Anton Osika, Co-Founder and CEO @ Lovable: Hitting 85% Day 30 Retention - Better than ChatGPT

Anton Osika 0:00 We have month one retention that's better than ChatGPT's month one retention. (upbeat music)

Harry Stebbings 0:04 Anton Osajca, he is the co-founder of Lovable.dev. Fastest-growing company in Europe, what a title.

Anton Osika 0:10 Growth starts ramping up after we launch. Growing one million ARR per week at some point, and that just keeps accelerating. The most important thing is talent and culture, and there's more raw available talent in Europe.

Harry Stebbings 0:22 When a competitor has a lot of money, do you have to raise too? Ready to go? Anton, fastest-growing company in Europe, what a title. But first, thank you so much for joining me today, man.

Anton Osika 0:45 Thank you, Harry. It's, it's always fun to talk to you.

Harry Stebbings 0:48 Uh, that is very, very kind of you, it's the British accent. But I want to start actually-

Anton Osika 0:51 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 0:51 ... pre-Lovable, and I spoke to a couple of your investors in your first company, Depict.

Anton Osika 0:57 Mm-hmm.

Harry Stebbings 0:57 And so I just want to start there. What are your biggest takeaways from Depict that shaped how you think about Lovable?

Anton Osika 1:05 We, um, scaled super, super fast at Depict as well. And, uh, and, uh, we did, like moving sup- just very fast, scrappy, we did that, we d- nailed that really well. I think we did really well on this high-potential talent as well, quite junior but high-potential talent. You, you can see that from all the, uh, companies coming out from Depict. The, the, the Depict mafia is, is absolutely real. Um, but what w- I think we did, what works in the beginning is to say yes onto a lot of opportunities, and try out what works. Once you become more people and you have to follow up and maintain, uh, everything that you start, you, you have to be much more focused. So we said yes to too many things at, at Depict, and, uh, we didn't like take this one thing and that we could do ten times better than anyone else. Uh, and then at, as e- the economics, uh, macro-wise turned, uh, worse, we, we didn't continue the scaling, uh, uh, trajectory that we were on initially.

Harry Stebbings 2:04 I was just reading an article actually with Paul Buchheit, the founder of Gmail, and he said, "You need three great features in a product, (laughs) and it's really that simple, and make them really, really great." Do you agree with that product simplicity towards feature depth?

Anton Osika 2:20 Yeah, I, I think, yeah, just on a produc- product level, you should say no to as many things as possible, and then make it more of like an Apple feeling, the things you do, you do them superb.

Harry Stebbings 2:31 Okay, and so we have, hey, don't say, uh, yes to everything. Is there anything else which you did or didn't do that really shaped how you think about the early days of Lovable?

Anton Osika 2:42 Mm, no, I think moving fast, um, and I, I would say t- talent's the, the most important thing, and, and culture, how you work together, every day, like how, how people interact and collaborate quickly. Uh, those are the two most important thing for, for almost any company.

Harry Stebbings 2:59 Okay, let's just unpack talent, because it's been a cool ... I spoke to Frederik at, uh, Creandum before this, and he said we had to chat about this too. You favor talent over experience, which sounds kind of obvious, (laughs) respectfully. You're gonna go for like an it- like an experienced, untalented person? (laughs)

Anton Osika 3:17 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 3:17 But, how, how do you think about your hiring lessons around experience versus talent?

Anton Osika 3:22 Um, so I think experience can be a negative thing, (laughs) in some cases. You often want people who are super ambitious and they have a lot to prove, and they are more open-minded towards how, how you should work together in a team. Uh, so, um, I mean, for many roles, I, I think, uh, junior talent is, it's first of all, it's super easy to, to get them into the company. They don't, they're not, uh, already committed to some like many of their n- projects. The best people that you can hire at the young age, they would go on and become founders, and then you can't hire them an- anymore, right? So, so that's why junior, uh, people are often quite good.

Harry Stebbings 4:01 Will you hire them if they haven't done what you're hiring them to do before? The benefit's often-

Anton Osika 4:06 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 4:06 ... of hiring someone experienced is, "Well, I can see they've been at X company for four years, they can do that at my company." Will you hire someone who hasn't done what you're asking them to do before?

Anton Osika 4:15 In most cases, yes. Uh, but like, I mean, if, if it's engineering, you have to (laughs) know software engineering, of course. Um, and you, for some roles, you definitely want, uh, in that domain someone with a lot of experience, like w- who can coach and who can, uh, tell the more junior people what great looks like.

Harry Stebbings 4:37 These are gonna sound like strange questions, but you mentioned the word ambition there. Did you always know that you would be successful when you were younger building? Did you always think, "I will be successful in something that I do?"

Anton Osika 4:49 I, no, I don't think so. I, uh, I, I alwa- I was always frustrated with how people around me didn't understand things as quickly as me, it felt like, and then, uh, after (laughs) at some point, I felt like, well, sometimes, it's me, um, being too naive. I went like that. That's something I learned over time. But, uh, ma- many of the, like, truths about what's going to happen in the future have, I have a very good track, track record on, and I think that's why this, one of the superpowers that have made me s- have made me successful. So like, I, I felt I had that superpower, I didn't know it would translate into building something successfully.

Harry Stebbings 5:23 How

Harry Stebbings 5:24 did you first make money? What was your first entrepreneurial thing, Anton?

Anton Osika 5:28 Mm. Ooh, I think ... So I always, uh, nerded out with, you know, computers and setting up our, um, like LAN parties when I was a kid and so on. And so, (laughs) I, uh, noticed that m- all neighbors and like friends or families, they had the compu- uh, computers and they had some issue, and then they called th- they wanted my help, and many of them wanted to pay me afterwards. So that became a bit of a side hustle when I was, I was a young teenager.

Harry Stebbings 5:56 (laughs) Did you do gaming when you were younger?

