Elena Verna: How Lovable Launches Product & Hacks Social to Go Viral

1. 0:00 – 1:31

   Intro

   1. EVElena Verna0:00

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

   2. HSHarry Stebbings0:04

      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 their growth machine.

   3. EVElena Verna0:21

      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 five years plus, you do not know your LTV, period. Do not lock people in subscription as the only way to monetize you.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings0:37

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

   5. EVElena Verna0:41

      Whoa. [laughs]

   6. HSHarry Stebbings0:44

      Ready to go? [upbeat music] 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.

   7. EVElena Verna1:02

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

   8. HSHarry Stebbings1:06

      Yeah, it's been a couple of years. I've actually aged about 15, but it's only been technically two and a half, so you look younger, and I've, I look 15 years older. I, I, I want to just start with a really hard and unfair question, which is 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?

2. 1:31 – 4:39

   Growth is a trust problem

   1. EVElena Verna1:31

      I have couple of ways that I think it's changing. Thing number one is that as software creation's becoming democratized and functionality is becoming available to anyone to build, whether you buy it from somebody, whether you build it yourself, and honestly, it 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 from? Do I believe in the team that is building behind it? Because otherwise, I'm just gonna go create my own if I don't believe that they're gonna continue worry about my needs, and they're gonna continue evolving it. So to me, there's just so much behind not just tactics, growth tactics, growth hacking, channel optimizations. It's literally winning trust of your consumer to have them vouch for you, to have them believe in you, to stand behind you as you're building your business. And then 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, um, what I call 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 with a human as opposed to just core basic functionality that it can do. I actually almost compare it to, um, Maslow's pyramids of needs. Like, the bottom of the layer of just like, okay, it works. Okay, I can kind of believe that it'll do security and all of the other pieces. Now I need to be able to connect to it, and we as humans always wanna connect with something. We don't like utilities. We don't like tools. And the more software starts to have actually some sort of personality that helps us trust the two, uh, is almost becoming like a minimum bar to, in order to even kickstart the growth. And then the last thing I would say in terms of growth hack, uh, tactics themselves, all of the performance marketing or, like, the optimizations are just becoming ... Something is getting automated pretty quickly. It's actually fascinating to watch. So to me, a growth work now is trying something new, trying to be innovative, creating these really, uh, 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 vibe coding all day long and trying to find the ways to really capture the hearts and minds of our customers, not just optimizing pricing page into, pricing page into oblivion.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings4:05

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

   3. EVElena Verna4:18

      What becomes more important is your product as a channel where you actually earn that trust that drives that word of mouth, that drives that likability. And what becomes less important is, um, something, uh, across marketing sales, like, more old traditional techniques that we would use to try

3. 4:39 – 5:22

   Is SEO dying?

   1. EVElena Verna4:39

      to drive growth.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings4:40

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

   3. EVElena Verna4:50

      Yeah, there is decline, but you have to understand, like, it's so enormous. Even if it's dying, it will take years for it to die. Like, I'm not gonna make a prediction of whether SEO is dying. It's declining. The habits are changing, absolutely. But is SEO still fruitful? Abso-fucking-lutely. Like, you, you still have to invest in SEO if you want to have the baseline of growth. But is SEO gonna be the reason that you're gonna win in your business? I don't think so. It's just something that you have to do. This is not gonna be the reason why you're gonna stand out and win.

4. 5:22 – 7:53

   Did Lovable's Growth Come From the Founder's Personal Brand?

   1. HSHarry Stebbings5:22

      How important is Anton's brand to Lovable's user acquisition? You know, I think Anton's amazing. Every new hire, he does the picture with them or maybe senior hire, but he does the picture with them. I think it's brilliant, and he's so mastered the founder brand. How important is his founder brand to net new user acquisition?

   2. EVElena Verna5:41

      I think that Lovable is where it is right now because of the founder-led socials that Anton has really leaned into and has done at the beginning.How important is his brand right now to existing success? Less important because we've diversified away from it, and we have other channels in which we're growing. Our users are very active. Our community is very strong. We have a lot of user-generated content. Um, we, we have other people on the team, including me, that are pushing our brand along as well. But at the beginning, was he the reason that Lovable spiked, I think, at first, and got to the traction that allowed it to scale where it is right now? I think so. Uh, but I, I have no way to prove it, but, like, looking at the data and looking at the early traction, that was it.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings6:30

      Welcome to being a venture capitalist, making bold statements with no data to back them up.

   4. EVElena Verna6:35

      [laughs]

   5. HSHarry Stebbings6:35

      And, and that is, that is our job. Um, but when we look at that, we have so many growth leaders, marketing leaders who are like, "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, how many to diversify to? Was it right to diversify from socials from Anton? Love your thoughts.

   6. EVElena Verna7:01

      Yes. So when I say diversify from Anton, that's not to say that Anton is not a meaningful channel anymore. I'm just saying we have other channels running in parallel, so he's not the only one that he was at the beginning, and that's a really big difference because he's still growing his channel, and it's still very important. We're just not ... it's not ... we're not relying on it as the only, uh, single failure point. Second of all, I would say that if I was any company, I would really heavily invest in social, but not in social in the traditional sense of you, uh, posting from your company account or hiring an intern who is your social me- media manager that is posting some puns on Twitter here and there. I really mean where you start building in public and you encourage your employees to build in public and grow their social followings and really reach your customer through your own team's voices.

5. 7:53 – 12:34

   Why Every Founder Should Push Employees to Be Marketers?

