SaaStr 858: Feature Differentiation Is Dead. Here's What Actually Wins Now with Lovable's Elena Verna

Lovable's Big Launch: SEO and AI Discoverability for Every App Thanks Elena for being here. I'm stoked to talk to you guys today. I, I thought we would also do a little bit of maybe some live vibe coding like we were yesterday just to continue the theme of the day. I've got a few points I want to hit, but the first thing I wanted to ask you is things will actually say is thanks for being here on a big release day. Speaker 2 Yes. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. Speaker 1 For those who don't know, can you walk folks through in the room a little about what you guys released today on the AOE thing? Speaker 2 Yes, I work for lovable. Lovable is a native speech way to build any software application that you can possibly imagine. And today is our big launch day for allowing every single app to be native for SEO and AI discoverability. So for those of you who are more technical from server side rendering SSR to pre rendering, you can be discoverable. And we also integrated with SEM rush. You can chat in Lovable about which keywords you're ranking on, where do you need to build out more content, and with a click of a button. Do it all so you're not just building an app, you're actually building an app that will be discovered by customers if you so wish. Speaker 1 And it's a big deal. So for those who are maybe newer to vibe coding, usually you deploy an app and it's like everything's indexed all the same way because it's all vibe coded. So this is a big game tutor because now you can actually get more specific with it. Speaker 2 Yes, you can build your site maps, you can fix titles on your pages, you can build more landing pages to rank on keywords. And sometimes we live in the tech bubble and we say, oh, all of the coverability is now happening through AI, yes. But still, there is a world out there where people are still using search and Google, and you can't just forget that we're here a little bit more in the bubble compared to the rest of the world. So if you're building for that rest of the world search is still very important to get right. Speaker 1 Yeah, that's true too. Why Elena Verna Fired Herself to Become a High-Power IC And then since you guys are on obviously use your own tools, you vibe put a lot of stuff like how do you feel like this release kind of impacts folks like it? Maybe we're on some of the things we still use. We use all the Vibe coding tools, but then we also still use WordPress and Squarespace. And now I'm like, I don't know if we need these anymore. Speaker 2 Yeah, it depends on what is it that you're trying to accomplish. At Lovable, we're specifically focused on non-technical builder, meaning that if you want to go start your business or build internal tools for your company, you build a website, you prototypes, build AB2B app, build an e-commerce app. And if you are don't have engineering background, we are the place where we make it all seamless and can make make it very easy. So yes, there's a lot of tools out there. This just really proves that it's a booming category and there's space for for quite a lot of competition. Honestly, it benefits all of you because more options that they're out there, the harder it makes us work to be on the bleeding edge of all of the innovation and capabilities. So I think it's a good thing it pushes the category to go faster. Speaker 1 Yeah, for sure. Yeah. You're listening to the official SASTR AI podcast brought to you by. Starting a tech company is thrilling. It's also really messy. Just ask anyone who's done it or anyone who's tried. Better yet, ask why they've seen startups in their best moments. Go to ey.com/tech Startups to learn more. Hey everybody, starting a business can get expensive fast. Website here, e-mail somewhere else. Business phone with another provider. Northwest registered agent gives you a complete business identity in one place with free tools, resources and built in [email protected]/saster freethatsnorthwestregisteredagent.com/saster Free SAASTRFREE. So you have such an A rich and interesting background at being at these big SAS giants right? Like Mirror, you were saying Dropbox, Amplitude, SurveyMonkey, like these are big names and we were just talking about how you used to manage. Now you're back to being not only a lovable, which is a vibe coding company, but back to being an IC. Speaker 2 I am. So I've been at lovable for a year. Today is actually my one year anniversary. I'm very excited. I've made it, I've made it. That was my goal. Can I make it a year at company like this? But I've been in the industry for 15, almost 20 years. So I my background is in traditional tech. It's not an AI. I'm trying to catch up and learn as we go. So actually my previous role at Dropbox, my team was a couple 100 people because it was growth was a really big driver for Dropbox. It was a very heavy product LED company and our team was bigger than marketing team as a whole. And now at Lovable, I started as running more of a marketing and growth, actually fired myself out of marketing job because I knew that they needed somebody else. Then I started a growth team and then I went back into being an IC and I'm falling back in love with work because I've always loved what I do. It's always been my hobby. But management of really large