20VC: Lovable on Hitting $17.5M in ARR in 3 Months | Adding $2.1M ARR Every Week | Hitting 85% Day 30 Retention: Better than ChatGPT | The Story of Europe's Fastest Scaling Company with Anton Osika

0:00growth starts ramping up after we launch. We're growing 1 million ARR per week at some point. How is she growing now, week? 2 million ARR per week. We have 1 -1 retention that's better than chat - GPT's 1 -1 retention on the pink customers. The most important thing is talent and culture, and there is more raw available talent in Europe. It only, you think that matters, is execution. So if you can outperform your execution, then I'm scared. This is 20VC with me Harry Stebbings. In today we have Anton Asika, co -founder and CEO, Loveable, the fastest growing start -up in Europe. With Loveable, you can turn your idea into an app in seconds with just a prompt.

0:41Check out these stats. After just three months, the company has scaled to 17 .5 million in annual recurring revenue. They are adding 2 million in net new revenue every single week. That's like $300 ,000 a day. Even better, Lovable has 85 % day 30 retention rate, making it more attentive than Chatch EPT. This is such an incredible story to unpack today. But before we dive in today, here are two fun facts about our newest brand sponsor, Kajabi. First, their customers just crossed a collective $8 billion in total revenue. Wow! Now, second, Kajabi's users keep 100 % of their earnings, with the average Kajabi creator bringing in over $30 ,000 per year.

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4:15Visit aws .amazon .com -flash .ru to get started. You have now arrived at your destination. Anton, fastest growing company in Europe. What a title, but first, thank you so much for joining me, Steyman. Thank you, Harry. It's always fun to talk to you. That is very, very kind of you. It's the British accent, but I want to start actually pre -lovable. And I spoke to a couple of your investors in your first company, Depict. And so I just want to start there. What are your biggest takeaways from depicts that shaped how you think about lovable? We scaled super, super fast that the picked as well. And we did like moving just very fast, scrappy, nailed that really well.

4:57I think we did really well on this high potential talent as well. Quite junior with high potential talent. And you can see that from all the companies coming out from the picked, the picked mafia is absolutely absolutely real. But I think what works in the beginning is to say yes, until a lot of opportunities and try out what works. Once you become more people and you have to follow up and maintain everything that you start, you have to be much more focused. So we said yes to too many things at the peak. And we didn't like take this one thing and that we could do 10 times better than anyone else.

5:33And then the economics macro wise turned worse. We didn't continue the scaling of trajectory that we were on initially. I was just really in Oscar actually with Paul BookHeight, the founder of Gmail. And he said, you need three great features in a product. And it's really that simple and make them really, really great. Do you agree with that product simplicity towards feature depth? Yeah, I think just on a product level, You should say no to as many things as possible and make it more of an app -ball feeling that things you do, you do them as a purpose. And so we have, hey, don't say yes to everything.

6:14Is there anything else which you did or didn't do that really shaped how you think about the early days of lovable? Moving fast and I would say talent is the most important thing in culture, how you work together, how people interact and collaborate quickly. those are the two most important things for almost any company. Let's just unpack talent because it's been a cool, I spoke to Fradric at Crayandum before this and he said we had to chat about this too. So you favor talent over experience which sounds kind of obvious respectfully. You're going to go for like an experienced untalented person.

6:52But how do you think about your hiring lessons around experience versus talent? I think experience can be a negative thing in some cases. You often want people who are super ambitious and they have a lot of proof they are more open -minded towards how you should work together in the team. For many roles, I think junior talent is, first of all, it's super easy to get them into the company. They're not already committed to some, like, many, their projects, the best people that you can hire at the young age. they would go on and become founders and then you can't hire them anymore, right? So that's why junior people are often quite good.

7:31Will you hire them if they haven't done what you're hiring them to do before? The benefits of having someone hire some of the experiences, well I can see they've been at X company for four years, they can do that at my company. Will you hire someone who hasn't done what you're asking them to do before? For most, in most cases, yes. But if he's engineering, you have to know software engineering, of course. And for some roles, you definitely want in that domain, someone with a lot of experience. Like who can coach and who can tell the more junior people what great looks like. These are going to sound strange questions, but you mentioned the word ambition there.

8:09Did you always know that you would be successful when you were younger building? Did you always think I will be successful in something that I do? No, I don't think so. I was always frustrated with how people around me didn't understand things as quickly as me. It felt like, and then at some point I felt like, well, sometimes it's me being too naive. That's something I learned over time. But many of the truths about what's going to happen in the future have, I have a very good track record on. And I think that's one of the superpowers that have made me successful. So I felt that I had That's a superpower.