   1. EVElena Verna7:53

      I think that is the channel that so many companies underestimate how important and how powerful it is, how much trust it builds, how much it unites people behind you in your mission, because they see the people that build the company, and they want to connect to other people. We're, with our little lizard brains, still want that connection. Like, we yearn for it. And in a world where we're bombarded with marketing messages everywhere we turn, be able to see and be able to connect is what it's all about, that trust piece that I'm, like, circling back over and over again. So I think it's, first of all, and I would, for any founder, I would suggest really deploy founder-led social, employee-led social, build in public, recruit people to be your biggest fans, be, be your, uh, cheerleaders, so to speak. And 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 into paid marketing? Do I want to do this? Do I want to do that? But first organic strategy that everybody, every startup should be going into is founder-led socials.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings8:56

      Build in public for your own employees. If I'm a founder listening, what, what do I actually take from that? I should 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 brand?" To which many founders will go, "Why would I encourage people to promote themselves when they'll then get hired and taken in a very competitive labor market?"

   3. EVElena Verna9:22

      Well, I think that ... Okay, I have couple of things against that statement. Number one, if you think that your employees are so easily, easily swayed to go somewhere else just if they get reached out by the right company, what are you doing? Like, there is some really bad cultural issues in your company, whe- whether it's motivation-based, whether it's just, like, ambitions based with who you're hiring, because you're hiring just warm body to be in there that whenever it's given an extra dollar somewhere else is, or a better logo somewhere else, it's just gonna run. So I would look at your recruiting practices if that's actually your worry, that people are gonna be stolen if they're gonna be known. Second of all, if you can use your company to help people build a better social presence that they can use to do marketing for your company, then who cares if they build a personal brand in the meantime? They become your biggest marketing agent, the most powerful marketing agent. And encouraging that, I think you have to look at it as a marketing channel that you almost, uh, invest into, and by the way, you get two for the price of one. 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 gonna lose it on one way or the other. We're a very multifunctional people. We can do multiple things, and I think a little bit of an encouragement and obviously leading the way by showing example goes really far.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings10:47

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

   5. EVElena Verna10:59

      No, there's a massive blurring of lines, and that's been happening for a long time. I mean, every product manager 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 line of the blurriness is accelerating, like the speed of the blurriness is accelerating. And what I see-

   6. HSHarry Stebbings11:24

      Does that change how you hire? Like, if you're hiring for a growth role today, how, what-

   7. EVElena Verna11:30

      I think that there's still a path to hire, hey, there is a generalist and then there is a specialist. Uh, so somebody ha- kind of like jack of all trades at the kitchen sink of all of the problem-solving, those people are very powerful, especially very early in company stages. As you start to grow and you actually say, "Okay, these are the channels that are really working for me. I really need to hire specialists that truly can fine-tune every single channel and get, like, to squeeze the last five, ten percent out of it." So you still need specialists and s- like a CEO specialist. That's still a thing. It's very much still a thing, and, uh, there's need for that. However, everybody now is also expected to do everybody else's job in some capacity, at least on the average level. So the level of the capabilities that all of us do has increased. So for example, I now ship code to production. I have never done that before, but I also go and I ship my own apps and run my own campaigns completely without anybody's support. I build apps, I go out there, I create, uh, noise around it, I drive engagement to it. It's part of, like, all, all of the growth work to, to me. I write copy, I make prototypes to-- for our engineering team that, that is

6. 12:34 – 21:37

   Why Every Employee at Lovable Ships Code (Even Marketing)

   1. EVElena Verna12:34

      designing it. Sometimes Design shits all over it, sometimes they say, "Good job, you can go through it." But all I'm saying is, like, I'm doing all of this now myself versus ten years ago I would say I was very specialized and more on more narrow lane, and that is expectation to me for every single employee. Every single employee at Lovable expected to ship code to production. Every single employee is expected to build their own satellite apps or to build their own products or even have a side gig that is running on Lovable. Every single employee at Lovable is expected to do their own marketing. Everybody's encouraged to post on social, to build their brand, to go talk about what they are doing at Lovable and building in public. And every single employee still has their daytime job and their specialty that they actually need to execute and, um, perform, and that is the norm now. That is the AI nativeness to me to at, at, at, at, at the root of it, because the only way that is possible is by becoming AI native.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings13:29

      Elena, is that possible at very large companies where you have compliance? Is that one of those th- is that one of those things where actually it don't know bla- it, where it's only possible in a world of growth, but the minute you're a public company and you have compliance, [laughs] uh, me and you both know how this works. I mean, 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 is only available to private companies?

   3. EVElena Verna14:00

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

   4. HSHarry Stebbings14:07

      Yeah.

   5. EVElena Verna14:08

      There's also a question of how much of the large company's functionality 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, like, an interesting question in that. And I do think that the world of very large complexity, compliance, security-driven enterprises will be at major disadvantage in this future. Now, how long does that gonna really take to materialize for us to feel? I have no idea, but maybe I'm in my bubble too. I don't know. Maybe, like, I'm completely, like, not seeing the big picture here, but it just feels like that is where masses are going. That's what masses want to interact with, uh, and that's where the trends are going. So I don't know. I get-- But I have a reasonable LinkedIn following, and I've been penalized for it in the larger companies. Like, they were like, "Absolutely no, don't post. Delete the post. This is not good. Uh, we want to, uh, we want to approve anything that you post on social," and I'm like, "Ah." It just, like, feels suffocating, so it almost was held against me that I had it. At Lovable is honestly one of the first companies that is, like, leaning into it. It's like, "Go post. More, more, more. Where-- Like, d- can, can you talk about this?" So I don't know. May- We'll, we'll, we'll see in the next year of how this is gonna play out and whether this is a truly trend that is an advantage or it's a blip in the, just the hype zone.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings15:43

      I think the employee-led content branding marketing is so helpful to, like, seed communities, especially in the early days when you need to seed them artificially, so to speak. What are the biggest mistakes you think that people make when trying to build a community? I mean, Jesus, Elena, I'm s- maybe I'm old and grumpy, which is very possible. Uh, but, like, I'm so bored of community being banded around as a word. And I think what are the biggest mistakes you see in people trying to embrace community?

