Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people | Anton Osika (CEO and co-founder)

Description

Anton Osika is the co-founder and CEO of Lovable, which is building what they call “the last piece of software”—an AI-powered tool that turns descriptions into working products without requiring any coding knowledge. Since launching three months ago, Lovable hit $4 million ARR in the first four weeks and $10 million ARR in two months with a team of just 15 people, making it Europe’s fastest-growing startup ever.

What you’ll learn:
1. Why you need to be in the top 1% of AI tool users
2. Watch Lovable build a functional Airbnb clone in 30 seconds—complete with working features and modern design
3. The unconventional hiring approach that helped build a 15-person team capable of extraordinary execution
4. How traditional product development will look with AI
5. What skills will matter most to product teams going forward
6. How Anton’s team discovered a breakthrough in AI “unsticking itself”



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Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-lovable-anton-osika

Where to find Anton Osika:
• X: https://x.com/antonosika
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/antonosika/

Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Introduction to Anton and Lovable
(05:12) Lovable’s rapid growth
(09:39) Live demo: Building an Airbnb clone
(18:34) Tips for mastering Lovable
(21:42) The origin story
(26:50) Scaling laws and getting AI unstuck
(33:20) Reliability and unique features
(36:25) The vision and future of Lovable
(38:14) Skills and job market evolution in the age of AI
(40:30) Hiring philosophy and team dynamics
(46:21) Building in Europe
(48:02) Prioritization and product roadmap
(51:38) Tools and work environment
(53:17) Tactics for moving fast
(54:37) Advice for building product teams
(57:11) Empowering non-technical founders
(58:31) Future developments and user support
(01:01:23) Failure corner
(01:05:20) Final thoughts and advice

Referenced:
• Lovable: https://lovable.dev/
• Lovable Launched: https://launched.lovable.app/
• Cloudflare: https://www.cloudflare.com/
• Supabase: https://supabase.com/
• GPT engineer: https://github.com/gpt-engineer-org/gptengineer.app
• Microsoft Copilot: https://copilot.microsoft.com/chats/cmFw8dTsGU8D6b9siqQ6U
• Fabian Hedin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fabian-hedin-2377b0144/
• Behind the product: Replit | Amjad Masad (co-founder and CEO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/behind-the-product-replit-amjad-masad
• Replit: https://replit.com/
• Cursor: https://www.cursor.com
• Bolt: https://bolt.new/
• GitHub: https://github.com/
• Lane Shackleton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laneshackleton/
• FigJam: https://www.figma.com/figjam/
• Linear: https://linear.app/
• Sana Labs: https://sanalabs.com/
• Duolingo: https://www.duolingo.com/
• Claude: https://claude.ai/
• ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/
• Lovable on X: https://x.com/Lovable_dev

Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.

Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

Summary

Building Lovable: How AI is Revolutionizing Software Development

In this insightful interview, Anton Osika, CEO and co-founder of Lovable, shares the remarkable story of how his company is transforming software development through AI. Lovable is an AI-powered tool that turns English descriptions into fully functional products without requiring coding knowledge, positioning itself as "the last piece of software" anyone will need to write.

The episode showcases Lovable's extraordinary growth trajectory - reaching $4 million ARR in just four weeks and $10 million ARR in two months with only 15 people, making it Europe's fastest-growing startup ever. During a live demo, Anton demonstrates how Lovable can build a functional Airbnb clone in just 30 seconds, complete with working features and modern design that users can immediately interact with and modify.

Anton explains how Lovable works by connecting to backend services like Supabase and deploying to Cloudflare, allowing non-technical users to create complete applications through simple text prompts. What sets Lovable apart from competitors is its unique ability to visually edit elements directly in the generated application and its focus on packaging the technology specifically for non-technical people.

The conversation explores the future of product development, with Anton suggesting that being a generalist will become increasingly valuable. He recommends that product teams should prioritize hiring people with diverse skill sets who understand architecture, design, user research, and product development. When hiring, Anton looks for people who deeply care about the product and users, possess obsessive attention to detail, and have demonstrated excellence in at least one dimension.

Anton shares valuable advice for mastering AI tools like Lovable, suggesting that users should be patient, curious, and extremely clear in their communication with the AI. He believes that spending a focused week using AI tools to solve a real problem can put someone in the top 1% of AI tool users globally.

The interview concludes with Anton's vision for the future of Lovable, including plans to make the system more "agentic" (capable of making decisions independently), improving collaboration features, and helping founders succeed after building their initial products by providing guidance on user acquisition and growth strategies.