Anton Osika 5:59 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 6:02 You're like the... I- I'm so sorry to be rude, but you're like the easiest, like, archetype because you fit, like, all the characteristics (laughs) of, like, successful founders that I have on this show. It's like, number one, made money early. Number two, excel in gaming, uh, both very, very clear, um, archetypes. I wanna move to Lovable. So, GPT Engineer starts as a side project. Where does the idea come from? We've left Depict. G- uh, GPT Engineer starts as a side project. Where does the idea come from?

Anton Osika 6:31 Um, this was the spring after ChatGPT came out and I'd been playing with the- with the precursors of that as well. And I- I- I- from already, like, a year before then I felt there's an a-... there's a massive wave coming from scaling up these models with more data. And Depict is not set up for such... (laughs) or are currently not set up for leveraging that. After... Like, I was actually traveling with my now wife, uh, a- as our engagement trip. And when you're traveling, I get extra creative and I... There... Um, I don't think there was anyone who was talking about, like, AI agents at the time, but I, uh, during those, like, sitting on an airplane, I was... I started writing a lot of, like, "Okay, shit, you can... You should hook them up and make..." Uh, you basically put the large language model in a for loop, and then you can have it do a lot of agentic things. And then, uh, when I'm back i- in Sweden, I'm- I'm like, "Okay, where do I apply this?" Obviously on software engineering. And I'd been talking to people about this and I felt no one was really s- sufficiently imaginative to what I was thinking about, and I had to, like, prove a point in that this is g- already now. With the current, uh, first versions of ChatGPT or APIs, you can build an agent that writes code. And then I put together that there were two... I drank a lot of coffee and then I just crammed away. And, um, I got the fir- first version that, I mean, pre- really impressed people. You write a... create a snake game and then you get a running snake game on your computer. Uh, yeah. So that- that was the- the first version of what- what we're building now.

Harry Stebbings 8:06 How long did it take you to build v1 with that caffeinated session?

Anton Osika 8:10 I think it was, um, like one main weekend and then a bit of polish over with a few hours here and there and t- two weekends after that.

Harry Stebbings 8:20 What are the biggest lessons or advice from building many different v1s for many founders that are listening?

Anton Osika 8:26 It depends what you're building for. Um, for most f- like, uh, first-time founders, I would really focus on the user and the user problem and say, like, "How can I get one person to love what I'm building in- in this new one?" Uh, that- that's my (laughs) general advice. I didn't do that. I just put out the video on Twitter and it got dozens of academic references and millions of, uh, people using it.

Harry Stebbings 8:54 So, ca- take me to that. So we have this weekend. We release the product. What happens then, dude?

Anton Osika 9:00 Yeah, so the- the... I wasn't clear to me that I would build a business on this at all. Thought it was fun that there was like... And this was an open source project, so I- I started nourishing, like, a community that went on to work on this open source, uh, project. While I wa- I talked... went to my co-founder and said like, "Okay, so this thing is absolutely huge. Um, I've been thinking of doing something else, to be honest." And here's, like, pre-... Like, this is a bit of a wake-up call for me that it's- it might be time to find a good replacement for me as a CTO at- at Depict. That's what happened next. And then- and then a few months passed.

Harry Stebbings 9:32 And so a few months passed, the community continues to grow. What happens then?

Anton Osika 9:37 No, but I- I- I figured out a good replacement for me. I decide I need... I want a great co-founder that I can... I was like my- my partner in crime here. And- and there was a guy who is the most super efficient, zero fluff and bullshit, eng- engineer and entrepreneur. So he had sold a company previously that I wanted to work with and I- I- I (laughs) biked to his apartment and said, "Hey, let's take a walk and, uh, plan the future." So he got... I got him o- him on board and then we- we started building and- and created the first version of what became Lov- Lovable.

Harry Stebbings 10:11 Okay, so we're building the first version of Lovable. You've got-

Anton Osika 10:14 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 10:14 ... your co-founder. Talk to me about that time. When did we release and how did the official release go with Lovable as a product and company?

Anton Osika 10:22 So the- the launch of, uh, Lovable, like the product, it was one year after we started building. And, um, in the meantime, we launched, like, waitlisted preview versions, uh, called GPT Engineer app. That was... I mean, tha- that's the getting user feedback cycle. And, um, building- building up, I guess, some- some excitement about what we were wor- working on and employer branding as well. And the- the first versions, I- I think they were very good as... Or they were good, they were not very good, and (laughs) we had some people really liking it. But the, like, the- the ha- aha moments were- didn't click for sufficiently man- many people. Like, "Okay, this is how I get real value from this." When we've... When we went on to iterate over the coming year, we packaged together all of these things so that you can ask today, Lovable, "I want to build a- basically a SaaS business." And then, uh, people have built their entire SaaS companies and get... made- made money o- o- by just prompting, uh, our AI. And-

Harry Stebbings 11:24 I just wanna... I just wanna break down a couple of different things that you said there. You mentioned the waitlist. Do you have any big lessons or advice on how to do a waitlist strategy well?

Anton Osika 11:33 I think that waitlists are useful in that you can control exactly how many people you want to get on board and take user interview- interviews well with. So I think that's the... Like, just get sufficiently many people on the waitlist, find a good way to qualify who you want to talk to. Like, you ha- you probably have a different hypothesis on who should get... who you should talk to, who you're going to sell into, who you... who has the most value from your product and then, uh, qualify only those and talk to them.

Harry Stebbings 12:00 When you do the user interviews and user feedback sessions, what are your big lessons or piece of advice on how to do them well? What questions are good? What questions are bad? Any lessons?

Anton Osika 12:10 Uh, so there- there... I think for us, there are two different type of user interviews. We- we have this- this type where we just see them use the product and see like, where do they... do- do they understand the product? And so that's more of a u- user experience interview. Um, and the other one is...... uh, to understand. Like, if they have just tried the product a bit, we ask them, "Hey- okay, so you tried the product a bit. What's the- why are you even interested in this?" And ask them, like, what problems they're facing in their business, try to identify what's the biggest pain point that you- that they are actually looking to solve. It might be, "Oh, I want to get more customers and I think I can get more customers if I, uh, can show to my customers that I can get the first version out with AI more- quick- more qui- quickly." Uh, so see, see, tho- those- those type of questions.

