Elena Verna

I bet you've seen this chart in an argument against PLG. Because, look, PLG Slack lost to SLG Teams. Don't be deceived.

1. Growth>Product for company success.
🛑 Great product <> successful company.
🟢 Great distribution or growth model = successful company. And a good enough product may be enough.

Every day companies with incredible products die because they don't have a distribution strategy. Every day shitty products thrive because of unfair distribution advantages.
Microsoft won by bundling Teams for *free* into their existing Office contracts. They gave Teams unfair distribution advantage that Office built. Then they gradually raised prices on future renewals to make ROI. It is monopoly-like behavior.
If mega enterprise goes after your category this way, you will struggle regardless of your growth model - PLG or SLG.

2. PLG is not enough in B2B.
PLG wins with SMB and lower Mid-Market. It can provide a unique, cost-effective way to acquire higher Mid-Market and Enterprise, but you will need Sales to capture full monetization potential.
PLG on its own is *never* an answer. A successful B2B will play across all motions: product-led, marketing-led, and sales-led.

👉 And by the way, PLG is why Slack even got as big as they have. No other growth model could face off with Microsoft so well. So kudos to Slack.

P.S. I'd like to see this chart in 10 years. The startup/midmarket is dominated by slack. Once these companies grow up, let's see how Teams holds up.

#growth #plg #b2b

So painfully accurate, it'll make you cringe.

Video by @tesstreg & Betches Media

#womenempowerment #womenempoweringwomen #culturechange

What does a Growth Team at Dropbox look like now?

➡ Growth model: Dropbox grows through PLG, where the majority of the revenue is self-serve. As such, the Growth team acts like a 'sales' team for the core product, comprising a sizable, cross-functional team of a few hundred people.

➡ Structure: As the Head of Growth, I oversee the Growth Product and Data teams.
The Growth Product is divided into:
- Driver Metrics pods: acquisition, activation, monetization
- Sharing Growth Loop pod
- Growth Infrastructure pod
- Mobile Growth pod
Each pod is led by a Growth Product Manager, supported by dedicated resources from Design, Engineering, Marketing, and Data.

➡ Metrics: As the Head of Growth, I hold revenue accountability. However, my team is responsible for revenue KPIs across driver metrics such as sign-ups, team invites, free-to-paid conversions, etc.

➡ Cultural values: Be data-driven. Be agile. Have high agency. Exhibit craft. Have a growth mindset.
Maintaining a growth mindset is most challenging because it involves embracing failures, which is inherently difficult since organizations typically try to avoid them. However, failure is how we learn. We have a Slack channel called # oh-sh1t where we post our failures, viewing them as opportunities to discover what works.

➡ ➡ More details on my blog-> https://lnkd.in/gfbng486

#growth

Reverse trial > standalone freemium OR trial.
Now I 💖 me my freemiums because they:
1. Lower cost of acquisition due to frictionless entry.
2. Customer focused—no credit card requirements or timing bounds mean we are on their terms, not ours.
3. Users build a habit of using your product early in the customer journey and on their timeline.
4. Pushes a version of your product to be commoditized in the market, raising stakes for innovation that can be monetized.
5. Forces you to understand what customers are willing to pay versus using time as a bandaid.
6. Allows for indirect monetization opportunities on a much larger user base.
6.1. Builds widespread brand advocacy and loops. Even if a user isn’t paying for your product, they’ll bring other people into your product who may pay. This feeds your growth loops so you can invest more in product development and less in acquisition marketing.
6.2. Network effects where free usage increases the value proposition for paid users.
7. Gain users in adjacent personas to inform future monetization models and use case expansion.

😥 But freemiums are terrible at converting to paid (top of the class is only at 5%), because customers optimize their behavior to avoid paywalls.
💰 So then all eyes on trial, as it excels in conversion (15% all day), but misses out on all of the freemium advantages above....

But not all is lost!
💡 Enter - Reverse Trial.
A reverse trial puts customers in a freemium experience with a timed free trial with access to paid capabilities which reverts to a traditional freemium product after the free trial ends.
* Users get to build habits with paid features from the start.
* They understand the monetization model faster and better.
* It's much better to play a psychological 'take away' game, not 'try me'.
Give it a try!

#growth

Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/edzqyTmD

Failure just hits differently now...
#growth

A tale as old as time.
#sales #product

$60M ARR in just over 6 months. Lovable continues to be on 🚀. How?

Well, of course there’s strong product-market fit pull… but in my first few weeks here, I’ve noticed this team operates on a whole different level:

→ Velocity is so freaking FAST. No endless debates - just build, ship, learn.

→ High trust: if you can convince one other teammate, you’re good to go (how amazing is that!??)

→ Full ownership: every task improves as it develops 🤯 - no scope-down mentality.

