20Growth: Inside Lovable's $400M ARR Growth Machine | How Lovable Does Product Launches | How Lovable Hacks Social To Make Posts Go Viral | How Lovable Makes Every Employee a Brand with Elena Verna

Growth is a trust problem. Now every single employee at Lovable expected to ship code to production for any founder in the first year. Investing in paid as the means of growth is a death trap. Unless you've been in the business for five years plus you do not know your ltv. Do not lock people in subscription as the only way to monetize you.

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This is 20 growth with me Harry Stubbings.

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And today we have one of the

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best heads of growth in the world. Joining us in the hot seat we have Elena Verner, head of growth at Lovable.

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Lovable is the cat category leader. They are now at over 350 million in ARR. Their latest round put them at over $6.6 billion. They are one of the fastest growing

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1:53

You have now arrived at your destination. Elena, it is so great to have you back on the show. It's been a while since we did this, so thank you so much for joining me again.

3:04

Yes, thank you for having me again. What it's been a couple of years at this point?

3:13

Yeah, it's been a couple of years. I've actually aged about 15, but it's only been technically two and a half. So you look younger and I look 15 years older. I want to just start with a really hard and unfair question, which is we as investors feel it. The sands and the technological winds are moving faster than ever. What are the single biggest ways that growth is changing in a world of AI?

3:16

I have couple of ways that I think it's changing. Thing number one is that as software creation is becoming democratized and functionality is becoming available to anyone to build, whether you buy it from somebody, whether you build it yourself, and honestly doesn't matter anymore if you want to actually sell software and grow your business. Growth is a trust problem. Now. Who do I trust to actually purchase it from? Who do I trust to use it from? Do I believe in the team that is building behind it? Because otherwise I'm just going to go create my own. If I don't believe that, they're going to continue worry about my needs and they're going to continue evolving it. So to me, there's just so much behind, not just tactics, growth tactics, growth, hacking channel optimizations. It's literally winning trust of your consumer to have them vouch for you, to have them believe in you, to stand behind you as you're building your business. And then the second thing which kind of goes along with the trust thing is that it's no longer about the software functionality that you're trying to grow. You're really trying to create what I call minimum lovable product out of every single little thing that you touch. Because software is now almost being judged by the emotion that it can invoke as opposed to just core basic functionality that it can do. I actually almost compare it to Maslow's pyramids of needs, like the bottom the layer of Just like, okay, it works okay, I can believe that it'll do security and all of the other pieces now I need to be able to connect to it. And we as humans always want to connect with something. We don't like utilities, we don't like tools. And the more software starts to have actually some sort of personality that helps us trust the two. It's almost becoming like a minimum bar in order to even kickstart the. And then the last thing I would say in terms of growth tactics themselves, all of the performance marketing or like the optimizations are just becoming something that's getting automated pretty quickly. It's actually fascinating to watch. So to me a growth work now is trying something new, trying to be innovative, creating these really once in a lifetime campaigns, so to speak, to try to win the eyeballs and trust of your customers. That's all I'm doing. I'm coding all day long and trying to find the ways to really capture the hearts and minds of our customers, not just optimizing pricing page into oblivion.

3:40

I want to just go through a couple of elements there. You mentioned trust being so optimal. In a world where trust is primary, what becomes more important as a channel and what becomes less important?

6:04

What becomes more important is your product as a channel where you actually earn that trust that drives that word of mouth, that drives that likability. And what becomes less important is something across marketing, sales like more old traditional techniques that we would use to try to drive growth.

6:15

Is SEO as a channel dying? We had Aaron from Monday on the show and he said that there was a 10% decline in that conversion on SEO since they did Google AI.

6:35

Yeah, there is decline, but you have to understand it's so enormous, even if it's dying, it will take years for it to die. But is SEO still fruitful? Absolute. Fucking lutely. Like you still have to invest in SEO if you want to have the baseline of growth. But is SEO going to be the reason that you're going to win in your business? I don't think so. It's just something that you have to do. This is not going to be the reason why you're going to stand out and win.

6:45

How important is Anton's brand to Lovable's user acquisition? You know, I think Anton's amazing. Every new hire, he does the picture with them. Or maybe senior hire, but he does the picture with them. I think it's brilliant. And he's so mastered the founder brand. How important is his founder brand to net new user acquisition?

7:11

I think that lovable is where it is right now because of the founder led socials that Anton has really leaned into and has done at the beginning. How important is his brand right now to existing success? Less important because we diversified away from it and we have other channels in which we are growing. Our users are very active, our community is very strong. We have a lot of user generated content. We have other people on the team, including me, that are pushing our brand a long as well. But at the beginning, was he the reason that Lovable spiked at first and got to the traction that allowed it to scale where it is right now? I think so. That was it.

7:30

When we look at that, we have so many growth leaders, marketing leaders, who are like, okay, we have a channel that works. How do we think about channel makeup when we're thinking about growth? What lessons do you have on when to concentrate, when to diversify, how many to diversify to? Was it right to diversify from socials from Anton?

8:12

If I was any company, I would really heavily invest in social, but not in social in the traditional sense of posting from your company account or hiring an intern who is your social media manager that is posting some puns on Twitter here and there. I really mean where you start building in public and you encourage your employees to build in public and grow their social followings and really reach your customer through, through your own team's voices. That is the channel that so many companies underestimate. How important and how powerful it is, how much trust it builds, how much it unites people behind you in your mission because they see the people that build the company and they want to connect to other people. We're with our little lizard brains, still want that connection like we earn for it. And then the world where we're bombarded with marketing messages everywhere we turn, be able to see and be able to connect is what it's all about. That trust piece that like circling back over and over again. So for any founder, I would suggest deploy founder led social, employee led social build in public, recruit people to be your biggest fans, to be your cheerleaders, so to speak. And then you can start thinking about, okay, where else do I want to be? Do I want to buy a billboard? Do I want to invest into paid marketing? Do I want to do this, do I want to do that? But first, organic strategy that everybody, every startup should be going into.

8:32

Build in public for your own employees. If I'm a founder listening to what do I actually take from that, I should go in tomorrow and say, hey guys, you do amazing work. Why don't you actively share the work that you're doing and how you do it and build your own personal brand to which many founders will go? Why would I encourage people to promote themselves when they'll then get hired and taken in a very competitive labor market?

