Nad Chishtie, Founding Designer, Head of Design at Lovable: Turning non-technical people into builders

0:00Hello and welcome back to the Skinner Europe show. I'm Seb Johnson. Today I'm joined by an amazing guest, Nad, who's the founding designer, head of design at Lovable, which is famous for its branding, virality. Everybody knows it. So Nad, thank you for joining me today. How are you doing?

0:13Nad Chishtie:Yeah, really good. Thanks. And thank you for having me as well today. Where are you calling from? Just Farringdon. So just down the road from you. So just in London. Amazing. And the news that I really want to talk about is London, right? So Lovable is doubling down in London. Can you tell me kind of what that means in practice? yeah for sure so we've always had like a bit of a skunkworks presence here so i've actually been based here for over two years whilst i've been here but um i mean fundamentally we think that we can build a category defining company from europe um we think that loveable is an example of that and really we're just entering our next scale of growth and for us london's integral to that and so you know really amazing i think just sadiq khan today was talking about how deep the talent pool is here really amazing like deep technical talent people with amazing products and design taste also people who are used to building globally from day one so multiple languages multiple markets regulatory frameworks and so amazing ecosystem here and then we're going to officially grow to around 70 people this year and that's a mixture of go-to-market but also working on the core products across engineering products and design that's amazing and so yeah Yeah, you mentioned a few things like product design, technical talent, go to market.

1:27Is the London office going to be like a blend of everything then? Almost like a mini HQ in some respects.

1:32Nad Chishtie:Yeah, I mean, Stockholm is always our center of gravity and like we'll always be in our HQ. It's in our, you know, it's in our blood, it's in our veins. But London will be like an official hub essentially. And so a hub for like both go to market, but also like EPD, meaning engineering, product and design. Super exciting. Yeah. And what's been the experience and history of the London office? So I guess you've been there for two years. How did it start? Was it you by yourself? Have you built a team there? Has it been a sort of like random collection of people? What's it been like to date and kind of what's led to this commitment to double down there?

2:07Nad Chishtie:Yeah, so historically, I mean, we care a lot about talent density. And we also care a lot about our in-office, like working culture as well. And so Stockholm's always been HQ. It's been our, you know, our center of gravity. but um we have made exceptions like over the years of like if somebody's truly great and we're flexing for um so there's been i'd say a bit of a ragtag skunkworks team here of um a few people um but you know we've had a dotted line into uh sweden as well so you know i've spent a week a month there for the last two years um roughly if not more actually if i were to go back and count and um and yeah so it's just the next um just the next chapter i think for us to like more officially commit to London and build out a more formal hub here.

2:51And how's your journey been at Lovable? You know, you've been the founding designer. I remember you went for that famous switch from the Loveheart to like the L. And the design keeps, it keeps changing, but there's a real core theme to it. The brand is really strong. How's it been being there from, you know, two, two and a half years ago?