teams is more so much about coordination and cross functional dependencies and I really empowering people that you sometimes lose touch of craft. And I think in this AI era, it is so important to maintain and evolve and amplify your craft that I love just build. Being back in the builder seed and just discovering of how many more things I can accomplish by myself as opposed to having to need a large team to make my ideas come to life. I love it. And I do think that is going to be the next flex of our careers, not to go up the leadership ladders, going to those fancy VP titles and actually becoming this high power I see that is capable to accomplish of what it used to take dozens of people to do, right. Speaker 1 Now with agents rights for one question, we've gotten a lot already in the last day and 1/2 is how do folks find an Elena? Right? You're back to being an ICI. Don't actually know the story of how Anton found you, but like how do folks find their own version of an Amelia or an Elena to do what you're doing right? Become an IC, get their hands dirty and start building with agents. Feature Differentiation is Dead: What Actually Wins Now in SaaS I think there's a lot of leaders out there in the companies that are deeply unhappy with the type of work that they're doing. So because how do most people get in management? You become a really good IC and your benefit of your appreciation for being good IC is to go into management and do something completely different versus what you're actually great at. So there's a lot of a very terrible managers out there as a result. Honestly, I wouldn't wish management on my worst enemy unless you truly enjoyed it because it's a hard job and you either have a skill set to do it or you don't. I would say I'm like mediocre manager. I'm much better at a sea craft person. Can I do it? Sure, but that's not where my superpower is. So reaching out to those people I and saying, hey, would you like to become a builder again? Would you like to exercise your craft again? You'd be surprised how many people are saying yes right now because they see it as an opportunity to fall back in love with, work against. Yeah. Speaker 1 Yeah, I want to. We're going to switch my laptop to a bit if we can. I wanted to show folks a few things that you they could do with Lovable just to kind of grounded reality because something you and I talked about on the prep call was how there's no feature differentiation, differentiation anymore, right? I like to do these protocols now because it's handy. But we were talking about how you any, almost anybody now that there is vibe coding can just catch up to everybody else in a day. So I wanted to show folks some of the things you could do on Lovable so. Speaker 2 So yeah, first of all, it's a really funny tagline. Oh, there's no more feature differentiation, which is through in some capacity, but it's a little bit maybe over exaggerated as a statement without context. So for sure what do I mean by that is that we in the SAS era, because how expensive it's been to develop anything technically have relied on feature differentiation as our molds. This is the reason that we won because we had different product offering versus the competition, because we had better technical teams building it, We had better product visionaries that were developing it. But now with the cost, cost of development collapsing because anybody can go to products like Lovable and just say, hey, I want to build this feature and AI builds it for you. You don't need years of engineering experience. You don't need for some of this obvious, it's more simple functionality. I'm not saying that lovable can build everything. It will be in the future, obviously, but for now it's still the commodity of what actually can be created by me, you. You is increasing substantially. So feature differentiation is really hard to maintain as a Moat. You might be ahead for a month to six months, but then everybody will catch up because AI is writing so much of our code in AI native organizations, 80% plus of the code is written by AI nowadays. So imagine how many more engineers that you would need on the traditional organization to do so. Yes, you can still have feature remote. It's just going to be very short lived and you cannot rely on it as an ongoing predictable way to grow. The molds that are still working are still the same ones, which is hardware because it's so hard to actually create hardware. Network effects, network effects has always been really hard to create. But once you have it, oh boy, this is a gift that is going to keep on giving. Data and security and compliance. Those are still very well worth investing into because those will be more long lasting. A. How to Build an AI VP of Marketing with Your Own Data 100% yeah. You mentioned data. So one of the things I did here just to walk you guys through what I did if you want to replicate it too. So yesterday we did the session where I live built an AIVP of marketing. So if you go to sasrania.com/resources you can grab the two things I already pre vibed for you guys so that you have it handy. But it's a testament to the data. So I, I packaged up some sample data so that people could just duplicate it, But I gave it a spec, I gave it some sample historical data and I popped it into lovable and I said, hey, here's my spec for an AIVP of marketing. I, this is