9:55

Well, I think that. Okay, I have a couple of things against that statement. Number one, if you think that your employees are so easily swayed to go somewhere else, just if they get reached out by the right company, what are you doing? Like there are some really bad cultural issues in your company where whether it's motivation based, whether it's just like ambitions based with who you hiring because you're hiring just warm body to be in there that whenever it's given an extra dollar somewhere else or a better logo somewhere else is just going to run. So I would look at your recruiting practices if that's actually your worry that people are going to be stolen, if they're going to be known. Second of all, if you can use your company to help people build a better social presence that they use to do marketing for your company, then who cares if they build a personal brand in the meantime they become your biggest marketing agent, the most powerful marketing agent and encouraging that. I think you have to look at it as a marketing channel that you almost invest into. And by the way, you get two for the price of one. You get for example, an engineer and a marketer at the same time. Who wouldn't want that? As opposed to seeing, oh well, if they rotate this way, then I'm going to lose it on one way or the other. Where very multifunctional people, we can do multiple things. And I think a little bit of an encouragement and obviously leading the way by showing example goes really far.

10:19

Does function matter at all anymore? I know that sounds strange, but growth is marketing and growth is also product. I don't really see the divide between any function today.

11:41

No, there is a massive blurring of lines and that's been happening for a long time. I mean, every product manager had to do their own analytics for the last decade. Every marketer was expected to build some landing pages and do some no code solutions for the last decade too. I think we've been going in this direction for a long time. But the line of the blurriness is accelerating. Like the speed of the blurring is accelerating.

11:51

Does that mean how you hire? Like if you're hiring for a growth

12:16

role today, I think that there's still a path to hire. Hey, there is a generalist and then there is a specialist. So Somebody kind of like Jack of all trades at the kitchen sink of all of the problem solving. Those people are very powerful, especially very early in company stages as you start to grow and you actually say, okay, these are the channels that are really working for me. I really need to hire specialists that truly can fine tune every single channel and get like the squeeze the last five, 10% out of it. So you still need specialists and like SEO specialists, that's still a thing. It's very much still a thing. And there's need for that. However, everybody now is also expected to do everybody else's job in some capacity, at least on the average level. So the level of the capabilities that all of us do has increased. So for example, I now ship code to production. I have never done that before, but I also go and I ship my own apps and run my own campaigns completely without anybody's support. I build apps, I go out there, I create noise around it, I drive engagement to it. It's part of like all of the growth works to me. I write copy, I make prototypes for our engineering team that is designing it. Sometimes design shits all over it. Sometimes they say good job, you can go through it. But all I'm saying is I'm doing all of this now myself versus 10 years ago. I would say I was very specialized and more narrow lane. And that is expectation to me for every single employee. Every single employee at Lovable expected to ship code to production. Every single employee is expected to build their own satellite apps or to build their own products or even have a side gig that is running on Lovable. Every single employee at Lovable is expected to do their own marketing. Everybody's encouraged to post on social to build their brand, to go talk about what they are doing at Lovable and building in public. And every single employee still has their daytime job and their specialty that they actually need to execute and perform. And that is the norm now. That is the AI nativeness to me at the root of it. Because the only way that is possible is by becoming AI native.

12:19

Don't laugh. Is that possible at very large companies where you have compliance? Is that one of those things where it's only possible in a world of growth? But the minute you're a public company and you have compliance, me and you both know how this works. I mean, it's a nightmare. You can't post anything on social. Everything has to go through somewhat. Some product person posts an update that hasn't been announced in earnings and oh my God, is this an advantage that is only Available to private companies.

14:15

It's a great question. I do think it's very much an advantage that is available to startups. Yeah, there's also a question of how much of the large companies functionality can be eaten away by the current technical advances that everybody's getting via AI nativeness and what everybody's able to code and do on their own as opposed to needing to buy software. There's like an interesting question in that and I do think that the world of very large complexity, compliance, security driven enterprises will be at major disadvantage in this future. Now how long does that gonna really take to materialize for us to feel? I have no idea. But maybe I'm in my bubble too. I don't know, maybe I'm completely not seeing the big picture here but it just feels like that is where masses are going, that's what masses want to interact with and that's where the trends are going. So I don't know. I have a reasonable LinkedIn following and I didn't penalize for it in the larger companies like they were like absolutely no, don't post, delete the post. This is not good. We want to prove anything that you post on social and I'm like ah, this just like feels suffocating. So it almost was held against me that I had it at lovable is honestly one of the first companies that was like leaning into is like go post more, more, more where like can, can you talk? So I don't know, we'll see in the next year of how this is going to play out and whether this is a truly trend that is an advantage or it's a blip in just a hype zone.

14:43

I think the employee led content branding marketing is so helpful to seed communities, especially in the early days when you need to seed them artificially so to speak. What are the biggest mistakes you think that people make when trying to build a community? Maybe I'm old and grumpy, which is very possible, but I'm so bored of community being banded around. As a word. What are the biggest mistakes you see in people trying to embrace community?

16:15

Well, the biggest one is that they treat us as just their support outlet. Oh, our support team cannot get through the queue. Let's create a community for it to be a community support so people can help each other and it just becomes a dumping ground of negative sentiment because when people cannot get in touch with you through support channels, they go to community to vent about their issues. So it becomes a very negative place. It's not filled with inspiration, it's not filled with positivity and accomplishment. It's literally filled with problems. And then in order to solve for that, companies start going after tooling and they start creating these community platforms and forums, basically trying to almost replicate what Microsoft has created or like another, like Core, so to speak. It just becomes cold. Not connecting support forums that are then indexed by the way, by SEO for all of the negativity that is being shared within it. And. And it just becomes it's not a community.

16:41

You're not selling it. This sounds like a hole of depression

17:38

where all the problems come, but that is the community. It's like it's an outlet for negativity that has not been addressed by your support team. That's literally nine out of 10 communities because they're not spawned from the place of connection, they're spawned for the place of, hey, there needs to be additional way for people to solve their problems.

17:41

Can we seed it? Can we like pay for ugc? You see UGC marketplaces. You see head of ugc. Is there a way where we can artificially UGC community?

17:59

So you can see it. But I actually think that what you need to find is your early super users and your early super adopters, those people that are really excited about your product. And you should pull them in to be your community managers. You should pull them in to be your community ambassadors. You should deploy them to be your biggest advocates and for them to start bringing other people around them because of their excitement for the product. But you do need to identify them very early and build community around around them. That is the right way to do it because then they will bring the positivity into it as opposed to it being just a support outlet.

