$13B Lovable Co-Founder: Build a Profitable AI Product From Scratch in 30 Minutes

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0:35Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. We're abandoning the word vibe coding.

0:47Anton Osika:Yeah, vibe works for demo, but we're way past that. You don't build your company on vibes. This is Anton Osika. He launched Lovable, where anyone can build an app without code. Less than two years later, the company is worth$13 billion. Together, apps built on Lovable now get nearly a billion visits every month. And more than a third of the people building businesses on the platform are already making money. Like I've seen those dogs built on Lovable. $300 ,000 a month? Yes. Why? How is that a business idea? I think the creativity is the biggest differentiator as the execution becomes easier. What everyone in the knowledge worker space should be building for yourself to make their lives easier.

1:28Anton Osika:Everyone should build an agent for themselves. Is it okay if I have to do the prompt here? Please, yeah. I want to see your prompt. When I tried Vibe coding, there were so many errors even a year ago. Like this QA was all manual, you would run into bugs. Now you said you're abandoning the word Vibe coding. Yeah, Vibe works for demo, but we're way past that. you don't build your company on vibes and people are running their businesses on our platform and i have these amazing founders sabrine she's building a startup called plink and she she wanted to solve a real problem that she saw in the world which is that can i trust this person i'm dating and she's been able to reach thousands of thousands of dollars in revenue on something that's just for social good.

2:19Anton Osika:And the beautiful thing that I think it comes back to is that it used to be so hard to build a software and it used to be a lot of overhead to run your business. And you can now simplify a lot of those things. And that's not something you do on Vibes. It's something you do on a serious platform. And when you think about a problem that you're solving, do you have a framework in your head? How do you solve a problem that seems kind of big? Do you separate it into tasks? Because, okay, like I want to build this content machine, for example, I don't know. When you have a problem that you want to automate, what is your thinking process of how to do it step by step and whether some of the problems are worth automating and some not?

2:56Anton Osika:I think it's usually good to just do things manually and then be systematic about, okay, how can I break this down into pieces that I can test and see if I can get value from if something is broken that replicates the thing I used to do manually? If you're over-engineering or you're overly ambitious from the get-go, then you might end up being very close. But there's some small part somewhere that doesn't work in the way that you thought it would work or your solution wasn't the right one. And you want to avoid that. You want to iterate towards perfection. So do you think, because doers are becoming entrepreneurs, do you think people who are day-to-day working on some boring tasks are becoming the best position for the next three years to become entrepreneurs?

3:43We're seeing from our customer data that most people on our platform, they have more than 11 years of professional experience.

3:53Anton Osika:And from that, they've become very close to a problem that they've been frustrated that they can't solve with the skills that they had at the time. And now the person who's closest to the problem, they can actually go out and solve that problem. And that's one of the biggest unlocks of these new technologies. Do you see that group of people generating the most money with Lavable? For most of our customers, it's people who are building and they're already generating revenue themselves or they're trucking towards and they're building a business towards generating revenue. Most of them have experience.

4:29Anton Osika:There's also a lot of young people who are building companies, as you might know, in this day and age. And that also often is connected with having advantages of seeing things with fresh eyes for the first time. if you're a younger person. But we're seeing people across the spectrum, across the entire world, every continent and every country building very serious things on the platform. Love it. If someone's watching and they're like, okay, this sounds incredible. I want to build something. Can you give me some ideas? What do you think are the top three opportunities to build these days? I think what you want to do is you want to solve a problem that is not just on the internet, but you usually want to build something connected to the real world, a combination of a service and the product.

5:17Anton Osika:And those two things together can actually make it really good. This is the type of direction that I would be going if I was starting a business myself these days. So it's even something that hasn't existed. I don't think you need to start something that is completely new either. You can take a fresh take on something. You can go out and talk to people who aren't yet adopting a solution that exists somewhere and see how can I make it so exciting for them that they want to adopt it. It could be something in how they get their groceries or how they get things in their home taken care of. And you can personalize it for them if you're an entrepreneur with a hustler mentality.

