YouSaid · the spoken record

Elena Verna

lines on the record: 99
first: 2025-12-18
most recent: 2025-12-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yes, please find me online on LinkedIn. Please feel free to follow me. Always engage on my post if you want to engage with me because that's the place that I always talk to people. I have my newsletter as well that baby steps compared to what Lenny has, but it's Elenaverna.com. I also try to, that's where I post most of my findings that I experience at my work. So if you want to continue. So many things are changing right now. I'm honestly not even sure myself of what is a pattern versus what is just a data point. So I'd love to just engage in as many conversations as possible and hear your opinions because that will help us as an industry just understand what is actually happening and makes more sense out of this whole thing.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I have been to IKEA here because that is a Swedish company too. It reminded me of in-person Amazon. It was like absolutely incredible. Ikea here is like next level. But Swedish meatballs for sure. Honestly, how clean the city is? It's kind of incredible. architecture, like everything is so built out. It's like picture perfect. Like it's on the card. I don't know. Different compared to like most of the large cities that I've been at that a little bit more worn down.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you always have to stay Swedish meatballs. I mean, I've never liked meatballs before. So now it's so good here. It's so good. So like every time one of my meals here throughout the day involves it. But I actually really love them. They're like, I don't know. They're so. Just tastes different, and”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You do have, you have to lead with that. That's the thing. You have to lead with the things that you are capable of achieving, knowing what you have with AI, because that is a lot of people, especially in traditional tech or more traditional companies, they're looking for somebody to show them because it's really hard to figure it out on your own versus coming in and seeing and then copying.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can start the best initiatives for you forward. And then it's also interesting that there's a really high demand for ex-founders now, for like those people that are truly have a lot of agency and high autonomy. So instead of just having people that have been working in the corporate world, the failed startup founders are now hot demand for a lot of these AI companies. So like these personas that we traditionally would not prioritize in companies to hire are now becoming the hottest commodity and the highest going talent, which is, I think, is fascinating and is like the wonderful thing that is changing how the culture inside operates.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Otherwise, we're literally setting up our young for complete failure. But I think it's incredible to see some of those new graduates come in and what they're capable of doing. We have multiple new graduates at Lovable that are working and I learned so much from them. And you need to obviously cut the right atmosphere where people with experience like old guard like me that can look at the new guard and really hear them and see them and really change the way that I operate based on how they do things. So make sure that you bring some of that fresh talent that doesn't understand any of the baggage that we came from. That can really look at the future in technology and what can unlock from a completely new lens. So highly recommend putting those into your team as a little fireballs that are going to be sometimes hard to contain.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess the only other thing that I will share is for AI companies when it comes to hiring. It's really interesting also the kind of the shift in the type of personas that end up being hired that I see for me at least it's quite different compared to anywhere that I've worked before. And that is there's this narrative going in the market always that like new hires sorry new grads have no jobs in the market left because all of the entry level jobs are automated. I actually think that's quite false because new grads, especially AI native new grads. So it's very important for kids that are entering into the, I shouldn't say kids, young adults that are entering into the workforce that they really know AI, which is there's another like really big issue that our schools are not teaching AI students. So this is like something else that we need to fix as a category because”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. I think there's lots of glimmers of hope. I think we can just all lean in and make sure that nobody is left behind in this wave. And that's not to stop people that are marching ahead. This is just to open up opportunities for everybody around us”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we're running it constantly. So our next cohort starts December 15th, but we're going to have more. We're planning a massive one on International Women's Day. So that's the one that if you can come join us.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They become potentially a hundred million dollar companies, but it also doesn't need to be anymore. So I just want to bring women to build more and vibe code more so we can have more diversity in software that is even created. Because I think that we all have a unique take on what problems that we can solve. And I want everybody's voices to be heard.