Harry Stebbings 12:57 How does it change the structure of teams? When you look at teams today, you have, obviously, software engineers, you have designers, you have developers, you have front-end, you have back-end. How does it change the structure of teams themselves?

Anton Osika 13:11 Harry, if you want to create y- a personal website for you, it's super productive. You can do it. You don't have a team. It's just you. You just create it with AI. Hey, if you want to ship the first version of your SaaS and start making money, it's all you, it's not a team. Like, a team just slows you down. Then maybe you get some inputs from a designer, like, e- "How does this... Well, how do you think it should look?" And- and so on. Uh, but once you have existing software with users and then you want to iterate and change that software, AI might, uh, absolutely bring down, uh, uh, kind of mess up your entire code base. AI might mess up your code base. So then you would want to work with then a software engineer that ha- knows how to bring- have quality and, uh, consistently keep quality in the product.

Harry Stebbings 13:59 You mentioned, like, people took a bit of time to find their aha moment. How important is the time to aha moment?

Anton Osika 14:07 I think it's very important to... And it's funny because you ask me this question, and I- I think we are very bad at making, uh, the time to aha moment super short. I think we could, like, double our conversion rates if we become better at, uh, like, speed to aha moment. But you- I- I can say it was something we're doing. Le- let me take credit for something. When you come to Lovable, you just see a prompt box.

Harry Stebbings 14:31 Mm-hmm.

Anton Osika 14:31 It's very inviting. Instead of getting to your landing page, you- you see a prompt box. And then for the ones that- that do enter a prompt box, you get a quite of quick aha- or the first aha moment. The... (clears throat) And the- the- there has been many aha moments in- in Lovable. It's, uh, quite a complex... S- a software engineer is a very complex feature. But, uh, that- that we are doing well and tha- that's what I- I would recommend. Just give the user something interactive with instant reward.

Harry Stebbings 14:58 You mentioned now the prompt box itself.

Anton Osika 14:59 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 14:59 I've had many guests on the show say before that almost the biggest sin that ChatGPT did was make chat the default UI for the future of AI.

Anton Osika 15:09 Mm-hmm.

Harry Stebbings 15:09 Do you think that, bluntly, chat and the prompting that we have today in- in Lovable and many other products is the right default UI for an age of AI?

Anton Osika 15:19 I think yes. Prompting can ex- you can do almost anything with prompting and explaining your thoughts in- in written form. It's, um, uh, it's also easy to implement and iterate on. But- but it's going to get more advanced over time with not just prompting.

Harry Stebbings 15:35 I love the way you took a deep breath there. It's like, "This is a weighty question." (laughs)

Anton Osika 15:40 (laughs) I'm thinking about it a lot. I mean, we're building the interface for creating software and no one knows what that interface is going to look like. But the age of prompt thing, yes, I think it remains.

Harry Stebbings 15:51 But f- I'm kind of going chronologically through this story because it's an amazing story. Um, wha- wha- you rejected YC at some point.

Anton Osika 16:00 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 16:01 Talk to me. Why did you reject YC?

Anton Osika 16:04 We felt that, at, uh, best, YC would be a lot of dilution and some acceleration, but a lot of dilution and some- some acceleration. And at worst, it would be a distraction, uh, to go do SF and go through all of this, like, fun things that happen when you go to YC. Um, and we- we just took some funding instead and, uh, built, uh, Focus on Talent.

Harry Stebbings 16:29 The seed round, when does the seed round come? Does that come post-launch or pre-launch?

Anton Osika 16:34 Mm, so that comes, uh, before we launch the l- first, uh, the first w- wait list of our product even.

Harry Stebbings 16:41 Okay. How did that seed round go? So, before you've launched the wait list of the product-

Anton Osika 16:47 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 16:47 ... how did that round go? How did it come to be?

Anton Osika 16:49 Yeah, so I- I- I have this advice that I've always gone by, which is to work with investors that you like, and I ha- I had some people that I know from before that I just, uh, think are am- amazing people that I want to have by my side in- if things go sour, if things go well. Uh, and I'd spoke to a few. Uh, I- I kept it very- very brief and I got, like, a preemptive offer and I said, "Yeah, let's- let's do it."

Harry Stebbings 17:14 I love it. How big was this round?

Anton Osika 17:16 So we- we took three million, and then we added on. Um, I got the advice to say like, "Just get a lot of cash because you never know what happens in the markets." So we- we raised a- quite a large pre-seed round, uh, with an up to, uh, almost $8 million.

Harry Stebbings 17:32 Would you advise founders to raise quite large pre-seed rounds if they can? If the money is on the table, would you say take it?

Anton Osika 17:38 Depends on how you want to operate. Like, if you like talking to investors, which at the time I was like, "No, I just want to be on the technology," then (laughs) then I'm sorry, sure, take- raise a big pre-seed so you can get time to figure things out. Um, if you like talking to investors, which I- I, uh, I think you should, or if you go- you think it's an interesting to just talk to a lot of interesting, you know, people who care about understanding the market, then I would go sm- raise more iteratively, uh, smaller- smaller rounds.

Harry Stebbings 18:11 We're seeing a lot of founders today be immensely dilution-sensitive from day one-

Anton Osika 18:16 Mm-hmm.

Harry Stebbings 18:16 ... in a way that they haven't been before. Like, 10% is like the max they're willing to give up on a round.

Anton Osika 18:22 Mm-hmm.

Harry Stebbings 18:23 How did you think about dilution sensitivity?

Anton Osika 18:25 Uh, here again, like I was a very wise person. I was like, "No, dilution doesn't matter so much. It's all about the size of the pie." And I-... I think that was, I was, uh, both affected by that advice, uh, as well as ............................ No. Minimized dilution, this is, this is my life, life's work. So, that's mainly how I think about it now.

Harry Stebbings 18:45 So, we now raise this round. We have-

Anton Osika 18:47 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 18:47 ... the wait list, we're skipping a little bit. Take me to go-live day. When, when does that happen? And how does go-live ha- go?

Anton Osika 18:56 We go live with Lovable the 21st of November last year.

