构建Lovable:15人团队60天达成1000万美元年经常性收入 | Anton Osika(CEO兼联合创始人)
Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people | Anton Osika (CEO and co-founder)
Anton Osika: … Lovable is your personal AI software engineer. You describe an idea and then you get a fully working product. The reason is to enable those who have had such a hard time finding people who are good at creating software that’s been their absolute bottleneck and let them take their ideas and their dreams into reality.
Future Skill Trends
Lenny Rachitsky: You guys hit 4 million ARR in the first four weeks. You hit 10 million ARR in the first two months with just 15 people. You’re the fastest growing startup in all of Europe. How did you decide on Lovable is the name. It’s so sweet.
Anton Osika: The best word for a great product is that it’s lovable. A lot of jargon that I like to use to emphasize what we should be striving for is building a minimum lovable product and then building a lovable product and then building an absolutely lovable product. So I took that jargon with me in the company name.
Introducing the Guest
Lenny Rachitsky: People would wonder just what jobs will be more important, what skills will be less important?
Anton Osika: Doing a bit of everything. Being a generalist, I think much more important than it used to be. If I’m putting together a product team today, I would really obsess about getting as many skill sets as possible for each person I hire.
What is Lovable
Lenny Rachitsky: What have you done that has allowed you to grow this fast with so few people?
Anton Osika: People love the product. That’s the driver of the growth.
Companies Built on Lovable
Lenny Rachitsky: Today, my guest is Anton O-C-K. Anton is co-founder and CEO of Lovable, which is essentially an AI engineer that takes an English prompt and codes a product for you in minutes. You can then talk to it, iterate on the product, and then launch it to the world. It’s one of the fastest growing products in history. The fastest growing startup in Europe ever, and as Anton describes, their goal for Lovable is for it to be the last piece of software that anybody has to write because it’ll be able to create all future products for us. They launched just a few months ago in the first four weeks, hit 4 million ARR in the first two months across 10 million ARR, all with just 15 people. Absurd. In our conversation, we covered a lot of ground, including a live demo of Lovable, how their team operates, how they hire, what has most enabled their team to scale this quickly with so few people, pro tips for using Lovable, how it all started, how he recommends you build product teams going forward with tools like this existing, what skills will matter more and less going forward?
Plus how to think about Lovable versus competitors and so much more. If you’re trying to wrap your head around how product building will change with the rise of AI tools, this episode is a must watch. If you enjoy this podcast, don’t forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become a yearly subscriber of my newsletter, you now get a year free of Perplexity and Notion and Superhuman and Linear and Granola. Check it out at Lenny’snewsletter.com. With that, I bring you Anton, O-C-K.
Anton Osika: It’s a pleasure to talk to you, Lenny, great to be here.
Live Demo: Building an Airbnb Clone
Lenny Rachitsky: I don’t know how you have time to do this podcast. Your life must be insane these days with the pace at which you guys are scaling, just how much is changing in AI every day. So I just extra appreciate you making time for this. I think you said it’s 10:30, your time, is when we’re doing this.
Anton Osika: I’m a bit tired, yes. Mostly from the crazy pace of everything, but yes.
Backend Deployment and Architecture
Lenny Rachitsky: This is going to be an invigorating conversation and you’re not going to be able to sleep.
Future of Tools and Advice
Anton Osika: Yes. I’m sure. I’m sure.
On Naming Lovable
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, so for folks that are maybe a little bit familiar with Lovable or not at all familiar, what is Lovable? What’s the simplest way to understand it?
Lovable’s Origin Story
Anton Osika: I’d say Lovable is your personal AI software engineer. You describe an idea and then you get a fully working product from the AI. And what this means is that entrepreneurs actually today, they turn their ideas into real businesses. We have a lot of designers and product managers that create the first version of their product ideas to show to the teams, and some of them become founders because of the empowerment from this, but also developers themselves, they actually writing code or creating products much faster. The reason, it’s pretty obvious for me, but I’ll spell it out, the reason why we’re doing Lovable is that I don’t know about your mom, but my mom doesn’t write code and-
From Open Source to Product: Lovable’s Birth
Lenny Rachitsky: Same.
