Lovable hits $300M ARR: co-founder Anton Osika on building a technical co-founder for the masses

well let's bring in our first guest of the show Anton from Lovable. While he comes on I'm going to tell you about Gusto the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and mediumsiz businesses. Welcome back [music] to the show. Welcome to the TVP and Ultradome. Thanks for taking the time to come and hang out with us. West Coast West Coast tour.

It's It's cool to be here in person. Thank you.

It's been like more than six months, but it feels like much more a [ __ ] ton has changed. [laughter] You know, my side, the business is doing better than ever.

I can imagine every time I every time I see a post about you, from you, there's a new biggest number. Uh how how is growth going? Is it still accelerating? How's the business doing?

Um we are doing great on the growth side. We uh hit 300 million AR two months after our 200 even louder in person. So uh but more interestingly to me is the builders who are doing the real things. I I was in the airport from San Francisco here um and Adam at owner.com who helps tens of thousands of restaurants. He he was like super excited and raving about he had built out a new product line over the weekend in 8 hours where he was he was solving a new problem where all the customers were saying like u we keep getting these phone calls it's not always someone picking up and he built an AI um who answers the phone for the restaurants and it was all working you could like configure it just like you were training a human um and and he was now building it releasing it next with his team and we're seeing all of these new opportunities where people would use Laval Blaster as their technical co-founder and build businesses. Yeah. And uh like you maybe you saw like I was super shocked when someone was shipping AI generated dog pictures in frames to pet owners uh and they were they're making $300,000 per per month on building that out without any technical.

How are they how are they actually doing that? Obviously, I think maybe you can describe like the the the technical co-founder process of building a new application that someone takes payment. But then I want to know about the top of funnel for that.

Yeah. But part of I mean I always saw lovable's growth as

millions of people out in the world that historically were just perpetually searching for a technical co-founder.

Problem is a lot of people that are technical have a bunch of great ideas. They don't necessarily need an idea guy. And so there's all this like sort of pent up creative entrepreneurial energy that just never really goes anywhere because somebody doesn't take the time to actually learn to code. They never find that that right partner.

Yeah, that's what we're seeing. And our mission is about human creativity which is very fun to empower. But it's not just new businesses. There's a lot of uh companies and I'm keep hearing from how they build out like AI applications and agents using Lovable. Um and once you get into it you if you especially if you look back compared to 6 months ago this feels like to me when I use it there's no limit almost of what you can do. Um and the the thing where lovable I what I'm hearing is that it's a bit unique is that um there are a lot of tools that are coming from kind of developers and then more people keep using them. We started with the nontechnical people and that makes it just super simple but it still has the same capabilities that more sophisticated uh users are are looking for in the same

how are you thinking about working with companies like owner that uh I'm not super familiar with owner. We got to have Adam the founder on but my understanding it's somewhat of like a system of record for a restaurant owner. Is that right? And so in theory he could also offer lovable as like an integration so that individual businesses that are using owner can expand kind of and just build products that they themselves want not necessarily have to rely on owner. Is is that right? Or are you seeing opportunities like that with other companies?

Yeah, I think we we have these partnership programs and I that's a good idea. I'm going to bring that back to to talk to Adam specifically. Um, but what what we're seeing

theoretically somebody is on owner, they have a feature that there's a feature that they want that's not being offered and they can just build it. They don't even have to request a feature.

I mean that that's what the future uh looks like and [clears throat] what we've seen is that Lovable is first used by as a communication medium and there a lot of people that have stopped using Google Slides and PowerPoint and they now they just prompt it away because it looks looks so nice. Yeah.

And um I think it's a better medium than the animated videos you were talking about previously. Um but but then um now a lot of companies and us is one of those we're running we're switching out SAS providers to using tools that we use build ourselves

and we connect we we tell loveable can you connect these two different applics internal tools that we build um and add AI in between of those and and that

I think is more of the future of how companies are going to be run where

okay let's talk about uh let's talk about kind of vibe coding debt and tech debt because we we've gone through this where we'll build a product. We built uh we built like a a guest directory. Very simple product that would basically every time an episode would get published.

Yeah.

