AI coding platform Lovable is rewriting growth records at an astonishing pace. This startup, founded just a year ago and with fewer than 100 employees, has generated $200 million in annual recurring revenue and recently raised $330 million in its Series B funding round at a $6.6 billion valuation, with investors including Nvidia. In an interview with the popular podcast "Lenny's Podcast," Lovable's Head of Growth, Elena Verna, revealed how the company has abandoned traditional marketing dogma and redefined growth strategies for the AI era.
The AI era requires abandoning the old script: shifting from optimization to innovation.
Elena Verna points out that for companies like Lovable, who are at the forefront of the AI era, only 30% to 40% of the traditional growth experience accumulated over the past 15 to 20 years is still applicable.
She said, "In the past, I spent 95% of my time on optimization and 5% on innovation; but in Lovable, I spend 95% of my time on innovation and only 5% on optimization." Verna emphasized that in the highly competitive Vibe Coding field, relying on fine-tuning conversion rates or optimizing button colors is no longer enough to break through. Real growth comes from continuously launching new features (such as integration with Shopify or voice mode), using this as the core growth engine.
The harsh reality: PMF needs to be regained every three months.
Verna has put forward a sobering point for all AI entrepreneurs: Product Market Fit (PMF) is no longer a one-time milestone.
Because the capabilities of AI models (such as OpenAI and Anthropic) improve dramatically every few months, coupled with rapidly changing consumer expectations, AI companies must regain product-market fit (PMF) every three months. This means that companies cannot rely solely on sales teams for expansion; product teams must always be on high alert to cope with the rapid iteration of technology and the market.
Long-term roadmaps are dead; only look at 3-month plans.
The old approach involved developing product roadmaps for one or even three years. But now, three months is equivalent to one year in the AI era. Because underlying models (such as GPT-4 and Claude 3.5) iterate extremely rapidly, any planning exceeding three months is futile. After three months, the technological boundaries will change, and user expectations will also change. Companies must possess extremely high agility, recalibrating their direction every quarter.
User experience: Aha Moment is dead, it has to be Wow Moment.
The old concept was to guide users through a series of actions to ultimately discover the product's value (the "Aha Moment"). However, the reality is that users lack the patience to wait. AI products must deliver a "cognitive explosion" the moment the first prompt is generated. This is no longer just about understanding value ("Aha"), but about being awestruck ("Wow Moment"). If the initial interaction isn't impressive enough, users will churn.
Abandon the sales team; the product itself becomes the sales agent.
When Lovable reached $200 million in ARR, it had virtually no traditional sales team (only a very small number of people handling passive demand). Relying on exceptional product strength (PLG) and word-of-mouth marketing, it empowered users to become salespeople themselves. In the AI era, the product itself is the most powerful salesperson.
Forget profit margins, now is the time for AI to establish its dominance.
The token cost of AI models is indeed high, leading to a decrease in gross profit. But now is not the time to make money; it's time to aggressively acquire market share (Land Grab). Treat the expensive AI computing costs as marketing and customer acquisition costs, not operating costs. Saving money now will leave you obsolete in the future.
Abandoning the mass market and focusing on pioneering users
AI is developing too rapidly, and most of the late majority simply cannot keep up. Trying to please everyone will result in mediocre products. Currently, we must focus on serving the most enthusiastic and tech-savvy pioneers, as they are the only ones who can keep up with the three-monthly technological iterations and provide cutting-edge feedback.
There's no such thing as being too big to fail, only being too slow to be eaten up.
The AI competitive advantage is extremely fragile. Even for a clear leader like OpenAI, its market share could collapse within weeks if Gemini or Claude releases a better model (OpenAI recently lost market share due to Gemini 3). There's no such thing as "too big to fail," only "too slow to be swallowed up."
This article discusses how only 30% of growth experiences in the internet age are applicable! Lovable: AI product cycles follow LLM with three-month iterations. This article first appeared on ABMedia, a ABMedia .
