Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:32:34 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:32:34] S0: So here it's... The CEO clearly is an important variable in this, them. In this case, Anton just tweeting, here's what's going on in Lovable, here's how fast it's growing, here's something We we've had the CEO of Gamma on recently, Grant, and he's exactly the same thing, just sharing a bunch of lessons, journey building in public, a big part of the growth lever. And your point here is, okay, so it's the CEO, but then it's also how do you get your customers to share things on socials, and then there's a paid influencer sort of component.
00:33:01 · Elena Verna
[00:33:01] S1: Yes. The customer is difficult one. 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 when they actually experience your product. We have a really almost unfair advantage because our product is called Lovable. So by default, we're trying to create an absolute lovable experiences. Like, that is a mentality internally. If it's not lovable, we're not going to ship it. So and the best way to fix a bug at Lovable is to say this is not lovable, like when everybody just like jumps on it to fix it right there and then. Sprints, no sprints. It doesn't matter. It's getting fixed right now. So from that perspective, we kind of have that culture already embedded as part of our brand and it's part of our name, which helps us a lot. But that's the point is that you feel that brand through every interaction. I talk to my designer all the time. How can we add more love marks into the product? How can we prioritize more unique interactions? The little elements that make up that that feeling of this product is speaking to me. It's like it feels something like that is unique. It has personality behind it. So we put all of the brand work actually into our product. When you think about Lovable, think about a brand, but we don't have a brand marketing team yet. So, it's all just through product interactions and some of those building in public moments of the people behind those product interactions. That is our strategy. And then there's influencer marketing. Interestingly enough, influencer marketing is 10 times bigger for us than paid social. So yeah, we do some paid social as well and it's working decently. It's quite expensive from payback period. We're still optimizing it. As I said, we're pretty early on in all of these channels. But influencer marketing is something that has worked from the beginning. A Lovable and reason behind it is that influencer marketing, especially on the socials, it gives you an opportunity to have a little video and interaction. And Lovable is all about seeing like, oh, my gosh, this is what I can do and this is possible. So that drives people to go and try it themselves. So that's why social works very well for us, because it's not really a written value proposition. Like, nobody knows what byte coding is.
00:35:13 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
But you watch ten seconds of it and you go, oh, that's new. Let me go give it a try. [00:35:18] S0: Who would have thought that a head of growth who is traditionally seen as like data, metrics, spreadsheets, drive KPIs is like, okay, how do we make this more lovable? How do we add more moments of delight? [00:35:31] S1: I know. My my my joke is, like, at the end of my lovable journey, whenever... Hopefully never comes to an end, but but at the end, I'll be like a growth brand person. Here here. Hi. My name is Elena. I do brand now. But I actually see it as part of growth strategy to make sure that that brand shines through every single interaction. And I always talk to my team about it because that is one big lever in our growth story. [00:35:58] S0: Yeah. So I think that's a really important point to highlight. The reason Lovable is growing so fast is it is a product people love. You've made something people want. And the word-of-mouth spreads because it's something that blows people's socks off, as you said. So it feels like that's the first thing you got to get right.
00:36:13 · Elena Verna
[00:36:13] S1: Yes. Well, the first thing you have to get right is you have to be at the right place at the right time, and you have to be in fast moving waters. Like, let's not discount how fast this category is exploding on its own. So this cannot happen in every single category that you're starting to build the products. But the way to stand out in the super crowded categories to create experiences that speak to people. That I think is something that a lot of people deprioritize because they still prioritize functionality over humanity within software. And I think that we're actually moving to the new era of software that needs to feel human, that people want to interact with, not just 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 of it. So to me, it's it's I love this move because I hate nothing more than going to software that is just like so painful to use that I lose some brain cells as I'm interacting with it versus software that I feel I get energy out of. And for Lovable for me, like I cannot wait on some of the projects that I have to go and vibe code myself. Like, that's the highlight of my day. And I just like I don't I bring in my daughter and I'm like, let's go do this. Like, what do you think that needs to be done? Because I just get so much energy out of doing it. And that is the feeling you cannot create by looking at it as a utility problem.
00:37:41 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:37:41] S0: The way I think about it, the way what you're describing is it's almost table stakes have increased and now it's so easy to build. Now the big differentiator is experience, design, delight. [00:37:52] S1: Exactly. And it has to translate through every single interaction. So your designer has to be one of your first hires now in startups. It's not just about the engineering, so to speak, utility. And you have to think through every single interaction of, does this communicate our brand or not? [00:38:09] S0: So along those lines, I want to come back to something you talked about, which is launching new features as a huge growth lever. Kind of the big question there is just how do you maintain quality and cohesiveness as all these people are empowered to ship stuff? Is there anything else there you've seen that works well to help avoid just the Frankenstein product, just endless features that you want to tweet about?
00:38:28 · Elena Verna
[00:38:28] S1: Yeah. One part of it is not something that you can codify, but it's the type of people that you hire that are going to go and ship these things. We at Lovable try to hire the absolute best talent available out there that we can bring in and that we can source and that we can attract to grow with. And what do I mean by that best talent? It's not that somebody who has been at really large companies or somebody that has really done a lot of logos or has big success stories behind them. It's somebody who is extremely passionate about their job. It's their hobby. They love to work. They have fire in their belly. This is not a paycheck for them. They want to do this for some ulterior reason. This is the biggest opportunity of their life. So this is global maximum against any other opportunities that are in front of them at the moment. So that's very important for us. We want people to come and do their absolute best work at Lovable. It's very important and you can feel it in this office. People are wired up. They are so high on how can we make this better? How can we deliver more to our customers? And that's very different compared to usually how companies grow. We're like, Okay, yeah, the check, check, check, they fit the skill set. Let's bring them in. But is that passion? Is that fire behind it? And then the second piece is that we work really hard on just addressing what's the success here looks like. What is it that we're building? What use cases are we building for? And then because we hire these people that are so passionate about it, the other two skills, by the way, that are super important is high agency and high autonomy. I can figure out things that are tangential to me that I don't need other specialties, so to speak. Like I don't need a marketer to go launch something. I can go figure it out. And I have high agency. I can go do it myself. I'm going to own it from all the way from start to finish. Those are very important, something that we screen for and something that we look for in our culture. And then you just see what you want to do is up to you. So there's very little supervision that happens on the ground. Now, we all have goals and like some of the big launches that we're all marching towards. But some of the work that is a completely up to developers, up to marketers or whatever, what is it that they want to do?