what I wanted to achieve. And it's this whole long spec. Build your own AIVP of marketing. Start as a dashboard here. All the goals that it's supposed to do. Here's the data, right? Obviously this is fake data, but when you use your own data, you'll get better results. And I think that's such a true. I'm glad you called that out because so many folks have been asking us, right? We're all vibing so many things so fast now. What is the mode? I'm like, what? We have like 12 years of Saturday and I don't think a lot of people. Speaker 2 Has, yeah, absolutely. Data's big. Brand is not the one that I didn't mention. Brand is back, baby. So much of the growth efforts now is how can you make your brand differentiate and connect with your customers? At Lovable, we're still big on building in public. Because of that, we want you to see who is behind the scenes. We want you to see what we're thinking. We want you to contribute to our development in real time as opposed to it being behind closed doors. And by the way, this prompt is like, it's amazing how well structured it is. So like, that's good. That's great. The way that I buy code is a lot more chaotic. I'm like this, no, this looks wrong. And then I just go to plan mode until I don't get what I want. So there's like very different styles to do it. Just don't think that you have to have this well articulated prompt in order to get started. Yeah, Correct. Yeah. I. Speaker 1 I like to I'm like, I'm I'm definitely like you. We're like once I have it live, then I like tweak it too much. I'm like, do this, do that, and then I'm like, OK, well, usually when I click. Speaker 2 Together and you just fill it in. Speaker 1 So I like to start it with a good spec so that I'm like. Speaker 2 OK, yeah, that way the. Speaker 1 Agent knows what its goal is and it's not chaotic because I was chaotic exactly. But this is pretty fun, so if you guys haven't tried it yet, you should try to do this in your own lovable and just prompt it right? So it made me this. Would you like that? I explained yesterday, but 10K, who is our AIVP of marketing started as a dashboard. It's going to generate for moves. Let's see what it does here. It's thinking, but I think it's pretty cool that you can put all this in and then, OK, let's see what it said. I'm going to see how these compared to yesterday's too. OK, So actually very interesting how different these are and actually not in the same category as the ones that I got generated yesterday from a different vibe coding platform. So this one as our AIVPO marketing said, it's four top ideas for me today to grow the go to market was to launch on site registration. OK, fine. That kind of only applies to disaster initiate LinkedIn campaigns. I'm like that's, that's always a good reminder. I'm always behind on my ads. I don't know about you, but it's like I'm constant struggling to keep up with my aunt sponsor revenue. Again, this is fake data, but it says send a personalized outreach or top sponsors. It can help you do that. So yeah, this is pretty good of like OK, you can take us back. It can take it was my faith data, but you guys would use some of your real data and then spit out already like 4 really good ideas that it can help. The agent can help you then deploy instantly. Speaker 2 And the power here is when you can actually connect to your data source, so it's live updating. So we use the word connectors in our product and you can connect it to Big Query or Notion or Slack or wherever your data source is actually coming from, which is what makes it so much more powerful because it's live and it's living breathing thing that can guide you through it. Empowering Non-Technical Builders and the Rise of Solopreneurs Yeah. And for the folks that are like maybe more so like the founders in the room, I don't do you know like your top use cases of what people are vibing right now in lovable? Speaker 2 Yes. So we have spent quite a bit of time of figuring out what is our ICP ideal customer persona because it's so easy to just be so horizontal and be anything to everyone, which really means nothing to everyone because you're too drawn out. So we started very explicitly with a non-technical builder that is very focused of our persona because we want to enable the 99% of the population that does not have engineering capabilities and knowledge to be able able to build the ideas because they are experts in something. Let them materialize that into whatever is it that they need to build from software perspective. So that is like at the very tippy top of the pyramid. Then it goes into do we have a founder persona that is non-technical founder or do we have a non-technical builder inside a company? So it's an employee persona and the founder persona. Then we're empower it for B to B companies, B to C companies or e-commerce companies. We have a partnership with Shopify to call if you create a really amazing e-commerce experiences, if that's what you wish for employee and non-technical builder, then it's more internal tools. Hey, I have this workflow. It's so annoying. Let me just go build a little software for it to solve it for me. Or prototyping or marketing sites or websites or satellite apps. I call it satellite apps. It's not your core product, but it's the apps that you create for campaigns or for sales outreaches. And it works quite wonderfully. So we have this tree