3:12Nad Chishtie:Yeah, I mean, on reflection, like just super fun and like really, really energizing um overall um but it's been great i mean we've been on this unprecedented speed run which in some ways uh maybe caught us out a little bit so you know not very very uncommon to rebrand as everything is going extremely well and so when when i decided to do that like definitely a few raised eyebrows of internally where it was like why are we changing everything if everything's working really well um but honestly just uh just really great just the scale that we're at now um honestly the numbers are like dizzying in terms of uh 50 million projects made to date um what's really impressive is those 50 million projects are driving 720 million views a month and so we're just at this scale now where um it's not about like can we create a great piece of technology or a great platform it's like people depend on this they depend on it to build the next big thing and to build um you know build whatever they're about and so that just kind of comes with more responsibility and so hence why uh kind of everything is maturing as well um you know be it brand but also product and also enterprise and the full works i mean i think it's a phenomenal product i built my entire site on novel and it's um it's crazy how much better it gets you know when i first used it it was like this amazing moment of like why usable anything but even now when compared to when i first tried it it's so robust and it just does everything you know i've actually tried using clawed code for building some of the things that i want to build and actually loveable has always been so much better in terms of like the capabilities and the functionality um but i want to talk about design you know you've been doing design for two and a half years what have been some of the guiding design principles that have guided you in your journey at loveable yeah so um the work that we always come back to internally is empowerment so and we think lovable is doing its job if it's empowering you fundamentally and so we used to think about lovable as a collaborator of you know hey you could you know co-create with lovable and you can create things now we actually think of it more like your co-founder and it's more like how can it fill in any blank that you have whatsoever and the interesting thing with co-founders is they're kind of the yin to your yang and they can mold to you know fill in whatever you need and also as you go on your own founding journey as well the problems get different over time as well right like early stage is probably building the thing um later stage is like scaling distributing it and finding more users and monetizing and stuff like that um and so really the prevailing theme i think is like empowerment like how do we create something where people feel truly empowered over time and that's the i'd say the enduring design principle that sort of overarches absolutely everything and yeah so when you talk about the non-technical it's like i think it was 80 percent of people are non-technical um and i think there's like 35 percent already revenue generating so it's it's people building real businesses who are people like me who like very limited technical capabilities but to i've got a business idea and want to want to make something with it totally um yeah and it's uh it's crazy and it's it's actually just genuinely i'll say this sincerely just genuinely wonderful to see that you know if if i look back in hindsight we'll look back at sort of pre-ai as a kind of crazy time where if you had a problem and you wanted it to be solved you had to wait for a team in silicon valley to agree you had a problem in the first place and then wait for them to solve it in their vision rather than your own um and so it's just completely wild um and like lots of fun as well what advice would you give to somebody like me who is leveraging lovable leveraging ai tools i'm a generalist and i'm always trying to think about design and i'm always trying to think about how i can make my brand and my design better when i'm using ai tools when i'm trying to like i'm essentially prompting builds right what's the best way that i can try and think about design when i'm using so many ai tools to actually build the product itself so i think that actually in general we have this admissible sense to be able to know when we consume something whether or not the person that made it cared and I think this is completely true across if you think back to I don't know childhood and like even consuming a meal and knowing when something's made with love versus when it isn't um the same is true of like music um you know you hear something for the first time you hear a beat and you're like okay that either makes me smile or it doesn't um and the same is true of software actually and so I think people over index on brand for example as oh like what is the visual emblem that I need as my like badge for my company or like whatever I'd say like forget all of that and just ask yourself like do I care like ideally you're working on something that you care and then that's that's the easy unlock and then the thing you create communicates it um but I would challenge yourself across those dimensions of like oh will the people who consume this know that I cared and so that might be you know going the extra mile on some positioning because you just truly understand your audience or it might be just making something painfully obvious that you normally have to dig for or it might be communicating production value you're like oh when people land I want them to say wow and so I'd say like looking through this lens of like like how do you communicate that you care is like actually one of the biggest unlocks for like elevating both brand and like design quality generally speaking.

8:38Nad Chishtie:That's really interesting how have you done that at Lovable are there certain things where you have been like really focused on to make that care come through yeah like honestly it's um every single level and especially early on we were very strategic around it as well where um you know we wanted people even down to the name we wanted uh to stand out we wanted to create an experience where if you heard the name you'd be like oh okay like hang on a second let me let me pay attention for a second and then it almost turns this breadcrumb of you hear the name you click on it you go there there's something unique about it um it speaks to something new it does it in an enduring way and then you know that just builds over time so it's honestly not one thing it's like every every single layer i'd say and what do you think about this the change in the nature of roles in the sense of like loveable is unlocking generalists to build anything right so at the moment i'm using loveable both in my professional site and i'm building a crm and so that you know to do that You need this combination of a bit of go-to-market skills, a bit of design skills, a bit of operation, technical.

9:45As a generalist, you're sort of fulfilling a lot of these roles and AI is enabling you to do a lot of that stuff. How do you see roles changing more broadly? Do you see the rise of more specialists like yourself who are amazing at doing the top 1 % of design where AI can do a lot of average design? do you see actually that we're going to see more and more generalists who can do a bit of engineering a bit of written market a bit of design equipped with best the better ai tools what do you think about how these roles are going to change so i think i think both generalists and specialists

10:17Nad Chishtie:are going to have a really great time in the future and going to be able to do like super interesting things i think generalists have a really interesting edge in the you can have exceptional range because you can carry things end to end and so that means when it comes to zero to one things, changing workflows, changing tasks, which then actually changes jobs in their entirety. I think generalists are going to be able to have girls completely shape that and are really well positioned to be at the front of all of this. And then separately, even if you create something, coming back to earlier, we were talking about, you know, really caring.

