The Ledger, every show

“This is like what people say, oh, engineering is dead or design is dead. All of that I think is a lie because we had never had more need for experienced incredible engineers that are going to push the boundary of what's possible to create with software, to ena…”

“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. Period.”

“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.”

“Meta... Just very little incrementality. Just a bunch of pass through views that don't materialize into anything.”

“We're over two hundred million in AR. At this point, we're a hundred people large.”

“In fact, in the sales led companies, growth teams are not necessarily needed even that much. You might have a growth marketing team, which is really a demand gen team. That is rebranded for growth marketing. So they can charge you a 20 to 30% more in their sal…”

“Full-time jobs are not the best way to monetize the skills that you have. It's one of the packages that everybody should evaluate and take advantage of, but too many people blindly default to that package and don't explore other options that are both available…”

“And I do think that is going to be the next flex Of our careers, not to go up the leadership ladders going to those fancy VP titles and actually becoming this high power IC that is capable to accomplish of what it used to take dozens of people to do.”

“So feature differentiation is really hard to maintain as a mode. You might be ahead for a month to six months, but then everybody will catch up because AI is writing so much of our code.”

“I really truly believe that we're going to be entering the era of solopreneurs and running companies that are almost mid-market, potentially even enterprise size-like, as well as the really long tail of really small What I would almost call mom and pop sass of…”

“We really believe that building something is already becoming a commodity. Everybody and their mother are going into competition of creating an app builders. How do you create value out of what you've built? Whether it's your personal value for your company or…”

“That's why we're completely flat. We don't have titles internally for a reason. Everybody is expected to do some sort of IC work. We don't have just leaders that are just sitting on top navigating things. Everybody's just expected to build”

“We shared our figures at numbers in February that we've crossed over four hundred million dollars in ARR. And we're just shy of 200 people still, so we are operating as a very tiny team for a reason.”

“Even Approaching half a billion dollars in revenue, we're still on the product market fit treadmill, because category is evolving so fast, both from technological perspective, from customer perception, that we still need to keep pushing the product at the maxi…”

“So often you'd go and try to do RFP and buying software and I was like, oh, let me just go build it in an hour because let me see how far I can get there. So we constantly pressure testing our own boundaries of how much of our lovable we can build on lovable o…”

“All of us will have to build our AI doubles at some point just to continue scaling ourselves. But your AI double, if it's just trained on world wide web, it's just going to be an average intelligence of everybody.”

“Every single employee at Lovable expected to ship code to production.”

“All of the performance marketing or like the optimizations are just becoming something that's getting automated pretty quickly.”

“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…”

“Like, you still have to invest in SEO if you want to have the baseline of growth. But is SEO gonna be the reason that you're gonna win in your business? I don't think so. It's just something that you have to do. This is not gonna be the reason why you're gonna…”

“If you can use your company to help people build a better social presence that they can use to do marketing for your company, then who cares if they build a personal brand in the meantime, they become your biggest marketing agent, the most powerful marketing a…”

“Less than 10% should be paid in the more scaled mature company can be 30, 40%, but anywhere over 50%, I would be very uncomfortable on the reliance on paid”

“Unless your conversion window is under three months, I would say don't start with paid marketing as your growth lever, because you will never be able to make it spin fast enough, because you don't, you have such a long conversion windows.”

“A lot of our costs are within our freemium, not with our paid marketing, not with employees, not with marketing or sales budgets. It's with Freemium, because we view Freemium as actually marketing channel.”

“Allowing flexibility in your monetization model for ad hoc purchases can mean the world of incrementality for your overall monetization capture potential. We just introduced top ups at lovable and it's been absolutely wild because in every other job I've ever …”

“But when LLM costs will collapse and they will collapse eventually, every LLM themselves are betting on it. Our monetization models will have to evolve and whoever evolves their monetization model To be more outcome based first is going to be the winner on the…”

“Because LLM is gonna be like a commoditized feature Very soon. And it doesn't feel so right now, but it will be like access to internet or access to the cloud. It's commoditized. It's cheap.”

“Because like, otherwise, like I said, all of the SaaS functionality is getting commoditized and democratized, and it's just like anybody can do everything now.”

“Because if you're not lovable, I think the end is near for a lot of companies that are only purely focused only on just Pure functional ability of the products.”

“If you look at your overall marketing spend, your free giveaways, whether it's part freemium, whether it's discount codes or whatnot, has to be bigger than your paid marketing spend.”

“I know that that constant noise is part of our retention strategy. That constant noise is what drives a lot of resurrection for us as well, because people feel like it's a living, breathing thing that is constantly growing and evolving, and they always want to…”

“Both of us together, it's almost like old guard of Sarah's and new guard of like truly employees that don't have that context, that don't have that baggage is what creates a perfect harmony that pushes the company forward. Because you can prevent stupid mistak…”

“I truly believe there's going to be a company of a billion dollar company running solo by some, by somebody.”

“However, what I can say, it's on par with benchmarks of other B to B SaaS products that I've ever worked at. And I worked with Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey, Netlify Amplitude and others.”

“When I'm thinking about the patterns here and what I have to unlearn, 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.”

“And that noise in the market happens by us shipping every day, every other day, multiple times per day, and just talking about it constantly. Interestingly enough, it's actually works with fantastic resurrection strategy because people are like, oh, there's mo…”

“If you ask me what's your organic marketing strategy right now, to me, it's all about social, which is what is my CEO posting? What is my team posting? What is my LinkedIn? What is my creator economy doing? Influencer marketing. And across all of the social pl…”

“And I think that we're actually moving to the new era of software that needs to feel human, that people want to interact with, not just utility of it. Because cost of software is coming down so much to develop that we now can actually invest into emotional fee…”

“If you want to host a lovable hackathon, we will sponsor it and give all of the participants credits away for free. So we give them away as candy and we basically track them over our LLM costs on freemium and giveaways as our marketing costs. And it doesn't go…”

“To find an AI company with 80, 90% margin profile is absolutely impossible. Let's be real. We're all sitting somewhere in the 40% or so, which is a lot smaller.”

“Honestly, it's more efficient way to do paid marketing almost in a sense because of the cost per eyeball that we get there is quite a bit lower compared to if we were trying to compute it on the Google. So yes and no to your statement, because it actually does…”

“The tricky piece here is that it's not enough to just wait for that technology to get better and then start building on top. You have to build beforehand to like make a bet and then that's the LLM to catch up because when that model releases, you already need …”

“Every three months, I feel like we have to recapture our product market fit and not just recapture on the same technology and with same customers. It's both of those pieces of the equation change every three months.”

“And the issue right now, which I'm actually quite worried about us like as a category is that we're constantly focusing on recapturing the pioneers. We don't have time to go after adjacent users. And I'm worried of whether there's going to be a gap in the spac…”

“You do not need growth teams until you actually can start running experiments on your user base, which means that you have volume of users that you can learn from and optimize and innovate on. And that first wave of growth has to be a founder led.”

“If you have the overall business slowing down, your head of growth is destined to fail because the reason business is slowing down is much deeper than not having a growth team. Growth team can optimize growth can maybe lift It by 10, 15%.”

“To ever promise a homepage redesign or marketing site redesign in order to drive more acquisition. Is a failed promise that is going to be led by lots of agency money spending often a million dollars plus, lots of arguing about which shade of blue your brand c…”