The new AI growth playbook for 2026 | How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year

I actually often call AI as average intelligence that helps me get the platform up. And then I add my human thinking and my human creativity on top of it to get it to the next level. But at least I can get this base level done with AI really freaking quickly.

We do a lot of trials for people. So trial work to see them in action for a couple of days. We pay them as part of the work trial. We have some probation periods that we start people on, because this company is not for everybody.

You cannot just have ChatGPT write your copy and post it, you need to show personality. There needs to be humanity that it goes through it. And it's not natural for everybody, and it feels very awkward sometimes to start. But it's important to people to see who is building the company, because there's so much competition now on functionality, so they can rally behind a team.

We work really hard on just addressing what's the success here looks like? What is it that we're building? What use cases are we building for? And then because we hire these people that are so passionate about it, the other two skills, by the way, that are super important is high agency and high autonomy. I can figure out things that are tangential to me that I don't need other specialties, so to speak.

We at Lovable try to hire the absolute best talent available out there that we can bring in, and that we can source and that we can attract to grow with. And what do I mean by that best talent? It's not that somebody who has been at really large companies, or somebody that has really done a lot of logos or has big success stories behind them. It's somebody who is extremely passionate about their job.

One of our biggest strategy is building in public, and it's coupled with employee socials, founder-led socials. And another one is giving your product away a lot, this is part of our growth secret sauce.

If somebody, one of our users stands up and say, hey, I'm going to have a hackathon at my work on Lovable, can you give us some free credits to play with? Why would we prevent a person who wants to do all of the marketing and activating for us from using us? We're like, take it, how much do you need?

If you asked me that five years ago, I would've said that's SEO. It's search engine optimization. Go on Google, that's your organic marketing strategy. If you ask me what's your organic marketing strategy right now, to me it's all about social.

You cannot just have ChatGPT write your copy and post it, you need to show personality. There needs to be humanity that it goes through it. And it's not natural for everybody, and it feels very awkward sometimes to start. But it's important to people to see who is building the company, because there's so much competition now on functionality, so they can rally behind a team.

The demand that is coming to us, we need to capture it mostly, we don't need to generate a lot of it yet. But at the same time, it comes with the really big downfalls of we're not in control of a lot of our growth.

Influencer marketing is 10 times bigger for us than paid social. So yeah, we do some paid social as well, and it's working decently. It's quite expensive from payback period, we're still optimizing it. As I said, we're pretty early on in all of these channels. But influencer marketing is something that has worked from the beginning at Lovable.

Lovable is an AI-powered software development platform that lets users build applications through natural language prompts.

A reason behind it is that influencer marketing, especially on the socials, it gives you an opportunity to have a little video and interaction. And Lovable is all about seeing like, 'Oh my gosh, this is what I can do, and this is possible.' So that drives people to go and try it themselves.

The only way to create a word of mouth loop is just to blow their socks off.

If you are very comfortable in being in that messy middle and really comfortable of converting chaos into clarity for you and those around you, then yeah, AI company is a wonderful place for you to really absorb new skill sets right now.

I actually see it as part of growth strategy to make sure that that brand shines through every single interaction. And I always talk to my team about it, because that is one big lever in our growth story.

"Here" refers to AI agent products, contrasted with traditional software products that require complex activation flows.

One area that we've spent very little time in is activation, because usually I spend majority of my time in activation because there's so many awareness things that need to happen, and so many things that we need to smooth out experience for the users in order for them to get through that setup moment, to aha moment, to the habit loop, and here you're just interacting with agent.

"Vibe coding" appears to be Elena's informal term for trendy AI coding tools or platforms, based on the context of needing to stay competitive.

I feel like only 30 to 40% of what I've learned in the last 15 to 20 years of being in growth transfers here because we just need to invest in such bigger bets, and innovate, and create new growth loops here, everybody and their mother is starting a vibe coding business nowadays, and we need to figure out how to be ahead of them.

Elena is discussing how AI companies are struggling with rapidly changing business models and market strategies while trying to find stable product-market fit.

AI companies are very hectic at the moment. They're very unstable by definition of that product-market fit treadmill, about that distribution of how they're actually distribute to the market, really changing about how product is even being developed in the first place.

The pace here is insane. I went on vacation for the first time. So I've been here for six months. I went on vacation for 10 days. I came back, I felt like I needed to onboard from the beginning. Everything changed.

"Them" refers to competitors in the growth field who focus on optimization rather than innovation.

To be ahead of them is not optimization of the problem, it's reinvention of the solution. I just feel like I usually spend maybe 5% innovating on growth in my previous roles, right now, I'm spending 95% innovating on growth, and only 5% on optimization.

Elena Verna is discussing how her company categorizes LLM (Large Language Model) AI costs for their freemium product as marketing investment rather than operational expense.

We track them over our LLM costs on freemium and giveaways as our marketing costs, and it doesn't go into our something we need to reduce to make our margins better. It goes into, this is something that we need to spend more in because this is part of our growth secret sauce.

It shouldn't be minimal viable product anymore. Viability is left back in 2010s. Now it's minimal lovable product. That's the only thing that matters.