Transcription
On November 21st, 2024, Anton Oska launched his first company. 243 days later, Lovable became the fastest growing company in history. Faster than Chat GBT, faster than Microsoft, growing from 0 to 100 million annual recurring revenue.
In a world's first, I've arranged for Anton to give you his step-by-step guide on how he reached the impossible. As someone who's been in business for 35 years and built 19 companies, I've never seen what you're about to see.
When you finish this video, drop in the comments what you've learned and how you're going to implement it into your life to make your business successful.
>> For people that don't know, what business have you built?
>> I built a company called Lovable and it lets anyone who's not technical create software you by explaining this is my idea. This is what I want to create and then talking to an AI and it creates it for you.
>> If you've got an idea, you can make it happen. Now, well, we're going to go through now the steps in which Anton managed to make that happen. I should probably tell my audience, I have invested in this business and that's why I asked Anton to come on and teach you what he knows. But a lot of people don't have an idea, right? So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to label up what we just talked about there. To me, you had a pain point.
>> Yeah.
>> And you solved it. That's a good way to think about if people are listening how they could go about generating an idea for themselves. Right. So, let's go back to those early stages. Where did you start?
Initially, I built a tool for myself to to prove that you can um in the first example is I could tell it create me a snake game. And this was two and a half years ago, uh, where it was like, wow, that it created a snake game that was it started it running on my my computer locally and then I put that out on a tweet and it completely blew up from that. I was like, "Wow, should" and I had to take a few days and think about is there is this something I should be uh take advantage of and build a real very, very, very ambitious business around. And after uh sleeping on it, I woke up and I was like, "Yes, this is the way that I unblock 99% of the world who don't know how to write code."
>> Back then, just to clarify, did you have a lot of money? Did you have a lot of money to do this? How much money?
>> No, I I started it with my I biked to my co-founder's place and I explained the vision here. We have this unique opportunity in a lifetime to create a new way to create software.
>> We going to call it lovable because we want >> the people who create software with our tool to create something that creates positive emotions in their customers in their customers. So we just started building like we we that was the most important thing building um getting it out there getting feedback. How we did it was we did um like a waitlisted launch so that we could get some very passionate early users and work with them to to help understand where did they get most value of the early early versions of our product before we went out in the mainstream. We did raise money but it wasn't the most important thing for us to be successful at all.
So there's three things right that I think if people listening you've got an idea now you you have development skills.
>> Okay, so many of the listeners, they won't have that. The irony is you made a product that would create the not the need for your skill in the early days and now someone else can have your skill in their pocket, right? And then you had it sounds like some element of marketing there, so you posted about it and it blew up.
>> Now, did you have a big following at the time?
>> Not the first. You just caught a cultural thing right with the snake game.
>> So you plugged into a cultural trend and that's partly why it blew up, right? And then from that you created a waiting list, but to create a waiting list again, there's marketing. What did you do to get the waiting list going?
>> We launched the first version of the tool for non-technical people, which were Lovable. You just open love.dev and you write in what you want to create. We got a lot of people that wanted to use it, but we we thought we have to keep working on this product. So at that the point in time was still building the product, assembling the continue to assemble the team of people who really, really care about building the the AI software engineer as we call it, and to get feedback and work with getting users on trying out, trying it out, and explaining where they get the most value.
>> So you found a niche, which in this case was other developers, right?
>> Yeah, those were some of the early users. But where we found the the most interest is for founders who don't have a technical. And that's to that's always been and and still is the >> the group. And even though there's many, many people types of people in marketing and everything that's using Lovable, that's the group where we have this the most raving fans. Again, I I always think about my listener as someone that doesn't have any money, doesn't know marketing, and they but they might have an idea or they're trying to come up with one, right? So, the pain point helps you come up with an idea, I think. But then, um, you mentioned something else, money. So, development, you then got the marketing going with this waitlist, which I think is brilliant. Everybody I know that's been successful started with a waitlist, including my platform, we had a waitlist, 10,000 people, which with the waitlist, you can go to an investor with an idea and a waitlist. Is that what you did? So, did you when did you raise the money bit? When did it wasn't of course at the early stages when >> so it was actually in the very, very early stage. We raised raised the money, but me and my co-founder, we didn't take any salaries. We had very, very few people on the team.
