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

“Hackathon she builds iVipe coded the first version of that site and submission process for applications and then other people came in and started building on top of it but I vibe coded but then like I don't have enough time sometimes because I need to run around and I want to push out so many different initiatives that I want to test in the market with our own products so reconnected on social can you like would you join us and he joined us for part-time so much value for example we partnered with Shopify and he created a bunch of Shopify lovable templates for us and it's been so helpful to have somebody like that that is just like pushing all of these things out and he's an absolute expert so he's teaching us all too of what is possible with lovable because he's on the cutting edge of constantly pushing it to the limit so I really enjoy having that role which I've”
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
“Great question. This is a new job role that is actually popping up here and there. It's absolutely fascinating to watch this development because I see vibe coding as a skill being added to a lot of job descriptions for designers, for product managers, for marketers, which I think is a really interesting shift. Finally, Excel can move over. Like we have a new skill to add that is super empowering and not 30 years old. But type code or so his name is Elizar and he actually was chief of staff in his previous role. So he's not technical at all. He's self-taught in technical aspects of it. But he was very early on in the vibe coding wave. So he learned a lot about it. He was user of all of the vibe coding tools allowable included. And when I was coming into the role, I'm like, I have so many projects that I will vibe code myself. So I run this woman on.”
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, well, it's the feedback cycle is just completely collapsed. You can go from idea to some product that is functioning to user feedback within a day if you want to. I mean, depending on how fast that you want to run or how complex the product is for missions, it took us a couple of weeks to vibe code it to the point to where, because we also have a full-time vibe coder on my team, he's amazing. So like he wanted to create videos. He did a bunch of designs for it too. So we took him a couple of weeks. We're testing it now and then we'll push it in the product. But it's a completely different development lifecycle. Before it would just take so many more steps from user research to the design sprints to prioritizing on engineering roadmap to build something minimal and viable to actually test to the long testing cycles. Now it's just like boom, let's go. It's taken 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
“Call it minimum lovable product. Like, it shouldn't be minimum viable products anymore. Viability is left back in 2010. Now it's minimal lovable product. That's the only thing that matters.”
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
“People that don't look for clarity but can create clarity out of chaos because it is absolutely chaotic otherwise. And if we start to look for people that can explain it to us, that's the only way that we can succeed.”
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
“Moving a work trial to see them in action for a couple of days, we pay them as part of the work trial. We have some probation periods that we start people on because this company is not for everybody. As I said in the podcast in the beginning, the pace here is insane. I went on a vacation for the first time. So I've been here for six months. I went on vacation for 10 days. I came back. I felt like I needed to onboard from the beginning. everything changed and when i'm in it i feel like it's an evolution but the fact that just being gone for 10 days it feels like a complete revolution in the company it's that pace is just not for everybody and that's okay because i'm very formal believer that there's different cultures and different environments that the best fit for different personalities and different people so we try to be very upfront with how things are and how chaotic they are and we prioritize”
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, especially recruit in Stockholm. I mean, the main office here is in Stockholm. We're asking a lot of people to relocate, which is a no small feat. Now, some of it is makes it easy because of how much hype we created around our product. People want to come work for us. They're reaching out to us. They're saying, I love what you're doing. I want to join it. that we have a cheat code to it because like we have most of the time when we reach out to somebody they say yeah i would love to explore so building that product that is highly lovable also creates a really great recruiting brand for you as well so make sure that there's like multiple benefits to that but uh second of all we do a lot of trials uh for people so trial work to see them in action”
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
“From all the way from start to finish. Those are very important, something that we screen for and something that we look for in our culture. And then you just see what you want to do is up to you. So there's very little supervision that happens on the ground. Now, we all have goals and like some of the big launches that we're all marching towards, but some of the work that is completely up to developers up to marketers or whatever, what is it that they want to do? There has to be that enablement of go try things. And because of our velocity, if you fail, it's not a big deal. We'll just pivot. We'll get through it. We are not here to just win all the time.”
