Everything I Learned at Lovable ($200M in 12 Months)

I just spent 3 months working at Lovable, a startup that went from zero turnover through to $200 million in 12 months. And I saw all the things that most businesses get wrong. And I'm gonna give you the exact playbook that Lovable used to execute on that mission. My name is Chris Donnelly and I've built 3 businesses to north of $10 million in revenue. And this channel is here to help you do the same. So let's get into it. Using AI to help write code is steadily gaining ground.

The pace is extraordinary. It was only 4 months ago, it was only back in July that you mentioned that you've got $100 million annual revenue run rate. Now that's doubled.

So for those of you that don't know, Lovable is one of the fastest growing startups in history. It has enabled an entire generation of people who previously could not build software to be able to effectively vibe code and create new pieces of software. And so we have seen the rise of the non-technical founder historically, and I've been doing this for 15 years. Historically, founders were not building software themselves. They were hiring engineering teams, they were raising money, and yet Lovable has come along and it has leveled the playing field. It has allowed ordinary people to build incredible businesses. And so when the opportunity presented itself for me to go and actually work at Lovable, I just knew I had to take it. Now, I've been a founder for 15 years. I've never actually had a job, so this was the first job I'd ever had. And it came about in the most bizarre way ever. My previous seed investor for my company Lottie, which is now a large business, was the same investor at Lovable. And they were looking to scale their business, and they were looking to do creator campaigns, they were looking to do education content to grow their user base. And my previous investor, who's a friend of mine, said, you should meet Anton. And therefore, literally the next day, I had a phone call with him. I think he was super busy. He was like, hey, I've seen your profile, I've seen what you do, I'd love to talk to you about how to create content for Lovable and how do we get more people using the app, how do we educate more people. And I just said, look, there's a lot I could do. I could help you do creator campaigns, I could help you launch an education-style program to get people using the tool. And he was like, look, I'd love you to do that, when can you start? And I was like, I'm not really working right now, so let's do this. So during the 3 months that I actually worked at Lovable, I was mainly focused on how to connect with creators that had big audiences who could promote Lovable, promote the tool, promote the things that they'd built, you know, put out to the audience why this was such a revolutionary piece of technology. And then the second piece that I was working on significantly, and I actually kicked off for them, was a program called Shipped, which was effectively a cohort education style training program where we took thousands of people in and we taught them over a 6-week period how to actually build a piece of software or an app from scratch, from the beginning. And so I did the first live broadcast to thousands of people, and we literally explained to people how to find a great idea, you know, how to validate your business, how to scale, how to build software. And the campaign was a huge success. And so importantly, I had unique access to the best team in the world doing things that no one's done before, executing playbooks that I've never witnessed ever. I've never seen a team move at the speed they have. I've never seen a team use technology in the way that they have, or, you know, utilize audiences in the way that they have. And having seen that and been in the team and on the ground building that business, I'm going to give you a playbook of how you can use this to build your business. So the first thing to focus on is how to spot and how to validate a trend. And Lovable is the perfect example of this ever. And so what had happened before Lovable? Well, ChatGPT had happened, and the world over was shocked, in awe, surprised. ChatGPT, maybe you've heard of it. If you haven't, then get ready. Do you use AI? I love ChatGPT. And off the back of that, you had the evolution of no-code tools. And so millions of people were using no-code tools, and what Lovable was able to do was to build something called GPT Engineer. And millions of people were using this free GPT Engineer to build software, to build landing pages, to build prototypes. And so they were able quite quickly to be able to use pre-existing technology to validate the demand for their space. And overnight, they saw an explosion of users using their tool GPT Engineer, and then they were able to launch Lovable off the back of this incredible consumer demand. Now, if we take a little bit of a step back and historically look at businesses, one of the most famous examples here is Jeff Bezos in like '95 spotting that internet usage was up 2,000 to 3,000% year on year. And so he knew that he had to build a business in the internet space selling to consumers. But this isn't a new thing. This is happening all the time. You saw this with mobile phones happening where suddenly mobile phones were a new consumer product and millions of people had them the year after, which meant business could sell to people with mobile phones. Then you had 2008, the App Store happened, and suddenly businesses could sell through apps to consumers. And what is the big change that's happened recently? Obviously ChatGPT happened, and the world over has changed. Consumer demand has changed. And so how do you as an ordinary person capitalize on this? A few things that you can use. So first and foremost, I want you to think about consumer trends. I want you to try and spot things that are changing in the consumer dynamic that you might be able to build a business in that space. And so what I often do is I often go to Google and I actually search for what the big 4 consultancies are talking about. So KPMG, Deloitte, Accenture, and they're gonna be spending millions in the creation of reports and datasets that are talking about consumer behavior. Other things you could use would be Google Trends or Exploding Topics. And what you are looking for is the same sort of insight that Jeff Bezos had, the same sort of insight that Lovable had, which is big consumer change. And in that consumer change, Your job is to try and identify how you can position a business to ride the wave in