18:10

What do you do when you have a competitor who spends so much more money than you? In the same space we chatted when we had Omar from Wix on the show. WIX bought two super bowl ads. I'm not saying whether that's good or bad.

18:46

I watch them.

19:01

It's a big span. What do you do when you have a player who is just spending a lot of money and you are on the other side of that?

19:02

Well, you can obsess about it, you can get upset by it, you can try to match it, or you can say, our growth strategy is completely different. Our growth strategy is through organic word of mouth and delighting people and showing them that we're actually better as opposed to trying to pay for their attention. Do we look at it? Yes, absolutely. I watched super bowl ads. I took notes, we discussed it the day after, like, did we think that we should have been in Super Bowl? We decided we shouldn't have been. After we saw the ads, we're like, we were happy with our decision not to be. Will we support some other big sporting events? Maybe that's not out of the question. Are we doing ourselves paid marketing, for example, now? Yes, absolutely. We're overtaking New York in subway systems. We have a bunch of ads running in London. We're taking more billboards in San Francisco. So we're doing some of the paid marketing spend as well.

19:10

Why did you decide on that as the challenge channel to invest in paid in New York, London, San Francisco, on billboards in particular, I'm fascinated because we're

20:01

going after latent majority now, not just the early pioneers that are looking for solution. We want to educate the rest of the market what is possible and the capabilities that technology now has that they should be taking advantage of because there's a really short window of opportunity where people can really get ahead if they really lean into it, because otherwise they're going to be left behind. And I think a lot of businesses will be disrupted if they're left behind. A lot of people will be disrupted if they're left behind behind. So we do feel like we need to start educating larger masses, which is why we went into billboard subway advertising. But again, this is also very short in the timeline period. From Lovable's perspective, I would never recommend a company to do it this quickly. But Lovable is not a normal company because we're already well past over 300 million in ARR even though we're only like a year and couple of months old. So we just need to move into that space a little bit faster. But all I'm saying is that's not our primary strategy of how we're going to drive growth. This is just branding awareness. We want to play in the field. We want to drive awareness across masses out there because we believe our product is very relevant for them. Our ICP is very broad. Ideal customer profile is very broad. So we can go after billboard advertising and feel like we appeal to most of the eyeballs that land on us.

20:10

In a PLG AI world. What is a good organic to paid ratio in your mind? I'm not asking for yours. I'm saying what's a good for founders listening.

21:27

All right, well, you're starting to immediately go into attribution. How is it that you attribute where is the traffic coming from? Is it paid? Is it organic? Which is impossible to do if you're doing any sort of last click or digital footprint only. But I would say that for any founder in the first year, investing in paid as the means of growth is a death trap. Because until you actually figure it out your true stable product market fit and until you are able to drive it in some sort of organic way, whether it's your organic socials, whether it's organic search, whatever it is, investing into paid I think is a really horrible idea because you haven't even optimized and really learned all of your funnels. You haven't even grabbed people that are already looking for your solution in organic ways and figure out how they progress through your product. So to pour money on your top of the funnel when you the experience is not even optimized for those who are are looking for you is just like lighting cash on fire. So I would say that less than 10% should be paid. In the more scaled mature company it can be 30, 40% but anywhere over 50%. I would be very uncomfortable on the reliance on paid because I'm now competing with everybody else on third party platforms for the attention as opposed to relying on my organic pool and my product itself to drive growth for the company.

21:37

I'm just thinking of so many companies that I see who are like 60% paid in the first year and I'm

22:55

like I would be very nervous like that dependency. I would look at it as a single point of failure.

23:00

Even if the economics work out. I'm thinking of one of my companies in particular where the economics are working out and they're profitable on a cohort basis. But they are, they are heavily paid.

23:07

Yeah. And the problem is just yes, it might be working out now. So first of all, even if you're going to do paid, at least make sure that the paid payback cycle is really quick. Like the biggest issue that I see with paid is people look at is just a cap to ltv. None of the small companies know their ltv. So you're literally just looking at CAC and like kind of trying to guess of what it's actually going to be. Think about actually when you recoup your investment, how fast will you put $100 into your system? Can you recuperate that $100 out of the system back? If it's under three months, fine, maybe it's a little bit better. Put it into the system, have it regenerate for you really quickly. So it's a self contained system that keeps on giving to you and in paying for itself. But anytime that and anywhere Close to eight, nine months, even a year. It's a sink of money at that point that you need to constantly put back into the system more and more you're going to constantly have to raise to do it. And the problem is that if Google doesn't hit their earnings, what are they going to do? Hey, let's go to AdWords and jack up all of the CACs by 20% so we can hit our earnings. And that's coming out of your budget so they can hit the Wall street numbers. So you have to be really careful because you're literally at mercy of other other super giants needing to hit business performance on the market and you are paying for it. So if that's how you want to do your growth, fine, if that's working, at least on a really fast, quick payback period. But other than that, I just feel like that is not a sustainable way to grow.

23:17

So you agree that cat to LTV for the majority of new ish companies today is respectfully irrelevant metric?

24:38

It's absolutely irrelevant. You don't know your LTV unless you've been in the business for five years plus you do not know your ltv.

24:46

So what numbers matter to you? If we go, you acquire a customer, you're like, is that good? Because we've got no idea how much they're going to pay over time. You look at lovable and bluntly, you can spend a lot or you can spend little, it's nice in that way. But you don't know how much they're going to spend. How do you determine what numbers matter?

24:53

So if I'm doing a paid market marketing, the payback period is the only thing I look at. How quickly do I recuperate my money on average from any given campaign? And I try to really try to do at least the last click attribution perspective, especially if it's performance marketing, a pretty tight tie in between those numbers. If your conversion windows are really long, so not Everybody converts within 24 hours, let's say. And if it takes you six months, a year to convert, again, very dangerous to invest into paid marketing because then you don't even know if you're going to recoup that money. So unless your conversion window is under three months, I would say don't start with paid marketing as your growth lever because you will never be able to make it spin fast enough because you don't you have such a long conversion windows if you have shorter conversion windows. I think it's very important to also look at any of the Signals beforehand how people are activating, how many of activated people are actually converting to paid. Because there's going to be many KPIs that you can look into, predict conversion or even predict retention that are not monetization based. So really understanding that behavior and your user base becomes the number one concern for you to be able to even know do I go into this or do I not? And again, paid marketing to me is it's actually the most expensive way out and it's not competitively defensible at all. And it's not sustainable you paying somebody else to generate demand for you. If you haven't figured out your unique way, way, your competitively defensible and sustainable way to generate demand without relying on other platform, then I think that you are just buying time in the market before the collapse is imminent.