5:57Finding a good idea is the first step. The next one is growing it into something bigger. I love learning how successful founders think and steal a lot of it for my own work. The best cases go into my newsletter. It's called Future Proof, so you can repeat them yourself. In my recent issue, I show how the top founders use AI for everyday tasks. There are rules and prompts step by step, plus a bonus. The one prompt I run every single month that helps me with my productivity. Get it right now? The link is down below. So do you have any ideas what everyone in the knowledge worker space should be building for yourself to make their lives easier?

6:38Anton Osika:I think everyone should build an agent for themselves. And if you do it from scratch or you use AI to build it for you from scratch, then you get a better understanding for how does an agent work? Because you can ask, how did you implement building this agent? So I think that's something we could build today. I also wanted to actually make a refresh on your personal website, if you wouldn't mind. Oh, please. Let's do it. Absolutely. There was a specific challenge I heard about, which is how you handle everyone who wants to talk to you. And that's sending emails, I imagine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And building an app specifically that helps sort that out with help of AI.

7:16By the way, let me ask quickly, when do you build an agent? When do you build an app?

7:21Anton Osika:I think everything that needs data is an app. and then if you want to oversee what is in the data and have some pieces that visualizes what this app does, then you, of course, want a graphical user interface. A recent thing we've added to Lovable is that for every single app, you can connect that to any agent harness. It's called agent integrations and then it's almost like the data that you're talking to is a part of the agent. You can use Lovable as that agent, you can use Cloval, Chat, whatever. So these things are actually, I would say, merging, depending on how you like to think about it.

7:59Anton Osika:So Marina, I said I really wanted to create a new version of your website. Yeah, and you know what? I wanted to just, I don't know if Flowable is going to do it automatically. It looks the way it looks. It used to be much more stylish, but then we redid it for AEO, GEO, whatever it is. And we didn't really pay attention to design. We just paid attention to being visible by chatbots and agents. So that's why it looks like that. There is a primitive in Lovable to optimize for AEO and SEO. Do I need to say it to Lovable? We'll first make it look good and then we'll optimize it for AEO, okay? All right.

8:32Anton Osika:Okay, so tell me something about what you care about with your website in terms of the brand and the aesthetics. Absolutely. So Silicon Valley Girl is a podcast that helps people see this bridge between them and Silicon Valley. Because for a lot of people, Silicon Valley is where weird stuff happens, AI, whatever it is. My goal is to translate what that AI means for their daily lives. For an entrepreneur, that means building things faster. For a mom, that means managing household with some agents. And maybe in 10 years, having a robot that does the laundry. For someone who's an artist, that means just managing the whole production flow with AI.

9:12And I interview founders and scientists who are building those tools and ask them to show me what I can do today to feel the magic of AI.

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10:08Anton Osika:great let's see if we can make a new version of the website based on that just so that it has something to reference i think we can put in the url to the current website now what lovable is going to do is that it's going to research your current website look at how it looks look at how it's implemented and then it might depending on how you want to use it ask you some clarifying questions or it will just give you the first new version that we can look at and iterate from there if we if we don't think it's perfect yet can i see the prompting that's going on there yeah you can click and see what's happening under the hood here are the details of how it's thinking through looking at finding the current website that you have today and to be able to compare with that one so the color grid we have white red black and i was thinking we can go back to your original problem statement build that and then we get back to see how the first how this new website the email there are so many different types of queries that come to our email so my initial thought was like an overview was going on categorized ai intelligence to tell me oh this was actually major is it okay if i do the prompt here please yeah i want to see your prompt okay so let me tell you what i heard you say and i'll have lovable listen in so you want a lead capture form for Silicon Valley Girl.

11:29Anton Osika:And anyone should be able to reach out to you and brought different types of opportunities. And then you and your team, they should be able to try it and see all the opportunities sorted by how relevant an AI thinks these are with a proposed answer. And then when they are maybe let the choose what the AI proposed or they do some edits, they can send send back the answer to the person who reached out. Is that correct? Yeah. The question is, should it be inside the email? Because we already have our email listed on several websites. Or do you think we should now just list the website so that they fill in the form?

