Elena Verna：Lovable 如何发布产品并玩转社交实现病毒式传播

Growth is a trust problem now. Every single employee at Lovable is expected to ship code to production.

Today we have one of the best heads of growth in the world, Elena Verna, head of growth at Lovable. They are now at over 350 million in ARR. Their latest round put them at over 6.6 billion dollars. They are one of the fastest growing companies in the world. This is an incredible breakdown inside that growth machine.

For any founder in the first year, investing in paid as the means of growth is a death trap. Unless you've been in the business for 5 years plus, you do not know your LTV, period. Do not lock people in subscription as the only way to monetize you.

Do you think Lovable removes the need for Figma in the design process? Ready to go?

Elena, it is so great to have you back on the show. It's been a while since we did this, so thank you so much for joining me again.

Yes, thank you for having me again. What has it been, a couple of years at this point?

Yeah, it's been a couple of years. I've actually aged about 15 years, but it's only technically been 2 and a half. You look younger, and I look 15 years older.

I want to start with a really hard and unfair question, which is that we, as investors, feel it: the sands and the technological winds are moving faster than ever. What are the single biggest ways that growth is changing in a world of AI?

I have a couple of ways that I think it's changing. Thing number 1 is that, as software creation is becoming democratized and functionality is becoming available to anyone to build, whether you buy it from somebody or build it yourself honestly doesn't matter anymore. If you want to actually sell software and grow your business, growth is a trust problem now. Who do I trust to actually purchase it from? Who do I trust to use it? Do I believe in the team that's building behind it?

Otherwise, I'm just going to go create my own. If I don't believe that they're going to continue to worry about my needs and continue evolving it. To me, there's just so much behind not just growth tactics, growth hacking, and channel optimizations. It's literally about winning the trust of your consumer, having them vouch for you, having them believe in you, and having them stand behind you as you're building your business.

The second thing, which kind of goes along with the trust thing, is that it's no longer about the software functionality that you're trying to grow. You're really trying to create what I call a minimum lovable product out of every single little thing that you touch, because software is now almost being judged by the emotion that it can invoke in a human, as opposed to just the core functionality that it can provide.

I actually compare it to Maslow's pyramid of needs. The bottom layer is just, "Okay, it works. Okay, I can believe that it'll handle security and all of the other pieces." Now I need to be able to connect to it. We, as humans, always want to connect with something. We don't like utilities. We don't like tools.

The more software starts to have some sort of personality that helps us trust it, too, it's almost becoming a minimum bar in order to even kick-start growth. The last thing I would say, in terms of growth tactics themselves, is that all of them—performance marketing and optimizations—are just becoming automated pretty quickly. It's fascinating to watch.

To me, growth work now is trying something new, trying to be innovative, and creating these once-in-a-lifetime campaigns, so to speak, to try to win the eyeballs and trust of your customers. That's all I'm doing. I'm coding all day long and trying to find ways to really capture the hearts and minds of our customers, not just optimizing pricing points and pricing pages into oblivion.

I wanted to go through a couple of elements there. You mentioned trust being so important. In a world where trust is primary, what becomes more important as a channel, and what becomes less important?

What becomes more important is your product as a channel, where you actually earn that trust. That drives word of mouth and likeability. What becomes less important is some of the more traditional marketing and sales techniques that we would use to try to drive growth.

Is SEO as a channel dying? We had Aaron from Monday on the show, and he said that there was a 10% decline in conversion from SEO since Google introduced AI.

Yeah, there's a decline, but you have to understand that it's so enormous. Even if it's dying, it will take years for it to die. I'm not going to make a prediction about whether SEO is dying. It's declining, and the habits are changing, absolutely. But is SEO still fruitful? Abso-fucking-lutely.

You still have to invest in SEO if you want to have the baseline of growth. But is SEO going to be the reason that you're going to win in your business? I don't think so. It's just something that you have to do. It's not going to be the reason why you're going to stand out and win.

How important is Anton's brand to Lovable's user acquisition? I think Anton's amazing. Every new hire—maybe every senior hire—gets a picture with him. I think he's mastered the founder brand. How important is his founder brand to net-new user acquisition?

I think that Lovable is where it is right now because of the founder-led social presence that Anton really leaned into at the beginning. How important is his brand right now to our existing success? Less important, because we've diversified away from it and have other channels through which we're growing.

Our users are very active, our community is very strong, and we have a lot of user-generated content. We also have other people on the team, including me, who are pushing our brand along. But at the beginning, was he the reason that Lovable spiked and got the traction that allowed it to scale to where it is right now? I think so. I have no way to prove it, but looking at the data and the early traction, that was it.

Welcome to being a venture capitalist: making bold statements with no data to back them up. That is our job.

When we look at that, we have so many growth leaders and marketing leaders who say, "Okay, we have a channel that works. Do we double down? How do we think about channel makeup when we're thinking about growth?" What lessons do you have on when to concentrate, when to diversify, and how many channels to diversify to? Was it right to diversify away from Anton's social presence? I'd love your thoughts.

When I say diversify away from Anton, that's not to say that Anton is not a meaningful channel anymore. I'm just saying that we have other channels running in parallel. He's not the only one, as he was at the beginning, and that's a really big difference. He's still growing his channel, and it's still very important. We're just not relying on it as the only single point of failure.

Second of all, if I were any company, I would invest heavily in social—not in social in the traditional sense of posting from your company account or hiring an intern as your social media manager to post some puns on Twitter here and there. I really mean building in public, encouraging your employees to build in public, grow their social followings, and reach your customers through your own team's voices.

I think that's the channel that so many companies underestimate: how important and powerful it is, how much trust it builds, and how much it unites people behind you and your mission. They see the people who build the company, and they want to connect to other people. We, with our little lizard brains, still want that connection. We yearn for it.

In a world where we're bombarded with marketing messages everywhere we turn, being able to see and connect is what it's all about. That's the trust piece that I keep circling back to over and over again.

So, first of all, for any founder, I would suggest deploying founder-led social and employee-led social, building in public, and recruiting people to be your biggest fans and cheerleaders, so to speak. Then you can start thinking about, "Okay, where else do I want to be? Do I want to buy a billboard? Do I want to invest in paid marketing? Do I want to do this or that?"

But the first organic strategy that every startup should pursue is founder-led social.