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hopefully not. I think that we're early on enough that we can bridge the gap. I think sometimes women just need space and ability to discover it. And that's what we're doing at Lovable. We have this initiative, She Builds, where we create a hackathon for women only and we give them unlimited access to lovable for 48 hours and it come together as a community and they build together. And there's like beautiful things that start to come out of it, which I've never anticipated before. But so many women in that hackathon for us build help for their elderly parents or with their kids or with the household or for their church group or for the kids' basketball team solutions, which have hyperlocal, hyper-relevant, very needed for what they need in their life and something that was never been able to build before because of how expensive software was, because it would never”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That latent majority that is just not catching up. And my worry is that it's going to affect the hirable talent. It's going to step us back again in the composition of the workplace, of the diversity. And maybe it matters. Maybe it doesn't, like whichever side that you sit on. But I think that there is a needs to be built for everybody in the world and for that it needs to be built by a representative sample of people that are behind the product as well. I just find it fascinating that even when the barrier to building has been lowered, you don't need computer science degree, which I appreciate there's not that many women that are getting. We're still seeing the gaping gap on the adoption between genders, which is just, I don't know. There's like something very frustrating about that.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company's composition in AI companies, it's mostly men. To me, this really came to the head of when I came to lovable and I'm like, it's pink, it's purple brand, it's a heart, it's lovable. I'm like, I'm sure this is where it's 50-50 men versus women. And although we don't collect this information, but just like through third party autofill, we saw it's like 20% at most. And I'm like, what is happening? Not again. Why is this again not being adopted by women? And obviously, I don't know all of the answers. I think that this is early on that weekend shortcut it. And by the way, I also don't want to put this as an indication that men are to blame because I think men are doing a wonderful job really spearheading the horizons and showing us what's possible and like leading the charge. I'm just afraid that so many women are stuck.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's conflicting data points about how women are keeping up with AI technology and WAVE because there's a bunch of reports that has been done that show massive gap between women adopting AI versus men adopting AI, which points the story that manages widening the gap of accessibility for technology. And whoever's adopting AI right now is getting paid the most gets the most opportunities. I mean, we're seeing insane aqua hires right now where people are getting paid more for their talent than for the companies that they've created. And that's like a really interesting trend that is occurring. And a lot of it is fueled on this wave of AI. And women are not really present there. Like if you can think about like one million dollar aqua hire that has been in the news that is a woman, like I can't think of one. If you look at AI companies and their CEOs, most of it is men. If you look at the”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Envision things that are so much better than the reality. And before until it hands it off to design, we would never be like designers would do it for us and try to make it awesome versus I often stop my ideas in tracks super early on without pushing it forward versus other times I might have pushed it too far too long even through design queue or even like pitching to leadership and I find that very powerful because it calibrates me really quickly.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for me, especially for product and growth, and even marketing at some point in some capacity, when I have an idea in my head, it like it sounds so freaking cool. And sometimes I can even like I put it in paper and it's like, oh, this is like we need to do it. And then like I go and try to vibe code it and I'm like this, I don't see the magic anymore. Or I can't like I can't envision it anymore. Or sometimes I'm like, yeah, yeah. And like there's more, there's more. So to me, it's actually has helped really complete the ideation process for me quite a bit because then I actually try to go and build it and it breaks down some of the elements of what's important, what's not. So it's taking me on product development lifecycle so much further down. And then it creates a much better communication vehicle with my engineers too because I then can tell them exactly what's important, what not. So to me, it's been great because sometimes.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lavable for us having unlimited credits are lovable is a pretty awesome perk, I have to say. Like I sometimes have to pinch myself. I'm like, I give page to vibe code. It looks so fun.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I use a lot for brainstorming, especially the deep thinking mode. I love it. It takes a long time, but it's so worth it. Sometimes it has crazy ideas, sometimes it does, like, sometimes I was like, yeah, this is like nothing new to me. So it's not interesting, but it like it gets me thinking and it gives me look at the different angles. And lots of, I use granola a lot, for example, because to me, it's super helpful to get AI summaries of the meetings. And it's very powerful for me. I use WhisperFlow a lot because I feel like I have no time to type anymore. So I just like talk to my phone and talk to my laptop all the time in order to do it. But we're even thinking about all of the customer support automations that are done through AI. How do we every single aspect of what we do is question is ask, what can AI do here first, and then how we can add ourselves into the equation.