[MUSIC] You are listening to the Sassius podcast in the world. Born in the Nordics, democratizing B2B Sass knowledge everywhere. Hi, I'm Daniel. And I'm Thomas and we are experienced Sass professionals that are curious about how other successful Sass companies go to market, scale, build winning teams and great products. Join us on our journey as we speak to Sass leaders trying to get hold of their secret sauce. And today's guest is Eliana Berna, Growth at Levelable. If the product disappeared tomorrow, how would you feel? [MUSIC] Hello there and welcome again to the Sassius podcast. Some weeks are more eventful than others. I mean, we started out in Paris. We went up like 4 a.m. in the morning. We went down there. We checked out five venues for the upcoming Sassius Paris event on the 16th of June. And we find just the right one. So super excited about that. And on Tuesday we went to Munich and we visited our venue there. That is going to be fantastic. So we have a busy week in the mid-June when we do Sassius Paris and Munich. But we have two fantastic venues and we are starting to plan that out now. Even before that, we have our flagship event here in Mont-Moussouit and that is coming along well. So Daniel, what can you tell us about that? I mean, it's going to be amazing. It's like you said, it's a little bit special for us as well. It's a five year anniversary. We're bringing the community together and we're going to double down on the things that we always have done. And it worked really well. You come for the content, but you stay there for the interactions with each other. So there's going to be lots of opportunities to interact with speakers, with partners with each other. So there's some new formats that we're launching as well. So lots of focus on learning from each other because I think this is the time where the best piece of advice, as much as I love the LLM's or LinkedIn and so on, it actually comes from the people that are in the trenches. And you'll find thousands of those in Malmö. And that's really our superpower. And you're a superpower like tap their brain. So really excited about that and then also excited about all the day-to-day stuff we do. And the wheels is still spinning. And now we have a podcast with, this is like a pinch me guest here. We've been talking to her for quite some time and finally we made it happen. Like calendars aligned and here we are. Here we are. And we flew out of Munich 6 am this morning. So we're a little bit tired. But this is getting us energized because this is a person we wanted to have on the show for a long time. No other than Elena Werna at Level 4. Today is a big day at the Sessis Podcast. We have no other than Elena Werna here in the studio. So welcome Elena. Thank you for having me finally. We made it work. Finally we made it work and we really appreciate it. I mean, you must be one of the busiest people in AI, in SAS, in tech. You're everywhere. There's like hackathons. You just did a podcast with Harry we saw. And now you're here like, and you still have a day-to-day job. Like how do you balance and manage all of this? I know you also have a family in small kids at home. I do. Like it's a lot. Yes. It's a lot. I have a 10 and 12 year old that are definitely a big part of my life as well. It's not a question of balance. I think balance is where people trip up because they try to think that there is a perfect equation to how much time you should be spending on all of it. To me, it's a ruthless prioritization and where I think is worth spending time at and versus where I delegate or did they prioritize versus where I don't. But I never deprioritize my family or just my own self-care. But work, I definitely just try to spend it where in the most visible, most impactful places. Yeah. And we're going to come back to your work in just a moment. So I think that most people probably that listen to our podcast, they didn't know of you. They definitely know the company represent. But in case there are some people that don't know Elena, like how would you describe yourself? Who is Elena? Like what do you stand for? What do you want people to think about you when it comes to Elena? Sure. I've spent most of my career helping B2B companies grow. What I mean by grow is taking their existing product and reaching maximum distribution potential for them across acquisition, activation, monetization and retention levers that I focus on. And lately I've been working with Labable as a full-time operator, although I've advised a bunch of companies and also been an interim or a full-time operator in a lot of really incredible logos and businesses because pattern matching is one of my superpowers and at Labable and responsible for their product led growth motion. So what product led growth motion really means, which is something that I specialize also over the last 15 years of my career, is how do we put that pressure on distribution on product itself, not just marketing and sales and have marketing and sales be the amplifiers, but not the primary levers for growth in terms of creating the most sustainable, predictable and competitively defensible growth model? Yeah. And you've been an advisor, thought leader here for many years. Did you envision yourself taking a full-time gig for a company? Well, my career title is actually going to be no more full-time roles, right before Labable. I was going to be. Writing books, you know, B. It's doing it like a push advisor role, right? Like doing advising of the company, doing some workshops, public speaking, you know, the life. But there's really big changes happening in the tech right now. There is a really huge technological shift that is going on. There's also really big distribution shift that is happening. Channels that worked five years ago are not really working right now. The way product was developed five years ago is not the way the product is being developed right now. Competitive advantage five years ago is not the competitive advantage that people have right now. So I really felt the need to go back into operator shoes and really be at the front lines of what is going on. Not only to continue growing myself and learning about the space, but also if I'm going to be advising other businesses in the future that I have the most up-to-date knowledge of how everything is working as opposed to operating on the 10-year-old frameworks that are no longer applicable. I like that. I like a true player's coach. Like you need to be great today. You also need to get your hands dirty. So I'm curious though, based on your last picks here, you've worked for some really great logos. So when you decided like I want to get my hands dirty here full-time somewhere, did you pick up the phone and call Anton at loveable and say like, "Hey, you want to hang or like how does this work? Like how do you end up there?" I wish the stories were that straightforward. I actually got introduced to Anton through Miro's CEO Andrei. So I used to work with Miro. Five years ago or so. And we still maintain really great relationships. So Andrei got connected to Anton. Anton started thinking it was only $20 million. Our company at that point, they were only like the less than six months into their launch. And they were starting to think about the distribution efforts as opposed to just thinking about the future development. So he connected us. Anton actually ghosted me for a couple of months. So he hasn't responded to any of my emails until he finally responded. He's like, "Oh, I did, I don't know. He's in box. I'm sure it's absolutely crazy, crazier than mine." So we got to chat and I joined as an interim first. So I joined as a contractor just to kind of feel each other out because they didn't know what growth even meant for them. No, it should look like. And I wasn't sure whether this is the right company for me either. And I wasn't going to go all in into this something that is not so easily defined yet. And