// transcript — 2738 segments
0:00 Introduction to Elena Verna
0:01 You're ahead of growth at Lovable on track to be the fastest or one of the
0:06 fastest growing companies in history. >> We're over 200 million in AR at this
0:10 point. We're 100 people large. The pace here is insane. >> You said that you've had to throw out
0:14 most of your growth playbook. >> I feel like only 30 to 40% of what I've
0:19 learned in the last 15 to 20 years of being in growth transfers here because
0:23 we just need to invest in such bigger bets and innovate and create new growth
0:27 loops here. Everybody and their mother is starting a vibe coding business
0:31 nowadays and we need to figure out how to be ahead of them. And to be ahead of
0:35 them is not optimization of the problem. It's reinvention of the solution. I just
0:40 feel like I usually spend maybe 5% innovating on growth in my previous
0:45 roles. Right now I'm spending 95% innovating on growth and only 5% on
0:48 optimization. >> What do you find is actually moving the
0:52 needle? One of our biggest strategy is building in public and it's coupled with
0:57 employee socials, founder le socials and another one is giving your product away
1:02 a lot. This is part of our growth secret sauce. You have to remove the barrier of
1:07 entry. If somebody one of our users stands up and say hey I'm going to have
1:11 a hackathon at my work unlovable. Can you give us some free credits to play
1:16 with? Why would we prevent a person who wants to do all of the marketing and
1:21 activating for us from using us? We're like, take it. How much do you need?
1:24 >> The trick is get more people to try it. Just ship things you can talk about.
1:27 >> The only way to create a word of mouth loop is just to blow their socks off.
1:33 >> Today, my guest is Elena Vera, head of growth at Lovable. In under one year
1:37 after launching with fewer than 100 people, Lovable hit 200 million ARR,
1:44 which is one of, if not the fastest ramp to 200 million AR R in history, and
1:48 growth is still accelerating. They've also recently raised a series B at a $6
1:53 billion valuation. So, with that, there's a lot to learn about what
1:57 Lovable has figured out about growth. This is Elena's fourth visit to the
2:01 podcast, A Record. She is my favorite growth mind. And in our conversation, we
2:06 talk about how the growth playbook has fundamentally changed for AI companies.
2:10 What works now, what no longer works, and what has surprised her most about
2:14 how Lovable grows. She also shares her advice about whether working at an AI
2:18 company is right for you, some incredibly interesting insights into
2:22 lovable secret sauce for growth, the unique ways they operate internally,
2:25 their approach to building minimal lovable products, also how they hire,
2:30 and also how product market fit as a concept is no longer what it used to be,
2:34 and how every company basically has to recapture product market fit every 3
2:38 months. This episode is incredibly tactical, and you will leave this
2:41 conversation smarter on so many levels. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget
2:45 to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. And
2:49 if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of 19
2:55 incredible premium products, including a year free of lovable, replet, bolt,
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3:11 pass. With that, I bring you Elena Vera after a short word from our sponsors.
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5:12 verscell.com/lenny to get started. That's Elena, thank you so much for being here
5:24 and welcome back to the podcast. >> Thank you for having me. As you know,
5:30 this is uh a record fourth time back to the podcast. No one else has ever
5:34 achieved this feat. I feel like you're uh you're basically my co-host now.
5:37 >> I love it. Thank you for inviting me back. I'm very proud record holder in
5:41 this regard. >> What I love about you coming back each
5:43 time is feels like every time you come back, you're just doing something even
5:47 more epic and exciting. And so these days, as we'll hear in the intro, you're
5:51 head of growth at Lovable, which no big deal, on track to be uh the fastest or
5:56 one of the fastest growing companies in history, uh depending on the metric that
6:00 you track. Let's talk about just the scale and growth of Lovable to give
6:03 people a sense of just how incredible this is. I'll share a bit of this in the
6:05 intro, but just like what are some stats you can share about just how things are
6:08 going at Loveable? >> So, uh we are just a little bit over one
6:12 years old since we launched. Uh the company actually did exist as a GPT
6:17 engineer before, but it officially launched in the third week of November
6:21 last year in 2024. So uh for us, we've hit over $200 million in annual recurring revenue
6:30 before we even hit our one-year uh milestone since being launched, which is
6:34 pretty incredible. Uleni actually have a really great um blog post on how quickly
6:39 it takes for companies usually to get to their first million AR and it's usually
6:45 multiple years. So this is definitely a unicorn. I don't think this is a
6:50 standard. There's couple of things that um account for it and we can talk about
6:54 it and the growth is only accelerating. So it's compounding which is great
6:58 because we had our 100 million in end of July and just four months later we were
7:04 at 200 million. So 7 months to well maybe 8 months to 100 million another 4
7:10 months to get to 200 million. And from uh users too we already have over 8
7:14 million users um that have tried lovable. We have as you can imagine to
7:19 feed that 200 million hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers as well
7:24 that are paying for us. Uh so things are things are going great and we'll talk
7:27 about why. >> Okay. Absurd. I think people are getting
7:31 used to these insane numbers and not long ago is like okay if you hit a
7:35 million ARR in a year you're doing pretty well. >> Yeah. Yeah. I think it's still you're
7:40 doing pretty well if you have a million AR in one year. This is uh this is one
7:46 of the once in a lifetime type of companies and the category the way that
7:50 it's evolving. So I want to make sure that people don't also set this as a
7:55 benchmark for success because it should never be and in some categories it might
7:59 be even faster um as we continue evolving technology but I don't think
8:05 that it's realistic to expect it um out of your business that you're starting
8:08 right now. >> That is such an important point you're making there. It's so discouraging to
8:14 founders to hear this these stories of getting 200 million not and again this
8:19 is ARR. There's a lot of companies, especially in the data labeling space,
8:22 I've had them all on the podcast that are uh very fast growing, but they're
8:26 not recurring revenue. There's also they pay out their people to do this data
8:30 labeling. So, the revenue numbers there don't really equate like recurring $200
8:36 million a year is absurd. >> Yeah, it is. It is absurd. I really want
8:41 to make sure that people understand as we go through this episode as to why
8:45 it's happening because part of it is unlovable, part of it is just in the
8:49 market and and how it's moving. So when you're setting yourself as a benchmark
8:52 uh so you know which benchmarks you actually to use and whether lovable is
8:56 the benchmark that you should be using. >> Cool. I'm going to get into that next.
8:59 Last question just I want to see what you can share here. A lot of people look
9:03 at these numbers. A lot of people are very skeptical. These are lasting
9:07 durable numbers. Like who are these people? How is there $200 million being
9:12 spent on lovable? Anything you can amp just like give people confidence. This
9:16 is real. This is going to last. This is a really durable business.
9:21 >> Well, I saw Stripe receipts. So, it is real as far as I'm concerned. Um, unless
9:25 Stripe dashboard is lying to us, but it is money getting deposited in our bank
9:30 account. But, uh, let's talk about who's actually contributing to that number. We
9:34 do have a really large use case of people uh, starting their own companies
9:38 on lovable. So we call it a founder use case where somebody that is nontechnical
9:42 that has never been able to code or create a piece of software is now able
9:46 to come in and actually build an app completely from scratch and uh some of
9:50 them are already monetizing it some of it just using it for lead genen for
9:55 other services or uh some physical goods for example that they're uh that they're
9:58 selling. Some of them are just still building and uh we monetize on the act
10:03 of building. So that progression of like building up to your product market fit
10:07 takes quite a bit of time. And even with lovable, we're so much more efficient
10:12 and effective compared to hiring an engineer uh in terms of the price. But
10:17 um it still takes time. Uh so we have a lot of founders uh whether it's B2C, whe
10:22 there's B2B, so consumer products, business products, e-commerce, um
10:25 whatever it is. But on the other side, we have a lot of employees within
10:29 companies using lovable as well. Uh where they're building internal tools or
10:33 they're building prototypes, they're building landing pages. So uh that is
10:38 another use case that is very relevant and quite uh efficient for us. But then
10:43 there is a hype and discovery that is happening as well because uh when I
10:48 think about software I think about it. I talked to John Cuddler actually and he
10:52 gave me this framework that is like completely stuck in my mind of software
10:56 always goes through capabilities stage first like what is possible uh to
11:01 actually create with this then it needs to transition into value of how is it
11:04 that am I going to get value out of this and then you can start thinking about
11:08 scaling it uh of which aspects of my life and my work uh can this actually go
11:13 in and we're right now very much in the capability stage with vibe coding
11:16 because everybody's just exploring what can I do and And the beautiful thing
11:21 here is that what you can do changes every month to three months. So, uh you
11:25 constantly need to come back and you need to see what has changed. So, a lot
11:29 of people use it for personal reasons. Um they I build myself uh apps, tutoring
11:35 apps for my kid. So, he has to answer questions in order to get some screen
11:39 time accumulated for him. I build my own portfolio. I see people doing wonderful
11:44 things. My favorite story that I always say, uh there's this um man that created
11:50 a proposal on lovable. So his fiance had to answer questions and like she had to
11:54 complete this game and then at the end there was like this big reveal and he
11:58 proposed to her. But people just unlock the most creative things that they build
12:02 on lovable and that's where the revenue is coming from. the one piece that is
12:06 working very well for us in terms of how our monetization model is set up and how
12:10 it interjects with your activation moment which we can also cover but that
12:15 is what's driving um that um both conversion and retention rates.
12:17 Retention at Lovable
12:18 >> Let me ask you one question that's on people's minds I imagine as you talk
12:21 about this just what is what is retention look like? Yeah. So retention
12:26 uh really I look at it in two ways. Uh retention that it comes as a subscriber
12:31 retention. Uh so how much pay subscribers do we get and how many of
12:35 them are we capable of renewing. There's also very important aspect of it is how
12:38 many of them can we expand because if you can get positive or above 100% net
12:42 dollar retention which is super important metric for investors. If you
12:46 don't know about net dollar retention please read it up. That's like a
12:49 superpower to get bigger multiple. if you can show um NDR that is over 100 and
12:53 then there's actually engagement retention as well because uh that is the
12:58 leading indicator for how your paid retention is going to look like for paid
13:03 retention um I know there's a so much on the market of oh this is a high product
13:08 and um it just it's a leaky bucket and it has really high churn rates although
13:13 um I'm not I shouldn't share it's not public numbers for us to share actual
13:17 retention however what I can say it's on par with benchmarks of other B2B SAS
13:22 products that I've ever worked at and I worked with Miro, Dropbox, uh Survey
13:28 Monkey, Netifi, um Amplitude and others. So, are we are we absolutely crushing
13:34 with paid retention? Um no, are we where most of the other companies are? Yes.
13:39 Our NDR is quite good because when people build, they want to buy more
13:42 credits to bill. So, uh, we're seeing really good, uh, revenue retention, but
13:46 we're honestly more focused right now on engagement retention than even paid
13:51 retention because our northstar is just to get as much usage as possible. And,
13:55 uh, we will fix and tune our monetization model afterwards. So,
14:00 engagement retention, I would say, is a by far bigger priority focus for us at
14:04 the moment. >> That is incredibly uh, interesting and optimistic to hear because of the growth
14:11 rate. Uh rarely is growth rate this high and retention is on par with great
14:15 companies. >> Yeah. And I'll just say too which is a little bit maybe counterintuitive to
14:22 would be to a lot of companies we don't optimize for revenue at all. In fact
14:26 internally we have a lot of discussions about how can we give more products
14:32 away. How can we uh reduce our revenue growth rate by just getting more paid
14:37 subscribers, more users using lovable to just get bigger share of the market. So
14:43 our revenue is an outcome of us just trying to get more people through the
14:48 door, not us trying to optimize for revenue per user or to get them to
14:52 monetize at the higher rate. So there's like a very interesting path here where
14:56 by actually focusing on the inputs like you should, it translates to a good
15:00 output. But we don't look at that output as something that we're trying to grow.
15:02 Lovable’s unique growth levers
15:04 >> Let's talk about growth. Let's talk about what you've learned about growth
15:08 in this space. You had this post online where you said that you've had to throw
15:11 out most of your growth playbook. >> This is a huge deal. You've led growth a
15:15 lot of really successful companies. >> Lovable is growing incredibly well. Uh
15:19 this tells me there's a lot we can learn from what you've seen. So tell us what
15:23 you're seeing, what's still working, what's not working, what you've uh
15:26 learned about what it takes to drive growth at a company like Lovable. Yeah,
15:30 I would say that in any other role that I've come into before, uh I felt
15:37 confident in about 80% of the patterns that I can bring to that role. Meaning
15:41 that I can identify inputs, understand which framework kind of applies. I know
15:46 a bunch of examples that fit in within that framework. So we just need to
15:49 localize a solution and push and it was quite productive in terms of getting a
15:54 company those additional acquisition, conversion, engagement, monetization
16:00 rates. So um I I felt very repetitive in a way um after some time because I feel
16:04 like I'm just coming in and copy pasting copy pasting and although every single
16:07 company loves to say that they have unique problems at the end of the day
16:10 all of the problems were very similar and I felt like I was like doing the
16:14 same job over and over again when I started at lovable the one thing to me
16:18 that was very clear is that uh this company was growing like crazy before I
16:23 joined. So I want to make sure that there's not that much value on what I
16:27 have even added to date because this company is on a tear and yes we're
16:32 rounding the edges to and removing barriers for growth. Uh so we're not
16:37 standing in our own way but uh there's something more magical happening here
16:42 that is not a pattern that I've ever seen before. It's not a framework that I
16:47 can even conceptualize um in my head. And plus, it's a new category that I've
16:52 never seen or I've never been in a company that is in a new emerging
16:57 category that hits fastmoving waters so quickly. And that's the difference
17:01 because when you're usually trying to create a new category, it takes years. I
17:05 know it's every marketer's dream to create a new category, but it takes
17:09 decades often to like really to really get that much hype and adoption around
17:14 it. Versus with Vibe coding, this has seemed to have happened really quickly.
17:17 It's like it's hit the nerve with the market. So yes, we're at the right
17:21 place, we're at the right time, but we're also in really fastm moving waters
17:26 and um the demand that is coming to us like we need to capture it mostly. We
17:31 don't need to generate a lot of it yet. But at the same time, it comes with a
17:34 really big downfalls of we're not in control of a lot of our growth. I mean,
17:38 let's be honest about it. There's so much incredible word of mouth that is
17:42 happening and we're trying to grow that but uh to enable as much of that as
17:47 possible but um it's the company is moving. We're just like hanging on to it
17:53 as fast as possible and making sure that the we're like not going to hit a wall
17:58 so to speak in front of us and that the wheels are greased and that all of the
18:02 pieces are in place. like your race car framework uh that you have as well that
18:06 like we're we're really just putting a lot of oil into it and um figuring out
18:11 what is our engine actually going to be that is going to take us forward. But uh
18:16 when I'm thinking about the patterns here and what I have to unlearn, I feel
18:21 like only 30 to 40% of what I've learned in the last 15 to 20 years of being in
18:26 growth transfers here. And uh some of it is very straightforward. Okay, this is
18:30 how you're going to do paid marketing. this is how you're going to do some of
18:33 the habitual retention. Here's the free to pay maybe monetization uh frameworks
18:40 that still stand. But the rest of it um seriously doesn't feel like it even
18:44 matters anymore because we just need to invest in such bigger bets and innovate
18:49 and create new growth loops here as opposed to trying to optimize it uh to
18:53 the moon and be and beyond uh which would I usually be focused on in a scale
18:57 business like this. >> Let's follow those threads. So what is
19:00 it that no longer is worth it in this bucket of just like let's not spend any
19:04 time on this thing and then what do you find is actually moving the needle
19:09 >> not worth it in growth uh most of the people spend most of the time optimizing
19:15 existing user journeys. So, uh, you already have maybe some of your growth
19:18 loops that you understand that you try to optimize or you just know, hey,
19:22 there's big drop offs from acquisition to activation. Let me go figure out how
19:27 to I can tweak the dials to get it done. Here, what I find is that um,
19:31 optimizations are just not worth our time. So, a lot of the times my growth
19:35 team actually ends up working on new features or just standing up new growth
19:40 loops one after another. And yes, there is of of course the saying of like more
19:45 growth loops does not mean more growth. But at the same time, the market is
19:50 moving so quickly. You need to stand up a bunch of initiatives uh to capture it
19:55 because it's perishable or we also have so much competition. We're not alone
20:01 here. So we can't ignore that there's everybody in their mother is starting a
20:05 VIP coding business nowadays and we need to figure out how to be ahead of them.
20:08 and to be ahead of them is not optimization of the problem. It's
20:13 reinvention of the solution. So I just feel like I usually spend maybe 5% maybe
20:19 10% if I'm lucky innovating on growth in my roles uh in my previous roles. Right
20:24 now I'm spending 95% innovating on growth and only 5% on optimization. And
20:29 most of my frameworks are on optimization because it's really hard to
20:33 come up with frameworks for innovation because by default they're by definition
20:38 they're innovative. >> What I'm hearing here is uh new features
20:42 launching new features, new products as one of the bigger growth levers versus
20:46 like you have a bunch of cool stuff make it more make it easier to use increase
20:50 activation reduce friction things like that. >> Yeah. And for example, um we on growth
20:57 team launched uh integration with Shopify to enable e-commerce use case
21:01 because we're like hey there's already people trying to come in and do it and
21:05 Shopify was open for integration with us. Let's go lean into it so people can
21:10 vibe code their storefronts. Uh that came out of growth that usually would
21:13 never come out of growth. like why would growth team ever invest into a core
21:18 product integration or we um enable voice mode for people so they can
21:21 actually chat with lovable using their voice as opposed to only having type and
21:26 um that's also it's a feature it's a core product feature but we're like hey
21:29 it's going to help people to converse with lovable more it's going to increase
21:33 the engagement one area that we've spent very little time in is activation
21:37 because usually I spend majority of my time in activation because there's so
21:42 many awareness things that need to happened and uh so many things that uh
21:48 we we need to like smooth out experience for the users in order for them to get
21:52 through that setup moment to aha moment to that habit loop and here you're just
21:57 interacting with agent. So uh we at the beginning were like the agent team that
22:01 we have here is working a lot on it like why would we go in there and and do
22:05 anything is like our core team is responsible for activation. Now we're
22:09 starting to move into doing agent work ourselves. So all of a sudden growth
22:14 team is not just doing product surfaces now we're doing agentic workflows um and
22:20 codifying agent instructions in order for customers to activate better. So the
22:24 work fundamentally I feel like has gotten deeper into product and deeper
22:30 into actual core product functionality as opposed to just being a smoothing
22:34 surface on the outer layers. >> Okay, that is also a very big deal.
22:38 Every growth person that's ever been on this podcast, including you, always
22:41 talks about the power of activation. Just the how much opportunity there is
22:45 constant to get people to this aha moment, realize how the value of this
22:48 product that increases retention, increases everything. And what you're
22:52 saying here is you barely spend any time on activation because in a company like
22:57 Lovable, there's a prompt. You give it what you want, it generates a thing, and
23:01 that's basically all it is. And so the impact is to make that agent better at
23:06 that thing versus microoptimize every step. >> And our agent team spends night and day
23:12 thinking about it. So I've never been at the company where core team thinks so
23:16 much about activation, think so much about that first generation, thinks so
23:21 much about reaching aha moment. So it's more weaved in into DNA of the overall
23:26 company which takes the pressure off of me to only have to focus on it because
23:30 otherwise yeah I would be in that in that experience all the time but I feel
23:34 a lot more at ease because everybody's thinking about it and everybody's
23:40 working on making agent better and agent the beauty of it is it doesn't matter if
23:43 it's actually first generation or if it's your nth generation it just needs
23:47 to be a better generation agent needs to understand your intent better and think
23:51 and reason behind behind it. So it like improves the entire life cycle
23:56 immediately as opposed to having to only work on that first experience per se.
24:01 >> And what you're not saying is don't care about that experience. It's the team
24:05 building that is already obsessed with making that activation experience
24:08 better. >> And I I love that because I that's the core product functionality at this
24:16 point. And before uh people would spend more time building deeper features or
24:22 deeper use cases or trying to um improve some platform functionality and now the
24:26 core team they're obsessed about that first experience because that is core
24:29 product. >> Another lever that I've noticed especially with lovable and I'm seeing
24:34 it more and more in social media is just founders telling you what's going on. I
24:38 think this connects really deeply with the new features. Launch new features.
24:41 Say Anton is just like hey check out this cool new thing. Check out our
24:44 growth numbers. Is that a big growth lever too? >> Yeah. So, one of our biggest strategy is
24:52 uh building in public. Uh building in public and it's coupled with employee
24:58 socials, founder socials for sure. Uh this is difficult for larger companies,
25:02 but when you're smaller and you still have a little bit more narrative control
25:07 uh with uh with everybody on your team, plus you have so much more trust within
25:11 your organization of whether people are going to say the right things because
25:14 they understand what actually has happened. Uh that ability to just really
25:19 quickly deliver the message to the market becomes really important. Now we
25:24 still do big launches. So we still have everything tiered into tier three, tier
25:28 one. Like tier ones are going to happen as like big moments that we're going to
25:33 really rally as a company behind and it's going to be something that um is
25:37 meant to step function change our product market fit and uh we're going to
25:40 do a bunch of activities behind it. But at the same time, what's really
25:45 important to us is to maintain noise in the market. And that noise in the market
25:50 happens by us shipping every day, every other day, multiple times per day and
25:55 just talking about it constantly. Interestingly enough, it's actually
25:59 works as fantastic resurrection strategy because people like, "Oh, there's more
26:02 things here. Like, I need to go check it out." It also works as great
26:06 re-engagement strategy. So, instead of sending newsletters to say like, "Here's
26:09 the market trends or here's the user stories." Like, people are like
26:13 literally logging into their social to see like, "Okay, what has lovable
26:16 shipped now?" like what what what is the change? So, it's interesting to them to
26:20 see because from the time that they voice their opinion on what needs to
26:24 happen to actual delivery is so short. So, they feel heard and they are heard
26:29 because that's how we uh prioritize all of the things that we're shipping. But,
26:33 it's interesting because I've never been in a company that tries
26:37 to maintain so much just shipping velocity to maintain certain amount of
26:42 noise that it feels like the product is alive. it's changing every single week.
