The new AI growth playbook for 2026 | How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year

Lenny Rachitsky:You're ahead of growth at Lovable on track to be the fastest or one of the fastest growing companies in history.

Elena Verna:We're over $200,000,000 in ARR at this point. We're a 100 people large. The pace here is insane.

Lenny Rachitsky:You said that you've had to throw out most of your growth playbook.

Elena Verna:I feel like only 30 to 40% of what I've learned in the last fifteen to twenty years of being in growth transfers here because we just need to invest in such bigger bets and innovate and create new growth loops here. Everybody and their mother is starting a vibe coding business nowadays and we need to figure out how to be ahead of them. And to be ahead of them is not optimization of the problem, it's reinvention of the solution. I just feel like I usually spend maybe 5% innovating on growth in my previous roles. Right now I'm spending 95% innovating on growth and only 5% on optimization.

Lenny Rachitsky:What do you find is actually moving the needle?

Elena Verna:One of our biggest strategy is building in public and it's coupled with employee socials, founder led socials, and another one is giving your product away a lot. This is part of our growth secret sauce. You have to remove the barrier of entry. If somebody, one of our users, stands up and says, hey, I'm going to have a hackathon at my work on Lovable, can you give us some free credits to play with? Why would we prevent a person who wants to do all of the marketing and activating for us from using us? We're like, take it, how much do you need?

Lenny Rachitsky:The trick is get more people to try it. Just ship things you can talk about.

Elena Verna:The only way to create a word-of-mouth loop is just to blow their socks off.

Lenny Rachitsky:Today my guest is Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable. In under one year after launching with fewer than 100 people, Lovable hit $200,000,000 ARR, which is one of, if not the fastest ramp to $200,000,000 ARR in history, and growth is still accelerating. They've also recently raised a Series B at a $6,000,000,000 valuation. So with that, there's a lot to learn about what Lovable has figured out about growth. This is Elena's fourth visit to the podcast, a record. She is my favorite growth mind, and in our conversation we talk about how the growth playbook has fundamentally changed for AI companies, what works now, what no longer works, and what has surprised her most about how Lovable grows. She also shares her advice about whether working at an AI company is right for you, some incredibly interesting insights into Lovable's secret sauce for growth, the unique ways they operate internally, their approach to building minimal lovable products, also how they hire, and also how product market fit as a concept is no longer what it used to be and how every company basically has to recapture product market fit every three months. This episode is incredibly tactical and you will leave this conversation smarter on so many levels. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube, and if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of 19 incredible premium products including a year free of Lovable, Replete, Bolt, N.A.N, Linear, Devon, Post Hoc, Superhuman, Descript, Whisper Flow, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, Chappy RD, Mobbin, and Stripe Atlas. Head on over to lennysnewsletter.com and click product pass. With that, I bring you Elena Verna. After a short word from our sponsors, here's a puzzle for you: what do OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, Vercel, Platt, and hundreds of other winning companies have in common? The answer is they're all powered by today's sponsor WorkOS. If you're building software for enterprises, you've probably felt the pain of integrating single sign on, SCIM, RBAC, audit logs, and other features required by big customers. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Whether you're a seed stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unlocking growth. They're essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack support where they have real engineers in there who answer your questions super fast. WorkOS allows you to build like the best with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise ready today. This episode is brought to you by VZero from FirstCell. VZero is the web development assistant designed for professionals of all technical backgrounds. Whether you're a product manager, designer, or developer, transform how you bring products to life with VZero. Everybody can cook. Don't just show up to reviews with docs and ideas, arrive with working prototypes that demonstrate real functionality. VZero drafts project plans, generates interactive interfaces, and builds full stack applications without writing a single line of code. And with features like AI and database integrations, screenshot import, and sync with GitHub, VZero helps reduce development bottlenecks and enhance collaboration between technical and nontechnical team members. The result: faster iteration and a shorter path from idea to implementation. Vercel built VZero for the builders who want to create at the moment of inspiration. If you can dream it, you can ship it. Visit vercel.com/leni to get started. That's vercel.com/lenny.

Lenny Rachitsky:Elena, thank you so much for being here and welcome back to the podcast.

Elena Verna:Thank you for having me.

Lenny Rachitsky:As you know, this is a record fourth time back to the podcast. No one else has ever achieved this feat. I feel like you're basically my cohost now.

Elena Verna:I love it. Thank you for inviting me back. I'm very proud record holder in this regard.

Lenny Rachitsky:What I love about you coming back each time is it feels like every time you come back you're just doing something even more epic and exciting. And so these days, as we'll hear in the intro, you're ahead of growth at Lovable, which no big deal, on track to be the fastest or one of the fastest growing companies in history depending on the metric that you track. Let's talk about just the scale and growth of Lovable to give people a sense of just how incredible this is. I'll share a bit of this in the intro, but just like what are some stats you can share about just how things are going at Lovable?

Elena Verna:So we are just a little bit over one years old since we launched the company actually did exist as a GPT engineer before but it officially launched in the November in 2024 so for us we've hit over $200,000,000 in annual recurring revenue before we even hit our one year milestone since being launched which is pretty incredible Yulani actually have a really great blog post on how quickly it takes for companies usually to get to their first million AR and it's usually multiple years so this is definitely a unicorn I don't think this is a standard there's a couple of things that account for it and we can talk about it the growth is only accelerating so it's compounding which is great because we had our 100,000,000 in July and just four months later were at 200,000,000 so seven months to well maybe eight months to 100,000,000 another four months to get to 200,000,000 and from users too we already have over 8,000,000 users that have tried lovable we have as you can imagine to feed that 200,000,000 hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers as well that are paying for us so things are things are going great and we'll talk about why

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay absurd I think people are getting used to these insane numbers and not long ago was like okay you hit a million ARR in a year you're doing pretty well

Elena Verna:Yeah I think it's still you're doing pretty well if you have a million ARR in one year this is this is one of the once in a lifetime type of companies and the category the way that it's evolving so I want to make sure that people don't all of sudden set this as a benchmark for success because it should never be in some categories it might be even faster as we continue evolving technology but I don't think that it's realistic to expect it out of your business that you're starting right now

Lenny Rachitsky:That is such an important point you're making there it's so discouraging to founders to hear these stories of okay 200,000,000 nuts and again this is ARR there's a lot of companies especially in the data labeling space I've had them all on the podcast that are very fast growing but they're not recurring revenue there's also they pay out their people to do this data labeling so the revenue numbers there don't really equate recurring $200,000,000 a year is absurd

Elena Verna:Yeah it is absurd I really want to make sure that people understand as we go through this episode as to why it's happening because part of it was unlovable part of it is just in the market and how it's moving so when you're setting yourself as a benchmark so you know which benchmarks you actually to use and whether lovable is the benchmark that you should be using

Lenny Rachitsky:Cool I'm gonna get into that next last question just I wanna see what you can share here a lot of people look at these numbers a lot of people are very skeptical these are lasting durable numbers like who are these people how is there $200,000,000 being spent on lovable anything you can add about just like give people confidence this is real this is gonna last this is a a really durable business

Elena Verna:Well I saw Stripe receipts so it is real as far as I'm concerned unless Stripe dashboard is lying to us but it is money getting deposited in our bank account but let's talk about who's actually contributing to that number we do have a really large use case of people starting their own companies on lovable so we call it a founder use case where somebody that is non technical that has never been able to code or create a piece of software is now able to come in and actually build an app completely from scratch and some of them are already monetizing it some of it just using it for lead gen for other services or some physical goods for example that they're selling some of them are just still building and we monetize on the act of building so that progression of like building up to your product market fit takes quite a bit of time and even with lovable we're so much more efficient and effective compared to hiring an engineer in terms of the price but it still takes time so we have a lot of founders whether it's B2C whether there's B2B or consumer products business products e commerce whatever it is but on the other side we have a lot of employees within companies using lovable as well where they're building internal tools or they're building prototypes they're building landing pages so that is another use case that is very relevant and quite efficient for us but then there is a hype and discovery that is happening as well because when I think about software think about it I talked to John Kotler actually and he gave me this framework that is like completely stuck in my mind of software always goes through capabilities stage first like what is possible to actually create with this then it needs to transition into value of how is it that am I going to get value out of this and then you can start thinking about scaling it of which aspects of my life and my work that can actually go in and we're right now very much in the capability stage with vibe coding because everybody's just exploring what can I do and the beautiful thing here is that what you can do changes every month to three months so I constantly need to come back and you need to see what has changed so a lot of people use it for personal reasons I build myself tutoring apps for my kid so he has to answer questions in order to get some screen time accumulated for him I build my own portfolio I see people doing wonderful things my favorite story that I always say there's this man that created a proposal on lovable so his fiancee had to answer questions and like she had to complete this game and then at the end there was like this big reveal and he proposed to her but people just unlock the most creative things that they build on lovable and that's where the revenue is coming from the one piece that is working very well for us in terms of how monetization model is set up and how it interjects with your activation moment which we can also cover but that is what's driving that both conversion and retention rates