then six months in, I converted to a full-time employee. So it was not a perfect journey. It was like, "Oh, match made in heaven off we go." We definitely did a trial period and we did a little bit of a back and forth. But I guess it wasn't the free trial. It was a paid trial. It was a paid trial. But I think that's the future of employment because companies are changing so fast and you'd never know what kind of talent you actually need. I really believe in the trial to conversion to full-time as a way of starting in the company if you really want to find the right fit where you can stay for extended period of time. Yeah. So I think most people know lovable. But what would you say today? Because it differs. Maybe if we would ask you one year ago or six months ago, you would have another answer. But what is lovable? What do you do and for who? Yeah. So at the core of it, the mission has not changed from even a year ago, which is we want to empower 99% of the people that don't know how to code and don't know software development to become builders. So people like me? People like me. Because I'm not an engineer. I've been in marketing and analytics and product management, but I don't know how to code. And it's empowering people like you and me to actually be able to build apps. Now the type of use cases that lovable is starting to span is increasing the type of functionality that it offers is changing every couple of weeks. So how many things that you're able to do super seamlessly without having to know any technical knowledge is increasing exponentially. And that is what really is changing. But our mission to really transition people from being users to being builders and empowering people to materialize their ideas into working apps. There's for personal use case, there's for their company, whether it's the business that they're starting state exactly the same and that's something that we're going to continue pursuing. And when 99% are potential users, how do you define your ICP in that?
When the 99% are potential builders, not the people that we want to make sure is that they're in charge of their own destiny and their building as opposed to just being Selectors of what's already out there. But our SCP we define a couple of ways. So first we look at it as a technical or not technical user and we specifically focus on non technical user because we wanted to be seamless easy to use. Then we look at some of the countries where we want to really succeed when we think about ICP because we don't want to the different local adoptions and local cultures. We want to make sure that we land first where we want to really win. Obviously it's North America, it's Europe and we're going to expand from there. And then the further down we look at specific jobs to be done that we want to succeed in from end to end. So some of the use cases, for example, okay, I want to build a consumer app and monetize it or I want to build a website and drive some leads into my services or do I want to build an internal tool or for my company or do I want to build a prototype for the product that I'm going to releasing. So that is our next level of definition where we have about five to six use cases that we're completely focused on developing into and solution. And those are the three main layers of our ICP that we're going after. I mean, I listen to this. I feel like I can relate to this. I am 100% your ICP and you are. I have generated in one of the use cases. I felt like, ah, check, I am one of those six use cases there. Is there something that you can share with us here that you feel like I'm really proud I built this myself with love of ball like and I don't know if it's something you use every day or you just use that once but a project of your own that you feel like the world needs to know I built this. I say that every build that I have done has been more collaborative than just me saying, oh, I did it completely by myself, but I built a lot of apps for our campaigns. So for example, we are running a really big initiative of she builds to get more woman into AI and into tech and the entire she builds that loveable that app, which is an app that is sitting outside of our main core product is built on loveable with internal portal and application processes and engagement for the community that comes in and actually. Participates in the she builds initiative I started it I contributed a lot to it and then other people contributed to it as well am I very proud of the result it like looks amazing it looks like it's own product that can be monetized and can be sold to other people. I also build a bunch of other campaigns for example we were doing edU educational giveaway of loveable and we built a ranking site to put people to both for which universities should be getting free loveable also I had somebody else started but then I finished the whole thing so we do it a lot more collaboratively but now even we're building so much on loveable especially for our own internal resources. I even have a team of vibe coders a full time vibe coders on staff that are going and building all of these things for us and that is my growth team so to speak that goes in across marketing across internal like people finance teams across product teams and builds all of these solutions for ourselves and for our customers as well. I'm super curious and like so vibe coders as employees like there's probably a lot of people I would love to have a bunch of vibe coders around us with so many ideas we can't do it all our own like what defines a good vibe quarter is it like domain expertise or like when you hand picked your vibe coders like what did you look for what background do they have. Yes so I think the main characteristics that are important in vibe coders are the ones that I can do that I'm a generalist they can understand the requirements they can they have the good eye for design they understand the UX UI of what like they need to look like and feel like they can deliver it to customer and do couple of the iterations is also like product managers honestly like that I'm kind of like the skill set of that but also within our section with marketing within engineering with. And with growth afterwards as well but also vibe coders have different superpowers and we do it we hire for that specifically some of them no enterprise space very well so they work more will say with our enterprise clients to help them get started some of them are more spike on design so they work on more of a template with design view that is going to be very inspirational so I think you kind of need to look at some of them are really great internal workflows like they understand how corporate. The level of internal issues happen like where they can plug in and actually automate a bunch of them so I think you have to kind of look at people's backgrounds and where they are super power spike but then the generalistic skill set of just ability to cover the entire spectrum of product development is the necessary skill yeah that's amazing and I mean you guys have grown so fast it's unbelievable how fast you grow like what can you share with us like you know like what is the revenue or AR like how many. Builders do you have on the platform like signed up versus active and are there certain regions that are more popular like it's everywhere it's the Asia Europe Africa US like you're just taking over the world tell us whatever you can tell us on the numbers yes so lovable started in November end of November 2024 that's when it's first time release it's first product which is what you see right now it looks kind of similar obviously with a lot more features and functionality based on the. And functionality based into it we are so we're like a year and four months into our journey we just crossed over 400 million dollars and AR which is just like absolutely insane and it's accelerating because it took us in July last year we've hit our 100 million