Bengali's Adjacent User Theory

The AI Growth Playbook for Fast-Moving Markets

Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable, shares how traditional growth frameworks are being rewritten in the AI era, with only 30-40% of established growth practices still applying in this new landscape.

The Shift from Optimization to Innovation

• Growth teams in AI companies must focus on innovation over optimization
  • "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."
  • Traditional growth focuses on optimizing existing user journeys and growth loops
  • AI companies must constantly create new growth loops to stay ahead of competition
• Growth teams are now building core product functionality
  • Growth teams at Lovable build integrations (e.g., Shopify for e-commerce)
  • They develop new features like voice mode for better engagement
  • Growth teams are even working on agent instructions and workflows

Effective Growth Levers for AI Companies

1. Build a Minimum Lovable Product (MLP)

• "It shouldn't be minimum viable product anymore. Viability is left back in the 2010s. Now it's minimum lovable product."
• Focus on creating emotional connections, not just utility
• Prioritize experiences that "blow people's socks off"
• Embed brand personality into every product interaction
• "The only way to create a word-of-mouth loop is just to blow their socks off."

2. Building in Public

• Maintain constant "noise in the market" through frequent shipping
  • Ship marketable features daily or weekly
  • Have founders and employees share updates on social media
  • Use building in public as a resurrection and re-engagement strategy
• "People are literally logging into their social to see 'What has Lovable shipped now?'"
• Empower engineers to announce their own work (product engineers)
• Create a culture where shipping velocity is the top core value

3. Give Your Product Away Strategically

• Track giveaways as marketing costs, not margin reduction
  • "If somebody stands up and says, 'I'm going to have a hackathon at my work on Lovable, can you give us some free credits?' Why would we prevent a person who wants to do all of the marketing and activating for us from using us?"
• Support community events, hackathons, and user-led initiatives
• Remove barriers to entry, especially for potential advocates
• This approach works because:
  • It's more efficient than competing for paid advertising
  • It creates advocates who do marketing for you
  • It's particularly effective when your product creates a "wow" moment

4. Leverage Social Over Search

• Organic strategy has shifted from SEO to social media
  • "If you asked me what's organic marketing strategy five years ago, I would have said that's SEO. If you ask me what's the organic marketing strategy right now, to me it's all about social."
• Focus on three key social components:
  • Founder-led social content (X/Twitter, LinkedIn)
  • Employee social sharing
  • Customer word-of-mouth and sharing
• Influencer marketing outperforms paid social by 10x for Lovable
  • Video content works particularly well for demonstrating AI capabilities
  • "Influencer marketing is 10 times bigger for us than paid social"

5. Build Strong Communities

• Communities amplify word-of-mouth and social posting
• They provide support networks for users helping each other
• They create spaces for users to share their creations and successes
• "Community has been a huge part of Lovable's success"

The Product Market Fit Treadmill

• Product market fit is no longer a one-time achievement
  • "Every three months I feel like we have to recapture our product market fit"
• Two forces drive this constant change:
  1. Rapid technology evolution (new LLM capabilities every ~3 months)
  2. Rapidly shifting consumer expectations
• Companies must build ahead of capability changes
  • "It's not enough to just wait for that technology to get better and then start building on top. You have to build beforehand."
• This creates tension between scaling and reinvention
  • "Every three months we have to throttle on our scaling efforts and just reinvent and then scale again."
  • The team that finds product market fit is different from the team that scales

Hiring for the AI Era

• Prioritize passion and intrinsic motivation over credentials
  • Look for people who see this as "the biggest opportunity of their life"
  • Find people who treat this work as their hobby, not just a paycheck
• Value high agency and autonomy
  • Seek people who can figure things out without specialists
  • Look for those who can own projects from start to finish
• Consider new graduate profiles
  • AI-native graduates often have advantages over experienced workers
  • "New grads, especially AI-native new grads... I learned so much from them"
• Ex-founders are in high demand
  • Failed startup founders bring valuable agency and autonomy
  • They're comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change