8:46I didn't know it would translate into building something successfully. How did you first make money? What was your first entrepreneurial thing? I think so. I always knurled out with computers and setting up our land parties when I was a kid and so on. I noticed that all neighbors and friends of families had computers and they had some issue and they wanted my help and many of them wanted to pay me afterwards. So that became a bit of a side hustle when I was a young teenager. Did you do gaming when you were younger? Yeah. You're like, I'm so sorry to be rude, but you're like the easiest archetype because you fit like all the characteristics of like successful founders that I have on the show.

9:30It's like number one made money early, number two exaling gaming, both very, very clear archetypes. I want to move to lovable. So GPT engineers starts as a side project. Where does the idea come from? We've left a page. GPT engineers starts as a side project. Where does the idea come from? So this was the spring after chat GPT came out and I've been playing with the the pre -cursors of that as well. I've been from already a year before then I've been felt there's a massive wave coming from scaling up these models with more data and the peak is not set up for, I was currently not set up for leveraging that.

10:11I was actually traveling with my now wife, engagement to trip, and when you're traveling, I get extra creative. I don't think there was anyone who was talking about AI agents at the time, but I during those sitting on an airplane, I started writing a lot of like, okay, you should hook them up and make, you basically put the large language model in a for loop, and then you can have it to do a lot of agent things. And then when I'm back in Sweden, I'm like, okay, where do I apply this? Obviously on software engineering. And I've been talking to people about this and I felt no one was really sufficiently imaginative to what I was thinking about.

10:50And I had to prove a point in that this is already now. With the current, the first versions of chativity APIs, you can build an agent at writes code. And then I put together that door to I drank a lot of coffee and then I just crammed away and I got the first version that really impressed people. You write a crata snake game and then you get a running snake game on your computer. That was the first version of what we were building now. How long did it take you to build V1 with that caffeinated session? I think it was one main weekend and then a bit of a polish over with a few hours here and there and two weekends after that.

11:26What are the biggest lessons or advice from building many different V1s? for many founders to be listening. For most first -time founders, I would really focus on the user and the user problem and say, how can I get one person to love what I'm building in this view? That's my general advice. I didn't do that. I just put out the video on Twitter and it got dozens of academic references and millions of people using it. He taped me to that. So we have this weekend. We released the product. What happens then, So I wasn't clear to me that I would build a business on this at all. I just thought it was fun that there was an open source project.

12:08So I started nourishing a community that went on to work on this open source project. And while I went to my co -founders, I was like, okay, so this thing is absolutely huge. I've been thinking of doing something else to be honest. And here's a pretty like this is a bit of a wake -up call for me. that it might be time to find a good replacement for me as a CTO at the peak. That's what happened next. And then a few months passed. And so a few months passed, the community continues to grow. What happens then? No, but I figure out a good replacement for me. I decide I need, I want to have a great co -founder that I can have as like my partnering crime here.

12:47And there was a guy who is the most super efficient, just zero fluff and bullshit. engineer and then entrepreneur. So he had sold the company previously that I wanted to work with. And I backed his apartment and said, hey, let's take a walk and plan the future. He got him on board and then he started building and created the first version of what became level -lovable. So we're building the first version of Lovable. You've got your co -founder. Talk to me about that time. When did we release and how did the official release go with Lovable as a product in company? So the launch of a lovable like the product gave us one year after we started building and in the meantime we launch like wait listed preview versions called GPT engineer apps.

13:33I mean that's the getting user feedback cycle and building building up I guess some some excitement about what we were working on and employer branding as well. And the first versions, I think they were very good. That's where they were good. They were not very good. And we had some people really liking it. But a whole moment, they didn't click for sufficiently many people. Like, okay, this is how I get real value from this. When we went on to iterate over the coming year, we packaged together all of these things so that you can ask today lovable, I want to build a basically a SaaS business. And then people have built their entire SaaS companies and get made money or why just prompting our AI.

14:16I just want to break down a couple of different things that you said that you mentioned the wait list. Do you have any big lessons or advice on how to do a wait list strategy well? The wait lists are useful in that you can control exactly how many people you want to get on board and take use or introduce well with. So I think that's the, like, just get sufficiently many people on the wait list, find a good way to qualify who you want to talk to, like you probably have different type of offices on who you should talk to, who you're going to sell into, who has the most value from your product, and then qualify only those and talk to them.