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, we use Lovable at Lovable a lot. Like all of our internal tools are built on lovable. We actually have our first hackathon on lovable happening next week where we're going to entire company is just going to take full day to vibe code and see what we actually have happened. We prototype everything unlovable. So our specs, yeah, we do still have a written spec, but it always accompanied by a lovable prototype that everybody can interact with and to click around with and provide feedback. And everybody punches in and also does some edits if they have any better ideas. So I create locks on lovable. So for example, we need to make some pricing changes or pricing page changes. I take a screenshot of our pricing page. It goes lovable as I recreate this pricing page, make these changes, and then I send that to my engineering team saying, hey, this is what I want to happen. And then they take it from there. So we just, and ChatGPT.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Achievable and it feels overwhelming to even think about. But I prioritize this in my sleep, my health, my workout schedule, my kids, my family, my husband, and just my downtime because I know that I'm most creative once I have separation from work because then I come in with like all cylinders firing and I have so many more ideas about it. So to me, it's actually part of doing my best work is to take time off.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, I would not think about it as a work life balance. There's no such thing as balance or balance feels like, oh, I have enough time for everything. I don't have enough time for anything. But I prioritize my family in some moments. I prioritize work in other moments. And I don't try to balance the two. I go where I'm needed and where I go and I feel like I'm not going to regret the choices that I'm making today. So I'm constantly trying to put myself in the future and say, well, I resent myself if I make this choice right now. And if the answer is yes, I don't make that choice. And sometimes I have to say no to Anton and say like, I can't make it or I won't be there. I need to be here with my family. Like today, I need to cancel my day. My kid is sick and he needs me. And I need to take him to the doctor. So I think that just making in the moment more like in every day and sometimes in the hour decisions to me works better than trying to balance something that is completely un”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just have to protect it ruthlessly, but you also need to be realistic with how much is expected out of you. And you need to feel confident that you'll be able to deliver it. And by the way, you won't be able to deliver it unless you use AI in many aspects of your work life. So that's like the piece that helps you actually get to hit those expectations of outcomes that you need to do and the velocity. I'm very protective of my personal time with kids. Like why did I have children? if I'm not going to spend time with them. So like those are part of the non-negotiables that I bring along with me in every single work.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if I'd go that far. I mean, I have family, I have two kids, I feel like I have a very good work-life balance. But I put in boundaries for myself. Like I know when I need time off, because I know when my brain starts to overheat, so to speak. But I also know that work is my hobby and it's my passion. And I will, this is the best work of my life that I'm doing right now. There's no other place that I'd rather be than to be here. So I think that you just need to be more careful about setting your own boundaries that you know you need. But I mean, let's face it, I don't think anybody has work-life balance regardless of a company that they work at, even at Google or Microsoft or any of the others. I think everybody is freaking out and running as fast as they can. It's just they're running it in different structures.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Creativity on top of it to get it to the next level, but at least I can get this base level done with AI really freaking quickly. So from that perspective, I think if you want to leapfrog on what it means to be AI native employee and how to use all of these AI tools, you should go to AI Company. But if you know that you're superpower is in more structure, in more definition, in really high specialty of things, because in the AI companies, they're all fairly small. So you have to generalize quite a bit and have a lot of ownership of areas that you usually may not have ownership over, then you shouldn't join it because AI companies will evolve to be more stable too. So it's just a matter of time on where you can join. So I would just urge people to look at their superpowers and the type of environments that really speak to them so they can feel happy because this can lead to burnout for wrong type of”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never used AI there the way I use AI at lovable and the things that I'm capable of accomplishing at Lovable. And I don't know if I've ever would have made that leap so fast unless I joined Lovable. If I would have just read or listened about it, it's just different compared to be surrounded by people where it's expectation. It's not like a nice to have or something that somebody's asking you to do. This is just how you get things done. And you have to think about everything of like, what can AI do here versus where do I add value versus like in a traditional sense of work is like I start with my own value and then I augment it with AI. And here like the mindset is completely shifted now. I don't think AI is replacing everybody's job. So like please don't like don't look at it as that cliche saying. I actually often call AI as like average intelligence that helps me get the platform up and then I add my human thinking and my human.