and then we hit 200 million by in November 300 million by the end of December or sorry January and then we're at 400 million now so it's really compounding which is really. Important to some of that we're going to talk about in terms of that means that's me probably me certain dropped you like you're going to start adding 100 million every month that's kind of the run rate obviously there's seasonality we there's a lunch we also in the fast moving waters of the category explosion to there's a lot of factors that play but the growth is compounding because we also really heavily invest into growth loops as opposed to funnels which is what we're going to talk about so every single thing that we do just continues to compound and grow. And then we're going to be used to compound and grow on top of each other as opposed to being a one off effort that then kind of loses its momentum but we revenue is just one part of the story that's just an outcome we really have a million paid subscribers which we're so thankful for people that are actually building meaningful things and extracting value out of it we have millions of projects that are being in apps that are being created at lovable and really high traffic to those lovable apps as well so we have over 400 million. We have over 400 million visitors a month to all of the lovable apps that are happening so and that is growing in really high double digits week over week even so it's really exciting to see the adoption spread that is happening and acceleration that comes along with it. And when you look at the revenue growth is it predominantly that you add new users to the platform or is that existing users are growing there yeah what they do in level. Yeah we track retention very carefully obviously that's one of the most important metrics but even more important is expansion yeah because we don't want to be a reliant on the new user growth new user growth is nice obviously but that's not that is not our main growth driver. May grow driver is both retaining users resurrecting those that left because maybe we were missing something and bringing them back for them to try lovable again and see if what they wanted to do is possible now and most importantly that net dollar retention metric or expansion on top of existing paid subscriber user base so I would say most of this growth actually comes from both retention and expansion not new user acquisition. All right and as you're starting to layer like compound any revenue growth like you want to see like your new user acquisition to be no more than let's say 20 to 30% of the overall growth because you want to make sure that if you should off the top of the funnel tomorrow that you can continue growing 20 30 40% year over year which is what we're trying to make our business look like so we're not dependent on the top of the funnel in a way that is like an obsession in some companies because it's a leaky bucket at the at the bottom of the market. Yeah yeah and and how many employees are you guys right now like full time and police to support this machine so we're just around 150 which is a little wild how small we are but when I joined which is almost 11 months ago we were only at 20 so from our perspective to go from 20 to 150 is also really big deal because it's a really massive cultural change and that's putting a lot more people at the problem and still making them efficient without having to lose velocity so for us it's a really big growth but from the outside and the next to like companies that have thousands of people we're definitely still really tiny but we're growing really fast in that respect too. I bet you the companies have thousands of employees that really jealous they would also wish to be this efficient with 150 people so congratulations to you it's it's fascinating it's amazing and I mean you truly have had an amazing career and now you're on to something. I mean I don't know if we can call it epic historical like we people will forever remember whatever happens next year it's all goes into the history books but I also wanted to to ask you a little bit you've ran growth in some really like some really like household names that people know if it's a drop box or mirror or who
whoever it is. But you also mentioned to us the way you potentially looked at growth in the past and the playbook you use in the past, that your views have changed a little bit. Growth is something different today. What does that mean? Yes. When I ran growth and companies like SurveyMonkey, Amplitude, Mirror, Dropbox, the main premise was that the product is the reason that people come because it's a differentiated offering that does not exist everywhere else. And you just need to create a sustainable distribution system around the feature set. Now, when you're talking about a sustainable system, it was mostly creating those growth loops around the product, whether it's sharing, whether it's some sort of virality that you're trying to create, whether it's just increased retention and habitual loops that you can create a product. But the premise was that the feature set is differentiational enough, so you just need to create a smooth of a user experience as around it. And then the customers will get to acquire, they will monetize, they will retain. The difference and right now that I see is that the feature set is no longer can be your competitive advantage, which is really scary if you think about software as a whole, where we create a software with a thought that this codified set of rules that we can create will be our competitive advantage. Because it's so hard to create that codified set of rules that we label a software. Now everybody can create that codified set of rules. Now, some of them are still much harder to create if they're in a regulated industry, is or there's some sort of security and permissioning issue, so it's not just like a copy paste. But so many software's right now are honestly copy paste or can be vibe coded completely from scratch. So when you're talking about growth now, you have to start from a different premise, assuming that every single feature is no longer the reason why people will come to you because they can either create it themselves and that is terrifying or they can go and choose out of 10 other solutions that exist in the space that also have the same feature set because the velocity to market and the cost of creating this feature set have reduced dramatically over the last year. Something that we have never seen in that type of technological shift before, I think ever in tech and in software. So now you have to look think about growth as more of a trust and human connection problem because why would they choose you? Well, it's not going to be because of what you do. It's because of how you do it and the relationship that you build with the people and the human connection that you can create with them wanting to root for you, want you to succeed and making it easier than the alternatives of doing it on their own or choosing a competitor that may not focus yet so much on how features are developed. So I just feel like my role has become so much more about how do I create trust? How do I build in public? How do I get people to really see what we're trying to do at LavaBull? Not only just what we're releasing at LavaBull and most importantly, how do we communicate that brand through every single customer experience? So my simple role, a draw box was so much more about user journey optimization to just make it as easy to use as possible versus my role at LavaBull is how can I make it as lovable as possible? How can I invoke an emotion? How can I create a human connection through every single interaction? And that's what ends up driving growth and retention and that affinity and we even measure it by doing a qualitative lovable score across our user base, which is like a combination between NPS, Net Promotor Score, Product Market Fidge, Sham Ellis