the same way that LUMBLE has. Nothing in life is ever certain, and so I have built businesses before that have taken off, that have become worth hundreds of millions. I've built businesses before that I was convinced were gonna work that didn't. The only thing in entrepreneurship that you can be 100% certain on is how much effort you put into the thing that you're doing. And so the only variable you really have is your effort and your energy. And so I would focus on trends I would focus on what's moving in the market and try and build a solution in it that your customer desperately needs, not just wants. The second thing I want to focus on with Lovable is something that I think a lot of businesses really do get wrong, which is they were able to create such a big mission and they were able to weaponize that mission in such a powerful way that they not only galvanized the best team of people I've ever seen working in a startup, but they were able to galvanize millions of their consumers into being you know, supportive of Lovable and being Lovable champions. And I think it's really important to study this. So what they were able to do is they were able to take the idea that founders had to be technical and turn it on its head. And so they were able to weaponize the idea that you can be a non-technical founder and you can build a business, like you can go and do that thing. And so what they got within their community was millions of people being like, I'm going to build my own business, I don't need to be technical, I can vibe code. And by doing that, they created this incredible vibe, confidence, momentum within their community. Also, for their own team, they were able to pull together the best people in the world who wanted to work on that mission, who wanted to allow people to build businesses, which became again something that pulls people out of other companies to come work for you. If they can so clearly see the mission you have, how you're going to achieve that mission, and the idea that mission could grow, you're going to be able to pull the best people from the best companies in the world to come work on your startup. So this is something called a counter mission, and it's really important to build this so that you can galvanize that support. And this isn't new, this something that a lot of amazing companies have done throughout history. You can look at companies as recent as Monzo, for example, which were able to galvanize their audience behind the idea that banks were really expensive and banks were really slow and they charged interchange fees, but Monzo was new and it was for the customer, and, you know, banks were very bad. And by that, Monzo— for anyone that remembers those coral cards— was able to talk to millions of consumers and capture them like a bank never ever had before. And I don't think necessarily has done since. And then there's companies like Spotify, for example. Their whole mission at the beginning was about freeing and empowering artists to be able to produce their own music and create their own music, make their own money by streaming. And so again, in the early days of Spotify, they were able to act as the countermission to big record labels. And so as a founder, if you're sitting there thinking, you know, how do I create a countermission, your goal should be looking at the status quo, trying to match that with the consumer trend that we were talking about earlier, and try and position yourself in a counter statement. And so Lovable is the perfect example of this because history forever, Y Combinator, etc., has been telling you you have to be technical to build a business, and they said no, we're going to allow non-technical people to build software products using our tool. So the third lesson that I want to give you from Lovable is a brutal focus on A-players. And so an A-player really is someone who's going to give every single thing that they have, as well as come with an incredible skill set and efficiency. And there's that really famous saying from Steve Jobs where he says that A players hire A players and B players hire C players. And that's why it's so important to you as the founder and the entrepreneur that at the beginning of your business you hire incredible people. And so before, we talked about the big mission and we talked about account submission, and these are the things that are so important to draw these A players in. A players don't want to go and work on, you know, SaaS business number 57. A players wanna go and work on a mission that can change the world. They wanna go and work on something that's gonna revolutionize a sector like Monzo, like Spotify. And I'll give you a personal example of how I did this in the last couple of years. So 5 years ago, my brother and I started a business called Lottie. Lottie was there to help people find care homes and to revolutionize the care sector. And it was the first time in my life that I've actually experienced so many A players wanting to come and work for us. They weren't there necessarily for the financial outcome. They were there 'cause they cared. About changing healthcare forever. And that brought to me people from Facebook, people from Google, people from all of these incredible companies who both wanted to be paid well and to make a lot of money through the equity of the company, but deeply, deeply cared about that mission. And so Lovable did this so well. They were able to take what is vibe coding and turn it into a revolution in allowing non-technical people to build software. And I experienced this very specifically at Lovable, specifically their engineering team would ship and create new features, not on a monthly basis or a weekly basis. The team was on Slack honestly 24/7 discussing and iterating on customer feedback and ideas. And they weren't talking about let's ship this on Monday or Thursday or Friday. They were like, how do we ship this tomorrow? And that's honestly what A-players look like. They don't need handholding. They have autonomy. They know what they want to do. They can take a bit of risk. And because they know that if they take the risk, they can fix the thing. And that's what you want in a startup. You want high autonomy, high agency people who wanna work hard, who are driven by the mission and are gonna be the people that build the culture in your company that's gonna then result in hiring more people. Because as the Steve Jobs saying goes, B players will hire C players and A players will hire A players. So the challenge of A players is that A players need the big mission. And so a