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
“Can feel it in this office. People are wired up. They are so high on how can we make this better? How can we deliver more to our customers? And that's very different compared to usually how companies grow. We're like, okay, yeah, the check, check, check, they fit the skill set. Let's bring them in. But is that passion? Is that fire behind it? And then the second piece is that we work really hard on just addressing what's the success here looks like what is it that we're building, what use cases are we building for. And then because we hire these people that are so passionate about it, the other two skills, by the way, that are super important is high agency and high autonomy. I can figure out things that are tangential to me that I don't need other specialty, so to speak. Like I don't need a marketer to go launch something. I can go figure it out. And I have high agency. I can go do it myself. I'm going to own 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
“Yeah, one part of it is not something that you can codify, but it's the type of people that you hire that are going to go and ship these things. We at Lovable try to hire the absolute best talent available out there that we can bring in and that we can source and that we can attract to grow with. And what do I mean by that best talent? It's not that somebody who has been a really large company or somebody that has really done a lot of logos or has big success stories behind them. It's somebody who is extremely passionate about their job. It's their hobby. They love to work. They have fire in their belly. This is not a paycheck for them. They want to do this for some ulterior reason. This is the biggest opportunity of their life. So this is global maxima against any other opportunities that are in front of them at the moment. So that's very important for us. We want people to come and do their absolute best work at lovable. It's very important.”
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 it has to translate through every single interaction. So you designer has to be one of your first hires now in startups. It's not just The engineering, so to speak, utility, and you have to think through every single interaction does this communicate our brand or not.”
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 hate nothing more than going to software that is just like so painful to use that I lose some brain cells as I'm interacting with it versus software that I feel I get energy out of and for lovable for me like I cannot wait on some of the projects that I have to go and vibe code myself like that's a highlight of my day and I just like I don't I bring in my daughter and I'm like let's go do this like what do you think that needs to be done because I just get so much energy out of doing it and that is the feeling you cannot create by looking at it as a utility problem”
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, well, the first thing you have to get right is you have to be at the right place at the right time and you have to be in fast moving waters. Like, let's not discount how fast this category is exploding on its own. So this cannot happen in every single category that you're starting to build a product. But the way to stand out in the super crowded category is to create experiences that speak to people. That, I think, is something that a lot of people deprioritize because they still prioritize functionality over humanity within software. And I think that we're actually moving to the new era of software that needs to feel human, that people want to interact with, not just utility of it. Because cost of software is coming down so much to develop that we now can actually invest into emotional feel of that software as opposed to only just focus on creating the utility out of it. So to me, it's a, I love the smooth 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
“My joke is like at the end of my lovable journey whenever propulsi never comes to an end, but at the end I'll be like a growth brand person. Hi, my name is Elena. I do brand now. But I actually see it as part of growth strategy to make sure that that brand shines through every single interaction. And I always talk to my team about it because that is. One big lever in our growth story”
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
“Behind it is that influencer marketing, especially on the socials, it gives you an opportunity to have a little video and interaction and lovable is all about seeing like, oh my gosh, this is what I can do and this is possible. So that drives people to go and try it themselves. So that's why social works very well for us because it's not really a written value proposition. Like nobody knows what vibe coding is, but you watch 10 seconds of it and you go. That's new. Let me go give it a try.”
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
“How can we prioritize more unique interactions, the low elements that make up that feeling of this product is speaking to me. It's like it feels something that is unique. It has personality behind it. So we put all of the brand work actually into our product. When you think about lovable, people think about a brand if we don't have a brand marketing team yet. So it's all just through product interactions. And some of those building and public moments of the people behind those product interactions. That is our strategy. And then there's influencer marketing. Interestingly enough, influencer marketing is 10 times bigger for us than paid social. So yeah, we do some paid social as well. And it's working decently. It's quite expensive from payback period. We're still optimizing it. As I said, we're pretty early on in all of these channels, but influencer marketing is something that has worked from the beginning lovable.”
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, the customer is difficult one. That's a word of mouth loop that you need to stand up. The only way to create a word of mouth loop is just to blow their socks off when they actually experience your product. We have a really almost unfair advantage because our product is called lovable. So by default, we're trying to create an absolute lovable experiences. That is a mentality internally if it's not lovable. We're not going to ship it. And the best way to fix a bug at lovable is to say this is not lovable. Like, and everybody's just like jumps on it to fix it right there and then. Sprints, no sprints. It doesn't matter. It's getting fixed right now. So from that perspective, we kind of have that culture already embedded as part of our brand and as part of our name, which helps us a lot. But that's the point is that you feel that brand through every interaction. I talked to my designer all the time. How can we add more love marks into the product?”