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really believe that there's different, you need to understand what's the environment that is right for you. Just please understand that AI companies are very hectic at the moment. They're very unstable by definition of that product market fit treadmill about that distribution of how they're actually distributed to the market really changing, about how product is even being developed in the first place. So if you are very comfortable in being in that messy middle and really comfortable of converting chaos into clarity for you and those around you, then yeah, AI company is a wonderful place for you to really absorb new skill sets right now. Because even before joining Lovable, when I kept seeing AI, I'm like, my gosh, like I'm so tired of seeing AI everywhere. Is it really changing the world? Like, is it really changing the way people work? And when I was a Dropbox before, and yeah, we wouldn't use AI here and there and I would use ChatGPT.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or it's like it's for just like it's for techies, it's like for tech people. It's like it never actually enters the people outside of our little bubble that we live in.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't have time to go after JSON users, and I'm worried of whether there's going to be a gap in the space where we actually going to alienate the latent majority because we're so hyper focused on just staying top of mind and top of capabilities on the pioneers. But I don't know the right answer here because without the You need pioneers for a latent majority to follow. But if you take pioneers and you take them too far into capabilities, will latent majority never be able to catch up? Maybe this is a fruitless concern, but it's just like something that I think about because at this stage we should be working on adjacent users. I would argue maybe OpenAI definitely started to do that with how many people they have on their platform, but not most of the other AI companies.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Bengali wrote a really wonderful article. It was many years ago at this point on adjacent user theory in that your product market fit expansion when you were in no growth stages, the biggest opportunity for you to go after. Is this what he called adjacent user, which are just outside of your core user? They have somewhat similar needs, but maybe they're in different geo. Maybe they have slightly different use case, slightly different needs. And your biggest way to continue growing a product market fit without having to go to next horizon is to capture that next group of users. The interesting piece here of how I relate to it, we still have the core users. And by the way, those core users are mostly pioneers right now that are excited by the capabilities. Then there's latent majority that is filled with adjacent users. And the issue right now, which I'm actually quite worried about us as a category, is that we're constantly focusing on recapturing the pioneers.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, exactly. The ceiling of what is possible has been raised so massively that we haven't even became too closest to even see it, I believe. So I think that that's the exciting part of it.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like nobody's future is bulletproof yet. And 10 years ago, if you ask me if a $200 million company was at risk in losing product market fit in the next three months, if it's experiencing 10% month over month growth, I would have said you're crazy. And now that's the reality that we live in. And I don't know. It's fascinating to World and what a time to be alive.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very different than the team that usually scales your company. Yet, we have to find the team that is capable of doing both on an ongoing basis. Now, I think every AI company is on this product market fit treadmill. Hopefully that treadmill speed slows down. If not, I think we're going to come up with crazy things of what the CLM and AI will be able to do if it's going to continue at this cusp. But it's a weird place to be in because every three months we have to throttle on our scaling efforts and just reinvent and then scale again, but it's like short blitz of growth, not these long year-long commitments.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too is he's this unprecedented time of consumers all standing in the month saying, oh, it's not doing this yet. Like I'm bouncing. Before again, consumer perceptions would be years to take. It's actually technology would sometimes be able to already address it, but consumer perception has not been changed yet. So it would take a long time. So we're like in this really weird part where both product and market is shifting so rapidly that every three months, I feel like we have to recapture our product market fit and not just recapture on the same technology and with the same customers. It's both of those pieces of the equation change every three months. And it's terrifying in the way. It's also very confusing in a way because we're 200 million dollar company and we're not solely focused on marketing and sales because we still have to recapture our product market fit. And you know that the team that finds your product market fit is”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not enough to just wait for that technology to get better and then start building on top. You have to build beforehand to like make a bet. And then the LLM to catch up because when that model releases, you already need to have that functionality available. So that piece is, I've never been in a company where the fundamental capabilities are still changing so rapidly. And that's the product part. So the product can leap to the new expectations. But let's not talk about the market part as well. Consumer expectations have never changed this fast before. What we expected chat GPT to be able to do and answer and how we wanted it to talk to us eight months ago versus now is night and day. And like the deep thinking mode and how deeply you can go into answering questions and what is capable of being building on top of it. So consumer perception has never changed this fast.