26:46 And then there's like these big amplifications, turbo boosts so to speak
26:51 in the race car model uh that then go out and they fundamentally create a step
26:56 function change in that product market fit as a whole. And uh that is a
27:01 retention strategy I can get behind any day and all day. I only hope that we can
27:07 maintain it as we continue scaling. >> Sounds stressful. This reminds me I had
27:13 Garav. He is the CEO of uh Mirage used to be called Captions which is a really
27:17 successful AI video company startup and they have a policy of you ship a a
27:23 marketable feature every week. >> That's how their company operates and
27:26 it's the same thing is just ship things you can talk about. >> Velocity of shipping is our number one
27:32 core value in development team. So we do anything and everything to just keep it
27:37 going up up up and um into the right. And by the way, this is also means that
27:40 everybody is a little has a little bit of marketer within them. This is uh we
27:44 have very lean product organization. We actually lean on our engineers uh to do
27:48 a lot of product work. We call them product engineers. Uh and uh they have
27:54 to go and they have to announce the thing that they've shipped. It doesn't
27:57 just funnel through marketing. So there's a lot of uh autonomy, a lot of
28:01 agency that needs to happen with this with this type of velocity because
28:05 marketing team otherwise you have to have like enormous marketing team to
28:09 staff that. So it has to come with some roles and responsibilities uh
28:13 redefinition on the team as well. >> Let's talk about marketing. That's
28:15 something else you've written about is just marketing is changing in a big way
28:19 their role in growth. How does marketing play a role in all of this? On one side,
28:24 marketing channels are changing. On the other side, marketing's involvement into
28:28 everything that product does is changing. And then number three, I think
28:32 even marketing organizations in terms of where they're hired the most um are
28:36 changing as a result as well. So I'll talk about second one first just because
28:40 we just talked about shipping and that is um yeah you still have your product
28:44 marketers, you still have your channel managers um but they focus more on the
28:49 big things and the narratives although it's difficult because the narrative
28:52 even changes all the time as these functionalities come through. Usually
28:57 you can come up with the positioning and messaging and you can have it for years
29:01 and and create all of the campaigns around it. Now you have it for three
29:05 months and then the product changes. So like the cycles here are really uh
29:10 really short and uh for smaller changes because cycles are so short they spend
29:14 so much time actually focusing on it as they should that some of these smaller
29:17 changes just cannot be supported by marketing. You have to delegate it to
29:21 your product and engineering team to do their own marketing because otherwise
29:24 again you're going to have to have enormous marketing team in order to
29:28 support it all. But at the same time, channels in which marketing right now
29:32 works I think are changing quite a bit and um not enough people I feel like are
29:36 freaking out and talking about it as opposed to like moving just in the same
29:40 direction over and over again. And the changes that I'm seeing is that it is
29:46 very has been very clear to me that when you're talking about organic strategy,
29:49 if you marketing organic strategy, if you asked me that five years ago, I
29:54 would have said that's SEO. It's search engine optimization. go on Google.
29:58 That's your organic marketing strategy. If you ask me what's the organic
30:01 marketing strategy right now, to me, it's all about social, which is what is
30:06 my CEO posting? What is my team posting? What is my LinkedIn? What is my creator
30:12 economy doing in influencer marketing? And um across all of the social
30:16 platforms, that is my organic, which is that one's kind of paid to be fair, but
30:19 when I think about organic, there is still a lot of that word of mouth. What
30:23 are my users posting on social? What are they talking about it? what are they uh
30:27 what are they sharing which is like a mind shift because I've been always
30:32 especially in B2B so focused on search and now I feel like it's been completely
30:37 pushed even further into consumerization territory and it has become all about
30:43 social no matter how B2B you are because that's where eyeballs are at
30:46 >> that is fascinating and so when you talk about socials what are you finding is
30:50 most helpful is it Twitterx is it LinkedIn is it YouTube Tik Tok Instagram
30:54 >> for founder socials uh O employee socials um X and LinkedIn are fantastic
30:59 sources. Um especially for B2B because that's where all of the B2B people are
31:05 at. But you cannot just have Chad GPT write your copy and post it. You need to
31:10 show personality like there needs to be humanity uh that it goes through it. And
31:15 it's not natural for everybody and it feels very awkward sometimes to start.
31:21 Uh but it's important to people to see who's building the company because
31:25 there's so much competition now on functionality so they can rally behind a
31:30 team. So they want to have a team that they want to win and for that you need
31:36 to be vulnerable. You need to be authentic obviously but you just need to
31:41 be yourself. Uh so like that corporate scrubbing has to completely fall off
31:47 which um is obviously going to pull in as as the company scales but at least at
31:51 the beginning that is a chance to stand out and then your customers posting
31:56 about you. So that word of mouth of uh really creating a product that creates
32:02 something for customers that is worth talking about. It gives them stories
32:07 that they want to share that feels empowering to them to tell to others
32:12 like they're unlocking a secret like they feel proud of what they have
32:16 created which what we focus a lot on lovable on to have that feeling of oh my
32:21 gosh I have superpowers now and I can't wait to tell others I cannot wait to
32:26 show others what is happening so on both of those sides to me that is very much
32:30 organic um if you're in a consumer then Instagram Tik Tok um are very much a go
32:34 as well. >> So here it's uh the CEO clearly is an important uh variable in this them in
32:41 this case Anton just tweeting here's what's going on lovable here's how fast
32:44 it's growing here's some we've learned >> uh we had the CEO of gamma uh on
32:48 recently Grant and he's exactly the same thing just sharing a bunch of lessons
32:51 journey building in public a big part of the growth lever and your point here is
32:55 okay so it's the co but then it's also how do you get your customers to share
32:59 things on socials and then there's a paid uh influencer sort of component
33:03 >> yes uh the customer is difficult one, that's a word of mouth loop that you
33:07 need to stand up. The only way to create a word of mouth loop is just to blow
33:12 their socks off uh when they actually experience your product. We have a
33:16 really almost unfair advantage because our product is called lovable. So by
33:20 default, we're trying to create an absolute lovable experiences. Like that
33:25 is a mentality internally. If it's not lovable, we're not going to ship it. So
33:30 uh and the best way to fix a bug at lovable is to say this is not lovable.
33:34 like when everybody's just like jumps on it. Uh to fix it right there and then
33:38 sprints, no sprints, it doesn't matter. It's getting fixed right now. So, uh
33:42 from that perspective, we kind of have that culture already embedded as part of
33:46 our brand and it's part of our name, which helps us a lot. But that's the
33:50 point is that you feel that brand through every interaction. Uh I talk to
33:54 my designer all the time. How can we add more love marks into the product? How
33:58 can we prioritize more unique interactions? the little elements that
34:03 make up that that feeling of this product is speaking to me. It's like it
34:06 feels something like that is unique. It has personality uh behind it. So we put
34:11 all of the brand work actually into our product. When you think about lovable
34:16 think people think about a brand but we don't have a brand marketing team yet.
34:19 So it's all just through product interactions and some of those building
34:25 and public moments of the people behind uh those product interactions. Um that
34:28 is our strategy. And then there's influencer marketing. Interestingly
34:32 enough, influencer marketing is 10 times bigger for us than paid social. So yeah,
34:37 we do some paid social as well. Um, and it's working decently. It's quite
34:42 expensive from payback period. Um, we're still optimizing it. As I said, we're
34:45 pretty early on in all of these channels, but influencer marketing is
34:48 something that has worked uh from the beginning. a lovable and uh reason
34:53 behind it is that influencer marketing especially on the socials it gives you
34:57 an opportunity to have a little video and interaction and lovable is all about
35:01 seeing like oh my gosh this is what I can do and uh this is possible so that
35:06 drives people to go and try it themselves so that's why social works
35:10 very well for us because it's not really a written value proposition like nobody
35:14 knows what bite coding is but you watch 10 seconds of it and you go that's new
35:18 let me go give it a try >> who would have thought that a head of
35:23 growth who is traditionally seen as like data metrics, spreadsheets, drive KPIs
35:28 is like, okay, how do we make this more lovable? How do we add more moments of
35:33 delight? I know my my my joke is like at the end of my lovable journey whenever
35:38 hopefully never comes to an end, but but at the end I'll be like a growth brand
35:43 person here. Here, hi, my name is Elena. I do brand now. But I I actually see it
35:48 as part of growth strategy to make sure that that brand shines through every
35:53 single interaction. Um and I always talk to my team about it because that is one
35:58 big lever in our growth story. >> Yeah. So I think that's a really
36:01 important point to highlight. The reason Lovable is growing so fast is it is a
36:05 product people love. You've made something people want and the word of
36:08 mouth spreads because it's something that blows people's socks off as you
36:12 said. So it feels like that's the first thing you got to get right.
36:15 >> Yes. Well, the first thing you have to get right is you have to be at the right
36:18 place at the right time and you have to be in fastmoving waters. Like let's not
36:22 discount how fast this category is exploding on its own. So this cannot
36:26 happen in every single category that you're starting to build a product. But
36:30 the way to stand out in the super crowded category is to create
36:34 experiences that speak to people. That I think is something that a lot of people
36:37 deprioritize because they still prioritize functionality over humanity
36:42 within software. And I think that we're actually moving to the new era of
36:46 software that needs to feel human that people want to interact with not just
36:51 utility of it because cost of software is coming down so much to develop that
36:57 we now can actually invest into emotional feel of that software as
37:02 opposed to only just focus on creating the utility out of it. So to me it's um
37:09 it's a I I I love this move because I I hate nothing more than going to software
37:13 that is just like so painful to use that I lose some brain cells uh as I'm
37:17 interacting with it versus software that I feel I get energy out of and for
37:22 lovable for me like I cannot wait on some of the projects that I have to go
37:25 and vibe code myself like that's the highlight of my day and I just like I
37:30 don't I I I bring in my daughter and I'm like let's go do this like what do you
37:33 think that needs to be done because I just get so energy out of doing it and
37:38 uh that is the feeling you cannot create by looking at it as a utility problem.
37:43 >> The way I think about it, the way what you're describing is it's almost table
37:47 stakes have increased and now it's so easy to build. Now the big
37:50 differentiator is experience, design, delight. >> Exactly. And it has to translate through
37:56 every single interaction. So your designer has to be one of your first
38:00 hires now in startups. It's not just about the the engineering so to speak
38:05 utility and you have to think through every single interaction of does this
38:09 communicate our brand or not. >> So along those lines I want to come back
38:11 to something you talked about which is launching new features is a huge growth
38:15 lever. Kind of the big question there is just how do you maintain quality and
38:19 cohesiveness as all these people are empowered to ship stuff. Is there
38:22 anything else there you've seen that works well to help avoid just a
38:26 Frankenstein product just endless features that you want to tweet about?
38:31 Yeah, one part of it is not something that you can codify, but it's the type
38:34 of people that you hire that are going to go and ship these things. We at
38:39 Lovable try to hire the absolute best talent available out there that we can
38:43 bring in and that we can source and that we can attract uh to grow with. And what
38:48 do I mean by that best talent? Um it's not that somebody who has been at really
38:51 large companies or somebody that has really uh done a lot of logos or has big
38:56 success stories behind them. It's somebody who is extremely passionate
39:00 about their job. It's their hobby. They love to work. They have fire in their
39:05 belly. This is not a paycheck for them. They want to do this for some ulterior
39:10 reason. This is the biggest opportunity of their life. So this is global maxima
39:15 against any other opportunities that are in front of them at the moment. So
39:19 that's very important for us. We want people to come and do their absolute
39:22 best work at lovable. It's very important and you can feel it in this
39:29 office. People are wired up. They are so high on how can we make this better? How
39:34 can we deliver more to our customers? And that's very different compared to
39:39 usually how companies grow. We're like, okay, yeah, the check, check, check.
39:42 They fit the skill set. Let's bring them in. But is that passion? Is that fire
39:47 behind it? And then uh the second piece is that um we work really hard on just
39:52 addressing what's the success here looks like? What is it that we're building?
39:56 what use cases are we building for? And then because we hire these people that
40:00 are so passionate about it, the other two skills, by the way, that are super
40:03 important is high agency and high autonomy, I can figure out things that
40:08 are tangential to me that I don't need other specialty, so to speak. Like I
40:12 don't need a marketer to go launch something. I can go figure it out and I
40:16 have high agency. I can go do it myself. Um I'm going to own it from all the way
40:21 from start to finish. uh those are very important, something that we screen for
40:24 and something that we look for in our culture and then uh you just see what
40:30 you want to do is up to you. So there's very little supervision that happens on
40:35 the ground. Um now we all have a goals and like some of the big launches that
40:38 we're all marching towards but some of the work um that is completely up to
40:43 developers up to uh marketers or whatever what is it that they want to
40:47 do. So there has to be that enablement of go try things and because of our
40:52 velocity if you fail it's not a big deal we'll just pivot we'll go we'll get
40:57 we'll get through it we are not here to just win all the time
41:02 >> on the hiring of these incredible people as we all know it's very hard to hire
41:05 people these days especially the best what have you seen lovable does
41:08 differently or does well that helps them recruit the best >> yes and especially recruit in Stockholm
41:14 I mean the main office here is in Stockholm we're asking a lot of people
41:18 to relocate uh which is a no small feat. Now some of it is um makes it easy
41:22 because of how much hype we created around our product. People want to come
41:27 work for us like there's um they're reaching out to us. They're saying I I
41:30 love what you're doing. I want to join it. Uh so that we have a cheat code to
41:35 it because like we have most of the time when we reach out to somebody they say
41:40 yeah I would love to explore. So uh building that product that is highly
41:44 lovable also creates a really great recruiting brand for you as well. So
41:48 make sure that there like multiple benefits to that. But uh second of all
41:54 we do a lot of trials uh for people. So trial work to see them in action
41:59 >> a work trial to see them in action for a couple of days. We pay them as part of
42:02 the work trial. We have uh some probation periods that we start people
42:06 on uh because this company is not for everybody. As I start said in the
42:11 podcast in in the beginning, the pace here is insane. I went on vacation uh
42:16 for the first time. So I've been here for 6 months. I went on vacation um for
42:21 10 days. I came back. I felt like I needed to on board from the beginning.
42:26 Like everything changed. And when I'm in it, I feel like it's an evolution. But
42:31 the fact that just being gone for 10 days, it feels like a complete
42:35 revolution in the company. It's that pace is just not for everybody. And
42:38 that's okay because I'm very firm believer that there's different cultures
42:42 and different environments that the best fit for different personalities and
42:45 different people. So we try to be very upfront with how things are and how
42:51 chaotic they are. And we prioritize people that don't look for clarity but
42:57 can create clarity out of chaos because um it is absolutely chaotic otherwise.
43:03 And if we start to look for people that can explain it uh to us, that's the only
43:06 way that we can succeed. >> The way you describe going on vacation
43:09 and feeling very different, it feels like when you don't see your kid for a
43:12 few days and they're just like completely different. You're like, "How
43:15 did you grow so fast in 3 days?" >> Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Let me try to
43:20 summarize the growth levers that you're finding is are working. And I'm trying
43:23 to think about this from the perspective of uh an AI startup trying to think
43:27 about, hey shoot, how do we grow faster? What is lovable figured out? So feels
43:32 like number one is just uh build something lovable, something that blows
43:36 people's socks off, but also in a market that is growing that people want to pay
43:39 money for like you can build something lovable that nobody actually cares about
43:43 that there isn't much money going to the space. There's no tide pushing it
43:47 forward and it won't work. I call it minimum lovable product. Like it
43:50 shouldn't be minimum viable product anymore. Viability is left in back in
43:57 2020 2010s. Now it's minimum lovable product. That's the only thing that
43:59 matters. >> I love how these AI tools are letting us you know like PMS have always had these
44:06 um what are they uh smoke door test or like what's the term just like or is
44:09 that not a real product? Uh >> painted door. >> Painted door. There it is. Yeah. And and
44:14 it's like okay we just have a landing page. There's nothing there. And now AI
44:17 makes it easier to do that and it's like more fullfeatured. >> Yeah. Well, it's the feedback cycle is
44:22 just completely collapsed. You can go from idea to some product uh that is
44:28 functioning to user feedback within a day if you want to. I mean depending on
44:31 how fast that you want to run or how complex the product is for missions. It
44:36 took us couple of weeks to vip code it to the point to where because we also um
44:41 I have a full-time vip coder on my team. He's amazing. So like he he wanted to
44:45 create videos like he did a bunch of designs for it uh too. So we he he took
44:49 him a couple of weeks. We're testing it now and then we'll push it in the
44:52 product. But it's a completely different development life cycle. Before uh it
44:57 would just take so many more steps uh from user research to uh the design
45:03 sprints uh to prioritizing on engineering roadmap to build something
45:08 minimal and and viable to actually test to little long testing cycles. Now it's
45:13 just like boom, let's go. Uh, it's taken us could have taken us a day. We just
45:17 decided to take a couple of weeks to get all of the video pieces correct.
45:20 >> I saw you launched this on LinkedIn. I to me it looked like a a full product
45:24 launch. Uh, it is interesting to hear. This is just a sort of prototype.
45:27 >> Yes. >> Prototype. >> Minimum level. >> Minimum level. Okay. Uh, I got to ask
45:32 you have this. You said you had a full-time vibe coder. What the heck is
45:36 this? Is this like an engineer? Is this something else? What is a full-time vibe
45:38 coder? >> Great question. This is a new job role that is actually popping up here and
45:44 there. Uh it's absolutely fascinating to watch uh this development because I see
45:49 vibe coding as a skill being added to a lot of job descriptions for designers,
45:54 for product managers, uh for marketers, which I think is a really interesting
45:58 shift. Finally, Excel can move over like we have a new skill to add that is um
46:04 super empowering and and not three years old, but uh vibe coder. So uh his name
46:10 is Lazar and he actually was chief of staff in his previous role. So he's not
46:14 technical at all. He's self-taught uh in technical aspects of it but he was very
46:20 early on in the vibe coding wave. So he learned a lot about it. He was um user
46:25 of all of the vibe coding tools lovable included. And uh when I was coming into
46:29 the role I'm like I have so many projects that I will vibe code myself.
46:34 So I run this uh woman only hackathon she builds. I vip coded the first
46:39 version of that site and like and submission process for applications and
46:43 then other people came in and started building on top of it. But I vip code
46:47 but then like I don't have enough time sometimes because I need to run around
46:51 and I want to push out so many different initiatives that I want to test in the
46:56 market with our own products. So um we connected on social um like can you like
47:00 would you join us and he joined us for uh part-time uh like you're bringing so
47:05 much value for example we partnered with Shopify and he created a bunch of
47:09 Shopify lovable templates uh by coded for us and it's been so helpful uh to
47:13 have somebody like that that is just like pushing all all of these things out
47:17 and he's an absolute expert so he's teaching us all too of what is possible
47:21 with lovable because he's on the cutting edge of constantly pushing it to the
47:27 limit. So, I I really enjoy having that role, which I've never had before in my
47:31 life and in my team. >> I I'm not surprised. I've I've never
47:35 heard of this role before as a real full-time job. Do you think this is a
47:39 thing people will start hiring for at non vibe coding companies?
47:43 >> So, I vibe code myself. So, like I would put that as even as a skill on my on my
47:47 resume now. It took me a while to figure out by the way like everybody's like,
47:50 "Oh, you just go and like it and it all happens automatically." It takes you a
47:54 couple of iterations, couple of projects until like you know, okay, this is this
47:58 is how I need to translate it, how I need to think about it. But for me, it's
48:02 when I started scaling of what I want to vibe code. That's where his value really
48:06 came in because I'm like, okay, I understand what is possible. I know what
48:10 needs to be achieved. And some of these apps I want to be almost full-blown
48:14 built uh because they're not going to get incorporated into the product
48:17 anytime soon. They don't need to be. I'll just link to them from uh from our
48:21 headers, so to speak. and uh he really accelerated that velocity for me. So
48:26 once you get into VIP coding and you see its value within your organization,
48:30 leaning into somebody like that just accelerates your velocity because it is
48:34 like an engineer uh on your team. It's just they're not to me he's his part his
48:38 part technical but they can be nontechnical if they're really good.
48:42 >> That is fascinating. This episode is brought to you by Persona, the verified
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49:47 this episode. Let me kind of go back to summarize just real quick the growth
49:50 lovers. I want to move in a somewhat different direction. So things that help
49:54 Lovable grow. One is just build something in mind that blows your socks
49:57 off as you said. Uh I love these phrases out here. The second is uh make noise in
50:03 the market. And the way that Lovable does this SEO is tweeting constantly.
50:07 You build something that blows people's socks off so that they share things on
50:11 socials themselves. Plus, this influencer marketing component and just
50:16 this idea of building in public has been really helpful. This point about
50:20 activation being kind of uh embedded within the product team of the AI exper
50:24 of the AI agent essentially. So, it's essentially not the growth team thinking
50:27 about activation. It's the product team that is building the AI magic that is
50:32 obsessed with activation and it feels like those are the main the main growth
50:37 levers. Is there anything else that I missed? >> Community. I think community is really
50:42 important here because you need to bring people together as they're exploring
50:46 these capabilities and as they're seeing what's possible so they can bounce off
50:49 each other and they can help each other out. So I would say community also
50:53 amplifies that word of mouth. It amplifies all of the social posting. It
50:58 it amplifies retention mechanisms uh for you as well. But community has been a
51:03 huge part of lovable success as well and that's something that was started very
51:07 early on. It runs on discord so it's nothing fancy. It's not like we build
51:10 anything completely from scratch for ourselves. Um and it has hundreds of
51:15 thousands of members and it's um it's very lively. We have community managers
51:21 that are making sure that all of the questions get answered and the right
51:23 groups are being created. We have incredible ambassador pro program now as
51:29 well of people uh doing it. So I would say community here again of really
51:35 making software more human is very important role. Now now obviously not
51:39 everybody can build a community but maybe at least plugging in into
51:43 somebody's community is uh quite important as well. And then there's
51:46 another one unless you have a question on community. >> No keep going. Another one is uh giving
51:53 your product away a lot. And for AI products, it may feel counterintuitive
51:58 because they're so costly. Every single interaction with an AI product cost
52:03 companies something. There's an LLM pass through cost uh that is coming through.