   7. EVElena Verna16:13

      I think that they... Well, the biggest one is that they treat us as just their support outlet. Our support team cannot get through the queue. Let's create a community for it to be a community support so people can help each other. And it just becomes a dumping ground of negative sentiment because when people cannot get in touch with you through support channels, they go to 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. And then in order to solve for that, companies start going after tooling, and they start creating these community platforms and forums, basically trying to almost replicate what Microsoft has created or, like, another, like, chorus, so to speak. And, um, it just becomes cold, not connecting support forums that are then indexed, by the way, by SEO for all of the negativity that is being shared within it. And it, it just becomes-- It's not a community. It's like a-

   8. HSHarry Stebbings17:15

      You're not selling it. This sounds like a hole of depression [laughs] where all the problems go.

   9. EVElena Verna17:21

      It is. But that is the comm- But that is the commun- It's like it's a, it b- it's an outlet for negativity that has not been addressed by your support team. That's literally nine out of ten communities because they're not spawned from the place of connection. They're spawned from the place of, hey, there needs to be additional way for people to solve their problems.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings17:37

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

   11. EVElena Verna17:48

       So you can seed it, but I actually think that what you need to find is your early super users and your early super adopters, those people that are really excited about your product, and 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 for them to 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.

   12. HSHarry Stebbings18:25

       Totally get that. [laughs] Can I ask, what do you do when you have a competitor who spends so much more money than you in the same space? You know, we, we chatted when we had Omer from Wix on the show. Um, Wix b-bought two Super Bowl ads. I'm not saying whether that's good or bad. It's just-

   13. EVElena Verna18:44

       I watched them.

   14. HSHarry Stebbings18:46

       I, I actually didn't. [laughs]

   15. EVElena Verna18:47

       [laughs]

   16. HSHarry Stebbings18:48

       Um, I shouldn't admit that, but like it's a big-

   17. EVElena Verna18:49

       Good marketing research on my part.

   18. HSHarry Stebbings18:51

       It's a big spend. What do you do when you have a player who is just spending a lot of money and you are on the other side of that?

   19. EVElena Verna19:00

       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." So we-- Do we look at it? Yes, absolutely. I, I watched Super Bowl ads. I took notes. I was-- We discussed it the day after. Like, did we think that we should have been in Super Bowl? We decided we shouldn't have been. After we saw the ads, we're like, we were happy with our decision not to be. Will we support some other big sporting events? Maybe. Uh, that's not out of the question. Are we doing ourselves paid marketing, for example, now? Yes, absolutely. We're overtaking New York, uh, in subway systems. We have a bunch of ads running in London. We're taking more s- uh, billboards in San Francisco, so we're doing some of the paid marketing spend as well.

   20. HSHarry Stebbings19:55

       Why, why did you decide on that as the channel to invest in paid in New York, London, San Francisco on billboards in particular? I'm fascinated.

   21. EVElena Verna20:04

       Because we're going after latent majority now, not just the early pioneers that are looking for solution. We want to educate the rest of the market that, uh, this-- what is possible and the capabilities, uh, that technology now has that they should be taking advantage of. Because there's a really short window of opportunity where people can really get ahead if they really lean into it, because otherwise they're gonna be left behind. And 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, subway advertising, uh, type of situations. But again, this is also very short in the timeline period from Lovable's perspective. I would never recommend a company to do it this quickly, but Lovable is not a normal company because we're already well past over three hundred million in ARR, even though we're only like a year and couple of months old. So like we just need to move into that space a little bit faster. But all I'm saying is, is that's not our primary strategy of how we're gonna drive growth. This is just branding awareness. We wanna play in the field. We want to drive awareness across masses out there because we believe our product is very relevant for them, and we, our ICP is very broad. 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.

   22. HSHarry Stebbings21:26

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

7. 21:37 – 32:29

   Why Paid Marketing in Year One Is a "Death Trap"

   1. EVElena Verna21:37

      All right. Well, you're starting to immediately go into attribution. How is it that you attribute? Where is the traffic coming from? Is it paid? Is it organic? Which is impossible to do if you're doing any sort of last click or digital footprint only. But I would say that for any founder in the first year, investing in paid as the means of growth is a death trap. Because until you actually figure it out, your true stable product market fit, and until you are able to drive it in some sort of organic way, whether it's your organic socials, whether it's organic search, whether whatever it is, investing into paid, I think is a really horrible idea because you haven't even optimized or really learned all of your funnels. You haven't even grabbed people that are already looking for your solution in organic ways and figure out how they progress through your product. So to pour money on your top of the funnel when you, the experience is not even optimized for those who are looking for you, is just like lighting cash on fire. So I would say that less than ten percent should be paid. In the more scaled, mature company, it can be thirty, forty percent. But anywhere over fifty percent, I would be very uncomfortable on the reliance on paid because I'm now competing with everybody else on third-party platforms for the attention as opposed to relying on my organic pool and my product itself to drive growth for the company.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings22:57

      I'm just thinking of so many companies that I see who are like sixty percent paid in the first year, and I'm like, "Oof."