Build in public for your own employees. If I'm a founder listening, what do I actually take from that? Should I go in tomorrow and say, "Hey, guys, you do amazing work. Why don't you actively share the work that you're doing and how you do it and build your own personal brands?" Many founders will say, "Why would I encourage people to promote themselves when they'll then get hired away in a very competitive labor market?"

I have a couple of things against that statement. Number 1, if you think that your employees are so easily swayed to go somewhere else just because the right company reaches out to them, what are you doing? There are really bad cultural issues in your company, whether they're motivation-based or ambition-based, with who you're hiring. You're hiring just a warm body to be there who, whenever they're offered an extra dollar somewhere else or a better logo somewhere else, is just going to run.

I would look at your recruiting practices if that's actually your worry: that people are going to be stolen if they become known. Second of all, if you can use your company to help people build a better social presence that they can use to market your company, then who cares if they build a personal brand in the meantime? They become your biggest marketing agents—the most powerful marketing agents.

I think you have to look at it as a marketing channel that you almost invest in. By the way, you get 2 for the price of 1. You get, for example, an engineer and a marketer at the same time. Who wouldn't want that, as opposed to seeing, “Oh, well, if they rotate this way, then I'm going to lose it one way or the other”? We're very multifunctional people. We can do multiple things, and I think a little bit of encouragement—and obviously leading the way by showing an example—goes really far.

Does function matter to anyone anymore? I know that sounds strange, but growth is marketing and growth is also product. I don't really see the divide between any function today.

No, there's massive blurring of lines, and that's been happening for a long time. Every product manager has had to do their own analytics for the last decade. Every marketer was expected to build some landing pages and do some no-code solutions for the last decade, too. I think we've been going in this direction for a long time, but the blurring is accelerating—the speed of that blurring is accelerating.

How do you hire for a growth role today?

I think there's still a path to hire. There is a generalist, and then there is a specialist. Somebody who is kind of a jack-of-all-trades, the kitchen sink of all problem-solving—those people are very powerful, especially very early in a company's stages.

As you start to grow and actually say, “Okay, these are the channels that are really working for me. I really need to hire a specialist who truly can fine-tune every single channel and squeeze the last 5–10% out of it,” you still need specialists. An SEO specialist is still a thing. It's very much still a thing, and there's a need for that.

However, everybody is now also expected to do everybody else's job in some capacity, at least at an average level. The level of capabilities that all of us have has increased. For example, I now ship code to production. I have never done that before, but I also go and ship my own apps and run my own campaigns completely without anybody's support. I build apps, go out there, create noise around them, and drive engagement to them. It's all part of the growth work to me.

I write copy, and I make prototypes for our engineering team that is designing them. Sometimes design shits all over it; sometimes they say, “Good job. You can go through it.” All I'm saying is, I'm doing all of this myself now, versus 10 years ago, when I would say I was very specialized, more on a narrow lane. That is the expectation for every single employee.

Every single employee at Lovable is expected to ship code to production. Every single employee is expected to build their own satellite apps or their own products, or even have a side gig that's running on Lovable. Every single employee at Lovable is expected to do their own marketing. Everybody's encouraged to post on social, build their brand, go talk about what they're doing at Lovable, and build in public.

Every single employee still has their day job and their specialty that they actually need to execute and perform. That is the norm now. That is AI nativeness to me, at the root of it, because the only way that is possible is by becoming AI-native.

Tell me, is that possible at very large companies where you have compliance? Is that one of those things where it's actually a no-no? Is it only possible in a world of growth, but the minute you're a public company and you have compliance—I mean, you both know how this works—it's a nightmare. You can't post anything on social; everything has to go through someone. Some product person posts an update that hasn't been announced in earnings, and, oh my God. Is this an advantage that's only available to private companies?

It's a great question. I do think it's very much an advantage that's available to startups.

Yeah.

There's also a question of how much of the functionality of large companies can be eaten away by the current technical advances that everybody's getting via AI nativeness, and what everybody's able to code and do on their own as opposed to needing to buy software. There's an interesting question in that.

I do think that the world of very large, complex, compliance- and security-driven enterprises will be at a major disadvantage in this future. Now, how long is that really going to take to materialize for us to feel? I have no idea.

Maybe I'm in my bubble, too. Maybe I'm completely not seeing the big picture here. But it just feels like that is where the masses are going. That's what the masses want to interact with, and that's where the trends are going. So I don't know.

I get that I have a reasonable LinkedIn following, and I've been penalized for it in the larger companies. They were like, “Absolutely not. Don't post. Delete the post. This is not good. We want to approve anything that you post on social.” I'm like, it just feels suffocating. It almost was held against me that I had it.

At Lovable, it was honestly one of the first companies that was leaning into us, like, “Go post more, more, more. Can you talk about this?” We'll see over the next year how this is going to play out and whether this is truly a trend that's an advantage, or a blip and just a hype zone.

I think employee-led content, branding, and marketing are so helpful to seed communities, especially in the early days, when you need to seed them artificially, so to speak. What are the biggest mistakes you think people make when trying to build a community?

I'm just saying, Elena, maybe I'm old and grumpy, which is very possible, but I'm so bored of community being bandied around as a word. What are the biggest mistakes you see people make when trying to embrace community?

Well, the biggest one is that they treat it as just their support outlet. “Our support team cannot get through the queue. Let's create a community for it to be community support, so people can help each other.”

It just becomes a dumping ground of negative sentiment, because when people cannot get in touch with you through support channels, they go to the community to vent about their issues. So it becomes a very negative place. It's not filled with inspiration; it's not filled with positivity and accomplishment. It's literally filled with problems.

Then, in order to solve for that, companies start going after tooling and creating these community platforms and forums, basically trying to almost replicate what Microsoft has created, or another Quora, so to speak. It just becomes cold, disconnected support forums that are then indexed, by the way, for SEO for all of the negativity that's being shared within them. It's not a community.

You're not selling it. This sounds like a hole of depression.

It is, but that is the community. It's an outlet for negativity that has not been addressed by your support team. That's literally 9 out of 10 communities, because they're not spawned from a place of connection; they're spawned from the place of, “Hey, there needs to be an additional way for people to solve their problems.”

Can we seed it? Can we pay for UGC? You see UGC marketplaces; you see that head of UGC. Is there a way where we can artificially seed a community?