that we go down and then we build full blown functionality for each one. Speaker 1 Yeah, makes a little sense. And then for folks that are maybe starting, like do you see them build a dashboard first? Like what are the founders building first on lovable? Speaker 2 Founders, they have an idea, they think this is the problem that I see in the market that problem can be very local. This is happening in my daughter's soccer camp and I see that there is a problem can I go build a solution? For example, one of our successful founders is a full time student and she build an AI study buddy and she got $130,000 in AR in the 1st 30 days of launching it because she distributed across her at the school and then it picked up like a wildfire. So it's depends on whatever is your local knowledge is whatever is it the idea that you're frustrated with and before you had to go and fire engineering team or find a Co founder to build it. And now you can just go and validate the idea on your own. Try to get first couple of customers of your own. I really truly believe that we're going to be entering the era of solar preneurs and running companies that are almost mid market, potentially even enterprise size like as well as the really long tail of really small what I almost all mom and pop SAS of something that makes a good living for you or makes a good side gig for you. It doesn't have to be this huge business that needs to raise money, but it can be a nice source of income for you. And especially as all of our roles are changing and organizational structures are changing, I really urge every single one of you to go and explore a side business because every single one of you knows the idea that is not been solved with software because often it was too costly to solve it with software, but now it's completely ungated for you to go and build something out on your own. Inside Lovable: Hiring for an AI-Native, High-Velocity Organization Not only costly, but I think so too. Like when we've tried to add like features and functionalities or even getting this event done in the past, we sometimes just can't find the resources to do it right, like and it's hard. Speaker 2 Yeah. And it's not even, it's that absolutely. But then it's also like how do you launch it? How do you find product market fit? Where do you get first couple of customers, which is also something that we're heavily focused on because we really believe that building something is already becoming a commodity. Everybody and their mother are going into competition of creating an app builders. How do you create value out of what you've built, whether it's your personal value for your company or value for your customers. That's where the next level of the umph is going to be and something that we're really heavily focused on. Speaker 1 Yeah, it's crazy how much folks can do just by vibing, right? To your point, like neon technical folks, like I don't consider technical. Like I don't know how to program, I don't know how to do like traditional coding, but I know the vibe code now. And I think it's one of those things too where like I feel like sometimes folks are nervous to start it because they're like, I don't have the agent to do too much or what if the outputs aren't very good? I'm like, it's not like my vibe coding was good five months ago. Like it's very different from how I vibe code now. It's the goal is just to start. Speaker 2 Doing it exactly, it's all about just starting it really the outputs at the beginning doesn't matter because the one thing that everybody there's almost like AAI confidence theater that is happening out there because everybody seems to be having workflows and tools and like these systems and you're like, OK, I feel behind because I don't have all of these things. In reality, all of us are still learning. All of us are just starting somewhere. You might be further in one exploration versus the other, but the only thing that you really need to do is just go and learn. What can they do for you? Speaker 1 And how does all of this impact hiring at Lovable, right? So you guys are an AI native company, you're a vibe coding company where you can use your own product. Like how do you find folks that have or that are AI affluent when it's still fairly new in the grand scheme of things? Speaker 2 Yeah. So there are really two types of people. There are truly AI native people out there. Those are usually much younger. They're right out of school. They grew up with learning with AI. And then there are people like me that have been in the industry for over a decade. I'm like learning how to be AI native. We're lovable, really believe combining those two personas. So we push on each other because I can bring more of the patterns and industry expertise to the table, but I'm learning how to be AI native. And then there's truly AI native that people that we're hiring right out of school to really go push the boundaries because they don't have the box of what's possible to them. World is their oyster and off they go creating and doing everything. So we try to combine different expertise and we're really just trying to find people where this job is going to be a global maxima for their career, an opportunity to learn the most, an opportunity to get back to craft. That's why we're completely flat. We don't have titles internally for a reason. Everybody is expected to do some