12:09Anton Osika:Yeah, you could take care of the inbound emails as well. That's a great question. Let's start with this. And then we can use the same flow and connect and read the emails as well later on. So we can do both. Okay. What kind of opportunities should people be able to submit? The thing is, so when I'm thinking about the forums on the website, I want it to be, first of all, as free-flowing as possible to give people some freedom. Just write our own. I think in the interest of time, let's tell Lovable, be as fast as possible at implementing this as well. Shall I just write it down? Yes, that's just possible.

12:46And don't limit to any use case, right?

12:48Anton Osika:Yeah. So we'll let it build? Yeah, now we can just let it build. It's going to take a few minutes. You're like me. You're like, what's happening here? Oh, yeah. It copied my style really well. Lovable keeps asking you which design you prefer. And you can zoom in on them if you want to, or just pick the one you prefer. I think I like this one a lot. Let's do it. Yeah. So this, like a knowledge worker can just build for themselves. What separates something like this that is very personal from a business that can be built on Lovable? How do you distinguish what idea is going to make you money? Like I've seen those dogs build on lovable.

13:24I could not believe when my team was like, have you seen this website?

13:28Anton Osika:The paintings you order with the dog. I mean,$300 ,000 a month? Yes. Why? On dog paintings. Explain it to me. How is that a business idea? So the founder, he's obviously very curious and creative. and when he sets his mind to something, he goes through with it. I think that's the main differentiator if you can build a serious business on this platform or if you can just build a tool for yourself. Both are good outcomes. But for building that business, then it usually comes down to how hard are you going to work to make this business work? And are you going to be able to make people who would be your customers care about you and understand that this is something exciting that they want to be a part of?

14:15So when I'm looking at a lot of businesses as an entrepreneur myself, I'm like, okay, even when I have ideas, I tell myself, especially if it's like a dog-like idea, like, oh, I'll make a dog look like a painting. This can be done with ChatGPT with an easy prompt, right? How do I tell myself as an entrepreneur to keep pushing? Like, I don't know if you talk to that guy because he's, I think, the best example of it because I tried and I could do the same, similar thing with ChatGPT. How do you not stop when you know Chajupiti, Claude can do this with one prompt?

14:50Anton Osika:Yeah, so Damien, who built this Surrealism World website, he doesn't just create the images for the dog. He sends it home to you as a portrait. And I think entrepreneurship is usually about combining those new discoveries into a service or a solution that hasn't been built before. that's when you can really make people care about it. And that's what he did. Combining the website, the payments, and somehow finding marketing the service, of course. And this is amazing because he added this extra feature and turns out there is a market for it. So how do you, first of all, how do you know there is a market for it and how do you price it right?

15:35Even when it comes to lovable, right? When it comes to pricing, how do you think about it?

15:39Anton Osika:And there are different approaches. You can be just your home in your garage, but the most reliable and I think fastest way to learn about your customers, which is key, is to get in front of 10 customers or potential customers and tell them about what you're thinking of building and actually dig into what they care about. Just ask a lot of questions from your customers. What's the pain that you're experiencing? What are the interests that you're excited about? And then going in front of 10 customers and try to make one of them actually buy and pay for what you're building. Is that what you do as well with Laval?

16:13Do you still talk to 10 people before you build a new feature?

16:17Anton Osika:That's what we try to do, yes. That's what the product team tries to do. And you think 10 is a good number? I think 10 is a good starting point, yes. And then in terms of pricing, I think you should get 10 really big fans of your product. And one way to know that they are really big fans is to not make it too cheap and not make it free. Because it's only if they actually pay that you know that this is something they really care about. You introduce that friction to know that they really like the product. And then you should hope that they spread the word and make them feel special and make them spread the word about the product that they are actually paying their hard-earned money for buying.

