explosive growth, necessitating a complete rewrite of their platform to stabilize and enhance their shipping speed.

Notable Quote:

• Anton Osika [21:08]: "We were like, wow, we're growing 1 million ARR per week at some point. And that just keeps going, accelerating through it."

5. Talent and Culture: The Backbone of Lovable’s Success

Anton emphasizes that talent and culture are paramount. He prefers hiring junior, ambitious individuals who are eager to prove themselves over experienced candidates, as they bring fresh perspectives and adaptability. Anton also discusses the challenges of maintaining a cohesive culture amidst rapid scaling, cautioning against introducing excessive management layers that can dilute the company's core values.

Notable Quotes:

• Anton Osika [06:23]: "Talent is the most important thing and culture, how you work together every day, how people interact and collaborate quickly, those are the two most important thing for almost any company."
• Anton Osika [25:25]: "I think energy is super important and I think the naivety is a benefit of them."

6. Fundraising and Investor Relations

Anton shares insights on their fundraising strategy, highlighting the importance of aligning with investors who share the company's vision and values. Lovable conducted a substantial seed round pre-launch, securing nearly $8 million to ensure ample runway amidst unpredictable market conditions. Anton advises founders to raise funds based on their operational preferences—whether they prefer financial independence or seek strategic investor partnerships.

Notable Quote:

• Anton Osika [19:02]: "I have some people that I know from before that I just think are amazing people that I want to have by my side if things go sour, if things go well. ... we decided to raise a small round."

7. Competition and Market Positioning

Addressing competition, Anton remains unfazed by well-funded US counterparts, asserting that execution is the key differentiator. He believes that as long as Lovable can outperform competitors through superior execution, their rapid growth trajectory will continue unimpeded. Anton also discusses the strategic decision to remain a Europe-based company, citing abundant raw talent and a conducive startup culture as significant advantages.

Notable Quote:

• Anton Osika [28:25]: "The only thing that matters is execution. So if you can outperform your own execution, then I'm scared."

8. Future Plans and Challenges

Looking ahead, Anton outlines Lovable's ambition to become the premier platform for builders, aiming to attract a million talented creators. He envisions integrating comprehensive entrepreneurial tools similar to those offered by Y Combinator, enabling founders to focus solely on product development and user engagement. Additionally, Anton acknowledges potential challenges such as scaling agility, maintaining culture, and staying ahead in an evolving AI landscape.

Notable Quote:

• Anton Osika [40:24]: "I'd love to build in a way for founders to get everything you get out of Y Combinator into lovable."

9. Quick Fire Round Highlights

In the rapid-fire segment, Anton shares candid insights on various topics:

• Foundation Models: Believes models will become commoditized, emphasizing the importance of specialized application rather than the models themselves.
• Favorite Failure: Failing school exams at 17, which propelled him to work harder and pursue entrepreneurial success.
• Biggest Weakness as CEO: Struggles with multitasking.
• North Star Metric: Focuses on the number of users successfully launching and hosting their creations via Lovable.
• Concerns if Lovable Fails: Losing momentum and excitement that currently fuels the company.

Notable Quotes:

• Anton Osika [42:25]: "We have models today that are really smart. I think that's where people don't agree with me. They're smarter than humans, but they don't have memory in the same extent as we do."
• Anton Osika [44:46]: "My favorite failure that I didn't depict didn't work out so I could do more things."

10. Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Harry commends Anton for inspiring European entrepreneurs and acknowledges the remarkable growth trajectory of Lovable. Anton reiterates his optimism about Europe’s startup ecosystem and the potential of AI to enhance human understanding and collaboration.

Notable Quote:

• Anton Osika [46:33]: "That AI is hopefully going to make us humans understand each other better and be better at doing win-win things, and that will be awesome."

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Key Takeaways:

• Execution Over Everything: Anton stresses that flawless execution is the cornerstone of Lovable’s success, enabling the company to outperform well-funded competitors.
• Talent and Culture: Prioritizing ambitious, junior talent and maintaining a strong, cohesive culture are crucial for sustained growth.
• Strategic Fundraising: Aligning with the right investors and securing ample funding pre-launch provided Lovable with the necessary runway to scale rapidly.
• Product Simplicity and User Focus: Creating an intuitive, prompt-based interface with multiple aha moments enhances user retention and satisfaction.
• Optimism in European Startup Ecosystem: Anton remains confident in Europe’s ability to produce world-class startups, leveraging local talent and a unique cultural mindset.

Final Notable Quote:

• Anton Osika [04:07]: "The most important thing is talent and culture and there is more raw available talent in Europe."

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This episode offers invaluable insights into building and scaling a high-growth startup in Europe’s competitive landscape. Anton Osika’s experiences and strategies provide a blueprint for aspiring entrepreneurs aiming to achieve remarkable success through execution, talent acquisition, and strategic focus.

Transcript

[Antonaseeka]

Growth starts ramping up after we launch. We're growing 1 million ARR per week at some point.

[Harry Stebbings]

How much are you growing now a week?

[Antonaseeka]

2 million ARR per week. We have month one retention that's better than ChatGPT's month one retention on paying customers. The most important thing is talent and culture and there is more raw available talent in Europe. The only thing that matters is execution. So if you can outperform your own execution, then I'm scared.