→ Tons of passion: everyone cares deeply about what we’re building and delivering for customers.

→ Everyone obsesses over making the product genuinely… lovable ❤️

Are we perfect? Hah, nope.
But this team is small (still well under 50 employees), scrappy, and outworking just about everyone.

P.S. Stay tuned for our new referral program, guided onboarding, collaboration updates (you guess it, moving it to free), and credit rollover improvements 💪

#startups #AI #PLG #growth #Lovable

I really believe that the Minimal Viable Product (MVP) era is over. When building was hard and expensive, “it has the minimum functionality needed to solve the problem” was enough. Shipping anything felt impressive.

But now there are 100+ product options, and even customers themselves can just vibe-code their own solution. The cost of development has collapsed. Everyone can ship. Everyone has an MVP. “Minimal utility” is no longer a differentiator. Good riddance, if you ask me.

Minimal products now have to feel human. They need taste. Personality. Brand. They have to evoke something: trust, delight, curiosity, even a smile.
Sometimes that’s the only differentiation left.

We’re in the MLP era: Minimal Lovable Product.
When building is easy, making people care is the hard part.
#growth

Big release day at Lovable. Our product and marketing teams are vibing today :)

We shipped the following upgrades:
1. Message queues - stack up work and walk away: your agent keeps grinding.

2. Automated browser testing - Lovable opens its own browser, clicks through your product like a real user, and catches bugs before you do.
QA without 'It works on my browser' energy.

3. Google auth in one prompt - If you’ve ever set up OAuth manually, you know this used to be a character-building exercise.

Our beta testers saw a 71% improvement in successfully completing complex tasks! Give this a shot!

What's next up? A little unscramble puzzle for ya:
elbiom ppa
tset tnemnorisvne
sselmaes pap sliame
#lovable

Last year I hired my first vibe coder. And I believe we are witnessing a start of a new profession.

Why hire? I needed help vibe coding things I didn’t have time to do myself. Too many ideas. Too many experiments. Not enough hours!!

His job was to vibe code whatever needed to get done - products, campaigns, templates, internal tools.

His name’s Lazar Jovanovic and today he’s on Lenny Rachitsky ’s Podcast talking about his role and what it looks like in practice.

Episode-> https://lnkd.in/gYcbp6r5

He’s pushed our product to the limit, given constant, high-signal feedback to our dev team, and built vibe-coded apps that we’ve used across partnerships, marketing, community, and growth. It’s worked so well that we’re now opening a Vibe Coder in Residence program to bring even more people in to vibe code with us at Lovable.

I think we’re watching a new profession emerge: full-time vibe coder.

Low key a dream job… Part PM, part designer, part marketer. Spinning up product, flows, copy, experiments, launches. Using AI to move fast and get to outcomes.

Yes, everyone vibe codes a bit now. But having people dedicated to it full time changes the pace of the whole team.

More shipped. More learning. Way less overhead.
#vibecoding

Just onboarded to Cursor, connected it to Slack, noticed that our (Lovable’s) upgrade button had inconsistent colors and… opened a pull request to fix it in prod. To non-technical people like me, this is black magic. I feel absolutely unstoppable and should not be trusted.
We are living in the future.
#BecomeAiNative

You know what's the best growth tactic out there right now? Building trust. Boring, I know. But oh how important. And yet most org designs, dev cycles, and growth teams actively work against it. Congrats, we played ourselves.

Here’s the part that should actually scare you: Most products are interchangeable now. Yes, including yours.

AI is flattening features, speed, and price. Switching costs are collapsing. Incumbents, startups, and even your own users can recreate your value faster than your next sprint planning meeting.

At the same time, SEO, paid, and social are getting more expensive, noisier, and less predictable. What’s working isn’t smarter tactics or new channels.

It’s customer trust. The kind that makes people bet on you, stick with you, and bring others along.

Trust built by shipping in public, sharing real roadmaps, responding fast to feedback, sweating the product details, aligning monetization with real outcomes, and letting users become the distribution.

When features get commoditized, people don’t stick with what’s cheapest or fastest. They stick with what they believe will keep delivering.

More in my blog post here 👉 https://lnkd.in/gmJ5c_xp.

P.S. Thank you to my sponsor Cello! Grow your referrals with them :)
#growth

International Women’s Day is coming up. Flowers and sweets are nice...
But unlocking new opportunities is better. More powerful. Sometimes life changing. That’s the kind of appreciation women deserve.

->>>Enter SheBuilds on Lovable 💃

This International Women’s Day, we’re going to help women *all over the world* unlock new capabilities, new confidence, and become new builders. No rejections. Everyone will be able to participate.

Who’s in???? Let’s break some records while we’re at it. Possibly even Guinness-level ones???