Lenny Rachitsky:Let me ask you one question that's on people's minds imagine as you talk about this just what is what does retention look like

Elena Verna:Yeah so retention really I look at it in two ways retention that it comes as a subscriber retention so how much mini pay subscribers do we get and how many of them are we capable of renewing there's also very important aspect of it is how many of them can we expand because if you can get positive or above a 100% net dollar retention which is super important metric for investors if you don't know about net dollar retention please read it up that's like a superpower to get bigger multiple if you can show NDR that is over 100 and then there's actually engagement retention as well because that is the leading indicator for how your paid retention is going to look like for paid retention I know there is so much on the market of oh this is a high product and it just it's a leaky bucket and it has really high churn rates although I'm not I shouldn't share it's not public numbers for us to share actual retention however what I can say it's on par with benchmarks of other B2B SaaS products that I've ever worked at and I worked with Miro Dropbox SurveyMonkey Netlify Amplitude and others so are we absolutely crushing with paid retention no are we where most of the other companies are yes our NDR is quite good because when people bill they want to buy more credits to bill so we're seeing really good revenue retention but we're honestly more focused right now on engagement retention than even paid retention because our north star is just to get as much usage as possible and we will fix and tune our monetization model afterwards so engagement retention I would say is by far bigger priority focus for us at the moment

Lenny Rachitsky:That is incredibly interesting and optimistic to hear because of the growth rate rarely is growth rate this high and retention is on par with great companies

Elena Verna:Yeah and I'll just say too which is a little bit maybe counterintuitive to would be to a lot of companies we don't optimize for revenue at all in fact internally we have a lot of discussions about how can we give more products away how can we reduce our revenue growth rate by just getting more paid subscribers more users using lovable to just get bigger share of the market so our revenue is an outcome of us just trying to get more people through the door not us trying to optimize for revenue per user or to get them to monetize at the higher rate so there's like a very interesting path here where by actually focusing on the inputs like you should it translates to a good output but we don't look at that output as something that we're trying to grow

Lenny Rachitsky:Let's talk about growth let's talk about what you've learned about growth in this space you had this post online where you said that you've had to throw out most of your growth playbook this is a huge deal you've led growth a lot of really successful companies lovable is growing incredibly well this tells me there's a lot we can learn from what you've seen so tell us what you're seeing what's still working what's not working what you've learned about what it takes to drive growth at a company like lovable

Elena Verna:Yeah I would say that in any other role that I've come into before I felt confident in about 80% of the patterns that I can bring to that role meaning that I can identify inputs understand which framework kind of applies I know a launch of examples that fit in within that framework so we just need to localize a solution and push and it was quite productive in terms of getting a company those additional acquisition conversion engagement monetization rates so I felt very repetitive in a way after some time because I feel like I'm just coming in and copy pasting copy pasting and although every single company loves to say that they have unique problems at the end of the day all of the problems were very similar and I felt like I was doing the same job over and over again when I started at lovable the one thing to me that was very clear is that this company was growing like crazy before I joined so I want to make sure that there's not that much value on what I have even added to date because this company is on a tear and yes we're rounding the edges and removing barriers for growth so we're not standing in our own way but there's something more magical happening here that is not a pattern that I've ever seen before it's not a framework that I can even conceptualize in my head and plus it's a new category that I've never seen or I've never been in a company that is in the new emerging category that hits fast moving water so quickly and that's the difference because when you're usually trying to create a new category it takes years I know it's every marketer's dream to create a new category but it takes decades often to like really to really get that much hype and adoption around it versus with vibe coding this has seemed to have happened really quickly it's like it's hit the nerve with the market so yes we're at the right place we're at the right time but we're also in really fast moving waters and the demand that is coming to us like we need to capture it mostly we don't need to generate a lot of it yet but at the same time it comes with a really big downfalls of we're not in control of a lot of our growth I mean let's be honest about it there's so much incredible word-of-mouth that is happening and we're trying to grow that but to enable as much of that as possible but it's the company is moving we're just like hanging on to it as fast as possible and making sure that we're not going to hit a wall so to speak in front of us and that the wheels are greased and that all of the pieces are in places like your race car framework that you have as well we're really just putting a lot of oil into it and figuring out what is our engine actually going to be that is going to take us forward but when I'm thinking about the patterns here and what I have to unlearn I feel like only 30 to 40% of what I've learned in the last fifteen to twenty years of being in growth transfers here and some of it is very straightforward okay this is how you're going to do paid marketing this is how you're going to do some of the habitual retention here's the free to pay maybe monetization frameworks that still stand but the rest of it I was just saying it doesn't feel like it even matters anymore because we just need to invest in such bigger bets and innovate and create new growth loops here as opposed to trying to optimize it to the moon and beyond which would I usually be focused on in a scaled business like this

Lenny Rachitsky:Let's follow those threads so what is it that no longer is worth it in this bucket of just like let's not spend any time on this thing and then what do you find is actually moving the needle

Elena Verna:Not worth it in growth most of the people spend most of the time optimizing existing user journeys so you already have maybe some of your growth loops that you understand that you try to optimize or you just know hey there's big drop offs from acquisition to activation let me go figure out how i can tweak the dials to get it done here what i find is that optimizations are just not worth our time so a lot of the times my growth team actually ends up working on new features or just standing up new growth loops one after another and yes there's of course the saying of like more growth loops does not mean more growth but at the same time the market is moving so quickly you need to stand up a bunch of initiatives to capture it because it's perishable or we also have so much competition we're not alone here so we can't ignore that there's everybody and their mother is starting a vibe coating business nowadays and we need to figure out how to be ahead of them and to be ahead of them is not optimization of the problem it's reinvention of the solution so i just feel like i usually spend maybe 5% maybe 10% if i'm lucky innovating on growth in my roles in my previous roles right now i'm spending 95% innovating on growth and only 5% on optimization and most of my frameworks are on optimization because it's really hard to come up with frameworks for innovation because by default they're by definition they're innovative

Lenny Rachitsky:What i'm hearing here is new features launching new features new products as one of the bigger growth levers versus like you have a bunch of cool stuff make it easier to use increase activation reduce friction things like that

Elena Verna:Yeah and for example we on growth team launched integration with shopify to enable e commerce use case has been like hey there's already people trying to come in and do it shopify was open for integration with us let's go lean into it so people can vibe code their storefronts that came out of growth that usually would never come out of growth why would growth team ever invest into a core product integration or we enabled voice mode for people so they can actually chat with lovable using their voice as opposed to only having type and that's also it's a feature it's a core product feature but we're like hey it's going to help people to converse with lovable more it's going to increase the engagement one area that we've spent very little time in is activation because usually i spend majority of my time in activation because there's so many awareness things that need to happen and so many things that we need to smooth out experience for the users in order for them to get through that setup moment to moment the habit loop and here you're just interacting with agent so we at the beginning were like the agent team that we have here is working a lot on it like why would we go in there and do anything it's like our core team is responsible for activation now we're starting to move into doing agent work ourselves so all of sudden growth team is not just doing product surfaces now we're doing agentic workflows and codifying agent instructions in order for customers to activate better so the work fundamentally i feel like has gotten deeper into product and deeper into actual core product functionality as opposed to just being a smoothing surface on the outer layers

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay that is also a very big deal every growth person that's ever been on this podcast including you always talks about the power of activation just how much opportunity there is to get people to this moment realize how the value of this product that increases retention increases everything and what you're saying here is you barely spend any time on activation because in a company like lovable there's a prompt you give it what you want it generates a thing and that's basically all it is and so the impact is to make that agent better at that thing versus micro optimize every step