Tech Breakthrough: Solving AI Stalls
Anton Osika: … almost all my friends throughout my life reached out for help. Like, “Anton, I need to build something. How do I find a great software engineer?” And we are building for this 99% of the population who don’t write code. Currently, if you’re technically inclined, you get much further, but over time, naturally the way to build software is by just talking to an AI. And that’s how we see it.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love the way that you guys describe it and you didn’t mention it, but I think it’s building the last piece of software ever. How do you phrase that?
Fast Growth for Small Teams
Anton Osika: Yeah, we say we’re building the last piece of software.
Lenny Rachitsky: The last piece of software. Okay, we’re going to do a live demo, but first of all, can you just share some stats on the scale of this business at this point because it’s quite absurd.
Team and Product Quality
Anton Osika: Yeah. So we launched Lovable less than three months ago, and now we have 300,000 monthly active users and 30,000 of those are actually paying and it is growing at the same rates, just almost only through organic word of mouth.
AI Tool Usage in Teams
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. And I’ll share a couple stats in terms of revenue, just so folks know this, and we’ll have this in the intro too. I think you guys hit 4 million ARR in the first four weeks. You hit 10 million ARR in the first two months with just 15 people. You’re the fastest growing startup in all of Europe, and you guys had to rewrite your entire code base recently and you couldn’t ship any new features for a while. Is that right?
Anton Osika: That’s right, yeah. People were saying like, “Oh, you’re shipping so fast.” And we were all quite frustrated because we wrote our service in this kind of scripting language and then as we started scaling, we were just, no, we have to throw everything away and rewrite it in a more performant way.
Differentiating from Competitors
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, before we get to the demo, last question, you shared there’s some companies that have started based on Lovable. I didn’t even know that. So what are some examples of companies slash businesses that have launched off of Lovable and now are actually companies?
Anton Osika: I mentioned designers using Lovable and one of our early users, Harry, he started shipping real web apps to his clients instead of just shipping designs. And then he went on to say, okay, wait, I’m going to start an AI startup. And his company, he launched on Product Hunt and everything and making money is just like, let’s anyone upload their photo library and then the AI parses and categorizes it. And if you go to launched.lovable.app, this is an app built with Lovable is again a product Hunt version where you can see a lot of businesses or small SaaS featured there.
The Vision for Lovable
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, cool. So we’re going to come back to some of this stuff, but let’s get into demo. I rarely do demos on this podcast, but I’m finding that I think it’s really important for people to see these products in action because in a large part, this is the future of product building and a lot of people hear about, “Oh yeah, AI’s coming,” and I don’t think a lot of people actually see what the latest tools are capable of. And so I love showing these sorts of things on this podcast.
Anton Osika: So Lenny, I was thinking, did you ever consider making a copy and build your own Airbnb?
Future Skills That Matter Most
Lenny Rachitsky: I haven’t, but go on.
Evolving Founder and Engineer Skills
Anton Osika: How about you do that?
Team Size and Hiring Philosophy
Lenny Rachitsky: Let’s do it. Let’s do it. Okay, so we’re going to make our own Airbnb.
Anton Osika: Okay.
Building in Sweden and Europe
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, cool.
Engineer-Led Priority Decisions
Anton Osika: So I just put in the first prompt for an Airbnb clone.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. And what is the prompt, just for folks that aren’t watching?
Development Pace and Roadmap
Anton Osika: Two words, Airbnb clones. That’s the prompt.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay.
Defining AI Agents
Anton Osika: Just start simple and then what you get is that the AI says, okay, I can go through what does a beautiful Airbnb clone look like and it goes through a bit of design decisions and then I’ll zoom out to see more of it. We have this just UI that is… I mean it has all the nice things you would expect from Airbnb clone where you see different categories and you can see two listings from Airbnb with login buttons and everything. So far it doesn’t have the functionality of Airbnb, it just has the UI. I would now ask for an improvement on some of the functionality. Like if I’m switching category, I want to see different listings, let’s say. But if you have any thoughts on what we should build next, let me know.
Secret to Rapid Iteration
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, and so you had this preloaded, so you didn’t see how long it would take, but how long would this normally take for it to just write all this code and have it for you?
Anton Osika: The first prompt takes 30 seconds.
Building Future Product Teams
Lenny Rachitsky: 30 seconds? Okay. And it’s like a very good copy of Airbnb. I love that you didn’t have to show it a design, you just tell it Airbnb and it knows. Okay, so your question is would I want to add to my own version of Airbnb? I’ve always wanted to explore buying the place that I look at just like, Is this for sale? So what if we see what that would feel like if you’re just a way to buy a listing.
