Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:40:46 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
So there has to be that enablement of go try things. And because of our velocity, if you fail, it's not a big deal. We'll just pivot. We'll go... We'll get we'll get through it. We are not here to just win all the time. [00:40:59] S0: On the hiring of these incredible people, as we all know, it's very hard to hire people these days, especially the best. What have you seen Lovable does differently or does well that helps them recruit the best? [00:41:10] S1: Yes. Especially recruit in Stockholm. I mean, the main office here is in Stockholm. We're asking a lot of people to relocate, which is a no small feat. Now, some of it makes it easy because of how much hype we created around our product. People want to come work for us. They're reaching out to us. They're saying, I love what you're doing. I want to join it. So that we have a cheat code to it because like we have most of the time when we reach out to somebody, they say, yeah, I would love to explore. So building that product that is highly lovable also creates a really great recruiting brand for you as well. So make sure that there's multiple benefits to that. But second of all, we do a lot of trials for people. So trial work to see [00:41:55] S0: them A work in
00:41:55 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:41:55] S0: them A work in [00:41:57] S1: trial to see them in action for a couple of days. We pay them as part of the work trial. We have some probation periods that we start people on because this company is not for everybody. As I said in the podcast in the beginning, the pace here is insane. I went on a vacation for the first time. So I've been here for six months. I went on vacation for ten days. I came back, I felt like I needed to onboard from the beginning. Like everything changed. And when I'm in it, I feel like it's an evolution. But the fact that just being gone for ten days, it feels like a complete revolution in the company. It's that piece is just not for everybody. And that's okay because I'm very firm believer that there's different cultures and different environments that the best fit for different personalities and different people. So we try to be very upfront with how things are and how chaotic they are. And we prioritize people that don't look for clarity. We can create clarity out of chaos because it is absolutely chaotic otherwise. And if we start to look for people that can explain it to us, that's the only way that we can succeed. [00:43:06] S0: The way you describe going on vacation and feeling very different, it feels like when you don't see your kid for a few days and they're just like completely different, you're like, how did you grow up so fast in three days? [00:43:15] S1: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.