You can seed it, but I actually think that what you need to find is your early superusers or your early super-adopters—those people who are really excited about your product. You should pull them in to be your community managers; you should pull them in to be your community ambassadors; you should deploy them to be your biggest advocates and have them start bringing other people around them because of their excitement for the product.

But you do need to identify them very early and build community around them. That is the right way to do it, because then they will bring the positivity into it, as opposed to it being just a support outlet.

Totally got that. Can I ask: what do you do when you have a competitor who spends so much more money than you in the same space? We chatted when we had Omer from Wix on the show. Wix bought 2 Super Bowl ads. I'm not saying whether that's good or bad; it's just—

I actually didn't see them. I shouldn't admit that.

It was market research on my part. It's a big spend.

Well, you can obsess about it, you can get upset by it, you can try to match it, or you can say our growth strategy is completely different. Our growth strategy is through organic word of mouth and delighting people and showing them that we're actually better, as opposed to trying to pay for their attention.

We do look at it, absolutely. I watched Super Bowl ads, took notes, and we discussed it the day after. Did we think that we should have been in the Super Bowl? We decided we shouldn't have been after we saw the ads. We were happy with our decision not to be.

Will we support some other big sporting events? Maybe. That's not out of the question. Are we doing paid marketing ourselves now? Yes, absolutely. We're taking over New York subway systems. We have a bunch of ads running in London. We're taking more billboards in San Francisco. So we're doing some of the paid marketing spend as well.

Why did you decide on that as the channel to invest in—paid in New York, London, and San Francisco, and billboards in particular?

I’m fascinated.

Because we’re going after the late majority now, not just the early pioneers who are looking for a solution. We want to educate the rest of the market about what is possible and the capabilities that technology now has, which they should be taking advantage of. There’s a really short window of opportunity where people can get ahead if they lean into it, because otherwise they’re going to be left behind.

I think a lot of businesses will be disrupted if they’re left behind. A lot of people will be disrupted if they’re left behind. So, we do feel like we need to start educating larger masses, which is why we went into billboard and subway advertising-type situations.

But again, this is also a very short timeline for Lovable. I would never recommend a company do it this quickly, but Lovable is not a normal company because we’re already well past $300 million in ARR, even though we’re only a year and a couple of months old. We just need to move into that space a little bit faster.

But all I’m saying is that’s not our primary strategy for how we’re going to drive growth. This is just brand awareness. We want to play in the field and drive awareness across the masses out there because we believe our product is very relevant for them, and our ICP—ideal customer profile—is very broad. So, we can go after billboard advertising and feel like we appeal to most of the eyeballs that land on us.

In a PLG AI world, what is a good organic-to-paid ratio in your mind? I’m not asking for yours; I’m just saying, what’s a good ratio for founders listening?

All right. You’re starting to immediately go into attribution. How is it that you attribute? Where is the traffic coming from? Is it paid or organic? That’s impossible to do if you’re using any sort of last-click or digital-footprint-only attribution.

I would say that for any founder in the first year, investing in paid as the means of growth is a death trap. Until you actually figure out your true, stable product-market fit and are able to drive it in some sort of organic way—whether it’s organic social, organic search, or whatever it is—investing in paid is a really horrible idea.

You haven’t even optimized or really learned all of your funnels. You haven’t even grabbed people who are already looking for your solution in organic ways and figured out how they progress through your product. So, pouring money into the top of your funnel when the experience isn’t even optimized for those who are looking for you is just lighting cash on fire.

I would say that less than 10% should be paid. In a more scaled, mature company, it can be 30% or 40%, but anywhere over 50%, I would be very uncomfortable with a reliance on paid. You’re competing with everybody else on third-party platforms for attention, as opposed to relying on your organic pool and your product itself to drive growth for the company.

I’m thinking of so many companies that I see that are 60% paid in the first year, and I'm like,

I would be very nervous. I would look at that dependency as a single point of failure.

Even if the economics work out, I’m thinking of one of my companies in particular where the economics are working out and they’re profitable on a cohort basis, but they’re heavily paid.

Yes, and the problem is that it might be working out now. First of all, even if you’re going to do paid, at least make sure that the paid payback cycle is really quick.

The biggest issue I see with paid is that people look at it as just CAC-to-LTV. None of the small companies know their LTV, so you’re literally just looking at CAC and trying to guess what it’s actually going to be. Think about when you actually recoup your investment. How quickly can you put $100 into your system and recuperate that $100 back out of the system?

If it’s under 3 months, fine. Maybe it’s a little bit better. Put it into the system and have it regenerate for you really quickly, so it’s a self-contained system that keeps on giving to you and paying for itself.

But any time that goes anywhere close to 8 or 9 months, or even a year, it’s a sink of money at that point. You’ll constantly have to put more and more back into the system, and you’re going to constantly have to race to do it.

The problem is, if Google doesn’t hit its earnings, what are they going to do? They’re going to say, “Let’s go to AdWords and jack up all of the CACs by 20% so we can hit our earnings.” That’s coming out of your budget so they can hit their Wall Street numbers.

You have to be really careful because you’re literally at the mercy of other supergiants needing to hit their business performance in the market, and you are paying for it. If that’s how you want to do your growth, fine—if it’s working with a really fast payback period. But other than that, I feel like it’s not a sustainable way to grow.

So, you agree that CAC-to-LTV, for the majority of newish companies today, is a respectfully irrelevant metric?

It’s absolutely irrelevant. You don’t know your LTV. Unless you’ve been in the business for 5 years or more, you do not know your LTV. Period.

So, what numbers matter to you? If you acquire a customer, are you asking, “Is that good?” Because we have no idea how much they’re going to pay over time. You look at Lovable, and bluntly, you can spend a lot or you can spend little. It’s nice in that way, but you don’t know how much they’re going to spend. How do you determine what numbers matter?

If I’m doing paid marketing, the payback period is the only thing I look at. How quickly do I recuperate my money, on average, from any given campaign? I try to have, at least from a last-click attribution perspective—especially if it’s performance marketing—a pretty tight tie-in between those numbers.

If your conversion windows are really long, so not everybody converts within 24 hours, let’s say, and if it takes you 6 months or a year to convert, that’s very dangerous for investing in paid marketing, because then you don’t even know if you’re going to recoup that money.

Unless your conversion window is under 3 months, I would say don’t start with paid marketing as your growth lever. You’ll never be able to make it spin fast enough because you have such a long conversion window.