Transcript

0:00 lovable is your personal AI software 0:02 engineer you describe an idea and then 0:04 you get a fully working product the 0:06 reason is to enable those who have had 0:10 like such a hard time finding people who 0:12 are good at grading software that's been 0:14 their absolute bottleneck and let them 0:16 take their ideas and their dreams into 0:18 reality you guys hit 4 million AR in the 0:21 first 4 weeks you hit 10 million AR in 0:24 the first 2 months with just 15 people 0:26 you're the fastest growing startup in 0:28 all of Europe how did you decide on 0:29 lovable as the name it's so sweet the 0:32 best word for a great product is that 0:33 it's lovable a lot of jargon that I like 0:35 to use to like emphasize what we should 0:38 be striving for is building a minimum 0:39 lovable product and then building a 0:41 lovable product and then building an 0:43 absolutely lovable product so I I took 0:45 that jargon with me in the company name 0:47 people wonder just what jobs will be 0:49 more important what skills will be less 0:50 important doing a bit of everything 0:52 being in generalist is I think much more 0:54 important than it used to be if I'm 0:56 putting together a product team today I 0:58 I would really obsess about getting as 1:00 many skill sets as possible for each 1:02 person I hire what have you done that 1:04 has allowed you to grow this fast with 1:06 so few people people love the product 1:09 that's the driver of the 1:14 growth today my guest is Anton OC Anton 1:18 is co-founder and CEO of lavable which 1:21 is essentially an AI engineer that takes 1:23 an English prompt and codes a product 1:25 for you in minutes you can then talk to 1:27 it iterate on the product and then 1:28 launch it to the world it's one of the 1:31 fastest growing products in history the 1:34 fastest growing startup in Europe ever 1:37 and as Anton describes their goal for 1:39 lovable is for it to be the last piece 1:40 of software that anybody has to write 1:43 because it'll be able to create all 1:45 future products for us they launched 1:47 just a few months ago in the first 4 1:49 weeks hit 4 million ARR in the first 2 1:52 months crossed 10 million ARR all with 1:55 just 15 people absurd in our 1:58 conversation we covered a lot of 2:00 including a live demo of lovable how 2:02 their team operates how they hire what 2:04 do most enable their team to scale this 2:06 quickly with so few people Pro tips for 2:08 using lovable how it all started how he 2:10 recommends you build product TPS going 2:12 forward with tools like this existing 2:14 what skills will matter more and less 2:16 going forward plus how to think about 2:18 lovable versus competitors and so much 2:21 more if you're trying to wrap your head 2:22 around how product building will change 2:24 with the rise of AI tools this episode 2:26 is a mustat if you enjoy this podcast 2:29 don't forget to subscribe and followed 2:30 in your favorite podcasting app or 2:32 YouTube also if you become a yearly 2:34 subscriber of my newsletter you now get 2:37 a yearfree of perplexity and notion and 2:40 superhuman and linear and granola check 2:43 it out at Lenny 2:44 newsletter. with that I bring you Anton 2:48 OC this episode is brought to you by 2:51 cinch the customer Communications Cloud 2:54 here's the thing about Digital customer 2:56 Communications whether you're sending 2:57 marketing campaigns verification codes 3:00 or account alerts you need them to reach 3:02 users reliably that's where cinch comes 3:04 in over 3:06 150,000 businesses including eight of 3:08 the top 10 largest tech companies 3:10 globally use ca's API to build messaging 3:13 email and calling into their products 3:15 and there's something big happening in 3:17 messaging that product teams need to 3:18 know about rich communication services 3:21 or RCS think of RCs as SMS 2.0 instead 3:25 of getting text from a random number 3:27 your users will see your verified 3:29 company name name and logo without 3:30 needing to download anything new it's a 3:33 more secure and branded experience plus 3:35 you get features like interactive 3:37 carousels and suggested replies and 3:39 here's why this matters US carriers are 3:41 starting to adopt RCS cinch is already 3:44 helping Major Brands send RCS messages 3:47 around the world and they're helping 3:48 Lenny's podcast listeners get registered 3:50 first before the Rush hits the US market 3:53 learn more a get started at cinch.com 3:56 Lenny that's s i nch.com 3:59 / 4:01 Lenny this episode is brought to you by 4:04 Persona the adaptable identity platform 4:06 that helps businesses fight fraud meet 4:08 compliance requirements and build trust 4:11 while you're listening to this right now 4:13 how do you know that you're really 4:14 listening to me Lenny these days it's 4:17 easier than ever for frauders to steal 4:19 pii faces and identities that's where 4:23 Persona comes in Persona helps leading 4:25 companies like LinkedIn Etsy and twilio 4:28 securely verify individual and 4:30 businesses across the world what sets 4:32 Persona part is its configurability 4:34 every company has different needs 4:36 depending on its industry use cases risk 4:39 tolerance and user demographics that's 4:42 why Persona offers flexible building 4:43 blocks that allow you to build tailored 4:45 collection and verification flows that 4:48 maximize conversion while minimizing 4:50 risk plus persona's orchestration tools 4:52 automate your identity process so that 4:54 you can fight rapidly shifting fraud and 4:56 meet new waves of Regulation whether 4:59 you're star up or an Enterprise business 5:01 Persona has a plan for you learn more at 5:04 withp persona.com Lenny again that's 5:07 with P RS o n 5:10 a.com 5:14 Lenny Anton thank you so much for being 5:17 here welcome to the podcast it it's a 5:20 pleasure to talk to you Lenny great to 5:22 be here I don't know how you have time 5:23 to do this podcast your life must be 5:25 insane these days with the uh the pace 5:28 at which you guys are scaling just how 5:30 much is changing in AI every day uh so I 5:32 just extra appreciate you making time 5:34 for this I think you said it's 10:30 5:37 your time is when we're doing this I'm a 5:39 bit tired yes mostly from the the crazy 5:43 pace of everything but yes we're gonna 5:45 this is gonna be a invigorating 5:46 conversation you're not gonna be able to 5:48 sleep I'm sure I'm sure okay so for 5:52 folks that are maybe a little bit 5:53 familiar with lovable or not at all 5:55 familiar what's just what is lovable 5:57 what's the simplest way to understand it 6:00 I'd say lovable is your personal AI 6:02 software engineer you describe an idea 6:05 and then you get a fully working product 6:08 that from the and what this means is 6:11 that entrepreneurs actually today they 6:14 turn their ideas into real businesses 6:17 and we have a lot of designers and 6:19 product managers that uh create the 6:21 first version of of their product ideas 6:23 to show to their teams and and some of 6:26 them become Founders because of like 6:28 their the empowerment from 6:30 um but also developers themselves they 6:33 actually writing code or creating 6:35 products much faster and um I mean the 6:39 the reason it's pretty obvious for me so 6:42 I'll spell it but I'll spell it out the 6:44 reason why we're doing lovable is that I 6:48 don't know about your mom but like my 6:50 mom doesn't write code and my 6:54 friends almost all my friends from 6:56 throughout my life reached out for help 6:58 like Anon I want I do I need to build 7:00 something how do I find a great software 7:02 engineer and we're building for this 99% 7:06 of the population who don't write write 7:08 code um currently if you're technically 7:11 inclined you get much further but over 7:14 time 7:15 naturally the way to build software is 7:18 by just talking to an AI That's How is 7:20 it I love the way you guys describe it 7:22 and uh you didn't mention but I think 7:24 it's like building the last piece of 7:25 software ever how do how do you how do 7:27 you phrase that yeah we say we say we're 7:29 building the last piece of software the 7:31 last piece of software okay we're going 7:33 to do a live demo but first of all can 7:35 you just share some stats on the scale 7:38 of this business at this point because 7:40 it's quite 7:41 absurd yeah so we launched lavable less 7:45 than three months ago and now we have 7:48 300,000 monthly active users and 30 of 7:51 those 30,000 of those are actually uh 7:54 paying uh and the it is growing on this 7:56 at the same rates like you you just 7:59 almost only through organic word of mou 8:03 okay and uh I'll share a couple stats in 8:05 terms of Revenue just so folks know this 8:07 and we'll have this an intro too I think 8:08 you guys hit four million AR in the 8:11 first four weeks you hit 10 million AR 8:13 in the first two months with just 15 8:16 people you're the fastest growing 8:18 startup in all of Europe and you guys 8:21 had to rewrite your entire code base 8:23 recently and you couldn't ship any new 8:24 features for a while is there right 8:26 that's that's right yeah people were 8:27 saying like oh you're shipping so fast 8:29 and we were all quite frustrated because 8:32 we wrote our service in this you know 8:35 kind of scripting language and then as 8:38 we started scaling we we were just now 8:39 we have to throw everything away and 8:41 rewrite it in a more performant way okay 8:44 uh before we get to demo last question 8:46 you shared there's some companies that 8:47 have started based on lovable I didn't 8:49 even know that so what are some examples 8:51 of companies businesses that have 8:53 launched off of lovable and now are 8:55 actually companies I I mentioned the 8:57 signers using lovable and and one of our 8:59 early users Harry he he started 9:03 shipping real web apps to his clients 9:05 instead of just shipping the signs and 9:08 then he went on to say okay wait I'm 9:09 going to start an AI startup and and his 9:12 he his company he like launched on 9:14 product hunt and everything and making 9:16 uh money is just like lets anyone upload 9:19 their photo libraries and then it's C 9:22 like Ai pares and C categorizes it and 9:25 if you go to launched. lovable. apppp 9:28 like this is an app build Bel lovable 9:30 which is again a product product hunt 9:32 version where you can see a lot of 9:34 businesses or small s featured there 9:38 okay cool so we're g to come