20VC: Lovable on Hitting $17.5M in ARR in 3 Months | Adding $2.1M ARR Every Week | Hitting 85% Day 30 Retention: Better than ChatGPT | The Story of Europe's Fastest Scaling Company with Anton Osika

Anton Osika is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Lovable, the fastest growing startup in Europe. With Lovable, you can turn your idea into an app in seconds with just a prompt. After just 3 months, the company has scaled to $17.5M in ARR. They are adding $2M in net new revenue every single week. Even better, Lovable has 85% Day 30 retention rate, making it more retentive than ChatGPT. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: 03:41 How a Side Project Turned into a $200M Company 05:39 Why Talent is 10x More Valuable Than Experience 08:57 How to Use a Waitlist Pre-Launch to 10x Growth 12:29 How to Master a Public Launch: $0 - $1M ARR in a Week 18:02 Why Raise a Large Seed Round 22:22 How Sustainable is Lovable and AI Revenue 25:22 What are Lovable’s Biggest Threats: Incumbents or Open Source 27:00 Raising Series A: Should You Always Take the Money 27:46 How to Compete in the US from Europe 28:25 Is Europe as F****** as the World Thinks 29:02 Building in Europe vs. Silicon Valley 31:20 The Future of Foundation Models: Who Wins 33:47 Grok vs OpenAI vs Anthropic: Buy and Short 41:37 Quickfire Round: Insights and Reflections

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Growth starts ramping up after we launch. We're growing one million ARR per week at some point.

• 0:05Harry Stebbings?

  How much are you growing now a week?

• 0:07Speaker 00

  Two million ARR per week. We have month one retention that's better than ChatGPT's month one retention on paying customers. The most important thing is talent and culture and there is more raw available talent in Europe. The only thing that matters is execution. So if you can outperform your execution, then I'm scared.

• 0:28Harry Stebbings?

  This is 20 VC with me, Harris Dabings. Today, we have Anton Asika, co-founder and CEO of Lovable, the fastest growing startup in Europe. With Lovable, you can turn your idea into an app in seconds with just a prompt. Check out these stats. After just three months, the company has scaled to seventeen and a half million in annual recurring revenue. They are adding two million in net new revenue every single week. That's like three hundred thousand dollars a day. Even better, Lovable has eighty-five percent day thirty retention rate, making it more retentive than ChatGPT. This is such an incredible story to unpack today.

• 1:09Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:52Harry Stebbings?

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• 3:16Harry Stebbings?

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• 4:00Harry Stebbings?

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• 4:19Speaker 00

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 4:22Harry Stebbings?

  Anton, fastest growing company in Europe. What a title. But first, thank you so much for joining me today, man.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  Thank you, Harry. It's always fun to talk to you.

• 4:31Harry Stebbings?

  That is very, very kind of you. It's the British accent. But I want to start actually pre-lovable. And I spoke to a couple of your investors in your first company, Depict. And so I just want to start there. What are your biggest takeaways from Depict that shaped how you think about lovable?

• 4:48Speaker 00

  We scaled super, super fast at Depict as well. And we did like moving just very fast, scrappy, nailed that really well. I think we did really well on this high potential talent as well. Quite junior, but high potential talent. You can see that from all the companies coming out from Depict. The Depict mafia is absolutely real. But I think what works in the beginning is to say yes onto a lot of opportunities and try out what works. Once you become more people and you have to follow up and maintain everything that you start, you have to be much more focused. So we said yes to too many things at Depict.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  And we didn't like take this one thing that we could do 10 times better than anyone else. And then as the economics macro wise turned worse, we didn't continue the scaling trajectory that we were on initially.

• 5:44Harry Stebbings?

  I was just reading an article actually with Paul Buchheit, the founder of Gmail. And he said, you need three great features in a product. And it's really that simple and make them really, really great. Do you agree with that product simplicity towards feature depth?

• 6:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think just on a product level, you should say no to as many things as possible and make it more of like an Apple feeling. The things you do, you do them to purpose.

• 6:10Harry Stebbings?

  And so we have, hey, don't say yes to everything. Is there anything else which you did or didn't do that really shaped how you think about the early days of lovable?

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Moving fast and I will say talent is the most important thing. And culture, how you work together every day, how people interact and collaborate quickly. Those are the two most important thing for almost any company.

• 6:35Harry Stebbings?

  Let's just unpack talent because it's been a call. I spoke to Frederick at Creandam before this and he said we had to chat about this too. So you favor talent over experience, which sounds kind of obvious respectfully. You're going to go for like an experienced, untalented person? But how do you think about your hiring lessons around experience versus talent?

• 6:58Speaker 00

  I think experience can be a negative thing in some cases. You often want people who are super ambitious, they have a lot to prove, they are more open minded towards how you should work together in a team. For many roles, I think junior talent is first of all is super easy to get them into the company. They're not already committed to some like many of their projects. The best people that you can hire at a young age, they would go on and become founders and then you can't hire them anymore, right? So that's why junior people are often quite good.

• 7:31Harry Stebbings?

  Will you hire them if they haven't done what you're hiring them to do before? The benefits often of hiring someone experiences, well, I can see they've been at X company for four years, they can do that at my company. Will you hire someone who hasn't done what you're asking them to do before?