[Unknown]

This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. And today we have Antonaseeka, founder and CEO at Lovable, the fastest growing startup in Europe. With Lovable, you can turn your idea into an app in seconds with just a prompt. Check out these stats. After just three months, the company has scaled to 17 and a half million in annual recurring revenue. They are adding 2 million in net new revenue every single week. That's like $300,000 a day. Even better, Lovable has 85% day 30 retention rate, making it attentive than ChatGPT. This is such an incredible story to unpack today. But before we dive in today, here are two fun facts about our newest brand sponsor, Kajabi. First, their customers just crossed a collective $8 billion in total revenue. Wow. Second, Kajabi's users keep 100% of their earnings, with the average Kajabi creator bringing in over $30,000 per year. In case you didn't know, Kajabi is the leading creator commerce platform with an all in one suite of tools including websites, email, market marketing, digital products, payment processing and analytics for as low as $69 per month. Whether you are looking to build a private community, write a paid newsletter or launch a course, Kajabi is the only platform that will enable you to build and grow your online business without taking a cut of your revenue. 20VC listeners can try Kajabi for free for 30 days by going to kajabi.com 20VC that's kajabi.com K-A-A-A-B-I.com 20VC and after building your online empire with Kajabi, it's time to scale your global team with remote seamless hiring solutions. So every business is a global business in 2025. But how do you do payroll for your global business and team and comply with international labor laws? Well, Remote handles payroll, benefits, taxes, stock options and compliance to help companies of all sizes pay and manage full time and contract workers all over the world. No matter where your team lives or works, Remote's global employment solutions keep your team your Finances and your intellectual proper property secure Remote never charges hidden fees just best in class global employment solutions for a low flat rate. The world's top remote companies love remote. GitLab, the world's largest all remote organization, trusts Remote to run their global team. Remote is funded by Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital and the host of the greatest podcast ever, Harry Stebbings and 20VC. Ready to learn more? Head over to remote.com 20VC that's 20VC and begin hiring within minutes. Enjoy 10% your first three months by using the promo code 20VC at checkout. And when it comes to scaling your business, having the right infrastructure is just as crucial as building the right team. That's why AWS is the perfect partner for startups and why they're proud to sponsor this Week's episode of 20 VC. The AWS startups team comprises former founders and CTOs, venture capitalists, angel investors and mentors ready to help you prove what's possible. Since 2013, AWS has supported over 280,000 startups across the globe and provided $7 billion in credits through the AWS Activate program. Big Ideas Feel at home on AWS and with access to cutting edge technologies like generative AI, you can quickly turn those ideas into marketable products. Want your own AI powered assistant? Try Amazon Q Want to build your own AI products privately? Customize leading foundation models on Amazon Bedrock. Want to reduce the cost of AI workloads? AWS Trainium is the silicon you're looking for. Whatever your ambitions, you've already had the idea. Now prove it's possible. AWS visit aws.Amazon.com startups to get started.

[Antonaseeka]

You have now arrived at your destination.

[Harry Stebbings]

Anton Fastest growing company in Europe. What a title. But first, thank you so much for joining me today man.

[Antonaseeka]

Thank you Harry. It's always fun to talk to you.

[Harry Stebbings]

That is very, very kind of you. It's the British accent.

[Unknown]

But I want to start actually pre Loveable and I spoke to a couple.

[Harry Stebbings]

Of your investors in your first company.

[Unknown]

Depict and so I just want to start there.

[Harry Stebbings]

What are your biggest takeaways from Depict that shaped how you think about Lovable?

[Antonaseeka]

We scaled super super fast at Depict as well. Moving just very fast. Scrappy nailed that really well. I think we did really well on this. High potential talent as well. Quite junior with high potential talent. You can see that from all the companies coming out from Depicted. The Depict mafia is absolutely real. But I think what works in the beginning is to say yes onto a lot of opportunities and try out what works once you Become more people and you have to follow up and maintain everything that you start. You have to be much more focused. So we said yes to too many things at depict and we didn't take this one thing that we could do 10 times better than anyone else. And then as the economics macro wise turned worse, we didn't continue the scaling trajectory that we were on initially.

[Harry Stebbings]

I was just reading an article actually with Paul Buchheit, the founder of Gmail and he said you need three great features in a product and it's really that simple and make them really, really great. Do you agree with that? Product simplicity towards feature depth?

[Antonaseeka]

Yeah, I think just on a product level you should say no to as many things as possible and make it more of like an Apple feeling. The things you do, you do them. Superposition.

[Harry Stebbings]

And so we have hey, don't say yes to everything. Is there anything else which you did or didn't do that really shaped how you think about the early days of lovable moving fast.

[Antonaseeka]

And I would say talent is the most important thing and culture, how you work together every day, how people interact and collaborate quickly, those are the two most important thing for almost any company.

[Harry Stebbings]

Let's just unpack talent because it's been a cool. I spoke to Frederic at Creandum before this and he said we had to chat about this too. You favor talent over experience, which sounds kind of obvious. Respectfully, are you going to go for an experienced untalented person? But how do you think about your hiring lessons around experience versus talent?

[Antonaseeka]

I think experience can be a negative thing in some cases. You often want people who are super ambitious and they have a lot to prove. They are more open minded towards how you should work together in a team for many roles. I think junior talent is first of all it's super easy to get them into the company. They're not already committed to some many different projects. The best people that you can hire at a young age they would go on and become founders and then you can't hire them anymore. Right. So that's why junior people are often quite good.

[Harry Stebbings]

Will you hire them if they haven't done what you're hiring them to do before? The benefits often of hiring someone experience is well, I can see they've been at X company for four years. They can do that at my company. Will you hire someone who hasn't done what you're asking them to do before?

[Antonaseeka]

In most cases yes. But if it's engineering, you have to know software engineering. Of course. And for some roles you definitely want in that domain, someone with a lot of experience who can coach and who can tell the more junior people what great looks like.

