Elena Verna

Product-led sales assumes that there is a migration from an individual use case that you acquired an end user with and an escalation into an enterprise-level solution that solves enterprise-level problems.

Do not skip those onboarding questions. No, they do not detract for your onboarding completion rates and people that do drop off in the profiling stage, they were low intent anyways.

My goal professional is actually to have options so I can choose what I want to do. You start thinking about what can I do next year that will increase my option pool?

Full-time jobs are not the best way to monetize the skill that you have. Too many people blindly default to that package and don't explore other options.

Never ever once have I seen a rebrand or redesign, especially of UK marketing site produce good performance results.

Self-serve monetization has a cap of about $10,000. That's just how much we're able to process on the credit cards before they start getting flagged and declined by the banks.

The worst thing that you can do is to say, 'I'm going to do product-led growth,' or, 'I'm going to do product-led sales and I'm going to do it in marketing.' Recipe for disaster. You'll be failure mode within six months because product has to take accountability over selling of the product itself.

In traditional sales world, marketing creates pipeline for sales. Sales sells product. Product engages with a paid user to drive retention. In the product-led sales, product acquires and activates a customer and product creates pipeline for sales.

90% of product-led sales is converting the usage into an opportunity by finding a buyer outside, by finding the decision-maker outside.

You cannot consider a new product sign-up an MQL in the traditional sense. They're just not there yet. They have a fraction of the enterprise problem that they're solving and they're not ready to buy.

When you're doing organic search or paid search, you're making Google richer. You need to create your own or your earned channel that nobody else can compete in but you.

Your problem is not unique. I am 99% sure of that. Your problem has been felt by somebody somewhere and you trying to re-engineer solution is time lost to market.

Growth team can optimize, growth can maybe lift it by 10, 15%. But if you have core product and core marketing issues, growth team will not be able to fix them for you.

I guarantee you 75% of your customers in freemium product are not aware of what you're selling. Only focusing on monetization awareness can give you incredible output on driving monetization.

If you cannot collect the sample size in a month, we shouldn't test it, period. Because it's just then it's not fast enough.

To figure out your product market fit and how to distribute it, it's not something that you can outsource to somebody.

My north star metric is insights per minute. That's what I try to use whenever I have any live meetings with people.

Just removing steps or yanking or simplifying things to an oblivion where you lose an identity of what you even do or what you're capable of doing is a completely failed growth tactic.

If every single one of your initiatives that you're doing on growth is an experiment that's a problem. It's almost like a disease, like a paralyzing disease.

My goal professional is actually to have options so I can choose what I want to do. So I can choose what fits my life right now that I can choose what fits my skills and that fits my personality and that makes me happy.

Full-time jobs are not the best way to monetize the skill that you have. It's one of the packages that everybody should evaluate and take advantage of, but too many people blindly default to that package.

You can never skip the ideation, the design, the user research, the customer interview, the experimentation step. And you should always balance it with actually innovating yourself in your product.

To figure out your product market fit and how to distribute it, it's not something that you can outsource to somebody.

Growth team can optimize, growth can maybe lift it by 10, 15%. Maybe that's enough for you. Even that is on the upper end of what growth team will be able to do if there is a slow-down trajectory.

If you have core product and core marketing issues, growth team will not be able to fix them for you. You're going to have to address the big elephant in the room as to why business is slowing down in the first place.

Just don't do it if you expect immediate results out of it, or at least educate the team on how long it's going to take to get to the point where you think that there's going to be upside away from your original brand.

Most of growth loops spin out their ability to produce meaningful results for you within the first five to six to seven years.

Your number one priority is to create your own or your earned channel. So channel that you've earned and that nobody else can compete in but you.

When you're doing organic search or paid search, you're making Google richer. Great for Google. Google is an incredible company, but by dumping money into paid marketing, you are paying them and you're paying for their distribution and access to their distribution.

Algorithm can giveth, but algorithm can also taketh away at any point. And you have no control because you don't own those channels.

If you don't have them on your growth roadmap, you are going to be in some really big trouble over the next year to two years because your cost of acquisition is only going to go up.

Being inspired by some aspects of what your competition is doing in their experience is a wonderful place to originate an ideation or potentially try to implement into your product as well. But blatantly saying, 'Hey, we're going to copy all of these best tactics or all of these flows because, hey, they're doing better than us. Let's just rip them and do exactly the same' - that's where things really go wrong.

One email will never do anything. If you're going to go into email, please think about it as a series about communication, about how it interacts with product communication.

Experimentation cannot be the way that people make decisions in the company. There's still so much about knowing your user, understanding the market for your brain to connect all of those dots.

I'm very sorry to break it to all of you, but your problem is not unique. I am 99% sure of that. Your problem has been felt by somebody somewhere in probably many, many places and you trying to re-engineer solution is time lost to market and has a huge opportunity cost.

To figure out your product market fit and how to distribute it, it's not something that you can outsource to somebody.

Growth team can optimize, growth can maybe lift it by 10, 15%. Maybe that's enough for you. Even that is on the upper end of what growth team will be able to do if there is a slow-down trajectory.

