Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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
Whether you're a seed stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unlocking growth. They're essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack support where they have real engineers in there who answer your questions super fast. WorkOS allows you to build like the best with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise ready today. This episode is brought to you by vZero from Vercel. v0 is the web development assistant designed for professionals of all technical backgrounds. Whether you're a product manager, designer, or developer, transform how you bring products to life. With vZero, everybody can cook. Don't just show up to reviews with docs and ideas. Arrive with working prototypes that demonstrate real functionality. v0 drafts project plans, generates interactive interfaces, 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 bottlenecks and enhance collaboration between technical and nontechnical team members. The result? Faster iteration and a shorter path from idea to implementation. Vercel built vZero for the builders who want to create at the moment of inspiration. If you can dream it, you can ship it. Visit vercel.com/lenny to get started. That's vercel.com/lenny. Elena, thank you so much for being here, and welcome back to the podcast.
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.
00:07:26 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[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. [00:07:36] S1: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's still you're doing pretty well if you have a million ARR in one year. This is this is one of the once in a lifetime type of companies and the category, the way that it's evolving. So I want to make sure that people don't all sunset this as a benchmark for success because it should never be. In some categories, it might be even faster as we continue evolving technology. But I don't think that it's realistic to expect it out of your business that you're starting right now. [00:08:08] S0: That is such an important point you're making there. It's so discouraging to founders to hear these stories of, okay, 200,000,000 nuts. And again, this is ARR. There's a lot of companies, especially in the data labeling space, I've had them all on the podcast, that are very fast growing, but they're not recurring revenue. There's also, they pay out their people to do this data labeling. So the revenue numbers there don't really equate. Recurring $200,000,000 a year is absurd. [00:08:36] S1: Yeah, it is absurd. I really wanna make sure that people understand as we go through this episode as to why it's happening, because part of it is unlovable, part of it is just in the market and how it's moving. So when you're setting yourself as a benchmark, so you know which benchmarks you actually to use and whether Lovable is the benchmark that you should be using.
00:08:36 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:08:36] S1: Yeah, it is absurd. I really wanna make sure that people understand as we go through this episode as to why it's happening, because part of it is unlovable, part of it is just in the market and how it's moving. So when you're setting yourself as a benchmark, so you know which benchmarks you actually to use and whether Lovable is the benchmark that you should be using. [00:08:56] S0: Cool. I'm gonna get into that next. Last question, just I wanna see what you can share here. A lot of people look at these numbers. A lot of people are very skeptical. These are lasting, durable numbers. Like, who are these people? How is there $200,000,000 being spent on Lovable? Anything you can have about just, like, give people confidence this is real. This is gonna last. This is a a really durable business.