Elena Verna — head of growth at Lovable, ex-Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey, Netlify, Amplitude — argues that the growth playbook she spent 15-20 years building only partly applies in this market. 'Only 30 to 40% of what I've learned in the last 15 to 20 years of being in growth transfers here,' she says. Her old job was 5% innovation, 95% optimization. At Lovable it's the inverse.
The central instinct her team is fighting: protectiveness. Traditional growth PMs guard revenue, gate trials, ration access, A/B test the funnel. Verna's team does the opposite — give the product away aggressively, including handing free credits to users running hackathons or building agents that distribute Lovable for them. 'Why would we prevent a person who wants to do all of the marketing and activating for us from using us?'
She is explicit that the team does not optimize for revenue right now: 'we don't optimize for revenue at all... we have a lot of discussions about how can we give more products away.' The North Star is engagement retention — the leading indicator of paid retention later. Subscriber-retention dashboards come second.
On what actually moves the needle: building in public (founder-led and employee socials), shipping things people want to talk about, and standing up new growth loops faster than competitors. The old optimization muscle — tweaking activation drop-offs by 3% — is the wrong work for a market this perishable. Reinvention beats refinement.
The quality bar holds it all together: the only way to create a word-of-mouth loop is to 'just blow their socks off.' No volume of distribution rescues a forgettable product.