52:08 And uh a lot of especially traditional tech companies I see are gating AI
52:13 immediately behind a pay wall because uh they're sitting on a really cush um high
52:18 margin profile. And the moment that you start giving AI away for free, you're
52:23 like cutting into those uh margins with like a like a knife through the butter.
52:29 Now, at the same time, AI being so new and the capabilities being so new, you
52:34 have to remove the barrier of entry. You have to give a lot of your product away
52:37 for free. But by the way, I don't just mean premium. Premium to me is just like
52:42 a baseline. If you're in the new category, you need to let people explore
52:47 what it is for free and get that initial wow moment. It's not a ha moment, by the
52:51 way. It doesn't need to be aha moment anymore. It just needs to be a wow
52:54 moment. And for lovable is that first preview generation after your first
52:59 prompt, even though it's absolutely not going to be complete thing of what you
53:03 want to build, but you just go this is possible like I had no idea I want to
53:06 keep building. And it becomes an addictive exercise. But we also give so
53:12 many of our lovable credits away to every event to every hackathon. If you
53:16 want to host a lovable hackathon, we will sponsor it and give all of the
53:19 participants credits away for free. So we give them away as candy and we uh
53:24 basically track them over our LLM cost on premium and giveaways as our
53:29 marketing costs and it doesn't go into our uh something we need to reduce uh to
53:35 make our margins better. It goes into this is something that we need to spend
53:39 more in because this is part of our growth secret sauce. >> Okay, I want to hear more about the
53:44 growth secret sauce. That is extremely interesting. Uh I haven't heard of that
53:48 as a strategy and I can see why this makes sense. If the strategy is blow
53:51 people's socks off so they could tell their friends, post on all the socials.
53:55 The trick is get more people to try it. And so this is and and it's such a new
53:59 crazy thing. Like why would I pay money? Why would I even go take the effort to
54:03 like try sign up for an account if I don't know what this is? because I don't
54:05 know what I'm doing with it. So, I could see how this loop goes faster and faster
54:10 by giving it away. >> Exactly. And again, this is very
54:14 uncomfortable sometimes for companies that a either used to really AI
54:19 companies have lower profile of margins. That's absolutely true. We to find an AI
54:24 company with 80 90% margin profile is absolutely impossible. Let's be real.
54:29 We're all sitting somewhere in the 40% uh or so, which is a lot smaller. So any
54:35 time that you look at those AI costs as your cost center, that's when you're in
54:39 trouble. You fundamentally have to flip the script and say, "I need to expose to
54:44 people of what is possible and I need to remove the monetization friction out of
54:48 it." Because if you don't, nobody's ever going to try it or you're going to be
54:52 very easily overtaken by a competitor that will give it away. And let's face
54:55 it, once you hook people, they're more likely going to stay with you. So you
54:58 obviously have to still work on the retention strategy there. But if you can
55:02 have like for our case if somebody one of our users stands up and say hey I'm
55:07 gonna have a hackathon at my work unlovable can you give us all some free credits to
55:15 play with why would we prevent a person who wants to do all of the marketing and
55:20 activating job for us in their company from using us? Of course we're like take
55:25 it. How much do you need? How much would you like? We will sponsor it all. We
55:28 will give you anything that you need. So, we're really leaning into people
55:32 that are wanting to show this magic to those around you and empowering them as
55:36 much as possible. And um that is something that is actually applies to
55:40 every single product. And I agree, this is not a growth strategy that I've ever
55:44 applied in my life on like giving product away as much as possible, but it
55:48 is something that uh is more and more becoming something that I see that is
55:52 absolutely non-negotiable. >> What I'm feeling is like the more
55:55 mind-blowing it is, the more you should give it away for free.
55:58 >> Yeah. especially in a competitive market where everyone is you know it's hard
56:02 there's like so many companies trying to do this thing and so um so it's almost
56:06 like the better you are the more you should give it away >> right right
56:10 >> and this also explains why uh so much VC money has to be raised for these sorts
56:13 of companies because this is not cheap like you said you're paying all these
56:16 foundational models a lot of money >> yes and no uh because I'm only going to
56:21 say no is because so take a look at lovable we're two over 200 million in AR
56:26 at this point we're 100 people charge. So our headcom count costs are
56:30 >> very Let me just let me just make sure people hear that. 200 millionaire I
56:35 didn't realize 100 people work at Lovable. >> Yes. And 6 months ago we had 30 people
56:40 working at Lovable. So we triple. So for us it's a really big deal. We tripled
56:43 our company size. Uh we're going to quadruple it by the end of Yeah. I know
56:49 >> we're big boy and girls now. But for for perspective of the headcount cost, it's
56:54 minimal. So we have very little in that going on. We are not spending a lot on
56:59 paid marketing. So, we're not a big paid marketing driver. Yeah, we're spending
57:02 on influencer marketing, but it's not majority of our growth. It's uh low
57:07 double digits uh to to be fair because it's it's not why we're successful. It's
57:11 amplifying our success and it's helping us reach new audiences. Uh we don't have
57:15 really large sales team. We have only a couple sales folks um and they're just
57:19 starting to ramp up their enterprise efforts. So, we don't have like really
57:23 big enterprise demand gen costs as well. So from that perspective, if you like
57:28 look at the equation and you say, well, okay, if you're not going to do a lot of
57:31 paid marketing, if you're not going to do a lot of sales because we're really
57:35 only working on hand raisers of people that are saying right now that they want
57:39 to buy lovable, then where is like you don't have big costs. So you can spend
57:43 it on product and that is the beautiful part because you're not when we're
57:46 giving our product away to our customers, we're not competing with
57:51 other companies in that space because they're just going to use lovable in
57:55 their hackathon on their own and we're not competing on AdWords or like in paid
58:01 Google where everybody's buying real estate for eyeballs. So from that
58:05 perspective is I think about it more as a shift of where we spend and cost and
58:11 honestly it's more efficient way to do paid marketing almost in a sense uh
58:16 because of the cost per eyeball that we get there is quite a bit lower compared
58:20 to if we were trying to compete it on Google. So yes and no to your statement
58:26 because it actually does not deteriorate margin profile. We're just shifting of
58:31 where we're spending it. That is an incredibly important point you're making
58:34 there. So it's not like uh you're generating an incredible amount of
58:39 revenue. Uh so there is money available to spend and what you're saying is
58:43 because it's been spreading through word of mouth mostly. You're not spending
58:47 tons of money on salespeople. You're not spending tons of money on paid ads.
58:51 >> This is just uh an amazing way to get more people to use it. So it's kind of
58:54 like a marketing cost. >> This is productled growth. >> Yeah.
59:00 >> To the max. Supercharged. Yes. because you're literally using your product to
59:05 drive that awareness by giving it away to the agents in your ecosystem that
59:11 will do that distribution for you. >> So fascinating. What a what a wild world
59:15 we're living in. Free stuff for everyone. >> Yes. Yes. I mean, it's great for
59:20 consumers. This is a great time to be a consumer. You have so many options. Like
59:24 everybody's throwing themselves at you, giving your product away for free. So,
59:28 it's great to be in the market right now. I think it's the the power should
59:32 be with consumer always but with software power has not been with
59:36 consumer previously because we were forced to use towards some solutions
59:40 because of either how they were chosen for us or what was available in the
59:43 market and now that supply is almost infinite the demand of from the
59:49 consumers can be very picky and the one that serves the best will win
59:53 >> and I think again it's important to highlight this is not some kind of VC
59:56 subsidized bubbleish sort of thing like there is a lot of money being generated
60:00 that you are spending to help it grow faster. It's not like some kind of we're
60:03 just raising more money to give away more money. Like you're actually making
60:06 real money. It's not driving it's not driven by VC money. >> I I I can't comment on specific margin
60:14 details for us. Uh but at the same time, the money that we're raising on VC is
60:18 for future development and hardening our business. >> Uh not because we will not be able to
60:22 survive without it. >> Awesome. Okay, great segue too. I want
1:00:23 Product-market-fit challenges
60:25 to talk about product market fit and competition. you had this really
60:27 interesting post that I don't think people uh grasp yet, which is that
60:33 product market fit is no longer this like we've done it product market fit
60:37 and we're up and to the right now we just grow grow now we hire sales people
60:41 it's going to be great uh you've written that just product market fit is no
60:43 longer this like you've done it and you're good it's this endless fight to
60:48 keep it talk about what you're seeing there >> so I'll first start with what I've felt
60:54 at least before when people were talking about product market fit
60:57 that yeah obviously always product market fit is an evolving thing but the
61:01 rate of that evolution was measured in years and what is it that you need the
61:05 next product market fit step function change which often was called second
61:11 horizon or third horizon sometimes five 10 years sometimes even longer that you
61:14 need that you depending on how good your and hardy your initial product market
61:18 fit was but you'd spend years scaling the original product market fit it was
61:23 like blitz growth stage marketing sales growth was very important um that you
61:27 just try to get it to as many people as possible and then once you have
61:31 saturation or the cost to getting to the marginal people becomes too high, you
61:33 start thinking, okay, what else can I offer to help me reach additional people
61:38 or sell more to existing users that I already have? And again, the main point
61:43 here is it would take years to get to that stage where it became a question
61:48 that you had to face um really hard face to face. Now it's 3 months and all of a
61:54 sudden you have to face that question again and it's happening because of two
61:59 things in my opinion. Number one in AI technology of what LLM is capable of
62:05 doing changes still very rapidly with new model release with each new model
62:10 release. So I think we're going to I think we'll stabilize at some point and
62:14 it's going to become more marginal but we're not there yet. So every 3 months
62:19 or so, every single AI LLM provider creates a step function change on what
62:25 is possible with that LLM. And when you have this new possibility in just an
62:29 underlying technology that opens up in front of you, then it creates another
62:34 ceiling of what is possible to build on top of it. And the tricky piece here is
62:40 that it's not enough to just wait for that technology to get better and then
62:45 start building on top. you have to build beforehand to like make a bet and then
62:49 it's the LLM to catch up because when that model releases you already need to
62:53 have that functionality available. So that piece is I've never been in a
62:58 company where the fundamental capabilities are still changing so
63:02 rapidly and that's the product part. So the product can leap to the new
63:06 expectations but let's not talk about the market part as well. Consumer
63:11 expectations have never changed this fast before. what we expected Chad GPT
63:17 to be able to do and answer and how we wanted it to talk to us eight months ago
63:23 versus now is night and day and like the deep thinking mode and uh the like the
63:28 how how how deeply it can go into answering questions and what is capable
63:31 of being building on top of it. So consumer perception has never changed
63:36 this fast too is this unprecedented time of consumers all of a sudden like in a
63:42 month saying oh it's not doing this yet like I'm bouncing before again consumer
63:46 perceptions would be years to take it's actually technology would sometimes be
63:50 able to already address it but consumer perception has not not been changed yet
63:54 so it would take a long time so we're like in this really weird part where
63:57 both product and market is shifting so rapidly that every 3 months I feel like
64:03 we have to recapture our product market fit and not just recapture on the same
64:08 technology and with same customers. It's both of those pieces of the equation
64:13 change every 3 months. And it's terrifying in a way. It's also very
64:18 confusing in a way because we're $200 million company and we're not solely
64:23 focused on marketing and sales because we still have to recapture our product
64:27 market fit. And you know that the team that finds your product market fit is
64:30 very different than the team that usually scales your company. Yet we have
64:34 to find the team that is capable of doing both on ongoing basis. Now I think
64:40 every AI company is in on this product market fit treadmill. Uh hopefully that
64:46 treadmill speed slows down. If not I think we're going to come up with like
64:49 crazy things of what this LLM and AI will be able to do if it's going to
64:53 continue at this cusp. But um it's a weird place to be in because every 3
64:58 months we have to throttle on our scaling efforts and just reinvent and
65:04 then scale again. But it's like short blitz of growth, not these long
65:08 year-long commitments. What makes this very real is just this week apparently
65:14 OpenAI had this whole code red moment where even though OpenAI by far the
65:20 leading AI assistant over almost a billion I think monthly active users
65:24 like basically synonymous with AI around the world with Gemini 3 launching their
65:28 market share just started to dip really quickly. I think they lost like six
65:34 something% in like a week. And so even OpenAI like chat GPT the original the
65:39 one that everyone uses constantly is is is in danger. >> It's like nobody's nobody's future is
65:46 bulletproof yet. And 10 years ago, if you asked me if a $200 million company
65:50 was at risk in losing product market fit in the next three months if it's
65:54 experiencing 10% month- over-month growth, I would have said, "You're
65:58 crazy." And now that's the reality that we live in. And I I I don't know. I it's
66:04 fascinating to world. And what a time to be alive. >> What a time to be alive. And uh very
66:09 stressful, but the prize at the end is massive. That's the, you know, that's
66:12 why this is worth doing. Uh not just, you know, monetarily, but just the
66:15 impact it's going to have on the world, the way we people build and ship.
66:19 >> Exactly. Exactly. The ceiling of what is possible has been raised so massively
66:24 that we haven't even became too closest to even see it. I believe so I think
66:29 that that's the exciting part of it. >> The way I've seen you write about this
66:33 product market fit challenge is the traditional approaches you have these
66:36 like core users that are using it happy with it and then you expand to the
66:39 adjacent users and expand to the next and you're basically just trying to
66:42 recapture that same core constantly and don't even have time to go adjacent.
66:47 Yeah, I Bengali wrote a really wonderful article. It was many years ago at this
66:51 point on adjacent user theory and that your product market fit expansion when
66:55 you're in no growth stages. The biggest opportunity for you to go after is this
66:59 what he called adjacent user which are just outside of your core user. They
67:04 have uh somewhat similar needs but maybe they're in different geo maybe they have
67:08 slightly different use case, slightly different needs. and your biggest way to
67:12 continue growing your product market fit without having to go to next horizon is
67:17 to capture those um that next group of users. The interesting piece
67:20 here of how I relate to it, we still have the core users and by the way those
67:24 core users are mostly pioneers right now that are excited by the capabilities.
67:28 Then there's latent majority that is filled with adjacent users. And the
67:33 issue right now which I'm actually quite worried about us like as a category is
67:37 that we're constantly focusing on recapturing the pioneers. We don't have
67:43 time to go after adjacent users and I'm worried of whether there's going to be a
67:47 gap in the space where we actually going to alienate the latent majority because
67:53 we're so hyperfocused on just staying top of mind and t top of capabilities on
67:58 the pioneers. But I don't know the right answer here because without the pioneers
68:03 they'll like you need pioneers for a latent majority to follow. But if you
68:09 take pioneers and you take them too far into capabilities, will latent majority
68:14 never be able to catch up? Uh maybe this is a fruitless concern, but it's just
68:17 like something that I think about because at this stage we should be
68:22 working on adjacent users and and I would argue maybe OpenAI definitely
68:27 started have uh to do that with so many people they have on their platform, but
68:31 not most of the other AI companies. >> I completely see what you're thinking
68:34 there. Like a brand could just become known as that's just for like startups
68:37 and prototyping and it's not for serious work. >> Yeah. Or it's like it's for just like
68:43 for it's for techies. It's like for tech people. It's like it never actually
68:48 enters the people uh outside of our little bubble that we live in.
1:08:50 Advice for joining AI companies
68:51 >> We kind of touched on this a little bit of just like working in AI, working on
68:57 AI companies. Uh challenging, stressful, a lot of work. What's your advice for
69:01 folks that are thinking about should I join a lovable? Should I join a cursor?
69:05 Should I just go work at Google Micros? You know, not not to throw them under
69:08 the bus or anything, but just although Google very very successful in AI now,
69:13 maybe less AI focused company. >> I really believe that there's different
69:16 you need to understand what's the environment that is right for you. Just
69:21 please understand that AI companies are very hectic at the moment. They're very
69:26 unstable by definition of that product market fit treadmill about that
69:30 distribution of how they're actually distributed to the market really
69:33 changing about how product is even being developed in the first place. So if you
69:37 are very comfortable in being in that messy middle and uh really comfortable
69:43 of converting chaos into clarity for you and those around you then yeah AI
69:47 company is a wonderful place for you to really absorb new skill sets right now
69:52 because I even before joining lovable when I kept seeing AI I'm like my gosh
69:57 like I'm so tired of seeing AI everywhere. Is it really changing the
70:01 world? Like is it really changing the way people work? And when I was um I was
70:05 at Dropbox before and yeah, we would use AI here and there and I would use
70:09 CHIGPT. I've never used AI there the way I use AI at lovable and the things that
70:14 I'm capable of accomplishing at Lovable and I don't know if I've ever would have
70:18 made that leap so fast unless I joined Lovable. If I would have just read or
70:22 listened about it, it's just different compared to be surrounded by people
70:27 where it's expectation. It's not like a nice to have or something that
70:30 somebody's asking you to do. This is just how you get things done and you
70:33 have to think about everything of like what can AI do here versus where do I
70:39 add value versus like in a traditional sense of work is like I start with my
70:44 own value and then I augmented with AI and here like the mindset is completely
70:48 uh shifted. Now I don't think AI is replacing everybody's job. So like
70:51 please don't like don't look at it as a as as that cliche saying. I actually
70:57 often call AI as like average intelligence that helps me get the
71:01 platform up and then I add my human thinking and my human creativity on top
71:06 of it to get it to the next level. But at least I can get this base level done
71:11 with AI really freaking quickly. So from that perspective, I think if you want to
71:16 leaprog on what it means to be AI native employee and how to use all of these AI
71:21 tools, you should go to AI company. But if you know that your superpower is in
71:26 more structure, in more definition, in a really high specialty of things, because
71:31 in AI companies, they're all fairly small. So, you'll have to generalize
71:35 quite a bit and have a lot of ownership of areas that you usually maybe not have
71:39 ownership over, then you shouldn't join it because AI companies will evolve to
71:44 be more stable too. So, it's just a matter of time on where you can join. So
71:47 I would just urge people to look at their superpowers and the type of
71:51 environments that really speak to them so they can feel happy because this can
71:58 lead to burnout for wrong type of personalities very quickly.
1:12:00 Work-life balance
72:02 >> Yeah. My sense is if you want work life balance, don't join one of these
72:05 companies because that's just not the way they work. >> I don't know if I'd go that far. I mean
72:11 I have family. I have two kids. I feel like I have a very good work life
72:15 balance. Uh, but I put in boundaries for myself. Like I know when I need time
72:19 off, I need because I know when my brain starts to overheat, so to speak. Uh, but
72:25 I I also know that work is my hobby and it's my passion and I will this is the
72:29 best work of my life that I'm doing right now. There's no other place that
72:34 I'd rather be uh than to be here. So, I think that you just need to be more
72:38 careful about setting your own boundaries that you know you need. But
72:43 um I mean let's face it I don't think anybody has work life balance regardless
72:46 of a company that they work at even at Google or like Microsoft or any of the
72:52 others. I think everybody is freaking out and running as fast as they can.
72:56 It's just they're running it in different structures. I'm really glad
73:00 you said that and corrected me there that it is possible to work at a company
73:05 one of if not the fastest growing company in history and actually uh have
73:09 work life balance to get sleep to spend time with your kids and family.
73:13 >> You just have to protect it uh ruthlessly but you also need to be
73:18 realistic with how much is expected out of you and you need to feel confident
73:22 that you'll be able to deliver it. And by the way, you won't be able to deliver
73:27 it unless you use AI in many aspects of your work life. So that's like the piece
73:31 that helps you actually get to hit those expectations of outcomes that you need
73:36 to do and the velocity. But um I'm I'm very protective of my personal time with
73:40 kids. Like why did I have children if I'm not going to spend time with them?
73:43 So like those are part of the non-negotiables um that I bring along
73:48 with me in every single work. for people that maybe have trouble setting
73:51 boundaries or just not good at this anything what do you what works for you
73:54 is it just is it as easy as just telling people here's where I need to leave what
73:57 do you what's what advice do you have for people to set boundaries like that
74:00 >> so first of all I would not think about it as a work life balance there's no
74:03 such thing as balance or balance feels like oh I have enough time for
74:06 everything I don't have enough time for anything but I prioritize my family in
74:13 some moments I prioritize work in other moments and I don't try to balance the
74:17 two I go where I'm needed and where I go and I feel like I'm not going to regret
74:21 the choices that I'm making today. So, I'm constantly trying to put myself in
74:25 the future and say, well, I resent myself if I make this choice right now.
74:28 And if the answer is yes, I don't make that choice. And sometimes I have to say
74:33 no to Anton and say like I can't make it or I won't be there. I need to be here
74:37 with my family or like today I need to cancel my day. My kid is sick and he
74:42 needs me and I need to be I need to take him to the doctor. So I think that just
74:47 making in the moment more like in every day even sometimes in the hour decisions
74:51 to me works better than trying to balance something that is completely
74:55 unachievable and it feels overwhelming to even think about. But I prioritize
75:00 this in my sleep, uh my health, my workout schedule, my kids, my family, my
75:05 husband, um and just my downtime because I know that I'm most creative once I
75:09 have separation from work because then I come in with like all still firing and I
75:14 have so many more ideas about it. So to me, it's actually part of doing my best
75:18 work is to take time off. >> That is really great advice. I want to
1:15:20 What it’s like to work at Lovable
75:22 touch on what it's like to work at Lovable because it feels like Lovable is
75:28 at the cutting edge of what working at in product is going to be. So, you
75:31 mentioned a little bit about how you're always talking to AI asking questions.