Elena Verna:And our agent team spends night and day thinking about it so i've never been at the company where core team thinks so much about activation thinks so much about that first generation thinks so much about reaching a moment so it's more weaved in into dna of the overall company which takes the pressure off of me to only have to focus on it because otherwise yeah i would be in that in that experience all the time but i feel a lot more at ease because everybody's thinking about it and everybody's working on making agents better and agent the beauty of it is it doesn't matter if it's actually first generation or if it's your nth generation it just needs to be a better generation agents needs to understand your intent better and think and reason behind it so it improves the entire life cycle immediately as opposed to having to only work on that first experience per se

Lenny Rachitsky:And what you're not saying is don't care about that experience it's the team building that is already obsessed with making that activation experience better and better

Elena Verna:I i love that because i that's the core product functionality at this point and before people would spend more time building deeper features or deeper use cases or trying to improve some platform functionality and now the core team they're obsessed about that first experience because that is core product

Lenny Rachitsky:Another lever that i've noticed especially with lovable and i'm seeing it more and more in social media is just founders telling you what's going on i think this connects really deeply with the new features launching new features say anton is just like hey check out this cool new thing check out our growth numbers is that a big growth lever too

Elena Verna:Yeah so one of our biggest strategy is building in public building in public and it's coupled with employee socials founder led socials for sure this is difficult for larger companies but when you're smaller and you still have a little bit more narrative control with everybody on your team plus you have so much more trust within your organization of where people are going to say the right things because they understand what actually has happened that ability to just really quickly deliver the message to the market becomes really important now we still do the big launches so we still have everything tiered into tier three two one like tier ones are going to happen as like big moments that we're going to really rally as a company behind and it's going to be something that is meant to step function change our product market fit and we're going to do a bunch of activities behind it but at the same time what's really important to us is to maintain noise in the market and that noise in the market happens by us shipping every day every other day multiple times per day and just talking about it constantly interestingly enough it's actually works as fantastic resurrection strategy because people are like oh there's more things here like i need to go check it out it also works as great re engagement strategy so instead of sending newsletters to say like here's the market trends or here's the user stories like people are like literally logging into their social to see like okay what has lovable shipped now it's like what is the change so it's interesting to them to see because from the time that they voice their opinion on what needs to happen to actual delivery is so short so they feel heard and they are heard because that's how we prioritize all of the things that we're shipping but it's interesting because i've never been in a company that tries to maintain so much just shipping velocity to maintain certain amount of noise that it feels like the product is alive it's changing every single week and then there's like these big amplifications turbo boosts so to speak in the race car model that then go out and they fundamentally create a step function change in that product market fit as a whole and that is a retention strategy i can get behind any day and all day i only hope that we can maintain it as we continue scaling

Lenny Rachitsky:Sounds stressful this reminds me i had gaurav he is the ceo of mirage he used to be called captions which is a really successful ai video company startup and they have a policy of you ship a marketable feature every week that's how their company operates and it's the same thing it's just ship things you can talk about

Elena Verna:Velocity of shipping is our number one core value in development team so we do anything and everything to just keep it going up up up and into the right and by the way this also means that everybody has a little bit of marketer within them we have very lean product organization we actually lean on our engineers to do a lot of product work we call them product engineers and they have to go and they have to announce the thing that they've shipped it doesn't just funnel through marketing so there's a lot of autonomy lot of agency that needs to happen with this type of velocity because marketing team otherwise you have to have an enormous marketing team to staff that so it has to come with some roles and responsibilities redefinition on the team as well

Lenny Rachitsky:Let's talk about marketing that's something else you've written about is just marketing is changing in a big way their role in growth how does marketing play a role in all of this

Elena Verna:On one side marketing channels are changing on the other side marketing's involvement into everything that product does is changing and then number three i think even marketing organizations in terms of where they hire the most are changing as a result as well so i'll talk about second one first just because we just talked about shipping and that is yeah you still have your product marketers you still have your channel managers but they focus more on the big things and the narratives although it's difficult because the narrative even changes all the time as these functionalities come through usually you can come up with a positioning and messaging and you can have it for years and create all of the campaigns around it now you have it for three months and then the product changes so the cycles here are really short for smaller changes because cycles are so short they spend so much time actually focusing on it as they should some of these smaller changes just cannot be supported by marketing you have to delegate it to your product and engineering team to do their own marketing because otherwise again you're going to have to have enormous marketing team in order to support it all but at the same time channels in which marketing right now works i think are changing quite a bit and not enough people i feel like are freaking out and talking about it as opposed to like moving just in the same direction over and over again and the changes that i'm seeing is that it has been very clear to me that when you're talking about organic strategy if you're marketing organic strategy if you asked me that five years ago i would have said that's seo it's search engine optimization go on google that's your organic marketing strategy if you ask me what's the organic marketing strategy right now to me it's all about social which is what is my ceo posting what is my team posting what is my linkedin what is my creator economy doing in influencer marketing and across all of the social platforms that is my organic which is that one's kind of paid to be fair but when i think about organic there is still a lot of that word-of-mouth what are my users posting on social what are they talking about it what are they what are they sharing which is like a mind shift because i've been always especially in b2b so focused on search and now i feel like it's been completely pushed even further into consumerization territory and it has become all about social no matter how b2b you are because that's where eyeballs are at

Lenny Rachitsky:That is fascinating and so when you talk about socials what are you finding is most helpful is it TwitterX is it LinkedIn is it YouTube TikTok Instagram

Elena Verna:For founder socials our employee socials X and LinkedIn are fantastic sources especially for B2B because that's where all of the B2B people are at but you cannot just have ChadGPC write your copy and post it you need to show personality there needs to be humanity that it goes through it and it's not natural for everybody and it feels very awkward sometimes to start but it's important to people to see who's building the company because there's so much competition now on functionality so they can rally behind a team so they want to have a team that they want to win and for that you need to be vulnerable you need to be authentic obviously but you just need to be yourself so that corporate scrubbing has to completely fall off which is obviously going to pull in as the company scales but at least at the beginning that is a chance to stand out and then your customers posting about you so that word-of-mouth of really creating a product that creates something for customers that is worth talking about it gives them stories that they want to share that feels empowering to them to tell to others like they're unlocking a secret like they feel proud of what they have created which what we focus a lot on lovable on to have that feeling of oh my gosh I have superpowers now and I can't wait to tell others I cannot wait to show others what is happening so on both of those sides to me that is very much organic if you're in a consumer then Instagram TikTok are very much a go as well

Lenny Rachitsky:So here it's the CEO clearly is an important variable in this them in this case Anton just tweeting here's what's going on in lovable here's how fast it's growing here's something we we've had the CEO of Gamma on recently Grant and he's exactly the same thing just sharing a bunch of lessons journey building in public a big part of the growth lever and your point here is okay so it's the CEO but then it's also how do you get your customers to share things on socials and then there's a paid influencer sort of component

Elena Verna:Yes the customer is difficult one that's a word-of-mouth loop that you need to stand up the only way to create a word-of-mouth loop is just to blow their socks off when they actually experience your product we have a really almost unfair advantage because our product is called lovable so by default we're trying to create an absolute lovable experiences like that is a mentality internally if it's not lovable we're not going to ship it so and the best way to fix a bug at lovable is to say this is not lovable like when everybody just like jumps on it to fix it right there and then sprints no sprints it doesn't matter it's getting fixed right now so from that perspective we kind of have that culture already embedded as part of our brand and it's part of our name which helps us a lot but that's the point is that you feel that brand through every interaction I talk to my designer all the time how can we add more love marks into the product how can we prioritize more unique interactions the little elements that make up that feeling of this product is speaking to me it's like it feels something that is unique it has personality behind it so we put all of the brand work actually into our product when you think about lovable thing people think about a brand but we don't have a brand marketing team yet so it's all just through product interactions and some of those building in public moments of the people behind those product interactions that is our strategy and then there's influencer marketing interestingly enough influencer marketing is 10 times bigger for us than paid social so we do some paid social as well and it's working decently it's quite expensive from payback period we're still optimizing it as I said we're pretty early on in all of these channels but influencer marketing is something that has worked from the beginning a lovable and reason behind it is that influencer marketing especially on the socials it gives you an opportunity to have a little video and interaction and lovable is all about seeing like oh my gosh this is what I can do and this is possible so that drives people to go and try it themselves so that's why social works very well for us because it's not really a written value proposition like nobody knows what by coding is but you watch ten seconds of it and you go oh that's new let me go give it a try