measure of how disappointed would they would be if lovable and disappear tomorrow to satisfaction, the CSAT to ease of use measurement because that becomes the core growth levers as opposed to more functional growth levers that I would do like a final optimization before. And does this also do that growth team looks different now? The different function of different people that you bring in a growth team? Yes, so growth teams always looked very different from company to company. Some teams are centralized and everybody reports into growth from marketing to product and it has dedicated engineering resources. Some of them are more distributed to where growth acts as an advisor to the rest of the organization and they help them do growth work and help them prioritize it along core work. Some of them don't have growth team at all because they're like, okay, everybody should be doing growth and we're not going to have a champion leading it. So I think all three models are still very much viable. Even at lovable, we were already rotated in the last 10 months that I've been there through multiple models because we started with centralized team. We decentralized it now. So we have growth efforts sitting across every single pod and I advise them on what to do and I push some of the growth work through all of the teams but everybody's responsible for growth. But now we're going back to actually hiring more dedicated growth engineering teams. So it just goes through constant evolution because of how quickly everything changes and how quickly you need to adapt to it, which I think is absolutely normal. So there's not like one-size-fits-all answer at the moment. I really can relate to what you said here and I think a lot of our listeners can relate to this and I mean this with love. We love our community, great people, great products, great platforms but the majority of them are in really crowded spaces. Crouted spaces where like on a piece of paper, demo wise, they all look the same. So if we would be here to pick your brain, free consulting, like what is your advice to those types of companies? You've built an HR platform and you compete with 50 other platforms that they're priced the same, they kind of look the same. How do I make my company, my platform, my people more loved? Like what you were saying about like making that human connection. Like is there a framework for this? Is there like a model that we should all use now? Yeah so first of all everybody isn't that competitive space. Even at Loveable, I feel like we have a new competitor popping up every week. It's such a crowded space. Everything is a crowded space. There is no more niche that you can own where you're one and only. Innovation has been democratized so grab onto your socks and like do what you wish with it. I think that the piece that I really want to emphasize in terms of how to succeed number one, your velocity matters so much because how you can win customers is by being extremely quick to address not only the technological shifts to unlock new capabilities but also to hear them and provide resolutions really quickly. There's a reason I'm on social a lot. I see pick up issues and I literally go into a product and I go fix them or I tagging years to go fix them. So it gets fixed within days, not months. It's not getting prioritized somewhere on the roadmap. And that matters because people go wow they're listening to me. They're evolving it. This is a living breathing thing. It also creates that every single time you come back to the product, it feels new. There's something new that happened in it. There's new functionality and lock. It makes it exciting almost like what's next? What is this? As opposed to having this once every three months or once every six months release. And then in the six months you're just staying quiet. So that noise level is really important to your retention efforts and to maintaining that customer without leaving your platform. The second piece that I would say is that you can't right now in this moment in time focus on revenue only because revenue focus or revenue obsession at the moment pushes you to prioritize your historical business and pushes you to prioritize your existing capabilities and your existing users. Right now the market is changing so rapidly. You really need to invest into innovation and take some bets and really put in customer first, like truly first, almost making anti-revenue moves for them. And that is how we actually capture the market. So I'll give an example at Loveable. Please. We're constantly doing things that should impact our revenue in a very negative way. That's the first time we hear that here in the podcast. But it's so I'll give I'll give two specific examples. So for example, one time the first that I joined Loveable, I one of the biggest things that I really wanted to do make is collaboration should be un-gated. Collaboration, a meaning multi-user multi-work space experience was a paid plan. And I'm like no, no, no, no, no, no, building is a collaborative experience. We will monetize on usage of AI in that workspace, not on number of users because number of users is an input and we will monetize on the output of those users. And we, but it was a paid plan with a lot of paid users in it. And we deprecated that plan. We moved all of those users into a cheaper plan because we didn't have any more feature differentiation to offer them. So we just took like a five million revenue hit up front and we made that feature free across the entire platform. Now it's terrifying because you see like a dip immediately in your numbers. But then it accelerated because our viability within work spaces has increased over 10x because the credit consumption or AI consumption has increased in a lot of those work spaces because the product started all some becoming more viral. So it's like it's one step back, 10 steps forward. But that one step back is terrifying. Another great example is that we're also obsessed about recurring revenue. We want recurring revenue so badly because that's what our investors love and they give us really big multiple on. But our users kept screaming at us saying subscriptions is just
not the way I want to work with you. Give me ability to buy one off. And we're like, oh my dash, it's going to cannibalize our recurring revenue. If we offer one off, they're not going to buy subscription anymore. But we kept getting hammered by that feedback and it was creating a very not-lovable experience. So we introduced the concept of top-ups, which are absolutely short term cannibalized revenue. It looked very negative in the short term, but it improved our retention, paid retention by 7%, which is huge on a million plus subscriber user base that we're talking about. And it improved immediately took up almost 20% plus of our overall money that we're collecting or not recurring revenue, but overall revenue. And it was actually recurring in nature. People kept buying top-ups over and over again. So it wasn't a completely one-off purchase. So again, our acceleration, especially in the last month or so, has been very big factor of being more flexible in how we monetize our customers and not being rigid in just pure optimization against annual recurring revenue as a whole. And those types of things, when you start listening to your customers and doing what's right for them, and then just reaping the results of the outcome that you might see like a month later after your initial release or your initial testing period, become the reasons of why you succeed in the space versus not. Yeah. And what's the chatter you hear out there? Because sometimes we hear that I think there's a perfect example from Desi if you're listening to this. I'm sorry, but there's a legacy platform intercom. And then they did exactly what you said. They decided to make a bold move and then they launched, I think they call it fin. Yes. And they took a major hit, you know, a