75:35 Is there any any other kind of anecdotes of just how people operate at Lovable
75:39 that is really unique or weird or funny or interesting that might be helpful for
75:43 people to try in their company? >> Yeah, I mean we use Lovable at Lovable a
75:47 lot. Like all of our internal tools are built on Lovables. Uh we actually have
75:51 our first hackathon on lovable happening next week. Uh where we're going to
75:55 entire company is just going to take full day to pipe code um and see what we
76:00 actually have happen. We prototype everything on lovable. So our specs yeah
76:05 we do still have a written spec but it always accompanied by a lovable
76:09 prototype uh that everybody can interact with and uh to click around with and
76:13 provide feedback and everybody punches in and also like does some edits if they
76:18 have any better ideas. So I uh create mocks on lovable. So for example, we
76:23 need to make some pricing changes um a pricing page changes. I take a
76:27 screenshot of our pricing page. I go to lovable. I say recreate this pricing
76:31 page, make these changes and then I send that to my engineering team saying hey
76:34 this is what I want to happen and then like they take it from there. So we just
76:39 you and Chad GPT I use a lot for brainstorming especially the deep
76:43 thinking mode. I love it. It takes a long time but it's so worth it. Uh
76:48 sometimes it has crazy ideas, sometimes it does. Like sometimes I was like,
76:51 "Yeah, this is like nothing new to me." So it's not interesting, but like it
76:55 gets me thinking and it gets me look at the different angles and um lots of um I
77:01 use Granola a lot for example because to me it's super helpful to get AI
77:05 summaries of the meetings and it's very powerful for me. I use Whisper Flow a
77:09 lot because I feel like I have no time to type anymore. So I just like talk to
77:13 my phone and talk to my laptop all the time uh in order to do it. But we're
77:18 even thinking about all of the customer support automations uh that are done
77:23 through AI. How do we um every single aspect of what we do is question is
77:30 asked what can AI do here first and then how we can add ourselves into the
77:35 equation. But lovable for us uh having unlimited credits at lovable is a pretty
77:40 awesome perk I have to say. Like I sometimes have to pinch myself. I'm like
77:44 I get paid to VIP code. This is like so fun. >> I feel like that engineer or that VIP
77:49 code engineer, he's he's like actually >> my dream job. I want his job. I feel
77:53 like I Yeah. I I got into the wrong line of profession here.
77:57 >> Oh man. Okay. Uh is there anything else about Lovable? Because the what I think
77:59 about actually I interviewed the perplexity founders back in the day
78:03 years ago and they shared like before we talked to anyone for advice we first
78:08 asked Chacha PT and I was just like that is the most insane thing I've ever
78:11 heard. How can you possibly work that way and now that's how everyone works
78:15 and so I'm curious just I don't know like how I don't know how Anton works.
78:17 Is there anyone else that just like way in the future of here's how things might
78:21 be? So for me especially for product and growth I and even marketing at some
78:25 point it's in some capacity when I have an idea in my head it like it sounds so
78:30 freaking cool and sometimes I can even like I put it in paper and it's like a
78:34 this is like like we need to do it and then like I go and try to vibe code it
78:38 and I'm like oh like this like I don't see the magic anymore like or I can't
78:43 like I can't envision it anymore or sometimes I'm like yeah yeah and like
78:47 there's more there's more. So to me it's actually has helped really complete the
78:52 ideation process for me quite a bit because then I actually try to go and
78:56 build it and it breaks down some of the elements of what's important, what's
79:01 not. So it's taking me on product development life cycle so much further
79:06 down and then it creates a much better communication vehicle with my engineers
79:10 too because like I then can tell them exactly what's important, what not. So
79:14 to me it's been great because sometimes we envision things that are so much
79:18 better than the reality and before until it hands it off to design like we would
79:22 never be a like designers would do it for us and try to make it awesome versus
79:28 I often stop my ideas in tracks super early on without pushing it forward
79:32 versus other times I might have pushed it too for too far too long even through
79:38 design queue or even like pitching to leadership and uh I find that very
79:43 powerful because It calibrates me really quickly. >> Awesome. Okay, last question. I want to
1:19:45 Women in tech
79:47 talk about something that you've written about that is a really uh I think it's a
79:50 really important topic, something that we should surface is you wrote this post
79:54 called I'm worried about women in tech. Talk about what you're seeing here. What
79:58 you're noticing, what you think might be going in the wrong direction.
80:01 >> Yeah. There's actually conflicting data points about how um women, you're
80:07 talking about women, right? Women. Yeah. uh there's conflicting data points about
80:12 uh how women are keeping up with AI technology and wave because there's a
80:16 bunch of reports that has been done that show massive gap between women adopting
80:22 AI versus men adopting AI which points the story that um men are just like
80:27 widening the gap uh of like accessibility for technology and whoever
80:31 is adopting AI right now is getting paid the most gets the most opportunities I
80:35 mean we're seeing like in say in aqua hires right now where people are getting
80:39 paid more for their talent than for the companies that they've created and
80:43 that's like a really interesting trend that is occurring and a lot of it is
80:47 fueled on um on this wave of AI and women are not really present there like
80:52 if you can think about like $1 million aqua hire that has been in the news that
80:56 is a woman like I can't think of one if you look at AI companies and their CEOs
81:01 uh most of it is men if you if you look at the company's composition of um in AI
81:07 companies it's mostly men. To me, this really came to the head of when I came
81:12 to Lovable and I'm like, it's pink, it's purple brand, it's a heart, it's
81:17 lovable. I'm like, I'm sure this is where it's 50/50 men versus women. And
81:22 uh although we don't collect this information, but just like through third
81:28 party um uh autofill, we saw it's like 20% at most. And I'm like, what is
81:32 happening? Not again. Why is this again not being adopted by women? And uh
81:37 obviously I don't know all of the answers. Um I think that this is early
81:42 on that we can shortcut it. And by the way, I also don't want to put this as a
81:47 indication that men are to blame because I think men are doing wonderful job
81:52 really spearheading the horizons and showing us what's possible and like
81:56 leading the charge. I'm just afraid that so many women are stuck in that latent
82:00 majority that is just not catching up. And my worry is that it's going to
82:05 affect the hirable talent. is going to step us back again in the composition of
82:09 the workplace of the diversity and maybe it matters maybe it doesn't like
82:13 whichever side that you s sit on but I think that there is it's if needs to be
82:18 built for everybody in the world and for that it needs to be built by a
82:22 representative sample of uh people that are behind the product as well. So I I I
82:29 just find it fascinating that even when the barrier to building has been lowered
82:34 uh versus like you don't need computer science degree which I appreciate
82:38 there's not that many women that are getting we're still seeing the gaping um
82:46 gap on the adoption between genders which is just is I I I I don't know
82:49 there's like something very frustrating about that. >> Yeah. Uh the thing that struck with me
82:54 with from your post is there has been a lot of progress being made in the last
82:58 decade and now AI is just kind of turning it all back, turning it all
83:02 around. Hopefully not. I think that we're early on enough that we can bridge
83:08 the gap. I think sometimes uh women just need space and ability to discover it.
83:12 Uh and uh that's what we're doing at lovable. We have this initiative uh she
83:17 builds where we have collect we have create a hackathon for women only and we
83:21 give them unlimited access to lovable for 48 hours and um they come together
83:25 as a community and they build together and there's like beautiful things that
83:28 start to come out of it which I've never anticipated before but so many women in
83:34 that hackathon for us build help for their with their elderly parents or with
83:39 their kids or with the household or for their church group or for the the kids
83:44 basketball team. solutions should have hyper local, hyper relevant, very needed
83:49 for what they need in their life and something that was never been able to
83:53 build before because of how expensive software was because it would never
83:57 going to become potentially a hundred million dollar companies but it also
84:01 doesn't need to be anymore. So I just want to bring women to build more and
84:06 vibe code more so we can have more diversity in software that is even
84:11 created because I think that we all have a unique take on what problems that we
84:16 can solve and I want everybody's voices to be heard. >> I'll give the URL for shebuilds. I
84:20 pulled it up while you're talking. >> bitecoded on lovable minimum viable
84:27 product. >> Minimal lovable product. >> There it is. So when is this happening?
84:33 Is this December 15th, 18th? So it's >> Yeah, we have it. We're running it
84:38 constantly. So our next cohort uh starts um December 15th, but we're going to
84:43 have more. We're planning a massive one on International Women's Day.
84:47 >> So that's the one that if you can come join us. >> Awesome. I don't know if you Okay, so
84:50 some glimmer of hope. I don't know if you saw this tweet where I tagged you
84:53 the other day or maybe it was this today. I was looking at my most recent
84:59 podcast video performance and the top four are all women and they're all AI
85:04 oriented and they're above Stuart Butterfields, founder of Slack, above
85:10 Gamma's CEO Grant. So maybe a glimmer of hope. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think there's lots
85:13 of glimmers of hope. I think we can just all lean in and make sure that nobody's
85:19 left behind in this wave. And uh that's not to stop people that are marching
85:23 ahead. This is just to open up opportunities for everybody around us.
85:26 >> Awesome. And we'll link to that post if people want to get a deeper perspective
1:25:29 Final thoughts and lightning round
28:13 The role of marketing in Lovable’s success
28:13 redefinition on the team as well. >> Let's talk about marketing. That's
28:15 something else you've written about is just marketing is changing in a big way
28:19 their role in growth. How does marketing play a role in all of this? On one side,
28:24 marketing channels are changing. On the other side, marketing's involvement into
28:28 everything that product does is changing. And then number three, I think
28:32 even marketing organizations in terms of where they're hired the most um are
28:36 changing as a result as well. So I'll talk about second one first just because
28:40 we just talked about shipping and that is um yeah you still have your product
28:44 marketers, you still have your channel managers um but they focus more on the
28:49 big things and the narratives although it's difficult because the narrative
28:52 even changes all the time as these functionalities come through. Usually
28:57 you can come up with the positioning and messaging and you can have it for years
29:01 and and create all of the campaigns around it. Now you have it for three
29:05 months and then the product changes. So like the cycles here are really uh
29:10 really short and uh for smaller changes because cycles are so short they spend
29:14 so much time actually focusing on it as they should that some of these smaller
29:17 changes just cannot be supported by marketing. You have to delegate it to
29:21 your product and engineering team to do their own marketing because otherwise
29:24 again you're going to have to have enormous marketing team in order to
29:28 support it all. But at the same time, channels in which marketing right now
29:32 works I think are changing quite a bit and um not enough people I feel like are
29:36 freaking out and talking about it as opposed to like moving just in the same
29:40 direction over and over again. And the changes that I'm seeing is that it is
29:46 very has been very clear to me that when you're talking about organic strategy,
29:49 if you marketing organic strategy, if you asked me that five years ago, I
29:54 would have said that's SEO. It's search engine optimization. go on Google.
29:58 That's your organic marketing strategy. If you ask me what's the organic
30:01 marketing strategy right now, to me, it's all about social, which is what is
30:06 my CEO posting? What is my team posting? What is my LinkedIn? What is my creator
30:12 economy doing in influencer marketing? And um across all of the social
30:16 platforms, that is my organic, which is that one's kind of paid to be fair, but
30:19 when I think about organic, there is still a lot of that word of mouth. What
30:23 are my users posting on social? What are they talking about it? what are they uh
30:27 what are they sharing which is like a mind shift because I've been always
30:32 especially in B2B so focused on search and now I feel like it's been completely
30:37 pushed even further into consumerization territory and it has become all about
30:43 social no matter how B2B you are because that's where eyeballs are at
30:46 >> that is fascinating and so when you talk about socials what are you finding is
30:50 most helpful is it Twitterx is it LinkedIn is it YouTube Tik Tok Instagram
30:54 >> for founder socials uh O employee socials um X and LinkedIn are fantastic
30:59 sources. Um especially for B2B because that's where all of the B2B people are
31:05 at. But you cannot just have Chad GPT write your copy and post it. You need to
31:10 show personality like there needs to be humanity uh that it goes through it. And
31:15 it's not natural for everybody and it feels very awkward sometimes to start.
31:21 Uh but it's important to people to see who's building the company because
31:25 there's so much competition now on functionality so they can rally behind a
31:30 team. So they want to have a team that they want to win and for that you need
31:36 to be vulnerable. You need to be authentic obviously but you just need to
31:41 be yourself. Uh so like that corporate scrubbing has to completely fall off
31:47 which um is obviously going to pull in as as the company scales but at least at
31:51 the beginning that is a chance to stand out and then your customers posting
31:56 about you. So that word of mouth of uh really creating a product that creates
32:02 something for customers that is worth talking about. It gives them stories
32:07 that they want to share that feels empowering to them to tell to others
32:12 like they're unlocking a secret like they feel proud of what they have
32:16 created which what we focus a lot on lovable on to have that feeling of oh my
32:21 gosh I have superpowers now and I can't wait to tell others I cannot wait to
32:26 show others what is happening so on both of those sides to me that is very much
32:30 organic um if you're in a consumer then Instagram Tik Tok um are very much a go
32:34 as well. >> So here it's uh the CEO clearly is an important uh variable in this them in
32:41 this case Anton just tweeting here's what's going on lovable here's how fast
32:44 it's growing here's some we've learned >> uh we had the CEO of gamma uh on
32:48 recently Grant and he's exactly the same thing just sharing a bunch of lessons
32:51 journey building in public a big part of the growth lever and your point here is
32:55 okay so it's the co but then it's also how do you get your customers to share
32:59 things on socials and then there's a paid uh influencer sort of component
33:03 >> yes uh the customer is difficult one, that's a word of mouth loop that you
33:07 need to stand up. The only way to create a word of mouth loop is just to blow
33:12 their socks off uh when they actually experience your product. We have a
33:16 really almost unfair advantage because our product is called lovable. So by
33:20 default, we're trying to create an absolute lovable experiences. Like that
33:25 is a mentality internally. If it's not lovable, we're not going to ship it. So
33:30 uh and the best way to fix a bug at lovable is to say this is not lovable.
33:34 like when everybody's just like jumps on it. Uh to fix it right there and then
33:38 sprints, no sprints, it doesn't matter. It's getting fixed right now. So, uh
33:42 from that perspective, we kind of have that culture already embedded as part of
33:46 our brand and it's part of our name, which helps us a lot. But that's the
33:50 point is that you feel that brand through every interaction. Uh I talk to
33:54 my designer all the time. How can we add more love marks into the product? How
33:58 can we prioritize more unique interactions? the little elements that
34:03 make up that that feeling of this product is speaking to me. It's like it
34:06 feels something like that is unique. It has personality uh behind it. So we put
34:11 all of the brand work actually into our product. When you think about lovable
34:16 think people think about a brand but we don't have a brand marketing team yet.
34:19 So it's all just through product interactions and some of those building
34:25 and public moments of the people behind uh those product interactions. Um that
34:28 is our strategy. And then there's influencer marketing. Interestingly
34:32 enough, influencer marketing is 10 times bigger for us than paid social. So yeah,
34:37 we do some paid social as well. Um, and it's working decently. It's quite
34:42 expensive from payback period. Um, we're still optimizing it. As I said, we're
34:45 pretty early on in all of these channels, but influencer marketing is
34:48 something that has worked uh from the beginning. a lovable and uh reason
34:53 behind it is that influencer marketing especially on the socials it gives you
34:57 an opportunity to have a little video and interaction and lovable is all about
35:01 seeing like oh my gosh this is what I can do and uh this is possible so that
35:06 drives people to go and try it themselves so that's why social works
35:10 very well for us because it's not really a written value proposition like nobody
35:14 knows what bite coding is but you watch 10 seconds of it and you go that's new
35:18 let me go give it a try >> who would have thought that a head of
35:23 growth who is traditionally seen as like data metrics, spreadsheets, drive KPIs
35:28 is like, okay, how do we make this more lovable? How do we add more moments of
35:33 delight? I know my my my joke is like at the end of my lovable journey whenever
35:38 hopefully never comes to an end, but but at the end I'll be like a growth brand
35:43 person here. Here, hi, my name is Elena. I do brand now. But I I actually see it
35:48 as part of growth strategy to make sure that that brand shines through every
35:53 single interaction. Um and I always talk to my team about it because that is one
35:58 big lever in our growth story. >> Yeah. So I think that's a really
36:01 important point to highlight. The reason Lovable is growing so fast is it is a
36:05 product people love. You've made something people want and the word of
36:08 mouth spreads because it's something that blows people's socks off as you
36:12 said. So it feels like that's the first thing you got to get right.
36:15 >> Yes. Well, the first thing you have to get right is you have to be at the right
36:18 place at the right time and you have to be in fastmoving waters. Like let's not
36:22 discount how fast this category is exploding on its own. So this cannot
36:26 happen in every single category that you're starting to build a product. But
36:30 the way to stand out in the super crowded category is to create
36:34 experiences that speak to people. That I think is something that a lot of people
36:37 deprioritize because they still prioritize functionality over humanity
36:42 within software. And I think that we're actually moving to the new era of
36:46 software that needs to feel human that people want to interact with not just
36:51 utility of it because cost of software is coming down so much to develop that
36:57 we now can actually invest into emotional feel of that software as
37:02 opposed to only just focus on creating the utility out of it. So to me it's um
37:09 it's a I I I love this move because I I hate nothing more than going to software
37:13 that is just like so painful to use that I lose some brain cells uh as I'm
37:17 interacting with it versus software that I feel I get energy out of and for
37:22 lovable for me like I cannot wait on some of the projects that I have to go
37:25 and vibe code myself like that's the highlight of my day and I just like I
37:30 don't I I I bring in my daughter and I'm like let's go do this like what do you
37:33 think that needs to be done because I just get so energy out of doing it and
37:38 uh that is the feeling you cannot create by looking at it as a utility problem.
37:43 >> The way I think about it, the way what you're describing is it's almost table
37:47 stakes have increased and now it's so easy to build. Now the big
37:50 differentiator is experience, design, delight. >> Exactly. And it has to translate through
37:56 every single interaction. So your designer has to be one of your first
38:00 hires now in startups. It's not just about the the engineering so to speak
38:05 utility and you have to think through every single interaction of does this
38:09 Launching new features
38:09 communicate our brand or not. >> So along those lines I want to come back
38:11 to something you talked about which is launching new features is a huge growth
38:15 lever. Kind of the big question there is just how do you maintain quality and
38:19 cohesiveness as all these people are empowered to ship stuff. Is there
38:22 anything else there you've seen that works well to help avoid just a
38:26 Frankenstein product just endless features that you want to tweet about?
38:31 Yeah, one part of it is not something that you can codify, but it's the type
38:34 of people that you hire that are going to go and ship these things. We at
38:39 Lovable try to hire the absolute best talent available out there that we can
38:43 bring in and that we can source and that we can attract uh to grow with. And what
38:48 do I mean by that best talent? Um it's not that somebody who has been at really
38:51 large companies or somebody that has really uh done a lot of logos or has big
38:56 success stories behind them. It's somebody who is extremely passionate
39:00 about their job. It's their hobby. They love to work. They have fire in their
39:05 belly. This is not a paycheck for them. They want to do this for some ulterior
39:10 reason. This is the biggest opportunity of their life. So this is global maxima
39:15 against any other opportunities that are in front of them at the moment. So
39:19 that's very important for us. We want people to come and do their absolute
39:22 best work at lovable. It's very important and you can feel it in this
39:29 office. People are wired up. They are so high on how can we make this better? How
39:34 can we deliver more to our customers? And that's very different compared to
39:39 usually how companies grow. We're like, okay, yeah, the check, check, check.
39:42 They fit the skill set. Let's bring them in. But is that passion? Is that fire
39:47 behind it? And then uh the second piece is that um we work really hard on just
39:52 addressing what's the success here looks like? What is it that we're building?
39:56 what use cases are we building for? And then because we hire these people that
40:00 are so passionate about it, the other two skills, by the way, that are super
40:03 important is high agency and high autonomy, I can figure out things that
40:08 are tangential to me that I don't need other specialty, so to speak. Like I
40:12 don't need a marketer to go launch something. I can go figure it out and I
40:16 have high agency. I can go do it myself. Um I'm going to own it from all the way
40:21 from start to finish. uh those are very important, something that we screen for
40:24 and something that we look for in our culture and then uh you just see what
40:30 you want to do is up to you. So there's very little supervision that happens on
40:35 the ground. Um now we all have a goals and like some of the big launches that
40:38 we're all marching towards but some of the work um that is completely up to
40:43 developers up to uh marketers or whatever what is it that they want to
40:47 do. So there has to be that enablement of go try things and because of our
40:52 velocity if you fail it's not a big deal we'll just pivot we'll go we'll get
40:57 we'll get through it we are not here to just win all the time
40:59 Hiring and team dynamics
41:02 >> on the hiring of these incredible people as we all know it's very hard to hire
41:05 people these days especially the best what have you seen lovable does
41:08 differently or does well that helps them recruit the best >> yes and especially recruit in Stockholm
41:14 I mean the main office here is in Stockholm we're asking a lot of people
41:18 to relocate uh which is a no small feat. Now some of it is um makes it easy
41:22 because of how much hype we created around our product. People want to come
41:27 work for us like there's um they're reaching out to us. They're saying I I
41:30 love what you're doing. I want to join it. Uh so that we have a cheat code to
41:35 it because like we have most of the time when we reach out to somebody they say
41:40 yeah I would love to explore. So uh building that product that is highly
41:44 lovable also creates a really great recruiting brand for you as well. So
41:48 make sure that there like multiple benefits to that. But uh second of all
41:54 we do a lot of trials uh for people. So trial work to see them in action
41:59 >> a work trial to see them in action for a couple of days. We pay them as part of
42:02 the work trial. We have uh some probation periods that we start people
42:06 on uh because this company is not for everybody. As I start said in the
42:11 podcast in in the beginning, the pace here is insane. I went on vacation uh
42:16 for the first time. So I've been here for 6 months. I went on vacation um for
42:21 10 days. I came back. I felt like I needed to on board from the beginning.
42:26 Like everything changed. And when I'm in it, I feel like it's an evolution. But
42:31 the fact that just being gone for 10 days, it feels like a complete
42:35 revolution in the company. It's that pace is just not for everybody. And
42:38 that's okay because I'm very firm believer that there's different cultures
42:42 and different environments that the best fit for different personalities and
42:45 different people. So we try to be very upfront with how things are and how
42:51 chaotic they are. And we prioritize people that don't look for clarity but
42:57 can create clarity out of chaos because um it is absolutely chaotic otherwise.