sort of IC work. We don't have just leaders that are just sitting on top navigating things. Everybody's just expected to build. And we're going to push the boundary of what it means to be an AI native organization as we continue scaling because even right now, we shared our figures numbers in February that we've crossed over $400 million in ARR. And we're just shy of 200 people still, so we are operating as a very tiny team for a reason. Speaker 1 And when you think about bringing people into the team are do you guys already know like where you do want to put those dollars and head counts into for folks? Are you like, no, we're just going to kind of stay where we are for a little bit? Speaker 2 Engineering is our biggest priority. This is, I could people say, oh, engineering is dead or design is dead. All of that I think is a lie because we had never had more need for experience, incredible engineers that are going to push the boundary of what's possible to create what software to enable AI for all of you to push the boundary of what's possible at the same time. So engineering has always been our number one priority and we actually call it product engineering because we don't follow the ratio of 1 product manager to seven engineers to designer to marketer. Everybody's doing everything. So autonomy is very important for our team and we love to hire previous ex Co founders or founders because they are incredible at be able to do marketing and engineering and product manager and analytics all at the same time. So those blurred roles and responsibilities are very important for us. And then we do have GTM, but a lot of our go to market is product LED. So just building amazing products that creates stories worth telling of our for our customers, so our customers can go tell that story to their people that they're connected with. That is our growth strategy. But we do have incredible marketing team. We're ramping up our sales team because we see incredible demand from organizations wanting to get into by coding as well. But engineering is still #1 priority because I say playfully that we even approaching half a billion dollars in revenue, we're still in the product market fit treadmill because category is evolving so fast, both from technological perspective, from customer perception that we still need to keep pushing the product at the maximum velocity forward. And it's a living, breathing thing that we need to almost recapture every single month. Lovable's Culture: Shipping Multiple Times a Day with Autonomy Yeah. Speaker 1 I was going to say, can we, can you, are you able to walk folks? What that looks like from your perspective of you guys are shipping features so fast like not every day. I was going to say almost every day, multiple times every day, OK, multiple times a day. And it's it sounds like it's due in part to how you're hiring, how you're structuring the team, keeping it go to market, maybe leaner, leaning more on engineer and more folks that are technical backgrounds, Co founders, folks that maybe their roles blend a little bit, but they can help do a little bit of everything to keep the products and features deploying every day. Yeah. Speaker 2 So we have a very clear goal across company of where we want to end up. We want to be a last piece of software. What that means actually changes even for us as technology continues to evolve and as we understand what AI is going to be capable of in the future. But we keep a really tight three month deliverables for ourselves of the things, the big items that we want to accomplish. And then engineering teams and product teams, they and even me, I ship to production myself to I've never been able to ship to production before. It's such, if you haven't done it, I really hope that you do. It's like the feeling of a superpower that you also unlocked. But everybody ships. So we have a Slack channel that is #shipped. And I love going there at the end of each day and just going through the wall of things that have been released to production. And just like, Oh my gosh, it's a, it's, I've never seen this much velocity in the product. And that's also because we leave a lot of room outside of that road map of people just going and fixing and developing things that they're passionate about. So it's not heavily prescribed top down, it's very much left in flex to what you or idea, what idea you have of what you're capable of doing. Speaker 1 And you guys have a hierarchy in like who should, because if you're you to your point, you're shipping features in the product like that engineering should be featured in the product like is it just if somebody has a good idea in that Slack channel you guys just put into production? Speaker 2 Yeah, we have a channel that's called Hashtag Feedback that everybody's like, hey, I think this needs to be done and everybody's that sounds great, let's go. And 24 hours later it's out in production. So it's like it's very agile. It's like it's very quick on its feet. And we bring customer ideas. We constantly screenshot things that we see on socials that come through our support queue or anybody writing to us. And if we agree. So we have almost the principle, if you can convince one other person that it's a good idea, let's go do it. But that's because everybody holds such a high amount of agency and autonomy that even getting agreement sometimes from another