Harry Stebbings 19:00 21st of November last year? Shit.

Anton Osika 19:02 Yeah. Uh-

Harry Stebbings 19:02 That was only four months ago.

Anton Osika 19:04 Yes. Just four months ago.

Harry Stebbings 19:05 Isn't it nuts how much, like, life changes in four months?

Anton Osika 19:09 It, it's true. It can change really fast, yes.

Harry Stebbings 19:11 Yeah. Okay.

Anton Osika 19:12 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 19:12 So November 2024, you-

Anton Osika 19:15 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 19:15 ... launch. From day one, is it just nuts? How does it go?

Anton Osika 19:18 Um, so I mean, we had users, paying users f- on, like, a earlier version that was called something else. Um, and then w- our launch, I think it wasn't one of these, like, wow launches, uh, I think. We could have, uh, gotten like ten times more press on the launch, 100%. Um, but people start noticing like, "Whoa, this is really good." And, and we continued to quickly improve things in the products, ship things very rapidly. Um, so it ramps, like growth starts ramping up after we launch. And we, we're like, "Wow, we're growing one million ARR per week at some point." And th- and that just keeps going, accelerating through it. That was in December, and then it just keeps acceler- accelerating. We, uh (laughs) , uh, it was a bit on the technical side, it was a bit frustrating because we have, we have some es- a lot of scaling issues that we run into. And the team is like, "Okay, we can continue to, uh, patch this, eh," but they say like, "We sh- well, let's rewrite everything while we're seeing this explosive growth and there's so many, uh, s- quick fixes that we want to do on the product side."

Harry Stebbings 20:27 So, you rewrote it ASAP and stabilized it then?

Anton Osika 20:30 Yeah. So it took a bit more than eigh- eight weeks. I mean, it's not com- completely done to date, but, uh, that, we, we took eight weeks and then now we're shipping faster.

Harry Stebbings 20:42 Can I ask you, you mentioned that like a million ARR a week. How much are you growing now a week?

Anton Osika 20:48 Uh, two million ARR per week.

Harry Stebbings 20:51 Two million a week now?

Anton Osika 20:53 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 20:56 (laughs) You're like... It's so funny for me, dude, 'cause like when you live in a world of venture, you don't, you don't kind of get this, I don't think, and I don't mean that rudely to you.

Anton Osika 21:06 Mm-hmm.

Harry Stebbings 21:06 But like, your companies go from like one to four in a year. And that's like, fucking A. Four acts in a year, amazing. That would be good. And then you're like growing two million ARR in a week. Does that sink in? Like, do you know how nuts that is?

Anton Osika 21:23 No, I guess not. I, I mean, um, I, a lot of things throughout last few weeks have just blunted me and (laughs) I'm just, I'm just fo- focused on all the things that we have to fix and like improve, and that's all I think about.

Harry Stebbings 21:34 What do you think are the most common ways or methods that companies' development process slows down? For founders listening, what should they watch out for that often happens?

Anton Osika 21:46 What makes product development slower is usually that you have a complex product, that you have a lot of requirements on your product. So, y- y- you said earlier, Harry, that you should have three, three things that are good in your product. I think that's, uh, generally a very wise thing to do.

Harry Stebbings 22:04 Simplicity leads to product direction, knowing where you're going and what you're working on.

Anton Osika 22:09 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 22:09 When you look back since the start of Lovable, where from a product perspective did you invest and spend time where, with the benefit of hindsight, you shouldn't have done?

Anton Osika 22:20 Hm. I think at Lovable, we s- we thought a lot about the community and like community features inside of the product. And, uh, that, I think that could have made a lot of sense if we had seen slower growth. But now that it's just like growth is not something we... not a concern, you don't need community features to power growth. So that, I think that was pretty much waste, waste of effort.

Harry Stebbings 22:44 Do you agree with the sentiment, build it and they will come? The growth has been amazing. From day one, it feels like since GPT Engineer even, people have just kind of come for the product because it's been amazing and different. Do you believe build it and they will come actually does stand true today?

Anton Osika 23:01 If you have a very strong vision of how th- where there is untapped potential, if you really know that deep down and you have a track record of showing that, then build it (laughs) and they will come, is going to work. Um, uh, and, and you also have the runway, your personal, like, energy runway and, and so on to truly make it work and, and make them come. But for m- in most cases, yeah, that is too risky. It's too risky to just build it and they will come. And it's, you can build it and make them come or try to make them come at the same time, and that's much lower, lower risk.

Harry Stebbings 23:40 You

Harry Stebbings 23:41 said there about energy. And it reminded me of a statement that Nick Revolut said to me in a show when he was talking about his investing. And he said the most successful founders that he invests in are between 30 and 35. They don't have the naivety of the incredibly young founders, but they don't have the, bluntly, tiredness in some ways or the, you know, you have more energy when you're younger-

Anton Osika 24:04 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 24:05 ... of older founders. How do you think about that given your age today?

Anton Osika 24:10 No, I think energy is, uh, is super important. And, uh, (laughs) I think, uh, the naivety is, uh, is a benefit o- o- often. But, uh, I mean, I, I made mistake, a lot of mistakes. I was a first time manager as well at, uh, at Depict pretty much.

Harry Stebbings 24:26 Okay. What was the biggest mistake you made?

Anton Osika 24:29 Thinking that we should change the culture and become a more of a scale up, something slow moving or like more management layers when we became 40 people. That's, that was the biggest mistake I did.

Harry Stebbings 24:41 Why did you think that?

Anton Osika 24:43 That was, I mean, my co-founder, um, and other s- senior people we spoke to said like, "Oh, now you have to hire executives," and so on. And that, uh, was, um, that was a bad idea, I think, yeah.

Harry Stebbings 24:58 Okay. And so did you start hiring executives?

Anton Osika 25:01 Pretty much, yeah. Or no, yeah, we did.

Harry Stebbings 25:04 A- and then they don't work?

Anton Osika 25:06 Uh, one person I hired didn't work out, uh, which slowed me down and then kind of set us back a lot.