substantial hit on the revenue to basically say, okay, we have this several hundred dollars in revenue from this platform, but that's not the future for us. We're going to basically, I don't want to say, "Sack it," but almost. And they bet all their money and energy on fin. And it worked out, but listening to them and understanding the story, it was a very courageous and bold move. And not everybody has maybe that courage and like, what's the chatter you hear out there from other growth people that maybe feel the same way, but they're maybe stuck in, oh, we can't let go of the current revenue here. Like how do they cross that hurdle? How do they convince people internally that now is a time because later is going to be even more painful? I think you coughs to create some belief of how defensible is that revenue. So the way that I would look at it, the way that I would evaluate it, at first I would look at is where is most of my revenue in the product is coming from? We've all got crazy by building platforms over the last 10 years. Platforms with a thousand plus one features, yet all of a customer's only using one feature. And most of our revenue actually is coming from that one feature, which often is initial product market fit of the software that I went out to market in the first place. So I would first look at, okay, where is my revenue actually coming from? What are people actually paying for? And then second question that I would ask, how easy is it for my users to rebuild this feature on their own with being completely custom to what they want? Because if it's really easy to vibe code this, then also in your, it's not even competition or defensibility against other competitors, also in your own customer becomes your competitor. And I would be sweating a lot if my customer also can become my own competitor. Because that means all of my revenue can walk out the door really quickly, which brings me to the point number three, do I have any switching costs? Do I have any network effects that create bigger mode for my product that makes it harder for my customer to walk away, whether it's a to competitor or to build something on their own. And sometimes, especially network effects are really, really strong. That's impossible to replicate anywhere else. And by network effects, I mean that every single customer creates more value for the entire system. Or there's data network effects, there's obviously teams network effects, Slack is a perfect example of it would be really hard to rebuild Slack with the network effects that they have Airbnb. It would be really hard to rebuild Airbnb with the network effects that they have. But some of the other products that are especially in V2B space, I would be a little bit more nervous about them if they don't have some of that component and they all send the entire world becomes their competition as opposed to a couple named competitors or manual workaround. And then I would really think about, which is my third point would be, well, then what do I have anything that I can compete in? Can I increase complexity of usage within my user base? Does that become my winning tactics? So I can move away from that one feature to actually 10, 15 features that becomes more complex to copy at least in the short term period. Or do I need to have a complete product innovation the way that Intercom did, which I agree is terrifying. And especially if you're in a public company where you are judged by your quarterly performance, it's almost debilitating. Like it feels like you're killing your business. But I guess it's the question of, do you want to see your business optimize for the next two quarters of revenue performance? Or do you want to have a survival plan for the next five years? And there's obviously can be different decisions based on what the ultimate outcome of every single company is. And maybe next two quarters is what optimization should be towards, in which case, yeah, forget innovation. But if you're here for a long term, there is just this big technological shift that is brewing that I think is very dangerous to ignore. It's a transformative time and we see a lot of companies trying to find how they're going to approach this. Really interesting to hear how to take one step back can really accelerate other things. And I just add one more thing, please. That is, I think that also really easy way to kind of test the waters here is to deploy a Sean Ellis product market fit question against your existing user base. And Sean Ellis's product market fit question asked very specific question. Yeah. And it's from extremely disappointed. I would be devastated to it's okay. I like I'll find an alternative. And most of the companies measure it at product market fit. So once they get the initial traction and they look for that 40% or above feeling devastated. If the solution disappeared, I think every single scaled company should be measuring their product market fit now across existing user base because product market fit is a fleeting concept in this AI transformation age. And you should not be the last to know when your product market fit disappears. Because then it's too late. Exactly. Measure your user's affinity to what is happening and like their dependency on you right now. Yeah. So if you're listening now, think about how would you feel if the Sassist podcast disappeared. So let us know. But anyway, we said we said earlier in the episode that we're going to talk about growth loops. And I spoke with Daniel a little bit before here to try to understand what it is. And I said, you know, isn't isn't this PLG or can you just introduce the concept a little bit if someone is not familiar with it? Yeah. There is a big framework that was introduced probably just like 10 years ago that has really become popular in the foundation of how to build a competitively defensible predictable and sustainable company, which is build growth loops not funnels. Now I'll start with funnels because that framework that existed for 20 years, maybe even 30 years, it's sometimes called the pirate framework because funnel, which is acquisition, activation, retention, engagement is spelled as R. So it's like pirate R. And I find it like always really funny. Revenue, revenue at the end as well, obviously. So but at the same time, if you look at it in the funnel perspective, you need a lot of top of the funnel and then the steps starts to converge. So you acquire let's say a thousand customers, but then only 50 of them activate only 10 of them convert to paid only five of them retain. So you constantly need more tactics at the top of the funnel just to get something at the very bottom. So it means more people, more money. You just described Thomas and mine professional career in one minute here. But you need constantly more people, more money, more channels, more tactics just to get something at the bottom. Growth loop is really creating a flywheel as opposed to thinking about it linearly. You thinking about it, how can I connect the output to become an input as well? So can I bend that funnel to be a circle as opposed to a linear line that bleeds in at the very end? So can this, for example, my retained users also attract new acquisition for me? Can monetization for me fuel more my ability to buy more users at the top? Can the activation produce some content that is shareable that then drives more acquisition on top of me? So it's all about creating those loops of can an output in each step of the funnel generate a new input at the top of the funnel for me. But then there's retention loops as well, which are also important. Can each action in the product generate another need for another action to drive on going retention? So there's like a big growth loops on acquisition that every single output in my platform should be driving acquisition. And then there is a habit loop retention at the very bottom. So like how do I keep those retained users over and over?