If you have shorter conversion windows, it’s also very important to look at signals beforehand: how people are activating, how many activated people actually convert to paid, and the many KPIs you can use to predict conversion or even predict retention that aren’t monetization-based. Really understanding that behavior in your user base becomes the number one concern in determining whether you should go into this or not.

Paid marketing, to me, is a cheap way out, and it’s not competitively defensible. I should say, cheap—it’s actually the most expensive way out. It’s not competitively defensible at all, and it’s not sustainable. You’re paying somebody else to generate demand for you.

If you haven’t figured out your unique, competitively defensible, and sustainable way to generate demand without relying on other platforms, then I think you’re just buying time in the market before the collapse is imminent.

How do you think about true activation? What does an activated user mean for you? Is someone who lands and converts? Is someone who lands, converts, and pays? What is true activation?

I live in a world where not everybody who uses your product is a paid customer. I also live in a world where every single customer has value beyond just paying you directly.

For example, at Lovable, we have a ton of free users. A lot of our costs are within our freemium—not in paid marketing, employees, or marketing and sales budgets. They’re in freemium because we view freemium as a marketing channel.

What I mean by that is that when a free user comes in and gets delighted by what they accomplish for free, they go and market on our behalf. They talk about us across social media, and they refer us to their friends.

We very carefully measure this. We have something called the Lovable Score, where we measure how often people actually refer us to somebody else, and we keep a really close eye on it because that is an earned channel that you cannot buy, you cannot compete with, and that we own.

A free user holds value to us. So, even if we acquire free users through paid marketing channels, they hold value to us. It’s not all about conversion.

But back to your activation question, to me, it’s purely engagement-based. It has nothing to do with monetization whatsoever. What is the aha moment with the product? What steps do you need to set up to get to that aha moment? What are the first habit loops that you’re going to start falling into to use the product on an ongoing basis?

So, it’s purely product-engagement-based. That is an incredible signal for both monetization and long-term retention.

With respect, do you want great product engagement? What I mean by that is, if you want simplicity, it wouldn’t necessarily be depth of product engagement. “Make me a website that’s like BBC News, but make it just for VCs and funding rounds.” Woof. That’s not very deep engagement, but it could be a happy user. How do you think about that product-engagement need versus what’s actually best for the user?

I think about it on multiple vectors. There is intensity of engagement: how deep do I go, how much time do I spend, and how complicated is the task I’m trying to accomplish? That’s one vector: intensity.

And you're right, intensity is very powerful for social platforms because the more intense you are on them, the better user you are for them. For simple productivity tools, intensity is almost an anti-metric because intensity means I'm getting stuck. I'm doing too much where this is actually supposed to be easy. So, intensity is often the anti-metric.

However, there's also frequency. How often do I come back and do it? Frequency is a big one. You always want to be in a habitual zone for our minds. A habitual zone for our minds is somewhere on a daily or weekly basis. Anytime you move into being monthly, you're in a forgettable zone. I don't remember what I did last month. The world is moving too quickly. I don't even remember if I looked at some software last month or if I tried it last month.

So, trying to be in that daily or weekly habitual zone is super important. On top of it, you look at what actions are meaningful. The worst thing is when you create frequency of engagement based on logins. That's a vanity metric. Everybody can log in. That doesn't mean they get value.

Setting up that frequency of engagement on something a little bit more meaningful—for us, for example, it's either building an app in Lovable, so you're prompting to make some changes, or receiving traffic on the app that you already published. So, you're on both sides of the engagement coin: either still editing or now reaping the benefits of what you've already published. Both are counted as an engagement signal, and then we count the frequency to see how many of them are active on a daily basis, which we call active builders.

So, you're right: intensity is often an anti-metric for us. You pick an action that provides value, but it can be fairly light—not as light as logging in or just visiting, because that is nonsensical in terms of what it means.

Does the majority of SaaS not require very limited interaction when you think about habitual usage? Like, if I'm a venture fund creating what we use Lovable for—Project Europe—amazing. We have a beautiful site, much better than 20VC's site, by the way, which cost us thousands and thousands. I'm so ashamed of that money. But we don't change it. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

It's an okay thing. If it's live and functioning and getting traffic, you're getting value out of it. That's great for us, so we count it as engagement. Some people are just going to have apps that they're still building. Some of them are just in the consumption state. Both are good. There's no preference for us of one versus the other in terms of value whatsoever.

If anything, we just measure and watch the proportions to make sure that there is a good enough amount of apps that are getting traffic and receiving value that way. We're not just about building; we're also about value capture after the build is complete.

What are your biggest lessons on conversion to paid in this new world of PLG AI prosumer tools?

My biggest lessons are a couple of old lessons. Lesson number 1: do not—and I mean do not—lock people into a subscription as the only way to monetize them.

I know that we all love our annual recurring revenue and our multiples are decided by annual recurring revenue, but if your product is anything like bursty usage, where it's not super consistent—when creativity strikes or a project strikes, I need to go and do a lot of work in it, and then I might have some periods of more downtime with much lighter usage—allowing flexibility in your monetization model for ad hoc purchases can mean the world of incrementality for your overall monetization capture potential.

We just introduced top-ups at Lovable, and it's been absolutely wild because in every other job I've ever held in my entire life, I've always thought about something like an ad hoc purchase on top of the subscription. I've always shut it down, or I was too nervous to even move it forward, because of the fear of affecting that treasured ARR. That's not true. It's a complete fallacy. You should do both, and it adds on incrementally. Your ARR only continues growing, and your retention improves.

So, that is one big learning for me, especially with AI, where people are still exploring and the usage is not super consistent for most of the products.

The second one is that your monetization model right now is not the correct one for every single AI company out there. We fundamentally have not found how to best monetize AI because we're all just passing through highly expensive LLM costs to our users. But when LLM costs collapse—and they will collapse eventually; every LLM company is betting on it—our monetization models will have to evolve. Whoever evolves their monetization model to be more outcome-based first is going to be the winner in the market.

So, you better set up the right infrastructure and the right team around it to be able to change your monetization model and test it really rapidly, as opposed to leaving it as something that is not touched for years and years. For most businesses, it is a taboo subject that cannot be adjusted because it feels so complicated.

A lot of startups today have subsidized LLM costs, very much like AWS did and Google Cloud did with credits for years, and Anthropic and OpenAI have done now with this generation of startups. Should they account for them in costs, or should they let themselves be artificially impressed by their margins despite this clear steroid injection of free for this time period?