Harry Stebbings 25:12 And so when you think about that, what would your advice be to other founders? Don't believe the bullshit you can scale way longer without execs?

Anton Osika 25:20 Many founders hire more mercenary style, maybe, like, skilled people, but just, like, they are running in their lane. Um, I hire generalists and I tell, like, try to empower them as much as possible. And y- if you have a lot of gener- super, super smart generalists that you're, um, doing a lot of smart, like, new initiatives and so on, adding executives o- on top of them, um, is high risk and, like, reward is questionable. It's at some point, of course, it makes sense.

Harry Stebbings 25:55 Does culture break at any point when you're scaling user base so fast, you're scaling revenue so fast?

Anton Osika 26:02 I mean, usually I think it does, yes, or it changes. It changes. It, it evolves, um, for... This is something I'm very mindful about and I, why I're so scared of adding too many heads.

Harry Stebbings 26:15 What are you worried about?

Anton Osika 26:16 The most important thing for everyone at our company, I, I, which I talk about, is, uh, to role model how much you care about the product, the users, the en- the team, how, how well the team works. And role model and make sure other people care as much as you. And feel, that, that comes from a feeling of, uh, of ownership of the culture and the team. If you're a lot of people, that gets diluted typically. So, um, yeah, that, that's, that's what breaks or that's what's harder.

Harry Stebbings 26:49 Okay. So we have the team scaling, we have user base, we have revenue scaling.

Anton Osika 26:55 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 26:55 We're making actually a lot of money at this point. Why raise with series A?

Anton Osika 26:59 I just had some scheduled check-ins with investors. And there was this one guy and, uh, his team that had, like, obsessed about Lovable for the last few months. And they're, they're here in this... Fredrik, he's here in Stockholm at Cleantum. And, uh, he gi- he just gives, gives, uh, amazing impressions on me. And I'm like, "Okay, I could, I can wait because I know, it's very clear to me that this is just the beginning and I can, uh, I can, could raise later." But we can accelerate by adding an investor as a partner in, on, in helping to find more amazing people, in, um, just as a sounding board. Fredrik helped to grow Spotify from, uh, from nothing. Um, and, uh, I, we decided to raise a small round.

Harry Stebbings 27:52 Okay.

Harry Stebbings 27:53 So you decide to raise a small round. I have to ask this.

Anton Osika 27:55 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 27:55 You have many well-funded competitors in the US. I think it was Neil Murray that said you put, like, "We're Devon that actually works," from, like, very early on (laughs) -

Anton Osika 28:05 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 28:06 ... which I thought was bold. Um, when a competitor has a lot of money, do you have to raise too?

Anton Osika 28:13 I don't think so, no. I mean, you can just, we could bootstrap. Uh (laughs) like, you don't... You can bootstrap, uh, most things so you never have to raise.

Harry Stebbings 28:21 But they can outspend you on talent, on customers, on marketing, no?

Anton Osika 28:27 Yeah, I mean, if you... I, I'm not afraid of any of those, if being outspent on any of those. I think it's, the only thing that matters is execution. So if you can outperform your execution, then I'm scared.

Harry Stebbings 28:40 Where could you improve your execution today?

Anton Osika 28:44 Mm.

Harry Stebbings 28:44 We spoke about speed of shipping, amazing, culture's great, the talent's phenomenal. Where would you say execution-wise you could improve?

Anton Osika 28:53 Hmm. I think you can always improve on, like, how the decision loop, on how fast you take care decisions and you communicate those decisions so that everyone is really on the same page. That's, uh, how, how you do it.

Harry Stebbings 29:07 How do you make them today? How could it be improved?

Anton Osika 29:10 I think it's about doing fewer... I think we could do fewer things as well, uh, at Lovable. Like, there's a lot of, uh, people with great ideas that... Each, each idea in isolation is great, but you can only have so many, should only exe- execute on so many at the same time.

Harry Stebbings 29:25 We mentioned the team and the culture, one-

Anton Osika 29:27 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 29:27 ... and we mentioned Fredrik there. You've been pretty ardent around building in Europe, keeping the team in Europe, being a European company. A lot of people say to me, "By staying in Europe, you are deliberately not doing what is best for your career. If you were in the Valley, you would be more successful." What is your response to them?

Anton Osika 29:47 The most important thing is talent and culture. And i- it's more raw. There's more raw available talent in Europe. Uh, the culture isn't on the, like... The US has more culture that fits succeeding as a startup, I, I have to say, by default. So-

Harry Stebbings 30:08 What, what specifically do you think it is about that culture?

Anton Osika 30:11 So it's about the, the thought of thinking big and being super ambitious and being very committed to making things work. That, that in, in Europe people are more, like, about, uh, living a balanced, uh, life and, uh, we're, we're kind of taught that we should, uh, uh... In, in Sweden we talk about, uh, the law of Jante, which is that you should be better than others.

Harry Stebbings 30:40 Okay. Yes, this, so this concerns me. So how do you respond to people who say you would be more successful if you were in the Valley?

Anton Osika 30:48 We would be... So, so if you're a founder, I think you...You have more free entropy of, like, talent to use and channel in some- into something successful. But there are, of course, many benefits from being in the Valley. I think it's a bit of playing on the- on hard mode for here in Europe, and I get excited about playing on hard mode and showing that you can create a category-defining company, uh, which is lovable, in our case, from Europe.

Harry Stebbings 31:17 Are you positive about Europe moving forwards? We are in a doom loop around Europe, which we both disagree with and hate. Are you positive, and what guides your thinking?

Anton Osika 31:27 Yeah, I'm, uh, I'm super positive. I- I think there is, uh, like, a strong underdog mentality, uh, a- among all of us founders h- now, which is usually a winning concept to be a- to feel like the underdog and having ev- wanting to prove oth- others wrong.

Harry Stebbings 31:41 I also think there's incredible superpowers in using the arbitrage pricing of incredible engineers in Europe and selling into the US.

Anton Osika 31:49 Mm.

Harry Stebbings 31:49 Like, you can build huge companies selling into the US from Europe. Doesn't mean you can't sell into the US just 'cause you're a European company.