We it we we had an app that would effectively scrape the episode, figure out who was a guest, link everything out and publish it. And it and it we it was built in uh in a day by by one of our interns last summer and then he had to spend like the entire summer just like maintaining it and like shipping incremental updates. So are you seeing any changes on that

front? Like obviously if it's easier to make products maybe it's easier to maintain them but uh I think the concern is like if you've created you know 200 different SAS tools and internal tools uh as part of your organization then you end up spending really valuable resources at the company you know human labor time uh just kind of maintaining these systems and making sure they keep running. Can I talk a bit about the recent updates we did yesterday lovable? So [clears throat]

there's a much more advanced um planning mode that helps asking the you or your intern questions about what it is that you're trying to achieve and that makes the AI be able to you know find a better solution that doesn't need that type of maintenance. Uh and and that's one of the many improvements that we shipped yesterday. Another big one is

so basically like if you if you vibe code poorly or if you prompt poorly you're adding a bunch of kind of like vibe coding debt and if you spend a little bit more time like prompting

yeah I think people should just move fast and and be not be like oh I have to think through this so it's maintainable. should move really fast to get something that works and that's like useful and but then you should sit down and you should reconsider [clears throat] talking to lovable and asking should I restart from from the beginning like I'm having these problems with the maintenance is this uh should I just be keeping shipping incremental updates or is there a um something else that could actually solve this on a deeper level and and keep having that conversation and be creative in terms of what could be the right solution for this because um the systems are they're extremely intelligent now and they're just getting more and more intelligent. So that should be your status quo. Explain your situation so that which the AI doesn't know and then it will help help guide you through what's the best path.

It feels like the the the solution to vibe coding is more vibe coding or more code, right? [laughter] So but but the question

he says the vibe coding dealer

he's like actually you need more uh but I believe that I believe that. But my I I think the the the interesting question is uh the shift to mobile and I want to know how you're thinking about that transition because if you go and vibe code an application and you sit down you really think about it you work with the tool to plan and and and test and you're giving feedback and you spend you know a full day or a couple hours and you got it in a good spot but then there's like that one little oh actually this button isn't quite working. can you just go check out? It doesn't work in this scenario. That winds up just being normally like you text a developer, you slack them. Uh how are you thinking about uh like long-term integration with end users who might not be jumping into the tool themselves and might not even be, you know, have the time to actually sit down and vibe code. Um I think the future of how teams operate is of course changing and I think there there should be um someone who is like ultimately responsible for the quality of of the applications and might not be you even though you you can throw in

um ideas of changes and then someone looks at it before it goes out to your customers. Yeah.

So that's high level how I think about it and there's a lot of new capabilities that we are looking at to make sure that uh quality is always maintained and we over the last nine months we've been super focused on security which is um this like if you're putting something in production that should be your first your first priority and and there's a lot built in that makes applications secure from the ground up in how we approach Yeah, the the challenge right now is if you have a hit product, you could go to 100 million users uh in 48 hours. We saw this what what was the company that was like Palunteer for dating? The [laughter]

Did they really go that big? That's

Yeah. No, no, no. They went the T dating app. Remember they they they went uh

they don't call it Palunteer for dating, but yeah. Yeah. You know, the tea dating app really is

went to the top.

Yes. Yes. [laughter] Uh but but yeah, the founder was just kind of coding.

I think he had some team members too.

Yeah, sure. But like clearly they were moving very quickly and

uh some some mistakes were made.

Yeah. uh what it what has anything changed in your mindset about wh the level that you want to operate at or integrate with versus uh being a web app uh with cloud hosting operating into the browser level into the OS leveling an a dedicated app on a phone or on a on a Mac uh or command line tools. How are you thinking about the the different unlocks that you get at different levels?

Yeah, great question. So, first of all, I I use um lovable on the phone all the time and it's really like a good mobile experience which is why we uh

we are seeing usage there. Yeah. Um I I know that a lot of entrepreneurs they're building out complete work OS systems. Yeah.

I talked to Gwyneith Paltor yesterday and she they're building a a lovable brain that I accumulates all the information that they need in running their company. Okay. And

what that uh gets some more capabilities from is that it can connect to your local file system.

Yeah.

And it can connect to I mean in the future I don't know exactly what the mobile device is going to look like. But um it's going to the AI has to have context on everything you do on your phone for it to be fully u unlocked for all the capabilities unlocked. And uh that's something we're looking at like exactly how does that future look like as we building towards

um the best interface for humans to use technology and use AI and because that's the vision we're on.

Yeah.

How do you think about the tradeoffs between consumer and enterprise? Obviously you can use it to make something that replaces a slide deck uh just communication external marketing materials landing pages. Uh you can also use it for building an internal tool uh and just and just spin something up internally to a company that's never going outside. Both are very interesting markets. Do you want to serve both? Do you think that there's a value to focusing on one over the other?

