The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth)

You're ahead of growth at Lovable, on track to be the fastest or one of the fastest growing companies in history. We're over two hundred million in AR. At this point, we're a hundred people large. The pace here is insane. You said that you've had to throw out most of your growth playbook. I feel like only thirty to forty percent of what I've learned in the last fifteen to twenty years of being in growth. Transfers here because we just need to invest in such bigger bets and innovate and create new growth loops here. Everybody and their mother is starting a vibe coding business nowadays, and we need to figure out how to be ahead of them. And to be ahead of them is not optimization of the problem, it's reinvention of the solution. I just feel like I usually spend maybe five. percent innovating on growth in my previous roles. Right now I'm spending ninety five percent innovating on growth and only five percent on optimization. What do you find is actually moving the needle? One of our biggest strategy is building in public and it's coupled with employee socials, founder led socials. And another one is giving your product away. Lot this is part of our growth secret sauce. You have to remove the barrier of entry. Somebody, one of our user stands up and say, Hey, I'm gonna have a acathon at my work on Lovable. Can you give us some free credits? to play with. Why would we prevent a person who wants to do all of the marketing and activating for us from using us? We're like, take it. How much do you need? The trick is get more people to try it, just ship things you can talk about. The only way to create a word of mouth loop is just to blow their socks off.

Today my guest is Elena Verna, head of growth at Lovable. In under one year after launching, with fewer than one hundred people Lovable hit two hundred million ARR Which is one of, if not the fastest ramp to two hundred million error in history, and growth is still accelerating. They've also recently raised a series B at a$6 billion valuation. So with that, there's a lot to learn about what Lovable has figured out about growth.

This is Elena's fourth visit to the podcast, a record. She is my favorite growth mind. And in our conversation, we talk about how the growth play book has fundamentally changed for AI companies. What works now, what no longer works, and what has surprised her most about how Lovable grows.

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