Lenny Rachitsky:Who would have thought that a head of growth who is traditionally seen as like data metrics spreadsheets drive KPIs is like okay how do we make this more lovable how do we add more moments of delight

Elena Verna:I know my my my joke is like at the end of my lovable journey hopefully never comes to an end but at the end I'll be like a growth brand person here here hi my name is Elena I do brand now but I I actually see it as part of growth strategy to make sure that that brand shines through every single interaction and I always talk to my team about it because that is one big lever in our growth story

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah so I think that's a really important point to highlight the reason lovable is growing so fast is it is a product people love you've made something people want and the word-of-mouth spreads because it's something that blows people's socks off as you said so it feels like that's the first thing you got to get right

Elena Verna:Yes well the first thing you have to get right is you have to be at the right place at the right time and you have to be in fast moving waters waters let's not discount how fast this category is exploding on its own so this cannot happen in every single category that you're starting to build the products but the way to stand out in the super crowded categories to create experiences that speak to people that I think is something that a lot of people deprioritize because they still prioritize functionality over humanity within software and I think that we're actually moving to the new era of software that needs to feel human that people want to interact with not just utility of it because cost of software is coming down so much to develop that we now can actually invest into emotional feel of that software as opposed to only just focus on creating the utility out of it so to me it's it's a I love this move because I hate nothing more than going to software that is just like so painful to use that I lose some brain cells as I'm interacting with it versus software that I feel I get energy out of and for lovable for me like I cannot wait on some of the projects that I have to go and vibe code myself like that's the highlight of my day and I just like I don't I bring in my daughter and I'm like let's go do this like what do you think that needs to be done because I just get so much energy out of doing it and that is the feeling you cannot create by looking at it as a utility problem

Lenny Rachitsky:The way I think about it way what you're describing is it's almost table stakes have increased and now it's so easy to build now the big differentiators experience design delight

Elena Verna:Exactly and it has to translate through every single interaction so your designer has to be one of your first hires now in startups it's not just about the the engineering so to speak utility and you have to think through every single interaction of does this communicate our brand or not

Lenny Rachitsky:So along those lines I wanna come back to something you talked about which is launching new features as a huge growth lever the kind of the big question there is just how do you maintain quality and cohesiveness as all these people are empowered to ship stuff is there anything else there you've seen that works well to help avoid just the Frankenstein product there's endless features that you want to tweet about

Elena Verna:Yeah one part of it is not something that you can codify but it's the type of people that you hire that are going to go and ship these things we at lovable try to hire the absolute best talent available out there that we can bring in and that we can source and that we can attract to grow with and what do I mean by that best talent it's not that somebody who has been at really large companies or somebody that has really done a lot of logos or has big success stories behind them it's somebody who is extremely passionate about their job it's their hobby they love to work they have fire in their belly this is not a paycheck for them they want to do this for some ulterior reason this is the biggest opportunity of their life so this is global maximum against any other opportunities that are in front of them at the moment so that's very important for us we want people to come and do their absolute best work at lovable it's very important and you can feel it in this office people are wired up they are so high on how can we make this better how can we deliver more to our customers and that's very different compared to usually how companies grow we're like okay yeah the check check check they fit the skill set let's bring them in but is that passion is that fire behind it and then the second piece is that we work really hard on just addressing what's the success here looks like what is it that we're building what use cases are we building for and then because we hire these people that are so passionate about it the other two skills by the way that are super important is high agency and high autonomy I can figure out things that are tangential to me that I don't need other specialties so to speak like don't need a marketer to go launch something I can go figure it out and I have high agency I can go do it myself I'm going to own it from all the way from start to finish those are very important something that we screen for and something that we look for in our culture and then you just see what you want to do is up to you so there's very little supervision that happens on the ground now we all have goals and like some of the big launches that we're all marching towards but some of the work that is a completely up to developers up to marketers or whatever what is it that they want to do so there has to be that enablement of go try things and because of our velocity if you fail it's not a big deal we'll just pivot we'll go we'll get we'll get through it we are not here to just win all the time

Lenny Rachitsky:On the hiring of these incredible people as we all know it's very hard to hire people these days especially the best what have you seen lovable does differently or does well that helps them recruit the best

Elena Verna:Yes especially recruit in Stockholm I mean the main office here is in Stockholm we're asking a lot of people to relocate which is a no small feat now some of it makes it easy because of how much hype we created around our product people want to come work for us they're reaching out to us they're saying I love what you're doing I want to join it so that we have a cheat code to it because like we have most of the time when we reach out to somebody they say yeah I would love to explore so building that product that is highly lovable also creates a really great recruiting brand for you as well so make sure that there are multiple benefits to that but second of all we do a lot of trials for people so trial work to see a them in work trial to see them in action for a couple of days we pay them as part of the work trial we have some probation periods that we start people on because this company is not for everybody as I said in the podcast in the beginning the pace here is insane I went on a vacation for the first time so I've been here for six months I went on vacation for ten days I came back I felt like I needed to onboard from the beginning like changed and when I'm in it I feel like it's an evolution but the fact that just being gone for ten days it feels like a complete revolution in the company it's that pace is just not for everybody and that's okay because I'm very firm believer that there's different cultures and different environments that the best fit for different personalities and different people so we try to be very upfront with how things are and how chaotic they are and we prioritize people that don't look for clarity we can create clarity out of chaos because it is absolutely chaotic otherwise and if we start to look for people that can explain it to us that's the only way that we can succeed

Lenny Rachitsky:The way you describe going on vacation and feeling very different it feels like when you don't see your kid for a few days and they're just like completely different you're like how did you grow up so fast in three days.

Elena Verna:Yeah exactly exactly.

Lenny Rachitsky:Let me try to summarize the growth levers that you're finding is are working and I'm trying to think about this from the perspective of an AI startup trying to think about hey shoot how do we grow faster what is lovable figured out so it feels like number one is just build something lovable something that blows people's socks off but also in a market that is growing that people want to pay money for like can build something lovable that nobody actually cares about that that there isn't much money going to this space there's no tide pushing it forward and it won't work.

Elena Verna:I call it minimum lovable product like it shouldn't be minimum viable product anymore viability is left in or back in twin twenty tens now it's minimum lovable product that's the only thing that matters.

Lenny Rachitsky:I love how these AI tools are letting us you know like PMs have always had these what are they smoke door test or like what's the term just like or it's not a real product painted door.

Elena Verna:Painted painted door door yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah and that and it's like okay we just have a landing page there's nothing there and now AI makes it easier to do that and it's like more full featured.

Elena Verna:Yeah well it's the feedback cycle is just completely collapsed you can go from idea to some product that is functioning to user feedback within a day if you want to I mean depending on how fast that you want to run or how complex the product is for missions it took us a couple of weeks to vibe code it to the point where because we also I have a full time vibe coder on my team he's amazing so like he he wanted to create videos like he did a bunch of designs for it too so we he he took him a couple of weeks we're testing it now and then we'll put it in the product but it's a completely different development lifecycle before it would just take so many more steps from user research to the design sprints to prioritizing on engineering roadmap to build something minimal and viable to actually test to live the long testing cycles now it's just like boom let's go it's taken us could have taken us a day we just decided to take a couple of weeks to get all of the video pieces correct.

Lenny Rachitsky:I saw you launched this on LinkedIn I to me it looked like a a full product launch it is interesting to hear this is just a sort of prototype.

Elena Verna:Yeah prototype it's minimum lovable okay.

Lenny Rachitsky:I gotta ask you said you had a full time vibe coder what the heck is this is this like an engineer or is this something else what is a full time vibe coder.