43:03 And if we start to look for people that can explain it uh to us, that's the only
43:06 way that we can succeed. >> The way you describe going on vacation
43:09 and feeling very different, it feels like when you don't see your kid for a
43:12 few days and they're just like completely different. You're like, "How
43:15 did you grow so fast in 3 days?" >> Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Let me try to
43:17 The value of vibe coding
43:20 summarize the growth levers that you're finding is are working. And I'm trying
43:23 to think about this from the perspective of uh an AI startup trying to think
43:27 about, hey shoot, how do we grow faster? What is lovable figured out? So feels
43:32 like number one is just uh build something lovable, something that blows
43:36 people's socks off, but also in a market that is growing that people want to pay
43:39 money for like you can build something lovable that nobody actually cares about
43:43 that there isn't much money going to the space. There's no tide pushing it
43:47 forward and it won't work. I call it minimum lovable product. Like it
43:50 shouldn't be minimum viable product anymore. Viability is left in back in
43:57 2020 2010s. Now it's minimum lovable product. That's the only thing that
43:59 matters. >> I love how these AI tools are letting us you know like PMS have always had these
44:06 um what are they uh smoke door test or like what's the term just like or is
44:09 that not a real product? Uh >> painted door. >> Painted door. There it is. Yeah. And and
44:14 it's like okay we just have a landing page. There's nothing there. And now AI
44:17 makes it easier to do that and it's like more fullfeatured. >> Yeah. Well, it's the feedback cycle is
44:22 just completely collapsed. You can go from idea to some product uh that is
44:28 functioning to user feedback within a day if you want to. I mean depending on
44:31 how fast that you want to run or how complex the product is for missions. It
44:36 took us couple of weeks to vip code it to the point to where because we also um
44:41 I have a full-time vip coder on my team. He's amazing. So like he he wanted to
44:45 create videos like he did a bunch of designs for it uh too. So we he he took
44:49 him a couple of weeks. We're testing it now and then we'll push it in the
44:52 product. But it's a completely different development life cycle. Before uh it
44:57 would just take so many more steps uh from user research to uh the design
45:03 sprints uh to prioritizing on engineering roadmap to build something
45:08 minimal and and viable to actually test to little long testing cycles. Now it's
45:13 just like boom, let's go. Uh, it's taken us could have taken us a day. We just
45:17 decided to take a couple of weeks to get all of the video pieces correct.
45:20 >> I saw you launched this on LinkedIn. I to me it looked like a a full product
45:24 launch. Uh, it is interesting to hear. This is just a sort of prototype.
45:27 >> Yes. >> Prototype. >> Minimum level. >> Minimum level. Okay. Uh, I got to ask
45:32 you have this. You said you had a full-time vibe coder. What the heck is
45:36 this? Is this like an engineer? Is this something else? What is a full-time vibe
45:38 coder? >> Great question. This is a new job role that is actually popping up here and
45:44 there. Uh it's absolutely fascinating to watch uh this development because I see
45:49 vibe coding as a skill being added to a lot of job descriptions for designers,
45:54 for product managers, uh for marketers, which I think is a really interesting
45:58 shift. Finally, Excel can move over like we have a new skill to add that is um
46:04 super empowering and and not three years old, but uh vibe coder. So uh his name
46:10 is Lazar and he actually was chief of staff in his previous role. So he's not
46:14 technical at all. He's self-taught uh in technical aspects of it but he was very
46:20 early on in the vibe coding wave. So he learned a lot about it. He was um user
46:25 of all of the vibe coding tools lovable included. And uh when I was coming into
46:29 the role I'm like I have so many projects that I will vibe code myself.
46:34 So I run this uh woman only hackathon she builds. I vip coded the first
46:39 version of that site and like and submission process for applications and
46:43 then other people came in and started building on top of it. But I vip code
46:47 but then like I don't have enough time sometimes because I need to run around
46:51 and I want to push out so many different initiatives that I want to test in the
46:56 market with our own products. So um we connected on social um like can you like
47:00 would you join us and he joined us for uh part-time uh like you're bringing so
47:05 much value for example we partnered with Shopify and he created a bunch of
47:09 Shopify lovable templates uh by coded for us and it's been so helpful uh to
47:13 have somebody like that that is just like pushing all all of these things out
47:17 and he's an absolute expert so he's teaching us all too of what is possible
47:21 with lovable because he's on the cutting edge of constantly pushing it to the
47:27 limit. So, I I really enjoy having that role, which I've never had before in my
47:31 life and in my team. >> I I'm not surprised. I've I've never
47:35 heard of this role before as a real full-time job. Do you think this is a
47:39 thing people will start hiring for at non vibe coding companies?
47:43 >> So, I vibe code myself. So, like I would put that as even as a skill on my on my
47:47 resume now. It took me a while to figure out by the way like everybody's like,
47:50 "Oh, you just go and like it and it all happens automatically." It takes you a
47:54 couple of iterations, couple of projects until like you know, okay, this is this
47:58 is how I need to translate it, how I need to think about it. But for me, it's
48:02 when I started scaling of what I want to vibe code. That's where his value really
48:06 came in because I'm like, okay, I understand what is possible. I know what
48:10 needs to be achieved. And some of these apps I want to be almost full-blown
48:14 built uh because they're not going to get incorporated into the product
48:17 anytime soon. They don't need to be. I'll just link to them from uh from our
48:21 headers, so to speak. and uh he really accelerated that velocity for me. So
48:26 once you get into VIP coding and you see its value within your organization,
48:30 leaning into somebody like that just accelerates your velocity because it is
48:34 like an engineer uh on your team. It's just they're not to me he's his part his
48:38 part technical but they can be nontechnical if they're really good.
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49:46 The importance of community
49:47 this episode. Let me kind of go back to summarize just real quick the growth
49:50 lovers. I want to move in a somewhat different direction. So things that help
49:54 Lovable grow. One is just build something in mind that blows your socks
49:57 off as you said. Uh I love these phrases out here. The second is uh make noise in
50:03 the market. And the way that Lovable does this SEO is tweeting constantly.
50:07 You build something that blows people's socks off so that they share things on
50:11 socials themselves. Plus, this influencer marketing component and just
50:16 this idea of building in public has been really helpful. This point about
50:20 activation being kind of uh embedded within the product team of the AI exper
50:24 of the AI agent essentially. So, it's essentially not the growth team thinking
50:27 about activation. It's the product team that is building the AI magic that is
50:32 obsessed with activation and it feels like those are the main the main growth
50:37 levers. Is there anything else that I missed? >> Community. I think community is really
50:42 important here because you need to bring people together as they're exploring
50:46 these capabilities and as they're seeing what's possible so they can bounce off
50:49 each other and they can help each other out. So I would say community also
50:53 amplifies that word of mouth. It amplifies all of the social posting. It
50:58 it amplifies retention mechanisms uh for you as well. But community has been a
51:03 huge part of lovable success as well and that's something that was started very
51:07 early on. It runs on discord so it's nothing fancy. It's not like we build
51:10 anything completely from scratch for ourselves. Um and it has hundreds of
51:15 thousands of members and it's um it's very lively. We have community managers
51:21 that are making sure that all of the questions get answered and the right
51:23 groups are being created. We have incredible ambassador pro program now as
51:29 well of people uh doing it. So I would say community here again of really
51:35 making software more human is very important role. Now now obviously not
51:39 everybody can build a community but maybe at least plugging in into
51:43 somebody's community is uh quite important as well. And then there's
51:46 another one unless you have a question on community. >> No keep going. Another one is uh giving
51:47 Giving away your product for free
51:53 your product away a lot. And for AI products, it may feel counterintuitive
51:58 because they're so costly. Every single interaction with an AI product cost
52:03 companies something. There's an LLM pass through cost uh that is coming through.
52:08 And uh a lot of especially traditional tech companies I see are gating AI
52:13 immediately behind a pay wall because uh they're sitting on a really cush um high
52:18 margin profile. And the moment that you start giving AI away for free, you're
52:23 like cutting into those uh margins with like a like a knife through the butter.
52:29 Now, at the same time, AI being so new and the capabilities being so new, you
52:34 have to remove the barrier of entry. You have to give a lot of your product away
52:37 for free. But by the way, I don't just mean premium. Premium to me is just like
52:42 a baseline. If you're in the new category, you need to let people explore
52:47 what it is for free and get that initial wow moment. It's not a ha moment, by the
52:51 way. It doesn't need to be aha moment anymore. It just needs to be a wow
52:54 moment. And for lovable is that first preview generation after your first
52:59 prompt, even though it's absolutely not going to be complete thing of what you
53:03 want to build, but you just go this is possible like I had no idea I want to
53:06 keep building. And it becomes an addictive exercise. But we also give so
53:12 many of our lovable credits away to every event to every hackathon. If you
53:16 want to host a lovable hackathon, we will sponsor it and give all of the
53:19 participants credits away for free. So we give them away as candy and we uh
53:24 basically track them over our LLM cost on premium and giveaways as our
53:29 marketing costs and it doesn't go into our uh something we need to reduce uh to
53:35 make our margins better. It goes into this is something that we need to spend
53:39 more in because this is part of our growth secret sauce. >> Okay, I want to hear more about the
53:44 growth secret sauce. That is extremely interesting. Uh I haven't heard of that
53:48 as a strategy and I can see why this makes sense. If the strategy is blow
53:51 people's socks off so they could tell their friends, post on all the socials.
53:55 The trick is get more people to try it. And so this is and and it's such a new
53:59 crazy thing. Like why would I pay money? Why would I even go take the effort to
54:03 like try sign up for an account if I don't know what this is? because I don't
54:05 know what I'm doing with it. So, I could see how this loop goes faster and faster
54:10 by giving it away. >> Exactly. And again, this is very
54:14 uncomfortable sometimes for companies that a either used to really AI
54:19 companies have lower profile of margins. That's absolutely true. We to find an AI
54:24 company with 80 90% margin profile is absolutely impossible. Let's be real.
54:29 We're all sitting somewhere in the 40% uh or so, which is a lot smaller. So any
54:35 time that you look at those AI costs as your cost center, that's when you're in
54:39 trouble. You fundamentally have to flip the script and say, "I need to expose to
54:44 people of what is possible and I need to remove the monetization friction out of
54:48 it." Because if you don't, nobody's ever going to try it or you're going to be
54:52 very easily overtaken by a competitor that will give it away. And let's face
54:55 it, once you hook people, they're more likely going to stay with you. So you
54:58 obviously have to still work on the retention strategy there. But if you can
55:02 have like for our case if somebody one of our users stands up and say hey I'm
55:07 gonna have a hackathon at my work unlovable can you give us all some free credits to
55:15 play with why would we prevent a person who wants to do all of the marketing and
55:20 activating job for us in their company from using us? Of course we're like take
55:25 it. How much do you need? How much would you like? We will sponsor it all. We
55:28 will give you anything that you need. So, we're really leaning into people
55:32 that are wanting to show this magic to those around you and empowering them as
55:36 much as possible. And um that is something that is actually applies to
55:40 every single product. And I agree, this is not a growth strategy that I've ever
55:44 applied in my life on like giving product away as much as possible, but it
55:48 is something that uh is more and more becoming something that I see that is
55:52 absolutely non-negotiable. >> What I'm feeling is like the more
55:55 mind-blowing it is, the more you should give it away for free.
55:58 >> Yeah. especially in a competitive market where everyone is you know it's hard
56:02 there's like so many companies trying to do this thing and so um so it's almost
56:06 like the better you are the more you should give it away >> right right
56:10 >> and this also explains why uh so much VC money has to be raised for these sorts
56:13 of companies because this is not cheap like you said you're paying all these
56:16 foundational models a lot of money >> yes and no uh because I'm only going to
56:21 say no is because so take a look at lovable we're two over 200 million in AR
56:26 Tripling their company size
5:19 The scale and growth of Lovable
5:24 and welcome back to the podcast. >> Thank you for having me. As you know,
5:30 this is uh a record fourth time back to the podcast. No one else has ever
5:34 achieved this feat. I feel like you're uh you're basically my co-host now.
5:37 >> I love it. Thank you for inviting me back. I'm very proud record holder in
5:41 this regard. >> What I love about you coming back each
5:43 time is feels like every time you come back, you're just doing something even
5:47 more epic and exciting. And so these days, as we'll hear in the intro, you're
5:51 head of growth at Lovable, which no big deal, on track to be uh the fastest or
5:56 one of the fastest growing companies in history, uh depending on the metric that
6:00 you track. Let's talk about just the scale and growth of Lovable to give
6:03 people a sense of just how incredible this is. I'll share a bit of this in the
6:05 intro, but just like what are some stats you can share about just how things are
6:08 going at Loveable? >> So, uh we are just a little bit over one
6:12 years old since we launched. Uh the company actually did exist as a GPT
6:17 engineer before, but it officially launched in the third week of November
6:21 last year in 2024. So uh for us, we've hit over $200 million in annual recurring revenue
6:30 before we even hit our one-year uh milestone since being launched, which is
6:34 pretty incredible. Uleni actually have a really great um blog post on how quickly
6:39 it takes for companies usually to get to their first million AR and it's usually
6:45 multiple years. So this is definitely a unicorn. I don't think this is a
6:50 standard. There's couple of things that um account for it and we can talk about
6:54 it and the growth is only accelerating. So it's compounding which is great
6:58 because we had our 100 million in end of July and just four months later we were
7:04 at 200 million. So 7 months to well maybe 8 months to 100 million another 4
7:10 months to get to 200 million. And from uh users too we already have over 8
7:14 million users um that have tried lovable. We have as you can imagine to
7:19 feed that 200 million hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers as well
7:24 that are paying for us. Uh so things are things are going great and we'll talk
7:27 about why. >> Okay. Absurd. I think people are getting
7:31 used to these insane numbers and not long ago is like okay if you hit a
7:35 million ARR in a year you're doing pretty well. >> Yeah. Yeah. I think it's still you're
7:40 doing pretty well if you have a million AR in one year. This is uh this is one
7:46 of the once in a lifetime type of companies and the category the way that
7:50 it's evolving. So I want to make sure that people don't also set this as a
7:55 benchmark for success because it should never be and in some categories it might
7:59 be even faster um as we continue evolving technology but I don't think
8:05 that it's realistic to expect it um out of your business that you're starting
8:08 right now. >> That is such an important point you're making there. It's so discouraging to
8:14 founders to hear this these stories of getting 200 million not and again this
8:19 is ARR. There's a lot of companies, especially in the data labeling space,
8:22 I've had them all on the podcast that are uh very fast growing, but they're
8:26 not recurring revenue. There's also they pay out their people to do this data
8:30 labeling. So, the revenue numbers there don't really equate like recurring $200
8:36 million a year is absurd. >> Yeah, it is. It is absurd. I really want
8:41 to make sure that people understand as we go through this episode as to why
8:45 it's happening because part of it is unlovable, part of it is just in the
8:49 market and and how it's moving. So when you're setting yourself as a benchmark
8:52 uh so you know which benchmarks you actually to use and whether lovable is
8:55 Confidence in Lovable as a business
8:56 the benchmark that you should be using. >> Cool. I'm going to get into that next.
8:59 Last question just I want to see what you can share here. A lot of people look
9:03 at these numbers. A lot of people are very skeptical. These are lasting
9:07 durable numbers. Like who are these people? How is there $200 million being
9:12 spent on lovable? Anything you can amp just like give people confidence. This
9:16 is real. This is going to last. This is a really durable business.
9:21 >> Well, I saw Stripe receipts. So, it is real as far as I'm concerned. Um, unless
9:25 Stripe dashboard is lying to us, but it is money getting deposited in our bank
9:30 account. But, uh, let's talk about who's actually contributing to that number. We
9:34 do have a really large use case of people uh, starting their own companies
9:38 on lovable. So we call it a founder use case where somebody that is nontechnical
9:42 that has never been able to code or create a piece of software is now able
9:46 to come in and actually build an app completely from scratch and uh some of
9:50 them are already monetizing it some of it just using it for lead genen for
9:55 other services or uh some physical goods for example that they're uh that they're
9:58 selling. Some of them are just still building and uh we monetize on the act
10:03 of building. So that progression of like building up to your product market fit
10:07 takes quite a bit of time. And even with lovable, we're so much more efficient
10:12 and effective compared to hiring an engineer uh in terms of the price. But
10:17 um it still takes time. Uh so we have a lot of founders uh whether it's B2C, whe
10:22 there's B2B, so consumer products, business products, e-commerce, um
10:25 whatever it is. But on the other side, we have a lot of employees within
10:29 companies using lovable as well. Uh where they're building internal tools or
10:33 they're building prototypes, they're building landing pages. So uh that is
10:38 another use case that is very relevant and quite uh efficient for us. But then
10:43 there is a hype and discovery that is happening as well because uh when I
10:48 think about software I think about it. I talked to John Cuddler actually and he
10:52 gave me this framework that is like completely stuck in my mind of software
10:56 always goes through capabilities stage first like what is possible uh to
11:01 actually create with this then it needs to transition into value of how is it
11:04 that am I going to get value out of this and then you can start thinking about
11:08 scaling it uh of which aspects of my life and my work uh can this actually go
11:13 in and we're right now very much in the capability stage with vibe coding
11:16 because everybody's just exploring what can I do and And the beautiful thing
11:21 here is that what you can do changes every month to three months. So, uh you
11:25 constantly need to come back and you need to see what has changed. So, a lot
11:29 of people use it for personal reasons. Um they I build myself uh apps, tutoring
11:35 apps for my kid. So, he has to answer questions in order to get some screen
11:39 time accumulated for him. I build my own portfolio. I see people doing wonderful
11:44 things. My favorite story that I always say, uh there's this um man that created
11:50 a proposal on lovable. So his fiance had to answer questions and like she had to
11:54 complete this game and then at the end there was like this big reveal and he
11:58 proposed to her. But people just unlock the most creative things that they build
12:02 on lovable and that's where the revenue is coming from. the one piece that is
12:06 working very well for us in terms of how our monetization model is set up and how
12:10 it interjects with your activation moment which we can also cover but that
12:15 is what's driving um that um both conversion and retention rates.
12:18 >> Let me ask you one question that's on people's minds I imagine as you talk
12:21 about this just what is what is retention look like? Yeah. So retention
12:26 uh really I look at it in two ways. Uh retention that it comes as a subscriber
12:31 retention. Uh so how much pay subscribers do we get and how many of
12:35 them are we capable of renewing. There's also very important aspect of it is how
12:38 many of them can we expand because if you can get positive or above 100% net
12:42 dollar retention which is super important metric for investors. If you
12:46 don't know about net dollar retention please read it up. That's like a
12:49 superpower to get bigger multiple. if you can show um NDR that is over 100 and
12:53 then there's actually engagement retention as well because uh that is the
12:58 leading indicator for how your paid retention is going to look like for paid
13:03 retention um I know there's a so much on the market of oh this is a high product
13:08 and um it just it's a leaky bucket and it has really high churn rates although
13:13 um I'm not I shouldn't share it's not public numbers for us to share actual
13:17 retention however what I can say it's on par with benchmarks of other B2B SAS
13:22 products that I've ever worked at and I worked with Miro, Dropbox, uh Survey
13:28 Monkey, Netifi, um Amplitude and others. So, are we are we absolutely crushing
13:34 with paid retention? Um no, are we where most of the other companies are? Yes.
13:39 Our NDR is quite good because when people build, they want to buy more
13:42 credits to bill. So, uh, we're seeing really good, uh, revenue retention, but
13:46 we're honestly more focused right now on engagement retention than even paid
13:51 retention because our northstar is just to get as much usage as possible. And,
13:55 uh, we will fix and tune our monetization model afterwards. So,
14:00 engagement retention, I would say, is a by far bigger priority focus for us at
14:04 the moment. >> That is incredibly uh, interesting and optimistic to hear because of the growth
14:11 rate. Uh rarely is growth rate this high and retention is on par with great
14:15 companies. >> Yeah. And I'll just say too which is a little bit maybe counterintuitive to
14:22 would be to a lot of companies we don't optimize for revenue at all. In fact
14:26 internally we have a lot of discussions about how can we give more products
14:32 away. How can we uh reduce our revenue growth rate by just getting more paid
14:37 subscribers, more users using lovable to just get bigger share of the market. So
14:43 our revenue is an outcome of us just trying to get more people through the
14:48 door, not us trying to optimize for revenue per user or to get them to
14:52 monetize at the higher rate. So there's like a very interesting path here where
14:56 by actually focusing on the inputs like you should, it translates to a good
15:00 output. But we don't look at that output as something that we're trying to grow.
15:04 >> Let's talk about growth. Let's talk about what you've learned about growth
15:08 in this space. You had this post online where you said that you've had to throw
15:11 out most of your growth playbook. >> This is a huge deal. You've led growth a
15:15 lot of really successful companies. >> Lovable is growing incredibly well. Uh
15:19 this tells me there's a lot we can learn from what you've seen. So tell us what
15:23 you're seeing, what's still working, what's not working, what you've uh
15:26 learned about what it takes to drive growth at a company like Lovable. Yeah,
15:30 I would say that in any other role that I've come into before, uh I felt
15:37 confident in about 80% of the patterns that I can bring to that role. Meaning
15:41 that I can identify inputs, understand which framework kind of applies. I know
15:46 a bunch of examples that fit in within that framework. So we just need to
15:49 localize a solution and push and it was quite productive in terms of getting a
15:54 company those additional acquisition, conversion, engagement, monetization
16:00 rates. So um I I felt very repetitive in a way um after some time because I feel
16:04 like I'm just coming in and copy pasting copy pasting and although every single
16:07 company loves to say that they have unique problems at the end of the day
16:10 all of the problems were very similar and I felt like I was like doing the
16:14 same job over and over again when I started at lovable the one thing to me
16:18 that was very clear is that uh this company was growing like crazy before I
16:23 joined. So I want to make sure that there's not that much value on what I
16:27 have even added to date because this company is on a tear and yes we're
16:32 rounding the edges to and removing barriers for growth. Uh so we're not
16:37 standing in our own way but uh there's something more magical happening here
16:42 that is not a pattern that I've ever seen before. It's not a framework that I
16:47 can even conceptualize um in my head. And plus, it's a new category that I've
16:52 never seen or I've never been in a company that is in a new emerging
16:57 category that hits fastmoving waters so quickly. And that's the difference
17:01 because when you're usually trying to create a new category, it takes years. I
17:05 know it's every marketer's dream to create a new category, but it takes
17:09 decades often to like really to really get that much hype and adoption around
17:14 it. Versus with Vibe coding, this has seemed to have happened really quickly.