25:12

What does an activated user mean for you? It's someone who lands and converts. It's someone who lands and converts and pays. What is ture activation?

26:54

So I live in a world where not everybody who uses your product is a paid customer. So I also live in a world where every single customer has other value besides just paying to you directly. So for example, at Lovable we have a ton of free users. A lot of our costs are within our freemium. Not with our paid marketing, not with employees, not with marketing or sales budgets. It's with freemium because we view freemium as actually marketing channel. What I mean by that is that a free user, when they come in and they get delighted by what they accomplish for free, they go go and do marketing on our behalf. They go talk across socials, they go refer to our friends. We very carefully measure. We have such thing as called lovable score where we measure how often people actually refer us to somebody else. And we keep a really close eye on it because that is an earned channel that you cannot buy, that you cannot compete with and that we own. So free user holds value to us. So even if we acquire through paid marketing channels, let's say for users, they hold value to us. It's not all about conversion. But back to your activation questions to me is purely engagement based. That has nothing to do with monetization whatsoever. So what is it that your aha moment is with the product? What is it steps for you to set up to get to that aha moment? What are the first habit loops that you're going to start falling into to start using product on ongoing basis? So it's purely product engagement based. That is an incredible signal for both monetization and Long term retention.

27:03

With respect, do you want great product engagement? And what I mean by that is if you want simplicity, it wouldn't necessarily be depth of product engagement. Hey, make me a Website that's like BBC News, but make it just for VCs and for funding rounds. That's not very deep engagement, but it could be a happy user. How do you think about that product engagement need versus actually just what's best for the user?

28:36

So I think about it on multiple vectors. There's intensity of engagement. So how deep do I go? How much time do I spend? How complicated of the task that I'm trying to accomplish? That's one vector, intensity. And you write intensity is very powerful for social platforms because the more intense you are on them, the better user you are for them. For simple productivity tools, intensity is almost an anti metric because intensity means like I'm getting stuck, I'm doing too much. Where this actually supposed to be easy. Intensity is often the anti metric. However, there's also frequency. So how often do I come back and do it? Frequency is a big one. You always want to be in a habitual zone for our minds. Habitual zone for our minds is somewhere on daily or weekly basis. Anytime you move into being monthly, you in the forgettable zone. I don't remember what I did last month. Like the world is moving too quickly. I don't even remember if I looked at like some software last month or even if I tried it last month. So trying to be in that daily or weekly habitual zone is super important. And then on top of it, you look at just what actions are meaningful. The worst thing is when you create frequency of engagement based on logins. That's a vanity metric. Everybody can log in. That doesn't mean they get value. So setting up that frequency engagement on something a little bit more meaningful, like for us for example, it's both either building an app and lovable so you're prompting to make some changes or receiving traffic on the app that you already published. So you're on both sides of the engagement coin of either still editing or now reaping the benefits of what you've already published that are both counter it as an engagement signal and then we count frequency of it to see how many of them are active on daily basis, which we call active builders. So you're right, intensity is an anti metric often for us. So you pick just an action that provides value. But it can be fairly light but not as light as login or just like a visit because that is just like nonsensical in terms of doesn't mean anything.

29:03

Do the majority of sites not require very limited interaction when you think about habitual use of usage like if I'm a venture fund creating one, we use Lovable for Project Europe. Amazing. We have a beautiful site but we don't change it. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

30:57

It's an okay thing. If it's live and it's functioning and it's getting traffic, you're getting value out of it. That's great for us. So we count it as engagement. Some people are just going to have apps they're still building. Some of them are just in the consumption state. Both are good. There's no preference for us of one versus the other value whatsoever. If anything, we just measure an watch for proportions just to make sure that there is a good enough amount of apps that are getting traffic and receiving value that way. So it's we're not just about building, we're also about value capture after the build is complete.

31:13

What are your biggest lessons on conversion to paid in this new world of PLG AI prosumer tools?

31:46

My biggest lessons are a couple of fold. Lesson number one do not and I mean do not lock people in subscription as the only way to monetize you. I know that we all love our annual recurring revenue and our multiples are decided by annual recurring revenue, but if your product is anything like a bursty usage where it's not super consistent when creativity strikes or project strikes, I need to go and I do a lot of work in it and then I might have some periods of more of a downtime or much lighter usage. Allowing flexibility in your monetization model for ad hoc purchases can mean the world of incrementality for your overall monetization capture potential. We just introduced top ups at Lovable and it's been absolutely wild because in every other job I've ever held in my entire life, I've always thought about something like an ad hoc purchase on top of the subscription. I've always shut down or I was too nervous to even move it forward because of the scares of affecting that treasured ARR. That's not true. It's like a complete fallacy. You should do both and it adds on incrementally and your AR only continues growing and your retention improves. So that is one big learning for me, especially with AI where people are still exploring and the usage is not super consistent for most of the products. And then I would say that the second one is that your monetization model right now is not the correct one for every single AI company out there. We just fundamentally have not found how to best monetize AI because we're all just passing through highly expensive LLM costs to our users. But when LLM costs will collapse, and they will collapse eventually, every LLM themselves are betting on it. Our monetization models will have to evolve. And whoever evolves their monetization model to be more outcome based first is going to be the winner on the market. So you better set up the right infrastructure and the right team around it to be able to change your monetization model and test it really rapidly as opposed to leaving it as something that is not touched for years and years because most of the businesses it is something that is a taboo subject that cannot be adjusted because it feels so complicated.

31:55

A lot of startups today have subsidized LLM costs very much, like AWS did and Google Cloud did with credits for years and Anthropic and OpenAI have done now very much. With this generation of startups, should they account for them in costs or should they let themselves be artificially impressed by their margins despite this clear steroid injection of free for this time period?

