Head of Growth at Lovable | Why Growth Playbooks Are Crumbling—and What’s Next

[Music]

Hi everyone. So excited to be here. I'll

also answer that question of what will I

do if AI eliminates my job. So hi, my

name is Elena Vera and I'm actively

trying to eliminate my job uh so I can

do farming. I already started with seven

chickens. It's going great. Okay. So

today I'll talk about collapse of PEI

distribution modes and how to build new

ones. Uh a lot of times in product we

don't really think about distribution. I

think that's a mistake. So let's talk

about how you should be thinking about

this as well. So she already did an

amazing intro on me. I'm going to skip

it. So growth, I've been running growth

teams for the last 10 years of my

career. I started in analytics actually.

Uh but there's still a lot of confusion

as what does it mean? It's actually kind

of embarrassing that 10 years later

after this profession really became um

like real that we're still have so many

different opinions of what it means.

Like nobody confuses what product

management is. Here we are. Let me talk

really quickly about what I think it is

for my definition and then we'll talk

about the distribution shifts that are

happening in growth. So there is

product. There's all you beautiful

product managers working on the products

and then there's distribution. Now those

two are not the same things because you

can have an amazing product and if you

don't bake in distribution into it or

you don't really think about

distribution you will die of slow death.

In fact that there's millions of

products that have been developed over

the last couple of decades that we have

never heard of. we have never seen that

were absolutely amazing. However, what

builds a successful company is having a

great distribution for your product. But

product has to be just okay because

there's also a lot of really terrible

products that are multibillion dollar

companies. You can kind of imagine of

those one of those products that you log

into and like one of your brain cells

dies every time you have to do an action

in it and you're like thinking how is

this thing alive yet they have absolute

monopoly in the category and nobody can

displace them. And that is because

distribution at the end of the day wins

of what's going to make a successful

company when what growth works on is

that distribution aspect of it because

great product is not enough. Now it

helps distribution if you have a great

product it makes everything so much

easier but if you're not thinking about

distribution right from the beginning if

you're not thinking about your go to

market strategies if you're not thinking

about growth as you're developing

product you're going to be dead in the

water. Now what is distribution actually

entails? is actually very

straightforward. Four questions. Those

are the four questions that I stress

about every single day that I lose sleep

over which is how do we acquire

customers? How do we activate them? How

do we monetize them? And then how do we

retain them? Very straightforward. That

is the traditional funnel that you need

to look into. Uh but ability to answer

those questions in predictable,

sustainable and competitively defensible

way is what separates companies that win

versus the companies that lose. And this

is something that you should also know

about your company. What is your

acquisition strategy? What is your

activation strategy? And the better you

have alignment internally against it,

the more straightforward your growth is

going to be. And the fastest growing

companies all have one thing in common

too. They don't grow via funnels. They

grow via

loops. Loops is super important. Funnels

is an f-word that sometimes I have to

use, but I prefer not to because loops

are just so much better. And loops are

very straightforward, too. It's a

compounding flywheel. So, there is an

input, let's say a new user. They

perform an action or a step in your

product that generates an output that

can be reinvested to produce another

input. So, there's lots of different

types of loop that you have on marketing

side, on sales side, most definitely on

product side. All of them have different

spans of lifetime. All of them have

different caliber of the heavy hitting

that they can do. But you constantly

have to think about your product as what

loops can I stand up on acquisition and

retention with monetization fueling all

of that because it pays our salary. But

that is what creates predictable and

sustainable and competitively defensible

growth. Not f word funnels but loops.

Loops is where it's all at. Let me give

you just two examples of what loops

usually are. I was at Dropbox last year.

Dropbox uh started actually with the

loop that's not on the slide, but what

was the loop? Do you remember the viral

loop that Dropbox had?

Give credits to get uh sorry, give

storage to get storage that like took

off like a wildfire. That actually took

company to our first billion dollars

almost with no marketing expenses. And

that was a really strong loop. They like

they hooked into the user psychology

there very well. Right now 60% of

acquisition for Dropbox is powered by

this product loop not marketing not

sales this product loop where they have

a new user they come in they upload the

content they want to share that content

with somebody else and percentage of

those recipients sign up to become new

users 60% of acquisition basically your

users doing your own marketing for you

the best case scenario but it doesn't

come from marketing teams it doesn't

come from sales teams it comes from you

product people building into customer

experience experiences.

