Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:44:11 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:44:11] S0: It is. Yeah. And and it's like, okay, we just have a landing page. There's nothing there. Now AI makes it easier to do that, and it's like more full featured. [00:44:18] S1: Yeah. Well, it's the feedback cycle is just completely collapsed. You can go from idea to some product that is functioning to user feedback within a day if you want to. I mean, depending on how fast that you wanna run or how complex the product is. For missions, it took us a couple of weeks to vibe code it to the point where... Because we also... I have a full time Bypecoder on my team. He's amazing. So like he wanted to create videos, like he did a bunch of designs for it too. So we he took him a couple of weeks. We're testing it now and then we'll put it in the product. But it's a completely different development life cycle. Before, it would just take so many more steps from user research to the design sprints, to prioritizing on engineering roadmap, to build something minimal and viable to actually test to the little long testing cycles. Now it's just like, boom, let's go. It's taken us could have taken us a day. We just decided to take a couple of weeks to get all of the video pieces correct. [00:45:18] S0: I saw you launch this on LinkedIn. To me, it looked like a full product launch. It is interesting to hear, this is just a prototype. [00:45:26] S1: Yes. It's... [00:45:27] S0: Minimum lovable Minimum lovable. I gotta ask, you have this, you said you had a full time vibe coder. What the heck is this? Is this like an engineer or is this something else? What is a full time vibe coder?
00:45:38 · Elena Verna
[00:45:38] S1: Great question. This is a new job role that is actually popping up here and there. It's absolutely fascinating to watch this development because I see vibe coding as a skill being added to a lot of job descriptions for designers, for product managers, for marketers, which I think is a really interesting shift. Finally, Excel can move over. Like we have a new skill to add that is super empowering and not three years old, but type coder. So his name is Lazar and he actually was chief of staff in his previous role. So he's not technical at all. He's self taught in technical aspects of it, but he was very early on in the vibe coding wave. So he learned a lot about it. He was a user of all of the vibe coding tools, Lovable included. And when I was coming into the role, I'm like, I have so many projects that I will vibe code myself. So I run this woman only hackathon she builds. I vibe coded the first version of that site and like and submission process for applications. And then other people came in and started building on top of it. But I've I've coded, but then like, I don't have enough time sometimes because I need to run around and I want to push out so many different initiatives that I want to test in the market with our own products. So we connected on social. Like, you join us? And he joined us for part time. I make you bringing so much value. For example, we partnered with Shopify and he created a bunch of Shopify Lovable templates by coded for us. And it's been so helpful to have somebody like that that is just like pushing all of these things out. And he's an absolute expert. So he's teaching us all too of what is possible with Lovable because he's on the cutting edge of constantly pushing it to the limit. So I I really enjoy having that role, which I've never had before in my life and in my team.
00:47:31 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:47:31] S0: I'm not surprised. I've I've never heard of this role before as a real full time job. Do you think this is a thing people will start hiring for at non vibe coding companies? [00:47:41] S1: So I vibe code myself. So like I would put that as even as a skill on my on my resume. Now, it took me a while to figure out. By the way, like, everybody is like, oh, you just go in like... And it all happens automatically. It takes you a couple of iterations, couple of projects until like you know, okay, this is how I need to translate it, how I need to think about it. But for me, it's when I started scaling of what I want to vibe code, that's where his value really came in. Because I'm like, okay, I understand what is possible. I know what needs to be achieved. And some of these apps, want to be almost full blown built because they're not going to get incorporated into the product anytime soon. They don't need to be. I'll just link to them from from our headers, so to speak. And he really accelerated that velocity for me. So once you get into by coding and you see its value within your organization, leaning into somebody like that just accelerates your velocity because it is like an engineer on your team. It's just they're not to me. He's his part his part technical, but they can be nontechnical if they're really good.
00:48:40 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:48:40] S0: That is fascinating. This episode is brought to you by Persona, the verified identity platform helping organizations onboard users, fight fraud, and build trust. We talk a lot on this podcast about the amazing advances in AI, but this can be a double edged sword. For every wow moment, there are fraudsters using the same tech to wreak havoc, laundering money, taking over employee identities, and impersonating businesses. Persona helps combat these threats with automated user, business, and employee verification. Whether you're looking to catch candidate fraud, meet age restrictions, or keep your platform safe, Persona helps you verify users in a way that's tailored to your specific needs. Best of all, Persona makes it easy to know who you're dealing with without adding friction for good users. This is why leading platforms like Etsy, LinkedIn, Square, and Lyft trust Persona to secure their platform. Persona is also offering my listeners 500 free services per month for one full year. Just head to withpersona.com/lenny to get started. That's with persona.com/lenny. Thanks again to Persona for sponsoring this episode. Let me kinda go back to summarize just real quick the growth levers. I wanna move in a somewhat different direction. So things that help Lovable grow. One is just build something in mind that blows your socks off, as you said. I love these phrases out here. The second is make noise in the market. And the way that Lovable does this, the CEO is tweeting constantly. You build something that blows people's socks off so that they share things on socials themselves, plus this influencer marketing component, and just this idea of building in public has been really helpful. This point about activation being kind of embedded within the product team of the AI of the AI agent essentially. So it's essentially not the growth team thinking about activation. It's the product team that is building the AI magic that is obsessed with activation. And it feels like those are the main the main growth levers. Is there anything else that I missed?
00:50:37 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:50:37] S1: Community. I think community is really important here because you need to bring people together as they're exploring these capabilities and as they're seeing what's possible so they can bounce off each other and they can help each other out. So I would say community also amplifies that word-of-mouth. It amplifies all of the social posting. It amplifies retention mechanisms for you as well. The community has been a huge part of Lovable success as well. And that's something that was started very early on. It runs on Discord, so it's nothing fancy. It's not like we build anything completely from scratch for ourselves. And it has hundreds of thousands of members, and it's very lively. We have community managers that are making sure that all of the questions get answered and the right groups are being created. We have incredible ambassador program now as well of people doing it. So I would say community here again of really making software more human is very important role. Now, obviously not everybody can build a community, but maybe at least plugging in into somebody's community is quite important as well. And then there's another one. Unless you have a question on community. [00:51:46] S0: No, keep going.
00:51:47 · Elena Verna
[00:51:47] S1: And another one is giving your product away a lot. And for AI products, it may feel counterintuitive because they're so costly. Every single interaction with an AI product cost company something. There's an LLM pass through cost that is coming through. And a lot of especially traditional tech companies I see are gating AI immediately behind the paywall because they're sitting on the really cush high margin profile. And the moment that you start giving AI away for free, you like cutting into those margins with like a knife through the butter. Now, at the same time, AI being so new and the capabilities being so new, you have to remove the barrier of entry. You have to give a lot of your product away for free. But by the way, I don't just mean freemium. Freemium to me is just like a baseline. If you're in the new category, you need to let people explore what it is free and get that initial wow moment. It's not a moment, by the way. It doesn't need to be a moment anymore. It just needs to be a wow moment. And for Lovable is that first preview generation after your first prompt, even though it's absolutely not gonna be complete thing of what you wanna build, but you just go, this is possible. Like, I had no idea. I wanna keep building. And it becomes an addictive exercise. But we also give so many of our Lovable credits away to every event, to every hackathon. If you want to host a Lovable hackathon, we will sponsor it and give all of the participants credits away for free. So we give them away as candy and we basically track them over our LLM costs on freemium and giveaways as our marketing costs. And it doesn't go into our something we need to reduce to make our margins better. It goes into this is something that we need to spend more in because this is part of our growth secret sauce.