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
“As the company scales, but at least at the beginning, that is a chance to stand out. And then you customer is posting about you. So that word of mouth of really creating a product that creates something for customers that is worth talking about. It gives them stories that they want to share that feels empowering to them to tell to others like they are unlocking a secret, like they feel proud of what they have created, which what we focus a lot on lovable on to have that feeling of, oh my gosh, I have superpowers now and I can't wait to tell others. I cannot wait to show others what is happening. So on both of those sides, to me, that is very much organic. If you're in a consumer, then Instagram, TikTok are very much a go as well.”
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
“For founder socials, our employee socials X and LinkedIn are fantastic sources, especially for B2B, because that's where all of the BB2B people are at. But you cannot just have ChatGPT write your copy and post it. You need to show personality. Like there needs to be humanity that it goes through it. And it's not natural for everybody and it feels very awkward sometimes to start. It's important to people to see who's building the company because there's so much competition now on functionality so they can rally behind a team. So they want to have a team that they want to win. And for that, you need to be vulnerable. You need to be authentic, obviously, but you just need to be yourself. So that corporate scrubbing has to completely fall off, which is obviously going to pull in as”
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
“Posting on social, what are they talking about it? What are they sharing? Which is like a mind shift because I've been always, especially”
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
“But at the same time, channels in which marketing right now works, I think, are changing quite a bit. And not enough people, I feel like, are freaking out and talking about it as opposed to like moving just in the same direction over and over again. And the changes that I'm seeing is that it has been very clear to me that when you're talking about organic strategy, if you marketing organic strategy, if you ask me that five years ago, I would have said that's SEO. It's search engine optimization, go on Google. That's your organic marketing strategy. If you ask me what's the organic marketing strategy right now, to me, it's all about social, which is what is my CEO posting? What is my team posting? What is my LinkedIn? What is my creator economy doing influencer marketing and across all of the social platforms? That is my organic, which is balance kind of paid, to be fair. But when I think about organic, there is still a lot of that word of mouth. What are my users?”
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
“Changes just cannot be supported by marketing. You have to delegate it to your product and engineering team to do their own marketing because otherwise, again, you're going to have to have enormous marketing team in order to support.”
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
“On one side, marketing channels are changing. On the other side, marketing's involvement into everything that product does is changing. And then number three, I think even marketing organizations in terms of where they hire the most are changing as a result as well. So I'll talk about second one first, just because we just talked about shipping, and that is, yeah, you still have your product marketers, you still have your channel managers, but they focus more on the big things and the narratives, although it's difficult because the narrative even changes all the time as dysfunctionalities come through. Usually you can come up with a positioning and messaging and you can have it for years and create all of the campaigns around it. Now you have it for three months and then the product changes. So the cycles here are really, really short. And for smaller changes, because cycles are so short, they spend so much time actually focusing on it as they should that some of these smaller”
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
“Velocity of shipping is our number one core value in development team. So we do anything and everything to just keep it going up, up, up and into the right. And by the way, this also means that everybody has a little bit of marketer within them. We have very lean product organization. We actually lean on our engineers to do a lot of product work. We call them product engineers. And they have to go and they have to announce the thing that they've shipped. It doesn't just funnel through marketing. So there's a lot of autonomy, a lot of agency that needs to happen with this type of velocity because marketing team, otherwise you have to have enormous marketing team to staff that. So it has to come with some roles and responsibilities, redefinition on the team as well.”
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
“Maintain so much just shipping velocity to maintain a certain amount of noise that it feels like the product is alive. It's changing every single week. And then there's like these big amplifications, turbo boosts, so to speak, in the race car model that then go out and they fundamentally create a step function change in that product market fit as a whole. That is a retention strategy I can get behind any day and all day. I only hope that we can maintain it as we continue scaling.”
