Elena Verna on Why 95% of Growth is Now Innovation, Not Optimization

The Growth Playbook Doesn't Work When You're Riding a Wave

Elena Verna has led growth at Miro, Dropbox, Amplitude, and SurveyMonkey. She knows every optimization pattern in the book. But at Lovable, where she's head of growth, only 30-40% of what she learned over 15 years actually transfers.

The company hit $100 million ARR in 7 months. Four months later, they crossed $200 million. They now have over 8 million users and hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers. Retention matches benchmarks of top B2B SaaS companies, but the team barely thinks about revenue optimization.

I usually spend maybe 5% innovating on growth in my previous roles. Right now I'm spending 95% innovating on growth and only 5% on optimization.

— Elena Verna

The shift is brutal and simple: when you're in fast-moving water, you don't tweak conversion funnels. You build new boats. Lovable's growth team ships Shopify integrations and voice mode features that would normally come from product. The focus is invention, not iteration.

Activation Is Someone Else's Problem Now

Every growth leader obsesses over activation. It's the highest-leverage moment in the funnel. But Verna barely touches it at Lovable.

Why? Because the core product team is already obsessed with it. When your product is an AI agent, the first generation and the hundredth generation use the same system. Improving the agent improves the entire lifecycle at once. There's no separate onboarding flow to optimize.

The agent team spends night and day thinking about it. So I've never been at a company where the core team thinks so much about activation.

— Elena Verna

This frees the growth team to work deeper in the stack. They're now writing agentic workflows and codifying agent instructions. Growth used to smooth surfaces. Now it rebuilds engines.

Ship Fast, Talk Loud, Give It Away

Lovable's top growth strategy is building in public. Founder Anton tweets updates constantly. Engineers ship features and announce them on social. The velocity creates noise, and noise drives resurrection and re-engagement better than newsletters ever did.

Users log into Twitter and LinkedIn to see what Lovable shipped today. The gap between user feedback and product delivery is so short that customers feel heard. That loop is retention gold.

The only way to create a word of mouth loop is just to blow their socks off.

— Elena Verna

Another lever: giving the product away. A lot. When a user wants to run a hackathon at work and asks for free credits, Lovable says yes immediately. Why block someone who will do your marketing for you? The strategy is to remove barriers, not maximize revenue per user. Get more people through the door. Optimize later.

Verna also notes that organic marketing has shifted completely. Five years ago, organic meant SEO. Now it's social. CEO posts, employee posts, customer posts, influencer posts. Even for B2B, the game is Twitter, LinkedIn, and personality. No more corporate scrubbing. No more ChatGPT-written copy. Show the humans building the thing.

Product-Market Fit Expires Every Three Months

In traditional SaaS, you find product-market fit and ride it for years. In AI, product-market fit is perishable. The market is in "capability stage," not value stage. Users are exploring what's possible, and what's possible changes every month.

Lovable ships tier-1 launches that create step-function changes in product-market fit. But between those moments, they maintain constant shipping velocity to keep the product feeling alive. Every week, users see something new. That cadence is the retention strategy.

Verna breaks down the software maturity curve she learned from John Cutler: capability, then value, then scale. Vibe coding is still in capability mode. People build proposal games, tutoring apps for their kids, storefronts, internal tools, prototypes. The use cases are exploding, not consolidating.

This means competition is everywhere. Every startup is launching a vibe coding tool. The only way to stay ahead is reinvention, not optimization. Lovable doesn't ignore revenue, but revenue is an outcome of getting more people to try the product. The focus is market share, not ARPU. Get the usage. Fix monetization later.

What This Means for You

Verna is careful to say Lovable is not a benchmark. Most companies won't hit $200 million ARR in under a year. This is a category-creation moment in a once-in-a-decade technology shift. If you're not in that wave, don't judge yourself by these numbers.

But the lessons hold. If your market is moving fast, stop optimizing. If your product is an agent, let the core team own activation and go deeper into agentic behavior. If you're in B2B, treat social like your primary organic channel. If you want word of mouth, make something worth talking about and give it away generously.

Shipping velocity matters more than polish. Building in public matters more than polished narratives. And in 2025, the growth team might be the one shipping product features while the product team obsesses over onboarding.