34:11

Well, I think why would OpenAI sell the LLM under cost? Yes, it's a market grab for sure, but I fundamentally believe that they think that LLMs costs are going to have to come down, down to the point that they're not going to have to raise the prices, but they're going to start getting the margins to actually make those prices make sense for them and potentially lower it even further. Because LLM is going to be a commoditized feature very soon and it doesn't feel so right now, but it will be like access to Internet or access to the cloud. It's commoditized, it's cheap. So I believe that they also believe that it's going to come down quite a bit once we get efficiency gains out of how LLMs are constructed. And this is where, when it becomes completely commoditized, you cannot monetize on it anymore. You have to start moving towards monetization of outcomes. And again, whoever evolves their monetization models first there will win.

34:36

Speaking of kind of commoditization of models there, how do you think about creating stickiness in what is seemingly a very transient transactional world? Especially when you look at the switch role cursor to clog code for a lot of developers, it's almost been overnight for a lot of them. How do you think about Creating stickiness in a transient transactional product environment.

35:33

I think this is where brand comes in, that trust comes in. You have to rely on people believing in you and your team because like otherwise, like I said, all of the SaaS functionality is getting commoditized and democratized and it's just like anybody can do everything now.

35:55

Do you know, I think that's a bit wooey.

36:11

Elena, honestly, listen, I'm like terrified of the fact that I'm becoming a brand marketer because I'm just like, because like it's becoming so much more because of brand. People will follow the brand because of its promise, because of its, the relation, because functionality is going to be available everywhere. So I don't know what else can differentiate you besides creating an absolutely delightful experience, stressing about the most littlest pieces of friction in your product, being really fast in innovation because you still cannot fall behind, but at least being like on the forefront even if you're not the leader. But it's that relationship that you develop with your customer is everything. How lovable are you? Because if you're not lovable, I think the end is near for a lot of companies that are only purely focused only on just pure functional ability of the products.

36:13

If I gave you an unlimited budget, Elena, what would you do differently? Would you do, I don't know, a sponsor, a real Madrid shirt? Would you do an F1 car? Would you pump money into Anton's brand and give him a media team to do daily vlogs and videos of what he does in a day?

37:04

And okay, a couple tactical things come to mind. I would still do out of home advertisement. I think that is coming back in spades because that's where eyeballs are at. That's where you can actually like capture attention. I would go very heavily into video and talking, not just visual ads because then you can explain things so much easier. I would go after Amazon Prime, Video, Spotify and all of those of the world because there's just like not a lot of competition. I would go after a creator economy so hard. I would have every single newsletter, every single podcast, have my ad on it and just box out everybody else. And then I would send every single one of my customers my own T shirt with a hat and just have them being my walking billboards all over, over the place and they would be top quality, the things that they actually would want to wear and they would feel like there is like absolutely kick ass thing that is a cool thing to have. So I would just deploy as much as possible at the end of my customers and people where they're already spending eyes and eyeballs at to have my brand all around it if we go through them.

37:21

One out of home. I think most people do out of home really badly. I stare looking at billboards or banners and I'm like, I have no idea what this person with a laptop is doing randomly typing in a very large drawing room with nothing but an orchid around them.

38:26

I think also billboards can be deployed almost in the performance marketing way. So one of my favorite stories is I worked with Maya who was at Segment and the way Segment has worked and I don't know, that sort of like just sticks with me that when they wanted to close an enterprise contract, they would buy a billboard right in front of that office office and they would put their ad on that billboard addressing that company specifically. And it would be like the cheapest way to close 6, 7 digit contract because they directly targeted every single employee in that company with the billboard. So I think that you can be like a lot more creative with the billboards the way that people think, everybody thinks constantly. San Francisco 101, like where am I going to be in the AI slop of billboards on that free freeway? But I think you can do it so much smarter with movie theaters, with the taxis, with the subway systems, with buses. Like go back to the basics because you can do some real cool shit there.

38:41

I remember one of the founders that I once invested in was doing a recruitment platform and they were trying to get people away from Goldman Sachs and join startups and it was a startup recruitment platform. So they got a billboard outside of Goldman Sachs and they put, I bet your parents are proud of you working for Goldman. And then do you know what's amazing though? The big newspapers wrote about it because it was funny and aggressive and characterful and you get these multiplier effective media because it's really out there.

39:40

But like you said, it needs to be funny and it needs to have character. It cannot just have your tone deaf AI marketing slogan of something collaborative platform on cloud with AI like you transformation. Nothing like those words cannot be used. And yes, you will not appeal to everybody. And it doesn't matter, just appeal to people that will have a smile, a chuckle, that will have a memory from it that will want to talk about it. Like we are in the era where we need to start taking more risks in marketing and people just need to get out of their, I don't know, boxed minds of how we've been trained for the last 20 years of what Good creative and good copy looks like. Because I think we're living a different world and if you want to capture people's attention, you have to think outside of the box.

40:09

When we think about video, what would you do with video? How would you think about what would work? What doesn't work, what you see, that's cool. What's not cool? How would you approach video in a world of unlimited, no constraints?

40:55

So I think AI generated video is the future. I was just playing with video platform where just I uploaded my just still photo and it just created a full thing of me moving my hands, doing the full ad with like back and forth transitions with, with an app screen. I think that there's still going to be a place for manual video creation. And those are almost going to be like artisan videos where it's just like handcrafted, hand, hand created. It's like a craft that just like think about like taking a picture versus painting the picture with watercolors. It's like there's still going to be some differences there. But I think for advertising needs, AI is where videos and even any creatives are going to be at. AI models on video creation and just visual creation are improving in such a rapid way and they can create these striking images and they can animate you in the way that you would never be able to record properly in one shot. That I think it's the future. I'm like playing around even with creating animation for myself when I'm reading my own blog as opposed to like me recording it. Let me just put in my screenshot, give it the blog's transcript and let it do it for me so it looks like I'm reading it out loud like annotating it. But it's not me, it's just AI doing all of the work. So I think the future of advertising is going to be almost purely all

41:07

AI creator economies, sponsoring newsletters, creators. People try and do this and they spray money I think pretty badly. How would you think about doing it? Well, what you would avoid, would you go horizontal? Would you go vertical? How do you think about that?