back to 9:39 some of the stuff but let's get into a 9:41 let's get into demo I I rarely do demos 9:44 on this podcast but I'm finding that uh 9:46 I think it's really important for people 9:48 to see these products in action because 9:51 in the large part this is the future of 9:53 product building and a lot of people 9:55 hear about oh yeah AI is coming and I 9:57 don't think a lot of people actually see 9:58 what the latest tool are capable of and 10:01 so uh I love showing these sorts of 10:03 things on this podcast H so Lenny I was 10:06 thinking um did you ever consider making 10:08 a copy and build your own adbn this I I 10:15 haven't but go on how about you do that 10:18 let's do it let's do it okay so we're 10:19 gonna make our own Airbnb okay so I I 10:22 just put in the first prompt for an rbnb 10:26 clone okay let's look and what what the 10:29 prompt just to for folks that aren't 10:30 watching two words rbnb clone that's the 10:33 pr I like she start INF and then what 10:36 you get is that the AI says okay I'm 10:40 going to go through what does a 10:42 beautiful rbnb clone look like and it 10:45 goes a bit of like decision design 10:47 decisions and then I'll zoom out to see 10:49 more of it h we we have this just UI 10:54 that is I mean it has all the the nice 10:56 things you would expect from araban 10:58 mclone where 11:00 um you see different categories and you 11:02 can see two listings fromb with login 11:06 buttons and everything so far it doesn't 11:09 have the functionality of rbnb it just 11:11 has the UI I would now ask for an 11:14 improvement on some of the functionality 11:17 like if I'm switching category I want to 11:19 see different listings let's say but if 11:22 you if you have any thoughts on what we 11:23 should build next let me know okay and 11:26 so you have this pre-loaded so you don't 11:27 see how long it would take but how long 11:28 would this normal take for it to just 11:30 write all this code and have it for you 11:31 the the first prom takes 30 seconds 30 11:34 seconds okay and it's like a very good 11:37 copy of Airbnb yeah I love that you 11:39 didn't have to show it to design you 11:41 just tell it Airbnb and it knows okay so 11:44 your question is what what I want to add 11:46 to my own version of Airbnb what I've 11:48 always wanted to explore buying the 11:51 place that I look at just like is this 11:53 for sale so what if we see what that 11:55 would feel like if you're just like a 11:57 way to buy buy a listing okay so let's 12:01 let's how about we add I mean prompting 12:04 is important here so let's be specific 12:06 but we would ask um creating a add a 12:10 button on the listing which say purchase 12:13 this this Airbnb home is that it perfect 12:17 so add I've 12:20 got and I'll be even more specific it 12:25 will pop up a model um to purchase the 12:31 listing perfect and I love so I think 12:34 some things as you're typing I'm just 12:35 going to share thoughts as you're doing 12:36 this so the site that you ask this AI 12:40 engineer to build like it's actually a 12:42 functioning website you can browse 12:44 around it's not just a design the say 12:47 obviously there's no like actual 12:48 listings here like there's no actual 12:50 houses here say you were trying to like 12:52 actually build Airbnb and you wanted to 12:55 start adding like actual homes that plug 12:57 into this how does that sort of Step 13:01 work so as you said this is just kind of 13:05 the mockup UI but it's Al also 13:08 interactive if I want to add login and 13:12 add listing 13:14 management 13:16 then we would connect something called 13:19 The backend so where data is stored 13:20 where users Lo information is stored and 13:23 I can show you how how to do that um 13:26 first let's just try out where we got 13:28 with this short prompt of adding the 13:31 adding the purchase uh listing and it it 13:34 didn't do exactly what I wanted I said 13:37 uh add um a button or I didn't say what 13:40 a button should say but it says book now 13:42 and if I click book now I get uh the a 13:47 booking confirmation so the the AI was 13:50 like okay it didn't really it was 13:52 probably surprised by you wanting to buy 13:55 the listing since it's rbnb right so it 13:57 still says book the listing but it's 13:59 shows a a pretty model where I can click 14:02 confirm and pay and then it says yeah 14:04 booking confirmed I'll just say real 14:06 quick I love that this is actually a 14:07 really good example of why being a good 14:10 product manager is important uh a lot of 14:13 wasted time happens when you're not 14:15 clear about the problem you're trying to 14:16 solve and why you're trying to solve it 14:18 and all that kind of stuff so it's 14:20 really cool that this is a use case 14:21 where you have to be really good at 14:23 explaining what it is you want and it's 14:25 interesting you don't have to tell this 14:27 a this aiy you know humans want to 14:29 understand why is this important uh 14:31 mostly you need to be very clear about 14:33 what it is you're doing uh and I love 14:34 that's a really strong PM skill you know 14:36 PM's really good at that so we have that 14:39 explaining exactly what you expect and 14:42 what you're not getting is even more 14:44 important with AI than with the humans 14:47 but um so so I go into hooking up more 14:51 of the actual functionality but first 14:54 I'll actually show you something um that 14:56 like how what's the fastest way to 14:58 change what went wrong it's it it 15:01 created uh buttons that say book now and 15:03 I want them to say um buy now and uh 15:08 what I could do is Select this item and 15:10 say change it to buy now but what we 15:14 just released is that you can actually 15:16 edit this like this is a fully 15:18 functioning product but you can edit it 15:21 visually like you can like you do in 15:23 square space and Wicks and so on so I'll 15:25 just change the text to BU now and then 15:28 it instantly it change just uh it 15:30 actually changes like deep down in the 15:32 code base but it's very fast to to do 15:35 that so I think people listening to this 15:37 and seeing this if you're not aware like 15:40 this is The Cutting Edge of tools like 15:42 this no other tool out there lets you 15:45 generate code from an AI engineer and 15:48 then actually just like change a small 15:50 element of it of every other tool that 15:52 I'm aware you have to like ask the agent 15:55 do this for me and then you hope that it 15:56 does the right thing so this is a huge 15:57 deal which you just showed 15:59 right yeah now it says by 16:01 now that's and that's something that you 16:03 just launched correct we just launched 16:06 it a few days ago but uh I want to go 16:08 into for building the full functionality 16:10 but what it looks like is that you 16:12 connect um an open source backend as a 16:16 service and that's called super base uh 16:19 and I have this instance to connect to 16:22 that's completely empty just like one 16:24 click to set that up and now it's 16:26 connected to uh the back end it's just 16:29 like automatically generating and 16:31 explaining um generating sound code and 16:33 explaining what I can do next and what I 16:36 would do now is say let's let's add 16:38 login let's say let's add login and 16:41 where is it actually hosted on the back 16:43 end and everything in general yeah 16:46 so everything can be one clicked 16:49 deployed and then it's running it's 16:51 hosted by like a cloud vendor which is 16:54 hosting I think a huge chunk of the 16:56 Internet it's called Cloud flare um and 16:59 the back end is hosted by the also good 17:03 cloud provider which is called super 17:06 based amazing okay uh let's wrap up the 17:10 demo that was unless there's anything 17:11 else was there anything else really 17:12 important you wanted to show no I mean 17:15 I'll just explain what you what I would 17:16 do next I would say okay let's add login 17:19 um let's make the listings editable by 17:22 the users so users can upload listings 17:24 and um then this is going to take a bit 17:27 more time but with patience and um good 17:30 prompting skills you're going to get to 17:32 a full working airbn that was a really 17:35 good uh piece to add so basically like 17:37 this is getting to a place where it 17:39 actually is not so different from actual 17:41 Airbnb uh people can log in they can add 17:44 their home you can add internal tools to 17:47 add listings for your say sales team Ops 17:49 Team basically it just will allow you to 17:52 build a market place that looks a lot 17:54 like careb um amazing okay thank you for 17:58 the demo I think for a lot of people 18:00 they're like yeah I've seen this kind of 18:01 stuff for most people like holy 18:04 it's unreal what like it's almost like 18:06 we're taking for granted now you can ask 18:09 a an app to build you a whole website 18:13 and that cost probably like a few 18:14 pennies it took like five minutes versus 18:18 like it would have been tens of 18:19 thousands in like weeks and weeks and 18:21 months Even build just a 18:22 prototype mean these tools as we see 18:25 here they're already very good like it 18:27 looks really good as well um but mainly 18:30 I I would say they getting uh better 18:33 very very fast and I I'd say like one of 18:36 the bigger bottlenecks is now they're 18:38 not integrated into the current way that 18:41 you have your existing products and so 18:43 on but since they getting better so fast 18:46 so fast I think the best thing for 18:49 people who are interested in this or 18:52 like interested in just being a part of 18:53 the future economies get your hands very 18:56 dirty with these tools because being in 18:58 the top 10% in using them is going to be 19:01 to absolutely set you apart in the 19:02 coming months and years so let's let me 19:05 follow that thread so say you are 19:08 magically able to sit next to everybody 19:12 that is uh using lovable for the first 19:14 time and you could just whisper a tip in 19:15 their ear to be successful with lovable 19:19 what would that tip be it it takes a lot 19:20 to master using tools like lovable and 19:24 being very curious and patient and I we 19:27 have something called chat mode where 19:28 you can just ask and like to understand 19:31 like how does this work like is I'm not 19:32 getting what I'm what I want here um am 19:36 I missing something what should I do is 19:39 is is the best way to be productive is 