Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:20:51 · Elena Verna
[00:20:51] S1: Yeah. And for example, we on Growth team launched integration with Shopify to enable e commerce use case. Because we're 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. Like 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, to 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.
00:22:34 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:22:34] S0: 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 and 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. [00:23:06] S1: 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.
00:23:06 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:23:06] S1: 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. [00:23:59] S0: 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, better. [00:24:07] S1: 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.
00:24:07 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:24:07] S1: 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. [00:24:29] S0: 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?
00:24:45 · Elena Verna
[00:24:45] S1: 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 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 actually works as fantastic resurrection strategy because people are like, Oh, there's more things here. 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, people are literally logging into their social to see like, okay, what has Lovable shipped now? It's like, 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.
00:27:06 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:27:06] S0: Sounds stressful. This reminds me I had Gaurav. He's the CEO of Miro. 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. [00:27:22] S1: Mhmm. [00:27:22] S0: That's how their company operates. And it's the same thing. It's just ship things you can talk about. [00:27:27] S1: 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 is a lot of autonomy, a 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. [00:28:13] S0: 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?