   3. EVElena Verna23:04

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

   4. HSHarry Stebbings23:10

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

   5. EVElena Verna23:20

      Yeah. And the problem is just, like, yes, it might be working out now. So first of all, even if you're gonna do paid, at least make sure that the paid payback cycle is really quick. Like the biggest issue that I see with paid is people look at it as just a CAC to LTV. None of the small companies know their LTV, so you're literally just looking at CAC and like kind of trying to guess of what it's actually gonna be. Think about actually when you recoup your investment, how fast will you put a hundred dollars into your system? Can you recuperate that a hundred dollars out of the system, uh, back? If it's under three months, fine. Maybe it's a little bit better. Put it into the system, have it regenerate for you really quickly, so it's a self-contained system that keeps on giving to you and s- and paying for itself. But anytime that goes anywhere close to eight, nine months, even a year, it's a, it's a-That it's a sink of money at that point that you need to constantly put back into the system more and more. You're gonna constantly have to race to do it. And the problem is that if Google doesn't hit their earnings, what are they gonna do? "Hey, let's go to AdWords and jack up all of the CACs by twenty percent so we can hit our earnings." And that's coming out of your budget so they can hit their Wall Street numbers. So you have to be really careful because you're literally at mercy of other super giants needing to hit b- business performance on the market, and you are paying for it. So if that's how you wanna do your growth, fine, if that's working at least on a really fast, quick, quick payback period. But other than that, I just feel like that is not a sustainable way to grow.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings24:42

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

   7. EVElena Verna24:50

      It's absolutely irrelevant. H- you don't know your LTV. Unless you've been in the business for five years plus, you do not know your LTV, period.

   8. HSHarry Stebbings24:58

      So what, so what numbers matter to you? If we go... You, you acquire a customer, you're like, "Is that good?" 'Cause we've got no idea how much they're gonna pay over time. You look at Lovable, you know, 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 gonna spend. How do you determine what numbers matter?

   9. EVElena Verna25:18

      So if I'm doing a paid marketing, the payback period is the only thing I look at. How quickly do I recuperate my money on average from a- any given campaign? And I try to really try to do at least the last click attribution perspective, especially if it's per- performance marketing, a, a pretty tight, um, tie-in between those numbers. If your conversion windows are really long, so not everybody converts within twenty-four hours, let's say, and if it takes you six months, a year to convert, again, very dangerous to invest into paid marketing because then you don't even know if you're gonna recoup that money. So unless your conversion window is under three months, I would say don't start with paid marketing as your growth lever because you will never be able to make it spin fast enough because you don't-- you have such a long conversion windows. If you have shorter conversion windows, I think it's very important to also look at any of the signals beforehand, how people are activating, how many of activated people are actually converting to paid, because there's gonna be many KPIs that you can look into to predict conversion or even predict retention that are not monetization based. So really understanding that behavior in your user base becomes the number one concern for you to be able to even know, do I go into this or do I not? And again, paid marketing to me is a, is a cheap way out, and it's not competitively defens- oh, I shouldn't say cheap. It's actually the most expensive way out, and it's not competitively defensible at all, and it's not sustainable. You paying somebody else to generate demand for you, if you haven't figured out your unique way, your competitively defensible and sustainable way to generate demand without relying on other platform, then I think that you are just buying time in the market before the collapse is imminent.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings27:07

       How do you think about true acti- like, what does an activated user mean for you? It's someone who lands and converts. It's someone who lands and converts and pays. What is true activation?

   11. EVElena Verna27:19

       So I live in a world where not everybody who uses your product is a paid customer. So I also live in a world where every single customer has other value besides just paying to you directly. So, for example, at Lovable, we have a ton of free users. A lot of our costs are within our freemium, not with our paid marketing, not with employees, not with marketing or sales budgets. It's with freemium because we view freemium as actually marketing channel. What I mean by that is that a free user, when they come in and they get delighted by what they accomplish for free, they go and do marketing on our behalf. They go talk across socials. They go refer to our friends. We very carefully measure. We have such thing as called 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, that you cannot compete with and that we own. So free user holds value to us. So even if we acquire through paid marketing channels, let's say free users, they hold value to us. It's not all about conversion. But back to your activation question, to me, it's purely engagement based. That has nothing to do with, um, monetization whatsoever. So what is it that your aha moment is with the product? What is it steps for you to set up to get to that aha moment? And, um, what are the first habit loops that you're gonna start falling into to start using product on ongoing basis? So it's purely product engagement based that is an incredible signal for both monetization and long-term retention.

   12. HSHarry Stebbings28:55

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

   13. EVElena Verna29:22

       So I think about it on multiple vectors. There's intensity of engagement, so how deep do I go? How much time do I spend? How complicated of the task that 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 more, the better user you are for them. For simple productivity tools, intensity is almost an anti-metric because intensity means, like, I'm getting stuck, uh, like I'm doing too much where this actually is supposed to be easy. So, um, intensity is often the anti-metric. However, there's also frequency, so how often do I come back and do it? Frequency is a big one. You always wanna be in a habitual zone for our minds. Habitual zone for our minds is somewhere on daily or weekly basis. Anytime you move into being monthly, you're in the forgettable zone. I don't remember what I did last month. Like, the world is moving too quickly. I don't even remember if I looked at the webs- like some software last month or even if I tried it last month. So trying to be in that daily or weekly habitual zone is super important. And then on top of it, you look at just 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. So setting up that frequency engagement on something a little bit more meaningful, like for us, for exampleIt's both 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 of either still editing or now reaping the benefits of what you've already published that are both counted as an engagement signal, and then we count frequency of it to see how many of them are active on daily basis, um, which we call active builders. So you're right, intensity is an anti-metric often for us. So you pick just an action that provides value, but it can be fairly light, but not as light as login or just like a visit, because that is just like nonsensical in terms of it doesn't mean anything.

   14. HSHarry Stebbings31:21

       Do the majority of sites not require very limited interaction? When you think about like habitual usage, like if I'm a venture fund creating what... You know, we use, um, uh, Lovable for Project Europe. Amazing. We have a beautiful site, much better than TwentyVC site, by the way, which cost us thousands and thousands. [laughs] I'm so ashamed of that money. [laughs] Um, but like we don't change it. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

   15. EVElena Verna31:44

       Uh, it's an okay thing. If you've, if it's live and it's functioning and it's getting traffic, you're getting value out of it. That's great for us. So we count it as engagement.