Elena Verna:Great question this is a new job role that is actually popping up here and there it's absolutely fascinating to watch this development because I see vibe coding as a skill being added to a lot of job descriptions for designers for product managers for marketers which I think is a really interesting shift finally Excel can move over I'm like we have a new skill to add that is super empowering and not three years old but type coder so his name is Lazar and he actually was chief of staff in his previous role so he's not technical at all he's self taught in technical aspects of it but he was very early on in the vibe coding wave so he learned a lot about it he was a user of all of the vibe coding tools lovable included and when I was coming into the role I'm like I have so many projects that I will vibe code myself so I run this woman only hackathon she builds I vibe coded the first version of that site and like and submission process for applications and then other people came in and started building on top of it but I have I quoted but then like I don't have enough time sometimes because I need to run around and I want to push out so many different initiatives that I want to test in the market with our own products so we connected on social and I'm like can you like would you join us and he joined us for part time I keep bringing so much value for example we partnered with Shopify and he created a bunch of Shopify lovable templates by coded for us and it's been so helpful to have somebody like that that is just like pushing all of these things out and he's an absolute expert so he's teaching us all too of what is possible was lovable because he's on the cutting edge of constantly pushing it to the limit so I I really enjoy having that role which I've never had before in my life and in my team.

Lenny Rachitsky:I'm not surprised I've I've never heard of this role before as a real full time job do you think this is a thing people will start hiring for at non vibe coding companies.

Elena Verna:So I vibe code myself so like I would put that as even as a scale on my resume now it took me a while to figure out by the way like everybody is like oh you just go in like and it all happens automatically it takes you a couple of iterations couple of projects until like you know okay this is how I need to translate it how I need to think about it but for me it's when I started scaling of what I want to vibe code that's where his value really came in because I'm like okay I understand what is possible I know what needs to be achieved and some of these apps I want to be almost full blown built because they're not going to get incorporated into the product anytime soon they don't need to be I'll just link to them from our headers so to speak and he really accelerated that velocity for me so once you get into by coding and you see its value within your organization leaning into somebody like that just accelerates your velocity because it is like an engineer on your team it's just they're not to me he's he's part he's part technical but he they can be nontechnical if they're really good.

Lenny Rachitsky:That is fascinating this episode is brought to you by Persona, the verified identity platform helping organizations onboard users, fight fraud, and build trust. We talk a lot on this podcast about the amazing advances in AI, but this can be a double-edged sword. For every wow moment, there are fraudsters using the same tech to wreak havoc, laundering money, taking over employee identities, and impersonating businesses. Persona helps combat these threats with automated user, business, and employee verification. Whether you're looking to catch candidate fraud, meet age restrictions, or keep your platform safe, Persona helps you verify users in a way that's tailored to your specific needs. Best of all, Persona makes it easy to know who you're dealing with without adding friction for good users. This is why leading platforms like Etsy, LinkedIn, Square, and Lyft trust Persona to secure their platform. Persona is also offering my listeners 500 free services per month for one full year. Just head to withpersona.com/leni to get started. That's withpersona.com/leni. Thanks again to Persona for sponsoring this episode. Let me kind of go back to summarize just real quick the growth levers I wanna move in a somewhat different direction. So things that help Lovable grow: one is just build something in mind that blows your socks off as you said. I love these phrases out here. The second is make noise in the market and the way that Lovable does this, the CEO is tweeting constantly. You build something that blows people's socks off so that they share things on socials themselves, plus this influencer marketing component and just this idea of building in public has been really helpful. This point about activation being kind of embedded within the product team of the AI, of the AI agent essentially, so it's essentially not the growth team thinking about activation, it's the product team that is building the AI magic that is obsessed with activation. And it feels like those are the main, the main growth levers. Is there anything else that I missed?

Elena Verna:Community. I think community is really important here because you need to bring people together as they're exploring these capabilities and as they're seeing what's possible so they can bounce off each other and they can help each other out. So I would say community also amplifies that word-of-mouth, it amplifies all of the social posting, it amplifies retention mechanisms for you as well. The community has been a huge part of Lovable's success as well and that's something that was started very early on. It runs on Discord so it's nothing fancy, it's not like we build anything completely from scratch for ourselves and it has hundreds of thousands of members and it's very lively. We have community managers that are making sure that all of the questions get answered and the right groups are being created. We have incredible ambassador program now as well of people doing it. So I would say community here again of really making software more human is very important role. Now obviously not everybody can build a community but maybe at least plugging in into somebody's community is quite important as well. And then there's another one unless you have a question on community.

Lenny Rachitsky:No, keep going.

Elena Verna:Another one is giving your product away a lot and for AI products it may feel counterintuitive because they're so costly. Every single interaction within the AI product costs company something. There's an LLM pass through cost that is coming through a lot of especially traditional tech companies I see are gating AI immediately behind the paywall because they're sitting on a really cush high margin profile and the moment that you start giving AI away for free you like cutting into those margins with like a knife through the butter. Now at the same time AI being so new and the capabilities being so new you have to remove the barrier of entry. You have to give a lot of your products away for free. By the way, I don't just mean freemium. Freemium to me is just like a baseline. If you're in the new category you need to let people explore what it is for free and get that initial wow moment. It's not a moment by the way, it doesn't need to be a moment anymore, it just needs to be a wow moment. And for Lovable is that first preview generation after your first prompt even though it's absolutely not gonna be complete thing of what you wanna build but you just go this is possible like had no idea I wanna keep building and it becomes an addictive exercise. But we also give so many of our Lovable credits away to every event, to every hackathon. If you want to host a Lovable hackathon we will sponsor it and give all of the participants credits away for free. So we give them away as candy and we basically track them over our LLM costs on freemium and giveaways as our marketing costs and it doesn't go into our something we need to reduce to make our margins better. It goes into this is something that we need to spend more in because this is part of our growth secret sauce.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay, I want to hear more about the growth secret sauce that is extremely interesting. I haven't heard of that as a strategy and I can see why this makes sense if the strategy is blow people's socks off so they can tell their friends, post on all socials. The trick is get more people to try it and so this is and and it's such a new crazy thing like why would I pay money, why would I even go take the effort to like try sign up for an account if I don't know what this is, don't know what I'm doing with it. So I could see how this loop goes faster and faster by giving it away.

Elena Verna:Exactly and again this is very uncomfortable sometimes for companies that either use to really AI companies have lower profile of margins that's absolutely true. To find an AI company with 90% margin profile is absolutely impossible. Let's be real we're all sitting somewhere in the 40% or so which is a lot smaller. So any time that you look at those AI costs as your cost center that's when you're in trouble. You fundamentally have to flip the script and say I need to expose to people of what is possible and I need to remove the monetization friction out of it because if you don't nobody's ever gonna try it or you're gonna be very easily overtaken by a competitor that will give it away. And let's face it once you hook people they're more likely gonna stay with you. So you obviously have to still work on the retention strategy there but if you can have like for our case if somebody one of our users stands up and say hey I'm going to have a hackathon at my work on Lovable can you give us all some free credits to play with why would we prevent a person who wants to do all of the marketing and activating job for us in their company from using us of course we're like take it how much do you need how much would you like we will sponsor it all we will give you anything that you need so we're really leaning into people that are wanting to show this magic to those around you and empowering them as much as possible and that is something that is actually applies to every single product and I agree this is not a growth strategy that I've ever applied in my life on like giving products away as much as possible but it is something that is more and more becoming something that I see that is absolutely non negotiable.

Lenny Rachitsky:What I'm feeling is like the more mind blowing it is the more you should give it away for free yeah especially in a competitive market where everyone is you know it's hard there's like so many companies trying to do this thing and so so it's almost like the better you are the more you should give it away.

Elena Verna:Right right.

Lenny Rachitsky:And this also explains why so much VC money has to be raised for these sorts of companies because this is not cheap like you said you're paying all these foundational models a lot of money.

Elena Verna:Yes and no I'm only gonna say no is because so take a look at Lovable we're two over 200,000,000 in ARR at this point we're a 100 people large so our headcount count costs are wait very.

Lenny Rachitsky:Let just make sure people hear that 200,000,000 ARR I didn't realize a 100 people work at Lovable.

Elena Verna:Yes and six months ago we had 30 people working at Lovable so we tripled so for us it's a really big deal we tripled our company size we're gonna quadruple it by the end of yeah I know we're big boy and girls now but for perspective of the headcount costs it's minimal so we have very little in that going on we are not spending a lot on paid marketing so we're not a big paid marketing driver yeah we're spending on influencer marketing but it's not majority of our growth it's low double digits to to be fair because it's it's not why we're successful it's amplifying our success and it's helping us reach new audiences we don't have really large sales team we have only a couple of sales folks and they're just starting to ramp up their enterprise efforts so we don't have like really big enterprise demand gen costs as well so from that perspective if you like look at the equation and you say well okay if you're not going to do a lot of paid marketing if you're not going to do a lot of sales because we're really only working on hand raisers of people that are saying right now that they want to buy Lovable then whereas you don't have big costs so you can spend it on product and that is the beautiful part because you're not when we're giving our product away to our customers we're not competing with other companies in that space because they're just going to use Lovable in their hackathon on their own and we're competing on AdWords or like in paid Google where everybody's buying real estate for eyeballs so from that perspective I think about it more as a shift of where we spend and cost and honestly it's more efficient way to do paid marketing almost in a sense because of the cost per eyeball that we get there is quite a bit lower compared to if we were trying to compete it on the Google so yes and no to your statement because it actually does not deteriorate margin profile we're just shifting of where we're spending it.