[Harry Stebbings]

These are going to sound like strange questions, but you mentioned the word ambition there. Did you always know that you would be successful when you were younger building? Did you always think I will be successful in something that I do?

[Antonaseeka]

No, I don't think so. I was always frustrated with how people around me didn't understand things as quickly as me. It felt like. And then at some point I felt like, well, sometimes it's me being too naive. That's something I learned over time. But many of the truths about what's going to happen in the future have. I have a very good track record on and I think that's my this one of the superpowers that have made me have made me successful. So I felt I had that superpower. I didn't know it would translate into building something successfully.

[Harry Stebbings]

How did you first make money? What was your first entrepreneurial thing? Anton?

[Antonaseeka]

Oh, I think so. I always nerded out with computers and setting up our LAN parties when I was a kid and so on. And so I noticed that all neighbors and friends of families, they had the computers and they had some issue and then they wanted my help and many of them wanted to pay me afterwards. So that became a bit of a side hustle when I was a young teenager.

[Harry Stebbings]

Did you do gaming when you were younger?

[Antonaseeka]

Yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

You're like, I'm so sorry to be rude, but you're like the easiest archetype because you fit all the characteristics of successful founders that I have on the show. It's like number one, made money early. Number two, excel in gaming. Both very, very clear archetypes. I want to move to lovable. So GPT Engineer starts as a side project. Where does the idea come from? We've left Depict. GPT Engineer starts as a side project. Where does the idea come from?

[Antonaseeka]

So this was the spring after ChatGPT came out and I've been playing with the precursors of that as well. And already like a year before then I felt there's a massive wave coming from scaling up these models with more data and Depict is not set up for currently not set up for leveraging that. I was actually traveling with my now wife engagement trip and when you're traveling I get extra creative. I don't think there was anyone who was talking about AI agents at the time, but during those sitting on an airplane I started writing a lot of like okay, you should hook them up and make you basically put the large language model in a for loop and then you can have it do a lot of agentic things. And then when I'm back in Sweden I'm like, okay, where do I apply this? Obviously on software engineering. And I've been talking to people about this and I felt no one was really sufficiently imaginative to what I was thinking about. And I had to prove a point in that this is already now with the current first versions of ChatGPT APIs you can build an agent that writes code. And then I put together that there were two. I drank a lot of coffee and then I just crammed away and I got the first version that really impressed people. You write, create a Snake game and then you get a running Snake game on your computer. That was the first version of what. What we're building now.

[Harry Stebbings]

How long did it take you to build V1 with that caffeinated session?

[Antonaseeka]

I think there was like one main weekend and then a bit of a polish over with a few hours here and there on two weekends after that.

[Harry Stebbings]

What are the biggest lessons or advice from building many different v1s for many founders that are listening.

[Antonaseeka]

For most first time founders I would really focus on the user and the user problem and say how can I get one person to love what I'm building in this V1? That's my general advice. I didn't do that. I just put out a video on Twitter and it got dozens of academic references and millions of people using it.

[Harry Stebbings]

Take me to that. So we have this weekend we released the product. What happens then, dude?

[Antonaseeka]

Yeah, so it wasn't clear to me that I would build a business on this at all. I just thought it was fun that there was like and this was an open source project. So I started nourishing like a community that went on to work on this open source project. And while I went to my co founder and said like okay, so this thing is absolutely huge. I've been thinking of doing something else to be honest. And here's a pretty like this is a bit of a wake up call for me that it's. It might be time to find a good replacement for me as a CTO at Depict. That's what happened next. And then within a few months passed.

[Harry Stebbings]

And so a few months pass, the community continues to grow. What happens then?

[Antonaseeka]

No, but I figure out a good replacement for me. I decide I want to have a great co founder that I can have as my partner in crime here and there was a guy who is the most super efficient, zero fluff and bullshit engineer and entrepreneur. So he had sold the company previous that I wanted to work with and I biked to his apartment and said, hey, let's take a walk and plan the future. I got him on board and then we started building and created the first version of what became Lovable.

[Harry Stebbings]

So we're building the first version of Lovable. You've got your co founder talk to me about that time. When did we release and how did the official release go with Lovable as a product and company?

[Antonaseeka]

So the launch of Lovable, like the product was one year after we started building and in the meantime we launched waitlisted preview versions called GPT Engineer app. I mean that's the getting user feedback cycle and building up, I guess, some excitement about what we were working on and employer branding as well. And the first versions, I think they were very good. They were good, they were not very good and we had some people really liking it but aha moments didn't click for sufficiently many people. Like, okay, this is how I get real value from this. When we went on to iterate over the coming year, we packaged together all of these things so that you can ask today, Lovable. I want to build basically a SaaS business and then people have built their entire SaaS companies and made money by just prompting our AI.

[Harry Stebbings]

I just want to break down a couple of different things that you said there. You mentioned the wait list. Do you have any big lessons or advice on how to do a waitlist strategy?

[Antonaseeka]

Well, the wait lists are useful in that you can control exactly how many people you want to get on board and take user interviews with. So I think that's the just get sufficiently many people on the waitlist, find a good way to qualify who you want to talk to. You probably have a different hypothesis on who you should talk to, who you're going to sell into, who has the most value from your product, and then qualify only those and talk to them.

[Harry Stebbings]

When you do the user interviews and user feedback sessions, what are your big lessons or piece of advice on how to do them? Well, what questions are good, what questions are bad, Any lessons?

