Verna: Paid marketing is the most expensive and defenseless growth path
Elena Verna · Elena Verna: How Lovable Launches Product & Hacks Social to Go Viral · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Mar 14, 2026 · at 26:34
Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable, warns against relying on third-party ad platforms to generate customer demand.
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“Paid marketing to me is Is a cheap way out, and it's not competitively defensible. I should say cheap. It's actually the most expensive way out, and it's not competitively defensible at all, and it's not sustainable.”
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More from Elena Verna
Verna: Paid marketing in year one is a death trap for founders
“For any founder in the first year, investing in paid as the means of growth is a death trap.”
Verna: Startups under five years old cannot accurately calculate their LTV
“Unless you've been in the business for five years plus, You do not know your LTV. Period.”
Verna: Meta ads deliver very little incremental growth for startups
“Meta... Just very little incrementality. Just a bunch of pass through views that don't materialize into anything.”
Verna: Every Lovable employee is expected to ship code to production
“Every single employee at Lovable expected to ship code to production.”
Verna: Performance marketing and growth optimizations are rapidly becoming automated
“All of the performance marketing or like the optimizations are just becoming something that's getting automated pretty quickly.”
Verna: Product will replace traditional marketing as the primary growth channel
“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…”