Yeah, great question. So um lovable started out from the AI early AI adopters and um that's where we're seeing now growth in all directions because people love how there's maybe some Swedish design sensibility like things just works and we put a lot of hard engineering making making it simple right um and one of the directions is spreading in the is in the enterprise people come to the work and they like look how much we can get done using glovable at work so now we have all of these required features for enterprises SEM and so on. Um and [clears throat] specifically uh what we like I I'll tell you an example of one of a really large company they have 80,000 plus real estate agents globally dozens of countries hundreds of websites they had offer to replplatform all these websites because you know there's always this pain for marketers changing website and the [clears throat] VP of marketing there uh it would that would take a year the marketing found lovable and he was like wow I can just build one of those websites in in a few minutes and Then they sat down and they looked at how can can we

these are websites for individual homes

for so different brands brands for real estate agents across different geos. Yeah. Um and then over 3 weeks they replatformed they saved $2 million in a on a solution uh which was part paying for AI chatbots on the website and uh their their chief innovation officer just says like this is the biggest change that their company has experienced in how fast they can move how they could build out an AI chatbot just by prompting lovable and that's a large company and that's them building product lines that are facing their end customers where what's what they're seeing Even more volume of is of course applica internal applications and uh applicant tracking systems uh built from the ground up by the people who are using those applicant tracking systems with AI uh with thousands of people uh being served.

How are you how are you thinking about headcount planning specifically on the engineering side?

Uh yes it's a good question. I I I was at the anthropic office and they're I I think they're hiring a lot of people uh just like we are doing. Um because if what what you're actually seeing is that if you use AI correctly as a business, which is one of my personal top goals or the entire company's top goal out of three goals is us learning how to use AI as productively as possible. And that means that each each human has more output, right? if you do that really well. And as we are learning that and figuring that out, we're putting that into the product and giving our users all the best practices in um how to connect all internal tools that your company is running on um to and share context across everything you're doing. Like when you're doing research on a podcast, you should all be able to just ask an AI what what question should I ask Anton? and that that all of that uh infrastructure, all that tooling, you should be able to build on lovable or just yeah get someone's uh else tool and copy it into your workspace.

How much do you guys pay attention to job descriptions at various companies in terms of understanding market pull? I could imagine people uh companies that wouldn't necessarily hire software engineers saying like we want engineers that are can you know use lovable and and other uh relevant tools because I think one of the one of the interesting things that we're trying to understand from uh just kind of understanding like how job how how we'll see job growth in some areas maybe job reduction in other areas is I think people are underestimating how many companies there will just be a net new role where somebody or multiple people are creating a maintaining software that the company's creating. And we're an example of that, right? Historically, a media company like if you if you had a fledgling media company, we brought Tyler on uh uh last I think like Q1 of last year. We'd only been in market for a handful of months. And normally if a somebody was building a media company and they were telling me they were hiring uh or a podcast, right, and they were telling me they were hiring a software engineer in their, you know, second quarter in business, I'd be like, "Dude, you you should focus on like a million other things, right? just make good content. But in our case, we realize, hey, we can build uh quite a lot of uh internal tooling for what we're doing to make the show better. And so, I think we're going to see a lot of uh job growth from companies that again wouldn't normally uh hire any anybody internally doing software engineering.

It's a good question. I I don't look at external other people's job offers. I my background is in physics. So I just break things down into like what is it that what are the governing principles for make making a team work really well and people work humans working well together and getting output as a company. Um and what what I'm seeing is that you want the team of people who [clears throat] they don't have to be software engineers but they're very curious and they uh get it they get new things understand them very quickly and and that's one of the things that we're fundamentally um fundamentally hiring for. I mean I I can take a another example because I I love I'm so inspired every time I meet someone who's has like we changed their lives who love so it's a it's a guy who Allan he built a healthcare AI stuffing company in five months there is a million dollars in error and he couldn't have able to build something like this and then [clears throat]

yeah there's so many niche labor marketplaces uh these were they used to be like more popular like venturebacked businesses and then a lot of VCs figured out like hey you can build a great business here, but you end up kind of capping out. There's some software component to do with like matching and kind of booking, payments, stuff like that. But ultimately, uh, a lot of these businesses should just remain like somewhat niche, right? You could have a $10 million a year business doing staffing and have it, you know, like the people running it, right? You have a lean uh team. Uh but now but historically it was a challenge because you're there was a number of companies that would build like out of the box like marketplace software but usually they were like it was you had to do so much work to like actually adapt the software that it was kind of this trade-off of like do I build it inhouse? Do I use

people used to abuse WordPress like crazy they build a whole social network on WordPress or try and modify it with e-commerce stuff and and it would take a year and millions of dollars to build something that now it takes a weekend. How do you uh how do you lead the team around dealing with uh competition and you know every you guys are now competing with pretty much every company in the whole world it [laughter] seems like you know from hyperscalers right that that are building uh vibe coding tools to other startups like what's your philosophy around uh dealing with with competition just kind of like emotionally like in the organization? Yeah,