Now, there's also Lovable. Lovable is um

we're only 10 months old, so uh we're

still working on our loops. That's

something that I definitely lose a lot

of sleep over, but Lovable also has a

really incredible word of mouth loop.

This is a great place to start for any

startup, for any new product. Just lean

into word of mouth as much as possible.

Now, it's not really sustainable for a

long time. You can't just like keep the

word of mouth going indefinitely. At

some point, it fizzles out. Not

everybody wants to talk about the

products that they're using, but at the

same time, it's the really best way to

kick off growth. And this is where most

of our growth right now is coming from.

Now, our what is the word of mouth loop?

You have a new user, the product exceeds

the expectations. That first generation

experience at lovable is so magical that

people go, I need to tell the world

about it. And they do. They tell their

network and all a sudden some people

sign up from it. And it's a gift that

just keeps on giving. And it's all done

just by providing lovable experiences to

customers. So make sure that you put in

those love marks and that think about

that activation and the first two

minutes of the customer experience

because that's going to be between make

it or break it for your word of mouth

loop. Now then about five years ago uh

everybody started obsessing about

productled growth. And honestly it was

somewhat overhyped. I think uh like we

did uh we did too good of a job like

advertising for it. Uh now I really want

to talk to you about why productled

growth even became a thing that we all

sudden started talking so much about and

that happened because of the four shifts

in the market. That was like the first

shift that happened. I'm going talk

about the other shifts that are

happening now too. So shift number one

users in B2B product all of a sudden

became buyers. Now this was kind of like

a pent-up demand because B2B products

used to sell to enterprise buyers.

enterprise buyers will like check their

checklist. It seems like all of the

requirements are satisfied and then they

just push the product down in the

organization and then the end user

afterwards were like what is this? This

is terrible. This is not solving any of

my problems. I'm going to go and find my

own solution which is where PLG was

born. Those self-s served proumer

consumerlike B2B products that actually

solve people's problems and then they

started going up market and also doing

enterprise as well. But that shift of

the user becoming a buyer is very

important and we'll come back to that in

a little bit. Number two is channel life

cycle. If you're just reply uh relying

on marketing and sales to do your

distribution

um that's really tough nowadays because

any campaign that marketing puts out

there uh on any honestly any channels

how off how fast do you think it becomes

irrelevant?

marketing teams are lucky if they get a

week out of it. Now, imagine needing to

produce this creatives, these campaigns

every single week. We're just not set up

for it. Maybe I will help us enable it

more. But also, our attention spans are

like this short right now. We like see

something once and like we never want to

see it again. Imagine like compared to

like Coca-Cola that used to put out a

campaign that would fire in for a year,

but now you cannot do that in the

market. It's just become way too

crowded. Number three is data

availability. you all product managers,

I hope that you have your data

dashboards to see how your product is

performing. That wasn't available

before. So now we actually know what's

happening in the products. We don't just

have to hear to salespeople what they're

saying. So we can go and make those

experiences better and make product work

better for us and for our companies and

for our customers. And then number four

is roles are blurring. So all of a

sudden um I don't know how about you,

but just being a product manager is

starting to be very quickly not enough.

You have to have a marketing hat or at

least product marketing hat on. Every

single marketer has to have a product

manager hat on. Everybody is an analyst

in the room or should be an analyst in

the room. And that really empowers us to

be more responsible than just

specialized in this one little area, but

be more responsible for the overall

company and customer outcomes. And that

role blurring is honestly the most

beautiful thing because it gives you

more agency. It gives you more autonomy.

But B2B products were definitely feeling

the pressure because it's stressful tool

being responsible for monetization

outcomes and acquisition outcomes. And

this is why I think that there was a lot

of this hype about productled growth

because in B2B traditional enterprises

um product managers are not used to

operating this way and meanwhile uh

consumer products were like what is

this? We've been doing this all along.

Like we've always been responsible for

company outcomes and we always had

productled growth. You just rebranded it

and put it as something new. Whereas

this concept existed all along. So my

biggest hint to you is if you want to do

PLG, just copy what consumer products

are doing. That's honestly the fastest

shortcut that you can do. But then

something else started to happen.

What happened? What has really changed

in the last year and a half?