with me through product hooks and interactions. And I'll give you a couple of examples. Yes, please, please. Yes, I was just about to ask. I'm supposed to ask. Of the most, the funnels and the loops that I've worked at, you can ask any company and I can probably figure out what kind of growth loop that they actually have. So for example, SurveyMonkey is super straightforward and that is something that I focused so heavily on when I was there. It's a survey platform very straightforward. Their main growth loop is that when you come in as a survey creator and you create a survey, you then send it to your respondents. Those respondents then get familiarized with SurveyMonkey as an offering and percentage of them become survey creators. The percentage is quite small. It's under 2%. But the distribution of respondents, because it's also user-generated distribution, it's not like SurveyMonkey has to find respondents. No, user sends it to their own audience and then percentage of them convert into becoming SurveyMonkey users. And that drove company from being 0 to 60 million in AR back in early 2000s without zero marketing spend, zero sales spend. It was just a growth loop that keep on giving. They can be a really good marketing funnel. I never worked at Monday.com. It's a project management software, but they know for incredible marketing funnel, which is they are able to spend paid marketing dollars so efficiently with such a quick payback period that they can just continuously reinvest it into the system as opposed to it being something that takes years to recuperate. Meaning if you put in a hundred dollars into the system, let's say into AdWords, and then you can recuperate those a hundred dollars within three months back. So your three month payback period, then you just can keep spinning that money over and over throughout the year. Four times, which is incredible. You don't need any new investment. You just can keep spinning it in the loop. There is obviously other more like a lovable word of mouth is a growth loop that is hugely invest into. That one is the hardest to quantify specifically of how to measure it, but we invest into people having the experience and the product that they then want to share with the world. So we create stories worth telling. And then they go to their social platforms, whether it's X, whether it's LinkedIn, whether it's just inside their companies or within their friendships, and they go, Oh my gosh, look what I was able to create at lovable or look what what they did. And they spread us out to their own network, which again, we just acquire user. We activate them. We give them a story good enough to tell. And then they go and acquire other users for us. And some of them are more trackable in virality because I'm inviting somebody into the product or I'm sharing something specific that is then can be tracked. Some of them are more word of mouth and social in nature. So there is a bunch of different growth loops that you can enact. If we could do what Monday did put some money in ads and get them back, you know, that would be great. Now we're planning for a big conference, right? We are not in that situation. I don't know how to do it. But it's not applicable for every company. That's the thing. Not every single category can create every single growth loop. That is very important. Specific products and specific offerings and services are more leaning towards specific types of growth loops in order for them to actually be meaningfully spinning. And then I think, you know, we try to create a great experience, memorable moments and all of that. And that gets shared and it's what I'm up to. I think we are more in that kind of space ourselves. So yeah, it's those for you. Like for the conference, do we be those moments that are shared across social look who I saw, look at the experience that I've had tears, everything that I've learned at the conference. So word of mouth is absolutely huge, but you can probably have some invitation viral flows as well with, I don't know, discounts, like incentivize referral type of thing. It's a good question, Thomas. I like it. Like it's different from the event is like, if now is the time to kick in that loop. So now we have a Lena in the studio. So you have to think about your own business as well. I try to extract the knowledge. Freconsulting, I like how you think. So Lena speaking about Freconsulting here, one thing that you also mentioned in the beginning here and that at least Thomas and I that and maybe we see it because we're in this space and so on. But it's not just you, it's not just Anton, there's lots of people from loveable. I don't know if it's if it's the game plan or it's just the nature of them. Like, but everybody is so social sharing like I think it was a week ago or so. I saw that your office manager, she shared that she had built an app for guest registration. So like everybody is sharing something all the time and it makes it very approachable and so on. But is there a tactic? Is there a game plan here because I'm trying to think like can other people company can they copy this? It's 100% by design. We call it building in public. We want to share with the world of what we're creating, what are the challenges, what we're releasing. And we want people that are working on those problems to share that with the world as well and their solutions. We're really hoping to create a superstar like a creator and influencer out of as many employees as possible because we want them to have their audience. We want them to have connection with the customers. It's a really great way to engage with your users as well in a very meaningful personal way. And do you handpick? Do you say like Steve and Julia, you guys are the next batch here. We're going to make you superstars. Like how does this happen? We enable everybody. We give them assets. We give them like the bullet points that they need to hear. They can just need to convert it to their voice or they can just go rogue. Type of thing. Our head of calm sometimes gets not super happy about it because she's like, oh my god, you need to delete this or you need to rephrase this. But overall, we really trust into our people to say to put lovable in the best light possible because everybody wants this company to succeed. So nobody would do anything terrible. Now, this actually really hard for larger companies because there's like a trust into their employees to post the right thing that is communications approved. We come from the direction of we trust our employees and we trust the people. If they built a thing, they should be able to talk about the thing or we fail somehow in even like telling them what they need to build in the first place. But we have also this channel called Bees Warming where anybody posts anything on socials. They cross-post it in our Slack channel and we all swarm it to support them to make sure that they get as much visibility as possible and so that we show up for them with the support. So everybody's welcome to participate. We don't make people do it if they absolutely don't want to. We encourage some more than others, especially our department leads or team leads to make sure that they're vocal and they are talking to our customers whether it's on Discord, whether it's on X, whether it's on LinkedIn. But it's really an incredible tactic because it helps us create, like I said, that more human connection with our customer. It helps us create that trust. They know who is behind lovable as it post it just being a