I mean first of all what we're seeing is that people come back to lovable uh and compare it with other tools. They say like wow this is such a wonderful see simpler experience that works better for them that we're actually work and it's more capable in many many dimensions. So that is just gives us a lot of belief in what we're doing and the way we think about it is to not look at um what others are doing is just to look at what do our customers want us to do and and being very grounded in that and that we

banned the like competition Slack channel you know people because it would literally be every day it's like hey like we have a new venture

back this yeah

but it's a sign that it's a sign that

we but yeah we fundamentally to say we're building the best product based on first principles what we think is the best way to do these things and it often means not adding new features adding new capabilities but thinking very long term how is this uh whole experience going to be for us humans as we interact with super intelligence basically in the future and that's what we're that's what we're driving us building that product is is the the motivator for everyone

what about uh international expansion you're obviously in Europe here already are you opening offices in other continents Yeah, we haven't announced more offices than um Stockholm and then and then great go to market

have any to announce.

What's that? [laughter]

I can't come back. We have more announcements but we have people hired a few people are hired remotely including here in the US in various cities. Yeah.

So so that's what it's like but we we getting a lot of value of being in person people who are very like long-term thinking very very bought into the mission that we're on based in Stockholm. How do you think about retention? There's so many amazing tools that come out. Like I remember those uh uh it was Lensza magic avatars. Everyone had to take their photo and do the the the Studio Gibli precursor like a year earlier the style transfer on their image and then uh people sort of like they tried it and then they churned out. Uh but at the same time like website builders have incredibly low churn because once you build your website even if you're not using the tool every day you're using it as hosting and you might be dumping uh be jumping back in to make changes. How are you thinking about uh the different retention dynamics the different cohorts. How are things looking?

We're seeing very very healthy retention. We're like net dollar retentioning has been more than 100%.

There we go.

But um

there we go. We're also of course seeing some AI tourists that are just trying a lot of

Yeah. Yeah. They must exist and they just stop by and then they move on to something else, right?

Yeah. And and what we what we're um doing is that we're splitting out the different segments and seeing like what what are the jobs to be done for the segments that we could do better. And um

fundamentally what we what we're noticing is that for most things we're adding which is about making the whole whole experience to do more things more seamless like more capabilities.

Exactly. more seamless without making it a more complex experience that's helping their transition across the board for for everyone

and and less of a point solution less of yeah I use that for slides this week but then there's a new one over there I got to try the new thing uh more of like actually run your entire business build the new business on this and then stay with that for a long time that makes a ton of sense um what about recommendations for other software products databases I've I've seen a bunch of charts where uh the default recommendation for Superbase for example is just climbing like crazy because it's recommended by uh by yeah by you and by a backend and by a number of the models. Um how what does that does that business evolve into an affiliate model? Do you have a do you have demand from your customers to educate them about the different tradeoffs when they're building when they're picking something or do you want all of that to be abstracted away so that the end user doesn't even know what a database is for example and database is just one example. There's a million things you probably plug in with, right?

This this is a great question. Um, we have some really good product integrations and you me mentioned superbase. It's one of them and uh we are we're covering more and more area of payments, email and communications. We want those we want more of those amazing partnerships. Um I I think

uh like there shouldn't be any limits of those integrations. You should be able to ask Lavable to I mean get cleaning for your podcast studio or whatever and and that should be that shouldn't be done by us. It should be a partnership where we current we currently just making um more of those partnerships successful and there are multiple companies that have been seen absolute majority of their growth coming from from us actually. Sure. Uh but and then but then uh at some some point um yeah I mean we need to let uh our users get the best product integration if there many ones

feel like other companies should be a little bit worried if the majority of their growth is coming from you guys given that your whole the whole purpose of the of the company is to make it easy to build software and eventually you guys will just

naturally do some do some of those things.

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean the integrations I I'm happy to not do them. We we want to focus on the interface the app creation layer and then uh underneath there needs to be a lot of uh things that connect to very very technically challenging systems to build the infrastructure and so on that um we don't need to put uh like our our efforts into into building. So it's fun we want to do a lot more partnership this year.