[Antonaseeka]

For us, there are two different types of user interviews. We have this type where we just see them, use the product and see do they understand the product? And so on. That's more of a user experience interview. And the other one is to understand if they have just tried the product a bit. We ask them, okay, so you tried the product a bit. Why are you even interested in this? And ask them what problems they're facing facing in their business. Try to identify what's the biggest pain point they're actually looking to solve. It might be, oh, I want to get more customers, and I think I can get more customers if I can show to my customers that I can get the first version out with AI more quickly. Those type of questions how does it.

[Harry Stebbings]

Change the structure of teams? When you look at teams today, you have obviously software engineers, you have designers, you have developers, you have front end, you have back end. How does it change the structure of teams themselves?

[Antonaseeka]

Harry, if you want to create a personal website for you, it's super productive, you can do it. You don't have a team, it's just you. You just create it with AI, it's not a team. Like a team just slows you down. Maybe you get some input from a designer, like, how does this work? How do you think it should look? And so on. But once you have existing software with users and then you want to iterate and change that software, AI might absolutely bring down, mess up your entire code base. Might mess up your code base. So then you would want to work with a software engineer that knows how to have quality and consistently keep quality in the product.

[Harry Stebbings]

You mentioned, like, people took a bit of time to find their aha moment. How important is the time to aha moment?

[Antonaseeka]

I think it's very important. And it's funny because you asked me this question and I think we are very bad at making the time to aha moment super short. I think we could double our conversion rates if we become better at speed to aha moment. But I can say with something we're doing. Let me take credit for something. When you come to Lovable, you just see a prompt box. It's very inviting. Instead of getting to a landing page, you see a prompt box. And then for the ones that do enter a prompt box, you get quite a quick aha of the first aha moment. And there has to be many aha moments in Lovable. It's quite a complex. A software engineer is a very complex feature that we are doing well and that's what I would recommend. Just give the user something interactive with instant reward.

[Harry Stebbings]

You mentioned there the prompt box itself. I've had many guests on the show say before that almost the biggest sin that ChatGPT did was make chat the default UI for a future of AI. Do you think that Chat and the prompting that we have today in Lovable and many other products is the right default UI for an age of AI?

[Antonaseeka]

I think yes. Prompting. You can do almost anything with prompting and explaining. Your thoughts in written form. It's also easy to implement and iterate on, but it's going to get more advanced over time with not just prompting.

[Harry Stebbings]

I love the way you took a deep breath there. It's like, this is a weighty question.

[Antonaseeka]

I'm thinking about it a lot. I mean, you're building the interface for creating software and no one knows what that interface is going to look like. But the prompt thing, yes, I think it remains.

[Harry Stebbings]

I'm kind of going chronologically through the story because it's an amazing story. You rejected yc. Why did you reject yc?

[Antonaseeka]

We felt that at best YC would be a lot of dilution and some acceleration, but a lot of dilution and some acceleration. And at worst it would be a distraction to go do SF and go through all of these fun things that happen when you go to yc. And we just took some funding instead and focused on talent.

[Harry Stebbings]

The seed round, when does the seed round come? Does that come post launch or pre launch?

[Antonaseeka]

So that comes before we launch the first wait list of our product.

[Harry Stebbings]

How did that seed round go? So before you've launched the wait list of the product, how did that round go?

[Antonaseeka]

Yeah, so I have this advice that I always come by, which is to work with investors that you like. And I had some people that I know from before that I just think are amazing people that I want to have by my side if things go sour, if things go well. And I spoke to a few, I kept it very brief. I got a preemptive offer and I said, yeah, let's do it.

[Harry Stebbings]

How big was this round?

[Antonaseeka]

So we took 3 million and then we added on. I got the advice to say, like, yeah, just to get a lot of cash because you never know what happens in the markets. So we raised quite a large precede round, almost $8 million.

[Harry Stebbings]

Would you advise founders to raise quite large precede rounds if they can? If the money's on the table, do you say take?

[Antonaseeka]

It depends on how you want to operate. If you like talking to investors, which at the time I was like, no, I just want to build the technology, then the answer sure, take. Raise a big proceed so you can get time to figure things. If you like talking to investors, which I think you should, I would go raise more iteratively smaller rounds.

[Harry Stebbings]

We're seeing a lot of founders today be immensely dilution sensitive from day one in a way that they haven't been before. Like 10% is like the max. They're willing to give up on a round. How did you think about dilution sensitivity.

[Antonaseeka]

It's a good question. I think here again, I have a very wise person who was like, no, dilution doesn't matter so much. It's all about the size of the pie. And I was both affected by that advice as well as my, like, no, minimize dilution. This is. This is my life. Life's work. So that's mainly how I think about it now.

[Harry Stebbings]

So we now raise this round. We have the wait list. We're skipping a little bit. Take Me to Go Live day. When does that happen and how does Go Live go?

[Antonaseeka]

We go live with lovable 21st November last year.

[Harry Stebbings]

That was only four months ago.

[Antonaseeka]

Yes, four months ago.

[Harry Stebbings]

Isn't it nuts how much, like, life changes in four months?

[Antonaseeka]

It's true. It can change really fast. Yes. Yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

So in November 2024, you launch from day one. Is it just nuts? How does it go?

[Antonaseeka]

I mean, we had users, paying users on like, earlier version that was called something else. And then our launch, I think it wasn't one of these wow launches. We could have gotten like 10 times more press on the launch, 100%. But people start noticing, like, whoa, this is really good. And we continue to quickly improve things in the products, chip things very rapidly. So it ramps. Like growth starts ramping up after we launch. And we were like, wow, we're growing 1 million ARR per week at some point. And that just keeps going, accelerating through it. That was in December. And then it just keeps accelerating. It was a bit on the technical side, it was a bit frustrating because we have a lot of scaling issues that we run into. And the team is like, okay, we can continue to patch this, but they say, let's rewrite everything while we're seeing this explosive growth. And there's so many quick fixes that we want to do on the product side.

