Growth is now a trust problem, not a marketing problem
βif you want to actually sell software and grow your business, growth is a trust problem now. Who do I trust to actually purchase it from? Who do I trust to use it from? Do I believe in the team that is building behind it? Because otherwise, I'm just going to go create my own, if I don't believe that they're going to continue to worry about my needs and they're going to continue evolving it.β
βfor any founder in the first year, investing in paid as the means of growth is a death trap. Because until you actually figure it out, your true stable product market fit, and until you are able to drive it in some sort of organic way, whether it's your organic socials, whether it's organic search, whatever it is, investing into paid, I think, is a really horrible idea. Because you haven't even optimized or really learned all of your funnels.β
βIt's absolutely relevant. You don't know your LTV. Unless you've been in the business for five years plus, you do not know your LTV. So if I'm doing a paid marketing, the payback period is the only thing I look at. How quickly do I recuperate my money on average from any given campaign?β
Don't lock users into subscriptions as the only monetization
βdo not lock people in subscription as the only way to monetize you. I know that we all love our annual recurring revenue, and our multiples are decided by annual recurring revenue. But if your product is anything like a bursty usage, where it's not super consistent when creativity strikes or project strikes, I need to go and I do a lot of work in it, and then I might have some periods of more of a downtime or much lighter usage, allowing flexibility in your monetization model for ad hoc purchases can mean the world of incrementality for your overall monetization capture potential.β
Every Lovable employee ships code and posts on social
βEvery single employee at Lovable expected to ship code to production. Every single employee is expected to build their own satellite apps or to build their own products or even have a site gig that is running on Lovable. Every single employee at Lovable is expected to do their own marketing. Everybody's encouraged to post on social, to build their brand, to go talk about what they are doing at Lovable and building in public.β
Segment closed enterprise deals via targeted billboards outside offices
βone of my favorite stories is I worked with Maya, who was at Segment, and the way Segment has worked, and I don't know, that story just sticks with me. The one they wanted to close an enterprise contract, they would buy a billboard right in front of that office, and they would put their ad on that billboard, addressing that company specifically. And it would be the cheapest way to close a six, seven-digit contract because they directly targeted every single employee in that company with the billboard.β
Communities fail when treated as support dumping grounds
βthe biggest one is that they treat us as just their support outlet. Our support team cannot get through the queue. Let's create a community for it to be a community support so people can help each other. And it just becomes a dumping ground of negative sentiment, because when people cannot get in touch with you through support channels, they go to community to vent about their issues. So it becomes a very negative place.β
Free giveaways should outspend paid marketing budgets
βif you look at your overall marketing spend, your free giveaways, whether it's part freemium, whether it's discount codes or whatnot, has to be bigger than your paid marketing spend. That I truly believe is the right ratio for every single company. Because if you're not using your product to acquire customers in some sort of offers way, I think that you're just giving too much money away to Googles and nettos of the world and not putting enough pressure on your product to wow people.β
βAt Lovable, we are committed to launching every day, so there's like ongoing buzz that is happening. Lovable is evolving every single day. Every single day is getting better. Something is improving, and that is very important for us to just stay relevant in the category, and then on top of it, every one to two months, we make big what we call tier one launches, which bundle a bunch of functionalities, where there is a story behind it.β
Big distribution incumbents are the scariest competitors
βI always worry about the big boys and girls in the world. So OpenAI's, Anthropic, Google's, Apple's, more so than our competitors that spring up from the bottom or from sideways. And the reason that I worry about them more, and I think everybody should be worried about them more, they just have the distribution hold in the market that is unparalleled. And in the world where product functionality becomes more commoditized of what you can create, distribution and growth becomes the reasons to win.β