Why would OpenAI sell the LLM under cost? Yes, it's a market grab for sure, but I fundamentally believe that they think LLM costs are going to have to come down to the point that they won't have to raise the prices. They're going to start getting the margins to actually make those prices make sense for them and potentially lower them even further, because LLMs are going to be a commoditized feature very soon.

It doesn't feel that way right now, but it will be like access to the internet or access to the cloud. It's commoditized. It's cheap. So, I believe that they also believe it's going to come down quite a bit once we get efficiency gains in how LLMs are constructed.

When it becomes completely commoditized, you cannot monetize on it anymore. You have to start moving toward monetization of outcomes. Again, whoever evolves their monetization models first will win.

Speaking of the commoditization of models, how do you think about creating stickiness in what is seemingly a very transient, transactional world? Especially when you look at the switch from Cursor to code for a lot of developers, it's almost been overnight for a lot of them. How do you think about creating stickiness in a transient, transactional product environment?

This is where brand comes in. Trust comes in. You have to rely on people believing in you and your team because, otherwise, like I said, all of the SaaS functionalities are getting commoditized and democratized. Anybody can do everything now. So, who do you—

That's a bit woo-woo, Elena, honestly.

Listen, I'm terrified of the fact that I'm becoming a brand marketer because it's becoming so much more about brand. People will follow the brand because of its promise, because of the relationship, because functionality is going to be available everywhere.

I don't know what else can differentiate you besides creating an absolutely delightful experience, stressing about the smallest pieces of friction in your product, and being really fast in innovation. You still cannot fall behind, but at least be on the forefront, even if you're not the leader. It's that relationship that you develop with your customer. It's everything.

How lovable are you? Because if you're not lovable, I think the end is near for a lot of companies that are purely focused on the functional ability of their products.

If I gave you an unlimited budget, Elena, what would you do differently?

With what?

Growth, spend, marketing. Would you sponsor a Real Madrid shirt? Would you do an F1 car? Would you pump money into Anton's brand and give him a media team to do daily vlogs and videos of what he does in a day?

A couple of tactical things come to mind. I would still do out-of-home advertising. I think that it's coming back in spades because that's where eyeballs are at. That's where you can actually capture attention.

I would go very heavily into video and talking, not just visual ads, because then you can explain things so much more easily. I would go after Amazon Prime Video, Spotify, and all of those of the world because there's just not a lot of competition.

I would go after the creator economy so hard. I would have every single newsletter and every single podcast have my ad on it and just box out everybody else.

Then I would send every single one of my customers my own T-shirt with a hat and have them be walking billboards all over the place. They would be top quality, things that they actually would want to wear. They would feel like they're an absolutely kick-ass thing that is cool to have.

So, I would deploy as much as possible in front of my customers and people where they're already spending their time and eyeballs, to have my brand all around it.

If we go through them, number 1: out-of-home. I think most people do out-of-home really badly. I stand looking at billboards or banners, and I'm like, I have no idea what this person with a laptop is doing, randomly typing in a very large drawing room with nothing but an orchid around them.

I think billboards can also be deployed almost like performance marketing. One of my favorite stories is that I worked with Maya, who was at Segment, and the way Segment worked has just stuck with me. When they wanted to close an enterprise contract, they would buy a billboard right in front of that office and put an ad on it addressing that company specifically. It was the cheapest way to close a six- or seven-figure contract because they directly targeted every single employee in the company with the billboard.

I think you can be a lot more creative with billboards than people think. Everybody constantly thinks San Francisco 101: “Where am I going to be? The AI slop of billboards on that freeway?” But I think you can do it so much smarter with movie theaters, taxis, subway systems, and buses. Go back to the bus stops. Go back to the basics, because you can do some really cool stuff there.

I remember one of the founders I once invested in was running a recruitment platform, and they were trying to get people away from Goldman Sachs and into startups. They got a billboard outside Goldman Sachs and put, “I bet your parents are proud of you working for Goldman.”

What’s amazing, though, is that the big newspapers wrote about it because it was funny, aggressive, and characterful. You get this multiplier effect of media because it’s really out there.

But, like you said, it needs to be funny and it needs to have character. It cannot just have your tone-deaf AI marketing slogan of “a collaborative platform in the cloud with AI.” Your transformation means nothing. Those words cannot be used.

You will not appeal to everybody, and it doesn’t matter. Just appeal to people who will smile, chuckle, have a memory from it, and want to talk about it. We are in an era where we need to start taking more risks in marketing.

People need to get out of their boxed-in minds about how we’ve been trained for the last 20 years to think about what good creative and good copy look like, because I think we’re living in a different world. If you want to capture people’s attention, you have to think outside of the box.

When we think about video, what would you do with it? How would you think about what works, what doesn’t work, what you see that’s cool, and what’s not cool? How would you approach video in a world of unlimited, unconstrained possibilities?

I think AI-generated video is the future. I was just playing with a video platform where I uploaded a still photo of myself, and it created a full video of me moving my hands and doing the entire ad, with back-and-forth transitions and an app screen.

I think there will still be a place for manual video creation. Those will always be artisan videos that are handcrafted and hand-created. It’s a craft. Think about taking a picture versus painting a picture with watercolors. There will still be some differences there.

But for advertising needs, AI is where video and even all creative work are going to be. AI models, video creation, and visual creation are improving so rapidly, and they can create these striking images and animate you in ways that you would never be able to record properly in one shot. I think that’s the future.

I’m even playing around with creating animations for myself when I’m reading my own blog, as opposed to recording it. I can just put in my screenshot, give it the blog’s transcript, and let it do it for me. It looks like I’m reading it out loud and annotating it, but it’s not me. It’s just AI doing all of the work.

I think the future of advertising is going to be almost purely AI.

In the creator economy, people sponsor newsletters and creatives, and they try to do this while spraying money around pretty badly. How would you think about doing it well? What would you avoid? Would you go horizontal or vertical? How do you think about that?

Every creator has their audience. You need to find creators whose audiences align most with your ideal customer profile.

You cannot look at the creator economy as a one-and-done exercise. You cannot do one ad placement and expect to see performance from it. It’s somewhere between performance and brand awareness, but it’s most definitely a brand-awareness touchpoint because people are not going to that audience to discover new products, so to speak. Consistency matters here. You have to be in it for the long haul.