   16. HSHarry Stebbings31:53

       Okay.

   17. EVElena Verna31:53

       Uh, some people are just gonna have apps they're, they're still building. Some of them are just in the consumption state. Both are good. There's no, uh, preference for us of one versus the other value whatsoever. If anything, we just like measure and watch for proportions just to make sure the, there is a good enough amount of apps that are getting traffic and receiving value that way. So it's, we're not just about building, we're also about value capture after the build is complete.

   18. HSHarry Stebbings32:21

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

8. 32:29 – 37:55

   Why Annual Subscriptions Are the Wrong Monetization Model for AI

   1. EVElena Verna32:29

      My biggest, uh, lessons are couple of fold. Lesson number one, do not, and I mean do not lock people in subscription as the only way to monetize you. 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 a bursty usage where it's not super consistent, when creativity strikes or project strikes, I need to go and I do a lot of work in it, and then I might have some periods of more of a downtime or 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 down or I was too nervous to even move it forward because of the scares of affecting, um, that treasured ARR. Uh, that's not true. It's like a complete fallacy. You should do both, and it adds on incrementally and your ARR only continues growing and your retention improves. So that is one big learning for me, especially with AI, where people are still explo- exploring and the usage is not super consistent for most of the products. And then I would say that the second one is that your monetization model right now is not the correct one for every single AI company out there. We just 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 will collapse, and they will collapse eventually, every LLM themselves are betting on it, our monetization models will have to evolve, and whoever evolves their monetization model to be more outcome-based first is gonna be the winner on 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. Because, um, most of the businesses, it is something that is a taboo sub- uh, subject that cannot be adjusted because it feels so complicated.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings34:51

      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, uh, now very much 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?

   3. EVElena Verna35:17

      Why would OpenAI sell the LLM under cost? Yes, it's a like market grab for sure, but I fundamentally believe that they think that LLM's costs are gonna have to come down to the point that they're not gonna have to raise the prices, but they're gonna start getting the margins to actually make those prices make sense for them and potentially lower it even further. Because LLM is just gonna be like a commoditized feature very soon. And it doesn't feel so right now, but it will be like access to internet or access to the cloud. It's commoditized, it's cheap. So I think that I believe that they're bel- also believe that it's gonna come down quite a bit once we get efficiency gains out of how LLMs are constructed. And, um, this is where when it becomes co- completely commoditized, you cannot monetize on it anymore. You have to start moving towards monetization of outcomes. And again, whoever evolves their monetization models first there will win.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings36:18

      Speaking of kind of commoditization of models there, how do you think about creating stickiness in what is seemingly a very transient, transactional world? You know, when, especially when you look at like the switch from Cursor to Claude 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?

   5. EVElena Verna36:41

      I think this is where brand comes in, that trust comes in. You have to rely onPeople believing in you and your team. Because like otherwise, like I said, all of the SaaS functionality is getting commoditized and democratized, and it's just like anybody can do everything now. So who do you-

   6. HSHarry Stebbings36:58

      Do, do you not think that's a bit wooey, Elena, honestly?

   7. EVElena Verna37:01

      Listen, I'm like, I'm like terrified of the fact that I'm becoming a brand marketer-

   8. HSHarry Stebbings37:06

      [laughs]

   9. EVElena Verna37:06

      ... because I'm just like f-b-because, because like it's becoming so much more, uh, because of brand. Like people will follow the brand because of its promise, because of its relation, because functionality is gonna be available everywhere. So I, I don't know what else can differentiate you besides creating an absolutely delightful experience, stressing about the most littlest pieces of friction in your product, being really fast in innovation because you still cannot fall behind, but at least being like on the forefront, even, even if you're not the leader. But it's that relationship that you develop with your customer is everything. How lovable are you? Because if you're not lovable, I think the end is near for a lot of companies that are only purely focused only on just pure functional ability

9. 37:55 – 49:47

   If Elena Had an Unlimited Marketing Budget, What Would She Do?

   1. EVElena Verna37:55

      of their products.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings37:56

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

   3. EVElena Verna38:01

      With what? [laughs]

   4. HSHarry Stebbings38:03

      Growth, spend, marketing. Would you do, oh, fuck, I don't know, 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 and-

   5. EVElena Verna38:19

      Okay, a couple tactical things come to mind. I would still do out of home advertisement. I think that is coming back in spades because that's where eyeballs are at, that's where you can actually like capture attention. I would go very heavily into video and talking, not just visual ads, because then you can explain things so much easier. Uh, so I would like go after Amazon Prime Video, Spotifys, um, and all of those the world because there's just like not a lot of competition. I would go after a creator economy so hard. I would have every single newsletter, every single podcast have my ad on it and just box out everybody else. And then I would send every single one of my customers my own T-shirt with a hat and just have them be my work- walking billboards all over the place, and they would be top quality, the things that they actually would want to wear, and they would feel like they're like absolutely kickass thing that is a cool thing to have. So I would just deploy as much as possible at the end of my customers and people where they're already spending eyes and eyeballs at, uh, to have my brand all around it.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings39:25

      If we go through them, one out of home. I think most people do out of home really badly.

   7. EVElena Verna39:30

      Yeah.

   8. HSHarry Stebbings39:30

      I stare 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."