17:17 It's like it's hit the nerve with the market. So yes, we're at the right
17:21 place, we're at the right time, but we're also in really fastm moving waters
17:26 and um the demand that is coming to us like we need to capture it mostly. We
17:31 don't need to generate a lot of it yet. But at the same time, it comes with a
17:34 really big downfalls of we're not in control of a lot of our growth. I mean,
17:38 let's be honest about it. There's so much incredible word of mouth that is
17:42 happening and we're trying to grow that but uh to enable as much of that as
17:47 possible but um it's the company is moving. We're just like hanging on to it
17:53 as fast as possible and making sure that the we're like not going to hit a wall
17:58 so to speak in front of us and that the wheels are greased and that all of the
18:02 pieces are in place. like your race car framework uh that you have as well that
18:06 like we're we're really just putting a lot of oil into it and um figuring out
18:11 what is our engine actually going to be that is going to take us forward. But uh
18:16 when I'm thinking about the patterns here and what I have to unlearn, I feel
18:21 like only 30 to 40% of what I've learned in the last 15 to 20 years of being in
18:26 growth transfers here. And uh some of it is very straightforward. Okay, this is
18:30 how you're going to do paid marketing. this is how you're going to do some of
18:33 the habitual retention. Here's the free to pay maybe monetization uh frameworks
18:40 that still stand. But the rest of it um seriously doesn't feel like it even
18:44 matters anymore because we just need to invest in such bigger bets and innovate
18:49 and create new growth loops here as opposed to trying to optimize it uh to
18:53 the moon and be and beyond uh which would I usually be focused on in a scale
18:57 business like this. >> Let's follow those threads. So what is
19:00 it that no longer is worth it in this bucket of just like let's not spend any
19:04 time on this thing and then what do you find is actually moving the needle
19:09 >> not worth it in growth uh most of the people spend most of the time optimizing
19:15 existing user journeys. So, uh, you already have maybe some of your growth
19:18 loops that you understand that you try to optimize or you just know, hey,
19:22 there's big drop offs from acquisition to activation. Let me go figure out how
19:27 to I can tweak the dials to get it done. Here, what I find is that um,
19:31 optimizations are just not worth our time. So, a lot of the times my growth
19:35 team actually ends up working on new features or just standing up new growth
19:40 loops one after another. And yes, there is of of course the saying of like more
19:45 growth loops does not mean more growth. But at the same time, the market is
19:50 moving so quickly. You need to stand up a bunch of initiatives uh to capture it
19:55 because it's perishable or we also have so much competition. We're not alone
20:01 here. So we can't ignore that there's everybody in their mother is starting a
20:05 VIP coding business nowadays and we need to figure out how to be ahead of them.
20:08 and to be ahead of them is not optimization of the problem. It's
20:13 reinvention of the solution. So I just feel like I usually spend maybe 5% maybe
20:19 10% if I'm lucky innovating on growth in my roles uh in my previous roles. Right
20:24 now I'm spending 95% innovating on growth and only 5% on optimization. And
20:29 most of my frameworks are on optimization because it's really hard to
20:33 come up with frameworks for innovation because by default they're by definition
20:38 they're innovative. >> What I'm hearing here is uh new features
20:42 launching new features, new products as one of the bigger growth levers versus
20:46 like you have a bunch of cool stuff make it more make it easier to use increase
20:50 activation reduce friction things like that. >> Yeah. And for example, um we on growth
20:57 team launched uh integration with Shopify to enable e-commerce use case
21:01 because we're like hey there's already people trying to come in and do it and
21:05 Shopify was open for integration with us. Let's go lean into it so people can
21:10 vibe code their storefronts. Uh that came out of growth that usually would
21:13 never come out of growth. like why would growth team ever invest into a core
21:18 product integration or we um enable voice mode for people so they can
21:21 actually chat with lovable using their voice as opposed to only having type and
21:26 um that's also it's a feature it's a core product feature but we're like hey
21:29 it's going to help people to converse with lovable more it's going to increase
21:33 the engagement one area that we've spent very little time in is activation
21:37 because usually I spend majority of my time in activation because there's so
21:42 many awareness things that need to happened and uh so many things that uh
21:48 we we need to like smooth out experience for the users in order for them to get
21:52 through that setup moment to aha moment to that habit loop and here you're just
21:57 interacting with agent. So uh we at the beginning were like the agent team that
22:01 we have here is working a lot on it like why would we go in there and and do
22:05 anything is like our core team is responsible for activation. Now we're
22:09 starting to move into doing agent work ourselves. So all of a sudden growth
22:14 team is not just doing product surfaces now we're doing agentic workflows um and
22:20 codifying agent instructions in order for customers to activate better. So the
22:24 work fundamentally I feel like has gotten deeper into product and deeper
22:30 into actual core product functionality as opposed to just being a smoothing
22:34 surface on the outer layers. >> Okay, that is also a very big deal.
22:38 Every growth person that's ever been on this podcast, including you, always
22:41 talks about the power of activation. Just the how much opportunity there is
22:45 constant to get people to this aha moment, realize how the value of this
22:48 product that increases retention, increases everything. And what you're
22:52 saying here is you barely spend any time on activation because in a company like
22:57 Lovable, there's a prompt. You give it what you want, it generates a thing, and
23:01 that's basically all it is. And so the impact is to make that agent better at
23:06 that thing versus microoptimize every step. >> And our agent team spends night and day
23:12 thinking about it. So I've never been at the company where core team thinks so
23:16 much about activation, think so much about that first generation, thinks so
23:21 much about reaching aha moment. So it's more weaved in into DNA of the overall
23:26 company which takes the pressure off of me to only have to focus on it because
23:30 otherwise yeah I would be in that in that experience all the time but I feel
23:34 a lot more at ease because everybody's thinking about it and everybody's
23:40 working on making agent better and agent the beauty of it is it doesn't matter if
23:43 it's actually first generation or if it's your nth generation it just needs
23:47 to be a better generation agent needs to understand your intent better and think
23:51 and reason behind behind it. So it like improves the entire life cycle
23:56 immediately as opposed to having to only work on that first experience per se.
24:01 >> And what you're not saying is don't care about that experience. It's the team
24:05 building that is already obsessed with making that activation experience
24:08 better. >> And I I love that because I that's the core product functionality at this
24:16 point. And before uh people would spend more time building deeper features or
24:22 deeper use cases or trying to um improve some platform functionality and now the
24:26 core team they're obsessed about that first experience because that is core
24:29 product. >> Another lever that I've noticed especially with lovable and I'm seeing
24:34 it more and more in social media is just founders telling you what's going on. I
24:38 think this connects really deeply with the new features. Launch new features.
24:41 Say Anton is just like hey check out this cool new thing. Check out our
24:44 growth numbers. Is that a big growth lever too? >> Yeah. So, one of our biggest strategy is
24:52 uh building in public. Uh building in public and it's coupled with employee
24:58 socials, founder socials for sure. Uh this is difficult for larger companies,
25:02 but when you're smaller and you still have a little bit more narrative control
25:07 uh with uh with everybody on your team, plus you have so much more trust within
25:11 your organization of whether people are going to say the right things because
25:14 they understand what actually has happened. Uh that ability to just really
25:19 quickly deliver the message to the market becomes really important. Now we
25:24 still do big launches. So we still have everything tiered into tier three, tier
25:28 one. Like tier ones are going to happen as like big moments that we're going to
25:33 really rally as a company behind and it's going to be something that um is
25:37 meant to step function change our product market fit and uh we're going to
25:40 do a bunch of activities behind it. But at the same time, what's really
25:45 important to us is to maintain noise in the market. And that noise in the market
25:50 happens by us shipping every day, every other day, multiple times per day and
25:55 just talking about it constantly. Interestingly enough, it's actually
25:59 works as fantastic resurrection strategy because people like, "Oh, there's more
26:02 things here. Like, I need to go check it out." It also works as great
26:06 re-engagement strategy. So, instead of sending newsletters to say like, "Here's
26:09 the market trends or here's the user stories." Like, people are like
26:13 literally logging into their social to see like, "Okay, what has lovable
26:16 shipped now?" like what what what is the change? So, it's interesting to them to
26:20 see because from the time that they voice their opinion on what needs to
26:24 happen to actual delivery is so short. So, they feel heard and they are heard
26:29 because that's how we uh prioritize all of the things that we're shipping. But,
26:33 it's interesting because I've never been in a company that tries
26:37 to maintain so much just shipping velocity to maintain certain amount of
26:42 noise that it feels like the product is alive. it's changing every single week.
26:46 And then there's like these big amplifications, turbo boosts so to speak
26:51 in the race car model uh that then go out and they fundamentally create a step
26:56 function change in that product market fit as a whole. And uh that is a
27:01 retention strategy I can get behind any day and all day. I only hope that we can
27:07 maintain it as we continue scaling. >> Sounds stressful. This reminds me I had
27:13 Garav. He is the CEO of uh Mirage used to be called Captions which is a really
27:17 successful AI video company startup and they have a policy of you ship a a
27:23 marketable feature every week. >> That's how their company operates and
27:26 it's the same thing is just ship things you can talk about. >> Velocity of shipping is our number one
27:32 core value in development team. So we do anything and everything to just keep it
27:37 going up up up and um into the right. And by the way, this is also means that
27:40 everybody is a little has a little bit of marketer within them. This is uh we
27:44 have very lean product organization. We actually lean on our engineers uh to do
27:48 a lot of product work. We call them product engineers. Uh and uh they have
27:54 to go and they have to announce the thing that they've shipped. It doesn't
27:57 just funnel through marketing. So there's a lot of uh autonomy, a lot of
28:01 agency that needs to happen with this with this type of velocity because
28:05 marketing team otherwise you have to have like enormous marketing team to
28:09 staff that. So it has to come with some roles and responsibilities uh
28:13 redefinition on the team as well. >> Let's talk about marketing. That's
28:15 something else you've written about is just marketing is changing in a big way
28:19 their role in growth. How does marketing play a role in all of this? On one side,
28:24 marketing channels are changing. On the other side, marketing's involvement into
28:28 everything that product does is changing. And then number three, I think
28:32 even marketing organizations in terms of where they're hired the most um are
28:36 changing as a result as well. So I'll talk about second one first just because
28:40 we just talked about shipping and that is um yeah you still have your product
28:44 marketers, you still have your channel managers um but they focus more on the
28:49 big things and the narratives although it's difficult because the narrative
28:52 even changes all the time as these functionalities come through. Usually
28:57 you can come up with the positioning and messaging and you can have it for years
29:01 and and create all of the campaigns around it. Now you have it for three
29:05 months and then the product changes. So like the cycles here are really uh
29:10 really short and uh for smaller changes because cycles are so short they spend
29:14 so much time actually focusing on it as they should that some of these smaller
29:17 changes just cannot be supported by marketing. You have to delegate it to
29:21 your product and engineering team to do their own marketing because otherwise
29:24 again you're going to have to have enormous marketing team in order to
29:28 support it all. But at the same time, channels in which marketing right now
29:32 works I think are changing quite a bit and um not enough people I feel like are
29:36 freaking out and talking about it as opposed to like moving just in the same
29:40 direction over and over again. And the changes that I'm seeing is that it is
29:46 very has been very clear to me that when you're talking about organic strategy,
29:49 if you marketing organic strategy, if you asked me that five years ago, I
29:54 would have said that's SEO. It's search engine optimization. go on Google.
29:58 That's your organic marketing strategy. If you ask me what's the organic
30:01 marketing strategy right now, to me, it's all about social, which is what is
30:06 my CEO posting? What is my team posting? What is my LinkedIn? What is my creator
30:12 economy doing in influencer marketing? And um across all of the social
30:16 platforms, that is my organic, which is that one's kind of paid to be fair, but
30:19 when I think about organic, there is still a lot of that word of mouth. What
30:23 are my users posting on social? What are they talking about it? what are they uh
30:27 what are they sharing which is like a mind shift because I've been always
30:32 especially in B2B so focused on search and now I feel like it's been completely
30:37 pushed even further into consumerization territory and it has become all about
30:43 social no matter how B2B you are because that's where eyeballs are at
30:46 >> that is fascinating and so when you talk about socials what are you finding is
30:50 most helpful is it Twitterx is it LinkedIn is it YouTube Tik Tok Instagram
30:54 >> for founder socials uh O employee socials um X and LinkedIn are fantastic
30:59 sources. Um especially for B2B because that's where all of the B2B people are
31:05 at. But you cannot just have Chad GPT write your copy and post it. You need to
31:10 show personality like there needs to be humanity uh that it goes through it. And
31:15 it's not natural for everybody and it feels very awkward sometimes to start.
31:21 Uh but it's important to people to see who's building the company because
31:25 there's so much competition now on functionality so they can rally behind a
31:30 team. So they want to have a team that they want to win and for that you need
31:36 to be vulnerable. You need to be authentic obviously but you just need to
31:41 be yourself. Uh so like that corporate scrubbing has to completely fall off
31:47 which um is obviously going to pull in as as the company scales but at least at
31:51 the beginning that is a chance to stand out and then your customers posting
31:56 about you. So that word of mouth of uh really creating a product that creates
32:02 something for customers that is worth talking about. It gives them stories
32:07 that they want to share that feels empowering to them to tell to others
32:12 like they're unlocking a secret like they feel proud of what they have
32:16 created which what we focus a lot on lovable on to have that feeling of oh my
32:21 gosh I have superpowers now and I can't wait to tell others I cannot wait to
32:26 show others what is happening so on both of those sides to me that is very much
32:30 organic um if you're in a consumer then Instagram Tik Tok um are very much a go
32:34 as well. >> So here it's uh the CEO clearly is an important uh variable in this them in
32:41 this case Anton just tweeting here's what's going on lovable here's how fast
32:44 it's growing here's some we've learned >> uh we had the CEO of gamma uh on
32:48 recently Grant and he's exactly the same thing just sharing a bunch of lessons
32:51 journey building in public a big part of the growth lever and your point here is
32:55 okay so it's the co but then it's also how do you get your customers to share
32:59 things on socials and then there's a paid uh influencer sort of component
33:03 >> yes uh the customer is difficult one, that's a word of mouth loop that you
33:07 need to stand up. The only way to create a word of mouth loop is just to blow
33:12 their socks off uh when they actually experience your product. We have a
33:16 really almost unfair advantage because our product is called lovable. So by
33:20 default, we're trying to create an absolute lovable experiences. Like that
33:25 is a mentality internally. If it's not lovable, we're not going to ship it. So
33:30 uh and the best way to fix a bug at lovable is to say this is not lovable.
33:34 like when everybody's just like jumps on it. Uh to fix it right there and then
33:38 sprints, no sprints, it doesn't matter. It's getting fixed right now. So, uh
33:42 from that perspective, we kind of have that culture already embedded as part of
33:46 our brand and it's part of our name, which helps us a lot. But that's the
33:50 point is that you feel that brand through every interaction. Uh I talk to
33:54 my designer all the time. How can we add more love marks into the product? How
33:58 can we prioritize more unique interactions? the little elements that
34:03 make up that that feeling of this product is speaking to me. It's like it
34:06 feels something like that is unique. It has personality uh behind it. So we put
34:11 all of the brand work actually into our product. When you think about lovable
34:16 think people think about a brand but we don't have a brand marketing team yet.
34:19 So it's all just through product interactions and some of those building
34:25 and public moments of the people behind uh those product interactions. Um that
34:28 is our strategy. And then there's influencer marketing. Interestingly
34:32 enough, influencer marketing is 10 times bigger for us than paid social. So yeah,
34:37 we do some paid social as well. Um, and it's working decently. It's quite
34:42 expensive from payback period. Um, we're still optimizing it. As I said, we're
34:45 pretty early on in all of these channels, but influencer marketing is
34:48 something that has worked uh from the beginning. a lovable and uh reason
34:53 behind it is that influencer marketing especially on the socials it gives you
34:57 an opportunity to have a little video and interaction and lovable is all about
35:01 seeing like oh my gosh this is what I can do and uh this is possible so that
35:06 drives people to go and try it themselves so that's why social works
35:10 very well for us because it's not really a written value proposition like nobody
35:14 knows what bite coding is but you watch 10 seconds of it and you go that's new
35:18 let me go give it a try >> who would have thought that a head of
35:23 growth who is traditionally seen as like data metrics, spreadsheets, drive KPIs
35:28 is like, okay, how do we make this more lovable? How do we add more moments of
35:33 delight? I know my my my joke is like at the end of my lovable journey whenever
35:38 hopefully never comes to an end, but but at the end I'll be like a growth brand
35:43 person here. Here, hi, my name is Elena. I do brand now. But I I actually see it
35:48 as part of growth strategy to make sure that that brand shines through every
35:53 single interaction. Um and I always talk to my team about it because that is one
35:58 big lever in our growth story. >> Yeah. So I think that's a really
36:01 important point to highlight. The reason Lovable is growing so fast is it is a
36:05 product people love. You've made something people want and the word of
36:08 mouth spreads because it's something that blows people's socks off as you
36:12 said. So it feels like that's the first thing you got to get right.
36:15 >> Yes. Well, the first thing you have to get right is you have to be at the right
36:18 place at the right time and you have to be in fastmoving waters. Like let's not
36:22 discount how fast this category is exploding on its own. So this cannot
36:26 happen in every single category that you're starting to build a product. But
36:30 the way to stand out in the super crowded category is to create
36:34 experiences that speak to people. That I think is something that a lot of people
36:37 deprioritize because they still prioritize functionality over humanity
36:42 within software. And I think that we're actually moving to the new era of
36:46 software that needs to feel human that people want to interact with not just
36:51 utility of it because cost of software is coming down so much to develop that
36:57 we now can actually invest into emotional feel of that software as
37:02 opposed to only just focus on creating the utility out of it. So to me it's um
37:09 it's a I I I love this move because I I hate nothing more than going to software
37:13 that is just like so painful to use that I lose some brain cells uh as I'm
37:17 interacting with it versus software that I feel I get energy out of and for
37:22 lovable for me like I cannot wait on some of the projects that I have to go
37:25 and vibe code myself like that's the highlight of my day and I just like I
37:30 don't I I I bring in my daughter and I'm like let's go do this like what do you
37:33 think that needs to be done because I just get so energy out of doing it and
37:38 uh that is the feeling you cannot create by looking at it as a utility problem.
37:43 >> The way I think about it, the way what you're describing is it's almost table
37:47 stakes have increased and now it's so easy to build. Now the big
37:50 differentiator is experience, design, delight. >> Exactly. And it has to translate through
37:56 every single interaction. So your designer has to be one of your first
38:00 hires now in startups. It's not just about the the engineering so to speak
38:05 utility and you have to think through every single interaction of does this
38:09 communicate our brand or not. >> So along those lines I want to come back
38:11 to something you talked about which is launching new features is a huge growth
38:15 lever. Kind of the big question there is just how do you maintain quality and
38:19 cohesiveness as all these people are empowered to ship stuff. Is there
38:22 anything else there you've seen that works well to help avoid just a
38:26 Frankenstein product just endless features that you want to tweet about?
38:31 Yeah, one part of it is not something that you can codify, but it's the type
38:34 of people that you hire that are going to go and ship these things. We at
38:39 Lovable try to hire the absolute best talent available out there that we can
38:43 bring in and that we can source and that we can attract uh to grow with. And what
38:48 do I mean by that best talent? Um it's not that somebody who has been at really
38:51 large companies or somebody that has really uh done a lot of logos or has big
38:56 success stories behind them. It's somebody who is extremely passionate
39:00 about their job. It's their hobby. They love to work. They have fire in their
39:05 belly. This is not a paycheck for them. They want to do this for some ulterior
39:10 reason. This is the biggest opportunity of their life. So this is global maxima
39:15 against any other opportunities that are in front of them at the moment. So
39:19 that's very important for us. We want people to come and do their absolute
39:22 best work at lovable. It's very important and you can feel it in this
39:29 office. People are wired up. They are so high on how can we make this better? How
39:34 can we deliver more to our customers? And that's very different compared to
39:39 usually how companies grow. We're like, okay, yeah, the check, check, check.
39:42 They fit the skill set. Let's bring them in. But is that passion? Is that fire
39:47 behind it? And then uh the second piece is that um we work really hard on just
39:52 addressing what's the success here looks like? What is it that we're building?
39:56 what use cases are we building for? And then because we hire these people that
40:00 are so passionate about it, the other two skills, by the way, that are super
40:03 important is high agency and high autonomy, I can figure out things that
40:08 are tangential to me that I don't need other specialty, so to speak. Like I
40:12 don't need a marketer to go launch something. I can go figure it out and I
40:16 have high agency. I can go do it myself. Um I'm going to own it from all the way
40:21 from start to finish. uh those are very important, something that we screen for
40:24 and something that we look for in our culture and then uh you just see what
40:30 you want to do is up to you. So there's very little supervision that happens on
40:35 the ground. Um now we all have a goals and like some of the big launches that
40:38 we're all marching towards but some of the work um that is completely up to
40:43 developers up to uh marketers or whatever what is it that they want to
40:47 do. So there has to be that enablement of go try things and because of our
40:52 velocity if you fail it's not a big deal we'll just pivot we'll go we'll get
40:57 we'll get through it we are not here to just win all the time
41:02 >> on the hiring of these incredible people as we all know it's very hard to hire
41:05 people these days especially the best what have you seen lovable does
41:08 differently or does well that helps them recruit the best >> yes and especially recruit in Stockholm
41:14 I mean the main office here is in Stockholm we're asking a lot of people
41:18 to relocate uh which is a no small feat. Now some of it is um makes it easy
41:22 because of how much hype we created around our product. People want to come
41:27 work for us like there's um they're reaching out to us. They're saying I I
41:30 love what you're doing. I want to join it. Uh so that we have a cheat code to
41:35 it because like we have most of the time when we reach out to somebody they say
41:40 yeah I would love to explore. So uh building that product that is highly
41:44 lovable also creates a really great recruiting brand for you as well. So
41:48 make sure that there like multiple benefits to that. But uh second of all
41:54 we do a lot of trials uh for people. So trial work to see them in action
41:59 >> a work trial to see them in action for a couple of days. We pay them as part of
42:02 the work trial. We have uh some probation periods that we start people
42:06 on uh because this company is not for everybody. As I start said in the
42:11 podcast in in the beginning, the pace here is insane. I went on vacation uh
42:16 for the first time. So I've been here for 6 months. I went on vacation um for
42:21 10 days. I came back. I felt like I needed to on board from the beginning.