[Harry Stebbings]

So you rewrote it ASAP and stabilized it then?

[Antonaseeka]

Yeah, so it took a bit more than eight weeks. I mean, it's not completely done to date, but we took eight weeks and then now we're shipping faster.

[Harry Stebbings]

Can I ask you, you mentioned that like a million ARR a week. How much are you growing now a week?

[Antonaseeka]

2 million ARR.

[Harry Stebbings]

2 million a week now?

[Antonaseeka]

Yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

It's so funny for me, dude, because like, when you live in a world of venture, you don't. You don't kind of get this. I don't think. And I don't mean that rudely to you, but, like, your companies go from like 1 to 4 in a year, and that's like 4x in a year. Amazing. That would be good. And then you're like growing 2 million ARR in a week. Does that sink in? Do you know how nuts that is?

[Antonaseeka]

No, I guess no. I mean a lot of things last few weeks have just blunted me and I'm just focused on all the things that we have to fix and improve. And that's all I think about.

[Harry Stebbings]

What do you think are the most common ways or methods that companies development process slows down? For founders listening, what should they watch out for? That often happens.

[Antonaseeka]

What makes product development slower is usually that you have a complex product and you have a lot of requirements. You said earlier Harry, that you should have three things that are good in your product. I think that's generally a very wise thing to do.

[Harry Stebbings]

Simplicity leads to product direction, knowing where you're going and what you're working on. When you look back since the start of lovable, where from a product perspective did you invest and spend time? Where was the benefit of hindsight you shouldn't have done?

[Antonaseeka]

At level we thought a lot about the community and community features inside of the product. I think that could have made a lot of sense if we had seen slower growth. But now that it's just like growth is not something not a concern. You don't need community features to power growth. So I think that was pretty much waste, waste of effort.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you agree with the sentiment Build this and they will come? The growth has been amazing from day one. It feels like since GPT Engineer even people have just kind of come for the product because it's been amazing and different. Do you believe build it and they will come actually does stand true today?

[Antonaseeka]

If you have a very strong vision of how that where there is untapped potential, if you really know that deep down and you have track record of showing that, then build it and they will come is going to work. And you also have the Runway, your personal energy Runway and so on to really make it work and make them come. But in most cases that is too risky. It's too risky to just build it and they will come and you can build it and make them come or try to make them come at the same time and that's much lower risk.

[Harry Stebbings]

You said there about energy and it reminded me of a statement that Nick at Revolut said to me in a show when he was talking about his investing and he said the most successful founders that he invests in are between 30 and 35. They don't have the naivety of the incredibly young founders. But they don't have the bluntly tiredness in some ways or that you know, you have more energy when you're younger of older founders. How do you think about that given your age today?

[Antonaseeka]

I think energy is super important and I think the naivety is a benefit of them. But I made mistakes a lot. I was the first time manager as well at the picked pretty much.

[Harry Stebbings]

What was the biggest mistake you made?

[Antonaseeka]

Thinking that we should change the culture and become a more of a scale up, something slow moving or like more management layers. When we became 40 people, that was the biggest mistake I did.

[Harry Stebbings]

Why did you think that?

[Antonaseeka]

I mean my co founder and other senior people we spoke to said like oh, now you have to hire executives and so on and that's. But that was a bad idea I think.

[Harry Stebbings]

Okay, and so did you start hiring executives?

[Antonaseeka]

Pretty much, yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

And then they don't work.

[Antonaseeka]

One person I hired didn't work out which slowed me down and they kind of set us back a lot.

[Harry Stebbings]

And so when you think about that, what would your advice be to other founders? Don't believe the bullshit. You can scale way longer without exacts.

[Antonaseeka]

Many founders hire mercenary style, maybe like skilled people, but they are running in their lane. I hire generalists and I try to empower them as much as possible. If you have a lot of super, super smart generalists that you're doing a lot of smart new initiatives and so on, adding executives on top of them is high risk and reward is questionable.

[Harry Stebbings]

Does culture break at any point when you're scaling user base so fast, you're scaling revenue so fast?

[Antonaseeka]

I mean usually I think it does, yes. Or it changes. It changes, it evolves. This is something I'm very mindful about and why I'm so scared of adding too many heads.

[Harry Stebbings]

What are you worried about?

[Antonaseeka]

The most important thing for everyone at our company, which I talk about, is to role model how much you care about the product, the users, the entire team, how well the team works and role model and making sure other people care as much as you. That comes from a feeling of ownership of the culture and the. If you're a lot of people that gets diluted typically. So that's what breaks or that's what's harder.

[Harry Stebbings]

So we have the team scaling, we have user base, we have revenue scaling. We're making actually a lot of money at this point. Why raise a Series A?

[Antonaseeka]

I spoke to, I just had some scheduled check ins with investors. There was this one guy and his team that had like obsessed about lovable for the last few Months. Friedrich, he's here in Stockholm at Kriendom. He just gives an amazing impression on me and I'm like, okay, I can wait. Because I know it's very clear to me that this is just the beginning and I could raise it later. But we can accelerate by adding an investor that is a partner helping to find more amazing people in just as a sounding board. Fredik helped to grow Spotify from. From nothing. And we decided to raise a small round.