42:28

So every creator has their audience. You need to find creators that align with your ideal customer profile audience the most. I think that you cannot look at creator economy as one and done like I'm doing one ad placement and I need to see performance out of it. It's somewhere between performance but it's most definitely brand awareness touchpoint because their audience is not going there to, to like discover new products, so to speak. And I think that Consistency here matters. Like you have to be in it for a long haul. I think the coverage matters. So you cannot just be, let's say one newsletter. You have to go across multiples and you have to just look at it as a, hey, I'm gonna do billboards or I'm gonna do creators. I can do influencers on social or I can do newsletter creators, I can do podcasters. Some of those slides. Lots are super cheap too because people like, they're not educated of how much to charge. You can go and like get thousands of impressions for like base to nothing. I don't know why more people don't do that. And I think that most of the time they think oh, what is my going to be my click through rate through my ad. But it's not an SEM, it's not an AdWords ad, it's not a paid marketing advertising on top of Google search results. And I think people underestimate association of their brand with that creator and their ability to target very specific audience that that creator ear by creating content for that audience that is just completely unappreciated as a channel in marketing right now.

42:44

At scale, do you try and get attribution from it? Do you try and do like referral codes, discount codes, whatever it is to get attribution or are you like, you know what, it's in the, it's in the brand bucket. Fine.

44:09

I think discount codes are always nice just to give that audience a little something I truly believe in. In I wouldn't say like a pure discounting strategy, but giving your product away for free for people to try as the biggest portion of your marketing budget, I think always has to be the case. So what do I mean by that? Let me just explain really quickly. Yes, you can do discount codes, you can just give free offers. You can make your freemium even bigger. But if you look at your overall marketing spend, your free giveaways, whether it's part freemium, whether it's discount codes or whatnot, has to be big, bigger than your paid marketing spend. That I truly believe is the right ratio for every single company. Because if you are not using your product to acquire customers in some sort of offers way, I think that you are just giving too much money away to Googles and metas of the world and not putting enough pressure on your product to wow people. But discount codes are good.

44:21

I saw you a post of yours and this power of social and your personal brand. I saw your offer on Women's Day where. Yeah. And making it free with Respect. Does that work? Like do you get a lot of take up on that? Does it lead to conversion or is it kind of good brand?

45:14

Well, ask me after Women's Day we'll see how much it actually leads to conversion. Lovable has had a couple of free weekends before where we would offer product completely for free. The first free weekend was quite good from acquisition perspective. It was in early 2025 when the brand was only a couple months old. The second free weekend was summer last year. So about seven months in Waktar we just about almost hit 100 million in ARR. So like a little bit like on the lower medium stage of where the product has been and that one has been incredible for re engagement and resurrection of existing users deepening their use cases. So it was more of a retention play than acquisition play, interestingly enough. But this time for Women's Day. I don't know about you, maybe algorithm is like boxing me out, but all I see is people talking about Lovable free day. So this social impact of just people being so excited about it, rightfully so, CR is going to be completely free for a day. To me, that is something that you cannot pay for. That is like a marketing campaign that would cost us millions of dollars to execute on. And our users are doing all of the marketing for us and grabbing everybody around them to bring into Lovable. So we'll see how it performs because this is the first time that we gave notice so early, early usually we did it like a day before, so it was like very last minute. And this is the first time that we aligned it with a mission as opposed to just saying it's a free day. So we're always experimenting and this is a large test that we're running to see how it's going to go. But just the market coverage and the buzz that it creates I think is fairly priceless because it's created by our own users.

45:29

How do you think about setting effective KPIs to determine determine the success of a campaign like this?

47:05

So we obviously have really big KPIs on how many people we expect to bring in, how many new signups we expect to get, how many people we expect to resurrect, how many existing users that are already active are going to come in. We're going to see how many apps are created or deepened in editing that day. We're going to see how many of them go publish. So our North Star metric is daily active apps. So we expect that to shoot up. The main goal is is it going to Just come down, down to previous growth levels or is it going to be a step function change and then we're going to grow from there. So our goal is to really understand the new exposure and deepening engagement with our existing users. On engagement level monetization obviously will just be a result outcome of that, but that is not primary KPI that we're optimizing against.

47:10

I love that taking advantage of like Women's Day or a weekend of free giveaway giveaways or whatever that is. When we think about product launches, what are your biggest lessons or piece of advice on how to do product launches well as a growth tactic?

47:57

So such a great question. At Lovable, the way product launches are done are very different than any other company that I've seen. Most of the time your product launch may be once a month if you're lucky, most likely once every three months. So a quarterly launch, if you're very unlucky in the larger company, it's like a semi annual or annual launch. It's like very slow cadences and you try to create a like big moments around it because that is like your time to make buzz to acquire new users or to re engage existing users. At Lovable, we are committed to launching every day. So there's like ongoing buzz that is happening. Lovable is evolving every single day. Every single day it's getting better, something is improving and that is very important for us to just stay relevant in the category. And then on top of it, every one to two months we make big what we call tier one one launches which bundle a bunch of functionality where there is a story behind it, where there is a like a step function change and what is actually happening. But it's like really interesting strategy of like just constant noise in the market and then big spikes in what we're actually launching. And I know that that constant noise is part of our retention strategy. That constant noise is what drives a lot of resurrection for us as well. Because people feel like it's a living, breathing thing that is constantly growing and evolving and they always want to come back and try it again. As opposed to us getting into forgettable zone almost a month, three months away and seeing competitors launch. So it's like a really different way to think about launches altogether.

48:12

But how do you have a launch every day? Everyone would love to have a launch every day. Is it just like the product velocity and being very vocal about every single little thing?

49:43

So we're not vocal about every single little thing. Our marketing does not get involved in every single day. We launches, those are just. Maybe I should just call them releases. Our engineering releases multiple things every single day that improve customer experience. Not just bugs. I'm not even talking about bugs. And actual changes in product that are based on frustrations, that are based on lack of capacity, that are based on lack of capability. And then we encourage them to go post it on social. And then we have a channel that's called beeswarming where they post their post and we all go beesworming on that post to try to get it more amplification. So we try to make a marketer out of every single engineer. Or we pick out things that we're excited about and post about it on social too. So it's like an employee led marketing for these releases. And then marketing comes in and puts all of its FirePower behind Tier 1 or some partner launches that are really meant to tell the story to the customer. But staying top of mind is important.

49:52

Relevancy is everything.

50:47

Yeah, everything.

50:49

People almost forget what you said, but the impact of you being there is what's important. And again, relevancy is everything. Bee swarming. I love that. And elevenlabs do it as well. Does it really make a difference when you have 100 people from lovable like something within a minute? It makes a big difference.