16:59Anton Osika:And then hopefully you get more customers from them. And over time, figure out how to scale that distribution. Yeah. And also knowing how big it can get. Because if you have a lot of ambition, sometimes you think, oh, maybe this is a too small problem to solve. Or do you think a good entrepreneur starts with a very small problem and then finds a will to scale it? I think it comes from both sides. Some of the most authentic products, I think they start with a problem for yourself. I was to some extent passionate about building lovable because I felt that there's so many ideas, both from me and people around me, that will never come to fruition because of how hard it used to be to build software.

17:41Anton Osika:And that's what we started. And being able to give anyone who's really close to the problems and who have that ambition and ideas, the tools to do it. That's what our mission remains to this date. Okay. Let's see what it's building for us. This is building work with Marina brand deals. Anything, tell us your name, what's it about, budget or timeline. I like it. We can polish the UI later, but just from your point of view, the first reaction, what do you think about this? I think it's great. Cool. I like that it's also opportunity. So it like filters for serious requests. Let's test it out with some example data.

18:20Anton Osika:Wow. Only such opportunities. Okay, what am I proposing? You want to sponsor the podcast? Sponsor, yes. Sponsor pod. Okay, send opportunity. And then here we can see the inbox now, right? That's great. Well, I'd love to see the budget right here. So I can prioritize. Paratize it, okay. Let me show you how you can iterate a bit on the visuals by creating a new draft. So what you would do then is you go up and you click new draft at the top under the title. Here, right? Correct. Oh, so it's going to create the same version, but looking different? Yeah, and then we can choose which one we prefer.

18:58Anton Osika:And then we can use the microphone again and say, hey, let's improve the styling a bit. You can maybe find Marina's Beehive website and take the branding from there, which I think looks pretty good. And let's say while we're iterating on the branding, we should put your face on there. So if you just search for your name, take a copy of photo, we can paste it back into Lovable. And then we can ask you to put on your face in a way that makes it feel more personal. Great photo. I'll do this on my signature. And we just put it here. You can just drag it in from up there, I think. Add it to branding?

19:38Anton Osika:Yeah, add it to the top. To the top? I wonder, will it look stylish enough? I think it will understand that this is a photo of your face. And we will add it to the top. Photo was added. I think it looks better. Do you want to check if we also want to add the new branding, if we like that one, by going back to the other draft?

20:04Anton Osika:ah this is so much better yeah great we can also look at the website meanwhile do you want to look at it i like that you're also multitasking yeah okay so we asked for a new take on your website what do you what do you think i think it's great i think it looks amazing question is it geo and ao that's a great question click on seo and ai search. And here you can do a bunch of things. The thing that I think is the simplest thing to do is to just tell Laval, hey, we want this geo optimized by doing a scan on how can we improve discoverability for AI agents and Google search. So these are example questions that you could do if you want the research, how can we differentiate more for a specific audience?

20:50Anton Osika:But now Laval is going to run your full SEO and AO. Can we make sure that the team receives an email when a request comes in and that people who submit the form get an email that it was submitted? I think it's fun with all this listening. I know I have too many agents. But it's Whisperflow and Granola. Yeah. Same as me. Yeah, because Granola is recording. It's going to give me feedback on how I did on this podcast right after I have an agent that grabs the transcript and then gives me feedback. I should have this. And Whisperflow is just... In my meetings with Senka, she's going to roast me. Yeah, actually it's so much because AI is more empathetic than my brain, for example, to me.

21:36Empathetic? Yeah, it's like, Marina, you did well. It's okay. It's so nice to me. Yeah, you mixed this up, but it's fine. Next time you're going to remember, it just makes me feel better. Because if it's me, I'm just roasting myself. Okay.

21:50Anton Osika:And here you can see some more of the primitives that is making lovable into a platform for you to run your company on. So you can obviously assume you can store data in there, you can handle emails, but you can also do things like payments, connecting to your existing emails or connecting to any other tools that you might use. You might, for example, want to get this posted in Slack when there's a new email coming in. Yeah, because now that I'm thinking, we have everything that's running inside different AIs and projects. If we connect all the emails, all the corporate emails to this and make it a hub where you see all the brand deals and what's working.