Lenny Distilled

Building in public accelerates trust and growth

Growth → Acquisition

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 a lot, this is part of our growth secret sauce.

Elena VernaThe new AI growth playbook for 2026 | How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year
Supporting

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?

Elena VernaThe new AI growth playbook for 2026 | How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year
Supporting

If you asked me that five years ago, I would've said that's SEO. It's search engine optimization. Go on Google, that's your organic marketing strategy. If you ask me what's your organic marketing strategy right now, to me it's all about social.

Elena VernaThe new AI growth playbook for 2026 | How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year
Supporting

You cannot just have ChatGPT write your copy and post it, you need to show personality. There needs to be humanity that it goes through it. And it's not natural for everybody, and it feels very awkward sometimes to start. But it's important to people to see who is building the company, because there's so much competition now on functionality, so they can rally behind a team.

Elena VernaThe new AI growth playbook for 2026 | How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year