Anton Osika: Okay. Okay. So how about we add, I mean prompting is important here, so let’s be specific, but we would ask, add a button on the listing which has purchased this Airbnb home. Is that it?
Core Hiring Philosophy
Lenny Rachitsky: Perfect.
Giving Everyone Superpowers
Anton Osika: Okay, so, add, and [inaudible 00:12:19]. I’ll be even more specific. It will pop up a model to purchase the listing.
Next Steps for Lovable
Lenny Rachitsky: Perfect. And I love… So I think something as you’re typing, I’m just going to share thoughts as you’re doing this. So the site that you asked this AI engineer to build, it’s actually a functioning website that you can browse around. It’s not just a design, obviously there’s no actual listings here, there’s no actual houses here. Say you were trying to actually build Airbnb and you wanted to start adding actual homes that plug into this, how does that sort of step work?
Existing Codebase Support
Anton Osika: So as you say, this is just kind of the mockup UI, but it’s also interactive. If I want to add login and add listing management, then we will connect something called the backend. So where data is stored, where user’s log information is stored, and I can show you how to do that. First let’s just try out where we got with this short prompt.
Areas of Failure
Lenny Rachitsky: Let’s do it.
Embracing AI Tools
Anton Osika: Adding the purchase listing and it didn’t do exactly what I wanted. I said, add a button… Or I didn’t say what a button should say, but it says book now, and if I click book now I get a booking confirmation. So the AI was like, okay, it didn’t… It was probably surprised by you wanting to buy the listing since it’s Airbnb. So it still says book the listing, but it shows a pretty model where I can click confirm and pay. And then it’s says booking confirmed.
Where to Find Us
Lenny Rachitsky: I’ll just say real quick, I love that this is actually a really good example of why being a good product manager is important. A lot of wasted time happens when you’re not clear about the problem you’re trying to solve and why you’re trying to solve it and all that kind of stuff. So it’s really cool that this is a use case where you have to be really good at explaining what it is you want. And it’s interesting, you don’t have to tell this AI-why. Humans want to understand, “Why is this important.” Mostly you need to be very clear about what it is you’re doing and I love that’s a really strong PM skill. Your PM’s really good at that. So we have to…
Anton Osika: Hey. Explaining exactly what you expect and what you’re not getting is even more important with AI than with the humans. So I’m going into hooking up more of the actual functionality, but first I’ll actually show you something. What’s the fastest way to change what went wrong, it’s created buttons that say book now and I want them to say, “Buy now.” And what I could do is select this item and say change it to buy now. But what we just realized is that you can actually edit this, this is a fully functioning product, but you can edit it visually like you do in Squarespace and Wix and so on. So I’ll just change the text to buy now and then it instantly changes. It actually changes deep down in the code base, but it’s very fast to do that.
Lenny Rachitsky: So I think people listening to this and seeing this, if you’re not aware this is the cutting edge of tools like this, no other tool out there lets you generate code from an AI engineer and then actually just change a small element of it of every other tool that I’m aware of. You have to ask the agent, do this for me, and then you hope that it does the right thing. So this is a huge deal which you just showed. Right?
Anton Osika: Yeah. Now it says buy now.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. Like that’s amazing. Okay, and that’s something you just launched?
Anton Osika: Yeah. Great. We just launched this a few days ago, but I won’t go into for building the full functionality, but what it looks like is that you connect an open source backend as a service and that’s called SuperBase. And I have this instance to connect to that’s completely empty, just like one click to set that up and now it’s connected to the backend. It’s just automatically generating some code and explaining what I can do next. And what I would do now is, say, let’s add login, let’s say let’s add login.
Lenny Rachitsky: And where is it actually hosted on the backend and everything in general?
Anton Osika: So everything can be one click deployed and then it’s running. It’s hosted by a cloud vendor, which is hosting, I think a huge chunk of the internet, it’s called Cloudflare, and the backend is hosted by also good cloud writer, which is called SuperBase.
Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. Okay, let’s wrap up the demo, that was… Unless there’s anything else, was there anything else really important that you wanted to show?
Anton Osika: No I’ll just explain what I would do next. I would say, okay, let’s add login. Let’s make the listings editable by the users so users can upload listings and then this is going to take a bit more time, but with patience and good prompting skills, you’re going to get to a full working Airbnb.