Anton Osika 31:58 True. No, and it's a very global market.

Harry Stebbings 32:00 Dude, um, I've got some questions which are a little bit spicier.

Anton Osika 32:04 Ooh.

Harry Stebbings 32:04 But I have to ask them, okay? So a s- a spicier one is, if one were to criticize Lovable, they would say, "Amazing. God, look at the revenue growth. Look at the user growth." But it is this, like, AI, um, sugar- sugar revenue? In other words, it's not sustainable, and it will churn very quickly. How do you respond to, "Mm, it's not really real sustainable revenue, and it's not sticky"?

Anton Osika 32:31 We have month one retention that's better than ChatGPT's month one retention on paying customers. And so it's about 85%. And that, um, that is just going up. Like, the- of course, there is a lot of things to be desired when you're working with an AI system. There- there's a fraction of people, some pe- people that come in, and they're- they just, like, flip out their credit card because they wanna try, they wanna learn, which is a rational thing to do, and then they know that they are going to stop using it almost, or they almost know. So we have a fraction of users who are like those people.

Harry Stebbings 33:08 Wow. 85% month one?

Anton Osika 33:11 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 33:12 Wow. That's great 'cause you're also too early to have month six.

Harry Stebbings 33:17 What could you do today to increase retention most significantly?

Anton Osika 33:22 The easiest thing we can do is to give more of the important aha moments to ensure that every- m- all of our users get more of the important aha moments on how to use the product, and-

Harry Stebbings 33:35 I- I- I don't- I don't really respectfully agree or get you-

Anton Osika 33:39 Uh-huh.

Harry Stebbings 33:39 ... because, like, you give prompts-

Anton Osika 33:41 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 33:41 ... under the prompt box. So you say, like, "Build me a SaaS app," or, "Build me a dog website," or whatever the prompt is. Dude, all you need do is click it, and you see the code being written, and then you see it being created. Like, the aha moment is pretty obvious, no?

Anton Osika 33:57 So there are many aha moments for- or, like, education moments to get the most value, get the full value out of using it, and they- the most important of those are with regards to when the- when you feel like you're getting stuck, and the AI doesn't understand you. And th- there's a- there are many things in how to get around- a- around that that you can pick up as a user. It is h- how you pr- about how you prompt. It's about how to understand what doesn't work and explain or, uh, to explain clearly what- what the- what problems you're seeing, what- what you find could be the problem when, uh, you're building a more complex feature, and it's about that you can actually onboard an engineer to do small changes to the code base. Like, those are things our users should know, and not everyone knows them.

Harry Stebbings 34:45 What's your North Star metric today? If you have one-

Anton Osika 34:48 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 34:48 ... metric on the TV for the whole team to focus on, what is it?

Anton Osika 34:52 Um, it's the number of, uh, users that g- go all the way to getting, like, users on what they built, getting- getting something hosted with users o- on what they built. That's what we focus on.

Harry Stebbings 35:05 What's the amount today?

Anton Osika 35:07 So we have almost 40,000 paying users, and then that's the proxy for that.

Harry Stebbings 35:13 Wow.

Anton Osika 35:13 That's pretty s- yeah.

Harry Stebbings 35:14 40,000 paying users. Shit, okay. Do you care about the time it takes to go from start to website created or not?

Anton Osika 35:22 We care, but- but I- I have to say, Harry, like, this- these things about the onboarding and how much we can improve, um, is not something that I, uh, we have had the focus on. Like, we were just making the core AI parts better, better, better. That's what we focus on. Uh, so-

Harry Stebbings 35:38 Okay, wait, so you- you say about making the core AI parts better, better, better.

Anton Osika 35:42 Yeah, yeah.

Harry Stebbings 35:42 Amazing. People also say, "Ah, wrappers on top of other people's models."

Anton Osika 35:48 Mm.

Harry Stebbings 35:49 Why are they wrong with that assumption?

Anton Osika 35:51 I mean, it's very easy to create a cool demo with just a wrapper. It's super easy to make a cool demo with just a wrapper. The hard part is to get to or get close to 100% you get what you're asking for, and there's a lot of small details, uh, m- in making that work. There's a lot of small details, and there's a chain of, uh, large language model co- API calls and other algorithms that run, and that chain is, like, you cannot continue to optimize that for years without reaching perfection.

Harry Stebbings 36:20 Whose models do you sit on top of today?

Anton Osika 36:22 We- we use, uh, all of OpenAI's models, uh, Goo- Google Gemini, and the m- m- the main workhorse is, uh, Anthropic's Claude model for writing the code.

Harry Stebbings 36:33 I was gonna have this in a quick-fire, but I have to ask it now. You've got Anthropic at 60 billion. You've got OpenAI at 300. Oh, you've got Groq at 50.

Anton Osika 36:44 Okay.

Harry Stebbings 36:44 Which do you buy, and which do you sell?

Anton Osika 36:47 Okay, so, um, I think I would- I- I care about the best talent here, and I feel like...... uh, Elon is very good at talent, so I would buy, I would buy Grok. Uh, I think they are also very ruthless in, like, finding business opportunities. We'll, we'll see about that, but I, I feel like they could be g- good at that. Even though Anthropic is my favorite, I love the, the culture and I love the, like, the leadership there. Um, and I would sh- short OpenAI because they're, they're like s- have been very good in this crappy phase, but they ha- they haven't proven that they can, um, have a clear product direction and focus now over the last year.

Harry Stebbings 37:28 So I would push... Sorry, I'm, uh, it's a Sunday. We're allowed to be a little bit more casual. I would push back on you and go the two biggest things that matter in this next wave is brand, yeah?

Anton Osika 37:37 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 37:38 Recognition on the consumer side. And it's consumer-facing front end products.

Anton Osika 37:43 Mm-hmm.

Harry Stebbings 37:43 And when you look at brand, everyone's mother knows ChatGPT. They don't even know OpenAI, but they know ChatGPT. And then on the consumer product side, respectfully, they're way ahead of anyone else.

Anton Osika 37:55 That's true.