person is not as easy. I have a lot of funny example. I was doing pricing page changes to make our enterprise plan a little bit more transparent of how we show it on the pricing page. And I vibe coded at the full design and I'm like, OK, I created APR, let's ship it. And an engineer who's a 20 year old engineer, I would like for you to get a design sign off before I committed to production. And I'm like, OK, let me go talk to designer. But everybody pushes against everybody. There is no hierarchy. There is no oh, if it comes from above or if it comes from this person, it has to go through everybody challenges each other. And it's a really wonderful atmosphere to be in. I love that type of mentality and it's. Speaker 1 Wild to think about how that probably compares to like how that worked for you at previous companies. Speaker 2 Right. It would take months, and then if I had an idea, I would get very little push back from my idea. Not by design, but just because of both the hierarchies that we create in organizations and the lack of the transparency and information flow for even for anybody at the bottom of the organization to be able to argue with the leader because they're not equipped with as much information. We at Lovable push that information all the way down to everybody so everybody can make the right decision. Yeah. Speaker 1 Because typically for the founders and folks in the room who are in leadership role since the law of our audience, like it's just so crazy to think about how to now as I see I've gotten a lot different in how I, I speak to our vendors, right? I asked for API features now and I'm like, I didn't, I would have never thought about asking for like all these crazy like custom AI features and functionality. And I did it I almost every week leading up to SAS because I was like, Hey, we're using it in our vibe coding. We're using it with our agent and like, we're just hooked up into the API. Like, can you add this to the API? Can you add that to the API? And they're like, what are you talking about? Have you read the documentation? I was like, no, I haven't read the documentation. Maybe my agent did. Why You Need to Build Your Own AI Double with Personal Context Well, we're literally just shipping and deploying, right? It's, it's just a dramatic shift and how a year, maybe even 2, maybe a year ago of going having to go to product and ask for features and having that lag versus now you guys are shipping daily and it's coming from within different people and the organ, the company. Speaker 2 And also the things that you even would, are you shipping so often you'd go and try to do RFP and buying software and I was like, oh, let me just go build it in an hour because let me see how far I can get there. So we're constantly pressure testing our own boundaries of how much of our lovable we can build on lovable ourselves, which gives us a really nice road map horizon of the things that we need to improve as well. Speaker 1 Yeah, What's the it's a little bit on the spot. What's the best thing you could think of that somebody internally has vibed at lovable? Speaker 2 The first one that actually is existed before I even joined is our internal admin tool, which I can log into any given workspace. I can grant credits to people, I can create a coupon codes or discounts and we call it wolf WOOF. But it's built on lovable and it's just like it's mind boggling. So sometimes I'm like, oh, I wish that there was like a bulk export of this and our person from supports. Oh yeah, let me go at it done 5 minutes later and I'm like mind blown. We keep with abilities that you can just add features on the spot that it's just, it's so great. Speaker 1 Yeah, it's crazy that it's, yeah, because you guys are building on your own builder and it's just all in real time, right? You're like, we don't, none of us need to wait on each other. We don't really have to. Somebody just has to plus one and then we're off to the races. Speaker 2 But it's just a different way of operating inside of company. It's it's something that you get used to because I sometimes go back to my old ways and then I'm like, no, no, no, I have to, I have to think about this differently. So it's a definitely, it's a transition even for for me for sure. Speaker 1 Yeah, we've talked about it a lot of sounds sort of like it's, and I know a lot of folks have talked about it this week who have been on the stages of it's a big mind shift change of I think sometimes too when I observe people when they start to vibe code or when they start to work with agents, the way they talk to an agent is different from how I talk to an agent or how you talk to an agent. And I, I always like to treat ours and like how we use our AIVPF marketing or AIVPF customer success is we treated the agent itself truly as its own entity with its own personality. And it does, it's not something that happens overnight, right. Like when we started by putting these, some of these were dashboards and some of these were just to help us get more emails out and make sure we followed up with customers. It started from a place of, OK, we just got to communicate better with the folks that are are in our product market in our fit and our customers and our prospects. But it turned into something much bigger now with spending a lot of time in it though, too, right? It's like some of this does become you