Lenny Rachitsky:That is an incredibly important point you're making there so it's not like you're generating an incredible amount of revenue so there is money available to spend and what you're saying is because it's been spreading through word-of-mouth mostly you're not spending tons of money on salespeople you're not spending tons of money on paid ads this is just an amazing way to get more people to use it so it's kind of like a marketing cost.

Elena Verna:This is product led growth yeah supercharged supercharged yes because you literally using your product to drive that awareness by giving it away to the agents in your ecosystem that will do that distribution for you.

Lenny Rachitsky:So fascinating what a a wild world we're living in free stuff for everyone.

Elena Verna:Yes yes I mean it's great for consumers this is a great time to be a consumer you have so many options like everybody's throwing themselves at you giving your product away for free so it's great to be in the market right now I think it's the power should be with consumer always but with software power has not been with consumer previously because we were forced to use towards some solutions because of either how they were chosen for us or what was available in the market and now that supply is almost infinite the demand from the consumers can be very picky and the one that serves the best will win.

Lenny Rachitsky:And I think again it's important to highlight this is not some kind of VC subsidized bubble ish sort of thing like there is a lot of money being generated that you are spending to help it grow faster it's not like some kind of we're just raising more money to give away more money like you're actually making your own money it's not driving it's not driven by VC money.

Elena Verna:I I can't comment on specific margin details but for at the same time the money that we're raising on VC is for future development and hardening our business not because we will not be able to survive without it.

Lenny Rachitsky:Awesome okay great segue to I want talk about product market fit and competition you had this really interesting post that I don't think people grasp yet which is that product market fit is no longer this like we've done it product market fit we're up into the right now we just grow grow grow now we hire salespeople it's going be great you've written that just product market fit is no longer this like you've done it and you're good it's this endless fight to keep it talk about what you're seeing there.

Elena Verna:So I'll first start with what I've felt at least before when people were talking about product market fit that yeah obviously always product market fit is an evolving thing but the rate of that evolution was measured in years what is it that you need the next product market fit step function change which often was called second horizon or third horizon sometimes five ten years sometimes even longer that you'd need to that you depending on how good you are and hardy your initial product market fit was but you'd spend years scaling the original product market fit it was like blitz growth stage marketing sales growth was very important that you just try to get it to as many people as possible and then once you have saturation of the cost to getting to the marginal people becomes too high you start thinking okay what else can I offer to help me reach additional people or sell more to existing users that I already have and again the main point here is it would take years to get to that stage where it became a question that you had to face really hard face to face now it's three months and all of a sudden you have to face that question again and it's happening because of two things in my opinion number one in AI technology of what LLM is capable of doing changes still very rapidly with each new model release so I think we'll stabilize at some point and it was going to become more marginal but we're not there yet so every three months or so every single AI LLM provider creates a step function change in what is possible with that LLM and when you have this new possibility in just the underlying technology that opens up in front of you then that creates another ceiling of what is possible to build on top of it and the tricky piece here is that it's not enough to just wait for that technology to get better and then start building on top you have to build beforehand to like make a bet and then the LLM to catch up because when that model releases you already need to have that functionality available so that piece is I've never been in a company where the fundamental capabilities are still changing so rapidly and that's the product part so the product can leap to the new expectations but let's not talk about the market part as well consumer expectations have never changed this fast before what we expected chat GPT to be able to do and answer and how we wanted it to talk to us eight months ago versus now is night and day and like the deep thinking mode and how how how deeply you can go into answering questions and what is capable of being building on top of it so consumer perception has never changed this fast too it's this unprecedented time of a consumer is all stand like in a month saying oh it's not doing this yet like I'm bouncing before again perceptions would be years to take it's actually technology would sometimes be able to already address it but consumer perception has not been changed yet so it would take a long time so we're in this really weird part where both product and market is shifting so rapidly that every three months I feel like we have to recapture our product market fit and not just recapture on the same technology and with same customers it's both of those pieces of the equation change every three months and it's terrifying in a way it's also very confusing in a way because we're $200,000,000 company and we're not solely focused on marketing and sales because we still have to recapture our product market fit and you know that the team that finds your product market fit is very different than the team that usually scales your company yet we have to find the team that is capable of doing both on ongoing basis now I think every AI company is on this product market fit treadmill hopefully that treadmill speed slows down if not I think we're going to come up with like crazy things of what this LLM and AI will be able to do if it's going to continue at this cusp but it's a weird place to be in because every three months we have to throttle on our scaling efforts and just reinvent and then scale again but it's like short blitz of growth not these long year long commitments.

Lenny Rachitsky:What makes this very real is just this week apparently OpenAI had this whole code red moment where even though OpenAI by far the leading AI assistant over almost a billion I think monthly active users like basically synonymous with AI around the world with Gemini three launching their market share just started to dip really quickly yeah I think they lost like six something percent in a week and so even OpenAI like ChatGPT the original the one that everyone uses constantly is is is in danger.

Elena Verna:It's like nobody's nobody's future is bulletproof yet and ten years ago if you asked me if a $200,000,000 company was at risk in losing product market fit in the next three months if it's experiencing 10% month over month growth I would have said you're crazy and now that's the reality that we live in and I I don't know I it's fascinating to world and what a time to be alive.

Lenny Rachitsky:What a time to be alive and very stressful but the prize at the end is massive that's the you know that's why this is worth doing not just you know monetarily but just the impact it's gonna have on the world the way we people build and ship and live.

Elena Verna:Exactly the ceiling of what is possible has been raised so massively that we haven't even became too closest to even see it I believe so I think that that's the exciting part of it.

Lenny Rachitsky:The way I've seen you write about this product market fit challenge is the traditional approach is you have these like core users that are using it happy with it and then you expand to the adjacent users and expand to the next and you're basically just trying to recapture that same core constantly and don't even have time to go adjacent.

Elena Verna:Yeah Bengali wrote a really wonderful article it was many years ago at this point on adjacent user theory and that your product market fit expansion when you're in the growth stages the biggest opportunity for you to go after is this what's he called adjacent user which are just outside of your core user they have somewhat similar needs but maybe they're in different geo maybe they have slightly different use case slightly different needs and your biggest way to continue growing your product market fit without having to go to next horizon is to capture that next group of users the interesting piece here of how I relate to it we still have the core users and by the way those core users are mostly pioneers right now that are excited by the capabilities then there's latent majority that is filled with adjacent users and the issue right now which I'm actually quite worried about us as a category is that we're constantly focusing on recapturing the pioneers we don't have time to go after adjacent users and I'm worried of whether there's going to be a gap in the space where we actually going to alienate the latent majority because we're so hyper focused on just staying top of mind and top of capabilities on the pioneers but I don't know the right answer here because without the pioneers they'll like you need pioneers for a latent majority to follow but if you take pioneers and you take them too far into capabilities will latent majority never be able to catch up maybe this is a fruitless concern but it's just like something that I think about because at this stage we should be working on adjacent users and I would argue maybe OpenAI definitely started to do that with so many people they have on their platform but not most of the other AI companies.

Lenny Rachitsky:I completely see what you're thinking there like a brand could just become known as that's just for like startups and prototyping and it's not for serious work.

Elena Verna:Yeah or it's like it's for just like it's for techies it's like protect people it's like it never actually enters the people outside of our little bubble that we live in.