   9. EVElena Verna39:41

      I think also billboards can be deployed almost in a performance marketing way. So one of my favorite stories is, um, I worked with Maya, who was at Segment. Um, and the way Segment has worked, and I don't know, that story like just sticks with me. That when they wanted to close an enterprise contract, they would buy a billboard right in front of that office, and they would put their ad on that billboard addressing that company specifically. And it would be like the cheapest way to close a six, seven-digit contract because they like directly targeted every single employee in that company with the billboard. So I think that you can be like a lot more creative with the billboards the way that people think. Everybody thinks constantly San Francisco 101, like where am I gonna be in the AI slop of billboards, uh, on that freeway? But I think you can do it so much smarter with, um, movie theaters, with the co- uh, with the taxis, with, um, the subway systems, with buses. Like go back to the bus stops. Like go back to the basics because you can do some real cool shit there.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings40:46

       I remember one of the founders that I once invested in was doing a recruitment platform, and they were trying to get people away from Goldman Sachs and join startups, and it was a startup recruitment platform. So they got a billboard outside of Goldman Sachs, and they put-

   11. EVElena Verna40:59

       Very-

   12. HSHarry Stebbings40:59

       "I bet your parents are proud of you working for Goldman."

   13. EVElena Verna41:02

       [laughs]

   14. HSHarry Stebbings41:04

       And then do you know what's amazing though? Th- So the big newspapers wrote about it because it was funny and aggressive and-

   15. EVElena Verna41:10

       Exactly

   16. HSHarry Stebbings41:10

       ... characterful, and you get these multiplier effect of media because it's really out there.

   17. EVElena Verna41:16

       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 something collaborative platform on cloud with AI. Like you transformation nothing. Like those words cannot be used. And yes, you will not appeal to everybody, and it doesn't matter. Just appeal to people that will have a smile, a chuckle, that will have a memory from it, that will want to talk about it. Like we're in the era where we need to start taking more risks in marketing. And, um, it needs-- people just need to get out of their, I don't know, boxed minds of how we've been trained for the last twenty years of what good creative and good copy looks like because I think we live in a different world, and if you want to capture people's attention, you have to think outside of the box.

   18. HSHarry Stebbings42:06

       When we think about video, what would you do with video? How would you think about what would work, what doesn't work, what you see that's cool, what's not cool? How would you approach video in a world of unlimited, no constraints?

   19. EVElena Verna42:19

       So I think AI-generated video is the future. I was just playing, uh, with video platform where just I uploaded my, uh, just still photo, and it just created a full thing of me moving my hands, doing the full ad with like back and forth transitions with, with an app screen.I think that there's still gonna be a place for manual video creation, and those are always gonna be like artisan videos, where it's just like handcrafted, hand, hand-created. It's like a craft that it's just like think about like taking a picture versus painting the picture, uh, with the, with watercolors. It's like there's still gonna be some differences there. But I think for advertising needs, AI is where videos and even any creatives are gonna be at. AI models and video creation and just visual creation are improving in such a rapid way, and they can create these striking images, and they can animate you in the way that you would never be able to record properly in one shot, uh, that I think it's the future. I'm, like, playing around even with creating animation for myself when I'm reading my own blog as opposed to, like, me recording it. So let me just put in my screenshot, give it the blog's transcript, and let it do it for me. So it looks like I'm reading it out loud and, like, an-annotating it, but it's not me. It's just AI doing all of the work. So I think the future of advertising is gonna be almost purely all AI.

   20. HSHarry Stebbings43:47

       Creator economy, sponsoring newsletters, creators.

   21. EVElena Verna43:51

       Podcasts.

   22. HSHarry Stebbings43:51

       People try and do this, and they spray money, I think, pretty badly. How would you think about doing it well, what you would avoid? Would you go horizontal? Would you go vertical? How do you think about that?

   23. EVElena Verna44:03

       So every creator has their audience. You need to find creators that align with your ideal customer profile audience the most. I think that you cannot look at creator economy as one and done, like I'm doing one ad placement, and I need to see performance out of it. It's somewhere between performance, but it's most definitely brand awareness touchpoint because their audience is not going there to, like, discover new products, so to speak. And I think that consistency here matters. Like, you have to be in it for a long haul. I think the coverage matters, so you cannot just be, let's say, one newsletter. You have to go across multiples, and you have to just look at it as a, "Hey, I'm gonna do billboards, or I'm gonna do creators, um, I can do influencers, uh, on social, or I can do newsletter creators, I can do podcasters." Some of those slots are super cheap too because people, like, they're not educated of how much to charge. You can go and, like, get thousands of impressions for based, like based on nothing. Um, I don't know why more people don't do that. And I think that most of the time they think, "Oh, what is my gonna be my click-through rate through my ad?" But it's not an SEM. It's not an AdWords ad. It's not a paid marketing advertisement at the top of Google search results. And I think people underestimate association of their brand with that creator and their ability to target very specific audience that that creator earned by creating content for that audience that is just completely unappreciated as a channel in marketing right now at scale.

   24. HSHarry Stebbings45:33

       Do you try and get attribution from it? Do you try and do, uh, like referral codes, discount codes, whatever it is, to get attribution? Or are you like, "You know what? It's in the, it's in the brand bucket. Fine."

   25. EVElena Verna45:44

       I think discount codes are always nice, uh, just to give that audience a little something. I truly believe in, I wouldn't say like a pure discounting strategy, but using your product, uh, for f- giving your product away for free for people to try as the biggest portion of your marketing budget, I think always has to be the case. So what I mean by that, let me just explain real quickly. Yes, you can do discount codes. You can just give free offers. You can ex- uh, make your freemium even bigger. But if you look at your overall marketing spend, your free giveaways, whether it's part freemium, whether it's discount codes or whatnot, has to be bigger than your paid marketing spend. That I truly believe is the right ratio for every single company because if you're not using your product to acquire customers in some sort of offers way, I think that you're just giving too much money away to Googles and Metas of the world and not putting enough pressure on your product to wow people. But discount codes are good.

   26. HSHarry Stebbings46:43

       I, I saw, I saw, I saw you a post of yours and this power of social and, and your personal brand. I saw your, um, offer on Women's Day where, yeah, and making it free. With respect, does that work? Like, do, do, do you get a lot of take-up on that? Does it lead to conversion, or is it kind of good brand?