Yeah makes sense.

Talk about the dynamics between lovable and all the different labs. I'm sure that you have very open dialogue with them around uh just like integrating with new tools, getting previews of models, all that kind of thing. Uh and I'm sure part of why you're on the West Coast is just to spend time with with the different teams.

Yeah. Uh those those relationships are really good. Um we um are fundamentally listening to the users more than them. We're building for the 99% while they're building development.

Please listen to your users less. You really want to

[laughter]

No, I'm kidding.

Yeah. No. Um and um what like they have to spend so much of their focus on the strategy on like building these models and making like pump squeezing out more and more juice from those models and we're in this place which is um very favorable favorable for the end users where we're not tied to a specific model. Um we we use a combination at level of different models and that serves that gives a better user experience in the end with the trade-off of speed and the the high quality for each specific task.

Yeah.

How did you and the team react to Claudebot? Was there any kind of like new kind of user paradigms that that you were inspired by? Anything to take away and kind of integrate? I mean we had Peter on the show uh Tuesday a couple days ago and he was very open like he's just like in it. He's not he's clearly not in it to make money. Like he's in it for the love of the game and just kind of

uh we asked him, you know, do you do you think that people will clone

uh what you're doing or or copy it or or um or build on top of it? And he was like, "Yeah, I do. That's cool." Uh so kind of an unexpected answer, but I'm curious if there's anything that uh you thought was particularly in interesting that you can bring back to Lovable.

Yes. Um I love Peter. Happy you had him on the show. I I think um like me and many people in the team have been building our own versions of this personal assistant that you just talked to record audio to and

talk on your phone.

Yeah. In my case on my my computer. Um and then what um we are of course thinking about which is like the other top goal for this year is to provide the best workspace for the best way to collaborate as a team. Um, and that of course has a big part of that is being able to talk to an agent that has access to all the all of your different tools that once you're building with lovable. Um, and can collect can pull out the data when you need it.

Um, and I think uh I'm very happy about this open source project in particular getting a lot of traction. This it's bit my roots as well.

Yeah, it feels like it's just waking everyone up to what's possible. It was real like feeling the AGI moment generally and maybe not everyone reaches for open source and all that's entailed with that, but it's sort of just like a new call to action for everyone to try new tools. So yeah, overall good, very bullish.

Twitter Twitter likes this completely new things that you can try out. Um, in the end, what users want is something that's simple and that's very, very trusted, high security, high reliability. And when you're building your strategy like us, that's what we're focusing on. What is it that most people want and what's the um sustaining product that you want to build?

What social platform is most important to Lovable's growth at the moment?

Um I think I'm not sure if my team likes me sharing data here, but Twitter and LinkedIn is what the ones I know are the big ones. And but we're also seeing Instagram

cuz I cuz I Yeah, cuz I feel like products when they actually go mainstream like going mainstream looks like n like going over to Instagram and these other platforms

feels like beyond a niche which I think of LinkedIn and X as but uh yeah I mean it's a big community so it makes a ton of sense especially with some of the some of the larger enterprises that you're working with at the business side that makes a ton of sense. Uh what does the top of funnel look like and growth function look like? Is there a flywheel where someone builds and then shares and then I I imagine that there's you know links built with lovable in the footer but is that a real engine of growth or is or are advertising like what what's driving growth overall at the high level.

Yeah. And so uh we're seeing about 300 million visits to lovable applications per month. Okay.

So uh that is a real effect. people like oh this is this great website and um most of the time that leading to conversion is they just talking to the person like oh yeah you built it with lovable and that um that is a part of the biggest channel which is just word of mouth and that continues to be like absolutely

they see something cool even if it's just a small demo even if they're not paying for that business they see it and they're like I want to do that but for me or my

yeah they they hear um I mean they hear about us from the friends or they see about us on the internet somewhere

um And um yeah, I'm I'm looking at investing more into growth of course and and then um I think Instagram and we're getting growth marketing really really strong. It could be the the next big channel.

Super Bowl's coming up. It's not too late to throw something together. Maybe anything.

Maybe next year. We'll see.

TV. We'll see. It's not breaking.

Thank you so much for coming on the show.

This was fantastic.

Have a great rest of your trip. We really appreciate you coming by

and we will tell you about Finn.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Finn.ai. And up next, we have

I'm expecting a Super Bowl ad.

I I want a Super Bowl ad that they could do some really fun stuff. I mean, even some of the c customer testimonials would be great, even if they go with