cold, software interface. They know how to get in touch with us. They feel like they're talking to us every single day and we love talking to them. Yeah, if I may be so cheeky here because and maybe there's not but maybe I feel that the fact that your office manager that she built this amazing registration app, I think it's really cool. It shows the power of the tool. It's again, a strength, the proof of evidence that anybody can now be a builder. So somehow it loops back to the product and everybody's a builder and so on. But if I look back at Thomas and I, last time we had real jobs, we represented a great company and we built something as boring as called product information management system. So basically it's a database where you manage your product information that you sell online then. And when we would try to encourage our sales people to post about this, it just sounds salesy. It's like it didn't come across as more trustworthy. Sometimes I think the legacy SaaS companies, maybe it's not that easy for them to become that trusted voice because there's so much chatter out there and can you actually make every individual to be a trusted source? Or do I just feel like I know they just want to sell me stuff. So now they have everybody posting. I think when you're coming it from the angle of I want to monetize this, then yes, it becomes a little harder. It's not a little hard. It becomes impossible to sound authentic. Yeah. Because you come off. People can see through your bullshit. Nobody's going to read it and go, this is so genuine. They just want me to like to use it. So this is why we focus on more on what did we learn from this, what works, what doesn't. Just letting people talk in their own voices. What are they excited about? So we don't do the scripts for them. We don't try to monetize those creations. We literally want people to share their feelings and their learnings from it. That's what building in public is all about. And that comes from a really big sense of vulnerability and risk potentially because people can say whatever they say and might come off wrong and you just provide them feedback for them to get better or you just lean into the messiness of humanity and that it's okay to not be polished, to not be corporate sounding. That's actually your superpower as opposed to the weakness. Yeah, because it's approachable. It is. It's human. We're like coming back to the fact of humanity matters the most. Now, whether it comes from every single software interaction, needing to feel human, not just easy to use or not just capable of performing something to where you go to markets,
strategy needs to feel human too. And if it's not, if it's like corporate polish and corporate heavy lean, then people are tired of it because it all sounds the same. It all converges to this cold voice with blue background and some sort of transformation, platform, collaboration, AI, wording in it. - So you have mentioned, I mean, you're growing a lot. And even if you're just 150 people, you're growing also with a head count. So what are you looking for right now for your team? I mean, a lot of people are really excited about loveable and what are you looking for when it comes to new colleagues? - Yeah, we're looking actually onto spectrum which I've never seen another company hire like this. It's really fascinating and I'm like so bought in behind this method. The first differentiation that we're looking in people is that we want both what we call cowboys and farmers. Cowboys are those people that are really pushing innovation. They want to capture new pastures, so to speak. They want to conquer new worlds. And then there's farmers that actually scale things that make sure that it gets the biggest yield of whatever the cowboy has captured. And we want to make sure that there is a healthy ratio of both cowboys and farmers on each team. And different people have different spikes in these areas. So for example, I would consider myself more of a cowboy. I get drained by operationalizing and scaling things, but I want to just like try, try, try. But I have the team of farmers that are behind me that if it works, then they completely operationalize it. And we work very well with each other. But on the other hand, we're also looking at people that are fresh out of school or have never had a corporate experience that are just the world is their oyster. They don't have the corporate box around them, but we pair them with people like me who have been in the field for 10, 15, 20 years that kind of seen it done it. But I have the box around me of how things could be done, which those people that don't have a corporate experience push against and they make me better. But I also helped them shortcut some of the mistakes because of all of the learnings that I've had in the field. So it's almost like new guard versus old guard, me being an old guard, but being paired with the new guard. So we both counteract and really advance each other in terms of creating something that really makes sense for today's world. But without making silly mistakes, that could be very easily avoidable. And then just the other third in terms of profiles, we really look for people that believe that lovable is their global maxima. This is not a job for the salary. This is not the job because they need a job. They really think that this is the biggest opportunity of their life. And this is the most interesting place for them to be right now. And then high agency, high autonomy. Because everybody at lovable is some sort of generalist. And you have to use AI. You have to be AI native in order to be able to accomplish what lovable is going to push you to accomplish. And everybody should feel that sense of, I can do this or I can figure out how to do it and not rely on 10 other team members in order to write an email that needs to go out, let's say to our customers. So it's a very high sense of agency that we are screening for. You had me at Cowboy. [LAUGHTER] I'm here. Being a cowboy is awesome, but I have a bias to premium. All right, so if someone is out here listening, maybe you're a CEO of the SaaS company, maybe you work within marketing or so, one piece of advice for you. If you just have to pick something that you would like to give out there to the world. Optimize speed to market over perfection. I think right now it's learning about what is actually works and doesn't is everything and push your team to really accelerate as much as possible. I think keep your ears open. This market has never changed as fast as it has over the last year. A pure speed of actual transformation that will have to happen internally is going to be nothing like that you've ever seen before. You just need to keep your eyes and ears open. I sometimes honestly feel like it's a full-time job just to keep up with AI. So it really finding those sources is super important to understand what's happening and what that means for your business. Because right now I feel like even consumer perception and consumer expectations are changing faster than I've ever seen before. Something that would take 10 years, let's say 15 years ago, all of a sudden right now collapses in three months of when people expect one thing or the other out of your product. And that is not the culture that we built in corporate in the past. And that is something that right now everybody needs to experiment almost in the wartime mode inside their companies of what actually works. That's almost it because I wanted to ask you so. A lot of people, they look at you, specifically