42:26 Like everything changed. And when I'm in it, I feel like it's an evolution. But
42:31 the fact that just being gone for 10 days, it feels like a complete
42:35 revolution in the company. It's that pace is just not for everybody. And
42:38 that's okay because I'm very firm believer that there's different cultures
42:42 and different environments that the best fit for different personalities and
42:45 different people. So we try to be very upfront with how things are and how
42:51 chaotic they are. And we prioritize people that don't look for clarity but
42:57 can create clarity out of chaos because um it is absolutely chaotic otherwise.
43:03 And if we start to look for people that can explain it uh to us, that's the only
43:06 way that we can succeed. >> The way you describe going on vacation
43:09 and feeling very different, it feels like when you don't see your kid for a
43:12 few days and they're just like completely different. You're like, "How
43:15 did you grow so fast in 3 days?" >> Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Let me try to
43:20 summarize the growth levers that you're finding is are working. And I'm trying
43:23 to think about this from the perspective of uh an AI startup trying to think
43:27 about, hey shoot, how do we grow faster? What is lovable figured out? So feels
43:32 like number one is just uh build something lovable, something that blows
43:36 people's socks off, but also in a market that is growing that people want to pay
43:39 money for like you can build something lovable that nobody actually cares about
43:43 that there isn't much money going to the space. There's no tide pushing it
43:47 forward and it won't work. I call it minimum lovable product. Like it
43:50 shouldn't be minimum viable product anymore. Viability is left in back in
43:57 2020 2010s. Now it's minimum lovable product. That's the only thing that
43:59 matters. >> I love how these AI tools are letting us you know like PMS have always had these
44:06 um what are they uh smoke door test or like what's the term just like or is
44:09 that not a real product? Uh >> painted door. >> Painted door. There it is. Yeah. And and
44:14 it's like okay we just have a landing page. There's nothing there. And now AI
44:17 makes it easier to do that and it's like more fullfeatured. >> Yeah. Well, it's the feedback cycle is
44:22 just completely collapsed. You can go from idea to some product uh that is
44:28 functioning to user feedback within a day if you want to. I mean depending on
44:31 how fast that you want to run or how complex the product is for missions. It
44:36 took us couple of weeks to vip code it to the point to where because we also um
44:41 I have a full-time vip coder on my team. He's amazing. So like he he wanted to
44:45 create videos like he did a bunch of designs for it uh too. So we he he took
44:49 him a couple of weeks. We're testing it now and then we'll push it in the
44:52 product. But it's a completely different development life cycle. Before uh it
44:57 would just take so many more steps uh from user research to uh the design
45:03 sprints uh to prioritizing on engineering roadmap to build something
45:08 minimal and and viable to actually test to little long testing cycles. Now it's
45:13 just like boom, let's go. Uh, it's taken us could have taken us a day. We just
45:17 decided to take a couple of weeks to get all of the video pieces correct.
45:20 >> I saw you launched this on LinkedIn. I to me it looked like a a full product
45:24 launch. Uh, it is interesting to hear. This is just a sort of prototype.
45:27 >> Yes. >> Prototype. >> Minimum level. >> Minimum level. Okay. Uh, I got to ask
45:32 you have this. You said you had a full-time vibe coder. What the heck is
45:36 this? Is this like an engineer? Is this something else? What is a full-time vibe
45:38 coder? >> Great question. This is a new job role that is actually popping up here and
45:44 there. Uh it's absolutely fascinating to watch uh this development because I see
45:49 vibe coding as a skill being added to a lot of job descriptions for designers,
45:54 for product managers, uh for marketers, which I think is a really interesting
45:58 shift. Finally, Excel can move over like we have a new skill to add that is um
46:04 super empowering and and not three years old, but uh vibe coder. So uh his name
46:10 is Lazar and he actually was chief of staff in his previous role. So he's not
46:14 technical at all. He's self-taught uh in technical aspects of it but he was very
46:20 early on in the vibe coding wave. So he learned a lot about it. He was um user
46:25 of all of the vibe coding tools lovable included. And uh when I was coming into
46:29 the role I'm like I have so many projects that I will vibe code myself.
46:34 So I run this uh woman only hackathon she builds. I vip coded the first
46:39 version of that site and like and submission process for applications and
46:43 then other people came in and started building on top of it. But I vip code
46:47 but then like I don't have enough time sometimes because I need to run around
46:51 and I want to push out so many different initiatives that I want to test in the
46:56 market with our own products. So um we connected on social um like can you like
47:00 would you join us and he joined us for uh part-time uh like you're bringing so
47:05 much value for example we partnered with Shopify and he created a bunch of
47:09 Shopify lovable templates uh by coded for us and it's been so helpful uh to
47:13 have somebody like that that is just like pushing all all of these things out
47:17 and he's an absolute expert so he's teaching us all too of what is possible
47:21 with lovable because he's on the cutting edge of constantly pushing it to the
47:27 limit. So, I I really enjoy having that role, which I've never had before in my
47:31 life and in my team. >> I I'm not surprised. I've I've never
47:35 heard of this role before as a real full-time job. Do you think this is a
47:39 thing people will start hiring for at non vibe coding companies?
47:43 >> So, I vibe code myself. So, like I would put that as even as a skill on my on my
47:47 resume now. It took me a while to figure out by the way like everybody's like,
47:50 "Oh, you just go and like it and it all happens automatically." It takes you a
47:54 couple of iterations, couple of projects until like you know, okay, this is this
47:58 is how I need to translate it, how I need to think about it. But for me, it's
48:02 when I started scaling of what I want to vibe code. That's where his value really
48:06 came in because I'm like, okay, I understand what is possible. I know what
48:10 needs to be achieved. And some of these apps I want to be almost full-blown
48:14 built uh because they're not going to get incorporated into the product
48:17 anytime soon. They don't need to be. I'll just link to them from uh from our
48:21 headers, so to speak. and uh he really accelerated that velocity for me. So
48:26 once you get into VIP coding and you see its value within your organization,
48:30 leaning into somebody like that just accelerates your velocity because it is
48:34 like an engineer uh on your team. It's just they're not to me he's his part his
48:38 part technical but they can be nontechnical if they're really good.
48:42 >> That is fascinating. This episode is brought to you by Persona, the verified
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49:47 this episode. Let me kind of go back to summarize just real quick the growth
49:50 lovers. I want to move in a somewhat different direction. So things that help
49:54 Lovable grow. One is just build something in mind that blows your socks
49:57 off as you said. Uh I love these phrases out here. The second is uh make noise in
50:03 the market. And the way that Lovable does this SEO is tweeting constantly.
50:07 You build something that blows people's socks off so that they share things on
50:11 socials themselves. Plus, this influencer marketing component and just
50:16 this idea of building in public has been really helpful. This point about
50:20 activation being kind of uh embedded within the product team of the AI exper
50:24 of the AI agent essentially. So, it's essentially not the growth team thinking
50:27 about activation. It's the product team that is building the AI magic that is
50:32 obsessed with activation and it feels like those are the main the main growth
50:37 levers. Is there anything else that I missed? >> Community. I think community is really
50:42 important here because you need to bring people together as they're exploring
50:46 these capabilities and as they're seeing what's possible so they can bounce off
50:49 each other and they can help each other out. So I would say community also
50:53 amplifies that word of mouth. It amplifies all of the social posting. It
50:58 it amplifies retention mechanisms uh for you as well. But community has been a
51:03 huge part of lovable success as well and that's something that was started very
51:07 early on. It runs on discord so it's nothing fancy. It's not like we build
51:10 anything completely from scratch for ourselves. Um and it has hundreds of
51:15 thousands of members and it's um it's very lively. We have community managers
51:21 that are making sure that all of the questions get answered and the right
51:23 groups are being created. We have incredible ambassador pro program now as
51:29 well of people uh doing it. So I would say community here again of really
51:35 making software more human is very important role. Now now obviously not
51:39 everybody can build a community but maybe at least plugging in into
51:43 somebody's community is uh quite important as well. And then there's
51:46 another one unless you have a question on community. >> No keep going. Another one is uh giving
51:53 your product away a lot. And for AI products, it may feel counterintuitive
51:58 because they're so costly. Every single interaction with an AI product cost
52:03 companies something. There's an LLM pass through cost uh that is coming through.
52:08 And uh a lot of especially traditional tech companies I see are gating AI
52:13 immediately behind a pay wall because uh they're sitting on a really cush um high
52:18 margin profile. And the moment that you start giving AI away for free, you're
52:23 like cutting into those uh margins with like a like a knife through the butter.
52:29 Now, at the same time, AI being so new and the capabilities being so new, you
52:34 have to remove the barrier of entry. You have to give a lot of your product away
52:37 for free. But by the way, I don't just mean premium. Premium to me is just like
52:42 a baseline. If you're in the new category, you need to let people explore
52:47 what it is for free and get that initial wow moment. It's not a ha moment, by the
52:51 way. It doesn't need to be aha moment anymore. It just needs to be a wow
52:54 moment. And for lovable is that first preview generation after your first
52:59 prompt, even though it's absolutely not going to be complete thing of what you
53:03 want to build, but you just go this is possible like I had no idea I want to
53:06 keep building. And it becomes an addictive exercise. But we also give so
53:12 many of our lovable credits away to every event to every hackathon. If you
53:16 want to host a lovable hackathon, we will sponsor it and give all of the
53:19 participants credits away for free. So we give them away as candy and we uh
53:24 basically track them over our LLM cost on premium and giveaways as our
53:29 marketing costs and it doesn't go into our uh something we need to reduce uh to
53:35 make our margins better. It goes into this is something that we need to spend
53:39 more in because this is part of our growth secret sauce. >> Okay, I want to hear more about the
53:44 growth secret sauce. That is extremely interesting. Uh I haven't heard of that
53:48 as a strategy and I can see why this makes sense. If the strategy is blow
53:51 people's socks off so they could tell their friends, post on all the socials.
53:55 The trick is get more people to try it. And so this is and and it's such a new
53:59 crazy thing. Like why would I pay money? Why would I even go take the effort to
54:03 like try sign up for an account if I don't know what this is? because I don't
54:05 know what I'm doing with it. So, I could see how this loop goes faster and faster
54:10 by giving it away. >> Exactly. And again, this is very
54:14 uncomfortable sometimes for companies that a either used to really AI
54:19 companies have lower profile of margins. That's absolutely true. We to find an AI
54:24 company with 80 90% margin profile is absolutely impossible. Let's be real.
54:29 We're all sitting somewhere in the 40% uh or so, which is a lot smaller. So any
54:35 time that you look at those AI costs as your cost center, that's when you're in
54:39 trouble. You fundamentally have to flip the script and say, "I need to expose to
54:44 people of what is possible and I need to remove the monetization friction out of
54:48 it." Because if you don't, nobody's ever going to try it or you're going to be
54:52 very easily overtaken by a competitor that will give it away. And let's face
54:55 it, once you hook people, they're more likely going to stay with you. So you
54:58 obviously have to still work on the retention strategy there. But if you can
55:02 have like for our case if somebody one of our users stands up and say hey I'm
55:07 gonna have a hackathon at my work unlovable can you give us all some free credits to
55:15 play with why would we prevent a person who wants to do all of the marketing and
55:20 activating job for us in their company from using us? Of course we're like take
55:25 it. How much do you need? How much would you like? We will sponsor it all. We
55:28 will give you anything that you need. So, we're really leaning into people
55:32 that are wanting to show this magic to those around you and empowering them as
55:36 much as possible. And um that is something that is actually applies to
55:40 every single product. And I agree, this is not a growth strategy that I've ever
55:44 applied in my life on like giving product away as much as possible, but it
55:48 is something that uh is more and more becoming something that I see that is
55:52 absolutely non-negotiable. >> What I'm feeling is like the more
55:55 mind-blowing it is, the more you should give it away for free.
55:58 >> Yeah. especially in a competitive market where everyone is you know it's hard
56:02 there's like so many companies trying to do this thing and so um so it's almost
56:06 like the better you are the more you should give it away >> right right
56:10 >> and this also explains why uh so much VC money has to be raised for these sorts
56:13 of companies because this is not cheap like you said you're paying all these
56:16 foundational models a lot of money >> yes and no uh because I'm only going to
56:21 say no is because so take a look at lovable we're two over 200 million in AR
56:26 at this point we're 100 people charge. So our headcom count costs are
56:30 >> very Let me just let me just make sure people hear that. 200 millionaire I
56:35 didn't realize 100 people work at Lovable. >> Yes. And 6 months ago we had 30 people
56:40 working at Lovable. So we triple. So for us it's a really big deal. We tripled
56:43 our company size. Uh we're going to quadruple it by the end of Yeah. I know
56:49 >> we're big boy and girls now. But for for perspective of the headcount cost, it's
56:54 minimal. So we have very little in that going on. We are not spending a lot on
56:59 paid marketing. So, we're not a big paid marketing driver. Yeah, we're spending
57:02 on influencer marketing, but it's not majority of our growth. It's uh low
57:07 double digits uh to to be fair because it's it's not why we're successful. It's
57:11 amplifying our success and it's helping us reach new audiences. Uh we don't have
57:15 really large sales team. We have only a couple sales folks um and they're just
57:19 starting to ramp up their enterprise efforts. So, we don't have like really
57:23 big enterprise demand gen costs as well. So from that perspective, if you like
57:28 look at the equation and you say, well, okay, if you're not going to do a lot of
57:31 paid marketing, if you're not going to do a lot of sales because we're really
57:35 only working on hand raisers of people that are saying right now that they want
57:39 to buy lovable, then where is like you don't have big costs. So you can spend
57:43 it on product and that is the beautiful part because you're not when we're
57:46 giving our product away to our customers, we're not competing with
57:51 other companies in that space because they're just going to use lovable in
57:55 their hackathon on their own and we're not competing on AdWords or like in paid
58:01 Google where everybody's buying real estate for eyeballs. So from that
58:05 perspective is I think about it more as a shift of where we spend and cost and
58:11 honestly it's more efficient way to do paid marketing almost in a sense uh
58:16 because of the cost per eyeball that we get there is quite a bit lower compared
58:20 to if we were trying to compete it on Google. So yes and no to your statement
58:26 because it actually does not deteriorate margin profile. We're just shifting of
58:31 where we're spending it. That is an incredibly important point you're making
58:34 there. So it's not like uh you're generating an incredible amount of
58:39 revenue. Uh so there is money available to spend and what you're saying is
58:43 because it's been spreading through word of mouth mostly. You're not spending
58:47 tons of money on salespeople. You're not spending tons of money on paid ads.
58:51 >> This is just uh an amazing way to get more people to use it. So it's kind of
58:54 like a marketing cost. >> This is productled growth. >> Yeah.
59:00 >> To the max. Supercharged. Yes. because you're literally using your product to
59:05 drive that awareness by giving it away to the agents in your ecosystem that
59:11 will do that distribution for you. >> So fascinating. What a what a wild world
59:15 we're living in. Free stuff for everyone. >> Yes. Yes. I mean, it's great for
59:20 consumers. This is a great time to be a consumer. You have so many options. Like
59:24 everybody's throwing themselves at you, giving your product away for free. So,
59:28 it's great to be in the market right now. I think it's the the power should
59:32 be with consumer always but with software power has not been with
59:36 consumer previously because we were forced to use towards some solutions
59:40 because of either how they were chosen for us or what was available in the
59:43 market and now that supply is almost infinite the demand of from the
59:49 consumers can be very picky and the one that serves the best will win
59:53 >> and I think again it's important to highlight this is not some kind of VC
59:56 subsidized bubbleish sort of thing like there is a lot of money being generated
60:00 that you are spending to help it grow faster. It's not like some kind of we're
60:03 just raising more money to give away more money. Like you're actually making
60:06 real money. It's not driving it's not driven by VC money. >> I I I can't comment on specific margin
60:14 details for us. Uh but at the same time, the money that we're raising on VC is
60:18 for future development and hardening our business. >> Uh not because we will not be able to
60:22 survive without it. >> Awesome. Okay, great segue too. I want
60:25 to talk about product market fit and competition. you had this really
60:27 interesting post that I don't think people uh grasp yet, which is that
60:33 product market fit is no longer this like we've done it product market fit
60:37 and we're up and to the right now we just grow grow now we hire sales people
60:41 it's going to be great uh you've written that just product market fit is no
60:43 longer this like you've done it and you're good it's this endless fight to
60:48 keep it talk about what you're seeing there >> so I'll first start with what I've felt
60:54 at least before when people were talking about product market fit
60:57 that yeah obviously always product market fit is an evolving thing but the
61:01 rate of that evolution was measured in years and what is it that you need the
61:05 next product market fit step function change which often was called second
61:11 horizon or third horizon sometimes five 10 years sometimes even longer that you
61:14 need that you depending on how good your and hardy your initial product market
61:18 fit was but you'd spend years scaling the original product market fit it was
61:23 like blitz growth stage marketing sales growth was very important um that you
61:27 just try to get it to as many people as possible and then once you have
61:31 saturation or the cost to getting to the marginal people becomes too high, you
61:33 start thinking, okay, what else can I offer to help me reach additional people
61:38 or sell more to existing users that I already have? And again, the main point
61:43 here is it would take years to get to that stage where it became a question
61:48 that you had to face um really hard face to face. Now it's 3 months and all of a
61:54 sudden you have to face that question again and it's happening because of two
61:59 things in my opinion. Number one in AI technology of what LLM is capable of
62:05 doing changes still very rapidly with new model release with each new model
62:10 release. So I think we're going to I think we'll stabilize at some point and
62:14 it's going to become more marginal but we're not there yet. So every 3 months
62:19 or so, every single AI LLM provider creates a step function change on what
62:25 is possible with that LLM. And when you have this new possibility in just an
62:29 underlying technology that opens up in front of you, then it creates another
62:34 ceiling of what is possible to build on top of it. And the tricky piece here is
62:40 that it's not enough to just wait for that technology to get better and then
62:45 start building on top. you have to build beforehand to like make a bet and then
62:49 it's the LLM to catch up because when that model releases you already need to
62:53 have that functionality available. So that piece is I've never been in a
62:58 company where the fundamental capabilities are still changing so
63:02 rapidly and that's the product part. So the product can leap to the new
63:06 expectations but let's not talk about the market part as well. Consumer
63:11 expectations have never changed this fast before. what we expected Chad GPT
63:17 to be able to do and answer and how we wanted it to talk to us eight months ago
63:23 versus now is night and day and like the deep thinking mode and uh the like the
63:28 how how how deeply it can go into answering questions and what is capable
63:31 of being building on top of it. So consumer perception has never changed
63:36 this fast too is this unprecedented time of consumers all of a sudden like in a
63:42 month saying oh it's not doing this yet like I'm bouncing before again consumer
63:46 perceptions would be years to take it's actually technology would sometimes be
63:50 able to already address it but consumer perception has not not been changed yet
63:54 so it would take a long time so we're like in this really weird part where
63:57 both product and market is shifting so rapidly that every 3 months I feel like
64:03 we have to recapture our product market fit and not just recapture on the same
64:08 technology and with same customers. It's both of those pieces of the equation
64:13 change every 3 months. And it's terrifying in a way. It's also very
64:18 confusing in a way because we're $200 million company and we're not solely
64:23 focused on marketing and sales because we still have to recapture our product
64:27 market fit. And you know that the team that finds your product market fit is
64:30 very different than the team that usually scales your company. Yet we have
64:34 to find the team that is capable of doing both on ongoing basis. Now I think
64:40 every AI company is in on this product market fit treadmill. Uh hopefully that
64:46 treadmill speed slows down. If not I think we're going to come up with like
64:49 crazy things of what this LLM and AI will be able to do if it's going to
64:53 continue at this cusp. But um it's a weird place to be in because every 3
64:58 months we have to throttle on our scaling efforts and just reinvent and
65:04 then scale again. But it's like short blitz of growth, not these long
65:08 year-long commitments. What makes this very real is just this week apparently
65:14 OpenAI had this whole code red moment where even though OpenAI by far the
65:20 leading AI assistant over almost a billion I think monthly active users
65:24 like basically synonymous with AI around the world with Gemini 3 launching their
65:28 market share just started to dip really quickly. I think they lost like six
65:34 something% in like a week. And so even OpenAI like chat GPT the original the
65:39 one that everyone uses constantly is is is in danger. >> It's like nobody's nobody's future is
65:46 bulletproof yet. And 10 years ago, if you asked me if a $200 million company
65:50 was at risk in losing product market fit in the next three months if it's
65:54 experiencing 10% month- over-month growth, I would have said, "You're
65:58 crazy." And now that's the reality that we live in. And I I I don't know. I it's
66:04 fascinating to world. And what a time to be alive. >> What a time to be alive. And uh very
66:09 stressful, but the prize at the end is massive. That's the, you know, that's
66:12 why this is worth doing. Uh not just, you know, monetarily, but just the
66:15 impact it's going to have on the world, the way we people build and ship.
66:19 >> Exactly. Exactly. The ceiling of what is possible has been raised so massively
66:24 that we haven't even became too closest to even see it. I believe so I think
66:29 that that's the exciting part of it. >> The way I've seen you write about this
66:33 product market fit challenge is the traditional approaches you have these
66:36 like core users that are using it happy with it and then you expand to the
66:39 adjacent users and expand to the next and you're basically just trying to
66:42 recapture that same core constantly and don't even have time to go adjacent.
66:47 Yeah, I Bengali wrote a really wonderful article. It was many years ago at this
66:51 point on adjacent user theory and that your product market fit expansion when
66:55 you're in no growth stages. The biggest opportunity for you to go after is this
66:59 what he called adjacent user which are just outside of your core user. They
67:04 have uh somewhat similar needs but maybe they're in different geo maybe they have
67:08 slightly different use case, slightly different needs. and your biggest way to
67:12 continue growing your product market fit without having to go to next horizon is
67:17 to capture those um that next group of users. The interesting piece
67:20 here of how I relate to it, we still have the core users and by the way those
67:24 core users are mostly pioneers right now that are excited by the capabilities.