Join the waitlist to be first to know all the deets -> shebuilds.lovable.app

P.S. There may or may not be a FREE Lovable day involved. I can’t confirm or deny it… yet.

P.S.S Please share so more women can see this!
#womenintech #lovable

I see a lot of companies fall into the same vicious cycle. It usually starts with something that sounds rational: “let’s prioritize what’s measurable and tied to immediate revenue.”

So every decision becomes about short-term lift.
But what you get is:
- squeezing existing users harder (hello price increases)
- endless funnel tweaks
- no patience for creativity or UX
- innovation gets deprioritized
- dark patterns emerge (let's hide our free plan, anyone?)
Basically, optimization theater.

For a while, numbers go up. But then the product gets worse. Word of mouth slows. Growth stalls. So you squeeze even harder. That’s the death spiral.

Of course, the opposite extreme isn’t great either.
We’ve all seen products with massive love and usage but no business model. look at Twitter, Snapchat early days, Discord, Wikipedia, Craigslist.

Huge audiences. Tons of engagement. Years of “cool… but how do we actually make money?". That’s not sustainable either.

The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle.

At Lovable, i’m grateful we’re in a phase where revenue is growing because we’re obsessing over user experience: making the product better, faster, simpler, more delightful. But we openly talk about our monetization model and how we can improve that too. Less squeezing. More value.

Ironically, that’s what drives the most durable revenue anyway. Because when every idea has to prove immediate, perfectly measurable ROI, it’s usually not discipline. It’s fear. And it’s often an early sign of long-term decline.
#growth

Huge news! To celebrate International Women’s Day, we’re making Lovable completely FREE on March 8th!!! No opt-ins, no gatekeeping. No fluff talk. Just BUILDING and SHIPPING. Because unlocking new skills beats flowers & chocolates every.single.time.

That's right - It’s free for *everyone* building with us as part of SheBuilds. Huge thanks to Anthropic for helping us make this happen!

Ladies, it’s time to build. Not someday. Not when you’re “ready.” The time is NOW. And men? JOIN IN. We need you! We shall create the future together.

So go solo, or grab a fellow woman, a friend, a sibling, a parent, your kid, your partner, or a teammate. Build something together.

Aaand we are offering in-person community-led events are happening around the world, with experienced builders on hand to help you ship, not overthink. 32 events across 17 countries, and counting:
-> Check: shebuilds.lovable.app

Where will I be? In our Stockholm HQ, building (with my daughter). If you want to join me in Stockholm, drop a comment and we'll get back to you if there is room!

But wait, there is more! Every participant also gets $100 in Claude API tokens and $250 in Stripe fee credits.

Warning: Lovable may be habit-forming. Results include shipping faster, feeling unreasonably powerful, and questioning why you ever waited for permission.

It's time to build.
#womenintech

I love me a good benchmark/insights report and Semrush’s AI visibility index delivers. Some interesting facts that all of us should pay attention to:

Checkout the report here: https://bit.ly/4nAfMQO

1. AI-generated results are projected to overtake traditional search traffic by 2028. Not shocking, but good to have a date.

2. Visitors from AI search convert at ~4.4× the rate of traditional search visitors.
Seen this first hand... That’s not “maybe better” - that’s worth paying attention to.

3. Traffic isn’t a good metric anymore. Sorry marketing. AI systems synthesize answers, meaning users often don’t click through traditional results - they get what they need inside the AI response itself.

4. ChatGPT and Google AI Mode favor different sources.
Meaning: your “AI optimization strategy” cannot be a single checklist. It’s fragmented and model-dependent. This one is annoying - can't they make it easier for us!?

5. AI visibility ≠ SEO visibility.
Ranking on Google doesn’t mean you’ll show up in AI answers. But non-branded SEO is still a solid first step - it forces you to learn how to create the right content and talk about your product clearly. That said, third-party mentions matter more.

The future of discovery isn’t blue links. It’s answers (duh). If you’re not inside the response, you basically don’t exist. The problem? There’s no clean, scalable playbook for how to win this yet. Everyone’s experimenting. But I know we will figure it out.

#growth #ai

We’ve launched a startup program at Lovable! Qualifying startups get 10K in Lovable credits if their VC, incubator, or accelerator partners with us.

Startups, if your roadmap currently starts with “once we hire X,” this is for you. Ship fast, test with real users, and get to real traction today - all on Lovable! Go bug your VC, accelerator, and incubator to join our startup program ASAP.

VC's, accelerators, and incubators - run, don't walk to apply: https://lnkd.in/g76xfrfk

#startup #growth

Please help me celebrate SheBuilds on Lovable Season 2 winners!