AI. Yes, Chad GPT, OpenAI, I'm going to

pick on OpenAI here came along and all

of a sudden there is LLM wars all over

the place and we're like sitting there

going, "What is happening over there?"

And all of the companies were like, "We

need to get onto this gravy train." So,

I saw this tweet. I thought it was

hilarious. Just change your loading to

states to thinking and you are an

agentic AI startup now. That's my girls

hack to you today. You're welcome. Thank

you. And by the way, what did our

product roadmap started to look like?

There's companies and then there's AI.

And nobody asked for it. Definitely not

customers. But let's start creating AI

features and call ourselves an AI

company. But honestly, it's not in our

control. We all know how road maps are

made. It's not based on customer

feedback and it's most definitely not on

innovation and what you're trying to

drive. Sometimes it's those sales

requests and promises, but we all know

who's in charge and who's actually

making the final call. But wait, AI is

actually doing a lot of changes in

product management, but it is killing

our distribution channels. This is an

example of a company G2. It's a also B2B

company. They do like reviews kind of

like Trust Pilot for consumer, but they

do similar for B2B. who is uh most of

their growth was coming from SEO, search

engine optimization, Google search uh

organic most of that although some paid

as well I'm sure this is the snapshot

just through February this trend

continued down um I just didn't have a

chance to update

this is just our acquisition that has

reduced by 80 to 90% since chat GPT

happened now why is that

what is happening with consumer habits

right now they're changing are you still

going to Google search to find things.

No, you're going to chat GPT or cloud or

whatever you are because conversational

AI is so much better to answer your

questions than doing search and like

spending a bunch of time looking at the

links. Um, and this is very much felt in

the companies that were really

optimizing against search being the main

growth driver that are now struggling

very very much. The list goes on. You

can actually find a blog on my um on my

Substack that goes through all of those

businesses that are crashing and

burning. so hard and social is not

helping either. Algorithms are changing

every single day. Algorithm giveth and

then algorithm taketh away. And most

importantly, social networks are

starting to clamp down too because

they optimize on intensity of use. That

is their retention tactic. So you put a

link out to try to drive traffic to your

company, no more traffic for you, no

more impressions for you. Which makes it

that search now is not a good channel.

Used to be big. Social is also really

hard to drive traffic through for your

company. But wait, there is more. Now,

I'm going to do a shameless plug here,

but I see this is starting to happen in

a really rapid fashion. um at lovable

and I want you to pay attention to this

as product managers

at lovable in lovable in vibe coding in

general it's we're starting to reduce

the friction and what it actually means

to build any product any software uh

whether it's website whether it's a B2C

app whether it's a B2B app you name it

and what people are starting to do is

instead of paying for bloated

subscriptions or bloated products

they're going and they're building their

own tooling we call it lovingly uh SAS

replacement use case internally, but

people are literally going and if the

functionality that they're using in the

product is very simple, they're going

and they're building it out in lovable

itself. I really urge you all to go. You

don't have to do lovable. I'd love it if

you do it in lovable, but go to one of

those VIP coding platforms and try to

rebuild your product, your main

functionality in your product. See how

easy it is. If it's easy, I'd freak out.

If it's hard and you can't unable to do

it, you're a little bit more in a safer

zone because otherwise if it's easy, you

all of a sudden overnight are going to

start competing not against other

companies but against your own customers

that are leaving you and building their

own replacements for you. Don't want to

be in that situation. So a lot of the

simple but formally defensible

functionality such as signatures, forms,

landing page generations, scheduling

tools, no code tools, dashboards,

internal tooling is all a sudden no

longer defensible. In fact, it's

becoming commoditized. So that

commoditization bar is really rising up.

If your company is still monetizing on

commoditized functionality, get yourself

out of that zone. I kind of think about

a 2 by 2. I love 2 by twos. And you

think about the simple functionality

versus complex, high utilization versus

low utilization. If you have a lot of

complex functionality that is hard to

replicate, that is hard to vibe code,

the high high utilization, you're in a

safe zone. Good for you. Now, if you

have complex functionality but low

utilization, get that utilization up.

However, if you have simple

functionality and that is what gets

highly um uh utilized, you need to think

about your product strategy. And in

fact, we're already starting to see a

shift where companies are being

disrupted by their own users. This was

fascinating because Docuine actually has

threatened a legal action against one of

our users that replicated there's e-

signature functionality. So, I mean, if

you have to start going in the legal

route as the way to defend your product

market fit, that's also not the best way

to grow. But that's sometimes the only

lever that companies can pull. So, what?

