Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedElena Verna: belief
18 Dec 2025 Lenny's Podcast The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth)
“I think community is really important here because you need to bring people together as they're exploring these capabilities and as they're seeing what's possible so they can bounce off each other and they can help each other out.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Elena Verna
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 18 Dec 2025
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…That is fascinating. This episode is brought to you by Persona, the verified identity platform, helping organizations onboard users, fight fraud, and build trust. We talk a lot on this podcast about the amazing advances in AI, but this can be a double-edged sword. For every wow moment, there are fraudsters using the same tech to wreak havoc, laundering money, taking over employee identities and impersonating businesses. Persona helps combat these threats with automated user, business, and employee verification. Whether you're looking to catch candidate fraud, meet age restrictions, or keep your platform safe, Persona helps you verify users in a way that's tailored to your specific needs. Best of all, Persona makes it easy to know who you're dealing with without adding friction for good users. This is why leading platforms like Etsy, LinkedIn, Square, and Lyft trust Persona to secure their platform. Persona is also offering my listeners 500 free services per month for one full year. Just head to withpersona.com/lenny to get started. That's with persona.com/lenny. Thanks again to Persona for sponsoring this episode. Let me go back to summarize just real quick the growth levers, I want to move in a somewhat different direction. Things that help Lovable grow. One is just build something that blows your socks off, as you said. I love these phrases out here. The second is make noise in the market. And the way that Lovable does this, the CEO's tweeting constantly. You build something that blows people's socks off so that they share things on socials themselves, plus this influencer marketing component, and just this idea of building in public has been really helpful. This point about activation being embedded within the product team of the AI agent essentially, so it's essentially not the growth team thinking about activation. It's the product team that is building the AI magic that is obsessed with activation. It feels like those are the main growth levers. Is there anything else that I missed? Community. I think community is really important here because you need to bring people together as they're exploring these capabilities and as they're seeing what's possible so they can bounce off each other and they can help each other out. I would say community also amplifies that word of mouth. It amplifies all of the social posting. It amplifies retention mechanisms for you as well. The community has been a huge part of Lovable's success as well, and that's something that was started very early on. It runs on Discord, so it's nothing fancy. It's not like we build anything completely from scratch for ourselves. And it has hundreds of thousands of members and it's very lively. We have community managers that are making sure that all of the questions get answered and the right groups are being created. We have incredible ambassador program now as well of people doing it. I would say community here, again, of really making software more human is very important role. Now, obviously not everybody can build a community, but maybe at least plugging in into somebody's community is quite important as well. And then there's another one, unless you have a question on community. No, keep going.…
Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.