50:50

To Algos, yes, it makes a big difference. It's actually not so much about like, it's more about comments. So yeah, you like, maybe you repost. But it's the comment that makes the biggest difference. Where the algorithms pick up right now. And it's not all happening in the first minute. People get to it when they get to it. So it's spread out throughout the first couple of hours. But I go to that channel at the end of each day and I just go down the line, okay, let me go support all of the things that people have said and I can get them more visibility through my platform as well. So we support all each other and it works quite nicely. We had employees that have grown their followings quite a bit since they started because of that. Because we just all beeswarm on them.

51:07

Final one that you mentioned that was like swag. I have the most inordinate amount of swag. Elaine, I'm sure you do too. Of shit T shirts and shit caps and the. I don't know what it is. I'm so sorry to lump you in as one nation, but you are one nation Americans and you have these, the big drinks that you have, you know, the like the soccer mom drink things, Stanley cup, those ones Yes, I have about 50 of them.

51:45

You do? Can you send me some my way? My daughter loves them.

52:09

I'm going to write a note. You can have an arrangement braves some of them. By the way. The startups are dead, but the Stanley cup survives. Okay, what would be your advice to someone on like? Okay, me, I want swag for our portfolio companies, for our LPs. What advice? What to do, what not to do, what you'd like to do. Help me out.

52:12

I can't say that at Lovable we're doing right either. We do it like on a one off basis. It took us for a while even to get the swag to all of our own employees because we wanted it to be top quality. We didn't want to just outsource it and get like another shitty T shirt on every. Everybody that like falls apart after the first wash. So it's actually a pretty big friction in the market right now. Like how to do this at scale because A, it's quite expensive to do it right and two, it's really hard to find partners that can scale the operations for you. I just know that if your customer wears your T shirt that is the best thing that you can possibly do. So how to get to the moment where. Well we, for example, when we did SheBuild's hackathon first two times, the first time to every single participant we sent T shirts and people like posted about it on LinkedIn like, oh my gosh, I got a lovable T shirt. I'll wear it all the time. So there's like some element of at the beginning of like it's a hot brand and I want to be affiliated with it and you need to lean into it as much as possible at the same time. Does anybody want a Google T shirt? I don't know. It's like, it's just like it's all over the place. And you can buy them in gift shops that like just say Google or something on them. So I think there's a time and place for that strategy. And it's most of the time when you're hot and you're growing really fast and people work, want to feel that affiliation with your brand lifts them in some way.

52:31

You can call yourself up the night before you join Lovable and say, elena, you should know this. What would you say to yourself if you had the ability to call yourself up and say that?

53:46

That every month at Lovable feels like a year in a normal company in terms of how much change it goes through and how much my role even evolves how many priority shifts we have in a given month. And one more thing that I would really tell myself is that I'd be in awe at what I'd be doing six months from starting the job and that'll be completely different from anything I've done in the last 20 years of my career.

53:58

So I'm a startup founder and I'm like, wow, Sarah led growth at I don't know, Notion. And I'm not picking on them just like choosing a random company. Amazing, amazing company led growth at Notion Notion. Gosh, she must be amazing. Does it matter if she's amazing because it's a different world or actually is it about mental plasticity towards growth?

54:25

I think it's about agency, it's about people's autonomy, it's about people's drive and wantingness to explore of how this world is changing with AI. I do still think that Sarahs matter. Like I consider myself a Sarah. I've been there for 20 years. Like I so deeply written in patterns and frameworks and like how things used to be done because that's been my entire professional career and I do have a lot of patterns that will help company to not trip up over obvious things. I do bring that value to the business. But I also need to be paired with people that are not burdened with those decades of knowledge. I can just go that can open my horizons, that can can teach me the new ways of how to do it. Because every single thing that I do I still rely like how did I do it before, let me do it now. And I'm constantly pressed by everybody at lovable that like no, this is the way to do it. And at first my mind breaks and like no, I've never done this before. This is not how you do it. And I have to constantly try their way. But I think both of us together, it's almost like old guard of Sarah's and new guard of like employees that don't have that context, that don't have that value. Baggage is what creates a perfect harmony that pushes the company forward because you can prevent stupid mistakes from happening with Sarahs but then you can push into AI nativeness with the new guard that is not burdened by those patterns and history.

54:46

This is something that I think about a lot. How do you prevent morale from reducing when numbers are down in very transient worlds when it's summer people people are outside more. They're not on lovable as much say. How do you prevent morale seeping when numbers are not there?

56:14

So I think step number one is try to have pre mortems about what would happen if your numbers start to go down. So you have the action plan at the earliest time of noticing those numbers so you're not reacting to it. You already have a go to war plan, so to speak, when something goes wrong, wrong. So this should be happening before any big release, before any big launch, before end of the year you should do pre mortems and the best path forward is the worst things happen to you, competitor enters and that. So like I really believe in having those conversations early on. Number two, knowing the key predictive indicators that will lead you into the decline, not just looking at revenue. Because when moment revenue starts declining it's already too late. So like you need to know like beforehand what will I see, what will lead, what will warn me of that decline. Just so you at least have a couple of months, maybe six months to react before actual revenue impact is going to get hit. So those two things I think are important and I think number three, we just have to accept the fact that some people don't do good with negativity of the business. They're not going to be the ones that are stand up and try to reverse it out. And you need to look at your culture and say there are going to be people that are passionate about what they do, that are passionate about the product, that are going to be up for the challenge and other people that are not. And I'm not going to be able to change people that are not. So I need to invest into people that will lead the change and that I believe will help me be able to get out of it. It's so much just about people's attitudes, but you need to find the ones that bring the right step function change into your organization. But get yourself prepared as much as possible beforehand.

56:33

Often people say row your own race. Don't worry about competitors. Today you kind of have to worry about competitors luxury not to, don't you? If Claude code releases something and you don't know that, that could be why you're seeing numbers reduce in some way. You wouldn't be able to make data informed decisions.

58:14

Okay, so I think the question is what do you define as worry? I think that you have to watch your competitors very carefully and know what they're doing because you need to know what you're playing against against in the field when the customers are making a choice. But do you obsess about your competitors and let them dictate your roadmap and your growth and marketing Activities? I don't think so. You have to look at it through the lens of what works for them may not work for us. Do we have an alternative way to do it and capture the market? But do you have to know the team you're playing against? Absolutely, there's no question about that.