All right. So, we went through the

platform shift. Platform shifts are

everywhere. Your product road mapaps

have something in AI, I'm sure.

Otherwise, you're living on the moon or

your CEO is not paying attention.

However, at the same time, there is also

distribution shifts that are happening.

Our search volume is dying. Our social

networks are clamping down. So, how is

it that you actually supposed to grow

the products? Now, just betting on SEO

and SEM and saying, "Hey, marketing,

you'll help us with our growth." Is no

longer enough. You have to take

responsibility over growth in your

company and product loops are still very

much a thing. Product loops is not where

distribution is shifting. You have to

look at your product as almost like a

marketing channel where you can

advertise to your own users and you can

deploy your users to be your marketing

agent. So make sure that you invest into

baking distribution and baking those

growth product loops into your product

experiences. I think fremiums are going

to continue raging on just because we're

all grasping for people's attention and

it's constantly the fight to remove the

friction of entry and we're going to

continue doing that and I think AI is

actually flipping fremium and making it

harder because now it's so costly to do

fremium with AI and we no longer have

margin profiles of those 80 90% that

were so flush across all of the tech

SAS. Now we're like operating at 30% or

less. But you have to start looking at

your product as marketing cost. For

example, at Lovable, over half of our

expense or cost comes from our premium

usage. But we look at it not as a cost

center. We're looking it as our

marketing budget because we much rather

give our product away to every single

one of you to give it a go as opposed to

making Google richer. If anybody's from

Google here, I'm so sorry. I think your

company is great, but I do love our

customers and I'd rather give them our

money as much as possible, too. However,

there's other options. So, let's run

through them really quickly. Option

number two is velocity.

Now, AI, one of the best things that it

can do is it can accelerate your

velocity of shipping to a point where it

can become your moat. At Lovable, we're

literally looking at velocity of

shipping as our moat. We protect it by

all means possible and we do it because

of a couple of things. Number one, we

heavily invest in what we call like what

I call they don't call it I call AI

native employees. I don't want to put

words in their mouth. Uh an AI native

employee is just somebody who uses AI

across many aspects of their work. So

they're blurred roles. Remember how I

talked about like everybody can wear

different hats. We have engineers doing

marketing. They put something up, they

launch it, they're responsible for it.

We don't have ability to staff marketing

and product managers against every

single thing. We're actually only like

60 to 70 people large. Yet we ship

updates every single day if not every

single hour with tier. We we tier it. So

like there's big launches and then

there's tier two, tier three. The tier

one big launches usually on the bigger

companies happen like what once a year

maybe twice a year. We're like every

three months we have to do something

enormous. But tier two happen almost on

the weekly basis. Tier three which is

like smaller updates but still

meaningful every single day if not every

single hour. So that in order to enable

that velocity you have to not be so

crossf functional because if you have

dependencies across everything that

creates a gridlock but if you empower

your employees with agency with trust

that's a hard one for us. We don't

really trust inside of our organizations

but you have to especially if you give

them AI tools so they can take the

project all the way from end to end and

full full autonomy against it. Now the

next one is oldie but goody. This one

has always been around. Data can

definitely be your moat and your new

distribution channel. User data in

memory is sticky. It can be your

defensibility tactic. It can be your

retention tactic. Don't overdo it like

don't keep your customers hostage

obviously but uh try to see how you can

leverage it to either make your product

better or make to sure that uh customers

see the value. But there is also an

interesting shift happening. Salesforce

realized how important their Slack data

is. So they decided to cut off access to

it to other companies. So for example

that company um you might have heard

Glean that is working on enterprise

internal search all of a sudden lost

access to Slack data. Now, what is

internal search without your Slack

information? Nothing. And Salesforce

knew this, which is exactly why they did

it. They're leveraging this to keep

their moat because they're trying to go

into offense against it. What is your

next option? Well, this one's

interesting. Brand. All of the product

people like, oh, not for me. Where is my

marketing counterpart? I challenge that

thought because brand all of a sudden is

now a product exercise,

not a marketing team function. Now

marketing might still come in with a

tone of voice and colors and maybe some

brand span. Maybe they'll put a

billboard up at Lovable. We're having

our first billboard up going up here in

San Francisco. When it goes up, please

take a picture and send it to me because

I don't live here anymore. But our

brand, if you think about Lovable, how

many of you, by the way, have heard

about Lovable? Awesome. Amazing. You

feel the brand. You know what the brand

is. We have zero branding spend. We

don't have brand marketing. We barely

have any marketing honestly to to begin

with because it's felt through the

product interactions because we actually

look internally and say is this lovable?