19:42 also one of the best ways to just learn 19:45 about how software engineering Works 19:47 which is you don't have to write the 19:48 code anymore but it is useful to 19:50 understand how software or how Building 19:52 Products works so that so I think that's 19:55 the patience and curiosity is super 19:58 useful the second part that we spoke 20:01 about is that 20:03 being I would if I Would S sit next to 20:05 you I would probably say like hey you 20:08 you're not being super clear here like 20:10 for example don't say it doesn't work 20:12 just explain exactly what you're 20:15 expecting and which parts are working 20:17 and which parts are not working and 20:19 that's a lot of that's something that a 20:21 lot of people don't do naturally I love 20:25 that like when you have an engineer 20:26 you're working with that is a very 20:28 expensive 20:29 uh mistake to miscommunicate something 20:31 to just forget about a future to forget 20:33 about a requirement and here it's you do 20:35 that and then like 30 seconds later 20:37 you're like oh okay sorry that was wrong 20:39 and then you could just try again that's 20:41 true it might it might be more costly 20:43 with 20:44 humans uh okay and the first step so the 20:47 first tip is chat mode so you could just 20:48 so your advice is chat with the what do 20:51 you call it do you call an agent you 20:52 call what's like the the term for the 20:54 thing that you were talking 20:55 with uh yeah lovable is just lovable 20:59 okay so you're talking about lovable by 21:01 the way where did you how did you decide 21:03 on lovable is the name it's so sweet I 21:06 think it's all about building I mean a 21:10 great product um that's what I I want 21:13 more people to be able to do and the 21:16 best word for a great product is that 21:18 it's 21:19 lovable the a lot of jargon that I like 21:22 to use to like emphasize what we should 21:24 be striving for is building a minimum 21:26 lovable product and then building 21:28 lovable product and they will an 21:30 absolutely lovable product so I I took 21:33 that jargon with me in the company name 21:36 that is great absolute level product Alp 21:39 the is the new MVP okay so we talked 21:43 about this the scale you guys have hit 21:45 at this point I imagine it's far beyond 21:46 10 million AR do you share that at this 21:48 point or you keeping that private we we 21:51 we don't an on numbers but I I could 21:54 probably do a twx tweet about this quite 21:56 soon yes okay so it's far beyond 10 21:59 million ER at this point uh it's uh one 22:02 of the fastest growing startups in 22:04 history the fastest growing startup in 22:05 Europe I want to zoom us back to the 22:07 beginning what is the origin story of 22:10 loable how did it all begin what was the 22:12 journey to 22:13 today I I think I was not impressed by 22:17 like what people were doing with the 22:19 large language models when after 22:21 especially after I was using them way 22:23 back but when CH gbt came out they were 22:26 starting to get really good at taking a 22:27 human instruction and spitting out code 22:30 and 22:31 then um people in my team I was the CTO 22:35 at a YC startup they felt like oh Anon 22:38 you're exaggerating this is not going to 22:41 change anything in the coming years so I 22:42 wanted to prove a point and I created a 22:46 open source tool called GPT 22:49 engineer where you you write something 22:52 like create a snake game and then it 22:54 spits out a lot of code a lot of 22:56 different files and then opens the snake 22:58 game 22:59 and then I tweeted a video about that 23:02 and um gbt engineer is today the most 23:06 popular uh open source tool to showcase 23:11 the ability for large language models to 23:12 create applications is that like 50 23:15 something 50 something thousand GitHub 23:18 stores and like dozen of academic 23:20 references and I know that I'll just add 23:22 that it like GitHub shut you down 23:24 because I thought it was some kind of 23:25 attack that like how many stars you 23:28 getting many people are using it right 23:29 yeah so that was that that came later 23:31 that that's with lavable thisable 23:34 lavable 23:36 um earlier was always creating new 23:39 projects on GitHub when someone used 23:41 lovable and it was we asked them is it 23:44 fine like how what's the limits here 23:46 they said oh there no limits but once we 23:48 started creating 15,000 projects per day 23:52 uh so there were a lot of usage then 23:55 some engineer when was on call maybe 23:59 they woke up in the night and they saw 24:01 their servers are were taking too much 24:03 load because of us so then they they 24:06 shut off down completely and we got this 24:08 email that said oh you broke some kind 24:10 of rules and we didn't know what was 24:12 going on that's some much just story I 24:14 heard when uh chat GPT was originally 24:16 being trained Microsoft servers were uh 24:20 blocked it because they thought it was 24:22 some crawler and it was just actually 24:23 like the very first version chat gbt 24:25 being trained on on data anyway keep 24:28 going 24:28 and so I I built this tool called GPT 24:32 engineer and um I was thinking about I 24:37 mean we're go we're seeing the biggest 24:40 change Humanity will ever see I think 24:42 where like before you had manual labor 24:45 being taken over by by machines but now 24:47 it's actually cognitive labor being T 24:49 being done better than humans by 24:52 machines and what's the best way to have 24:55 some kind of positive impact here it's 24:58 not to make Engineers more productive 25:00 which is there's a lot of companies 25:01 using a to make Engineers more 25:03 productive Microsoft you build co-pilot 25:04 and so on but it is to enable those who 25:09 have like such a hard time finding 25:12 people who are good at creating software 25:13 that's been their absolute bottleneck 25:16 and let them take their ideas and their 25:19 dreams into reality so enabling more 25:22 entrepreneurship and The Innovation by 25:25 building the AI software engineer for 25:26 for anyone and then I I put I grabbed a 25:30 previous colleague of mine who has also 25:32 been a Founder Fabian and I said we we 25:34 should build something like GPT engineer 25:37 but it it has to be for the people who 25:39 don't write 25:41 code that's the story okay and then that 25:44 became lovable there's like the shift 25:46 from open source into a product that 25:48 anyone can use but also pay for makes 25:51 sense okay so from that point uh I saw 25:54 stat they started making a million 25:56 dollars in AR per week and once you 25:58 launch lavable is that true yeah so we 26:01 launched um so we actually called the 26:04 first version of the product like GPT 26:06 engineer app uh and that that's it was 26:09 very different in some ways um and we we 26:12 launched that under a weit list and so 26:14 like oh yeah we have this weight list 26:16 and we got a lot of feedback and 26:17 iterated and finally when we thought the 26:20 product was really good we said okay now 26:21 we have a lovable product and it was 26:24 mainly on the AI that we did a lot of 26:26 improvements 26:28 once we launched that that was 21st of 26:30 November so that's almost three months 26:32 ago we uh just hit like one mill million 26:36 AR in a week and then it kept go growing 26:38 at that that pace it's still growing at 26:41 even faster than that pace faster than 26:43 one million AR per week holy okay 26:48 that sounds like product Market fit to 26:49 me you said that you did a lot of work 26:52 on the back in I saw you tweet about 26:53 this that you guys figured out some kind 26:55 of unlock on scalability like a new SC 26:58 scaling law that allowed you to build 27:00 something like this what can you talk 27:02 about there that kind of on the 27:03 technical element allowed you to build 27:05 something new and and the successful 27:08 there are many scaling laws I would say 27:09 when you build AI systems and this one 27:12 in particular is about when you put in 27:14 more work this the pro the product 27:16 reliably gets better and better and what 27:20 you what you've seen um generally when 27:24 you have ai building something is that 27:26 it can get stuck in in some place it 27:28 stars is super good in the beginning and 27:30 then it gets stck what we did was to 27:33 painstakingly identify places where it 27:36 go stuck and um there there's a 27:39 different approaches but address like 27:42 different ways how we do it but address 27:44 the places where it gets like tuned the 27:46 entire system quantitatively and having 27:50 a very fast feedback loop to improve it 27:52 in the areas where it got stuck the most 27:54 important areas it still does get stuck 27:56 sometimes but that's the scale law and 28:00 um we're still early in that scaling law 28:02 I would say and so when you talk about 28:05 things getting stuck it's like the the 28:07 AI agent just saying like I don't know 28:08 what to do from this point and or like 28:10 they introduce some kind of bug is that 28:11 is that an example of getting stuck 28:13 introduces some kind of bug and then um 28:17 it's not smart enough to figure out how 28:19 to get out of that bug I see and this is 28:21 a common a common problem people have 28:23 with tools like this is they like get to 28:25 a certain point and then it's like well 28:27 I don't know what to do I'm not an 28:28 engineer like here's a bug it's running 28:30 into or the infrastructure is built the 28:32 wrong way and so it sounds like uh one 28:35 of the paths to solving that is what 28:37 you're describing is you make the AI 28:40 smarter to get to avoid more and more of 28:42 these places they get 28:43 stuck another is people just learning 28:46 how to get AI 28:49 unstuck uh this something when we had 28:51 omj on the podcast from replate he said 28:52 that this is like the main skill that he 28:54 thinks people need to learn is how to 28:56 unstuck AI when it runs into a problem 28:59 uh just thoughts there I don't know 29:01 anything along those lines come up as I 29:02 say that me this is something that uh is 29:05 a problem today and it the frontier of 29:10 where this is a problem is very rapidly 29:14 like receding back so uh what we did was 29:18 we identify the most important areas 29:20 like oh so specifically adding login 29:23 creating data persistence 29:26 adding payment with stripe like those 29:29 are the things that we