[Harry Stebbings]

Okay, so you decided to raise a small round. I have to ask this. You have many well funded competitors in the us. I think it was Neil Murray that said you put like, we're Devon. That actually works from like very early on, which I thought was bold. When a competitor has a lot of money, do you have to raise two?

[Antonaseeka]

I don't think so, no. I mean you can just. We could bootstrap. You can bootstrap most things so you never happen to race, but they can.

[Harry Stebbings]

Outspend you on talent, on customers, on marketing.

[Antonaseeka]

I'm not afraid of any of those. The only thing that matters is execution. So if you can outperform your execution, then I'm scared.

[Harry Stebbings]

Where could you improve your execution? Today we spoke about speed of shipping. Amazing. Culture's great. Where would you say, execution wise, you could improve?

[Antonaseeka]

I think you can always improve on like how the decision loop, on how fast you take decisions and communicate those decisions so that everyone is really on the same page.

[Harry Stebbings]

How do you make them today? How could it be improved?

[Antonaseeka]

I think it's about doing fewer. I think we could do fewer things as well. At Lovable, there's a lot of people with great ideas that each idea in isolation is great, but you can only have so many. You should only execute on so many. At the same time.

[Harry Stebbings]

We mentioned the team and the culture one and we mentioned Frederik there. You've been pretty ardent around building in Europe, keeping the team in Europe, being a European company. A lot of people say to me, by staying in Europe you are deliberately not doing what is best for your career. If you were in the Valley, you would be more successful. What is your response to them?

[Antonaseeka]

The most important thing is talent and culture. And there is more raw, available talent in Europe. The culture isn't on the like. The US has more culture that fits succeeding as a startup. I have to say, per default.

[Harry Stebbings]

What specifically do you think it is about that culture?

[Antonaseeka]

So it's about the default of thinking big and being super ambitious and being very committed to making things work. That in Europe people are more like living a Balanced life and thought that we should. In Sweden we talk about the law of Jante, which is that you should be better than others.

[Harry Stebbings]

Oh my God. Okay.

[Unknown]

Yes.

[Harry Stebbings]

So this concerns me. So how do you respond to people who say you would be more successful if you're in the Valley?

[Antonaseeka]

So if you're a founder, you have more free entropy of talent to use and channel into something successful. But there are of course many benefits from being in the Valley. I think it's a bit of playing on hard mode here from Europe and I get excited about playing on hard mode and showing that you can create the category defining company which is lovable in our case from Europe.

[Harry Stebbings]

Are you positive about Europe moving forwards? We are in a doom loop around Europe which we both disagree with and hate. Are you positive and what guides your thinking?

[Antonaseeka]

Yeah, I'm super positive. I think there is a strong underdog mentality among all of us founders now, which is usually a winning concept to be to feel like the underdog and having wanting to prove others wrong.

[Harry Stebbings]

I totally agree with you. I also think there's incredible superpowers in using the arbitrage pricing of incredible engineers in Europe and selling into the U.S. you can build huge companies selling into the U.S. from Europe doesn't mean you can't sell into the U.S. just because you're a European company.

[Antonaseeka]

True. No. There's a very global market.

[Harry Stebbings]

I've got some questions which are a little bit spicier. A spicier one is if one were to criticize lovable, they would say amazing. God, look at the revenue growth, look at the user growth. But is this like AI sugar revenue? In other words, it's not sustainable and it will churn very quickly. How do you respond to it's not really real sustainable revenue and it's not sticky.

[Antonaseeka]

We have month one retention that's better than ChatGPT's month one retention on paying customers. So it's about 85% that is just going up. Of course there is a lot of things to be desired when you were working with an AI system. There's a fraction of people, some people that come in and they just flip up their credit card because they want to try, they want to learn, which is a rational thing to do. And then they know that they are going to stop using it. Almost. They almost know. So we have a fraction of users who are like those people.

[Harry Stebbings]

85% month one.

[Antonaseeka]

Yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

Wow, that's great. Because you're also too early to have month six. What could you do today to increase retention? Most significantly the easiest thing we can.

[Antonaseeka]

Do is to give more of the important aha moments to ensure that all of our users get more of the important aha moments on how to use the product.

[Unknown]

I don't really respectfully agree or get.

[Harry Stebbings]

You because like you give prompts under the prompt box. So you say like build me a SaaS app or build me a dog website or whatever the prompt is. Dude, all you need to do is click it and you see the code being written and then you see it being created. The aha moment is pretty obvious, no?

[Antonaseeka]

So there are many aha moments for or like education moments to get the most value, get the full value out of using it. The most important of those are with regards to when the. When you feel like you're getting stuck and the AI doesn't understand you. And there are many things in how to get a role around that that you can pick up as a user. It is about how you prompt. It's about how to understand what doesn't work and explain or to explain clearly what the problems you're seeing. What you find could be the problem when you're building a more complex feature. And it's about that you can actually onboard an engineer to do small changes to the code base. Those are things our users should know and not everyone knows them.

[Harry Stebbings]

What's your North Star metric today? If you have one metric on the TV for the whole team to focus on, what is it?

[Antonaseeka]

It's the number of users that go all the way to getting users on what they built, getting something hosted with users on what they built. That's what we focus on.

[Harry Stebbings]

What's the amount today?

[Antonaseeka]

So we have almost 40,000 paying users.

[Harry Stebbings]

And then that's the proxy for that 40,000 paying users. Shit. Do you care about the time it takes to go from start to website created or not?

[Antonaseeka]

We care. But I have to say, Harry, like these things about the onboarding and how much we can improve is not something that we have had focus on. We were just making the core AI parts better, Better, better. That's what we focus on.