get out what you put in, right? It's like, OK, we put a lot of time into some of our apps that we've custom build and asking for custom API calls and working with vendors that have helped us connect to our agents. And it's just a little crazy for folks to think about how much they can achieve though in real time. But some, sometimes it does take a little bit more effort to get it to like where you want it or as more or less thorough and custom. The more time you spend with it, the better the agents and the sites can be. Speaker 2 Yeah, this. Everybody says it, but it's all about context. Agent will just produce an average for you unless you feed it detailed enough context and instructions. So one of the biggest advices that I have for every single one of you is to start building your own context, your ideas, your call recordings, your just brainstorming because all of us will have to build our AI double S at some point just to continue scaling ourselves. But your AI double, if it's just trained on World Wide Web, it's just going to be an average intelligence of everybody. So try to start capturing the context. So when it's time for you to go into more of a gentic version of yourself, even to start performing some work flows and tasks for you, it has your thinking so it can truly replicate some of the work that you're doing as opposed to, again, just doing average that is not going to be exciting or interesting. Speaker 1 Yeah, I think it's something that I've definitely got more comfortable with too. And I'm sure you see it in your customer base of like people start with like fairly either basic problems or like, hey, just fill me that or duplicate this task or hey, take this task over for me that I don't want to do anymore. But then the more you get into vibing and like comfortable with the agent, you'll see that like the way you talk to it, you can just talk to it like it's a soup. Like it's the I talk to it like it's the Internet. I'm like, it's the Internet. Plus any other context you put in there. If you're talking like to like an Iron Man, Jarvis, if you will, like it knows a lot of stuff. The more context you give it and then the more you actually talk to the agent of like, hey, if these are your your top four ideas for my marketing campaigns for the day. And you actually tell it and train it like you would a human being and say, OK, maybe I really like #1 or #2 or maybe I'm not ready to spend so much on LinkedIn ads. Can you give me two more ideas like this is what I think we should do. What do you think we should do? And literally treat it like a copilot or a person or in a brain. It starts to get better because then it starts to get to know you. And then the magic of the agents like this and like in Lovable is it won't forget that context. Speaker 2 Yeah, I my favorite prompt and lovable is. This is my idea, This is the problem, this is the solution. Now build what I say and then build two other options that are better than mine. And just then I can see like what it pulled out and then I can merge it into what I actually think is a great solution. But I often like, Oh, my idea was horrible. Yours is so much better. But again, just it's a thinking partner at this point. It's not something that IA 100% trust because there still needs to be what is your contribution to it? What is your context to it? But it's so great at pushing you forward and being like the biggest amplifier of what you're capable of doing. Elena Verna Answers Audience Questions on Growth, Build vs. Buy, and AI Marketing I want to make sure we can try and hit maybe one or two audience questions before we wrap. So if you guys have a question for Elena, there are two microphones out here in the audience. We can probably take one or two questions before we roll right into the next session. But if you guys have a question you want to come up and ask, please do. Speaker 2 Hey Elena, I just have a question because you've obviously done growth for a lot of big size companies. And when you move to Lovable, what was the biggest growth all your learnings shift that you had to do because it's a very different sort of company, a very different Ave. right after changing that mindset, what has been maybe one most successful growth story that you've has a growth feature that you've shipped at Lovable which has worked really well for you? Yeah, great question. So the question was, is what has really changed when it comes to growth at Lovable versus other companies that I've been at, let's say Dropbox, Miro, SurveyMonkey, I've advised 50 plus startups as well on their growth efforts. I would say that's twofold. Some of the things that used to be the reasons that company one are now just table stakes for existence. So for example, SEO used to be why you could win the market. SCO right now is just something everybody has to do. It is not going to be the reason that you win. Same with SCM. So with paid marketing, it is something that you're probably going to have to do, but it's not going to be the reason of why you're going to be successful out there unless you have those moats that we've talked about, which is a more sustainable, predictable growth that you're going to win. So to me, I actually joined Lovable to help codify a lot of those growth one-on-one things that everybody should be doing at this point, because these things don't need to be reinvented. And