Growth lessons behind Lovable’s $6.6B valuation (shared on Lenny’s podcast!)
Talking about my favorite product on my favorite podcast.
It’s been a big week for Lovable - we raised at a $6.6B valuation just 13 months after launch. Wowza.
Everyone keeps asking for the secret sauce behind the growth. Sorry to disappoint - there’s no magic new channel. We just do a few things differently, and we’re relentless about them.
I was back on Lenny’s Podcast for the fourth time (but who’s counting?), and we talked about what growth at Lovable actually looks like in practice. Here are a few of the major growth topics that I wanted to unpack a bit.
Optimize for empathy & emotion
Build in public
Shipping velocity is everything
Invest in your community
Social>search
Give a lot of shit away
Like I told Lenny: Not every company can or should be like Lovable! A very unique set of circumstances came together to make this outlier growth trajectory possible: be at the right place, at the right time, with a right group of people, and in the fast moving waters of a category that is rapidly expanding. But still, Lovable has 100’s of competitors and we are doing quite well - so here are some of the key growth lessons that worked for us.
This post is brought to you by the Semrush Enterprise AI Visibility Index. This is the definitive research into AI search and can power every brand’s strategy.
Explore interactive leaderboards for key industries to see who’s winning the most mentions, the top competitors, and the dominant sources.
The best part? The study is completely free, including data-backed tactics you can use to fuel your brand’s rise to the top of AI search.
1 - Optimize for empathy & emotion
When the cost of building comes down, building for utility is no longer enough. The value of creating empathy and emotion goes up.
Product and Growth teams used to be able to focus on the pure product utility and what the features did. With the rise of AI-enabled building, those features are becoming commoditized - anyone can rebuild your app’s capabilities. But the experience of the product and how it connects with people is what lasts.
This can’t just be an afterthought, and it’s one of Lovable’s unfair advantages: it’s literally right there in the name! Everything we build has to be ‘lovable.’ Those moments of delight are what keep bringing people back.
Read more: Brand… a Product job now?
2 - Shipping velocity is everything
Shipping velocity is everything, because products & markets are evolving so fast.
‘Velocity of Shipping’ is our #1 dev team value. And for a product like Lovable, it has to be, because Product-Market Fit is now a constantly moving target. This is because both the underlying technology (which shapes the product) and the customer expectations (which shape the market) are both changing on a monthly basis. PMF used to be something you could achieve and then gradually scale… now, features can become outdated almost as soon as they’ve shipped.
Read more: The Product-Market Fit Treadmill: Why every AI company is sprinting just to stay in place
3 - Build in public
Building in Public is the natural distribution mechanism for fast-shipping companies.
When you’re shipping this fast, traditional marketing timelines don’t make sense. You can’t finalize the product and then finalize an elaborate campaign to promote it, months later. The overall volume of updates would likely overwhelm marketing teams, anyway.
‘Build In Public’ (BIP) turns this weakness into a strength: Use the momentum of constant shipping to your advantage.
Plus, this approach has another huge advantage - it builds trust. In a super competitive field, loyalty is key. BIP creates a connection between the team behind the product and the users, which builds a sense of buy-in.
Read more: Building In Public is scary. Do it anyway.
4 - Invest in your community
When software starts to feel less like a tool and more like a place.
But community doesn’t just magically appear. You have to design for it.
At Lovable, it’s been non-negotiable because we’re early in a category. People are still figuring out what’s possible, and they need a place to compare notes, brainstorm ideas, and unblock each other.
What actually matters:
Give users a place to show their work. We run on Discord - nothing fancy. It works because the value is the people, not the platform.
Staff it. Community doesn’t self-heal. If questions go unanswered, it dies. Stewardship is the job.
Reward the helpers. Call them out, give early access, share their builds. This is how “ambassadors” happen without over-engineering it.
Show up as a team. Engineers, PMs, designers. If users feel like they’re yelling into the void, you’ve already lost.
Let users teach. The best content is never your marketing team. It’s users explaining how they actually use the product.
Community is a force multiplier. It boosts word of mouth, social distribution, retention. It turns solo users into a network.
And in a crowded market, that matters. Features are easy to copy. Community isn’t. When people stick around because they feel invested, the switching costs are emotional, not technical.
5 - Social>search
Distribution shift is happening right in front of us.
Marketing channels are getting reshuffled in real time, and not nearly enough teams are talking and freaking out about it.
Five years ago, “organic strategy” was easy. SEO. Google. Ship content, wait.
That playbook is breaking.
Organic today is social. Full stop.
What is your CEO/leadership posting?
What is your team posting?
What are creators/influencers saying on your behalf?
What are your users sharing without being asked (WOM, baby)?
That’s the channel now. Even in B2B. Especially in B2B.
Here’s the uncomfortable part: most companies aren’t built for this.
They’re optimized for brand accounts, legal approvals, and campaigns.
Not for employees showing up daily, building in public, and shipping opinions. And that’s … a problem. I don’t know how to fix it though.
Eyeballs didn’t disappear. They moved. And if your growth strategy still starts with “let’s rank on Google,” you’re optimizing for where attention used to be, not where it actually lives today.
P.S. Traditional paid performance marketing isn’t a meaningful lever for us at Lovable. Performance works when there’s existing demand. We’re building a new category, so the job isn’t capturing demand - it’s creating it.
6 - Give a lot of shit away
Certain AI products are basically born for aggressive PLG.
If you’re pulling back on freemium because of margins, you’re playing the wrong game. You should be giving your AI away.
Why this works:
It’s a brand-new category - people don’t get it until they use it
The first “blow my socks off” moment lives inside the product, not in your ads
Word of mouth is the growth engine
Competition is brutal and moving fast
The old marketing playbook is quietly dying
So yes, LLMs are expensive. And yes, we’re handing out Lovable credits like candy to our free users, hackathons, events, and teams who want to experiment.
That’s not an OpEx problem. That’s a marketing investment.
Classic PLG math still applies: ship real value, drive usage, let the loops compound. In AI, the fastest way to grow is to let people experience the magic before you try to monetize it.
Read more: Why AI doesn’t mean the end of Freemium
Speaking of giving stuff away - all paid Growth Scoop subscribers now get one year of Lovable for free. Enjoy!
It’s all coming together
Here’s the thing: These aren’t six separate tactics you can cherry-pick. They all come together as a flywheel.
Ship fast… which forces you to Build in Public… which pumps up your Community… which improves your ability to build with Empathy… which makes people want to tell others… across social channels… which creates effective opportunities for you to Give Shit Away… which creates more usage and more requests that you need to ship fast.
It all compounds. It’s an entire system that’s built to make the most of this unique moment and this unique company. Right place, right time, right team, right fast-moving waters!
That’s why this approach won’t work for every business. And it requires operators to unlearn their habits and patterns (I had to unlearn… a lot. I find less than 40% of what I know applies nowadays).
A lot has to come together to make this work. But when it does? That’s when you get $200M ARR and a $6.6B valuation in a year. And we’re literally just getting started.
Be sure to check out the full conversation with Lenny, here:
Edited by Jonathan Yagel.
There's so much good in this article Elena! Starting with: "When software starts to feel less like a tool and more like a place." Looking at Lovable's competitors, this is exactly where they fall short. Thank you for sharing🤗
Throwing out the playbook is often the real sign of mastery. Playbooks are useful when you are learning the game. They become dangerous when the context changes but the rules do not.
At scale, pattern matching beats frameworks. Judgment beats checklists. This reads less like rebellion and more like earned clarity.