Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:00:00 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:00:00] S0: You're a head of growth at Lovable, on track to be the fastest or one of the fastest growing companies in history. [00:00:06] S1: We're over 200,000,000 in ARR. At this point, we're a 100 people large. The pace here is insane. [00:00:11] S0: You said that you've had to throw out most of your growth playbook. [00:00:14] S1: 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 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. 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. [00:00:48] S0: What do you find is actually moving the needle? [00:00:50] S1: 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 say, 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?
00:00:50 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:00:50] S1: 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 say, 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? [00:01:22] S0: The trick is get more people to try it. Just ship things you can talk about. [00:01:25] S1: The only way to create a word-of-mouth loop is just to blow their socks off.
00:01:30 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:01:30] S0: 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, Replit, Bolt, N8N, Linear, Devon, Posthawk, Superhuman, Descript, Wispr Flow, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, Chappier, D Mobbin, and Stripe Atlas. Head on over to lenny'snewsletter.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 b to b SaaS.
00:03:46 · Lenny Rachitsky
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00:05:24 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:05:24] S1: Thank you for having me. [00:05:26] S0: 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 you're basically my cohost now. [00:05:35] S1: I love it. Thank you for inviting me back. I'm very proud record holder in this regard. [00:05:41] S0: 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 head 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?
00:06:08 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:06:08] S1: 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 third week of November last year 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 was pretty incredible. You Lenny actually have a really great blog post on how quickly it takes for companies usually to get to their first million ARR 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 end of 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 wine. [00:07:26] S0: Okay. Absurd. I think people are getting used to these insane numbers. And not long ago, it was like, okay, if you had a million ARR in a year, you're doing pretty well.