I want every Lovable app to be equipped with those things. And then #2 I think how important it is it to be on social. I know that we've talked about it and like it's been around, but having that building in social mentality and really leveraging your employees as marketing almost powerhouse behind your brand and uniting customers behind it has been very important. And then just one other tactic that I will say freemium has never been as important as it is right now in age of AI. And I know it costs a lot of money and I know it's really scary to see that bill, especially of the things that you gave away for free. However, it is the only way to get into customers hands and to change their habits in order to do it. So we actually treat our freemium cost as marketing budget and we constantly looking for more ways to give away our product. We just announced our partnership with LinkedIn a couple of days ago where every LinkedIn Premium member now has free access to lovable and those conversion rates to paid are double digits. I really get out of that mentality of I have to gate my high cost features. You have to really undate it in order to win in this market. Speaker 1 Hi there. Absolutely love this. I think a lot of businesses right now are going through a dilemma of buy versus build and clearly are for the building of it, but internally at Lovable. Speaker 2 Do you guys go through this dilemma yourself? Are you all 100% build? We definitely go through very hard evaluation of anything that we're gonna buy, but we're not fully built on lovable internally too. So we love linear. We use linear for project management. It's just it's so deepened features that we need to organize, especially across all of the individuals that are running so quickly. We love Slack. We use Slack, we love granola for meeting recording. So we definitely pick and choose solutions too. But we've built so many of our own. So for example, we've built our own CRM internally for sales team to use and our sales team love it. So we're constantly pushing the boundary of it internally, but it's not a zero or one. The answer is somewhere always in the middle of the complexity of maintenance and the future richness that needs to even function in that tool. But we try constantly to do it all ourselves. Hi Elena, love your session. You talked about marketing structures and marketing teams in the AI era. I need marketing for compliance automation tool. We've been around for a long time. So we are like we embedded in a very typical traditional marketing structure. Your demands in bonding PMM, it's slightly harder like when you're not born in the AI era and you have that legacy. It's a lot of baggage because we've been around for a long time. So how are you think about that? So I would think about it in two sides. On one side, you as a marketer are capable of doing so much more on by yourself compared to before. And you should really take advantage of that, whether it's improving your work flows and how the systems are connected, so you're not working in Excel sheets and wasting your time there so you can actually do creative things. Or whether it's creating launch assets yourself or apps on your own to really, you can remember lead magnets or like all of these little tools that companies created. Hotspot has been amazing at that strategy. Now you can do it yourself. You don't need engineering talent to do it. And you should really lean into it because your marketing efforts can be 100X more important. However, marketing structures, the way that they're structured right now, are not created for the type of velocity that is introduced with the AI native development. So once your development team starts to go into AI native, then you really need to think about adjusting your marketing structure and organization because you're never going to be able to keep up with the velocity that is going to get introduced into the system. And then marketing goes into more of an enablement mode. How can I make every engineer into a marketer? And how do I create systems for everybody to say at least somewhat the right things while maintaining their voice, have the tools at their disposal. And then I just pick and choose the things that I want to control and launch. And then the rest of it goes as the ongoing noise in the system that is also its own marketing strategy on itself. But development team really needs to lead the change in the actual marketing organization because otherwise you'll be the biggest blocker to velocity that they are capable of maintaining all of a sudden. Speaker 1 Thanks for being here, Elena. Everyone give a round of applause. Speaker 2 And I'll just be outside there if you have additional questions. Thank you everybody. Speaker 1 Why knows you don't start a company to burn cycles on regulatory hoops or discounted cash flows, but you can't ignore it. Episode Break That's how risk compounds. What you can do is work with EY. They'll help you get it right early so you can stay in builder mode. Go to ey.com/tech Startups to learn more. Costs can add up quickly when you start a business, so stop paying for five different services. Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete business identity in one place with free tools and resources to actually launch your business for real. [email protected]/faster. Freethatsnorthwestregisteredagent.com/S AASTRFREE.