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
“At the same time, what's really important to us is to maintain noise in the market. And that noise in the market happens by us shipping every day, every other day, multiple times per day, and just talking about it constantly. Interestingly enough, it actually works with fantastic resurrection strategy because people like, oh, there's more things here. Like I need to go check it out. It also works as great re-engagement strategy. So instead of sending newsletters to say like, here's the market trends or here's the user stories. people are like literally logging into their social to see like okay what has lovable shipped now it's like what what what is the change so it's interesting to them to see because from the time that they voice their opinion on what needs to happen to actual delivery is so short so they feel heard and they are heard because that's how we prioritize all of the things that we're shipping but it's interesting because i've never been in a company that tries 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
“Yeah, so one of our biggest strategy is building in public, building in public and it's coupled with employee socials, founder-led socials for sure. This is difficult for larger companies, but when you're smaller and you still have a little bit more narrative control with everybody on your team, plus you have so much more trust within the organization of whether people are going to say the right things because they understand what actually has happened. That ability to just really quickly deliver the message to the market becomes really important. Now, we still do the big launches, so we still have everything tiered into tiered three, two, one, like tier ones are going to happen as big moments that we're going to really rally as a company behind. And it's going to be something that is meant to step, function, change our product market fit. And we're going to do a bunch of activities behind 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
“That activation experience is better and better. I love that because that's the core product functionality at this point. And before people would spend more time building deeper features or deeper use cases or trying to improve some platform functionality and now the core team, they're obsessed about that first experience because that is core product.”
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
“And our agent team spends night and day thinking about it. So I've never been at the company where core team thinks so much about activation, think so much about that first generation, think so much about reaching a moment. So it's more weaved in DNA of the overall company, which takes the pressure off of me to only have to focus on it. Because otherwise, yeah, I would be in that experience all the time. But I feel a lot more at ease because everybody's thinking about it and everybody's working on making agents better. An agent, the beauty of it is it doesn't matter if it's actually first generation or if it's your nth generation. It just needs to be a better generation. Agents needs to understand your intent better and think and reason behind it. So it improves the entire life cycle immediately as opposed to having to only work on that first experience per se.”
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 need to smooth out experience for the users in order for them to get through that setup moment, to aha moment, to that habit loop. And here you're just interacting with agent. So we at the beginning were like the agent team that we have here is working a lot on it. Like, why would we go in there and do anything? It's like our core team is responsible for activation. Now we're starting to move into doing agent work ourselves. So Ulstan Growth team is not just doing product surfaces now we're doing agentic workflows and codifying agent instructions in order for customers to activate better so the work fundamentally I feel like has gotten deeper into product and deeper into actual core product functionality as opposed to just being a smoothing surface on the outer layers.”
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, and for example, we on the growth team launched integration with Shopify to enable e-commerce use case because we're like, hey, there's already people trying to come in and do it. Shopify was open for integration with us. Let's go lean into it so people can bibe code their storefronts. That came out of growth that usually would never come out of growth. Like why would growth team ever invest into a core product integration? Or we enabled voice mode for people so they can actually chat with lovable using their voice as opposed to only having type. And that's also, it's a feature. It's a core product feature. But we're like, hey, it's going to help people to converse with lovable more. It's going to increase the engagement. One area that we've spent very little time in is activation because usually I spend majority of my time in activation because there's so many awareness things that need to happen and so many things that we”
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
“Mother is starting a vibe coating business nowadays, and we need to figure out how to be ahead of them. And to be ahead of them is not optimization of the problem. It's reinvention of the solution. So I just feel like I usually spend maybe 5%, maybe 10% if I'm lucky innovating on growth in my roles, in my previous roles. Right now, I'm spending 95% innovating on growth and only 5% on optimization. And most of my frameworks are on optimization because it's really hard to come up with frameworks for innovation because by default there, by definition, they're innovative.”