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where it became a question that you had to face really hard face to face. Now it's three months. And all of a sudden you have to face that question again. And it's happening because of two things, in my opinion. Number one, in AI, technology of what LLM is capable of doing changes still very rapidly with new model release, with each new model release. So I think we're going to, I think we'll stabilize at some point and it's going to become more marginal, but we're not there yet. So every three months or so, every single AI LLM provider creates a step function change on what is possible with that LLM. And when you have this new possibility in just an underlying technology that opens up in front of you, then it creates another ceiling of what is possible to build on top of it. And the tricky piece here is that”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'll first start with what I've felt at least before when people were talking about product market fit, that yeah, obviously always product market fit is an evolving thing, but the rate of that evolution was measured in years. What is it that you need the next product market fit step function change, which often was called Second Horizon or Third Horizon? Sometimes five, 10 years, sometimes even longer that you, depending on how good you and hardy your initial product market fit was, but you'd spend years scaling the original product market fit. It was like Blitz growth stage, marketing, sales, growth was very important that you just try to get it to as many people as possible. And then once you have saturation or the cost to getting to the marginal people becomes too high, you start thinking, okay, what else can I offer to help me reach additional people or sell more to existing users that I already have? And again, the main point here is it would take years to get to that stage.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't comment on specific Margin details for us, but at the same time, the money that we're raising on BC is for future development and hardening our business, not because we will not be able to survive without it.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes. I mean, it's great for consumers. This is like a great time to be a consumer. You have so many options. Like everybody's throwing themselves at you, giving your product away for free. So it's great to be in the market right now. I think the power should be with consumer always. But with software, power has not been with consumer previously because we were forced to use towards some solutions because of either how they were chosen for us or what was available in the market. And now that supply is almost infinite, the demand from the consumers can be very picky. And the one that serves the best will win.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The max supercharged, yes, because you're literally using your product to drive that awareness by giving it away to the agents in your ecosystem that will do that distribution for you.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes and no to your statement because it actually does not deteriorate margin profile. We're just shifting of where we're spending it.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To do a lot of sales because we're really only working on hand raisers of people that are saying right now that they want to buy lovable, then where is you don't have big costs so you can spend it on products? And that is the beautiful part because you're not, when we're giving our product away to our customers, we're not competing with other companies in that space because they're just going to use lovable in their hackathon or on their own and we're not competing on ad words or like in paid Google where everybody's buying real estate for eyeballs. So from that perspective, I think about it more as a shift of where we spend in cost. And honestly, it's more efficient way to do paid marketing almost in a sense because of the cost per eyeball that we get there is quite a bit lower compared to if we were trying to compute it on Google.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And six months ago, we had 30 people working at Lavable. So we triple. So for us, it's a really big deal. We tripled our company size. We're going to quadruple it by the end of, yeah, I know. We're big boy and girls now. But for perspective of the headcount cost, it's minimal. So we have very little in that going on. We are not spending a lot on paid marketing. So we're not a big paid marketing driver. We're spending on influencer marketing, but it's not majority of our growth. It's low double digits, to be fair, because it's not why we're successful. It's amplifying our success and it's helping us reach new audiences. We have really large sales team. We have only a couple sales folks and they're just starting to ramp up their enterprise efforts. So we don't have like really big enterprise demand gen costs as well. So from that perspective, if you look at the equation and you say, well, okay, if you're not going to do a lot of paid marketing, if you're not going to”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes and no because I'm only going to say no is because so take a look at lovable. We're took over 200 million in AR. At this point we're 100 people large. So our headcount costs are very...”