[Harry Stebbings]

Okay, so you say about making the core AI parts better, better, better. People also say wrappers on top of other people's models. Why are they wrong with that assumption?

[Antonaseeka]

I mean, it's very easy to create a cool demo with just a wrapper. It's super easy to make a cool demo with just a wrapper. The hard part is to get close to 100%. You get what you're asking for and there's a lot of small details in making that work, there's a lot of small details and there's a chain of large language model API calls and other algorithms that run. And that chain is like. You can continue to optimize that for years without reaching perfection.

[Harry Stebbings]

Whose models do you sit on top of?

[Antonaseeka]

Today we use all of OpenAI's models, Google, Gemini, and the main workhorse is Anthropic's Claude model for writing the code.

[Harry Stebbings]

I was going to have this in a quick fire but I have to ask it now. You've got anthropic at 60 billion, you've got OpenAI at 300 or you've got grok at 50. Which do you buy and which do you sell?

[Antonaseeka]

Okay, so I care about the best talent here and I feel like Elon is very good at talent. So I would buy Grok. I think they're also very ruthless in finding business opportunities. We'll see about that. But I feel like they could be good at that. Even though Anthropic is my favorite, I love the culture and I love the leadership there and I will short OpenAI because they're have been very good in the scrappy phase. But they haven't proven that they can have a clear product direction and focus now over the last year.

[Harry Stebbings]

So I would push, sorry, it's a Sunday, we're allowed to be a little bit more casual. I would push back on you and go. The two biggest things that matter in this next wave is brand recognition on the consumer side and it's consumer facing front end products. And when you look at brand, everyone's mother knows ChatGPT. They don't even know OpenAI but they know ChatGPT. And then on the consumer product side, respectfully, they're way ahead of anyone else. Am I wrong?

[Antonaseeka]

I just think we're still early in the days of AI and if you look at the enterprise revenue, Anthropic is almost caught up to OpenAI from nothing, from being absolutely dominated. I don't know what Grok is going to do here, but I expect them to be having like OpenAI lost all their best talent to Anthropic. I think Grok might be to pull something off here.

[Harry Stebbings]

I spoke to a very wise friend of mine before this and they said that the biggest concern that I have is that open source or megacorps of the world with massive distribution advantages come in and win the market. How do you think about that and is that a concern?

[Antonaseeka]

The big mega corps, they move very slowly in many domains, so they're never going to in Many years they're not going to have the best product on the market. There are distribution advantages for some of these mega corps and that's like the marketing and distribution is what I'm more concerned about about. But overall, it's going to be a growing market where you can easily as a startup be best positioned for some parts of the market.

[Harry Stebbings]

One thing that's going to be a real shift, I imagine, that you have to face is the shift from PLG and kind of prosumer to enterprise. How do you think about that shift and is that just not a concern given the speed of revenue ramp? How do you think about that?

[Antonaseeka]

If we would do enterprise, I would want to do that really well. So we're holding off with doing enterprise for now. We're holding off our goal. You may ask about the North Star metric. What we want to have is we want to be the best place for builders to create products and get a million of the most talented builders on lovable. And if we succeed in that, that's a great segue into many other areas, including enterprise.

[Harry Stebbings]

When you look at Shopify, what do you learn from them? Blazing a trail in the way they have done as efficiently as they have done?

[Antonaseeka]

I'd love to hear from you, Hari. What are you most impressed by with Shopify?

[Harry Stebbings]

Honestly, I would say it's a narrative around everyone being an entrepreneur. I think Harley's a phenomenal communicator and storyteller at bringing very real businesses to life and how Shopify has changed their processes, their sales really made an impact. And I love Toby and I think he's obviously a brilliant technologist. But I think without Harley's storytelling, narrative, entrepreneurial vibes to life, it would be a different company. So I would learn from that a lot in terms of how to tell your customers stories.

[Antonaseeka]

I think Shopify has been able to execute on many things and just created a good package. They've iterated fast. That's my impression. They've iterated fast on serving all the needs for building your E commerce. And I think this velocity was the most important thing for building the best product.

[Harry Stebbings]

When we look forward, dude, what would you most like to build in the product? But for whatever reason, you cannot.

[Antonaseeka]

What would that reason be? I think I can build anything into the product.

[Harry Stebbings]

Really?

[Unknown]

Like team would block you prioritization.

[Harry Stebbings]

Not the right time.

[Antonaseeka]

Okay, so something that we have to say no to right now. So I'd love to build in a way for founders to get everything you get out of Y combinator into lovable. So that includes some marketing infrastructure. Y Combinator has that all the entire playbook and going above that and even saying like oh here's your incorporated Delaware C company, your stripe setup. You just have to focus on the product and talking to users and creating content for marketing.

[Harry Stebbings]

When you look at partnerships today, APIs that we have staying to the different providers, that's quite a real and possible product.

[Antonaseeka]

Yes, it's on the roadmap.

[Harry Stebbings]

Good. Okay, well YC are going to love you after this show. A final one when we look forward.

[Unknown]

What concerns you most if you had.

[Harry Stebbings]

To choose, Would it be regulatory challenges, competition or hype cycles?

[Antonaseeka]

I think if someone some competitors are super, super good at marketing, that would concern me.

[Harry Stebbings]

How important is brand?

[Antonaseeka]

Brand is mainly the outcome of your product. There's other factors too. Product is the important thing. And then good product plus awareness just creates brand. That's I think what's sufficient. So it's more of a downstream effect of something else.

[Harry Stebbings]

When you're doing 2 million a week in additional ARR, you're going to have more and more investors want to give you money. How do you think about that and what makes it worth its take versus this is a distraction. Get out of my face.

