Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:09:18 · Elena Verna
[00:09:18] S1: Well, I saw Stripe receipts, so it is real as far as I'm concerned, unless Stripe dashboard is lying to us. But it is money getting deposited in our bank account. But let's talk about who's actually contributing to that number. We do have a really large use case of people starting their own companies on Lovable. So we call it a founder use case where somebody that is non technical that has never been able to code or create a piece of software is now able to come in and actually build an app completely from scratch. And some of them are already monetizing it, some of it just using it for lead gen, for other services or some physical goods, for example, that they're selling. Some of them are just still building. And we monetize on the act of building. So that progression of like building up to your product market fit takes quite a bit of time. And even with Lovable, we're so much more efficient and effective compared to hiring an engineer in terms of the price, but it still takes time. So we have a lot of founders, whether it's B2C, whether there's B2B or consumer products, business products, e commerce, whatever it is. But on the other side, we have a lot of employees within companies using Lovable as well, where they're building internal tools or they're building prototypes, they're building landing pages. So that is another use case that is very relevant and quite efficient for us. But then there is a hype and discovery that is happening as well. Because when I think about software, I think about it. I talked to John Cutler actually, and he gave me this framework that is like completely stuck in my mind of software always goes through capabilities stage first, like what is possible to actually create with this? Then it needs to transition into value of how is it that am I going to get value out of this? And then you can start thinking about scaling it, of which aspects of my life and my work that can actually go in. And we're right now very much in the capability stage with vibe coding because everybody's just exploring what can I do? And the beautiful thing here is that what you can do changes every month to three months. So you constantly need to come back and you need to see what has changed. So a lot of people use it for personal reasons. I build myself tutoring apps for my kid.
00:11:33 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
So he has to answer questions in order to get some screen time accumulated for him. I build my own portfolio. I see people doing wonderful things. My favorite story that I always say, there's this man that created a proposal on Lovable. So his fiancee had to answer questions and like she had to complete this game. And then at the end, was like this big reveal and he proposed to her. But people just unlock the most creative things that they build on Lovable. And that's where the revenue is coming from. The one piece that is working very well for us in terms of how monetization model is set up and how it interjects with your activation moment, which we can also cover. But that is what's driving that both conversion and retention rates. [00:12:17] S0: Let me ask you one question that's on people's minds. Imagine as you talk about this, just what is what is retention look like?