made sure it 29:30 doesn't get stuck on for example um and 29:33 the places where it gets stuck today um 29:37 is currently the something that where 29:39 you can use being very good at 29:41 understanding and getting unstuck but in 29:43 the future it won't be so important this 29:45 is just going to not get stuck and I 29:48 know you're you're not talking super in 29:50 depth about this because this is one of 29:51 your unfair advantages this kind of 29:53 stuff you figured out so I'm not going 29:54 to push too far I don't know I know you 29:56 want not everyone to do exactly the same 29:57 stuff stuff so I want to zoom back to 30:01 the pace of growth that you guys have 30:03 seen one of the big stories everyone's 30:05 always looking at you guys of like 15 30:07 people 10 million AR in two months 30:10 that's absurd it's something I don't 30:12 know if it's ever been done in history 30:14 if if so it's maybe a couple other AI 30:15 startups recently how have you been able 30:18 to do this what have you done that has 30:20 allowed you to grow this fast with so 30:23 few people I'd like to take credit of 30:26 like having done everything end to end 30:29 in the product um but what but we're 30:33 building on top of the kind of the oil 30:36 here which we have discovered oil which 30:38 is are the foundation models right um 30:41 and then what you what we've done is 30:42 that we obsessed about what's the right 30:44 way to present this to a user what's the 30:46 interface for the human to get as much 30:48 out of this as possible 30:51 packaging together I I showed you in the 30:53 demo that you how you can add 30:56 authentication and making this work 30:58 seamlessly together as a whole that 31:00 that's what we've done and then people 31:03 love the product that's what that's the 31:05 driver of the growth uh the for getting 31:10 awareness we' mainly been posting what 31:13 we've shipped on social media that's 31:15 that's how people know about us so 31:17 building in public is is is how people 31:19 usually describe that so it's like uh I 31:22 think it's like you guys have the 31:23 advantage of the demos are just like 31:24 holy you can do that and then you 31:26 guys share the numbers that you guys are 31:27 growing at so it's innately interesting 31:30 and 31:30 sharable uh but I imagine most people 31:33 have something interesting to share I 31:35 guess is there anything that you think 31:36 you did that other companies maybe 31:38 haven't done that make the product so uh 31:42 lovable that I mean the the te is 31:45 everything in building a great product 31:47 so I I just give a give a big shout out 31:50 to to te that has written the code I I 31:53 Haven written the code Rec much of the 31:55 code recently I would say um 31:58 and the I mean you you want people who 32:03 can ship really fast and have have good 32:05 taste for like what is simple what's the 32:08 right 32:09 abstractions and I think that's what 32:11 we've done differently and have have 32:13 this Obsession for us making it better 32:15 and better and 32:16 better this episode is brought to you by 32:18 the fundrise flagship fund full 32:20 disclosure real estate investing is 32:23 boring prediction markets are exciting 32:26 meme coins are A 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ad okay I want to come back to the team 33:23 because I know you have a lot of 33:24 thoughts there in terms of writing code 33:26 how much do you guys actually use AI to 33:28 write the code that is building lovable 33:30 like how does that work on your team we 33:32 have set up lovable so that we can 33:34 change lovable with itself we have done 33:37 that um since there's a lot of 33:41 like hyp specific things um in terms of 33:46 running a separate like we spin up a 33:49 dedicated computer for each user uh it's 33:53 doesn't do everything lavable doesn't do 33:55 everything so we use we like 33:58 the tools are for developers not for the 34:00 99% most of the most of the time and uh 34:04 everyone uses AI all the time in writing 34:07 code it's also a great course for 34:09 experimentations and other tools like 34:11 cursor and stuff like that like any 34:12 tools you can sh I think cursor is the 34:15 um the one that almost every everyone 34:17 uses in in the team yeah okay cool we I 34:20 did a survey recently in on tools that 34:23 my listeners and readers use in cursor 34:25 like 177% of all people that read my 34:27 newsletter use cursor already which is 34:30 absurd and you guys are in there too 34:33 okay so kind of along these lines 34:34 there's obviously other competitors and 34:36 companies in the space so everyone's 34:37 always wondering uh you bolt repet 34:40 cursor is a different kind of thing 34:42 what's the simplest way to understand 34:43 maybe how Lev B might be different from 34:46 say bolt and ret which I think are 34:48 probably the 34:49 closest the packaging for non-technical 34:52 people is what we what we aim for and um 34:56 I showed you in the demo that that you 34:58 can edit the text like you can change 35:01 the colors and so on instantly with 35:04 without having to go into like code 35:06 editor um and without having to wait 35:08 this about 30 seconds for the AI to to 35:10 the full change so uh that's the the big 35:14 way that we think about packaging it and 35:16 then for you know making sure that this 35:21 can be used as productively as possible 35:23 in a larger team uh something that's 35:25 different from I think the other other 35:27 tools is that it's it is synchronized 35:30 with GitHub and that means that you can 35:33 use cursor if you're or the people in 35:35 your team that that want to be more low 35:38 level they can use cursor and while the 35:40 people who don't want to mess and set up 35:42 their local file system and commit to 35:45 GitHub and so so on they you can use 35:47 slbl not getting stuck is I I think the 35:50 most important thing for people and 35:51 that's why we came we can't enter the 35:54 space late we haven't done the same type 35:56 of marketing as many others and we're 35:58 still um from the people that I talk to 36:02 ranked as the one that works most 36:04 reliably I I love it okay so uh so this 36:08 point about how you can just use lava B 36:11 to build a lot of it for you and then 36:13 get into cursor to edit and tweak is is 36:16 a really big point and you're saying 36:17 other other companies aren't as good at 36:19 that yeah I don't know any other dust 36:22 that oh he W let you do that amazing 36:24 okay and then what's kind of like the 36:26 vision for lovable like what's the end 36:30 state of this is this everybody can 36:31 build anything they want sort of thing 36:33 what's the simplest way to understand 36:34 where you're going in the next I don't 36:35 know five 10 years I mean I have to say 36:38 so we're building the last piece of 36:40 software and it is inherently very hard 36:42 to predict how the world looks like in 36:44 five years these days it's very hard and 36:47 but the last piece of software how I see 36:49 that is that it's almost instant to go 36:53 from what you want to change in a 36:55 product or what you what product you 36:56 want to build to having it fully working 36:58 end to end integrated with any of your 37:01 existing systems or integrated with the 37:04 kind of the very powerful third party 37:06 providers already today you can just ask 37:09 add a chat with open Ai and then you get 37:12 a chat with open AI in your in your 37:14 product but um that's like just work 37:17 working perfectly is the something 37:20 that's coming in the coming two years I 37:22 would say um and then after that 37:28 there is a lot of things in building a 37:30 product that is not just engineering 37:31 side 37:32 right and I think um an AI can be very 37:38 useful in AGG aggregating and 37:41 understanding your users so like if you 37:44 have if you use the analytics tools you 37:46 know that there's something quite common 37:47 which is to see how users have 37:50 interacted with the product AI can do 37:52 that an absolutely massive scale and 37:55 propose changes to a human to say like 37:57 yeah that sounds like a good change to 37:58 make it a bit more intuitive and it can 38:01 also automatically run spin out AB tests 38:05 so that you can see with data all these 38:08 improvements to the product so that I 38:10 think that's on the horizon as well 38:12 quite 38:14 soon like what's interesting about this 38:16 in in one way is people wonder just what 38:19 jobs will be more important what skills 38:21 will be less important let me share a 38:22 thought I have and then I want to get 38:23 your take and see where you go with this 38:26 it feels like what is getting more 38:28 valuable as being good at figuring out 38:31 what to build and then knowing if the 38:33 thing you had built is correct and good 38:36 and ready so it's like Discovery 38:39 ideation uh 38:41 idea part of the step of launching a 38:43 product and then it's like taste and and 38:46 craft just like is this the thing is 38:48 this going to solve people's problems 38:50 because the the building now is being 38:52 done more and more and it's interesting 38:54 it used to be the reverse engineering 38:55 was the hardest most valuable skill and 38:57 now it's like figuring out what to build 38:59 you could sit there and you you could 39:00 just tell what to build and a lot of 39:02 people get to your screen I'm sure and 39:04 they're like I don't know what to build 39:05 I don't know what people want and it's 39:07 like that's the thing now so I just 39:09 reactions to that and thoughts on what 39:10 skills will matter more and less I mean 39:13 if you're if you want to if you're a 39:15 founder or you want to build something 39:16 yeah I I totally agree that figuring out 39:19 what are what are pain pain points and 39:22 seeing like there are pro often 39:25 currently solutions to every some kind 39:27 of solution to everything what is the 39:29 and how can you make this tenic better 39:31 somehow like figuring that out is super 39:34 important when you have um an existing 39:37 product then I think taste and like 39:39 refine tasting what is what is good is 39:41 even more of the important part the tech 39:46 like the engineer skill set is still 39:48 going to be important because that that 39:51 helps you understand what are the 39:52 constraints so what you can build and I 39:55 just think a lot of software