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
“Not worth it in growth. Most of the people spend most of the time optimizing existing user journeys. So you already have maybe some of your growth loops that you understand that you try to optimize or you just know, hey, there's big drop-offs from acquisition to activation. Let me go figure out how to, I can tweak the dials to get it done. Here, what I find is that optimizations are just not worth our time. So a lot of the times my growth team actually ends up working on new features or just standing up new growth loops one after another. And yes, there is, of course, the saying of like more growth loops does not mean more growth, but at the same time, the market is moving so quickly, you need to stand up a bunch of initiatives to capture it because it's perishable. Or we also have so much competition. We're not alone here. So we can't ignore that there's everybody in their”
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
“Our engine actually going to be that is going to take us forward. But when I'm thinking about the patterns here and what I have to unlearn, I feel like only 30 to 40 percent of what I've learned in the last 15 to 20 years of being in growth transfers here. And some of it is very straightforward. Okay, this is how you're going to do paid marketing. This is how you're going to do some of the habitual retention. Here's the free to pay maybe monetization frameworks that still stand. But the rest of it doesn't feel like it even matters anymore because we just need to invest in such bigger bets and innovate and create new growth loops here as opposed to trying to optimize it to the moon and beyond, which would I usually be focused on in a scale business like this.”
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
“Really quickly is like it's hit the nerve with the market. So, yes, we're at the right place. We're at the right time, but we're also in really fast moving waters. And the demand that is coming to us, like we need to capture it mostly, we don't need to generate a lot of it yet. But at the same time, it comes with a really big downfalls of we're not in control of a lot of our growth. I mean, let's be honest about it. There's so much incredible word of mouth that is happening, and we're trying to grow that, but to enable as much of that as possible, but the company is moving. We're just like hanging on to it as fast as possible and making sure that we're not going to hit a wall, so to speak, in front of us, and that the wheels are greased and that all of the pieces are in place, it's like your race car framework that you have as well. We're really just putting a lot of oil into it and figuring out what”
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 would say that in any Growing like crazy before I joined, so I want to make sure that there's not that much value on what I have even added today because this company is a tear. And yes, we're rounding the edges and removing barriers for growth. So we're not standing in our own way, but there's something more magical happening here that is not a pattern that I've ever seen before. It's not a framework that I can even conceptualize in my head. And plus, it's a new category that I've never seen or I've never been in a company that is in a new emerging category that hits fast moving water so quickly. And that's the difference because when you're usually trying to create a new category, it takes years. I know it's every marketer's dream to create a new category, but it takes decades often to like really get that much hype and adoption around it versus with vibe coding. This hype seems to have happened.”
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, and I'll just say too, which is a little bit maybe counterintuitive to be to a lot of companies. We don't optimize for revenue at all. In fact, internally, we have a lot of discussions about how can we give more products away? How can we reduce our revenue growth rate by just getting more paid subscribers, more users using lovable to just get bigger share of the market? So our revenue is an outcome of us just trying to get more people through the door, not us trying to optimize for revenue per user or to get them to monetize at the higher rate. So there's like a very interesting path here where by actually focusing on the inputs like you should, it translates to a good output, but we don't look at that output as something that we're trying to grow.”
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
“Par with benchmarks of other B2B SaaS products that I've ever worked at. And I worked with Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey, Netlify, Amplitude, and others. Are we absolutely crushing with paid retention? No. Are we where most of the other companies are? Yes, our NDR is quite good because when people build, they want to buy more credits to build. So we're seeing really good revenue retention, but we're honestly more focused right now on engagement retention than even paid retention because our North Star is just to get as much usage as possible. And we will fix and tune our monetization model afterwards. So engagement retention, I would say, is by far bigger priority focus for us at the moment.”
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, so retention really, I look at it in two ways retention that it comes as a subscriber retention. So how much media pay subscribers do we get and how many of them are we capable of renewing? There's also very important aspect of it is how many of them can we expand because if you can get positive or above 100% net dollar retention, which is super important metric for investors, if you don't know about net dollar retention, please read it up. That's like a superpower to get bigger multiple if you can show NDR that is over 100. And then there's actually engagement retention as well, because that is the leading indicator for how paid retention is going to look like. For paid retention, I know there is so much on the market of, oh, this is a high product and it just a leaky bucket and it has really high churn rates. Although I shouldn't share, it's not public numbers for us to share actual retention. However, what I can say is on”
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
“Is working very well for us in terms of how monetization model is set up and how it interjects with your activation moment, which we can also cover. But that is what's driving both conversion and retention rates.”