• 7:46Speaker 00

  For most, in most cases, yes. But like, I mean, if it's engineering, you have to know software engineering, of course. And you, for some roles, you definitely want in that domain, someone with a lot of experience, like who can coach and who can tell the more junior people what great looks like.

• 8:05Harry Stebbings?

  These are gonna sound like strange questions, but you mentioned the word ambition there. Did you always know that you would be successful? When you were younger building, did you always think, I will be successful in something that I do?

• 8:17Speaker 00

  No, I don't think so. I was always frustrated with how people around me didn't understand things as quickly as me. It felt like, and then at some point I felt like, well, sometimes it's me being too naive. That's something I learned over time. But many of the truths about what's going to happen in the future have, I have a very good track record on, and I think that's by this, one of the superpowers that have made me, have made me successful. So I felt I had that superpower. I didn't know it would translate into building something successfully.

• 8:49Harry Stebbings?

  How did you first make money? What was your first entrepreneurial thing?

• 8:54Speaker 00

  Oh, I think, so I always nerded out with computers and setting up our LAN parties when I was a kid and so on. And so I noticed that all neighbors and like friends or families, they had the computers and they had some issue and then they called, they wanted my help. And many of them wanted to pay me afterwards. So that became a bit of a side hustle when I was a young teenager.

• 9:18Harry Stebbings?

  Did you do gaming when you were younger?

• 9:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:21Harry Stebbings?

  You're like the, I'm so sorry to be rude, but you're like the easiest archetype because you fit like all the characteristics of like successful founders that I have on the show. It's like number one, made money early. Number two, excelling gaming, both very, very clear archetypes. I want to move to lovable. So GPT engineer starts as a side project. Where does the idea come from? We've left a pick. GPT engineer starts as a side project. Where does the idea come from?

• 9:49Speaker 00

  So this was the spring after ChatGPT came out and I've been playing with the pre-proportions of that as well. And I from already like a year before then, I felt there's a massive wave coming from scaling up these models with more data. And the pick is not set up for, or currently not set up for leveraging that. Like I was actually traveling with my now wife, engagement trip. And when you're traveling, I get extra creative. I don't think there was anyone who was talking about like AI agents at the time. But I, during those, like sitting on an airplane, I was, I started writing a lot of like, okay, you can, you should hook them up and make, you basically put the large language model in

• 10:31Speaker 00

  a for loop and then you can have it to do a lot of agentic things. And then when I'm back in Sweden, I'm like, okay, where do I apply this? Obviously on software engineering. And I've been talking to people about this and I felt no one was really sufficiently imaginative to what I was thinking about. And I had to like prove a point in that this is already now with the current, the first versions of ChatGPT APIs, you can build an agent that writes code. And then I put together that there were two, I drank a lot of coffee and then I just crammed away and I got the first version that really impressed people. You write, create a snake game and then you get a running snake game on your computer. So that was the first version of what we're building now.

• 11:15Harry Stebbings?

  How long did it take you to build V1 with that caffeinated session?

• 11:19Speaker 00

  I think it was like one main weekend and then a bit of polish over a few hours here and there and two weekends after that.

• 11:26Harry Stebbings?

  What are the biggest lessons or advice from building many different V1s for many founders that are listening?

• 11:33Speaker 00

  For most first time founders, I would really focus on the user and the user problem and say like, how can I get one person to love what I'm building in this V1? And that's my general advice. I didn't do that. I just put out the video on Twitter and it... Got dozens of academic references and millions of people using it.

• 11:55Harry Stebbings?

  Take me to that. So we have this weekend, we release the product. What happens then, dude?

• 12:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it wasn't clear to me that I would build a business on this at all. I just thought it was fun that there was like, and this was an open source project. So I started nourishing like a community that went on to work on this open source project. And while I went to my co-founder and said, like, okay, so this thing is absolutely huge. I've been thinking of doing something else, to be honest. And here's a pretty like, this is a bit of a wake up call for me that it's, it might be time to find a good replacement for me as a CTO at the pick. That's what happened next. And then within a few months passed.

• 12:32Harry Stebbings?

  And so a few months passed, the community continues to grow. What happens then?

• 12:38Speaker 00

  No, but I, I figured out a good replacement for me. I decide I need, I want to have a great co-founder that I can have as like my partner in crime here. And, and there was a guy who is the most super efficient, zero fluff and bullshit engineer and entrepreneur. So he had sold the company previously that I wanted to work with. And I, I biked to his apartment and said, hey, let's take a walk and plan the future. He got, I got him on board and then we started building and created the first version of what became lovable.

• 13:11Harry Stebbings?

  So we're building the first version of lovable. You've got your co-founder. Talk to me about that time. When did we release? And how did the official release go with lovable as a product and company?

• 13:21Speaker 00

  So the, the launch of lovable, like the product was one year after we started building. And in the meantime, we launched like waitlisted preview versions called GPT engineer app. I mean, that's the getting user feedback cycle and building, building up, I guess, some, some excitement about what we were working on and employer branding as well. And the first versions, I, I think they were very good. They were good. They were not very good. And we had some people really liking it, but aha moments didn't click for sufficiently many, many people. Like, okay, this is how I get this real value from this. When we, when we went on to iterate over the coming year, we packaged together all of these things

• 14:04Speaker 00

  so that you can ask today, lovable, I want to build a basically a SaaS business. And then people have built their entire SaaS companies and get made, made money by just prompting our AI.