Coverage matters, too. You cannot just be in one newsletter; you have to be across multiple newsletters. You have to look at it as, “Okay, I’m going to do billboards or creators. I can do influencers on social, newsletter creators, or podcasters.”

Some of those slots are super cheap, too, because people aren’t educated on how much to charge. You can get thousands of impressions for basically next to nothing. I don’t know why more people don’t do that.

Most of the time, people think, “What is my click-through rate going to be through my ad?” But it’s not SEM. It’s not an AdWords ad. It’s not a paid marketing advertisement on top of Google search results.

People underestimate the association of their brand with that creator and their ability to target a very specific audience that the creator earned by creating content for that audience. That is completely unappreciated as a marketing channel at scale right now.

Do you try to get attribution from it? Do you try referral codes, discount codes, or whatever it is to get attribution? Or are you like, “You know what? It’s in the brand bucket. Fine”?

I think discount codes are always nice, just to give that audience a little something. I truly believe in—I wouldn’t say a pure discounting strategy—but using your product and giving your product away for free for people to try as the biggest portion of your marketing budget. I think that always has to be the case.

Let me explain that quickly. Yes, you can do discount codes, give free offers, or make your premium offering even bigger. But if you look at your overall marketing spend, your free giveaways—whether it’s part of premium, discount codes, or whatever—have to be bigger than your paid marketing spend.

I truly believe that is the right ratio for every single company. If you’re not using your product to acquire customers through some sort of offer, I think you’re giving too much money away to the Googles and Metas of the world and not putting enough pressure on your product to wow people. But discount codes are good.

I saw a post of yours about the power of social and your personal brand. I saw your offer for Women’s Day, where you were making Lovable free. With respect, does that work? Do you get a lot of take-up on it? Does it lead to conversion, or is it just good brand awareness?

Ask me after Women’s Day. We’ll see how much it actually leads to conversion.

Lovable has had a couple of free weekends before, where we offered the product completely for free. The first free weekend was quite good from an acquisition perspective. It was in early 2025, when the brand was only a couple of months old.

The second free weekend was in the summer last year, about 7 months in, when we had just about almost hit $100 million in ARR. That one was incredible for reengagement and resurrection of existing users and for deepening their use cases. It was more of a retention play than an acquisition play, interestingly enough.

This time, for Women’s Day, I don’t know about you—maybe the algorithm is boxing me out—but all I see is people talking about Lovable Free Day. The social impact of people being so excited about it, rightfully so, and how it’s going to be completely free for a day is something you cannot pay for.

That’s a marketing campaign. A campaign like that would cost us millions of dollars to execute. Our users are doing all of the marketing for us and grabbing everybody around them to bring them into Lovable.

We’ll see how it performs, because this is the first time we’ve given notice so early. Usually, we did it a day before, so it was very last-minute. This is also the first time we’ve aligned it with a mission, as opposed to just saying it was a free day.

We’re always experimenting, and this is a large test, so to speak, that we’re running to see how it’s going to go. But the market coverage and the buzz that it creates are fairly priceless because they’re created by our own users.

How do you think about setting effective KPIs to determine the success of a campaign like this?

We obviously have really big KPIs around how many people we expect to bring in, how many new sign-ups we expect to get, how many people we expect to resurrect, and how many existing users who are already active are going to come in.

We’re going to see how many apps are created or deepened through editing that day. We’re going to see how many of them get published. Our North Star metric is daily active apps, so we expect that to shoot up.

The main goal is to see how far it comes back down to previous growth levels, or whether it’s going to be a step-function change and then we’re going to grow from there. Our goal is to really understand the new exposure and the deepening engagement with our existing users at the engagement level.

Monetization, obviously, will just be a result of that, but it is not the primary KPI that we’re optimizing against.

I love that—taking advantage of Women’s Day or a weekend of free giveaways, or whatever that is. When we think about product launches, what are your biggest lessons or pieces of advice on how to do product launches well as a product manager?

Yeah, such a great question.

That’s very kind of you. I’ve had some practice lately.

I think product launches at Lovable are done very differently from any other company I’ve seen. Most of the time, your product launch may be once a month if you’re lucky—most likely once every 3 months, or quarterly. If you’re very unlucky, in larger companies, it’s a semiannual or annual launch. It’s a very slow cadence, and you try to create big moments around it because that’s your time to make buzz, acquire new users, or reengage existing users.

At Lovable, we are committed to launching every day. There’s ongoing buzz happening; it’s almost chaotic. Lovable is evolving every single day. Every single day, it’s getting better and something is improving, and that is very important for us to stay relevant in the category.

On top of that, every 1–2 months, we make big, what we call Tier 1, launches that bundle a bunch of functionality. There’s a story behind them, and there’s a step-function change in what’s actually happening. It’s a really interesting strategy of constant noise in the market and then big spikes in what we’re launching.

I know that constant noise is part of our retention strategy. That constant noise drives a lot of resurrection for us as well, because people feel like it’s a living, breathing thing that is constantly growing and evolving, and they always want to come back and try it again. That’s as opposed to us getting into a forgettable zone for almost a month or 3 months and seeing competitors launch. It’s a really different way to think about launches altogether.

But how do you have a launch every day? Everyone would love to have a launch every day. Is it just the product velocity and being very vocal about every single little thing?

We’re not vocal about every single little thing. Our marketing does not get involved in everyday launches. Those are really—maybe I should just call them releases.

Our engineering team releases multiple things every single day that improve the customer experience. Not just bugs—I’m not even talking about bugs—but actual changes in the product based on frustrations, lack of capacity, or lack of capability.

Then we encourage them to post about it on social. We have a channel called Bees Swarming at Lovable, where they post their posts, and we all go bee-swarm on that post to try to give it more amplification. We try to make a marketer out of every single engineer.

We also pick out things that we’re excited about and post about them on social. It’s employee-led marketing for these releases, and then marketing comes in and puts all of its firepower behind Tier 1 or partner launches that are really meant to tell the story to the customer. Staying top of mind is important.

I think relevancy is everything. Everything. People almost forget what you said, but the impact of you being there is what’s important. And again, relevancy is everything.

Bee swarming—I love that. ElevenLabs does it as well, which is interesting. Does it really make a difference when you have people from Lovable like something within, yeah, a minute? It makes a big difference to algorithms.