Engineers 39:58 are probably a bit scared now like okay 40:00 am I out of a job what's going to happen 40:03 but they should see themselves as the 40:05 people who translate the the problems 40:07 that are stated by a human probably um 40:11 to Technical Solutions and but they do 40:15 have to abstract themselves up a few 40:16 steps not just like looking at the in 40:18 their text stack like oh I can just do 40:19 the front end changes they Engineers or 40:23 technical people are very good at 40:24 understanding what are the constraints 40:26 technically and they should see 40:28 themselves as that translators is there 40:30 like a like is it almost like you want 40:32 to be learn the enge manager skill of 40:35 overseeing Engineers versus like the 40:38 actual engineering skill or is you think 40:40 it's still going to be really important 40:41 to learn how to code and be really good 40:43 at that I mean doing a bit of everything 40:46 being in generalist is I think much more 40:48 important than it used to be and the if 40:52 if I'm putting together a product team 40:53 today I I would re obsess about getting 40:56 as much 40:57 of as many skill sets as possible for 41:01 each person I I hire like they should 41:03 know how architecting and system works 41:07 prably they should know design they 41:10 should know they should have product 41:11 taste they should know how to talk to 41:12 users I think everyone should be able to 41:14 know should know a bit of all of that 41:16 preferably easier said than done it's 41:19 hard to find people that know all these 41:20 things so let's Segway to hiring and how 41:23 you hire how many people do you have at 41:25 this point is that some you sure yeah 41:28 now we're at 18 18 okay wow so I love 41:32 that you it sounded like you're about to 41:34 say oh we have 100 people now no 18 okay 41:36 so you went from 15 to 18 uh okay great 41:40 so what do you look for when you're 41:42 hiring people the way saw you describe 41:43 it on Twitter as you look for cracked 41:45 Engineers the best cracked team in 41:48 Europe things like that I guess just 41:49 specifically what are you looking for 41:50 when you're hiring I think the most 41:52 important thing is that people care a 41:55 lot and they're not just like oh I'm 41:58 here for a job I'm here for being as as 42:01 a passenger on this journey but everyone 42:03 should really care about the product the 42:05 users and Care a ton about the team how 42:09 the team works together and that you're 42:11 always contributing to making the team 42:14 work more productively together and that 42:18 like care or preferably Obsession ER 42:21 gets you very long 42:23 way and then um you do 42:27 often want to have like absolute 42:29 absolute superpower of some Dimension to 42:32 be able to understand and do as many POS 42:34 things as possible like have this 42:36 generalist brain that quickly learns any 42:39 skills but be super super good in in one 42:42 dimension and that's for us that's of 42:44 that's mostly cramming as much out of AI 42:48 out of the large language models and 42:50 understanding the um the entire 42:53 parameter space of what you can change 42:55 to make this the our product to perform 42:57 better so how do you actually test for 42:59 these things you know like some of these 43:01 things described I think everyone's 43:02 looking for like they care about the 43:04 user they want to collaborate well just 43:06 like when you're because like you have 43:08 18 people building in a company that's 43:10 growing more than a million AR every 43:12 week like that's an absurd uh uh scale 43:16 and the people you found are clearly 43:18 world class and I think a lot of people 43:20 are going to like want to hire the type 43:22 of people you're hiring so when you're 43:24 actually interviewing how do you sus out 43:26 some of these things like like their AI 43:27 cramming skills their team building 43:30 collaboration what do you actually do I 43:33 ask people what they've done before and 43:35 they these people that I'm describing 43:38 they have often done something where 43:39 they care a lot about what they've done 43:41 before uh and dig into details about the 43:47 technical things that they did and then 43:50 um I mean we do the normal thing of 43:52 giving it showing a very hard problem 43:54 that is a bit unorthodox that someone 43:56 hasn't seen before preferably and see 43:58 how they think through the think and 43:59 reason through that I then something 44:02 that I think is more Uncommon is that we 44:05 do I pretty much always have people join 44:09 the work simulation for at least a day 44:11 often a full week awesome okay so work 44:14 trial that's awesome so basically they 44:17 work with the team for at least a day 44:19 you said like sometimes a week yeah and 44:22 uh I love this point you made about they 44:24 show they cared deeply about some they 44:27 previously worked on and you can you 44:29 look for just like obsession with the 44:31 thing that they built last or something 44:33 they worked on like what percentage are 44:36 Engineers of these 44:38 18 the 12 at least write code in at 44:44 least part times 12 out 18 okay cool uh 44:48 you when we were setting up you're like 44:49 oh our Engineers creating content now I 44:52 think that's a cool example of of how 44:54 people do a lot of different things yeah 44:56 uh also okay so I have your job posting 44:59 that you shared once of 45:00 like the actual job description I'm 45:03 going to read a few lines from it it's 45:04 uh very inspired by Shackleton right 45:07 would you agree cool I love it by the 45:09 way did you write this or did you have 45:11 ai write this job description where you 45:12 like create an engineering job 45:14 description FR let me read it to you I 45:15 don't even know you may not know 45:16 whatever you referring to uh I'll read a 45:19 few lines here long hours High Pace 45:22 candidates must Thrive under high 45:23 urgency under AGI timelines approaching 45:27 uh difficult Mission ahead honor and 45:29 recognition in case of success those 45:31 seeking comfortable work need not 45:33 apply and then there's a few other 45:35 things collaboration with other 45:36 exceptional Minds purpose larger than 45:38 any normal engineering role generous 45:40 share in the Venture success 45:43 amazing thank you thoughts yeah so I I 45:46 did I did get some help with the the 45:48 formatting of this but then I was mostly 45:52 me doing the the exact pring of the 45:54 different sentences so good and I love 45:57 that you know to some people it's going 45:59 to be like holy I'm not signing out 46:01 for this but to a lot of people the 46:02 people you want is like yes this is 46:04 exactly what I want to be 46:06 doing great amazing Okay cool so so it 46:10 feels like one of the elements of hiring 46:12 here is uh create a really good filter 46:15 to be clear about just how intense this 46:18 is so that the people that want that are 46:20 the ones drawn to 46:21 you okay and then you're also you're in 46:24 Sweden uh fastest growing startup in 46:27 Europe ever thoughts on building in 46:30 Europe Sweden versus the US San 46:33 Francisco yeah so this this ambition 46:35 level that you you're talking about in 46:38 the job is more Uncommon in Sweden and I 46:41 think that is the like the biggest 46:44 unlock that someone like me who sees 46:48 that this is the um like the time in 46:53 human history when you have the most 46:54 impact per worked hour and and that's 46:57 why we have to be super ambitious like 46:59 just up the ambition level and then then 47:00 we can maybe retire and have ai take 47:03 care of most most things in society um 47:07 that and inspiring people to be this 47:11 ambitious um in a place where the 47:15 average ambition is lower but the talent 47:17 the raw talent is um much more available 47:21 is is a great recipe I think that's a 47:23 great recipe so the and that's what 47:27 I think it's some kind of Advantage 47:28 there it's a bit of a double-edged sword 47:32 but but it's some kind of Advantage so 47:34 I'm hearing is like there's there's 47:36 incredible people in Europe they're just 47:38 not uh they're harder to find and what 47:41 I'm hearing is like the key is how do 47:43 you sus them out and get them to to want 47:46 to talk to you yeah most people in 47:50 Europe they haven't thought that oh do 47:53 going on an extremely ambitious mission 47:55 is what I want to do so that's that 47:57 figuring out who those are H is is a big 48:00 part of it awesome okay I want to talk 48:03 about priorization I 48:05 imagine all these things that I just 48:07 shared about just like how uh ambitious 48:09 this mission is how much you're doing 48:10 the last piece of software you must have 48:13 a bazillion things that people ask you 48:15 to build that you want to build what's 48:17 your approach to deciding what to biriz 48:19 and actually build I ju Just Top Line I 48:22 think identifying what is the biggest 48:26 ball neck what the biggest produ problem 48:28 and iterating fast on saying okay this 48:31 is the biggest problem let's really 48:32 really solve that that problem and then 48:34 picking the next one um and not 48:37 overthinking not like dreaming out the 48:38 long road map that's my my default it's 48:41 a very very simple algorithm um 48:44 understanding what is the most B the 48:46 biggest problem is not always a simple 48:48 simple problem I 48:50 think yeah so we spend time as one 48:53 should on talking to users list 48:57 reading up on what people are writing we 48:59 we have the F board for where people do 49:02 a lot of requests as you say and then um 49:07 when we pick one of the problems we're 49:10 quite engineering lead like for a 49:13 product like ours it's hard to be like 49:15 have uh product managers that are not 49:18 Engineers say oh this is what we should 49:20 do now 49:21 because like the right solution to the 49:25 problem might be in time Tangled in 49:27 things that are um like technical 49:31 details they might be entangled in 49:33 technical details of like okay yes this 49:36 is the biggest problem but we should Sol 49:38 we should have this larger technical 49:40 initiative that's going to solve all of 49:41 these problems so it's it's quite 49:43 engineering lead um compared to many 49:46 other product companies as it should I'd 49:48 be I'd be worried if you guys had a 49:50 product manager at this