[Antonaseeka]

Currently it's a distraction. I think it will make it worth it when we know exactly how we want to spend the money or it's a partner we really want to work with and terms where we would never regret saying yes to them.

[Harry Stebbings]

What if done would be a massive needle mover for the company.

[Antonaseeka]

One or two more of the perfect technical product hires.

[Harry Stebbings]

Dude, I could talk to you all day. I want to move into a quick fire round. So I say a short statement, you give me your thoughts. What do you believe that most most around you disbelieve.

[Antonaseeka]

We have models today that are really smart. I think that's where people don't agree with me. They're smarter than humans, but they don't have memory in the same extent as we do. They don't have context.

[Harry Stebbings]

How fast will we ramp context and memory? Given scaling today, what you need to.

[Antonaseeka]

Ramp is to decide the process for storing memory I think is what you have to ramp. And it has to store all of these things. Like my conversation with Harry has to be stored somehow into the AI system and my childhood almost has to be stored as well. I don't know. It's going to take years.

[Harry Stebbings]

You can buy and hold one public stock for the next 10 years. Which one do you buy and hold?

[Antonaseeka]

Some talent play. What comes to mind is Tesla, they're also interestingly positioned outside of software.

[Harry Stebbings]

What's the most important trait in a founder that no one talks about?

[Antonaseeka]

I think great judgment people probably talk about. But I like people who hire, like see potential in people. It's like, okay, this person can, can become amazing. And the judgment in picking talent like that.

[Harry Stebbings]

What's your biggest weakness as CEO? Today?

[Antonaseeka]

I'm not as good as multitasking as I would like to be.

[Harry Stebbings]

If Lovable failed tomorrow, what would be the reason? Like investors write a pre mortem, which is like a reason why something doesn't work. What is that?

[Antonaseeka]

The one I can think of is just we lose momentum and excitement and that's what fuels us today. Right. All the excitement.

[Harry Stebbings]

And what have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

[Antonaseeka]

You don't need to be attached to one foundation model provider. They're all going to be amazing. There's not going to be one winner here.

[Harry Stebbings]

Are we seeing foundation models be completely commoditized?

[Antonaseeka]

Yes.

[Harry Stebbings]

We won't see specializations like we do today. I know Claude is better for code and engineering. Do you think that will really equalize? Yeah, I love the Swedes. Fucking one word answers. What's your favorite failure? I know that sounds weird. So when I was 17, I failed my exams at school. Anton. I failed them. Yeah, like these across the board. I looked at myself and I was like, I'm either gonna work behind a bar or I can make something of my life. And I chose to work harder than ever and make something of my life. That is my favorite failure.

[Antonaseeka]

I love that. My favorite failure that I didn't depict didn't work out so I could do more things.

[Harry Stebbings]

What concerns you most in the world today?

[Antonaseeka]

I'd love all leadership to be true idealists and not functional circumstances and people to please and be much more open minded to people who disagree with them and super intelligent as well. But leadership in the world today are usually a bit corrupted and narrow minded and that's what concerns me.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you think they would say you're naive?

[Antonaseeka]

Yes, I want to be naive.

[Harry Stebbings]

So yes, to the challenges of leadership, to the challenges of having a voter population. You sometimes have to be certain ways.

[Antonaseeka]

I think we used to have better precedents and leaderships throughout the last century. So no, I don't think I'm too naive, but I'm definitely always a bit naive.

[Harry Stebbings]

I totally agree with you. I think the state of leadership stays woeful. Penultimate one. What's your biggest short in the public markets?

[Antonaseeka]

It would be like a SaaS company that has a per seat pricing where their ICP is going to be replaced by AI SaaS that just replaces the employees.

[Harry Stebbings]

What's the future of pricing in an AI world?

[Antonaseeka]

I think it depends on how defensible your business is. If you're selling to enterprises that never change SaaS software to try to make some value based pricing. I don't know how you get to good value based pricing but I would do something like that that otherwise I think you should don't innovate so much too much on pricing. Do whatever works today.

[Harry Stebbings]

I love the facial expressions. Final one. I like optimism and I think we need more of it in the world. I'm incredibly excited for the next decade because I think we'll find cures to My mother's got multiple cirrhosis which is a horrible disease. I think we'll find cures to diseases that we really didn't think possible before. What excites you most about the next decade that we have come?

[Antonaseeka]

That AI is hopefully going to make us humans understand each other better and be better at doing win win thing win and that will be awesome. I'm excited about that. So like our leadership actually being enhanced by super intelligent AI.

[Harry Stebbings]

Anton. Listen dude, I've so enjoyed doing this. Thank you so much for joining me and thank you for inspiring a generation of European entrepreneurs that they can build unbelievable businesses in Europe.

[Antonaseeka]

Thank you Harry. It was super fun.

[Unknown]

2 million in ARR added every week. Is he kidding me?

[Harry Stebbings]

He's making every other investment look terrible right now. Listen, I love doing that show. It was so much fun.

[Unknown]

Oh my God, what a rocket ship lovable is. If you haven't tried it yet, try it. It is incredible. If you want to watch the show you can find it on YouTube by searching for 20VC. That's two 0VC on YouTube. But before we leave you today, here are two fun facts about our newest brand sponsor, Kajabi. First, their customers just crossed a collective $8 billion in total revenue.

[Antonaseeka]

Wow.

[Unknown]

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[Harry Stebbings]

As always, I so appreciate all your.

[Unknown]

Support and stay tuned for an incredible 20 sales episode with 1Password CRO coming on Friday.