   27. EVElena Verna47:01

       Well, ask me after Women's Day. We'll see how much it actually leads to conversion. Lovable has had couple of free weekends before, where we would offer p- product completely for free. The first free weekend was quite good from acquisition perspective. It was in early twenty twenty-five when the brand was only a couple months old. The second free weekend was summer last year, so about seven months in, after we just about almost hit a hundred million in ARR, so like a little bit like on the lower medium stage of where the product has been. And that one has been incredible for re-engagement and resurrection of existing users, deepening their use cases. So it was more of a retention play than acquisition play, interestingly enough. But this time, for Women's Day, I don't know about you, maybe algorithm is, like, boxing me out, but all I see is people talking about Lovable Free Day. So the social impact of just people being so excited about it, rightfully so, product is gonna be completely free for a day, to me, that is something that you cannot pay for. That is like a marketing campaign, like bigger than... That would cost us millions of dollars to execute on, and our users are doing all of the marketing for us and grabbing everybody around them to bring into Lovable. So we'll see how it performs because this is the first time that we gave notice so early. Usually, we did it like a day before, so it was like very last minute. And this is the first time that we aligned it with a mission as opposed to just saying it's a free day. So we're always experimenting, and this is a large test, so to speak, that we're running to see how it's gonna go. But just the market coverage and the buzz that it creates, I think is fairly priceless because it's created by our own users.

   28. HSHarry Stebbings48:40

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

   29. EVElena Verna48:45

       So we obviously have really big KPIs on how many people we expect to bring in, how many new signups we expect to get, how many people we expect to resurrect, how many existing users that are already active are gonna come in. We're gonna see how many apps are created or deepened, uh, in the editing that day. We're gonna see how many of them go published. So our north star metric is daily active apps, so we expect that to shoot up, and the main goal is how far... Is it gonna just come down to previous growth levels, or is it gonna be a step function change and then we're gonna grow from there? So our goal is to really understand the new exposure and deepening engagement with our existing users on engagement level. Monetization obviously will just be a result outcome of that, but that is not primary KPI that we're optimizing against.

   30. HSHarry Stebbings49:34

       I love the, like, taking advantage of, like, Women's Day or, uh, a weekend of, like, free giveaways or whatever that is. When we think about product launches, what are your biggest lessons or piece of advice on how to do product launches

10. 49:47 – 1:10:46

    How Lovable Does Product Launches

    1. HSHarry Stebbings49:47

       well as a growth tactic?

    2. EVElena Verna49:48

       Yeah. So such a great question.

    3. HSHarry Stebbings49:51

       Oh, thank you.

    4. EVElena Verna49:51

       Lovable has a-

    5. HSHarry Stebbings49:52

       That's very kind of you. I've, I've had some practice, Elena, you know?

    6. EVElena Verna49:56

       [laughs]

    7. HSHarry Stebbings49:56

       I've done this for a while.

    8. EVElena Verna49:57

       So I think product launches, uh, at Lovable, the way product launches are done are very different than any other company that I've seen. Most of the time your product launch may be once a month if you're lucky. Most likely once every three months, so a quarterly launch. Um, if you're very unlucky in the larger company, it's like a semi-annual or annual launch. It's, like, very slow cadences, and you try to create, like, big moments around it because that is, like, your time to make buzz to acquire new users or to re-engage existing users. At Lovable, we are committed to launching every day, so there's, like, ongoing buzz that is happening. It's almost like a chaotic... Uh, Lovable is evolving every single day. Every single day it's getting better. Something is improving, and that is very important for us to just stay relevant in the category. And then on top of it, every one to two months, we make big, what we call tier one launches, which bundle a bunch of functionality where there is a story behind it, where there is a, like, a step function change in what is actually happening. But it's, like, really interesting strategy of, like, just constant noise in the market and then big spikes in what we're actually launching. And I actually think that that constant noise, not actually think, sorry. I know that that constant noise is part of our retention strategy. That constant noise is what 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, as opposed to us getting into forgettable zone almost a month, three months away and seeing competitors launch. So it's, like, a really different way to think about launches altogether.

    9. HSHarry Stebbings51:35

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

    10. EVElena Verna51:44

        So we're not vocal about every single little thing. Our marketing does not get involved in every single day launches. Uh, why those are just real- maybe I should just, like, call them releases. Our engineering releases multiple things every single day that improve customer experience, not just bugs. I don't-- I'm not even talking about bugs. In actual changes in product that are based on frustrations, that are based on lack of capacity, that are based on lack of capability. And then we encourage them to go post it on social, and then we have a channel that's called bee-swarming, uh, at Lovable, where they post their post, and we all go bee-swarming on that post to try to get it more amplification. So we try to make a marketer out of every single engineer, or we pick out things that we're excited about and post about it on social too. So it's like an employer-led marketing for these releases, and then marketing comes in and puts all of its firepower bet- behind tier one or some partner launches that are really meant to tell the story to the customer. But staying top of mind is important.

    11. HSHarry Stebbings52:41

        I, relevancy is everything. Like everything.

    12. EVElena Verna52:43

        Yeah, everything.

    13. HSHarry Stebbings52:44

        People almost forget what you said, but the impact of you being there is what's important. And again, relevancy is everything. Uh, bee-swarming, I love that, and Eleven Labs do it as well, which is interesting. Does it really make a difference when you have-

    14. EVElena Verna52:58

        Yeah, a hundred percent

    15. HSHarry Stebbings52:59

        ... like hundreds of people from Lovable like something within, you know, a minute, it makes a big difference to algos?

    16. EVElena Verna53:04

        Yes, it makes a big difference. It's actually not so much about like, it's more about comments. So yeah, you like, uh, maybe you repost, but it's the comment that makes the biggest difference, uh, where the algorithms pick up, uh, right now. And 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 I just go down the line. Okay, let me go support all of the things that people have said and, uh, that, um, I can get them more visibility through my platform as well. So we support all each other, and it works quite nicely. We had employees that have grown their followings, uh, quite a bit since they started because of that, because we just all bee-swarm on them.