point makes that 49:52 would not that wouldn't make no sense 49:54 right now I imagine the answer is it's 49:56 chaos and there's no actual uh defined 49:59 process but just like what does it look 50:01 like generally like what's kind of the 50:03 Cadence you guys operate on how do you 50:04 take an idea to like build it spec it 50:07 launch it just like what does that look 50:09 like if you have something if you look 50:12 back like three months we mainly said 50:15 okay let's do this weekly planning and 50:18 we have we have like a fig Jam board 50:21 where we have all the main problems and 50:23 then we have kind of rank them which are 50:25 which on do we focus one more f on next 50:27 or this week um and then we have a demo 50:31 where we say like okay this are this the 50:33 things we Shi this week so they get 50:35 everyone on the same page and we do have 50:39 a bit more of a road map now and where 50:41 we say like here are we going to make so 50:45 sure you can support custom domains next 50:47 they're going to add 50:48 collaboration uh after that and and the 50:53 like the biggest problem now or the the 50:55 biggest initiative now that solves the 50:57 biggest problem is making the system 50:59 more identic um and that has a bit of a 51:02 longer road map but we still do the 51:03 kadence of weekly planning these are the 51:06 like the things we're focusing on this 51:09 week it's mostly there's a good word for 51:12 this that you I would want you help with 51:14 with Polish fixing the bags and and 51:18 polish this week and that was the 51:19 planning on Monday that was actually 51:21 this week was uh Polish Polish week I 51:24 love that uh how far is this road map 51:26 that you're now having I mean it's uh 51:30 clear over the coming month but it 51:33 stretches up three months and then but 51:35 with with in one month it's probably 51:37 going to look a bit different okay and 51:39 then what are the tools you use just for 51:40 folks that want to understand like the 51:41 latest tools so you said fig Jam what 51:44 else isn't that stack of tools I mean we 51:46 do so many things in our company in 51:49 linear because it's just such amazing 51:51 product so we we do Talent application 51:54 tracking in linear oh w 51:57 after going through and and this seeing 51:59 a l of the other made custom made tools 52:01 for that uh linear and then uh feed jum 52:06 so simple uh how soon until one of your 52:09 engineers is an agent engineer in AI 52:12 engineer do you think do you have a 52:14 sense I love to dig into what what does 52:17 that question actually mean um I think 52:20 we've been talking about like oh AI that 52:23 would require um or something playing 52:26 chess that's that's AI like if you if an 52:29 if a computer can play chess that's Ai 52:30 and now that's like oh no that's a chess 52:33 program and we always shifting this 52:36 forward and forward um I 52:39 think 52:42 anything that a human doesn't do is just 52:47 a smart computer system right so what 52:51 is when is some when is an a software 52:54 engineer and agent 52:57 I think it's always going to be just 52:59 we're building in lovable is just an 53:01 interface that humans interact with to 53:04 create the software that they want and 53:07 then how we solve that is that going to 53:09 be an agent under some definition yeah 53:11 sure I think so but uh that's less 53:14 important to me okay I like 53:17 that let me ask this you guys are moving 53:20 super fast scaling like crazy you 53:22 described a little bit about your 53:23 process weekly planning uh fig Jam Board 53:26 of is and now there's a road map that 53:28 you're kind of thinking out in the 53:29 future is there anything else that you 53:31 found was helps you move this fast that 53:34 gives you a lot of Leverage over the 53:35 small team you have to ship quickly and 53:37 move fast that you haven't already 53:39 mentioned we we work from the office 53:42 most of the time I think it's it's 53:44 pretty nice then you can say like hey I 53:46 think we're thinking wrong about this 53:48 thing or like shouldn't we actually do 53:49 this other thing and especially I think 53:52 lunch like eting lunch together is a 53:54 pretty productive hour 53:57 uh where you're cross-pollinating I mean 54:00 people are constantly thinking 54:02 subconsciously as well about the how to 54:04 solve the different problems and which 54:05 the most important ones are and then 54:07 being in office um has this like Focus 54:10 or most of the time you should be Focus 54:12 but you also have this like high 54:14 bandwidth where everyone has a bit 54:15 unstructured 54:17 communication I love that uh the answer 54:19 to uh the CEO of a company that's the 54:22 one of the most advanced AI tools in the 54:24 world is one of your answers to how to 54:26 move fast is like lunch together I love 54:29 that it's so human and so it makes all 54:32 the sense in the world but I love that 54:33 that's still a part of this 54:35 yeah okay you talked about this kind of 54:38 on the same thread you talked about if 54:41 you were to start in a team like a new 54:43 product team today say you were head of 54:45 product somewhere or head of RPM uh VP 54:48 of product somewhere building a new 54:49 product team scaling a product 54:51 team what would you do going forward 54:55 that's different 54:56 from what people have done in the past 54:59 in terms of who you're hiring how you're 55:02 structuring them that kind of thing just 55:04 like what do you think people should be 55:05 thinking as they build product teams 55:07 going forward knowing tools like lovable 55:09 exist and all the other stuff that's 55:11 going on I mean everyone should be 55:13 excited about using AI I think that's a 55:15 pretty big one um and then and the team 55:20 working really well together is is what 55:23 like the lunch you have to H like to sit 55:25 down and solve problems together um you 55:29 should at the bottleneck for most 55:34 products these days is not going to be 55:36 as much on engineering but having good 55:39 taste good intuition about your users 55:42 and um that I mean engineers and 55:47 everyone preferably in the team should 55:48 have that like willingness at least to 55:51 to want to go through that motion and 55:52 listen to the users um and 55:56 truly understand what what they care 55:59 about what's kind of like the background 56:01 of most of the engineers and people 56:03 you've hired are they like is there 56:05 anything like in common are they just 56:07 like 56:08 super uh impressive humans generally 56:11 like you know champions of programming 56:14 contest stuff like that I don't know 56:15 like what are some attributes of the 56:16 folks you've hired so far I think Ro 56:21 cognitive capability is the strongest 56:23 like di the the strongest correlate of 56:26 being at love lovable 56:29 but there there is this startup mindset 56:32 that I I think is also very strong being 56:35 a bit more being being much more 56:39 interested in moving very fast and uh 56:41 iterating fast than having like a lot of 56:44 structure a lot of 56:45 process and thinking about the business 56:48 as a whole more than thinking about my 56:50 specific profession my specific craft 56:52 that I'm see myself like wanting to dig 56:55 in into on me amazing okay so smart like 56:59 very smart entrepreneurial acts like an 57:03 owner yeah doesn't just uh isn't just 57:06 like this isn't just a job but they feel 57:07 like they actually have agency okay this 57:10 is great there's something you said kind 57:12 of along these lines that uh I think is 57:14 important that one of the things that 57:16 gets you excited about what you're 57:17 building is giving people superpowers 57:20 and especially people that don't out a 57:21 code basically 99% of people is there 57:24 anything along those lines that you 57:25 think is important to share it's very 57:28 clear to most people who have been 57:30 Engineers or been Founders that the um 57:33 there's so many that have failed in 57:35 their Endeavors because they didn't have 57:37 someone that know how to solve the 57:39 technical parts 57:41 and now that we're close to having 57:45 people know that this was like know that 57:47 this was exist and they work they solve 57:49 everything uh it's going to be an gri an 57:53 explosion of like entrepreneurship and 57:56 better software product we're not going 57:59 to settle for all the annoying bad 58:03 technology that we that we use today and 58:07 um 58:09 everyone uh who has an idea is going to 58:12 say like okay I'm gonna build this thing 58:14 and show you that this is the best this 58:17 is the best version of the product or 58:19 what our company should be doing instead 58:21 of having long meetings or like writing 58:23 up documents so it's um going to be 58:26 empowering across a lot of different 58:29 professions and and places in the world 58:32 what's what's next for lovable what's 58:34 kind of like the next few things they 58:35 might launch as this episode comes out I 58:39 mentioned this agentic behavior and when 58:41 I say agentic what it means is that the 58:43 you give more freedom to the system to 58:46 decide what what happens next it might 58:49 want to write a test run those tests and 58:51 see like oh the tests fail let let's fix 58:52 those so so that's um one the big 58:56 unlocks for getting further faster and 59:00 on then there's some more like obvious 59:03 things that you want to 59:05 do to go all the way to easily go all 59:10 the way to making money with lovable and 59:13 that's that's like how do you set up so 59:15 that it's hosted on your specific domain 59:18 how do you collaborate seamlessly with 59:21 your team H and making that that easier 59:24 so that are just obvious things um and 59:28 something we're thinking about is to 59:31 help the founders succeed after they 59:34 built their first version and like how 59:36 do they get more users how do they get 59:37 feedback how do they get the word out if 59:39 they buil something 59:41 useful I was just gonna say that that 59:44 that's that's exactly where my mind went 59:45 is like everyone's gonna be building all 59:47 these things no one's ever gonna get any 59:49 traction with these tools because no one 59:51 knows how to find users get anyone to 59:53 basically go to market and growth is 59:55 like a whole different skill so that is 59:57 so cool that you're thinking about that 59:59 