B2B: SiteAlign by Teresa Hill: https://lnkd.in/gX25e7XY
B2C: Lets Get Real by Jena Zangs and Shannon Seaver NBCT: https://lnkd.in/ggh77Emr
Social Good: Get To Give by Maria Presley and Line Hjartarson: https://lnkd.in/gJ-UXpWM

For 48 hours, 200+ women came together and shipped. But what happened here wasn’t just about that. It was about rewriting patterns. It was watching women lead, build, mentor, and create — not in reaction to the system, but in ownership of it.

Where women weren't the exception in the room - they were the standard. That’s the future of tech!

And we are just getting started at SheBuilds!

Next Shebuilds on Lovable will me on the International Woman's Day. Save the date. We are going to break some records!

Who runs the world???

#womenintech

My 2025 Lovable vibes (I started building in June)
(and yours are too, in your Lovable account! ❤️ )

Drove 100K+ visitors to apps I built myself (not baaaad)
Sent 1K+ messages to Lovable 🫨
I shipped ~300K lines of code!!! (!!!)
My apps got remixed 200+ times
Said please and thank you every time (You’re welcome, future overlords.)

A year ago, I couldn’t ship anything on my own. I'm a PM/Marketer, but I'm not an engineer. Everything depended on the... roadmap. Now? If I have an idea and it ships. Same day sometimes. It feels so magical and addicting. And I have to pinch myself that I get paid to vibe code.

What a time to be a non-technical person with the power to build! 🚀 My surface area for impact has increased so much!

What did I build? Just a few examples:
Personal: A tutoring app for my son, Lovable offer distribution for my Substack
Prototypes: Pricing pages, Top ups, etc
Public apps: SheBuilds portal, Lovable AI avatar generator, my portfolio site
Internal tools: Memo docs, Workflow optimizations, Internal apps

#growth #lovable

I'm sorry! 😆
#ai

Am I the only one stuck in this terrible cycle? Why does doing nothing for 3 minutes feel like such a waste?
#corporatelife

We’re giving 3 schools FREE access to Lovable ($100K value!). Your votes decide which ones! 🚀

Students are entering a workforce where AI is table stakes and vibe coding is a real skill. Let’s help schools prepare real builders for the future.

VOTE HERE-> https://lnkd.in/gtX_UQKZ

P.S. We already offer 50% off for students via self-serve and school-wide deployments through enterprise sales.

#lovable

Soon, Lovable is shipping separate testing and prod environments - something desperately needed for any production app.

Because once an app is live, making changes without risking production becomes painfully hard. We need to fix that.

We’re opening this to early testers first.
If you want in, sign up here 👇
https://lnkd.in/grcgBdGi

#lovable

Today we launched Vibe Coders in Residence program at Lovable!!! VCIR is a group of independent builders (and absolutely incredible vibe-coders) collaborating alongside us to push what’s possible as we build Lovable on... Lovable.

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. Vibe coding has officially entered the job market.

Now, we’re all already vibe coding nonstop, but we wanted to go further. The way software gets built is changing and working with more Vibe Coders let us live in that future. I even find myself vibe coding most of the time now, something I never would have imagined.

Erich Kottke, Shane Spencer, Jon Higginbotham, Bobby Siegfried - I'm so excited to build along side you. Learn from you. And see what is possible!

Growth=vibe coding now.

LFG!
#vibecoding

Everyone is stuck debating whether AI will take their job. The answer is almost certainly yes (I know, I know - it’s terrifying). That part isn’t interesting anymore.
The more important question is this: What if this is also the biggest opportunity of your career?

There’s a short window to get radically ahead by going AI-native. But you need to act now. Not in five years. In the next few months. After that, it will just becomes table stakes and the edge disappears.

Because AI isn’t taking your job. Being complacent about what's happening around you will.

But what I keep seeing instead: people critiquing AI. Pointing out flaws. Mocking outputs. Arguing about em dashes.

That mindset is already obsolete.

AI should be your default starting point, not your backup plan. Writing. Thinking. Designing. Coding. Planning. If you’re manually doing work AI can do faster and better, that’s not craftsmanship. It’s wasted time when no time could be wasted.

Here’s the part people don’t like hearing: the demand for AI-native employees is exploding right now. Companies are starting to care less about fancy titles and padded resumes and more about who can actually ship. People with good taste, real business sense, and insane drive.

If you’re stuck in a role you don’t love, waiting for permission, budget, or prioritization, this moment isn’t something to fear. It’s your opening.

Stop watching. Stop critiquing. Stop waiting to feel ready.
Start building.

Want to know how to get started? read on my blog: https://lnkd.in/ga8KcqCV

And huge thank you to my this week's blog sponsor, Salespeak.ai! Check them out to make sure your product is discoverable by ai.

#ai #growth

Everyone: SaaS is dead. Saaspocalypse!

Also everyone: Hiring a Head of Growth and Marketing. Massive opportunity ahead. Must scale fast.

#tech

We will be friends. I know it.
#vibecoding