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
“And my work at the Canvas actually go in. And we're right now very much in the capability stage with vibe coding because everybody's just exploring what can I do. And the beautiful thing here is that what you can do changes every month to three months. So you constantly need to come back and you need to see what has changed. So a lot of people use it for personal reasons. I build myself apps tutoring apps for my kid. So he has to answer questions in order to get some screen time accumulated for him. I build my own portfolio. I see people doing wonderful things. My favorite story that I always say there's this man that created a proposal unlovable. So his fiance had to answer questions and like she had to complete this game. And then at the end, there was like this big reveal and he proposed to her. But people just unlock the most creative things that they build on lovable. And that's where the revenue is coming from. The one piece that”
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
“In terms of the price, but it still takes time. So we have a lot of founders, whether it's B2C, whether there's B2B, so consumer products, business products, e-commerce, whatever it is. But on the other side, we have a lot of employees within companies using lovable as well, where they're building internal tools or they're building prototypes. They're building landing pages. So that is not a use case that is very relevant and quite efficient for us. But then there is a hype and discovery that is happening as well. Because when I think about software, I think about it. I talked to John Cutler actually, and he gave me this framework that is completely stuck in my mind of software always goes through capabilities, stage first. Like, what is possible to actually create with this? Then it needs to transition into value of how is it that am I going to get value out of this? And then you can start thinking about scaling it, of which aspects of my life.”
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 saw strip receipts, so it is real as far as I'm concerned, unless Stripe dashboard is lying to us, but it is money getting deposited in our bank account. But let's talk about who's actually contributing to that number. We do have a really large use case of people starting their own companies unlovable. So we call it a founder use case, where somebody that is non-technical, that has never been able to code or create a piece of software is now able to come in and actually build an app completely from scratch. And some of them are already monetizing it, some of it just using it for LegGen for other services or some physical goods, for example, that they're selling. Some of them are just still building. And we monetize on the act of building. So that progression of building up to your product market fit takes quite a bit of time. And even with lovable, we're so much more efficient and effective compared to hiring an engineer.”
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, it is absurd. I really want to make sure that people understand as we go through this episode as to why it's happening, because part of it is unlovable. Part of it is just in the market and how it's moving. So when you're setting yourself as a benchmark so you know which benchmarks you actually to use and what the lovable is the benchmark that you should be using”
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, yeah. I think it's still you're doing pretty well if you have a million AR in one year. This is one of the once in the lifetime type of companies and the category the way that it's evolving. So I want to make sure that people don't all set this as a benchmark for success because it should never be. In some categories it might be even faster as we continue evolving.”
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
“Seven months to, well, maybe eight months to 100 million, another four months to get to 200 million. And from users too, we already have over 8 million users that have tried lovable. We have, as you can imagine, to feed that 200 million, hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers as well that are paying for us. So things are going great. And we'll talk about why.”
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 we are just a little bit over one year old since we launched. The company actually did exist as a GPT engineer before, but it officially launched in the third week of November last year in 2024. So for us, we've hit over $200 million in annual recurring revenue before we even hit our one year milestone since being launched, which is pretty incredible. Yuleni actually have really great blog post on how quickly it takes for companies usually to get to their first million AR and it's usually multiple years. So this is definitely a unicorn. I don't think this is a standard. There's a couple of things that account for it and we can talk about it. And the growth is only accelerating so it's compounding, which is great because we had our 100 million in end of July and just four months later we were at 200 million.”
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
“One of our biggest strategy is building in public, and it's coupled with employee social's founder-led socials. Another one is giving your product away a lot. This is part of our growth secret sauce. You have to remove the barrier of entry. If somebody, one of our users stands up and say, hey, I'm going to have a hackathon at my work unlovable. Can you give us some free credits to play with? Why would we prevent a person who wants to do all of the marketing and activating for us from using us? We're like, take it. How much do 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
“I feel like only 30 to 40 percent of what I've learned in the last 15 to 20 years of being in growth transfers here because we just need to invest in such bigger bets and innovate and create new growth loops here. Everybody and their mother is starting a vibe coding business nowadays and we need to figure out how to be ahead of them and to be ahead of them is not optimization of the problem, it's reinvention of the solution. I just feel like I usually spend maybe five percent innovating on growth in my previous roles right now. I'm spending 95% innovating on growth and only 5% on optimization.”
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