Yes, it makes a big difference. It’s actually not so much about likes; it’s more about comments. You like it, maybe you repost it, but it’s the comment that makes the biggest difference in what the algorithms pick up right now.

It’s not all happening in the first minute. People get to it when they get to it, so it’s spread out throughout the first couple of hours. But I go to that channel at the end of each day and just go down the line: “Okay, let me go support all of the things that people have said,” and I can get them more visibility through my platform as well.

We support each other, and it works quite nicely. We’ve had employees who have grown their followings quite a bit since they started because of that, because we all bee-swarm on them.

The final one that you mentioned was swag. I have the most inordinate amount of swag, Elena. I’m sure you do, too—T-shirts and caps. I don’t know what it is. I’m so sorry to lump you in as one nation, but you are one nation, Americans, and you have these big drinks. Do you know the soccer-mom drink things?

Stanley Cup?

Those ones, yes. I have about 50 of them.

You do? Can you send me some? My daughter loves them.

I’m going to write a note. You can have an array of them. Some of them, by the way, are from startups that are dead, but the Stanley Cup survives.

Okay, thank you. What would be your advice to someone like—okay, me? I want swag for our portfolio companies, for our LPs, you name it. What advice? What to do, what not to do, what you’d like to do? Help me out.

I can’t say that at Lovable we’re doing it right either. We do it on a one-off basis. It took us a while even to get the swag to all of our own employees because we wanted it to be top quality. We didn’t want to just outsource it and get another shitty T-shirt on everybody that falls apart after the first wash.

It’s actually a pretty big friction in the market right now: how to do this at scale. First, it’s quite expensive to do it right, and 2, it’s really hard to find partners that can scale the operations for you. I don’t know if I have the right answer for you.

I just know that if your customer wears your T-shirt, that is the best thing you can possibly do. So, how do you get to the moment where—well, for example, when we did the She Builds Hackathon the first 2 times, we sent T-shirts to every single participant. People posted about it on LinkedIn: “Oh my gosh, I got a Lovable T-shirt. I’ll wear it all the time.”

There’s some element at the beginning of it being a hot brand and people wanting to be affiliated with it, and you need to lean into it as much as possible. At the same time, does anybody want a Google T-shirt? I don’t know. It’s just all over the place, and you can buy them in gift shops that just say Google or something on them.

I think there’s a time and place for that strategy, and it’s most of the time when you’re hot and growing really fast and people want to feel that affiliation with your brand lifts them in some way.

If you could call yourself up the night before you joined Lovable and say, “Elena, you should know this,” what would you say to yourself if you had the ability to call yourself up and say that?

Every month at Lovable feels like a year in a normal company in terms of how much change it goes through, how much my role evolves, and how many priority shifts we have in a given month.

One more thing that I would really tell myself is that I’d be in awe of what I’d be doing 6 months after starting the job and how completely different it would be from anything I’d done in the last 20 years of my career.

Okay, so I’m a startup founder, and I’m like, “Wow, you know, Sarah led growth at—I don’t know—Notion.” Amazing, amazing company. She led growth at Notion. Gosh, she must be amazing.

Does it matter if she’s amazing because it’s a different world, or is it actually about mental plasticity toward growth?

I think it’s about agency. It’s about people’s autonomy. It’s about people’s drive and willingness to explore how this world is changing with AI.

I do still think that Sarahs matter. Like I consider myself a Sarah. I've been there for 20 years. I have so deeply embedded patterns and frameworks around how things used to be done because that’s been my entire professional career. I do have a lot of patterns that will help a company not trip up over obvious things. I do bring that value to the business.

But I also need to be paired with people who are not burdened with those decades of knowledge, who can just go and open my horizons, who can teach me new ways of how to do it. Because every single thing that I do, I still rely on: “How did I do it before? Let me do it now.”

I’m constantly pressed by everybody at Lovable. They’re like, “No, this is the way to do it.” At first, my mind breaks, and I’m like, “No, I’ve never done this before. This is not how you do it.” I have to constantly try their way.

I think both of us together—it’s almost like an old guard of Sarahs and a new guard of employees who don’t have that context and don’t have that baggage—is what creates a perfect harmony that pushes the company forward. You can prevent stupid mistakes from happening with seniors, but then you can push into AI nativeness with the new guard that is not burdened by those patterns and history.

How do you prevent morale from declining when numbers are down in a very transient world? When it’s summer, people are outside more and they’re not on Lovable as much, say, how do you prevent morale from seeping when the numbers aren’t there?

I think step number 1 is to try to have pre-mortems about what would happen if your numbers start to go down.

So, you have the action plan at the earliest sign of those numbers, so you’re not reacting to it. You already have a go-to-war plan, so to speak, when something goes wrong. This should be happening before any big release, before any big launch, and before the end of the year. You should do pre-mortems.

The best path forward is to think through the worst things that can happen to you: a competitor enters, and so on. I really believe in having those conversations early on. Number 2 is knowing the key predictive indicators that will lead you into the decline, not just looking at revenue, because when revenue starts declining, it’s already too late. You need to know beforehand: What will I see? What will lead me there? What will warn me of that decline?

That way, you have at least a couple of months, maybe 6 months, to react before the actual revenue impact hits. Those 2 things are important. Number 3 is that we just have to accept the fact that some people don’t do well with negativity in the business. They’re not going to be the ones who stand up and try to reverse it.

You need to look at your culture and say, “There are going to be people who are passionate about what they do, who are passionate about the product, and who are going to be up for the challenge, and there are people who are not.” I’m not going to be able to change the people who are not. I need to invest in the people who will lead the change and who I believe will help me get out of it.

It’s so much about people’s attitudes, but you need to find the ones who bring the right step-function change into your organization. Get yourself prepared as much as possible beforehand.

Often people say, “Run your own race. Don’t worry about competitors.” Today, you kind of have to worry about competitors. Luxury ought to.

I think so. Don’t you?

I think you have to keep an eye on competitors.

If Cloud Code releases something and you don’t know that could be why you’re seeing numbers reduce in some way, you wouldn’t be able to make data-informed decisions.

Okay. I think the question is: What do you define as worry?

You have to watch your competitors very carefully and know what they’re doing, because you need to know what you’re playing against in the field when customers are making a choice. But do you obsess over your competitors and let them dictate your roadmap, growth, and marketing activities? I don’t think so.