you as a person to learn from you if they're in growth, growth leaders and so on. Where do you go to find your inspiration? Like you said, there is maybe not the set playbook here. Like where do you go to find out? Here's the latest and the greatest or here's the moves we need to make. Is that a person? Is that a forum? Is it like where do you find your inspiration? So first of all, I do my own work. So I think that there's still not enough people sharing what works and what doesn't. This is why I go out there and be extremely uncomfortable in sharing what works and what doesn't for me. And my lessons, lessons learned because I hope that it will inspire more people to democratize the knowledge that they're otherwise getting inside their companies or behind some courses. I really think that we can also help each other and create a much better future if we just all talk a little bit more about what's happening in our professional life. Absolutely. But I really heavily rely on other people on what they pick up as tactics or where they rely on my network. This is honestly one of the biggest things that I'm so happy that came out out of me sharing. That knowledge is now I have a network of incredible people that I can just go and ask, hey, how does this work for you? What works here? What doesn't work here? So I don't try to reinvent solutions. I constantly scan people in the companies to say, hey, what works, what doesn't? What has been here? Unfortunately, as I said, it's just not enough public information. And then I read a bunch of newsletters, like my sub-stack folder in my email is huge. And I constantly scan it to see like what's interesting, what other people are saying. And I listen to podcasts like yours. Because I think it's just a wonderful way to really get inspired or like start to put different puzzle pieces together that otherwise you're not potentially seeing if you're stuck in your specific lane and your company doing something that you didn't even imagine that it's possible to do in a different way. - Yeah. Elina, this has been great having you on the podcast. It's, yeah, we have looked forward to this for a long time and it didn't disappoint. So we're really happy that you could join us today. - Thank you for inviting me. - We certainly learned a lot of things and you can find Elina, you have a great sub-stack. I'm a reader and subscriber. LinkedIn obviously, you're in the Sheebills forums. I know that's one of your babies over there. So if you didn't know her before, check her out. You'll certainly learn and your mind will be expanded. I promise you that. So Elina, once again, thanks a lot for coming on the show. Much appreciated. - Thank you for having me. Let's do it again sometime. - For sure. All right, Thomas, this was quite the awakening pill here. So if you were tired here this morning because you get up super early, I know you're all awake. At least, yeah, I can see that here on the camera. Like, this was very insightful and I love her energy and I love her pragmatic way of seeing, you know, there's a past, there's a present and there's a future and we all have to build for the future and we have to sometimes painfully let go of things and adapt for the future. Like, with that said, what is your grand take away here today? That the one of the big advantages is velocity. So you need to move fast and I know that you usually said that I move too fast sometimes but it seems to be the way of the future. So. (laughing) - It's a thin line. It's a thin line. - I don't think I'm doing something right. - We don't have a PR member here in our staff that can stop you or me from saying anything that we shouldn't say, so like we control it ourselves but we can move as fast as we possibly want here and I 100% agree with that and on that note, she also talked about high-agent things like this. You should be self-sufficient. Like, she had this example of like anybody can pick up that look, I'm seeing a lot of chatter. There's a bunch of asks for this feature or there's something that we need to add and so on. Instead of waiting for 10 people to do it, like she said, like, you know, potentially she could go and fix it depending on what it is. Or there was a really quick and direct line like, okay, in Slack or wherever they do it. Let's fix it and one day later it's there. - Yeah, that's what I'm waiting for that you should fix the things that you're. - I'm an ID man. Somebody needs to, like, really the ID man and the big visionary, like that's where you come in. Like, somebody needs to also get stopped on here. So, no, but, and really exciting here about the growth loops and I also love, I learned quite a few things here, like, you know, sometimes people think about, or I should speak about myself, a growth loop always just related to the product. But she explained a loop can be related to, for example, marketing, like she had the Monday.com example. There's many different loops, the word of mouth loop and so on. So, think about how you can find this loop that re-energizes your growth motion over,
over and over again and after time it obviously compounds into something massive so that was really really interesting to hear. Yeah what I think is fascinating is that when technology moves faster than ever the humanity the empathy the human relations becomes even more important I think that is quite cool. Yeah absolutely things that makes us human that's that's why we are going to be winners in this I think like people that say we're very likeable or usually not likeable but I think we're prepared likeable. We're not lovable but maybe likeable. We are sassius that's who we are we are sassius and if you want to have a sassius experience you should definitely head to Malmö 56 of May we have a massive conference and experience for you we have some 40-50 great speakers we have a lot of different opportunities to meet other people may that be social activities such as going on the canal tour playing poker do yoga in the morning or maybe sign up for a round table and discuss something specific with some some peers or go to the party or whatever book one to modern meetings in the event app so there are so many ways of getting to know new people absorbing new knowledge and just having a great time with your peers so really looking forward to that we have some six intense weeks a little bit less than six intense weeks here ahead of the event so yeah it's going to be fun it's going to be great and here's a little bit of a secret that's not so secret yes of course there's going to be some lovable people there yes they're willing to share how they do things so you get to meet them as well in person on that happy note thank you for listening if you enjoyed this let us know if you didn't enjoy it let us know that's almost more important if you have any ideas for future guests future topics how we can improve how we can enhance not just the podcast but anything and everything we do all the forums do let us know and as always we love the community we love all the ideas you have if you think you have an idea you want to get involved and engage somehow don't be a stranger hit us up DM or
[email protected] [email protected] and we'll take it from there I'm sure we'll be able to do something great together yeah tell us how said you would be if sassius this is you bring but I hope you will appear at sassius 2026 you can head over to sassius2026.com and sign up now and with that said hope to see you soon ciao cowboy
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