5 New Growth Rules Behind Lovable’s $200M ARR

Another AI SEO Hit $1M ARR in Just 3 Weeks

Dec 24, 2025

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When the Old Map Stops Working

In the journey of vibe coding, Lovable’s rise is a true outlier. In less than 2 years since its founding, the company surpassed $200 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), making it one of the fastest companies ever to reach this milestone.

Even more astonishing: this was achieved with a team of just 100 people—and only 30 people six months earlier. What’s the secret behind this explosive growth?

When Lenny asked Lovable’s Head of Growth, Elena Vera, for answers, she offered a disruptive perspective. Based on her 15–20 years of growth experience, she believes that only 30–40% of what worked before is still applicable in today’s AI era. The old growth playbook is breaking down. The old map can no longer guide a new journey.

In this piece, I have learned five new growth laws Lovable has distilled through practice. These principles don’t just challenge conventional wisdom—they’re a new operating manual designed for the speed and volatility of the AI age.

1. A Complete Reversal of Focus: From 95% Optimization to 95% Innovation

In traditional growth models, teams typically spend 95% of their time optimizing existing user journeys—improving conversion rates, refining funnels, and polishing current features. It’s a game of incremental improvement.

Lovable does the opposite.

According to Elena Vera, she now spends 95% of her time on “growth innovation” and only 5% on optimization. This radical shift comes from a clear understanding of the AI era’s defining traits: markets move at breakneck speed, and competitors emerge constantly. In such an environment, optimization alone can’t sustain leadership. The only way forward is continuous reinvention of the solution itself.

Here, “innovation” is not theoretical. It means building entirely new product extensions and growth loops. For example, Lovable’s growth team led the Shopify integration—something that would be almost unthinkable for a growth team in a traditional company.

In my previous roles, maybe 5% of my time went into growth innovation. Now it’s 95% innovation and only 5% optimization.

2. Product-Market Fit Is No Longer a Destination—It’s a Quarterly Sprint

Product-market fit (PMF) used to be a stable milestone—a moment when startups could finally relax and begin scaling with confidence. Its lifecycle was measured in years.

That era is over.

Lovable’s experience shows that the half-life of PMF has shrunk to just three months, driven by two forces:

Rapid technological leaps: Core AI models (LLMs) achieve major capability breakthroughs every few months, constantly raising the ceiling of what products can do.
Exploding user expectations: As technology advances, users’ expectations evolve just as quickly. What feels magical today becomes table stakes tomorrow.

As a result, companies must continuously re-earn PMF. Teams can no longer separate “finding PMF” from “scaling.” Instead, they must do both simultaneously—running one three-month sprint after another.

3. The Most Generous Marketing Strategy: Give Your Product Away Like Candy

AI products are expensive to operate, particularly due to the costs of LLM inference. This prompts many companies to erect paywalls early to protect their margins. Lovable once again takes the counterintuitive path: it gives away its product—generously and at scale.

This isn’t a simple freemium model. It’s a deliberate business strategy. Lovable treats free usage as a core marketing expense and a key growth lever. Instead of competing in increasingly crowded and expensive channels like Google Ads, the company reallocates marketing budget directly into the product.

By offering free credits—especially for hackathons or company events—Lovable lets users experience genuine “wow moments.” Those users then do the most effective marketing and activation on Lovable’s behalf, at a cost far lower than paid advertising.

This is part of our growth secret… you have to remove the barriers to entry. If a user says, ‘Hey, I want to run a hackathon at my company—can Lovable give us some free credits to play with?’ Why would we ever stop someone who wants to do all our marketing and activation for us?

4. Redefining Ownership: Activation Belongs to the Core Product Team

In most companies, user activation is the growth team’s top KPI. They optimize onboarding flows, tooltips, and copy to get users to value as quickly as possible.

Lovable’s structure is very different.

Their growth team spends very little time on activation. Why? Because activation happens the moment an AI agent truly understands user intent and produces a stunning result. That responsibility belongs to the core product team building the AI agent.

Obsessed with this moment, the product team continuously improves the entire experience—from first interaction to the hundredth. This creates a compounding effect that no traditional activation team could replicate.

This organizational design is also what makes Law #1 (95% innovation) possible. By freeing the growth team from incremental funnel tweaks, they can focus entirely on opening up new growth loops—like the Shopify integration.

5. Say Goodbye to MVP. Embrace MLP (Minimum Lovable Product)

The concept of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) has long been central to lean startup thinking: ship something usable as fast as possible to validate demand.

Elena Vera argues this idea is outdated. She proposes a new paradigm: the Minimum Lovable Product (MLP).

In an era of feature abundance and collapsing development costs, “viable” is no longer enough. From day one, a product must be lovable—emotionally delightful, surprising, and capable of making users say “wow.”

This mindset runs so deep at Lovable that an internal saying goes:

The fastest way to fix a bug at Lovable is to say, ‘This isn’t lovable.’ Everyone immediately jumps in to fix it.
‘Minimum viable product’ belongs to the 2010s. Viability was enough back then. Today, we’re in the era of the minimum lovable product—and that’s the only thing that matters.

Moving Forward Through Constant Reinvention

Returning to the opening metaphor: the old map no longer works. Lovable’s story shows that growth in the AI era is fundamentally different. It’s no longer about refining existing models—it’s about relentless innovation, rapid adaptation, and continuous reinvention.

These five laws are not a final map, but a first set of navigation principles for anyone building in a world where the map must be redrawn every three months.

Now it’s your turn to reflect: which old growth rule in your business needs to be broken first?