lot of founders ask me, they're like, how do I attract A players to my business? You know, A-players don't want to come work for me. And it's like, the mission isn't big enough. Your clarity in delivering the mission isn't big enough. And you yourself are not directing people towards a big enough outcome for them to want to come and work for you. And so if you want to get people from Google and Facebook and like all these incredible companies to come and work for you, your small business, it needs a huge mission with like deep clarity around how you're gonna achieve it and deep clarity about why that matters to them. The minute you achieve those things, people are gonna come and want to work for you. For you. The fourth point would be ship fast and learn fast. And so in software companies and technology companies in general, you see this evolution of their products. You know, they will develop over time. However, what I experienced at Lovable was an almost 24-hour cycle of we've heard this from the community, we've heard this from our customers. You know, whether it was a bug or a fix or whether a customer had given them a really good idea, the team would take that feedback immediately. They would distill it, they would talk about it, they would try and collect more feedback, and within a 24-hour cycle, they would then iterate and release a new feature or improvement or so forth. And that just means that as a team, they are able to take a product from, you know, basic through to advanced in a matter of 30 days. Whereas a normal company would debate it, they would think about it, they would design it, they would look at the design, they would, you know, move boxes around on pages. Whereas with Lovable, they were quite literally saying, here's an amazing idea, let's just build it and launch it and get feedback. And that is something that I took as a piece of feedback and as a, and a general point for business moving forwards, is that it is so much better to launch the thing as an MVP, get lots of feedback on it, and then iterate and move forward rather than spend months and months and months planning. You want to get out there and listen to how people are actually using it. This is simply referred to as the feedback loop, which is really, really straightforward. You simply ship a product, you ask your customers how they're using it, and you track how they're using it, and then you take that information, iterate and improve, and launch again. And you just keep doing that again and again. And what Lovable got right, which a lot of people don't, is they did all three parts of that. They did the, I'm gonna listen to what my community has to say, I'm also gonna record and watch as people click through my products. And then I'm gonna take both of those pieces of information, improve my product and relaunch it and do the same thing again. This also builds on the point from before, which is a big mission, a weaponized mission and shipping fast and learning fast. It also allows you to galvanize these product evangelists, you know, your, you know, 100x customer, the person who's gonna talk about you every single day on their LinkedIn or on their X or whatever. And that's because you are, facilitating, listening to their feedback, and you're implementing it. And for them, that feels incredibly special. For them, they feel like they are part of the mission more than anything else. They feel like they are a driving force within the community. And I have never seen anything like the Lovable community. Truthfully, I have been involved in maybe 7 large businesses now that have all had some form of community. The Lovable community is such high energy, such high conviction, and everyone feels like they are part of building that business. At this stage. A lot of people often ask me, do I need to build a community? Do I need to do content to build my business? And the honest truth is you obviously don't have to. However, your choices are relatively limited because distribution is going to be the biggest challenge that your business has, especially now that companies like Lovable have lowered the barrier to being able to build software and ship landing pages and, you know, develop websites or whatever. You now have less levers at your disposal to be really successful, and so distribution becomes one of those levers. And so do you have to build a community? Do you have to make content? No, but if you don't, you're making it harder for yourself. If you form a great community and if you create great content that results in a lot of followers and it results in a lot of people checking out what you do, then you have built your own distribution and you've also built an audience of people who are predisposed to like a product that you build, predisposed to wanna give feedback to a product you've built. And so this is something that I talk about a lot in general, which is when I launch a business, I am able to launch it to 1.1 million people on LinkedIn. I'm able to launch it to 300,000 people on my newsletter. And so immediately I'm able to get hundreds, if not thousands of people, to give me their opinion on a product or a feature that I ship. And that is so valuable. I cannot even put a price on how valuable that is. And so if I'm speaking directly to the founder here, I would say that it would be a huge missed opportunity not to create content and try and create community around your product, because the value is found in so many areas, from validation, from feedback, from product improvements, and then ultimately people becoming, as we spoke about earlier, product evangelists. The last point I would just say on community and content is that by creating incredible content, creating an incredible community, you're actually going to find a lot of your future team members. And I saw that at Lovable, half the team had been in the Lovable community before they worked at Lovable, and I thought that was just so incredible because it means that when your team join you, they have context of you, they have context of the business, and from day one they can add value as a customer. You don't have to teach them the product or teach them the sector. They're all in because they're already product users. So the fifth thing I want to talk about with Lovable is their ability to use viral mechanisms. And so what is a viral mechanism? First and foremost, it is something that happens in the nature of using the product that makes other people see the product. And so you can think of this as, you know, Loom. If I send you a Loom, you not only see my