You have to look at it through the lens of what works for them may not work for us. Do we have an alternative way to do it and capture the market? But do you have to know the team you’re playing against? Absolutely. There’s no question about that.

I agree with that. Has that changed over time?

I think that worked when functionality was very expensive to produce. We could afford to obsess about competitors a little bit more. With functionality and speed of development happening so much faster now, it almost paves the way for you to have a very opinionated point of view of where you need to go, pull all efforts behind that hypothesis, and pray and hope that it plays out.

But you cannot just copy your competitors and win anymore, because it’s going to be a zero-sum game.

Do you think Lovable removes the need for Figma in the design process?

I think there are always going to be tools for vertical use cases and specific specialties, for now. However, can you design beautiful prototypes in Lovable without Figma? Yes. AI is only going to get better at design, so I still very much see a time and place for Figma for specific workflows. There’s no question about that.

But my bigger worry for Figma is what will happen a year from now, when AI is going to be so good that it will be able to do all of the little changes, down to even things outside of software design, like CAD files and 3D designs. What if it will be able to do all of that? Why would you need design software at that point if it can shortcut all of those stages for you?

If you still see a need for Figma and they have Figma Make, how do you think about that?

I think that most nontechnical users don’t start with Figma. There’s a pretty large population of designers who start in Figma, and Figma Make makes a lot of sense for them if they want to have functional prototypes.

But there are product managers, analysts, marketers, salespeople, engineers, operations people, HR people, and ops people. All of those people never live in Figma. They never start with Figma. They start with Lovable because that is an easier way, and we build specifically for their persona. This is why I’m saying that the technicality of it and your specialty matter quite a bit.

Who do you think is the most challenging competitor?

I always worry about the big boys and girls in the world—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Apple—more so than our competitors that spring up from the bottom or from the side. The reason I worry about them more, and I think everybody should be worried about them more, is that they have a distribution hold in the market that is unparalleled.

In a world where product functionality becomes more commoditized in terms of what you can create, distribution and growth become the reasons to win. Whoever has the best distribution—earned, competitively defensible, sustainable, and predictable—is going to be the winner in the market. I worry about the companies that have that figured out.

Do you think Anthropic has that level of distribution now?

I think they’re making really great gains.

What worries you most?

What worries me most is—maybe this is a big-world, big-picture answer—that we live in the AI bubble as tech workers. We’re taking advantage of it, pushing each other forward, and challenging each other, but there’s a whole world out there that hasn’t even tried AI. How far behind are they going to be left if they’re not going to get on the train?

It creates such a huge disparity between people, or it will create a really big set of concentrated winners and a very large mass of losers, so to speak, behind this technology change. What worries me the most is that we’re not going to bring everybody along with us, because all of the companies, startups, and AI technology are so heavily focused on the pioneer and not the average person who would benefit the most from it. I just worry what that’s going to do to our society as a whole.

Listen, I’d love to do a quick-fire round, and I’m going to start with a super-easy one following that conversation. If you’re advising your kids coming out of university today on what to do, what advice do you give them?

I would tell them, first of all, to be AI-first in everything. Make AI do so much work for them that otherwise they would have expected to learn somewhere else or be able to do something else. Start a side hustle right now.

Right now, the world is primed for everybody to have a meaningful side hustle that they can monetize. The window of opportunity is pretty short, and if you have a founder profile, you’re going to be more likely to be hired by a company if you want to get hired by a company.

But listen, there’s so much money in the creator economy and so much money in just being a solopreneur right now. I truly believe there’s going to be a billion-dollar company run solo by somebody. I would challenge my kids to be that solopreneur with a billion-dollar company.

I think there is Peter Steinberger with OpenDoor. It was unannounced how much he got bought for, but—

Maybe he’s the one. Maybe. But my kid could be the second one, then.

From a growth perspective, outside SaaS—but I’m not saying competitor—who else in tech do you think has done growth and brand so well in the last year?

I think Granola has done a wonderful job. From a product perspective, I see WhisperFlow also spreading like fire across many people. Again, it’s mostly people talking about it so much. It’s really customer-led. Customers are the biggest marketing agents, and I think it’s genius.

I have to say, I couldn't live without it. Yeah. I never ever type emails anymore. I type them to LPs cuz I need to make sure there's commas and that.

On my phone. Like Granola I'm sorry, not Granola, WhisperFlow is like the only reason that I'm typing

is the integration though where I'm going back, swipe up, back. Apple, just buy it already.

I know, right?

Yeah, Apple, seriously—a $4 trillion market cap, and you can’t do a dictation tool?

Well, listen, Apple still has Siri, and Siri is dumb as a doorknob. Honestly, my kids try to talk to Siri sometimes, and I’m like, “Oh my God, how is this still live and functioning? How has this not been deprecated by now?” It’s just appalling.

What channel did you spend on that you wish you’d never spent on?

Meta.

Ooh. Why?

Very little incrementality. Just a bunch of pass-through views that don’t materialize into anything. Channels like the creator economy are so much bigger to me. I still do influencers through social platforms, but not just full-on Meta ads. I haven’t seen them work in a little while.

If you called up a growth leader today before they started a new role, what would you tell them?

Get ready to drop 80% of what you know and lean into the new way of working and growing a company.

That’s reassuring.

It’s also super exciting because I’ve been bored in the space for the last 5 years, thinking everything looks and feels the same. Now I actually see a rapid change in how things are being done. I think it’s the most exciting thing in the world.

I love that. Let’s end on that. I like a tone of positivity. What are you most excited for when you look forward to the next 5 to 10 years? My mom’s got MS, so I’m super excited for drug discovery and potential MS treatments that were never possible. What are you excited for?

I’m actually very excited about AI advancing our medical research quite a bit faster, fixing some of the human imperfections that we’ve always dealt with and that we will never have cures for, because we’re so incentivized toward just medicine and not actually prevention or cures of the diseases. Medicine makes more money than the actual cure of the disease for our economy.

I’m really hoping that AI can change that and eradicate a bunch of diseases and deformities, and just issues with human bodies, to make our lives more comfortable.

Elena, you are a star. I think we need to solve for anyone. We’re doing a request for startups on high-quality swag that is customizable and great.

Please hit me up. Yes.

You’re a star. I always learn so much from you, so thank you so much for being so amazing.

Thank you for having me here. I appreciate you.