how do we run some paid ads for you how 60:01 do we think about SEO how do we think 60:02 about Word of Mouth reality referrals 60:05 that is very cool okay yeah we already 60:07 have some playbooks that we that we help 60:10 the people building with like how how do 60:11 you do those things that you can find up 60:13 on a Blog oh interestingly this makes me 60:16 want to buy some meta stock because all 60:18 these apps that everyone's building 60:20 they're gonna all be running paid ads on 60:21 Facebook and Google oh my God what a 60:23 good business those other guys got uh I 60:27 want to come back to you said that you 60:28 can work on your existing code base this 60:30 actually a big question for a lot of 60:31 people they see all these tools they're 60:33 all like amazing for prototypes and 60:35 concepting you talked about how you can 60:37 actually do this within your existing 60:39 codebase use lovable let me correct you 60:41 there you cannot use it on any con 60:45 existing codebase got it um we kind of 60:48 have a research preview of of importing 60:50 your codebase but what you can do is if 60:53 you start in lovable then you can have 60:55 engineer is editing it how in whatever 60:57 tool they want to use for editing it 60:59 okay cool that's great clarification so 61:01 I guess just for people because a lot of 61:03 like most list here are not building 61:04 something brand new they're working 61:06 within an existing product so you're 61:08 saying that that is coming you can use 61:10 lovable in the future in some form with 61:13 your existing app and product great wow 61:17 that's huge okay because that's 61:19 basically the most most people so that's 61:21 going to be a big deal okay uh final 61:24 question we have the segment on this 61:27 podcast called failure Corner okay where 61:31 most people come this podcast they show 61:32 all these stories of success and 61:34 everything's going great and here's all 61:35 the things always winning you guys this 61:37 is a good example just up and to the 61:39 right the fastest growing product ever 61:42 uh what's an example when something 61:44 totally failed in the course of your 61:46 career and and what did you learn from 61:48 that I I'm withit hard pressed to find 61:50 something that totally failed but I 61:52 think there's a bit of a product lesson 61:55 um where I was the first employee at an 61:58 AI startup here in stockolm called sonal 62:01 labs and the premise was just okay so 62:05 humans learn in different ways you if 62:07 you personalize then you get two 62:09 standard deviations more uh effective 62:13 learning so there there are a lot of 62:16 products like education software that 62:19 helps you learn um that is not 62:22 personalized and we could build we were 62:24 building an API personalized 62:27 learning uh and the I mean the AI and so 62:32 was it was pretty good but 62:35 the thing that we were doing in the end 62:39 was to say like okay here's this product 62:41 here someone has build a product or some 62:43 some way to learn where be it like 62:45 English thing du lingo and then that the 62:50 people that have that product have to 62:53 use this Advanced AI API to start to 62:56 making it 62:58 personalized and it was it's a very hard 63:01 like retrofitting like oh you have to 63:02 switch out the engine and put in this Ai 63:05 and it it's the big learning here is it 63:10 didn't work very well on for the company 63:12 I mean the company wasn't super 63:14 successful in this the big learning is 63:16 that you have to start with like how is 63:18 this product working end to end and then 63:21 add AI or think where should we add 63:24 AI so that was big learning for me that 63:27 um you you really want to see like like 63:32 how the what is the big picture of the 63:35 user what's the big picture of how this 63:37 should how do you think the user 63:38 experience should be and then add 63:40 something with AI uh to solve specific 63:43 problems and now now Sons is doing great 63:46 but it's it's not on top of that product 63:48 specifically that's I think it's a lot 63:50 of people hear this and they're like of 63:51 course but I think it's so hard to 63:54 actually remember this point when you 63:55 have cool Tack and you're like holy 63:57 everyone needs to try this they're going 63:58 to love it and then you don't realize 64:00 like no one actually cares if it's not 64:02 solving a problem for them you know 64:03 there's like a lot of novelty products 64:05 that like everyone want to use for a 64:07 little bit and then like forget and it's 64:09 not I don't actually need this often and 64:11 so I like what this makes me think about 64:13 is there's all these product lessons for 64:16 what is likely to help your product be 64:19 successful and an app like like a tool 64:21 like lovable can help you do this 64:25 because because if someone is building 64:26 something you can guide them okay what's 64:29 the problem you're solving for somebody 64:32 how many people have this problem how 64:35 much does this matter to 64:37 them maybe we should add like the Lenny 64:39 mode it activates in lavable activates 64:42 like this product product 64:45 coach questions you wait hold on are you 64:49 this why let's take a step 64:52 back everyone's G be like out of my way 64:57 yeah 64:58 exactly what's your yeah what's your 65:00 experiment plan uh that's actually I 65:01 think there's actually a big opportunity 65:02 there to say people because you know 65:04 there's like a play around with this 65:05 thing and then there's like okay but 65:06 really is this anything people actually 65:09 want can we call it Lenny mode is that a 65:11 fine with you 100% awesome let's do it 65:15 I'll license you no cost sure okay okay 65:18 we made a deal here let's do it okay uh 65:21 Anton is there anything else that you 65:23 wanted to share anything you want to 65:24 leave listeners with 65:26 uh before I let you go and go to sleep I 65:28 think again the the world is changing 65:31 quickly and it's very fun you should see 65:34 that's like have fun in all all of this 65:35 change um and the best thing you can do 65:40 for your current profession or if you 65:42 want to have a new job is to be in the 65:45 top 1% in knowing how to use the AI 65:47 tools so go out there use use lovable 65:51 use other a tools and become um make 65:54 sure to understand or try to understand 65:56 as much as possible and how to use them 65:58 productively um that that's that's 66:01 something I I tell all my friends in 66:03 jally and I I like love the audience to 66:05 know as well okay well I gotta make try 66:07 to make this even more specific for 66:08 people uh how do you know if you're in 66:10 the top 1% like what's like a heuristic 66:13 almost of like slash how do you get 66:15 there is it just use it a 100 times a 66:17 day what else what can you recommend 66:19 yeah I I think if you spend a full week 66:23 on trying to reach an outcome the best 66:26 way to learn is like I want to do this 66:27 thing and then I want to use AI to do 66:29 that thing uh and you've spent a full 66:31 week you're you're in the top one% in 66:33 the global population if you have 66:37 friends that you surround yourself with 66:39 friends who who have this Obsession or 66:41 they also care a lot about this uh then 66:43 you'll be quickly in the top 66:46 0.1% so what I'm hearing is like find a 66:48 problem that that need that can be 66:51 solved like find a problem a pain point 66:52 for yourself or someone yeah and then 66:54 end to end like fully solve that problem 66:56 spend a week getting from idea to like a 66:59 thing that was actually somebody's 67:00 actually using yeah and you're in the 67:03 top one% yeah I I think at the top yeah 67:07 the top one% by just spending a a full 67:09 week and making like asking AI if you 67:12 don't understand so make making sure 67:14 that you understand yeah like that's the 67:16 thing people forget you just ask like 67:19 like you would would you ask the chat 67:20 feature of lovable in this case or would 67:22 you go to cloud or chat GPT to ask for 67:23 advice I mean my recommendation here if 67:26 you're in product is to use lavable to 67:29 build software and and learn that AI 67:31 tool if you're and then you should use 67:34 chat mode and chat mode I have to add is 67:37 something you activate in your user 67:39 profile it's not launch like in the in 67:43 the main product so it's in in in Labs 67:45 but if you add that flag then you can 67:48 use chat mod if you're if you want to 67:51 learn some other AI tool then you should 67:54 I mean ask that tool or ask Claude B 67:58 about how how how that topic that domain 68:01 works okay amazing uh where can people 68:05 find you where they where can they find 68:06 lovable and how can listeners be useful 68:08 to you lovable posts updates and me on 68:12 lovable Dev on Twitter and we post 68:16 things on LinkedIn as well and there a 68:17 lot of lot of things coming out and 68:20 changing in how we will software so you 68:22 can follow lovable Dev and you can 68:24 follow me at Anon OA at Twitter um I'd 68:30 love more feedback on what people like 68:33 where people see this is huge change for 68:37 them and we there lot a lot of people 68:39 posting about that on Twitter but there 68:42 we have a Discord where you can share 68:43 like oh this is how I use loveable it 68:45 was super useful to me um and H 68:49 feedback. lovable dodev you can give you 68:53 can ask for uh new features there's a 68:56 lot of people asking enough boting what 68:57 features you want next so and that's 68:59 useful that's the most important thing 69:00 for us we just want to solve people's 69:03 problems amazing Anon you're doing 69:05 incredible work what a what a journey uh 69:07 I'm excited to have you back someday 69:09 when we see more chapters of this 69:11 journey to as do we all that's why 69:13 people listen to this podcast uh Anton 69:16 thank you so much for being here thank 69:18 you so much Lenny bye 69:22 everyone thank you so much for listening 69:24 if you found this valuable you can 69:26 subscribe to the show on Apple podcast 69:28 Spotify or your favorite podcast app 69:31 also please consider giving us a rating 69:33 or leaving a review as that really helps 69:35 other listeners find the podcast you can 69:37 find all past episodes or learn more 69:39 about the show at Lenny's podcast.com 69:42 see you in the next episode