If you have core product and core marketing issues, growth team will not be able to fix them for you. You're going to have to address the big elephant in the room as to why business is slowing down in the first place.

My rule of thumb, if we cannot collect the sample size in the month, we shouldn't test it, period. Because it's just then it's not fast enough.

Copying competition is like the fastest way to mediocrity because you'll never be a leader if you copied somebody else.

Every 18 months you need to introduce something new in order for it to continue evolving.

Not overlaying every single way that you can grow through product, through marketing and through sales as an evolution. Is a huge mistake that a lot of growth teams fail to iterate on and innovate on.

You have to fail to learn. You can't just constantly succeed. Success is an output of a lot of failures, but the question is, how much time do you have to fail?

I actually often call AI as average intelligence that helps me get the platform up. And then I add my human thinking and my human creativity on top of it to get it to the next level. But at least I can get this base level done with AI really freaking quickly.

We do a lot of trials for people. So trial work to see them in action for a couple of days. We pay them as part of the work trial. We have some probation periods that we start people on, because this company is not for everybody.

You cannot just have ChatGPT write your copy and post it, you need to show personality. There needs to be humanity that it goes through it. And it's not natural for everybody, and it feels very awkward sometimes to start. But it's important to people to see who is building the company, because there's so much competition now on functionality, so they can rally behind a team.

We work really hard on just addressing what's the success here looks like? What is it that we're building? What use cases are we building for? And then because we hire these people that are so passionate about it, the other two skills, by the way, that are super important is high agency and high autonomy. I can figure out things that are tangential to me that I don't need other specialties, so to speak.

We at Lovable try to hire the absolute best talent available out there that we can bring in, and that we can source and that we can attract to grow with. And what do I mean by that best talent? It's not that somebody who has been at really large companies, or somebody that has really done a lot of logos or has big success stories behind them. It's somebody who is extremely passionate about their job.

One of our biggest strategy is building in public, and it's coupled with employee socials, founder-led socials. And another one is giving your product away a lot, this is part of our growth secret sauce.

If somebody, one of our users stands up and say, hey, I'm going to have a hackathon at my work on Lovable, can you give us some free credits to play with? Why would we prevent a person who wants to do all of the marketing and activating for us from using us? We're like, take it, how much do you need?

If you asked me that five years ago, I would've said that's SEO. It's search engine optimization. Go on Google, that's your organic marketing strategy. If you ask me what's your organic marketing strategy right now, to me it's all about social.

You cannot just have ChatGPT write your copy and post it, you need to show personality. There needs to be humanity that it goes through it. And it's not natural for everybody, and it feels very awkward sometimes to start. But it's important to people to see who is building the company, because there's so much competition now on functionality, so they can rally behind a team.

The demand that is coming to us, we need to capture it mostly, we don't need to generate a lot of it yet. But at the same time, it comes with the really big downfalls of we're not in control of a lot of our growth.

Influencer marketing is 10 times bigger for us than paid social. So yeah, we do some paid social as well, and it's working decently. It's quite expensive from payback period, we're still optimizing it. As I said, we're pretty early on in all of these channels. But influencer marketing is something that has worked from the beginning at Lovable.

A reason behind it is that influencer marketing, especially on the socials, it gives you an opportunity to have a little video and interaction. And Lovable is all about seeing like, 'Oh my gosh, this is what I can do, and this is possible.' So that drives people to go and try it themselves.

The only way to create a word of mouth loop is just to blow their socks off.

If you are very comfortable in being in that messy middle and really comfortable of converting chaos into clarity for you and those around you, then yeah, AI company is a wonderful place for you to really absorb new skill sets right now.

I actually see it as part of growth strategy to make sure that that brand shines through every single interaction. And I always talk to my team about it, because that is one big lever in our growth story.

One area that we've spent very little time in is activation, because usually I spend majority of my time in activation because there's so many awareness things that need to happen, and so many things that we need to smooth out experience for the users in order for them to get through that setup moment, to aha moment, to the habit loop, and here you're just interacting with agent.

I feel like only 30 to 40% of what I've learned in the last 15 to 20 years of being in growth transfers here because we just need to invest in such bigger bets, and innovate, and create new growth loops here, everybody and their mother is starting a vibe coding business nowadays, and we need to figure out how to be ahead of them.

AI companies are very hectic at the moment. They're very unstable by definition of that product-market fit treadmill, about that distribution of how they're actually distribute to the market, really changing about how product is even being developed in the first place.

The pace here is insane. I went on vacation for the first time. So I've been here for six months. I went on vacation for 10 days. I came back, I felt like I needed to onboard from the beginning. Everything changed.

To be ahead of them is not optimization of the problem, it's reinvention of the solution. I just feel like I usually spend maybe 5% innovating on growth in my previous roles, right now, I'm spending 95% innovating on growth, and only 5% on optimization.

We track them over our LLM costs on freemium and giveaways as our marketing costs, and it doesn't go into our something we need to reduce to make our margins better. It goes into, this is something that we need to spend more in because this is part of our growth secret sauce.

It shouldn't be minimal viable product anymore. Viability is left back in 2010s. Now it's minimal lovable product. That's the only thing that matters.