67:28 Then there's latent majority that is filled with adjacent users. And the
67:33 issue right now which I'm actually quite worried about us like as a category is
67:37 that we're constantly focusing on recapturing the pioneers. We don't have
67:43 time to go after adjacent users and I'm worried of whether there's going to be a
67:47 gap in the space where we actually going to alienate the latent majority because
67:53 we're so hyperfocused on just staying top of mind and t top of capabilities on
67:58 the pioneers. But I don't know the right answer here because without the pioneers
68:03 they'll like you need pioneers for a latent majority to follow. But if you
68:09 take pioneers and you take them too far into capabilities, will latent majority
68:14 never be able to catch up? Uh maybe this is a fruitless concern, but it's just
68:17 like something that I think about because at this stage we should be
68:22 working on adjacent users and and I would argue maybe OpenAI definitely
68:27 started have uh to do that with so many people they have on their platform, but
68:31 not most of the other AI companies. >> I completely see what you're thinking
68:34 there. Like a brand could just become known as that's just for like startups
68:37 and prototyping and it's not for serious work. >> Yeah. Or it's like it's for just like
68:43 for it's for techies. It's like for tech people. It's like it never actually
68:48 enters the people uh outside of our little bubble that we live in.
68:51 >> We kind of touched on this a little bit of just like working in AI, working on
68:57 AI companies. Uh challenging, stressful, a lot of work. What's your advice for
69:01 folks that are thinking about should I join a lovable? Should I join a cursor?
69:05 Should I just go work at Google Micros? You know, not not to throw them under
69:08 the bus or anything, but just although Google very very successful in AI now,
69:13 maybe less AI focused company. >> I really believe that there's different
69:16 you need to understand what's the environment that is right for you. Just
69:21 please understand that AI companies are very hectic at the moment. They're very
69:26 unstable by definition of that product market fit treadmill about that
69:30 distribution of how they're actually distributed to the market really
69:33 changing about how product is even being developed in the first place. So if you
69:37 are very comfortable in being in that messy middle and uh really comfortable
69:43 of converting chaos into clarity for you and those around you then yeah AI
69:47 company is a wonderful place for you to really absorb new skill sets right now
69:52 because I even before joining lovable when I kept seeing AI I'm like my gosh
69:57 like I'm so tired of seeing AI everywhere. Is it really changing the
70:01 world? Like is it really changing the way people work? And when I was um I was
70:05 at Dropbox before and yeah, we would use AI here and there and I would use
70:09 CHIGPT. I've never used AI there the way I use AI at lovable and the things that
70:14 I'm capable of accomplishing at Lovable and I don't know if I've ever would have
70:18 made that leap so fast unless I joined Lovable. If I would have just read or
70:22 listened about it, it's just different compared to be surrounded by people
70:27 where it's expectation. It's not like a nice to have or something that
70:30 somebody's asking you to do. This is just how you get things done and you
70:33 have to think about everything of like what can AI do here versus where do I
70:39 add value versus like in a traditional sense of work is like I start with my
70:44 own value and then I augmented with AI and here like the mindset is completely
70:48 uh shifted. Now I don't think AI is replacing everybody's job. So like
70:51 please don't like don't look at it as a as as that cliche saying. I actually
70:57 often call AI as like average intelligence that helps me get the
71:01 platform up and then I add my human thinking and my human creativity on top
71:06 of it to get it to the next level. But at least I can get this base level done
71:11 with AI really freaking quickly. So from that perspective, I think if you want to
71:16 leaprog on what it means to be AI native employee and how to use all of these AI
71:21 tools, you should go to AI company. But if you know that your superpower is in
71:26 more structure, in more definition, in a really high specialty of things, because
71:31 in AI companies, they're all fairly small. So, you'll have to generalize
71:35 quite a bit and have a lot of ownership of areas that you usually maybe not have
71:39 ownership over, then you shouldn't join it because AI companies will evolve to
71:44 be more stable too. So, it's just a matter of time on where you can join. So
71:47 I would just urge people to look at their superpowers and the type of
71:51 environments that really speak to them so they can feel happy because this can
71:58 lead to burnout for wrong type of personalities very quickly.
72:02 >> Yeah. My sense is if you want work life balance, don't join one of these
72:05 companies because that's just not the way they work. >> I don't know if I'd go that far. I mean
72:11 I have family. I have two kids. I feel like I have a very good work life
72:15 balance. Uh, but I put in boundaries for myself. Like I know when I need time
72:19 off, I need because I know when my brain starts to overheat, so to speak. Uh, but
72:25 I I also know that work is my hobby and it's my passion and I will this is the
72:29 best work of my life that I'm doing right now. There's no other place that
72:34 I'd rather be uh than to be here. So, I think that you just need to be more
72:38 careful about setting your own boundaries that you know you need. But
72:43 um I mean let's face it I don't think anybody has work life balance regardless
72:46 of a company that they work at even at Google or like Microsoft or any of the
72:52 others. I think everybody is freaking out and running as fast as they can.
72:56 It's just they're running it in different structures. I'm really glad
73:00 you said that and corrected me there that it is possible to work at a company
73:05 one of if not the fastest growing company in history and actually uh have
73:09 work life balance to get sleep to spend time with your kids and family.
73:13 >> You just have to protect it uh ruthlessly but you also need to be
73:18 realistic with how much is expected out of you and you need to feel confident
73:22 that you'll be able to deliver it. And by the way, you won't be able to deliver
73:27 it unless you use AI in many aspects of your work life. So that's like the piece
73:31 that helps you actually get to hit those expectations of outcomes that you need
73:36 to do and the velocity. But um I'm I'm very protective of my personal time with
73:40 kids. Like why did I have children if I'm not going to spend time with them?
73:43 So like those are part of the non-negotiables um that I bring along
73:48 with me in every single work. for people that maybe have trouble setting
73:51 boundaries or just not good at this anything what do you what works for you
73:54 is it just is it as easy as just telling people here's where I need to leave what
73:57 do you what's what advice do you have for people to set boundaries like that
74:00 >> so first of all I would not think about it as a work life balance there's no
74:03 such thing as balance or balance feels like oh I have enough time for
74:06 everything I don't have enough time for anything but I prioritize my family in
74:13 some moments I prioritize work in other moments and I don't try to balance the
74:17 two I go where I'm needed and where I go and I feel like I'm not going to regret
74:21 the choices that I'm making today. So, I'm constantly trying to put myself in
74:25 the future and say, well, I resent myself if I make this choice right now.
74:28 And if the answer is yes, I don't make that choice. And sometimes I have to say
74:33 no to Anton and say like I can't make it or I won't be there. I need to be here
74:37 with my family or like today I need to cancel my day. My kid is sick and he
74:42 needs me and I need to be I need to take him to the doctor. So I think that just
74:47 making in the moment more like in every day even sometimes in the hour decisions
74:51 to me works better than trying to balance something that is completely
74:55 unachievable and it feels overwhelming to even think about. But I prioritize
75:00 this in my sleep, uh my health, my workout schedule, my kids, my family, my
75:05 husband, um and just my downtime because I know that I'm most creative once I
75:09 have separation from work because then I come in with like all still firing and I
75:14 have so many more ideas about it. So to me, it's actually part of doing my best
75:18 work is to take time off. >> That is really great advice. I want to
75:22 touch on what it's like to work at Lovable because it feels like Lovable is
75:28 at the cutting edge of what working at in product is going to be. So, you
75:31 mentioned a little bit about how you're always talking to AI asking questions.
75:35 Is there any any other kind of anecdotes of just how people operate at Lovable
75:39 that is really unique or weird or funny or interesting that might be helpful for
75:43 people to try in their company? >> Yeah, I mean we use Lovable at Lovable a
75:47 lot. Like all of our internal tools are built on Lovables. Uh we actually have
75:51 our first hackathon on lovable happening next week. Uh where we're going to
75:55 entire company is just going to take full day to pipe code um and see what we
76:00 actually have happen. We prototype everything on lovable. So our specs yeah
76:05 we do still have a written spec but it always accompanied by a lovable
76:09 prototype uh that everybody can interact with and uh to click around with and
76:13 provide feedback and everybody punches in and also like does some edits if they
76:18 have any better ideas. So I uh create mocks on lovable. So for example, we
76:23 need to make some pricing changes um a pricing page changes. I take a
76:27 screenshot of our pricing page. I go to lovable. I say recreate this pricing
76:31 page, make these changes and then I send that to my engineering team saying hey
76:34 this is what I want to happen and then like they take it from there. So we just
76:39 you and Chad GPT I use a lot for brainstorming especially the deep
76:43 thinking mode. I love it. It takes a long time but it's so worth it. Uh
76:48 sometimes it has crazy ideas, sometimes it does. Like sometimes I was like,
76:51 "Yeah, this is like nothing new to me." So it's not interesting, but like it
76:55 gets me thinking and it gets me look at the different angles and um lots of um I
77:01 use Granola a lot for example because to me it's super helpful to get AI
77:05 summaries of the meetings and it's very powerful for me. I use Whisper Flow a
77:09 lot because I feel like I have no time to type anymore. So I just like talk to
77:13 my phone and talk to my laptop all the time uh in order to do it. But we're
77:18 even thinking about all of the customer support automations uh that are done
77:23 through AI. How do we um every single aspect of what we do is question is
77:30 asked what can AI do here first and then how we can add ourselves into the
77:35 equation. But lovable for us uh having unlimited credits at lovable is a pretty
77:40 awesome perk I have to say. Like I sometimes have to pinch myself. I'm like
77:44 I get paid to VIP code. This is like so fun. >> I feel like that engineer or that VIP
77:49 code engineer, he's he's like actually >> my dream job. I want his job. I feel
77:53 like I Yeah. I I got into the wrong line of profession here.
77:57 >> Oh man. Okay. Uh is there anything else about Lovable? Because the what I think
77:59 about actually I interviewed the perplexity founders back in the day
78:03 years ago and they shared like before we talked to anyone for advice we first
78:08 asked Chacha PT and I was just like that is the most insane thing I've ever
78:11 heard. How can you possibly work that way and now that's how everyone works
78:15 and so I'm curious just I don't know like how I don't know how Anton works.
78:17 Is there anyone else that just like way in the future of here's how things might
78:21 be? So for me especially for product and growth I and even marketing at some
78:25 point it's in some capacity when I have an idea in my head it like it sounds so
78:30 freaking cool and sometimes I can even like I put it in paper and it's like a
78:34 this is like like we need to do it and then like I go and try to vibe code it
78:38 and I'm like oh like this like I don't see the magic anymore like or I can't
78:43 like I can't envision it anymore or sometimes I'm like yeah yeah and like
78:47 there's more there's more. So to me it's actually has helped really complete the
78:52 ideation process for me quite a bit because then I actually try to go and
78:56 build it and it breaks down some of the elements of what's important, what's
79:01 not. So it's taking me on product development life cycle so much further
79:06 down and then it creates a much better communication vehicle with my engineers
79:10 too because like I then can tell them exactly what's important, what not. So
79:14 to me it's been great because sometimes we envision things that are so much
79:18 better than the reality and before until it hands it off to design like we would
79:22 never be a like designers would do it for us and try to make it awesome versus
79:28 I often stop my ideas in tracks super early on without pushing it forward
79:32 versus other times I might have pushed it too for too far too long even through
79:38 design queue or even like pitching to leadership and uh I find that very
79:43 powerful because It calibrates me really quickly. >> Awesome. Okay, last question. I want to
79:47 talk about something that you've written about that is a really uh I think it's a
79:50 really important topic, something that we should surface is you wrote this post
79:54 called I'm worried about women in tech. Talk about what you're seeing here. What
79:58 you're noticing, what you think might be going in the wrong direction.
80:01 >> Yeah. There's actually conflicting data points about how um women, you're
80:07 talking about women, right? Women. Yeah. uh there's conflicting data points about
80:12 uh how women are keeping up with AI technology and wave because there's a
80:16 bunch of reports that has been done that show massive gap between women adopting
80:22 AI versus men adopting AI which points the story that um men are just like
80:27 widening the gap uh of like accessibility for technology and whoever
80:31 is adopting AI right now is getting paid the most gets the most opportunities I
80:35 mean we're seeing like in say in aqua hires right now where people are getting
80:39 paid more for their talent than for the companies that they've created and
80:43 that's like a really interesting trend that is occurring and a lot of it is
80:47 fueled on um on this wave of AI and women are not really present there like
80:52 if you can think about like $1 million aqua hire that has been in the news that
80:56 is a woman like I can't think of one if you look at AI companies and their CEOs
81:01 uh most of it is men if you if you look at the company's composition of um in AI
81:07 companies it's mostly men. To me, this really came to the head of when I came
81:12 to Lovable and I'm like, it's pink, it's purple brand, it's a heart, it's
81:17 lovable. I'm like, I'm sure this is where it's 50/50 men versus women. And
81:22 uh although we don't collect this information, but just like through third
81:28 party um uh autofill, we saw it's like 20% at most. And I'm like, what is
81:32 happening? Not again. Why is this again not being adopted by women? And uh
81:37 obviously I don't know all of the answers. Um I think that this is early
81:42 on that we can shortcut it. And by the way, I also don't want to put this as a
81:47 indication that men are to blame because I think men are doing wonderful job
81:52 really spearheading the horizons and showing us what's possible and like
81:56 leading the charge. I'm just afraid that so many women are stuck in that latent
82:00 majority that is just not catching up. And my worry is that it's going to
82:05 affect the hirable talent. is going to step us back again in the composition of
82:09 the workplace of the diversity and maybe it matters maybe it doesn't like
82:13 whichever side that you s sit on but I think that there is it's if needs to be
82:18 built for everybody in the world and for that it needs to be built by a
82:22 representative sample of uh people that are behind the product as well. So I I I
82:29 just find it fascinating that even when the barrier to building has been lowered
82:34 uh versus like you don't need computer science degree which I appreciate
82:38 there's not that many women that are getting we're still seeing the gaping um
82:46 gap on the adoption between genders which is just is I I I I don't know
82:49 there's like something very frustrating about that. >> Yeah. Uh the thing that struck with me
82:54 with from your post is there has been a lot of progress being made in the last
82:58 decade and now AI is just kind of turning it all back, turning it all
83:02 around. Hopefully not. I think that we're early on enough that we can bridge
83:08 the gap. I think sometimes uh women just need space and ability to discover it.
83:12 Uh and uh that's what we're doing at lovable. We have this initiative uh she
83:17 builds where we have collect we have create a hackathon for women only and we
83:21 give them unlimited access to lovable for 48 hours and um they come together
83:25 as a community and they build together and there's like beautiful things that
83:28 start to come out of it which I've never anticipated before but so many women in
83:34 that hackathon for us build help for their with their elderly parents or with
83:39 their kids or with the household or for their church group or for the the kids
83:44 basketball team. solutions should have hyper local, hyper relevant, very needed
83:49 for what they need in their life and something that was never been able to
83:53 build before because of how expensive software was because it would never
83:57 going to become potentially a hundred million dollar companies but it also
84:01 doesn't need to be anymore. So I just want to bring women to build more and
84:06 vibe code more so we can have more diversity in software that is even
84:11 created because I think that we all have a unique take on what problems that we
84:16 can solve and I want everybody's voices to be heard. >> I'll give the URL for shebuilds. I
84:20 pulled it up while you're talking. >> bitecoded on lovable minimum viable
84:27 product. >> Minimal lovable product. >> There it is. So when is this happening?
84:33 Is this December 15th, 18th? So it's >> Yeah, we have it. We're running it
84:38 constantly. So our next cohort uh starts um December 15th, but we're going to
84:43 have more. We're planning a massive one on International Women's Day.
84:47 >> So that's the one that if you can come join us. >> Awesome. I don't know if you Okay, so
84:50 some glimmer of hope. I don't know if you saw this tweet where I tagged you
84:53 the other day or maybe it was this today. I was looking at my most recent
84:59 podcast video performance and the top four are all women and they're all AI
85:04 oriented and they're above Stuart Butterfields, founder of Slack, above
85:10 Gamma's CEO Grant. So maybe a glimmer of hope. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think there's lots
85:13 of glimmers of hope. I think we can just all lean in and make sure that nobody's
85:19 left behind in this wave. And uh that's not to stop people that are marching
85:23 ahead. This is just to open up opportunities for everybody around us.
85:26 >> Awesome. And we'll link to that post if people want to get a deeper perspective
85:30 what you're saying. Elena, is there anything else that you wanted to share?
85:34 Is there anything else you want to remind people of before we get to our
85:38 one question lightning round? >> I guess the only other thing that I will
85:43 share uh is for AI companies when it comes to hiring. It's really interesting
85:49 also the kind of the shift in the type of personas that end up being hired that
85:53 I see for me at least it's quite different compared to anywhere uh that
85:57 I've worked before and that is uh there's this narrative going in the
86:01 market always that like new hire sorry new grads have no jobs in the market
86:05 left because all of the entry-level jobs are automated. I actually think that's
86:10 quite false because new grads especially AI native new grads. So it's very
86:15 important for kids that are entering into the work I shouldn't say kids young
86:21 adults that are entering into uh the the workforce that they really know AI which
86:26 is there's another like really big issue that our schools are not teaching AI uh
86:30 students. So, this is like something else that we need to fix as a as a
86:33 category because otherwise we're literally setting up our uh young for
86:39 for a complete failure. But I think it's incredible to see some of those new
86:42 graduates come in and what they're capable of doing. I have um we have
86:48 multiple new graduates at lovable that are working and I learned so much from
86:53 them and you need to obviously have the right atmosphere where people with
86:58 experience like old guard like me that can look at the new guard and take
87:02 really hear them and see them and really change the way that I operate based on
87:07 how they do things. So, uh, make sure that you bring some of that fresh talent
87:12 that doesn't understand any of the baggage that we came from and that can
87:17 really look at the future in technology and what can unlock from a completely
87:22 new lens. So, highly recommend putting those into your team as like little
87:27 fireballs that are going to be sometimes hard to contain, but can start the best
87:32 the best initiatives for you forward. And then um it's also interesting that
87:36 there's a really high demand for uh ex-founders now for like those people
87:41 that are truly have a lot of agency and um high autonomy. So instead of just
87:45 having people that have been working in the corporate world, the failed startup
87:50 founders are now hot demand for a lot of these AI companies. So like these
87:54 personas that we traditionally would not prioritize in companies uh to to hire
88:00 are now becoming the hottest commodity and the highest going talent which is I
88:03 think is fascinating and it's like the wonderful thing that is changing the how
88:08 uh the culture inside operates >> that is really interesting and really
88:12 empowering just this idea that uh if you need gradu's hope you're not you're not
88:14 going to be out of job. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. >> You might have an advantage. Yeah.
88:18 >> You you do have a you have to lead with that. That's the thing like you have to
88:22 lead with the things that you can you are capable of achieving knowing that
88:26 what you have with AI because that is a lot of people especially in traditional
88:30 tech or in more traditional companies they're looking for somebody to show
88:33 them because it's really hard to figure it out on your own uh versus coming in
88:37 and seeing and then copying. >> Well Elena with that we reached our very
88:40 exciting lightning round because it's your fourth time I'm not going to ask
88:43 you all the questions I always ask you so I'm just going to ask you one
88:46 question. So Lovable is based in Stockholm Sweden. I'm curious just like
88:49 what do you what's something you love about Stockholm that you weren't
88:53 expecting? Is there like a food, a restaurant, I don't know, something?
88:57 >> Well, you always have to say Swedish meatballs. I mean, I've never liked
89:03 meatballs before. Uh so like and now it's it's so good here. It's so good. So
89:08 like every time one of my meals here throughout the day involves it. But I
89:13 actually really love the sounds. They're like they're I don't know. They're so
89:16 they just taste different. It's not like the IKEA. It's not like the IKEA Swedish
89:19 meatballs. >> Well, I have been to IKEA here because that is a Swedish company, too. It like
89:25 reminded me of uh in person Amazon. It was like absolutely incredible. IKEA
89:30 here is like next level. But, uh food food I Swedish meatballs for sure.
89:34 Honestly, how clean the city is like it's it's kind of incredible. The
89:38 architecture like everything is so built out. It's like picture perfect. Like
89:41 it's on the card. I don't know. It's It's different compared to like most of the
89:47 large cities that I've been at that are a little bit more worn down.
89:51 >> So fun. Makes me want to visit get some meatballs. >> Yeah. You're in the visit during the
89:56 summer. Otherwise, the daylight here is really is really tight during the
89:59 winter. >> Okay, good tip. Okay. Uh two final questions. Where can folks find you
90:04 online if they want to reach out, maybe learn more? And how can listeners be
90:06 useful to you? >> Yes, please find me online uh on LinkedIn. Uh please feel free to follow
90:12 me. Always engage on my post if you want to engage with me because that's um the
90:16 place that I always talk to people. I have my newsletter as well um that um
90:22 baby baby steps compared to what Lenny has, but it's elenena verna.com. I also
90:26 try to that's where I post most of my findings that that I experience at my
90:30 work. So if you want to continue seeing how my thinking evolves or what the
90:34 patterns that I noticed, that's where to find me. and how to be useful to me. Um,
90:39 really pressure test my thinking because so many things are changing right now.
90:43 I'm honestly not even sure myself of what is a pattern versus what is just a
90:47 data point. So, I'd love to just engage in as many conversations as possible uh
90:53 and hear your opinions because that will help us as an industry just understand
90:57 what is actually happening and makes more sense out of this whole thing.
91:00 >> I'm just going to double click on your newsletter. Definitely subscribe to it.
91:03 It's incredibly good. Everything we've talked about here, uh, Elena has written
91:07 about in her newsletter in in large part and goes even deeper. It's just elena
91:11 vernett.com. If you're like reading this on your podcast app or YouTube, you can
91:14 just look at her name and just type it.com and you'll find it and subscribe
91:18 and you'll be really happy. Elena, thank you so much for being here. This was
91:20 amazing. Everything I wanted it to be. Thank you for sharing. I know you have a
91:24 lot a lot of work to do, so I appreciate you making time for this and for joining
91:26 us. >> Thank you for having me. Really appreciate you.
91:30 >> Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you
91:33 found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
91:39 or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or
91:42 leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You
91:47 can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennispodcast.com.
