"You're ahead of growth at Lovable on track to be the fastest or one of the fastest growing companies in history. >> We're over 200 million in AR at this point. We're 100 people large. The pace here is..."

">> I feel like only 30 to 40% of what I've learned in the last 15 to 20 years of being in growth transfers here because we just need to invest in such bigger bets and innovate and create new growth lo..."

"optimization. >> What do you find is actually moving the needle? One of our biggest strategy is building in public and it's coupled with employee socials, founder le socials and another one is giving ..."

"sauce. You have to remove the barrier of entry. If somebody one of our users stands up and say hey I'm going to have a hackathon at my work unlovable. Can you give us some free credits to play with? W..."

">> Today, my guest is Elena Vera, head of growth at Lovable. In under one year after launching with fewer than 100 people, Lovable hit 200 million ARR, which is one of, if not the fastest ramp to 200 ..."

"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 incred..."

"lennisnewsletter.com and click product pass. With that, I bring you Elena Vera after a short word from our sponsors. Here's a puzzle for you. What do OpenAI,"

"Here's a puzzle for you. What do OpenAI, Cursor Perplexity Versel Platt and hundreds of other winning companies have in common? The answer is they're all powered by today's sponsor, Work OS. If you're..."

"those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SAS. Whether you're a seedstage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn exp..."

"make your app enterprise ready today. This episode is brought to you by Vzero from Versell. Vzero is the web development assistant designed for professionals of all technical backgrounds. Whether you'..."

"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 b..."

"V0ero for the builders who want to create at the moment of inspiration. If you can dream it, you can ship it. Visit verscell.com/lenny to get started. That's versell.com/lenny. Elena, thank you so muc..."

">> I love it. Thank you for inviting me back. I'm very proud record holder in this regard. >> What I love about you coming back each time is feels like every time you come back, you're just doing some..."

"with paid retention? Um no, are we where most of the other companies are? Yes. Our NDR is quite good because when people build, they want to buy more credits to bill. So, uh, we're seeing really good,..."

">> That is incredibly uh, interesting and optimistic to hear because of the growth rate. Uh rarely is growth rate this high and retention is on par with great companies. >> Yeah. And I'll just say too..."

">> 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 ..."

"can even conceptualize um 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 a new emerging category that hits fastmoving waters so quickly. And ..."

"pieces are in place. like your race car framework uh that you have as well that like we're we're really just putting a lot of oil into it and um figuring out what is our engine actually going to be th..."

">> not worth it in growth uh most of the people spend most of the time optimizing existing user journeys. So, uh, you already have maybe some of your growth loops that you understand that you try to o..."

"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. >> What I'm hearing here is uh..."

"as opposed to just being a smoothing surface on the outer layers. >> Okay, that is also a very big deal. Every growth person that's ever been on this podcast, including you, always talks about the pow..."

">> 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 ne..."

"fit as a whole. And uh 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. >> Sounds stressful. This reminds me I had Garav. ..."

"really short and uh for smaller changes because cycles are so short they spend so much time actually focusing on it as they should that some of these smaller changes just cannot be supported by market..."

"that's where eyeballs are at >> 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 Tik Tok Instagram >> for founder..."

"to be vulnerable. You need to be authentic obviously but you just need to be yourself. Uh so like that corporate scrubbing has to completely fall off which um is obviously going to pull in as as the c..."

"Instagram Tik Tok um are very much a go as well. >> So here it's uh the CEO clearly is an important uh variable in this them in this case Anton just tweeting here's what's going on lovable here's how ..."

"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 uh when they actually experience your product. We have a really almos..."

"all of the brand work actually into our product. When you think about lovable think people think about a brand but we don't have a brand marketing team yet. So it's all just through product interactio..."

"very well for us because it's not really a written value proposition like nobody knows what bite coding is but you watch 10 seconds of it and you go that's new let me go give it a try >> who would hav..."

"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 ..."

"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. >> So along those lines I want to come back to something..."

"just win all the time >> 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 t..."

">> 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 gro..."

"you know like PMS have always had these um what are they uh smoke door test or like what's the term just like or is that not a real product? Uh >> painted door. >> Painted door. There it is. Yeah. And..."

"us could have taken us a day. We just decided to take a couple of weeks to get all of the video pieces correct. >> I saw you launched this on LinkedIn. I to me it looked like a a full product launch. ..."

"then other people came in and started building on top of it. But I vip code 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 initi..."

"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 uh..."

"have like for our case if somebody one of our users stands up and say hey I'm gonna have a hackathon at my work unlovable can you give us all some free credits to play with why would we prevent a pers..."

"there's like so many companies trying to do this thing and so um so it's almost like the better you are the more you should give it away >> right right >> and this also explains why uh so much VC mone..."

"on influencer marketing, but it's not majority of our growth. It's uh low double digits uh to to be fair because it's it's not why we're successful. It's amplifying our success and it's helping us rea..."

"estate for eyeballs. So from that perspective is 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 uh because of t..."

"you're 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. >> So fascinating. What a what a wild world we're ..."

"faster. It's not like some kind of we're just raising more money to give away more money. Like you're actually making real money. It's not driving it's not driven by VC money. >> I I I can't comment o..."

"years and 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 10 years sometimes even longer that you need t..."

"doing changes still very rapidly with new model release with each new model release. So I think we're going to I think we'll stabilize at some point and it's going to become more marginal but we're no..."

"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 w..."

"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 3 months. And it's terrifying ..."

"to alienate the latent majority because we're so hyperfocused on just staying top of mind and t top of capabilities on the pioneers. But I don't know the right answer here because without the pioneers..."

">> 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. >> Yeah. Or it's like it's for just..."

"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 I even before joining lovable when I k..."

"please don't like don't look at it as a as as that cliche saying. I actually often call AI as like average intelligence that helps me get the platform up and then I add my human thinking and my human ..."

">> 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. >> I don't know if I'd go that far. I mean I have family. I have two ki..."

"kids. Like why did I have children if I'm not going to spend time with them? So like those are part of the non-negotiables um that I bring along with me in every single work. for people that maybe hav..."

"work is to take time off. >> 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 goi..."

"long time but it's so worth it. Uh 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 like it gets me thin..."

"growth I and 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 I can even like I put it in paper and it's like a this i..."

"lovable. We have this initiative uh she builds where we have collect we have create a hackathon for women only and we give them unlimited access to lovable for 48 hours and um they come together as a ..."

"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. >> I'll give the URL for shebuilds. I pulled it up while you're tal..."

"hope. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think there's lots of glimmers of hope. I think we can just all lean in and make sure that nobody's left behind in this wave. And uh that's not to stop people that are mar..."

"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 uh the the workfo..."

"the best initiatives for you forward. And then um it's also interesting that there's a really high demand for uh ex-founders now for like those people that are truly have a lot of agency and um high a..."

"and the highest going talent which is I think is fascinating and it's like the wonderful thing that is changing the how uh the culture inside operates >> that is really interesting and really empoweri..."

"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 sounds. They're like they're I don't know. They're so they ..."