14:51When you do the user interviews and use your feedback sessions, what are your big lessons or piece of advice on how to do them well? What questions are good? What questions are bad? Any lessons? For us, there are two different type of user interviews. We have this type where we just see them use the product and say, do they understand the product and so on. That's more about user experience, in to you. And the other one is to understand if they have just tried the product a bit, we ask them, okay, so you try the product a bit, why are you even interested in this? And ask them what problems they're facing in their business, try to identify what's the biggest pain point they're actually looking to solve.

15:29It might be, oh, I want to get more customers. And I think I can get more customers if I can show to my customers that I can get the first version out with AI more quickly, those other questions. How does it change the structure of teams? When you look at teams today, you have obviously so far engineers, you have designers, you have developers, you have front end, you have back end. How does it change the structure of teams themselves? Harry, if you want to create a personal website for you, it's super productive. You can do it. You don't have a team. It's just you. You just create it with AI.

16:01It's not a team. Like a team just allows you down. Maybe you get some inputs from a designer. Like, how does this work? How do you think it should look? and so on. But once you have existing software with users and then you want to iterate and change that software, AI might absolutely bring down mess up your entire codebase. AI might mess up your codebase. So then you would want to work with a software engineer that knows how to bring, have quality and consistently keep quality in the product. You mentioned like people took a bit time to find a home moment. How important is the time to a home moment?

16:38I think it's very important and it's funny because you asked me this question and I think we are very bad at making the time to a home moment super short. I think we could double our conversion rates if we become better at speed to a home moment. But I can say it's something we're doing. Let me take credit for something. When you come to Lavable, you just see a prompt box. It's very inviting. Instead of getting to a landing page, you see a prompt box and And then for the ones that do enter a prompt box, you get a quite quick, or the first, the harmon. And there has to be many a harmonies in loveable.

17:13They're quite a complex software engineer. It's a very complex feature that we are doing well. And that's what I would recommend. Just give the user something interactive with instant reward. You mentioned that the prompt box itself. I've had many guests on the show say before that almost the biggest sin that ChatGPT did was make chat the default UI for a future of AI. Do you think that chat and the prompting that we have today in lovable and many other products is the right default UI for an age of AI? I think yes, prompting, you can do almost anything with prompting you and explaining your thoughts in written form.

17:52It's also easy to implement anything, but it's going to get more advanced through time with not just prompting. I love the way you took a deep breath there. That's like, this is a wavy question. I'm thinking about it a lot. I mean, you're building the interface for creating software and no one knows what that interface is going to look like. But the prompt thing, yes, I think it remains. I'm kind of going chronologically through the story because it's an amazing story. You rejected YC. Why did you reject YC? We felt that at best YC would be a lot of dilution and some acceleration, but a lot of dilution and some acceleration, and at worst it would be a distraction to go to SF and go through all of these like, fun things that happen when you go to IC.

18:39And we just took some fun things that and build focus on talent. The seed round, when does the seed round come? Does that come post launch or pre launch? So that comes before we launch the first, our first to wait list of our product. How did that seed round go? So before you've launched the weight list of the product. How did that round go? Yeah, so I have this advice that I've always gone by, which is to work with investors that you like. And I had some people that I know from before that I just think are amazing people that I want to have by my side in things called sour, things go well. And I spoke to a few, I kept it very brief and I got like a preemptive offer and I said, yeah, let's do it.

19:25How big was this round? So we took three million and then we added on, I got the advice to just get a lot of cash because you never know what happens in the markets. So we raised quite a large pre -season job, almost eight million dollars. Would you advise founders to raise quite large pre -season rounds if they can? If the money's on the table, do you say take it? Depends on how you want to operate. Like if you like talking to investors, which at the time I was like, no, I just want to build a technology. Then the answer, sure, it takes a big visit, so you can get time to figure things out. If you like talking to investors, which I think you should, I would go with more of race more effectively as smaller rounds.

20:08We're seeing a lot of founders today be immensely dilution sensitive from day one in a way that they haven't been before. Like 10 % is like the max they're willing to give up on around. How did you think about dilution sensitivity? It's a good question. I think here again, I can have a very wise person who's like, no, dilution doesn't matter so much. It's all about the size of the pie. And I was both affected by that advice as well as my like, no, meaning my dilution, this is my life's work. So that's mainly how I think about it now. So we now raise this round. We have to wait this. We're skipping a little bit.