Harry Stebbings 37:55 Am I wrong?

Anton Osika 37:57 I just, I just think, uh, we're still early in the days of AI. And if you look at the enterprise revenue, like, Anthropic has almost caught up to OpenAI from nothing, her- from them being absolutely dominated. And I don't know what Grok is going to do here, but I expect them to be having a... Like, OpenAI lost all their best talent to, to Anthropic (laughs) . And I think Grok might be able to pull something off here.

Harry Stebbings 38:24 I spoke to a very wise friend of mine before this and they said that the biggest concern that I have is that open source or mega corps of the world with massive distribution advantages come in and win the market. How do you think about that and is that a concern?

Anton Osika 38:39 The big mega corps, they move very slowly in many domains, so they're never going to... In, in many years, they're not going to have the best product on the market. There are distribution advantages for some of these mega corps and that's like, the marketing and distribution is, is what I'm more concerned about. Um, but overall, it's going to be a, like, a growing market where you can easily, as a s- as a startup, be b- b- best positioned for some parts of the market.

Harry Stebbings 39:07 One thing that's gonna be a, a real shift, I imagine, that you have to face-

Anton Osika 39:11 Mm-hmm.

Harry Stebbings 39:11 ... is the shift from PLG and kind of prosumer to enterprise. How do you think about that shift and is that just not a concern given the speed of revenue ramp? How do you think about that?

Anton Osika 39:23 Um, yeah, I think if we would do enterprise, I would want to do that really well. So we're holding off with doing enterprise for now. We're holding off. And, uh, our goal... You may ask about the north, um, North Star Metric. What we want to have is w- we want to be the best place for, for builders to create products and get the 100... Get, get a million of the most talented builders on Lovable. And w- if we succeed in that, that's a great segue into many other areas, including enterprise.

Harry Stebbings 39:54 When you look at Shopify, what do you learn from them blazing a trail in the way they have done as efficiently as they have done?

Anton Osika 40:01 Hmm. I'd, I'd l- I'd love to hear from you, Harry. What, what's the, w- what does, what are you most impressed by, by, with Shopify?

Harry Stebbings 40:09 Honestly-

Anton Osika 40:09 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 40:09 ... I would say it's their narrative around everyone being an entrepreneur. I think Harley is a phenomenal communicator and storyteller-

Anton Osika 40:16 Mm-hmm.

Harry Stebbings 40:16 ... at bringing very real businesses to life and how Shopify has changed their processes, their sales, and really made an impact. And I, I love Tobi, and I think he's obviously a brilliant technologist, but I think without Harley's storytelling narrative, entrepreneurial vibes to life, it would be a different company. So I would learn from that a lot in terms of how to tell your customer stories.

Anton Osika 40:44 Yeah. Yeah, t- no, totally. I, I think Shopify, um, has been able to execute on many things and they just created a good package. I, I, they, they've iterated fast. That's my impression. They've iterated fast on serving all the needs for, for building your e-commerce. And I think this velocity is, was the, one of the, the most i- important thing for building the best product.

Harry Stebbings 41:05 When we look forward, dude, what would you most like to build in the product, but for whatever reason, you cannot?

Anton Osika 41:13 Why? Well, what would that reason be? I think I can build anything into the pro- product.

Harry Stebbings 41:17 Really?

Anton Osika 41:18 Why not?

Harry Stebbings 41:18 Like team would block you. Um, the pri- prioritization, not the right time.

Anton Osika 41:23 Okay. So yeah. Something that we have to say no to right now.

Harry Stebbings 41:26 Yeah.

Anton Osika 41:26 Uh, yeah. So I'd love to build in the way for founders to get everything you get out of Y Combinator into Lovable. (laughs) So that, that includes, like, some marketing infrastructure, Y Combinator has that, uh, all the, the entire playbook and going above that and e- even saying like, "Oh, here's your incorporated Delaware C comp- company, your Stripe setup. You just have to focus on the product and talking to users and creating content for marketing."

Harry Stebbings 41:56 When you look at partnerships today, APIs that we have, say, into the different providers, that's, that's quite a real and possible product-

Anton Osika 42:03 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 42:04 ... request.

Anton Osika 42:04 Yes, really. It's, uh, it's on the roadmap.

Harry Stebbings 42:08 Wow. Yeah. Good. Okay. Well, YC are gonna love you after this show, uh. (laughs)

Anton Osika 42:14 Hope so. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 42:15 Um, final one. When we look forward, dude, what concerns you most, if you had to choose? Would it be regulatory challenges, competition, or hype cycles?

Anton Osika 42:25 I think if someone, if some competitor is super, super good at marketing, uh, that would concern me.

Harry Stebbings 42:30 How important is brand?

Anton Osika 42:33 Mm. I think brand is mainly the outcome of your product. There's other factors too. And then, so, I mean, product is an important thing, and then product, p- good product plus awareness just creates brands. That's, that's, I think, w- what's sufficient. So it's more of a, a downstream effect of something else.

Harry Stebbings 42:55 Dude, when you-

Anton Osika 42:55 But it is important.

Harry Stebbings 42:57 When you're doing two million a week in, in additional ARR, you're gonna have more and more investors wanna give you money.

Anton Osika 43:04 Hmm.

Harry Stebbings 43:04 (laughs) How do you think about that and w- what makes it worth it to take versus this is a distraction, get out of my face?

Anton Osika 43:15 It's currently it's a distraction. I think it might make it worth it, it m- it will make it worth it when we kn-know how to sp- exactly how we want to spend the money or it's a partner we really want to work with. And, um, it's like a- terms where we, we would never regret saying yes to them.

Harry Stebbings 43:34 What, if done, would be a massive needle mover for the company?

Anton Osika 43:40 One or two more of the s- the perfect technical product hires.

Harry Stebbings 43:44 Hmm.

Harry Stebbings 43:46 Dude, I could talk to you all day. I wanna move into a quick fire round.

Anton Osika 43:48 Okay. Great. Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 43:49 So I say a short statement, you give me your thoughts. So f-

Anton Osika 43:51 Okay. Okay. Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 43:52 What do you believe that most around you disbelieve?