>> Um, so I think we could have done it. We're just just building, just building ourselves. I mean, of course, it helps to be able to spend money on this. AI cost money and so on. So so >> but tell tell people how you raised money then because you've got this idea, you've launched it, you've put up this waiting list, how did you raise money early on?
>> Look, so when I built this open-source tool for developers, it was large, large interest from investors. So, and I think that's generally the best way to raise money when investors come to you. You've shown that you can you can do >> uh, you can get attention for what you're building and you can show that >> you you can build a product. You can build something that's creating a lot of value, and that's what we had shown, and then they came to us. Investors are going to be very busy now because as people listening can now develop a product themselves on Lovable, build a waiting list for that idea, and then the market will see that you've got an idea and a demand.
>> Yes, there is a lot of >> you made that whole process that for you was manual, right?
>> So much easier.
>> Did you have some business support or knowledge, or did you just go with your gut back in those early days?
>> It really depends on what type of business you're building. But for us, um, we kind of followed how a typical Y Combinator company would raise funding, and um, there is a lot of resources online, or you can talk to an AI about how that how it looks like in a SaaS scenario.
>> Did you have any idea that your business was going to be worth billions? Did you, did you, did you feel it, or that that was your focus?
>> I mean, I it wasn't my focus, but I knew that there was a path to uh, just build the ultimate tool to create software, and it's going to be something completely different than what it's been in the past. Going to be this platform where you have um, very, very intuitive experience talking to an AI that does everything across building the products, iterating on the products with your users, even distributing and uh, like running your business around this. All the things that it takes to incorporate a company, even. And and that platform is what we're building.
>> What was your first few hires?
>> It was engineers to continue to build the product because it's a very, very complex product. It's not something you just use AI to put together. Maybe these days you could you could do that, but back then you really needed really passionate engineers that care about the entire product and they care about how do we get the most out of the AI capabilities today.
>> Why don't we make a separate video with one of your engineers >> about how it works because I think yeah, it's good to understand what's in the black box, right? And understand what your prompts do. So, um, again, I I love to understand, you know, the things now that happen next. So, um, we've got this brilliant idea that's getting traction. You've got a co-founder. How did you pick your co-founder? What was the decision for the co-founder partnership?
>> For me, it's very important to have someone who you work together with as a team. It's you're going to go through a lot of hard decisions, and I wanted someone who complements me. And I mean, it's really smart about taking business decisions on across building the product and across everything else. And my my co-founder had since he was like a teenager, built companies by creating the products himself.
>> And I respect him, I trust him, and that's what I focused on. Uh, we talked yesterday off camera about um, servicing the 1% or servicing the 99%. I think it's interesting this point for the audience. One of the things that you did is you thought, right, how can I help people that are not developers?
>> Which is a much bigger market than say, just helping developers, although the original idea was very much, you know, appealed by developers. Was that the very beginning, or did that get developed as you were building out? You're like, when did I realize from the very >> very beginning, right? And so so you thought to yourself, I'm going to mass market support, but mass market marketing is quite a different thing, right? So you actually, your initial success is in niche marketing. So did you, did you think, okay, I'm now, I'm going to market to the mass market?
>> So we I didn't think too much about the marketing in the beginning. I thought about building the product, making the product good, and leveraging that there's an appetite for new AI tools and people wanting to try new AI tools. So so that was of course play that was playing in our favor for growing so fast as we've.
A lot of people won't launch until it's perfect. So, what's your take on that?
>> I mean, you should you should launch and get it in front of users as early as possible. But once you know that this is this is the product that you're going to make your money on and this is like this is it, then you should I think you should strive for a perfect product. And especially in this these days, the bar of quality is very high for most consumers. If you go very niche and you solve like a problem that no one really no one else is solving, then you you just have to solve the problem. So, and you don't have to think too much about the quality, and maybe it's the market isn't that big. So, you can build um like one product line that works and then the next product line that works in the same niche category. If you're building like for for a large market, then you should really focus on perfectly quality after you've proven that you have product market fit. Users want to pay for this, and you it's growing.
>> I think this is where a lot of people get stuck, right? They build something and they're scared to put it out because people might judge them. They might say it's rubbish. I had this with my own platform, by the way, when I first put Help Bank out. A lot of people like, it's not that great, Simon. And you take it personally. You know, your personal brand could be damaged, and like that negative feedback helps you improve the product.
>> But a lot of people are scared to just put it out there because of that. Yeah. I think that's an important lesson for people to learn cuz that people want perfection and they won't put it out until they think it's 100% right. And you won't know if it's 100% right until the customer's used it.
This is probably going to be out of date by the time the podcast comes out, but the last headline was your company is the fastest growing revenue ever in history in Europe, right?
>> Yeah. So the we're the fastest in the world to reach $100 million.
>> That is a mental statement when you think about things like OpenAI, whichever one >> fastest growing revenue. That that you know what made you go down the revenue route so early because sometimes it's, oh, let's get users. A lot of people listening like, I get users and don't worry about revenue. So when did you insert the revenue piece in and and that must have been quite a big call, really.
>> I knew that if you're optimizing, if you're having people pay, that's a very good proof that this is actually a good product, good enough product. And if people don't want to pay, then maybe you should be able to create more value for them. And so we we put it in there in the beginning. I think it's quite it's quite fortunate for us in a way that the AI is very costly. So we had to charge for a significant amount of money, so we don't just lose lose a lot of money on each of our user, and that was a contributing factor to that uh we made um we we had to monetize a lot.
>> So how did you decide on the pricing? Again, people listening, how do they decide on pricing on this?
>> Yeah. So the first pricing was it was actually too cheap, and we lost a lot of money. So that was when we we hadn't launched publicly yet. Um, and then in the public launch, we made it more expensive, and then we were improving the AI so much that it got it again got too expensive.
>> Right. So, so we had to uh change the pricing again, and then we improved the product so that it behaved differently, and we had to change the pricing so that it was not per message, but it's per so Lovable is now an agent that goes out and takes like decisions and reads the internet and for no, it takes cost tiny amount, tiny amount of credits per each of those actions. We we iterated on that as well.
>> You went for a monthly subscription model, right? So again, like I think Whoop, who I've interviewed the founder of Whoop, and they did a one-year fixed subscription.
>> Did you, did you look at those different models and and >> yeah, so first of all, let me say that Lovable is completely free to use. Even it's not even a free trial. You can just keep using it for free. But it then if you want to build something serious, you will need to pay to use it more than just a few iterations with AI. And then the free is still a big part of the >> but the free cost you money when people use the free.
>> Does we lose money when? Yeah. I don't know if we're allowed to say the numbers because I know the numbers. I'm not sure if we're allowed to say the numbers, so we can bleep it out, but like >> 7 million people that will use the free product. I mean, I'm guessing that's that's probably 100 million right there in potential costs. I'm guessing, you know, probably more, but like for people to use it for free, right?
>> Yeah.
>> I mean, you don't have to make a lot of money in the beginning, but it's worthwhile to think about who are the ones who are going to give so much value and who are not so price sensitive. Like pick someone who's not that price sensitive that are going to be the main revenue driver, and then you can make be generous to everyone else. So if you have built a good product, it spreads by itself.
>> Yeah. We want to help our users build successful businesses.
>> That's the part of the part of the >> crucial. Yeah. Yeah. I know that's what you care about. Another reason I invested, by the way. It's a very competitive world. How do you view competition? How do you stay ahead?
>> I'm making sure that Lovable is a customer-focused and a customer-obsessed company, not a competitor-focused company. And that means that we we don't look at competitors, we look at our customers. We look at what are they doing? How do we get them more successful? If we make them more successful, >> it's naturally going to be the case that they tell others that they should be using Lovable. And that that's how I think about it.
>> And there's a lot of stories about Lovable. I'm actually one of them where we built a product on Lovable and we're making hundreds of thousands of dollars from it. There's a lot of case studies coming out like that right now. What does success mean for you personally and for the business, and and what and people are thinking about building a business or have a business out there? How how do you give them a bit of advice on what you think success is?
>> I think you should focus on what do you want to get out of life, right?
>> And for me, it's very important that we have a world where humans create things and they just don't mindlessly consume things.
All right, guys. I hope you got something from this podcast. There'll be links down below where you can of course try out Lovable for free. You almost uh don't realize we're losing money. Uh Anton's losing money when he let you use it for free. But you should learn how it works. Even if you don't right now build something, just learn how it works. That's how you stay relevant in a changing world. Thanks for listening. We're off to have some chicken.