10:51Nad Chishtie:People care about different things, right? And so like as a specialist, I think now you're empowered to go even deeper on absolutely anything and so that means you're actually able to chase this you know to borrow your phrasing this top one percent execution and that means um you know reaching new heights in the quality of your work or it might mean delegating um more to ai and then that means that you can free yourself up to work on more bigger picture or more strategy work as well one of the things i saw in the report was that two-thirds of the builders came from outside tech so these were not techie people there's not within the tech industry is that something that you had to think about when you were doing the design like how do we make a design that is both impactful and interesting but appeals not just to the the market that we live in the tech world but it sort of has this mass market appeal yeah 100 i mean we um the way that i think about our vision is that we are democratizing the ability to build.

11:51Nad Chishtie:And in most cases, that's for people who just never could build before. And by doing that, we're unlocking a lot of previously gatecapped human creativity as well. And when we first started originally, we actually did this napkin math. We were like, okay, we think that AI will be able to write all code in the world at some point. We realized this in 2023 at a time where people would actually laugh at us for saying this out loud. But we thought that was true. and then we asked ourselves if that's true what's the most impactful thing that we could do with this and we did this napkin math of developers are 0.6 0.7 percent of the planet and we thought even if we made developers a hundred times more productive we didn't we didn't think we'd change the world we were like okay maybe sass margins might change and silicon valley might change but in terms of why like impacting the wider world um we didn't think we'd get that and so we we sat down and we we did this sort of one percent math versus the 99 and then uh focused on empowering the other the other 99 and was that was that challenging for you i mean i know that your background has always been in tech but i know a lot of people that you hit and you target it they could be like students or teachers or anyone and everyone you know like like i've got my wife's uncle is building a site on lovable who is not at all in this world did you have to try and figure out how to reach those people or a design that resonates with them yeah and I was mostly and the early team like we were mostly inspired by truly horizontal products and so um you know I think about lovable like a web browser that could create the entire internet rather than just consume it um and I think about things like the iPhone and so um my mum for example um she doesn't care about camera specs she just wants to like use her phone to you know take great photos i'm a nerd so i do so i read upon even like supply chains of sensors and like sapphire and computational photography whatever but as a product as a consumer the iphone can meet both of us wherever we are and so i think about lovable in those terms as well of okay like lovable should be able to meet people both at their current expertise but also take them on a journey as well so you know you might start as a first-time builder or a first-time founder but over time that won't be the case anymore and you're going to be solving you know more and more problems and when you look back over the course of the last two and a half years are there is it like a design or a moment that you are the like that's your proudest moment in your lovable career i think there's there's maybe maybe two i mean first of all we had to convince people that lovable even existed in the first place and i i kid you not i remember the look on people's faces when we get on a call with them to show them the products and they'd be like why are we even talking like this is going to be it's going to be awful and so like seeing people's face change and actually i knew that we were ready to remove the waitlist for lovable when people would start to steal my laptop from me like i'd sit down with them and they'd be like hang on a second and they'd they'd take it away from me um so there's that and then there's also i don't know if you saw we shipped a new creative engine in lovable um that in uh kind of uplifts like design and visual quality that was some of the most fun i've had in like decades um actually and um the way that we built it was we wanted to avoid picking templates so the quicker way would have been predetermining what good looks like and then having an agent pick between them but that would have basically been templates in disguise and the problem with that would have been that um nobody's individual vision would have been served like you might as well go and use a website builder and just like like take that and change the color and that's it but instead we started to figure out how to unlock like true creativity from frontier models and then now we reached another outcome where um every single time you generate something it's truly unique and it serves your individual vision and like this is one of the most like personally as a designer who's always been technical um this is one of the most interesting spaces for me right now and i love it because it's actually i i had a brand before i built my site on lovable i've now changed my brand based on the brand that i built on lovable so it actually took what i already done it actually made it better and now i'm trying to retro fixing all of my other brand assets based on the branding this is very similar but it's just better it's just more polished it's just more interesting and it was so much easier for me to do that than it was on the tools that I was using, like Canva or Figma.

16:22And so that's definitely been my experience of like, wow, I've been able to build amazing designs on there. And now I need to fix everything else based on that. But like, I'm conscious, we're out of time. Nat, thank you so much for joining me. It is such exciting news to hear about your news in London. And like, I'm super excited to see the team grow. So thank you so much for the time.

16:38Nad Chishtie:No, thank you. And a pleasure to chat.

16:49You