Lenny Rachitsky:We kind of touched on this a little bit of just like working in AI working on AI companies challenging stressful a lot of work what's your advice for folks that are thinking about should I join a Lovable should I join a Cursor should I just go work at Google Makers you know not not not to throw them under the bus or anything but just although Google very successful in AI now maybe less AI focused company

Elena Verna:I really believe that there's different you need to understand what's the environment that is right for you just please understand that AI companies are very hectic at the moment they're very unstable by definition of that product market fit treadmill about that distribution of how they're actually distributed to the market really changing about how product is even being developed in the first place so if you are very comfortable in being in that messy middle and really comfortable of converting chaos into clarity for you and those around you then yeah AI company is a wonderful place for you to really absorb new skill sets right now because even before joining Lovable when I kept seeing AI I'm like my gosh like I'm so tired of seeing AI everywhere is it really changing the world like is it really changing the way people work and when I was I was at Dropbox before and yeah we would use AI here and there and I would use TryGPT I've never used AI there the way I use AI at Lovable and the things that I'm capable of accomplishing at Lovable and I don't know if I've ever would have made that leap so fast unless I joined Lovable if I would have just read or listened about it it's just different compared to be surrounded by people where it's expectation it's not like a nice to have or something that somebody is asking you to do this is just how you get things done and you have to think about everything of like what can I do here versus where do I add value versus like in the traditional sense of work is like I start with my own value and then I augmented with AI and here like the mindset is completely shifted now I don't think AI is replacing everybody's jobs so like please don't like don't look at it as a as as that cliche saying I actually often call AI is like average intelligence that helps me get the platform up and then I add my human thinking and my human creativity on top of it to get it to the next level but at least I can get this base level done with AI really freaking quickly so from that perspective I think if you want to leapfrog on what it means to be AI native employee and how to use all of these AI tools you should go to AI company but if you know that your superpower is in more structure in more definition in really high specialty of things because in the AI companies they're all fairly small so you'll have to generalize quite a bit and have a lot of ownership all of areas that you usually maybe not have ownership over then you shouldn't join it because AI companies will evolve to be more stable too so it's just a matter of time on where you can join so I would just urge people to look at their superpowers and the type of environments that really speak to them so they can feel happy because this can lead to burnout for wrong type of personalities very quickly

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah my sense is if you want work life balance don't join one of these companies because that's just not the way they work

Elena Verna:I don't know if I'd go that far I mean I have family I have two kids I feel like I have a very good work life balance but I put in boundaries for myself like I know when I need time off I need because I know when my brain starts to overheat so to speak but I also know that work is my hobby and it's my passion and I will this is the best work of my life that I'm doing right now there's no other place that I'd rather be than to be here so I think that you just need to be more careful about setting your own boundaries that you know you need but I mean let's face it I don't think anybody has work life balance regardless of a company that they work at even at Google or Microsoft or any of the others I think everybody's freaking out and running as fast as they can it's just they're running it in different structures

Lenny Rachitsky:I'm really glad you said that and corrected me there that it is possible to work at a company one of if not the fastest growing company in history and actually have work life balance to get sleep to spend time with your kids and family

Elena Verna:You just have to protect it ruthlessly but you also need to be realistic with how much is expected out of you and you need to feel confident that you'll be able to deliver it and by the way you won't be able to deliver it unless you use AI in many aspects of your work life so that's like the piece that helps you actually get to hit those expectations of outcomes that you need to do and the velocity but I'm very protective of my personal time with kids like why did I have children if I'm not gonna spend time with them so like those are part of the non negotiables that I bring along with me in every single work

Lenny Rachitsky:For people that maybe have trouble setting boundaries or just not good at this anything what do you what works for you is it just is it as easy as just telling people here's where I need to leave what advice do you have for people to set boundaries like that

Elena Verna:So first of all I would not think about it as a work life balance there's no such thing as balance a balance feels like oh I have enough time for everything I don't have enough time for anything but I prioritize my family in some moments I prioritize work in other moments and I don't try to balance the two I go where I'm needed and where I go and I feel like I'm not going to regret the choices that I'm making today so I'm constantly trying to put myself in the future and say well I resent myself if I make this choice right now and if the answer is yes I don't make that choice and sometimes I have to say no to Anton and say I can't make it or I won't be there I need to be here with my family like today I need to cancel my day my kid is sick and he needs me and I need to be I need to take him to the doctor so I think that just making in the moment more like in every day even sometimes in the hour decisions to me works better than trying to balance something that is completely unachievable and it feels overwhelming to even think about but I prioritise this in my sleep my health my workout schedule my kids my family my husband and just my downtime because I know that I'm most creative once I have separation from work because then I come in with like all cylinders firing and I have so many more ideas about it so to me it's actually part of doing my best work is to take time off

Lenny Rachitsky:That is really great advice I want to touch on what it's like to work at Lovable because it feels like Lovable is at the cutting edge of what working at in product is gonna be so you mentioned a little bit about how you're always talking to AI asking questions is there any any other kind of anecdotes of just how people operate at Lovable that is really unique or weird or funny or interesting that might be helpful for people to try in their company

Elena Verna:Yeah I mean we use Lovable at Lovable a lot like all of our internal tools are built on Lovable's we actually have our first hackathon on Lovable happening next week where we're gonna entire company is just gonna take full day to pipe code and see what we actually have happened we prototype everything on Lovable so our specs yeah we do still have a written spec but it always accompanied by a lovable prototype that everybody can interact with and to click around with and provide feedback and everybody bunches in and also like does some edits if they have any better ideas so I create locks on Lovable so for example we need to make some pricing changes or pricing page changes I take a screenshot of our pricing page I go to Lovable say recreate this pricing page make these changes and then I send that to my engineering team saying hey this is what I want to happen and then like they take it from there so we just and Chat GPT I use a lot for brainstorming especially the deep thinking mode I love it it takes a long time but it's so worth it sometimes it has crazy ideas sometimes it does like sometimes I was like yeah this is like nothing new to me so it's not interesting but it like it gets me thinking and it gets me look at the different angles and lots of I use Granola a lot for example because to me it's super helpful to get AI summaries of the meetings and it's very powerful for me I use Whisper Flow a lot because I feel like I have no time to type anymore so I just like talk to my phone and talk to my laptop all the time in order to do it but we're even thinking about all of the customer support automations that are done through AI how do we every single aspect of what we do is question is asked what can AI do here first and then how we can add ourselves into the equation but Lovable for us having unlimited credits at Lovable is a pretty awesome perk have to say like I sometimes have to pinch myself I'm like I get paid to bytecode it looks so fun

Lenny Rachitsky:I feel like that engineer or that bytecode engineer he's he's like actually

Elena Verna:Getting his pipe job I want his job I feel like I yeah I I got into the wrong line of fashion here

Lenny Rachitsky:Oh man okay is there anything else about Lovable cause what I think about actually I interviewed the Perplexity founders back in the day years ago and they shared like before we talked to anyone for advice we first asked ChatGPT and I was just like that is the most insane thing I've ever how couldn't you possibly work that way and now that's how everyone works and so I'm curious just to I don't know like how I don't know how Anton works is there anyone else that just like way in the future of here's how things might be

Elena Verna:So for me especially for product and growth even marketing at some point it's in some capacity when I have an idea in my head it like it sounds so freaking cool and sometimes they can even like I put it in paper and it's like oh this is like like we need to do it and then like I go and try to vibe code it and I'm like oh like this I don't see the magic anymore like or I can't like I can't envision it anymore or sometimes I'm like yeah yeah and like there's more there's more so to me it's actually has helped really complete the ideation process for me quite a bit because then I actually try to go and build it and it breaks down some of the elements of what's important what's not so it's taking me on product development life cycle so much further down and then it creates a much better communication vehicle with my engineers too because I then can tell them exactly what's important and whatnot so to me it's been great because sometimes we envision things that are so much better than the reality and before until it hands off to design we would never be like designers would do it for us and try to make it awesome versus I often stop my ideas in tracks super early on without pushing it forward versus other times I might have pushed it to for too far too long even through design queue or even like pitching to leadership and I find that very powerful because it calibrates me really quickly

Lenny Rachitsky:Awesome okay last question I want to talk about something that you've written about that is a really I think it's a really important topic something that we should surface is you wrote this post called I'm worried about women in tech talk about what you're seeing here what you're noticing what you think might be going in the wrong direction