58:33

I agree with that. Has that changed over a time when

59:07

the functionality was very expensive to produce, we could afford to obsess about competitors a little bit more. With the functionality and the speed of development happening so much faster now, it almost paves the way for you to just have a very opinionated point of view of where you need to go and pull all efforts behind that hypothesis and praying and hoping that it plays out. But you cannot just copy your competitors and win any anymore because it's going to be a sum all game.

59:11

Do you think lovable removes the need for Figma and the design process?

59:40

I think that there's always going to be tools for vertical use cases for specific specialties. For now, however, can you design beautiful prototypes and lovable without figma? Yes. And AI is only going to get better at design. I still very much see time and place for figma for specific workflows and there's no question about that. But my bigger just worries for Figma is what will happen a year from now when AI is going to be so good it will be able to do all of the little changes down to even outside of Software design, to CAD files, to 3D designs. What if we'll be able to do all of that? Why would you need design software at that point where it can shortcut all of those stages for you?

59:47

If you still see a need for Figma and they have figma make, how do you think about that?

1:00:36

I think that most of the non technical users don't start with Figma and there is a pretty large population of there's designers that start in Figma and Figma makes a lot of sense for them if they want to have their functional program prototypes. But there's product managers, analysts, marketers, sales, even engineers, operations people, HR people. All of those people, they never live in figma. They never start with figma. They start with Lovable because that is an easier way and we build specifically for their Persona. This is why I'm saying the technicality of it and your specialty matters quite a bit.

1:00:42

Who do you think is the most challenging competitor?

1:01:20

I always worry about the big boys and girls in the world. So OpenAI's anthropic, Google's apples more so than our competitors that sprang up from the bottom or from sideways. And the reason that I worry about them more, and I think everybody should be worried about them more, they just have the distribution hold in the market that is unparalleled. And in the world where product functionality becomes, becomes more commoditized of what you can create, distribution and growth becomes the reasons to win. So whoever has the best distribution that is earned, that is competitively defensible, that is sustainable, that is predictable, is going to be the winner in the market. So I worry about the companies that have that figured out.

1:01:23

What worries you most?

1:02:08

What worries me most is that we live in the AI bubble as tech workers and we're taking advantage of it and we're pushing each other forward and we're challenging each other other. But there's a whole world out there that has even tried AI and how far behind they're going to be left if they're not going to get on the train is that it creates such a huge disparity between people or it will create really big set of concentrated winners and the very large masses of losers, so to speak, behind this technology change. And that what worries me the most that we're not going to bring everybody along with us because all of the companies and all of the startups and all of the AI technology is really so heavily focused on the pioneer and not the average person that would benefit the most out of it. And I, I just worry what that's going to do to our society as a whole.

1:02:09

Listen, I'd love to do a quick fire round and I'm going to start with a super easy one following that conversation. If you're advising your kids coming out of university, university today what to do, what advice do you give them?

1:03:03

I would tell them to first of all be AI first in everything, make AI do so much work for them that otherwise they would have expected to learn somewhere else or be able to do something else and start a side hustle right now. Right now it's like the world is primed for everybody to have meaningful side hustle that they can monetize. And the window of opportunity is pretty short. And if you have a founder profile on you, you're going to be more likely to be hired by a company if you to get hired by a company. But listen, there's so much money in creator economy, so much money in just being a solopreneur right now. I truly believe there's going to be a company of a billion dollar company running solo by somebody. I would challenge my kids to Be that solopreneur with a billion dollar company.

1:03:16

I think there is Peter Steinberger with openclaw. I mean it was unannounced how much he got bought for.

1:04:00

Maybe he's the one. Maybe let my kid be the second one then.

1:04:05

Who else in tech do you think has done growth brand so well in the last year?

1:04:09

I think Granola has done a wonderful job from the products perspective. I see whisper flow also spreading like fire across many people and again it's mostly like a people talking about it. So much so customers are being the biggest marketing agents and I think it's genius.

1:04:16

I have to say I couldn't live without it. I never ever type emails anymore. I type them to LPs because I need to make sure that there's commerce.

1:04:32

I never type on my phone like whisper flows like how annoying is the

1:04:39

integration though where I'm going back, swipe up back. Apple just buy it already.

1:04:44

I know, right?

1:04:49

Apple, seriously? A $4 trillion market cap and you can't do a dictation tool? I am.

1:04:50

Well listen, Apple still has Siri and Siri is dumb as a doorknob. I mean it's honestly like my kids try to talk to Siri sometimes and I'm like oh my God, how is this still like live and functioning and like how is this not. It's been like deprecated by them.

1:04:54

What channel did you spend on that you wish you'd never spent on meta? Oh, why?

1:05:09

Just very little incrementality, just a bunch of pass through views that don't materialize into anything. So I still do influencers through social platforms but not just like full on just meta ads. It just I haven't seen them working a little while.

1:05:15

If you were to call up a growth leader today before they start a new role, what would you tell them?

1:05:30

Get ready to drop 80% of what you know and lean into the new way of working and growing company.

1:05:37

That's reassuring.

1:05:44

It's also super exciting because I don't know, I've been bored in the space for last five years thinking everything looks and feels the same and now I actually see a rapid change in how things are being done. I think it's the most exciting thing in the world. World.

1:05:47

I love that. What are you most excited for when you look forward next 5 to 10 years? My mom's got Ms. I'm super excited for drug discovery and potential Ms. Treatments that never were possible. What are you excited for?

1:06:00

I'm actually very excited about AI advancing our medical research quite a bit Faster fixing some of the human imperfections that we've always dealt with and that we've never had cure because we're so incentivized on just medicine and not actually prevention or cure of the diseases, but because medicine makes more money than the actual cure of the disease for our economy. But I'm really hoping that AI can change and just eradicate a bunch of diseases and deformities and just issues with human bodies to make our life more comfortable.

1:06:12

Elena, you are a star. I think we need to solve for anyone. We're doing a request for startups on high quality swag that is customizable and great.

1:06:43

Please hit, hit me up. Please hit me up.

1:06:53

Great.

1:06:55

You're a star. I always learn so much from you. So thank you so much for being so amazing.

1:06:56

Thank you for having me, Harry. Appreciate you.

1:07:00

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1:08:09