The fastest way to fix anything at

lovable is to say this experience is

unlovable. Gets hot fixed immediately.

So we are so spec uh very specific about

making this experience channel our

brand. So and that's actually can become

your mult because when the

democratization of software is happening

of building the software and all of a

sudden there is 100 options people are

no longer going to you uh use the tools

that are just utilitarian in nature.

They're going to use the tools that

speak to them that make them feel

because we as humans want connection. So

take it on as a product role to channel

the brand as opposed to just saying uh

brand marketing they're going to do it

in the corner over there. Next one is

also oldie but goody but ecosystem

integrations integrations integrations

and partnerships. This one is very

important uh because instead of trying

to claw your way out into your own

distribution, you say, "Hey, you already

have distribution. Let me stand over

here and get into your distribution

channel by doing an integration or a

partnership." Beautiful strategy needs

to have first mover advantage. So don't

wait on it. If somebody gives you a

hand, you have to take it. Um otherwise,

you just have competition that is going

to take it on. But it's the channels

that nobody really competes in because

there's so much manual things that need

to happen. Make sure to do it. One of

them that I'll just mention is two days

ago. Uh OpenAI released a new

integration opportunity, the app store.

Uh you should all be looking at it. I

know we are because we're like is this

it? Is this the next distribution shift?

Is this the first time AI, OpenAI

actually going to provide distribution

advantage to us? Because otherwise it's

just a destination. there's no way to

like really market through it. So, uh

make sure that you pay attention to this

one. Now, this one is interesting, very

uncomfortable for larger companies. Uh

founder of socials, um or just like even

employee socials, like let's we talk

about it as a whole. Connecting with

your customers on the human level and

for your customers to know who's behind

the company is becoming more important

than ever. Now, we have our CEO Anton

that post on LinkedIn. He posts on X all

the time. I just took a couple of

screenshots of his LinkedIn post. 10

months ago when he started, he had like

no following, no reach whatsoever. Now

almost all of his posts get 2,000 plus

reactions and hundreds and thousands of

impressions, millions of impressions by

the way, free organically that is

happening across all of these platforms.

It is something that a marketer would

like just dream in their mind to

achieving yet you can create with just

your own team. So I would really

encourage a you starting to up your

social game, connecting with your

customers on more personal level and

humanizing your company. We allowed

lovable everybody to post. Now we're

small. So we don't have a legal team yet

that says so we can afford that in the

larger companies. When I was at Dropbox,

the legal team was told to me to do

anything for Dropbox. But uh as much as

you can possibly build in public, it can

be a huge leverage for your organic

growth strategy and it starts with you.

The more people that you can have in the

company actually do socials, the better

it is. And then the last one that I'll

talk about is creator economy. So

creator economy specifically is um all

of those influencers. I know this feels

like a dirty word to say, but there's so

many eyeballs in the socials on those

creators and your ability to market with

them is no longer just a B2C strategy.

It is most definitely a B2B strategy. We

do a lot of influencer marketing on

YouTube. YouTube is huge right now. If

you're not on YouTube, I don't know what

you're doing. Tik Tok relevant for B2B,

believe it or not. Instagram relevant

for B2B because there's influencers and

creators that are building their

audience that are have your potential

customers there. So, make sure that

you're playing in there as well. But

also keep an eye on any other new

developments. Like I said those two days

ago, the app store for OpenAI, it might

be the next Google search. It might be a

big big uh absolutely nothing. Who

knows? But these types of things we need

to look at because otherwise there's a

gap in the market of how is it that we

actually going to grow our products. But

what I do want you to take away from

this is that put that pressure on the

product itself because that is the most

defensible channel that you have because

remember distribution is everything.

That's what builds that successful

company. That's what makes that equity

that you own in that business worth

something. Not just great product. It's

not enough. It's great product plus

distribution. I'm out of time. Thank you

very much and catch me later. Bye.