20:44Take me to go live day. When does that happen? And how does go live go? We go live with Lavable 21st of November last year. It was only four months ago. Yes, four months ago. Isn't it nuts how much life changes in four months? It's true, it can change really fast. Yeah, alright. It's a November 2024 launch. From day one, is it just nuts? How does it go? I mean, we had users, ping users on like earlier version, that was called something else. And then our launch, I think it was just one of these like wow launches, we could have gotten like 10 times more press on the launch 100 % but people start noticing like wow this is really good and we continue to quickly improve things in the products, chip things very quickly.

21:31So it ramps like growth starts ramping up after we launch and we were like wow we're growing 1 million ARR per week at some point and that just keeps going so accelerating that was in December and then it just keeps accelerating. We, it was a bit on the technical side it was a bit frustrating because we have some, a lot of scaling issues that we run into and the team is like, okay, we can continue to patch this but they say like we'll let's rewrite everything while we're seeing this explosive growth and there's so many quick fixes that we want to do on the product side. So you re -roaded ASAP and stabilized it then?

22:10Yeah, so it took a bit more than 8 -3 -7 -8 -7 -8. It's not completely done today, but that we took eight weeks and then now we're shipping faster. Akinashi, you mentioned that a millionaire are a week. How much are you growing now a week? A two million a year, a week. Two million a week now. Yeah. It's so funny for me to, because when you live in a world of venture, you don't get this, I don't think, and I didn't mean that really to you, but your companies go from one to four in a year. And that's like four acts in a year, amazing. That would be good. And then you're like growing two million hours in a week.

22:49Does that sink in? Like, do you know how nuts that is? No, I guess not. I mean, a lot of things last few weeks have just blunted me and I'm just focused on all the things that we have to fix and improve, and that's all I think about. What do you think are the most common ways or methods that companies' development process slows down? For founders listening, what should they watch out for that often happens? What makes product development slower is usually that you have a complex product, that you have a lot of requirements. You said earlier, Harry, that you have three things that are good in your product.

23:27I think that's generally a very wise thing to do. Simplicity leads to product direction, knowing where you're going and what you're working on. When you look back since the start of Loveable, where from a product perspective did you invest in spend time where with the benefit of hindsight you shouldn't have done? At Loveable we thought a lot about the community and like community features inside of the product. I think that could have made a lot of sense if we had seen slower growth but now that the growth is not something we're not concerned, you don't need community features to power growth.

24:02So that's I think that was pretty much twist. Where's the leverage? Do you agree with the centrum build it and they will come? The growth has been amazing. From day one, it feels like it's since GPT engineer even. People have just kind of come for the product because it's been amazing and different. Do you believe build it and they will come actually does stand true today? If you have a very strong vision of how that where there is untaffed potential, If you really know that deep down and you have track record of showing that, then build it and they will come, it's going to work. And you also have the runway, your personal energy runway and so on to really make it work and they make them come.

24:44But in most cases, that is too risky. It's too risky to just build it and they will come and it's... You can build it and make them come or try to make them come at the same time. And that's much lower risk. You said there about energy and it reminded me of a statement that Nick Ravallu said to me in a show when he was talking about his Investing and he said the most successful founders that he invests in are between 30 and 35 They don't have the naivety of the incredibly young founders But they don't have the bluntly tiredness in some ways or that you know you have more energy when you're younger of older founders.

25:22How do you think about that given your age today? I think energy is super important and I think the NaviTis is a benefit of man. But I made mistake, a lot of mistakes. It was the first time manager as well at the picked pretty much. What was the biggest mistake you made? Thinking that we should change the culture and become more of a skill up, something slow moving or like more management layers when we became 40 people. That was the biggest mistake I did. Why did you think that? I mean, my co -founder and other senior people we spoke to said, like, oh, now you have to hire executives and so on.

26:02And that was a bad idea. I think you got it. And so did you start hiring executives? Pretty much, yeah. And then they don't work? One person now hired didn't work out, which slowed me down and then kind of set us back a lot. And so when you think about that, What would your advice be to other founders? Don't believe the bullshit you can scale way longer without execs? Many founders hire mercenary style, maybe like skilled people, but they are running in their lane. I hire generalists, and I try to empower them as much as possible. If you have a lot of general super, super smart, generalists that you're doing a lot of smart, like new initiatives and so on, adding executives all on top of them is high -risk and like reward is questionable.