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A hackathon at my work on lovable. Can you give us all some free credits to play with? Why would we prevent a person who wants to do all of the marketing and activating job for us in their company from using us? Of course, we're like, take it. How much do you need? How much would you like? We will sponsor it all. We will give you anything that you need. So we're really leaning into people that are wanting to show this magic to those around you and empowering them as much as possible. And that is something that is actually applies to every single product. And I agree, this is not a growth strategy that I've ever applied in my life on like giving product away as much as possible, but it is something that is more and more becoming something that I see that is absolutely non-negotiable.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And again, this is very uncomfortable sometimes for companies that either used to really AI companies have lower profile of margins. That's absolutely true. To find an AI company with 80-90% margin profile is absolutely impossible, let's be real. We're all sitting somewhere in the 40% or so, which is a lot smaller. So any time that you look at those AI costs as you cost center, that's when you're in trouble. You fundamentally have to flip the script and say, I need to expose to people of what is possible and I need to remove the monetization friction out of it. Because if you don't, nobody's ever going to try it. Or you're going to be very easily overtaken by a competitor that will give it away. And let's face it, once you hook people, they're more likely to stay with you. So you obviously have to still work on the retention strategy there. But if you can have like for our case, if somebody, one of our users stands up and say, hey, I'm going to have.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To let people explore what it is for free and get that initial wow moment. It's not a ha moment, by the way. It doesn't need to be a ha moment anymore. It just needs to be a wow moment. And for lovable is that first preview generation after your first prompt, even though it's absolutely not going to be complete. Something we need to reduce to make our margins better. It goes into this, this is something that we need to spend more in because this is part of our growth secret sauce.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another one is giving your product away a lot. And for AI products, it may feel counterintuitive because they're so costly. Every single interaction within the AI product costs companies something. There's an LLM pass-through cost that is coming through. And a lot of, especially traditional tech companies I see are gating AI immediately behind a paywall because they're sitting on a really kush high margin profile and the moment that you start giving AI away for free you're like cutting into those margins with like a knife through the butter now at the same time ai being so new and the capabilities being so new you have to remove the barrier of entry you have to give a lot of your product away for free by the way i don't just mean premium freemium to me is just like a baseline if you're in the new category you need”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Software more human is a very important role. Now, obviously, not everybody can build a community, but maybe at least plugging in into somebody's community is quite important as well. And then there's another one, unless you have a question on community.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Community. I think community is really important here because you need to bring people together as they're exploring these capabilities and as they're seeing what's possible so they can bounce off each other and they can help each other out. So I would say community also amplifies that word of mouth, it amplifies all of the social posting. It amplifies retention mechanisms for you as well. A community has been a huge part of lovable success as well. And that's something that was started very early on. It runs on Discord. So it's nothing fancy. It's not like we build anything completely from scratch for ourselves. And it has hundreds of thousands of members and it's very lively. We have community managers that are making sure that all of the questions get answered and the right groups are being created. We have incredible ambassador program now as well of people doing it. So I would say community here again of really making some”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I vibe code myself. So, I would put that as even as a skill on my resume. Now, it took me a while to figure out. By the way, like everybody is like, oh, you just go and it all happens automagically. It takes you a couple of iterations, couple of projects until like, you know, okay, this is how I need to translate it, how I need to think about it. But for me, it's when I started scaling of what I want to vibe code, that's where his value really came in. Because I'm like, okay, I understand what is possible. I know what needs to be achieved. And some of these apps, I want to be almost full-blown built because they're not going to get incorporated into the product anytime anytime soon. They don't need to be. I'll just link to them from our header, so to speak. And he really accelerated that velocity for me. So once you get into bike coding and you see its value within your organization, leaning into somebody like that, just accelerates your velocity because it is like an engineer on your team. It's just they're not to me.”
2025-12-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source