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

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
You're head of growth at Lovable, on track to be the fastest or one of the fastest growing companies in history.

**Elena Verna** (0:05)
We're over 200 million in AR at this point. We're 100 people large. The pace here is insane.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:11)
You said that you've had to throw out most of your growth playbook.

**Elena Verna** (0:14)
I feel like only 30 to 40 percent of what I've learned in the last 15 to 20 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. 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 5 percent innovating on growth in my previous roles. Right now, I'm spending 95 percent innovating on growth and only 5 percent on optimization.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:48)
What do you find is actually moving the needle?

**Elena Verna** (0:50)
One of our biggest strategy is building in public, and it's coupled with employee socials, founder led socials. Another one is giving your product away a lot. This is part of our growth secret sauce. You have to remove the barrier of entry. If somebody, one of our users stands up and say, hey, I'm going to have a hackathon 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?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:22)
The trick is to get more people to try it. Just ship things you can talk about.

**Elena Verna** (1:25)
The only way to create a word of mouth loop is just to blow their socks off.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:30)
Today my guest is Elena Verna, head of growth at Lovable. In under one year after launching, with fewer than 100 people, Lovable hit 200 million ARR, which is one of, if not the fastest ramp to 200 million ARR 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 playbook has fundamentally changed for AI companies. What works now, what no longer works, and what has surprised her most about how Lovable grows. She also shares her advice about whether working at an AI company is right for you, some incredibly interesting insights into Lovable's secret sauce for growth, the unique ways they operate internally, their approach to building minimal Lovable products, also how they hire, and also how product market fit as a concept is no longer what it used to be, and how every company basically has to recapture product market fit every three months. This episode is incredibly tactical and you will leave this conversation smarter on so many levels. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. If you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of 19 incredible premium products, including a year free of Loveable, Replet, Bolt, N8N, Linear, Devin, PostHawk, Superhuman, Descript, Busperflow, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, Chappier, D-Mobin, and Stripe, Atlas. Head on over to lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Elena Verna after a short word from our sponsors. Here's a puzzle for you. What do OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, Vercel, Plaid, and hundreds of other winning companies have in common? The answer is they're all powered by today's sponsor, WorkOS. If you're building software for enterprises, you've probably felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, skim, RBAC, audit logs, and other features required by big customers. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Whether you're a seed-stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer, or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise-ready and unlocking growth. They're essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack support where they have real engineers in there who answer your questions super fast. WorkOS allows you to build like the best with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise-ready today. This episode is brought to you by V0 from Vercel. V0 is the web development assistant designed for professionals of all technical backgrounds. Whether you're a product manager, designer, or developer, transform how you bring products to life. With V0, everybody can cook. Don't just show up to reviews with docs and ideas. Arrive with working prototypes that demonstrate real functionality. V0 drafts project plans, generates interactive interfaces, and builds full stack applications without writing a single line of code. And with features like AI and database integrations, screenshot import, and sync with GitHub, V0 helps reduce development bottlenecks and enhance collaboration between technical and non-technical team members. The result? Faster iteration and a shorter path from idea to implementation. Vercel built V0 for the builders who want to create at the moment of inspiration. If you can dream it, you can ship it. Visit vercel.com/lenny to get started. That's vercel.com/lenny.