video, but you see the product Loom. If I was to send you a Zoom link, link, for example, you not only get an invitation to have a video call with me, but you get to see that Zoom is the provider of that. And we've got a million examples of this, from Dropbox in the early days who said, if you want more storage, invite a friend, from Uber to get $10 to invite a friend to Uber. And so with Lovable, it's very similar. Their product is inherently viral in the sense that non-technical people want to show off the fact that they are creating software, and so they share it first and foremost. And so Lovable made it very easy for people to share their products and their projects and so forth. But also, Lovable are very good at amplifying what is already a relatively viral product. And so how many of the ads you've seen from Lovable are focused on this kid just rebuilt DocuSign and DocuSign are suing this kid for building this massively valuable company? And it's like they are very good at creating theater around viral moments within their product. And you see this all the time with like youngsters continuously sharing like Stripe dashboards. Now Stripe, obviously for them that's amazing because the kids or the person, I should say, is showing off about the success of their business. But at the same time, they're simply showing off, uh, Stripe. They're simply showing off Stripe, which is really important. So when you're thinking about your business, you might not design your business necessarily around the viral moment, but you should look within your business and see if you can identify the viral moment that you have. So a lot of people at this stage ask, like, how do I create a viral mechanism for my business? And obviously, the businesses that have truly achieved this have been the ones that have gone on to become super successful. Successful, but you can obviously find them in small moments in your business. And so you could think of a viral loop, and that could be that your customer is the CEO and the customer is going to send the report from your dashboard to his team. And so immediately it has a viral mechanism in that it will get distributed throughout the team. I'll give you an example of my agency. When I was 21, I made the Luxury Digital Awards, and by creating the Luxury Digital Awards, I was able to invite the 25 best people within Luxury Digital to get these awards. They all shared it because they were so proud of the award that they had won. And at the same time, I then had these incredible luxury leaders talking about my business online. And so what you want to do is you want to look for these moments to either amplify them or to create them. And the obvious ones are things like referral schemes, or, you know, sending a link from your product to someone else, and they see the product as well as the thing that the customer is trying to show. The last point, and I genuinely think this is the reason that Lovable have done so well, is they have been able to expand their TAM. And so by that I mean expand the amount of people that can use their tool and can consider themselves an engineer. And so importantly, they made the decision to make their product free so that you can use it up to about 5 credits a day. And 5 credits will allow you to do a few things. And to the non-technical person who never previously thought they were an engineer, suddenly things thinks they're an engineer, suddenly thinks that they can build software. And so they were able to expand the total addressable market by allowing anyone to sign up to their tool to build a quick landing page and suddenly think, wow, that was magical. Well, maybe I can build software. And so importantly, if you're thinking about your business right now, you want to be able to get people to discover the business and then have that magic moment. So what is that magic moment? How do you cultivate that with your audience and then allow them to see it and experience it themselves. They truly were the best in the world at doing that. And so what I want you to take away from that point is time to value. How do you get your customer to experience value and do it in a way that it can be experienced in their first session? Think about the Lovell example. They are allowing someone to build a landing page or a piece of software in quite literally one day, probably one sitting. And so how can you break down your product to allow your customer to experience real value as fast as possible. So after 3 incredibly hard-working months, many late nights working with some of the best people I ever have, I made the quite crazy decision to leave. But it's very much the case with this channel as well. I have taken the lessons that I've just told you about what I've learned from Lovable, and I've put them into play in building a new business. So I saw a massive consumer trend in the nature that no one is Googling anything anymore. We are no longer looking to Google for the answers. People are now using ChatGPT to find products and services. So I was like, I'm going to build a business within this We want to ship fast, we want to learn fast. And so I built a community of people off the back of my personal brand and built a Slack community of 1,000 people and a waitlist of 10,000 people. And every single time I developed a new feature or had an idea, I would ask the community what they thought. And so very quickly, over the period of 100 days, we have massive product evangelists already. And I've also studied how to create viral mechanisms and how we can make the product accessible to so many more people and they can have a quick time to value. And so what we did is we made it so that people could use the searchable agent to optimize their business and then quickly share it within their corporate work teams. And so now we have people saying, look at how much traffic we're getting from ChatGPT, and they're able to send those visibility reports to their colleagues and send the traffic increases to their colleagues. The last thing is the magic moment, that moment that people have where they go, wow, this is incredible. We actually allow people within Searchable to talk directly to their analytics and say, which pages do I get most of my revenue from, and how can I increase my revenue? And the machine that's trained on you starts to tell you. So if you've enjoyed this video and the steps that I've given you that Lovable Reviews and I'm using now within my business, you should definitely check out this video that I've created on how to get to your first million in turnover in 2026.