    17. HSHarry Stebbings53:45

        Final one that you mentioned there was, like, swag. I have the most inordinate amount of swag, Elena. I'm sure you do too, of shit T-shirts and shit caps and the... 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, the big drinks that you have. The, you know, the, like, the soccer mom drink things. I don't know-

    18. EVElena Verna54:06

        The Stanley cup?

    19. HSHarry Stebbings54:07

        Those ones, yes. I have about fifty of them. Um-

    20. EVElena Verna54:10

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

    21. HSHarry Stebbings54:13

        Oh, no, I'm, I'm gonna write a note. You, you can have an array of... Some of them, by the way, the startups are dead, but the Stanley Cup survives.

    22. EVElena Verna54:19

        [laughs]

    23. HSHarry Stebbings54:19

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

    24. EVElena Verna54:35

        I can't say that at Lovable we're doing it right either. We do it, like, on, uh, one-off basis. It took us for a while even to get the swag to all of our own employees, uh, because we wanted it to be top quality. We didn't wanna just outsource it and get, like, another shitty T-shirt on everybody that, like, falls apart after the first wash. So, uh-It's actually a pretty big friction in the market right now, like how to do this at scale because, A, it's quite expensive to do it right, and two, it's really hard to find partners that can scale the operations for you. Um, so I don't know if I have the right answer for you. I just know that if, if we, if your customer wears your T-shirt, that is the best thing that you can possibly do. So how to get to the moment where... Well, we, for example, when we did She Builds Hackathon first two times, the first time to every single participant, we sent T-shirts. We sent, uh... And people like posted about it on LinkedIn, like, "Oh my gosh, I got a Lovable T-shirt. I'll wear it all the time." So there's like some element of, at the beginning of like it's a hot brand, and I want to be affiliated with it, and you need to lean into it as much as possible. At the same time, like does anybody want a Google T-shirt? Mm, I don't know. It's like, it's just like it's, it's all over the place, and you can buy them in gift shops that like just say Google or something on them. So I think there's a time and place for that strategy, and it's most of the time when you're hot and you're growing really fast and people wanna feel that affiliation with your brand lifts them in some way.

    25. HSHarry Stebbings55:57

        You can call yourself up the night before you join 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?

    26. EVElena Verna56:11

        That every month at Lovable feels like a year in a normal company in terms of how much change it goes through and how much my role even evolves and how many priority shifts we have in a given month. And one more thing that I would really tell myself is that I'd be in awe at what I'd be doing six months from starting the job, and that'll be completely different from anything I've done in the last twenty years of my career.

    27. HSHarry Stebbings56:40

        Okay, so I'm a startup founder, and I'm like, "Wow, you know, Sarah led growth at, ah, fuck, I don't know, Notion." And I'm not picking on them, just like choosing a random company. Amazing, amazing company. Led growth at Notion. Gosh, she must be amazing. Does it matter if she's amazing because it's a different world, or actually is it about mental plasticity towards growth?

    28. EVElena Verna57:04

        I think it's about agency. It's about people's autonomy. It's about people's drive and willingness to explore of 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 twenty years. Like I've, I've so deeply written in patterns and frameworks and like how things used to be done because that's been my entire professional career. And I do have a lot of patterns that will help company to not trip up over obvious things. I do bring that value to the business. But I also need to be paired with people that are not burdened with those decades of knowledge and can just go, that can open my horizons, that can teach me the new ways of how to do it. Because every single thing that I do, I still rely, like how did I do it before? Let me do it now. And I'm constantly pressed by everybody at Lovable that are like, "No, this is the way to do it." And at first, my mind breaks, and like, "No, I've never done this before. This is not how you do it." And I have to constantly try their way. But I think both of us together, it's almost like old guard of Sarahs and new guard of like truly n-employees that don't have that context, that don't have that baggage, is what creates a perfect harmony that pushes the company forward. Because you can prevent stupid mistakes from happening with Sarahs, but then you can push into AI nativeness with the new guard that is not burdened by those patterns and history.

    29. HSHarry Stebbings58:33

        How do you prevent morale from reducing when numbers are down in very transient world? You know, when it's summer, people are outside more. They're not on Lovable as much, say. How do you prevent morale seeping when numbers are not there?

    30. EVElena Verna58:50

        So I think step number one is try to have pre-mortems about what would happen if your numbers are start to go down, so you have the action plan at the earliest time of noticing those numbers, so you're not reacting to it. You already have a go to war plan, so to speak, when something goes wrong. So this should be happening before any big release, before any big launch, before end of the year. You should look at and do pre-mortems on the best, on the, on the best path forward is the worst things happen to you. Competitor enters and d- So like I really believe in having those conversations early on. Number two, knowing the key predictive indicators that will lead you into the decline, not just looking at revenue, because the moment revenue starts declining, it's already too fucking late. Uh, so like you need to know like beforehand, what will I see? What will lead? What will warn me of that decline? Just so you at least have couple of months, maybe six months to react before actual revenue impact is gonna get hit. So those two things I think are important. And I think number three, we just have to accept the fact that some people don't do good with negativity of the business. They're not gonna be the ones that are stand up and try to reverse it out, and you need to look at your culture and say there are gonna be people that are passionate about what they do, that are passionate about the product, that are gonna be up for the challenge, and there are people that are not. And I'm not gonna be able to change people that are not, so I need to invest into people that will lead the change and that I believe will help me be able to get out of it. It's so much just about people's attitudes, but you need to find the ones that bring the right step function change into your organization. But get yourself prepared as much as possible beforehand.

Episode duration: 1:10:56