• 14:16Harry Stebbings?

  I just want to break down a couple of different things that you said there. You mentioned the waitlist. Do you have any big lessons or advice on how to do a waitlist strategy well?

• 14:25Speaker 00

  The waitlists are useful in that you can control exactly how many people you want to get on board and take user interviews with them. So I think that's the, like, just get sufficiently many people on the waitlist. Find a good way to qualify who you want to talk to. Like, you probably have a different hypothesis on who you should get, who you should talk to, who you're going to sell into, who has the most value from your product. And then qualify only those and talk to them.

• 14:51Harry Stebbings?

  When you do the user interviews and user feedback sessions, what are your big lessons or piece of advice on how to do them well? What questions are good? What questions are bad? Any lessons?

• 15:01Speaker 00

  For us, there are two different types of user interviews. We have this type where we just see them use the product and see like, where do they, do they understand the product? And so that's more of a user experience interview. And the other one is to understand if they have just tried the product a bit. We ask them, okay, so you tried the product a bit. Why are you even interested in this? And ask them like, what problems they're facing in their business? Try to identify what's the biggest pain point they're actually looking to solve. It might be, oh, I want to get more customers. And I think I can get more customers if I can show to my customers that I can get the first version out with AI more quickly. Those are the questions.

• 15:39Harry Stebbings?

  How does it change the structure of teams? When you look at teams today, you have obviously software engineers, you have designers, you have developers, you have front end, you have back end. How does it change the structure of teams themselves?

• 15:53Speaker 00

  Harry, if you want to create a personal website for you, it's super productive. You can do it, you don't have a team. It's just you, you just create it with AI. It's not a team, like a team just slows you down. Maybe you get some input from a designer, like, how does this, how do you think it should look? And so on. But once you have existing software with users and then you want to iterate and change that software, AI might absolutely bring down, mess up your entire codebase. AI might mess up your codebase. So then you would want to work with a software engineer that knows how to have quality and consistently.

• 16:30Speaker 00

  Keep quality in the product.

• 16:32Harry Stebbings?

  You mentioned like people took a bit of time to find their aha moment. How important is the time to aha moment?

• 16:38Speaker 00

  I think it's very important and it's funny because you asked me this question and I I think we are very bad at making the time to aha moment super short. I think we could like double our conversion rates if we become better at speed to aha moment. But you can, I can say with something we're doing, let me take credit for something. When you come to lovable, you just see a prompt box. It's very inviting. Instead of getting to a landing page, you you see a prompt box. And then for the ones that do enter a prompt box, you get a quite a quick aha or the first aha moment. And there has to be many aha moments in lovable. It's quite a complex. A software engineer is a very complex feature that we are doing well. And that's what I would recommend. Just give the user something interactive with instant reward.

• 17:24Harry Stebbings?

  You mentioned that the prompt box itself, I've had many guests on the show say before that almost the biggest sin that chat G P T did was make chat the default UI for a future of A I. Do you think that chat and the prompting that we have today in lovable and many other products is the right default UI for an age of A I?

• 17:45Speaker 00

  I think yes, prompting, you can do almost anything with prompting and explaining your thoughts in written form. It's also easy to implement and iterate on, but it's going to get more advanced over time with not just prompting.

• 17:58Harry Stebbings?

  I love the way you took a deep breath there. It's like, this is a weighty question.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  I'm thinking about it a lot. I mean, you're building the interface for creating software and no one knows what that interface is going to look like. But the prompting, yes, I think it remains.

• 18:13Harry Stebbings?

  I'm kind of going chronologically through the story because it's an amazing story. You rejected Y C. Why did you reject Y C?

• 18:21Speaker 00

  We felt that at best Y C would be a lot of dilution and some acceleration, but a lot of dilution and some acceleration. And at worst, it would be a distraction to go to S F and go through all of these like fun things that happen when you go to Y C. And we we just took some funding instead and built focus on talent.

• 18:44Harry Stebbings?

  The seed round, when does the seed round come? Does that come post-launch or pre-launch?

• 18:49Speaker 00

  So that comes before we launch the first or the first waitlist of our product.

• 18:56Harry Stebbings?

  How did that seed round go? So before you've launched the waitlist of the product, how did that round go?

• 19:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I have this advice that I've always gone by, which is to work with investors that you like. And I had some people that I know from before that I just think are amazing people that I want to have by my side. And if things go sour, if things go well, and I spoke to a few, I kept it very, very brief. I got like a preemptive offer and I said, yeah, let's do it.

• 19:26Harry Stebbings?

  How big was this round?

• 19:27Speaker 00

  So we took three million and then we added on. I got the advice to say like, yeah, just to get a lot of cash because you never know what happens in the markets. So we raised quite a large pre-seed round, almost eight million dollars.

• 19:39Harry Stebbings?

  Would you advise founders to raise quite large pre-seed rounds if they can? If the money's on the table, do you say, take it?