Elena Verna:Yeah there's actually conflicting data points about how women you're talking about women right yeah in sec yeah yeah yeah there's conflicting data points about how women are keeping up with AI technology and wave because there's a bunch of reports that has been done that show massive gap between women adopting AI versus men adopting AI which points the story that men are just widening the gap of accessibility for technology and whoever's adopting AI right now is getting paid the most gets the most opportunities I mean we're seeing like insane aqua hires right now where people are getting paid more for their talent than for the companies that they've created and that's like a really interesting trend that is occurring and a lot of it is fueled on on this wave of AI and women are not really present there like if you can think about like $1,000,000 acqui hire that has been in the news that is a woman like I can't think of one if you look at AI companies and their CEOs most of it is men if you look at the company's composition in the AI companies it's mostly men to me this really came to the head of when I came to lovable and I'm like it's pink it's purple brand it's a heart it's lovable I'm like I'm sure this is where it's fiftyfifty men versus women and although we don't collect this information but just like the third party autofill if we saw it's like 20% at most and I'm like what is happening not again why is this again not being adopted by a woman and obviously I don't know all of the answers I think that this is early on that we can shortcut it and by the way I also don't want to put this as an indication that men are to blame because I think men are doing wonderful job really spearheading the horizons and showing us what's possible and like leading the charge I'm just afraid that so many women are stuck in that latent majority that is just not catching up and my worry is that it's going to affect the hireable talent it's going to step us back again in the composition of the workplace of the diversity and maybe it matters maybe it doesn't like whichever side that you sit on but I think that there is it needs to be built for everybody in the world and for that it needs to be built by a representative sample of people that are behind the product as well so I I I just find it fascinating that even when the barrier to building has been lowered versus you don't need computer science degree which I appreciate there's not that many women that are getting we're still seeing the gaping gap on the adoption between genders which is just is I I I don't know there's like something very frustrating about that

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah the thing that struck with me with from your post is there has been a lot of progress being made in that last decade and now AI is just kind of turning it all back turning it all around

Elena Verna:Hopefully not I think that we're early on enough that we can bridge the gap I think sometimes women just need space and ability to discover it and that's what we're doing at lovable we have this initiative she builds where we create a hackathon for women only and we give them unlimited access to lovable for forty eight hours and it come together as a community and they build together and there's like beautiful things that start to come out of it which I've never anticipated before but so many women in that hackathon for us build a help for their elderly parents or with their kids or with the household or for their church group or for the kids basketball team solutions we should have hyper local hyper relevant very needed for what they need in their life and something that was never been able to build before because of how expensive software was because it would never gonna become potentially a $100,000,000 companies but it also doesn't need to be anymore so I just want to bring women to build more and vibe code more so we can have more diversity in software that is even created because I think that we all have a unique take on what problems that we can solve and I want everybody's voices to be heard

Lenny Rachitsky:I'll give the URL for shebuilds I pulled it up while you're talking shebuilds.lovable.app

Elena Verna:And we vibe coded on lovable they're a minimum viable product

Lenny Rachitsky:Minimal lovable product

Elena Verna:Minimal lovable product

Lenny Rachitsky:There it is so when is this happening is this December so

Elena Verna:It's yeah have it we're running it constantly so our next cohort starts on December 15 but we're gonna have more we're planning a massive one on international women's day so that's the one that if you can come join us

Lenny Rachitsky:Awesome I don't know if you saw okay so some glimmer of hope I don't know if you saw this tweet where I tagged you the other day or maybe it was this today I was looking at my most recent podcast video performance and the top four are all women and they're all AI oriented and they're above Stewart Butterfield founder of Slack above Gamma's CEO Grant so maybe a glimmer of hope

Elena Verna:Yeah absolutely I think there's lots of glimmers of hope I think we can just all lean in and make sure that nobody is left behind in this wave and that's not to stop people that are marching ahead this is just to open up opportunities for everybody around us

Lenny Rachitsky:Awesome and we'll link to that post if people wanna get a deeper perspective of what you're saying Elena is there anything else that you wanted to share is there anything else you wanna remind people of before we get to our one question lightning round

Elena Verna:I guess the only other thing that I will share is for AI companies when it comes to hiring it's really interesting also the kind of the shift in the type of personas that end up being hired that I see for me at least it's quite different compared to anywhere that I've worked before and that is there's this narrative going in the market always that like new hires sorry new grads have no jobs in the market left because all of the entry level jobs are automated I actually think that's quite false because new grads especially AI native new grads so it's very important for kids that are entering into the work I shouldn't say kids young adults that are entering into the workforce that they really know AI which is there's another like really big issue that our schools are not teaching AI students so this is like something else that we need to fix as a category because otherwise we're literally setting up our young for a complete failure but I think it's incredible to see some of those new graduates come in and what they're capable of doing have we have multiple new graduates at lovable that are working and I learned so much from them and you need to obviously have the right atmosphere where people with experience like old guard like me that can look at the new guard and take really hear them and see them and really change the way that I operate based on how they do things so make sure that you bring some of that fresh talent that doesn't understand any of the baggage that we came from and that can really look at the future in technology and what can unlock from a completely new lens highly recommend putting those into your team as little fireballs that are going to be sometimes hard to contain we can start the initiatives for you forward and then it's also interesting that there's a really high demand for ex founders now for those people that truly have a lot of agency and high autonomy so instead of just having people that have been working in the corporate world the failed startup founders are now hot demand for a lot of these AI companies so like these personas that we traditionally would not prioritize in companies to hire are now becoming the hottest commodity and the highest going talent which is I think is fascinating and it's like the wonderful thing that is changing the how the culture inside operates

Lenny Rachitsky:That is really interesting and really empowering this idea that if you need grad there's hope you're not you're not gonna be out of absolutely absolutely and you may have an advantage yeah

Elena Verna:You you do have it you have to lead with that that's the thing like you have to lead with the things that you can you are capable of achieving knowing that what you have with ai because that is a lot of people especially in traditional tech or in more traditional companies they're looking for somebody to show them because it's really hard to figure it out on your own versus coming in and seeing and then copying

Lenny Rachitsky:Well Elena with that we reached our very exciting lightning round because it's your fourth time i'm not gonna ask you all the questions i always ask you so i'm just gonna ask you one question so lovable is based in stockholm sweden i'm curious just like what do you what's something you love about stockholm that you weren't expecting is there like a food a restaurant i don't know something

Elena Verna:Well you always have to say swedish meatballs i mean i've never liked meatballs before so like now it's it's so good here it's so good so like every time one of my meals here throughout the day involves it but i actually really love the yeah they're like they're they're i don't know they're so they just taste different

Lenny Rachitsky:They're like it's not like the ikea it's not like the ikea swedish meatballs

Elena Verna:Well i have been to ikea here because that is a swedish company too it like reminded me of in person amazon it was like absolutely incredible ikea here is like next level but food food swedish meatballs for sure honestly how clean the city is like it's it's kind of incredible the architecture like everything is so built out it's like picture perfect like it's on the card i don't know it's it's

Elena Verna:Different compared to like most of the large cities that i've been at that a little bit more worn down

Lenny Rachitsky:So fun make me wanna visit and get some meatballs

Elena Verna:Yeah just visit during the do visit during the summer otherwise the daylight here is really is really tight during the winter

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay good tip okay two final questions where can folks find you online if they want to reach out maybe learn more how can listeners be useful to you

Elena Verna:Yes please find me online on linkedin please feel free to follow me always engage on my post if you want to engage with me because that's the place that i always talk to people i have my newsletter as well that i'm baby steps compared to what lenny has but it's alenaverna.com i also try to that's where i post most of my findings that i experienced at my work so if you want to continue seeing how my thinking evolves or what are the patterns that i noticed that's where to find me and how to be useful to me really pressure test my thinking because so many things are changing right now i'm honestly not even sure myself of what is a pattern versus what is just a data point so i'd love to just engage in as many conversations as possible and hear your opinions because that will help us as an industry just understand what is actually happening and makes more sense out of this whole thing

Lenny Rachitsky:I'm just gonna double click on your newsletter definitely subscribe to it it's incredibly good everything we talked about here elena has written about in her newsletter in in large part and goes even deeper it's just elenaverna.com if you're like reading this on your podcast app or youtube can just look at her name and just type in com and you'll find it and subscribe and you'll be really happy elena thank you so much for being here this was amazing everything i wanted to be thank you for sharing i know you have a lot a lot of work to do so i appreciate you making time for this and for joining us

Elena Verna:Thank you for having me really appreciate you

Lenny Rachitsky:Bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on apple podcasts spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode