Anton Osika: Lovable hits $10M ARR with 15 people in two months, bets on personalized web

on the stream because I wanted the eyebrow raise like the uh you know from the Brian Chesy when the IPO and Emily Chang tells him how much the stock is up and he goes It's like one of the most iconic moments in tech history. Anyway, uh we got Anton from Lovable. How you doing? What's happening? Great.

Great to meet you finally. Yeah. Yeah. Great to meet you, too. Uh we were going back and forth with uh with with folks in and around your orbit. Every time we talked, there was a new massive number. There was uh you know certain amount of people on the platform, certain amount of websites.

Give me the latest headline number. That's shocking. Isn't it like some insane number of websites on the internet are generated every day? That is true. What are you holding? I'm holding a gong. Uh, a malar celebrate. I I just learned today we have 100,000 new projects built every single day. Congratulations.

That's fantastic. How'd you do it? What's the key to success? What are people using Lovable for more than anything else? There's when you think about just a web page can be anything.

It can be everything from from Facebook, a billion users, a trillion dollar company to, you know, a little homepage for my, you know, my my like my resume. Um, what are people using it for? Yeah.

Look, look, Lovable, it's the fastest way to go from an idea to a production ready application and a lot of people make that into a real business and that's something we that's in our mission to empower much more people to do.

But apart from the entrepreneurs, the solarreneurs like building for the first time or building for the nth time without but by themselves you have a lot of people in larger companies now and we're seeing that use case growing very very fast like percentage wise much faster and then they go from like I have this idea my engineers should build it but they don't understand me so I need to create a a full working version of it and then they're going to be like okay I get it.

looks great. Let's build it. How are you How are you thinking about tool use right now? I I I feel like there's so much open source software there. Um LM are incredible. They could probably rewrite Linux from scratch.

They could rewrite a database from scratch, but you want to be provisioning and standing on the shoulders of giants. But how often are you focused on allowing the like the like to grab different open source projects and tools?

Like if you want to build an e-commerce software, you probably don't need to rewrite a catalog from scratch. There's probably a tool for that. Yeah. You know, um how we think about build making the product as good as possible. And we've thought about it for a long long time is like we have an agent that can do things.

You can browse the web, generate images, but specifically create applications and a website, personal website for you, whatever. We are making giving that this agent more capabilities. We're adding new things. Okay.

So, for e-commerce specifically, we're taking the best of breed to build e-commerce as a tool and more to I'm spoiling some teasing some things there on the e-commerce side actually. Um, giving it more tools and then we're making the agent itself smarter. So, those are the two things we're doing.

Giving more tools, making it smarter. What's the key to high retention? I feel like um there's a world where you you you know use a tool lovable, you build something and then you're like okay we're ready to go and stand up a whole team of engineers to actually build this thing and take it to the next level.

How how are you uh you know fighting that urge to just use this as a prototyping tool? Yeah.

Um like if you have a high performing engineering team with a large existing system then there's always this balance of like do I take this thing I built in lovable y and I connect it to my system many people do that or do I just use it as a design and then um I like know exactly how to build it so it's going to be super fast with my engineers both are fine or do you do I even edit the code as an engineer level also popular um I I think regardless of all of those you can have very very high retention because if If you want to just prototype in Lava, it's the easiest way to do it.

You just open the browser and then boom, you have you have your prototype and it has access to your design philosophy. It has access to um like integrations and different tools that you might want to want to use. So there's a high retention there's a very high retention on that use case.

But um how I think about it going forward is that we want to just build a platform where you never want to leave this platform because it provides you so much value and what large language models have done now is that like they generate code really well and but that's just one tiny part of the entire life cycle of building and maintaining and operating and a product and growing a growing a business on top of that.

So I'm not sure you know Eliana on our team. She's like, uh, I've been doing growth for 20 years and now I'm so excited to not have to do like the boring growth and just do the innovative growth and AI is going to handle all the growth like all the growth things. So, so that that's on the horizon.

And when when you have a platform like that, um, you should be getting so much value that you never want to live. That makes sense. How do you what do what do you think is the future state of, you know, what do you think the average startup's website will look like 5 10 years from today?

I feel like right now we're in this era where AI is changing everything. It's changing workflows. It's changed the way changing the way we work with software. And yet startups, you know, still buy they try to buy their one-word uh. com domain.

And that the typical website is like incredibly, you know, static and and tries to reach a broad audience. And I can imagine uh I can imagine a world in the future where where websites are being almost generated in real time depending on the user and and the type of customer they are.

um more paral we're getting more paralyzed. Yeah. Yeah. Knowing knowing the the trend to date will be more of that. Um but I'm curious, you know, kind of if you have I think the websites of the future are going to be better at hacking the human brain and like its addicting nature addictive nature and so on.

And what that means exactly, I don't know. We like we let algorithms figure out partly. Um, but no, I think Anton is going to hack your brain everybody. Yeah.

I mean, do you think that starts with like AB testing because you can generate more pages quicker that you're just kind of optimizing for retention or conversion and then because you're just generating the entire site instead of just, you know, testing two different headlines.

You're testing the entire concept of what the website is.

I I yeah I think the algorithm like there's going to more and more be algorithms that figure out how how things should be optimized for us and then um I think what like what you're also seeing now already is some a bit of counterculture to that where a human coming in and being like no I want it to be much more minimalist like a new type of yeah this is the Nat Friedman style that Mark Zuckerberg recently times just raw HTML there's a time and a place for both time and a place for So I guess we see like some complex um evolution of the of of different different ways of doing things and um generally I think the f like the future has always been more and more diverse.

There's like many different websites and applications and we I think that trend is going to continue. It's not like it will converge to just just one way of doing things. Last question from my side. What what's uh what's next on the horizon? Are you focused on taking the product that you have?

You clearly have product market fit. Are you focused on sales marketing, ramping up, expanding what you have or or or expanding the portfolio to different areas and different markets, different products? Yeah. Um I'll answer it like this.

So in the order of like the sides of the use cases, founders are taking their ideas, they're building real businesses, software businesses.

designers and product managers and others in in companies, they're taking their ideas and building um concepts to communicate with their team up and like 100 times faster than building out the concept in the past. And then everyone else is building like their personal or business websites much much faster.

And we're doing all all of these things. Lovable does all of these things at the same time. And it like becomes as you use it, it becomes better and better at uh helping you. Cool. So that then that's what we're going for. Amazing. Well, congratulations on all the fantastic growth. Uh truly staggering data.

Barely a week goes by without a big lovable number hitting the timeline. Yeah, another another lovable number has hit the timeline. Congratulations. Thank you so much for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. And up next, we're shifting over to uh Thomas