• 19:45Speaker 00

  Depends on how you want to operate. Like if you like talking to investors, which at the time I was like, no, I just want to build the technology. Then the answer, sure, take, raise a big pre-seed so you can get time to figure things out. If you like talking to investors, which I think you should, I would go more, raise more iteratively, smaller rounds.

• 20:07Harry Stebbings?

  We're seeing a lot of founders today be immensely dilution sensitive from day one in a way that they haven't been before, like 10% is like the max they're willing to give up on a round. How did you think about dilution sensitivity?

• 20:21Speaker 00

  It's a good, it's a good question. I think here again, I have a very wise person who was like, no, dilution doesn't matter so much. It's all about the size of the pie. And I was both affected by that advice as well as my like, no, minimize dilution. This is, this is my life, life's work. So that's mainly how I think about it now.

• 20:40Harry Stebbings?

  So we now raised this round, we have the waitlist, we're skipping a little bit. Take me to go live day. When does that happen and how does go live go?

• 20:49Speaker 00

  We go live with Lovable 21st of November last year.

• 20:52Harry Stebbings?

  That was only four months ago.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  Yes, four months ago.

• 20:56Harry Stebbings?

  Isn't it nuts how much like life changes in four months?

• 20:59Speaker 00

  It's true. It can change really fast. Yes.

• 21:01Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, okay. So November 2024, you launch. From day one, is it just nuts? How does it go?

• 21:08Speaker 00

  I mean, we had users, paying users on like earlier version that was called something else. And then our launch, I think it wasn't one of these like wow launches. We could have gotten like 10 times more press on the launch, 100%. But people start noticing like, whoa, this is really good. And we continue to quickly improve things in the products, cheap things very rapidly. So it ramps, like growth starts ramping up after we launch. And we were like, wow, we're growing 1 million ARR per week at some point. And that just keeps going, accelerating through. That was in December and then it just keeps accelerating. We, it was a bit, on the technical side, it was a bit frustrating because we have, we have some, a lot of scaling issues

• 21:53Speaker 00

  that we run into. And the team is like, okay, we can continue to patch this. But they say like, we should, we'll let's rewrite everything. While we're seeing this explosive growth and there's so many quick fixes that we want to do on the product side.

• 22:07Harry Stebbings?

  So you rewrote it ASAP and stabilized it then?

• 22:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it took a bit more than eight weeks. I mean, it's not completely done to date, but that we took eight weeks and then now we're shipping faster.

• 22:21Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask you, you mentioned that like a million ARR a week. How much are you growing now a week?

• 22:27Speaker 00

  Two million ARR per week.

• 22:28Harry Stebbings?

  Two million a week now?

• 22:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:31Harry Stebbings?

  It's so funny for me, dude, because like when you live in a world of venture, you don't, you don't kind of get this, I don't think. And I don't mean that rudely to you, but like your companies go from like one to four in a year. And that's like four X in a year. Amazing. That would be good. And then you're like growing two million ARR in a week. Does that sink in? Like, do you know how nuts that is?

• 22:52Speaker 00

  No, I guess no. I mean, a lot of things the last few weeks have just blunted me. And I'm just focused on all the things that we have to fix and like improve. And that's all I think about.

• 23:04Harry Stebbings?

  What do you think are the most common ways or methods that companies' development process slows down? For founders listening, what should they watch out for that often happens?

• 23:15Speaker 00

  What makes product development slower is usually that you have a complex product and you have a lot of requirements. You said earlier, Harry, that you have three things that are good in your product. I think that's generally a very wise thing to do.

• 23:30Harry Stebbings?

  Simplicity leads to product direction, knowing where you're going and what you're working on.

• 23:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:36Harry Stebbings?

  When you look back since the start of Lovable, where from a product perspective, did you invest and spend time? Where was the benefit of hindsight you shouldn't have done?

• 23:46Speaker 00

  At Lovable, we thought a lot about the community and like community features inside of the product. I think that could have made a lot of sense if we had seen slower growth. But now that it's just like growth is not something we, not a concern. You don't need community features to power growth. So that, I think that was pretty much waste, waste of effort.

• 24:05Harry Stebbings?

  Do you agree with the sentiment, build it and they will come? The growth has been amazing. From day one, it feels like since GPT engineer even, people have just kind of come for the product because it's been amazing and different. Do you believe build it and they will come actually does stand true today?

• 24:22Speaker 00

  If you have a very strong vision of how, where there is untapped potential. If you really know that deep down and you have track record of showing that, then build it and they will come is going to work. And you also have the runway, your personal like energy runway and so on to truly make it work and make them come. But for, in most cases, yeah, that is too risky. It's too risky to just build it and they will come. And it's, you can build it and make them come or try to make them come at the same time. And that's much lower, lower risk.

• 24:57Harry Stebbings?

  You said there about energy and it reminded me of a statement that Nick. Revolut said to me in a show when he was talking about his investing. And he said, the most successful founders that he invests in are between thirty and thirty five. They don't have the naivety of the incredibly young founders. But they don't have the bluntly tiredness in some ways, or the, you know, you have more energy when you're younger of older founders. How do you think about that, given your age today?

• 25:25Speaker 00

  I think energy is super important and I think the naivety is a benefit of them. But I made a mistake, a lot of mistakes. It was the first time manager as well. They picked pretty much.

• 25:39Harry Stebbings?

  What was the biggest mistake you made?

• 25:41Speaker 00

  Thinking that we should change the culture and become more of a scale up, something slow moving or like more management layers. When we became forty people, that was the biggest mistake I did.

• 25:52Harry Stebbings?

  Why did you think that?

• 25:54Speaker 00

  I mean, my co-founder and other senior people we spoke to said like, oh, now you have to hire executives and so on. And that that was a bad idea, I think.

• 26:03Harry Stebbings?

  Okay. And so did you start hiring executives?

• 26:06Speaker 00

  Pretty much, yeah.

• 26:07Harry Stebbings?

  And then they don't work?

• 26:10Speaker 00

  One person I hired didn't work out, which slowed me down and they kind of set us back a lot.

• 26:16Harry Stebbings?

  And so when you think about that, what would your advice be to other founders? Don't believe the bullshit. You can scale way longer without execs.

• 26:23Speaker 00

  Many founders hire mercenaries style, maybe like skilled people, but they're like they are running in their lane. I hire generalists and I try to empower them as much as possible. If you have a lot of super, super smart generalists that you're doing a lot of smart, like new initiatives and so on. Adding executives all on top of them is high risk and like reward is questionable.

• 26:50Harry Stebbings?

  Does culture break at any point when you're scaling user base so fast? You're scaling revenue so fast.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  I mean, usually I think it does, yes, or it changes, it changes, it evolves. This is something I'm very mindful about and why I'm so scared of adding too many heads.

• 27:06Harry Stebbings?

  What are you worried about?

• 27:08Speaker 00

  The most important thing for everyone at our company, which I talk about, is to role model how much you care about the product, the users, the team, how well the team works. Then role model and make sure other people care as much as you. That comes from a feeling of ownership of the culture and the team. If you're a lot of people, that gets diluted typically. So that's what breaks or that's what's harder.

• 27:35Harry Stebbings?

  So we have the team scaling, we have user base, we have revenue scaling. We're making actually a lot of money at this point. Why raise a series A?

• 27:43Speaker 00

  I spoke, I just had some scheduled check-ins with investors. There was this one guy and his team that had obsessed about Lovable for the last few months. Fredrik, he's here in Stockholm at Kriandam. He just gives an amazing impression on me. And I'm like, okay, I could, I can wait because I know, it's very clear to me that this is just the beginning and I can, could raise it later. But we can accelerate by adding an investor that's a partner, helping to find more amazing people in, as a sounding board. Fredrik helped to grow Spotify from nothing. And we decided to raise a small round.

• 28:25Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so you decided to raise a small round. I have to ask this. You have many well-funded competitors in the US. I think it was Neil Murray that said, you put like, we're Devon that actually works from like very early on.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:39Harry Stebbings?

  Which I thought was bold. When a competitor has a lot of money, do you have to raise to?

• 28:45Speaker 00

  I don't think so, no. I mean, you can just, we could bootstrap. Like you don't, you can bootstrap most things, so you never have to raise.

• 28:53Harry Stebbings?

  But they can outspend you on talent, on customers, on marketing?

• 28:58Speaker 00

  I'm not afraid of any of those. The only thing that matters is execution. So if you can outperform your execution, then I'm scared.

• 29:06Harry Stebbings?

  Where could you improve your execution today? We spoke about speed of shipping, amazing, culture's great. Where would you say execution wise you could improve?

• 29:16Speaker 00

  I think you can always improve on like how the decision loop on how fast you take your decisions and you communicate those decisions so that everyone is really on the same page.

• 29:26Harry Stebbings?

  How do you make them today? How could it be improved?

• 29:30Speaker 00

  I think it's about doing fewer, I think we could do fewer things as well at Lovable. Like there's a lot of people with great ideas that each idea isolation is great, but you can only have so much, you should only execute on so many at the same time.

• 29:44Harry Stebbings?

  We mentioned the team and the culture, one, and we mentioned Frederick there. You've been pretty ardent around building in Europe, keeping the team in Europe, being a European company. A lot of people say to me, by staying in Europe, you are deliberately not doing what is best for your career. If you were in the valley, you would be more successful. What is your response to them?

• 30:04Speaker 00

  The most important thing is talent and culture. And there is more raw available talent in Europe. The culture isn't on the like, the US has more culture that fits succeeding as a startup. I have to say for default.

• 30:21Harry Stebbings?

  What specifically do you think it is about that culture?

• 30:23Speaker 00

  So it's about the fault of thinking big and being super ambitious and being very committed to making things work. That in Europe, people are more like living a balanced life and taught that we should. In Sweden, we talk about the law of Jante, which is that you should be better than others.

• 30:44Harry Stebbings?

  Oh my God. Okay, yes, so this concerns me. So how do you respond to people who say you would be more successful if you're in the valley?

• 30:54Speaker 00

  Well, you would be, so if you're a founder, you have more free entropy of like talent to use a channel into something successful. But there are of course many benefits from being in the valley. I think it's a bit of playing on the hard mode here from Europe. And I get excited about playing on hard mode and showing that you can create a category defining company, which is Lovable in our case, from Europe.

• 31:19Harry Stebbings?

  Are you positive about Europe moving forwards? We are in a doom loop around Europe, which we both disagree with and hate. Are you positive and what guides your thinking?

• 31:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm I'm super positive. I think there is a strong underdog mentality among all of us founders now, which is usually a winning concept to be to feel like the underdog and wanting to prove others wrong.

• 31:42Harry Stebbings?

  I totally agree with you. I also think there's incredible superpowers in using the arbitrage pricing of incredible engineers in Europe and selling into the US. You can build huge companies selling into the US from Europe. Doesn't mean you can't sell into the US just because you're a European company.

• 31:59Speaker 00

  True. No, it's a very global market.

• 32:01Harry Stebbings?

  I've got some questions which are a little bit spicier. A spicier one is if one were to criticize lovable, they would say, amazing, god, look at the revenue growth, look at the user growth, but is this like AI sugar revenue? In other words, it's not sustainable and it will churn very quickly. How do you respond to it's not really real sustainable revenue and it's not sticky?

• 32:25Speaker 00

  We have month one retention that's better than chat GPT's month one retention on paying customers. So it's about eighty five percent. That is just going up. Like, of course, there is a lot of things to be desired when you're working with an AI system. There's a fraction of people, some people that come in and they're they're just like flip out their credit card because they want to try, they want to learn, which is a rational thing to do. And then they know that they are going to stop using it almost, or they almost know. So we have a fraction of users who are like those people.

• 32:57Harry Stebbings?

  Eighty five percent month one?

• 32:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:59Harry Stebbings?

  Wow, that's great because you're also too early to have month six.

• 33:05Harry Stebbings?

  What could you do today to increase retention most significantly?

• 33:11Speaker 00

  The easiest thing we can do is to give more of the important aha moments to ensure that every all of our users get more of the important aha moments on how to use the product.

• 33:23Harry Stebbings?

  I don't really respectfully agree or get you because like you give prompts under the prompt box. So you say like build me a SaaS app or build me a dog website or whatever the prompt is. Dude, all you need to do is click it and you see the code being written and then you see it being created. The aha moment is pretty obvious, no?

• 33:43Speaker 00

  So there are many aha moments or like education moments to get the most value, get the full value out of using it. The most important of those are with regards to when you feel like you're getting stuck and the AI doesn't understand you. And there are many things in how to get around that that you can pick up as a user. It is about how you prompt. It's about how to understand what doesn't work and explain or to explain clearly what the problems you're seeing, what you find could be the problem when you're building a more complex feature. And it's about that you can actually onboard an engineer to do small changes to the code base. Like those are things our users should know and not everyone knows them.

• 34:28Harry Stebbings?

  What's your North Star metric today? If you have one metric on the TV for the whole team to focus on, what is it?

• 34:35Speaker 00

  It's the number of users that go all the way to getting like users on what they built, getting something hosted with users on what they built. That's what we focus on.

• 34:48Harry Stebbings?

  What's the amount today?

• 34:50Speaker 00

  So we have almost 40,000 paying users and then that's the proxy for that.

• 34:55Harry Stebbings?

  Forty thousand paying users, shit. Do you care about the time it takes to go from start to website created or not?

• 35:02Speaker 00

  We care, but I have to say, Harry, like these things about onboarding and how much we can improve is not something that we have had the focus on. Like we were just making the core AI parts better, better, better. That's what we focus on.

• 35:16Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so you say about making the core AI parts better, better, better.

• 35:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:20Harry Stebbings?

  People also say wrappers on top of other people's models. Why are they wrong with that assumption?

• 35:27Speaker 00

  I mean, it's very easy to create a cool demo with just a wrapper. It's super easy to make a cool demo with just a wrapper. The hard part is to get close to 100% you get what you're asking for. And there is a lot of small details in making that work. There's a lot of small details and there's a chain of large language model API calls and other algorithms that run and that chain is like you can continue to optimize that for years without reaching perfection.

• 35:53Harry Stebbings?

  Whose models do you sit on top of today?

• 35:56Speaker 00

  We use all of OpenAI's models, the Google Gemini, and the main workhorse is Anthropic's Claude model for writing the code.

• 36:06Harry Stebbings?

  I was gonna have this in a quickfire, but I have to ask it now. You've got Anthropic at sixty billion, you've got OpenAI at three hundred, or you've got Grok at fifty. Which do you buy and which do you sell?

• 36:19Speaker 00

  Okay, so I would, I care about the best talent here. And I feel like Elon is very good at talent. So I would buy, I would buy Grok. I think they're also very ruthless in like finding business opportunities. We'll, we'll see about that, but I feel like they could be good at that. Even though Anthropic is my favorite, I love the, the culture and I love the, like the leadership there. And, and I would short OpenAI because they have been very good in the scrappy phase, but they, they haven't proven that they can, we have a clear product direction and focus now over the last year.

• 36:51Harry Stebbings?

  So I would push, sorry, I'm, it's a Sunday, we're allowed to be a little bit more casual. I would push back on you and go, the two biggest things that matter in this next wave is brand. Yeah, recognition on the consumer side and it's consumer facing front end products. And when you look at brand, everyone's mother knows ChatGPT. They don't even know OpenAI, but they know ChatGPT. And then on the consumer product side, respectfully, they're way ahead of anyone else. Why, am I wrong?

• 37:19Speaker 00

  I just, I just think we're still early in the days of AI. And if you look at the enterprise revenue, Anthropic has almost caught up to OpenAI from nothing, from being absolutely dominated. I don't know what Grok is going to do here, but I expect them to be having, like, OpenAI lost all their best talent to, to Anthropic. I think Grok might be able to pull something off here.

• 37:43Harry Stebbings?

  I spoke to a very wise friend of mine before this, and they said that the biggest concern that I have is that open source or mega corps of the world with massive distribution advantages, come in and win the market. How do you think about that and is that a concern?

• 37:57Speaker 00

  The big mega corps, they move very slowly in many domains. So they're never going to, in many years, they're not going to have the best product on the market. There are distribution advantages for some of these mega corps. And that's like the marketing and distribution is what I'm more concerned about. But overall, it's going to be a growing market where you can easily, as a startup, be both best positioned for some parts of the market.

• 38:23Harry Stebbings?

  One thing that's going to be a real shift, I imagine, that you have to face is the shift from PLG and kind of prosumer to enterprise. How do you think about that shift? And is that just not a concern, given the speed of revenue ramp? How do you think about that?

• 38:38Speaker 00

  If we would do enterprise, I would want to do that really well. So we're holding off with doing enterprise for now. We're holding off. Our goal, you may ask about the North Star metric. What we want to have is, we want to be the best place for builders to create products and get the hundred, get a million of the most talented builders on Lovable. And if we succeed in that, that's a great segue into many other areas, including enterprise.

• 39:06Harry Stebbings?

  When you look at Shopify, what do you learn from them blazing a trial and the way they have done as efficiently as they have done?

• 39:13Speaker 00

  I'd love to hear from you, Harry. What's the, what are you most impressed by with Shopify?

• 39:19Harry Stebbings?

  Honestly, I would say it's a narrative around everyone being an entrepreneur. I think Harley's a phenomenal communicator and storyteller at bringing very real businesses to life. And how Shopify has changed their processes, their sales really made an impact. And I love Toby, and I think he's obviously a brilliant technologist. But I think without Harley's storytelling, narrative, entrepreneurial vibes to life, it would be a different company. So I would learn from that a lot in terms of how to tell your customers' stories.

• 39:51Speaker 00

  I think Shopify has been able to execute on many things. And they just created a good package. They retreated fast, that's my impression. They retreated fast on serving all the needs for building your e-commerce. And that, I think this velocity is what's the most important thing for building the best product.

• 40:10Harry Stebbings?

  When we look forward, dude, what would you most like to build in the product? But for whatever reason, you cannot.

• 40:17Speaker 00

  What would that reason be? I think I can build anything into the product.

• 40:21Harry Stebbings?

  Really? Like team would block you, prioritization, not the right time.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  Okay, so something that we have to say no to right now.

• 40:29Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 40:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I'd love to build in a way for founders to get everything you would get out of Y Combinator into lovable. So that includes like some marketing infrastructure, Y Combinator has that, all the entire playbook. And going above that and even saying like, oh, here is your incorporated Delarci company, your Stripe setup. You just have to focus on the product and talking to users and creating content for marketing.

• 40:57Harry Stebbings?

  When you look at partnerships today, APIs that we have to say into the different providers, that's quite a real impossible product.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  Yes, it's on the roadmap.

• 41:07Harry Stebbings?

  Good, okay. Well, YC are gonna love you after this show.

• 41:12Harry Stebbings?

  A final one, when we look forward, what concerns you most if you had to choose? Would it be regulatory challenges, competition, or hype cycles?

• 41:21Speaker 00

  I think if someone, some competitor is super, super good at marketing, that would concern me.

• 41:26Harry Stebbings?

  How important is brand?

• 41:27Speaker 00

  Brand is mainly the outcome of your product. There's other factors too. Product is the important thing and then good product plus awareness just creates brands. That's, I think, what's sufficient. So it's more of a downstream effect or something else.

• 41:40Harry Stebbings?

  When you're doing 2 million a week in additional ARR, you're gonna have more and more investors wanna give you money. How do you think about that? And what makes it worth it to take versus this is a distraction, get out of my face?

• 41:55Speaker 00

  Currently, it's a distraction. I think it will make it worth it when we know how to, exactly how we want to spend the money. Or it's a partner we really want to work with and terms where we would never regret saying yes to them.

• 42:08Harry Stebbings?

  What, if done, would be a massive needle mover for the company?

• 42:13Speaker 00

  One or two more of the perfect technical product hires.

• 42:17Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, I could talk to you all day. I want to move into a quickfire round. So I say a short statement, you give me your thoughts. What do you believe that most around you disbelieve?

• 42:25Speaker 00

  We have models today that are really smart. I think that's where people don't agree with me. They're smarter than humans, but they don't have memory in the same extent as we do. They don't have context.

• 42:37Harry Stebbings?

  How fast will we ramp context and memory, given scaling today?

• 42:43Speaker 00

  What you need to ramp is to decide the process for storing memory. I think is what you have to ramp. And it has to store all of these things, like my conversation with Harry has to be stored somehow into the system. And all like my childhood almost has to be stored as well. And I don't know, it's going to take years.

• 42:59Harry Stebbings?

  You can buy and hold one public stock for the next 10 years. Which one do you buy and hold?

• 43:04Speaker 00

  Some talent play. What comes to mind is Tesla. They're also interestingly positioned outside of software.

• 43:10Harry Stebbings?

  What's the most important trait in a founder that no one talks about?

• 43:14Speaker 00

  I think great judgment, people probably talk about. But I like people who hire, like see potential in people. And it's like, okay, this person can become amazing. And the judgment in picking talent like that.

• 43:26Harry Stebbings?

  What's your biggest weakness as CEO today?

• 43:28Speaker 00

  I'm not as good at multitasking as I would like to be.

• 43:32Harry Stebbings?

  If Loveable failed tomorrow, what would be the reason? Like investors write a pre-mortem, which is like a reason why something doesn't work. What is that?

• 43:41Speaker 00

  The one I can think of is just we lose momentum and excitement. And that's what fuels us today, right? All the excitement and momentum.

• 43:50Harry Stebbings?

  What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

• 43:53Speaker 00

  You don't need to be attached to one foundation model provider. They're all going to be amazing. There's not going to be one winner here.

• 44:00Harry Stebbings?

  Are we seeing foundation models be completely commoditized?

• 44:03Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 44:04Harry Stebbings?

  We won't see specializations like we do today. I know Claude is better for code and engineering. Do you think that will really equalize?

• 44:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:12Harry Stebbings?

  I love the Swedes, fucking one word answers.

• 44:17Harry Stebbings?

  What's your favourite failure? I know that sounds weird. So when I was 17, I failed my exams at school, Anton. I failed them badly. Yeah, like Ds across the board. I looked at myself and I was like, I'm either gonna work behind a bar or I can make something of my life. And I chose to work harder than ever and make something of my life. That is my favourite failure.

• 44:39Speaker 00

  I love that. My favourite failure that I didn't, the pick didn't work out, so I could do more things.

• 44:46Harry Stebbings?

  What concerns you most in the world today?

• 44:48Speaker 00

  I'd love that all leadership to be true idealists and not like function of circumstances and people to please and be much more open minded to people who disagree with them. And super intelligent as well. But leadership in the world today are usually a bit corrupted and narrow minded. And that's what concerns me.

• 45:11Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think they would say you're naive?

• 45:13Speaker 00

  Yes, I don't want to be naive, so yes.

• 45:15Harry Stebbings?

  To the challenges of leadership, to the challenges of having a voter population, you sometimes have to be certain ways.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  I think we used to have like better presidents and leaderships throughout the last century. So no, I don't think I'm too naive, but I'm definitely always a bit naive.

• 45:31Harry Stebbings?

  I totally agree with you. I think the state of leadership stays woeful. Penultimate one, what's your biggest short in the public markets?

• 45:38Speaker 00

  It would be like a SaaS company that has a per seat pricing where their ICP is going to be replaced by AI SaaS that just replaces the employees.

• 45:49Harry Stebbings?

  What's the future of pricing in an AI world?

• 45:51Speaker 00

  I think it depends on how defensible your business is. If you're selling to like enterprises that never change SaaS software, you should try to make some value based pricing. I don't know how you get to good value based pricing, but I would do something like that. Otherwise, I think you shouldn't, don't innovate so much, too much on pricing. Do whatever works today.

• 46:12Harry Stebbings?

  I love the facial expressions. Final one, I like optimism and I think we need more of it in the world. I'm incredibly excited for the next decade because I think we'll find cures to, my mother's got multiple sclerosis, which is a horrible disease. I think we'll find cures to diseases that we really didn't think possible before. What excites you most about the next decade that we have coming?

• 46:33Speaker 00

  That AI is hopefully going to make us humans understand each other better and be better at doing win-win, playing win-win. And that will be awesome. I'm excited about that. So like our leadership actually being enhanced by super intelligent AI.

• 46:48Harry Stebbings?

  Anton, listen dude, I've so enjoyed doing this. Thank you so much for joining me and thank you for inspiring a generation of European entrepreneurs that they can build unbelievable businesses in Europe.

• 46:59Speaker 00

  Thank you, Harry. It was super fun.

• 47:01Harry Stebbings?

  Two million in ARR added every week. Is he kidding me? He's making every other investment look terrible right now. Listen, I love doing that show. It was so much fun. Oh my God, what a rocket ship lovable is. If you haven't tried it yet, try it. It is incredible. If you want to watch the show, you can find it on YouTube by searching for 20VC. That's 20VC on YouTube. But before we leave you today, here are two fun facts about our newest brand sponsor, Kajabi. First, their customers just crossed a collective $8 billion in total revenue. Wow. Second, Kajabi's users keep 100% of their earnings, with the average Kajabi creator bringing in over $30,000 per year. In case you didn't

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• 49:15Harry Stebbings?

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• 49:59Harry Stebbings?

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