Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:27:57 · Lenny Rachitsky, Lazar Jovanovic
[01:27:57] S1: The comedy piece is interesting. I had one of the founders of the data labeling company, I don't know if it was Mercor or maybe Surge. And he said that, I think it was Anthropic hired a bunch of National Lampoon comedy writers to help them train models. And so they're working on it. So I love this strong prediction you made. I'm so curious in a year to look back and be like, "He was completely right." Or, "Nope, they got that one too." [01:28:23] S0: I'll be wrong on 95% of the things I said today, three months from now. That is the only thing I can say very, very confidently. [01:28:31] S1: That seems right. Okay. So speaking of career. So one interesting career option is to do what you're doing. As you said, this is a dream job for you. It's a dream job for so many people. What is your path to this job and what do you think it takes for someone to actually do this as a profession?
01:28:50 · Lazar Jovanovic
[01:28:50] S0: Well, my personal path and personal journey was anything but linear. I've done so many things in life like blue collar jobs, even at Subway while I was studying and stuff like that. I'm an engineer by trade, but not a software engineer. I'm a forestry engineer. So no coding, but still, engineering is engineering, I feel. You still develop certain set of skills doing that. I waited tables a long time. So you develop some human skills, you understand what people like, what they don't like. I've, again, blue collar jobs teach you hard work. And as I said, the path was not linear, but I feel almost like a slum dog millionaire, the movie storyline, which is everything that happens to the character brings them into a position to be able to answer the questions in the quiz better. I feel the same way. I've done a lot of stuff last seven to eight years, obviously spent in startups. But doing everything but code writing, started in community management, social media. Again, distribution matters a lot. That's something we haven't touched upon at all. In a world when everybody's building and there's roughly the same amount of consumers in the world. How do you get in front of the eyeballs and get attention, which is going to ... It is this most scarce resource and it will be even more scarce. But going back to the vibe coder role, if somebody's saying, "Okay, well, I have a pretty diverse background too, and I'm vibe coding and how does this become a job?" Well, for me, I feel it became a job by building in public. I did chat with Elena once, only once on like, "Why me? There are so many good vibe coders that how did you pick me out of the crowd?" And I think obviously, she gave me a couple of reasons, but to translate it into one concept, I was building in public and sharing. As I said, I made a YouTube channel and I shared all the failures and all the knowledge, all the projects that I was building. I used social media a lot. LinkedIn was my go to because I just have that type of cadence. As you can see, all my answers are very long and X doesn't cut it for that. You need to be very on point to be successful at X, so I'm not. So I guess it's just building public, share your knowledge, give away all the secrets. There are no secrets whatsoever. If you're sitting on a good concept, you're missing out.
01:31:24 · Lazar Jovanovic
So just share it immediately, if you figure something out. I recognize that very early on. And just, I think a lot of people participate in hackathons these days, I want to encourage people to do them. Find those opportunities locally to connect with other builders. Lovable is hiring across the board. Check out our app, open positions. It's as easy as that. Just apply really. Find companies that are hiring and hiring in different roles. And I've seen people do something, I'm going to give people a secret away. A couple of hires stood up by not sending resumes, but sending Lovable apps. They built Lovable apps to show why they're good fit for a role. And we, as Lovable employees, will always open an app that uses Lovable.app domain. Always, if you send me a DM, send me a Lovable app. Don't send me anything long. Send me an app that tells me what you want from me or how do you see us collaborating and working together. So there's people finding creative ways to get in front of eyeballs of decision makers like Elena. And skill-wise, again, we're just repeating ourselves here, but I think it's important to repeat it as many times as possible. Really develop good judgment, right? Really understand in a deeper sense how things translate when vibe code comes into play. There's a company out there, I'm not going to name them but that uses Lovable religiously, is going to be one of our main case studies, actually, where they actually hired vibe coders before Lovable. I'm the first official vibe coding engineer at Lovable with that title, but I've met people in companies where they hired them before us. People that are just vibe coders, people that just understand that speed matters, right? It still matters a lot to be fast. And there's a company out there with three vibe coders full-time. All they do is translating the old code base onto Lovable. There's bringing everything. There's CRM, CMS, everything. They're all the tool sets that they have and they need it. There are people now actively just migrating everything over. There's S&P 500 companies that are putting Lovable in job descriptions too, like saying, "Hey, Lovable skills are in the recommended tab." So to go back to how to become vibe coder professionally. Well, you don't need a company to hire you. You can hire yourself as a professional vibe coder first.
01:33:59 · Lazar Jovanovic, Lenny Rachitsky
I think the reason why I clicked with Anton and with Elena and everyone else, because I was already doing it. All I did, I just changed the vehicle, but I was already doing it professionally before I got hired. So that's kind of the key. Do the job you would've done anyways. [01:34:18] S1: What a mind-expanding conversation. I love just how passionate and excited and motivated you are about all this. It feels like there's so many people out there right now that are so burnt out, I don't know, disillusioned, scared, and you're the opposite of that. You're just leaning into this, just taking advantage, taking ... You're not sure where it's going to go, but following the path.
01:34:39 · Lazar Jovanovic
[01:34:39] S0: Yeah. And I don't want to interrupt you, but it's because, look, Lovable specifically isn't a company. You can talk about it as a company. I don't see it as a company. It's an idea. It's a mission. It's something more powerful than the internet in my mind because internet allows us to consume. Lovable allows us to build. And in our nature and human nature is to build, to create. And the fact that there's a tool today that you can go into and dump an idea in and something comes out of it and somebody uses it and finds it useful, to me, it's the craziest concept ever. It's my only life's dream. I had my first computer when I was six, and I was convinced my whole life that I'm going to be a software engineer or that I'm going to be building, but life wasn't as simple as that for me. It was very, very complicated. And honestly, the last five to 10 years, I gave up on that dream almost. I thought I'm never going to build anything. I've tried. I've tried to build with technical co-founders. I just couldn't find alignment. I just gave up on it. And now at 36, 30 years later, I feel, again, like that kid. I dream every day. It's amazing what this enabled us to do. And anybody that's scared, just try it. It switches from fear to excitement immediately because then you see what's possible firsthand. Just go in, build something, build anything, and the fear goes away. You should only be afraid if you're doing nothing. If you're doing absolutely nothing, yes. Be terrified. By all means, be terrified. And then take a step towards doing something about it. And trust me, the leap is no longer as big as it used to be. It's as big as you come in and you just say what's on your mind and just ship.
01:36:45 · Lenny Rachitsky, Lazar Jovanovic
[01:36:45] S1: I think a big part of this is just stop listening to this podcast and just do stuff because you actually try it, right? [01:36:51] S0: Ideally, people stop right now. They've heard enough. I gave them the best that I could. Just stop listening and just go. [01:36:59] S1: All right. Bye everyone. Okay. I'm just joking, but we shall wrap it up. I'm going to skip the lightning round just to keep this episode shorter. Before we wrap up, is there anything else other than just go build some stuff? Anything else you want to say? Anything else you want to leave listeners with? Otherwise, we'll let you go.