Anton Osika 43:55 I think we have models today that are really smart. I think that's, (laughs) where p- people don't agree with me. They're, they're smarter than humans, but they don't have memory in the same extent as, uh, we do. They don't have context.

Harry Stebbings 44:09 How fast will we ramp context and memory given scaling today?

Anton Osika 44:14 It's d- the ramp... What you need to ramp is to decide what, like, the, the process for storing r- memory I think is what you have to ramp. And it has to store all of these things. Like, my conversation with Harry has to be stored somehow into the AI system. And all of... Like, my childhood almost has to be stored as well. Uh, I don't know. It's gonna take years.

Harry Stebbings 44:34 You can buy and hold one public stock for the next 10 years-

Anton Osika 44:38 Okay.

Harry Stebbings 44:38 ... which one would you buy and hold?

Anton Osika 44:40 Um, some talent play, maybe that would... And then the, what comes to mind is Tesla. They're also interestingly positioned outside of, uh, software.

Harry Stebbings 44:49 Wow. Okay. What's the most important trait in a founder that no one talks about?

Anton Osika 44:55 Uh, okay. I think great judgment, people probably talk about. But, but I think, um, I like people who hire, like see potential in people and is like, "Okay, this, this person can become amazing," and, and the judgment in, in picking talent like that.

Harry Stebbings 45:10 What's your biggest weakness as CEO today?

Anton Osika 45:12 Um, I'm not as good as multitasking as I would like to be. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 45:17 (laughs) If Lovable failed tomorrow, what would be the reason? Like investors write a pre-mortem, which is like a reason why something doesn't work. What is that?

Anton Osika 45:27 Um, we lose momentum and excitement, and that's, like, we, that's what fuels us today, right? All the excitement and the momentum.

Harry Stebbings 45:38 What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

Anton Osika 45:41 Y- you don't need to be attached to one foundation model provider. They're all going to be amazing. You don't need to... There's not gonna be one winner here.

Harry Stebbings 45:49 Are we seeing foundation models be completely commoditized?

Anton Osika 45:52 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 45:54 We won't see specializations like we do today? I know Claude is better for code and engineering.

Anton Osika 46:00 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 46:00 Do you think that will really, uh, equalize?

Anton Osika 46:03 Yes.

Harry Stebbings 46:04 I love the Swedes, fucking one-word answers. (laughs)

Anton Osika 46:08 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 46:08 Um, what's your favorite failure?

Anton Osika 46:11 Um, I, I think-

Harry Stebbings 46:13 So when I was 17, I failed my exams at school, Anton. I failed them-

Anton Osika 46:17 Yeah. You did? Yeah. Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 46:18 ... badly. Yeah, like D- Ds across the board. And I, I looked at myself and I was like, "I'm either gonna work behind a bar or I can make something of my life."

Anton Osika 46:27 Mm-hmm.

Harry Stebbings 46:28 And I chose to m- work harder than ever and make something (laughs) of my life. Um, that was my favorite failure.

Anton Osika 46:36 I think my favorite failure, um, I probably... That I didn't, um, m- the pick didn't work out so I could do more things.

Harry Stebbings 46:48 What concerns you most in the world today?

Anton Osika 46:50 I think that leadership in this wor- in the world today, I, I'd love the whole leadership to be true idealists and not like f- functional circumstances and, uh, people to please, um, and be much more open-minded to people who disagree with them, and s- super intelligent as well. But leadership in the world today, uh, are usually like a bit corrupted and, uh, narrow-minded, and that's what concerns me.

Harry Stebbings 47:20 Do you think they would say you're naive?

Anton Osika 47:23 I? Uh, s- I don't want-

Harry Stebbings 47:26 Like to the, to the, to the-

Anton Osika 47:26 ... to be naive, sorry.

Harry Stebbings 47:27 ... to the challenges of leadership, to the challenges of having a, a, you know, a voter population you sometimes have to be certain ways.

Anton Osika 47:34 I think we used to have like better precedence in leaderships in, throughout the l- last century. So, no, I don't think I'm too naive, but, um, I'm definitely b- always a bit naive.

Harry Stebbings 47:43 I totally agree with you. I think the state of leadership today is woeful. Um, who's... Penultimate one. What's your biggest short in the public markets?

Anton Osika 47:51 I not so read, well-read on the public market. It would be a SaaS company. It would be like a SaaS company that has a per-seat pricing, uh, where tho- those, their ICP, um, is going to be replaced by AI SaaS that just replaces the employees. So the se- the seat, number of seats goes down.

Harry Stebbings 48:11 What's the future of s- pricing in an AI world?

Anton Osika 48:14 Yeah, I think it depends on how defensible your, your, like, your business is. Uh, if you're selling to, like, enterprises that never change SaaS software, you should try to make some value-based pricing. Yeah, I don't know how you, (laughs) how you get to the va- good value-based pricing, but I would do something like that. Otherwise, I think you shouldn't, sh- don't innovate so much on, too much on pricing. Do what, do whatever works today.

Harry Stebbings 48:35 I love the facial expressions. Uh, my, my f- final one. I like optimism and I think-

Anton Osika 48:40 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 48:40 ... we need more of it in the world. I'm incredibly excited for the next decade because I think we'll find cures to... My mother's got multiple sclerosis, which is a horrible disease.

Anton Osika 48:49 Mm-hmm.

Harry Stebbings 48:49 I think we'll find cures to diseases that we really didn't think possible before. What excites you most about the next decade that we have coming?

Anton Osika 48:58 I think it's that (laughs) AI is hopefully going to make us, humans understand each other better and be better at doing win-win, playing win w- win. And that will be awesome. I'm excited about that. So like, the, our leadership actually being, um, enhanced by super intelligent AI.

Harry Stebbings 49:17 Anton, listen, dude, I've so enjoyed doing this. Thank you so much for joining me, and thank you for inspiring a generation of European entrepreneurs that they can build unbelievable businesses in Europe.

Anton Osika 49:27 Thank you, Harry. It was a, it was super fun.