20Growth: Inside Lovable's $400M ARR Growth Machine | How Lovable Does Product Launches | How Lovable Hacks Social To Make Posts Go Viral | How Lovable Makes Every Employee a Brand with Elena Verna

Growth is a trust problem now. Every single employee at Lovable expected to ship code to production. For any founder in the first year, investing in paid as the means of growth is a death trap. Unless you've been in the business for five years plus, you do not know your LTV. Do not lock people in subscription as the only way to monetize you. This is 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings. And today we have one of the best heads of growth in the world joining us in the hot seat. We have Elena Werner, head of growth at Lovable. Lovable is the category leader. They are now at over 350 million in ARR. Their latest round put them at over $6.6 billion. They are one of the fastest growing companies in the world. This is an incredible breakdown inside their growth machine. But before we dive into the show today, if you're looking for a way to transform your customer service, let me introduce you to Finn, baby. Finn is the number one AI agent for customer service, resolving up to 93% of customer queries automatically. There is no other agent that can do that. Not 93% of customer queries, okay? So why choose FIN? FIN is the best performing AI agent for CS. FIN doesn't just answer questions. It takes actions. It automates the most complex customer queries like refunds, transaction disputes, technical troubleshooting with speed and reliability. Beats every competitor in every head-to-head bake-off. Completely configurable and code optional setup. My word. I mean, the benefits just go on and on. It's easy and efficient implementation. It works on any help desk with no tedious migration needs. It's trusted by over 6,000 customer service leaders, including top AI companies like Anthropic, Lovable, Synthesia, Clay. So if you're ready to transform your customer service team, learn more about Finn at finn.ai forward slash 20VC. While Finn scales your support without losing speed, ReFord shows you how to translate that scale into durable product-led growth. Everyone's shipping faster than ever.

Cursor, claw code, codex, AI is making code and writing code faster than ever. But here's the problem. Speed means nothing if nobody uses what you ship. That's where Reforge comes in. Reforge is building the product discovery engine that sits upstream of your coding agents. Not another prototyping tool, research repo, or AI interviewer, but a product that will ingest your customer data, generate variations of product solutions, validate the solutions before code is written, and hand off winning directions to your team. Reforge kills product debt before it starts, because every unused feature you ship isn't just wasted engineering time, it's a maintenance burden, complexity tax, and surface area that you cannot shrink. Used by product teams at companies like Toast, Vimeo, Klaviyo, and many more. Reforge helps teams ship more features than actually get used. Try Reforge at reforge.com forward slash build and use the code 20VC, that's 20VC for one month free of pro. You have now arrived at your destination. Elena, it is so great to have you back on the show. It's been a while since we did this. So thank you so much for joining me again. Yes, thank you for having me again. What has been a couple of years at this point? Yeah, it's been a couple of years. I've actually aged about 15, but it's only been technically two and a half. So you look younger and I look 15 years older. I'd want to just start with a really hard and unfair question, which is we as investors feel it, the sands and the technological winds are moving faster than ever. What are the single biggest ways that growth is changing in a world of AI? I have a couple of ways that I think it's changing. Thing number one is that as software creation is becoming democratized and functionality is becoming available to anyone to build, whether you buy it from somebody, whether you build it yourself, and honestly, it doesn't matter anymore. If you want to actually sell software and grow your business, growth is a trust problem now. Who do I trust to actually purchase it from? Who do I trust to use it from? Do I believe in the team that is building behind it? Because otherwise, I'm just going to go create my own if I don't believe that they're going to continue worrying about my needs and they're going to continue evolving it.

So to me, there's just so much behind not just tactics, growth tactics, growth hacking, channel optimizations. It's literally winning trust of your consumer to have them vouch for you, to have them believe in you, to stand behind you as you're building your business. And then the second thing, which kind of goes along with the trust thing, is that it's no longer about the software functionality that you're trying to grow. you're really trying to create what I call minimum lovable product out of every single little thing that you touch because software is now almost being judged by the emotion that it can invoke as opposed to just core basic functionality that it can do I actually almost compare it to Maslow pyramids of needs like the bottom of the layer of just like, okay, it works. Okay, I can believe that it'll do security and all of the other pieces. Now I need to be able to connect to it. And we as humans always want to connect with something. We don't like utilities. We don't like tools. And the more software starts to have actually some sort of personality that helps us trust to is almost becoming like a minimum bar in order to even kickstart the growth. And then the last thing I would say, in terms of growth tactics themselves, all of the performance marketing or like the optimizations are just becoming something that's getting automated pretty quickly. It's actually fascinating to watch. So to me, a growth work now is trying something new, trying to be innovative, creating these really once in a lifetime campaigns, so to speak, to try to win the eyeballs and trust of your customers. That's all I'm doing. I'm vibe coding all day long and trying to find the ways to really capture the hearts and minds of our customers, not just

optimizing pricing page into oblivion. I want to just go through a couple of elements there. You mentioned trust being so optimal. In a world where trust is primary, what becomes more important as a channel and what becomes less important? What becomes more important is your product as a channel where you actually earn that trust that drives that word of mouth that drives that likability and what becomes less important is something across marketing sales like more old traditional techniques that we would use to try to drive growth is seo is a channel dying we had aaron from monday on the show and he said that there was like 10 decline in that conversion on SEO since they did Google AI? Yeah, there is decline, but you have to understand like it's so enormous. Even if it's dying, you will take years for it to die. But is SEO still fruitful? Abso-fucking-lutely. Like you still have to invest in SEO if you want to have the baseline of growth. But is SEO going to be the reason that you're going to win in your business? I don't think so. It's just something that you have to do. This is not going to be the reason why you're going to stand out and win. How important is Anton's brand to Lovable's user acquisition? I think Anton's amazing. Every new hire, he does the picture with them, or maybe senior hire, but he does the picture with them. I think it's brilliant. And he's so mastered the founder brand. How important is his founder brand to net new user acquisition? I think that Lovable is where it is right now because of the founder-led socials that Anton has really leaned into and has done at the beginning. How important is his brand right now to existing success? Less important because we've diversified away from it. And we have other channels in which we're growing. Our users are very active. Our community is very strong. We have a lot of user-generated content. We have other people on the team, including me, that are pushing our brand along as well.