Lenny Rachitsky: That was a really good piece to add. So basically this is getting to a place where it actually is not so different from actual Airbnb. People can log in, they can add their home, you can add internal tools to add listings for your, say, sales team, ops team. Basically it just will allow you to build a marketplace that looks a lot like Airbnb. Amazing. Okay, thank you for the demo. I think for a lot of people they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen this kind of stuff,” for most people, like, “Holy shit.” It’s unreal what… It’s almost like we’re taking for granted now. You can ask an app to build you a whole website and that costs probably like a few pennies. It took like five minutes versus it would’ve been tens of thousands and weeks and weeks and months to even build just a prototype.
Anton Osika: I mean, these tools as we see here, they’re already very good, it looks really good as well, but mainly I would say they’re getting better very, very fast. And I’d say one of the bigger bottlenecks is now they’re not integrated into the current way that you have your existing products and so on. But since they’re getting better so fast, I think the best thing for people who are interested in this or interested in just being a part of the future economies, get your hands very dirty with these tools because being in the top 10% in using them is going to absolutely set you apart in the coming months and years.
Lenny Rachitsky: So let me follow that thread. So say you are magically able to sit next to everybody that is using Lovable for the first time and you could just whisper a tip in their ear to be successful with Lovable, what would that tip be?
Anton Osika: It takes a lot to master using tools like Lovable and being very curious and patient and we have something called chat mode where you can just ask to understand like, “How does this work? I’m not getting what I want here, am I missing something? What should I do?” Is the best way to be productive is also one of the best ways to just learn about how software engineering works, which is you don’t have to write the code anymore, but it is useful to understand how software engin- or how building products works. So I think that’s the patience and curiosity is super useful. The second part that we spoke about is that being, if I would sit next to you, I would probably say like, “Hey, you are not being super clear here.” For example, don’t say it doesn’t work. Just explain exactly what you’re expecting and which parts are working and which parts are not working. And that’s something that a lot of people don’t do naturally.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love that when you have an engineer you’re working with that does a very expensive mistake to miscommunicate something, to just forget about a feature, to forget a better requirement, and here it’s… You do that and then 30 seconds later you’re like, “Oh okay, sorry, that was wrong.” And then you could just try again.
Anton Osika: That’s true. It might be more costly with humans.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, and so the first step is chat mode. So your advice is chat with the… What do you call it? Do you call it an agent? What’s the term for the thing that you were talking with?
Anton Osika: Yeah, Lovable is an agent.
Lenny Rachitsky: Just Lovable?
Anton Osika: Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. So you’re talking about Lovable by the way. How decide on Lovable as the name? It’s so sweet.
Anton Osika: I think it’s all about building a great product. That’s what I want more people to be able to do and the best word for a great product is that it’s Lovable. A lot of jargon that I like to use to emphasize what we should be striving for is building a minimum Lovable product and then building a Lovable product and then building an absolutely Lovable product. So I took that jargon with me in the company name.
Lenny Rachitsky: That is great. Absolute Lovable product. ALP is the new MVP. Okay, so we talked about this, the scale you guys have hit at this point, I imagine it’s far beyond 10 million ARR. Do you share that at this point or are you keeping that private?
Anton Osika: We don’t anchor on the numbers, but I could probably do a two X tweet about this quite soon. Yes.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, so it’s far beyond 10 million ARR at this point. It’s one of the fastest growing startups in history, the fastest growing startup in Europe. I want to zoom us back to the beginning. What is the origin story of Lovable? How did it all begin? What was the journey to today?
Anton Osika: I think I was not impressed by what people were doing with the large language models [inaudible 00:22:21], especially after I was using them way back. But when ChatGPT came out, they were starting to get really good at taking a human instruction and spitting out code and then people in my team, I was the CTO at a YC startup, they felt like, “Oh, Anton, you’re exaggerating. This is not going to change anything in the coming years.” So I wanted to prove a point and I created an open source tool called GPT Engineer where you write something like create a snake game and then it spits out a lot of code, a little of different files and then opens the snake game. And then I tweeted a video about that and GPT Engineer is to date the most popular open source tool to showcase the ability for large language models to create applications and it’s at like 50 something thousand GitHub stars and dozens of academic references.
Lenny Rachitsky: And I know that I’ll just add that it GitHub shut you down because they thought it was some kind of attack, like how many stars you’re getting, how many people were using it,
Anton Osika: Right. Yeah. So that came later. That’s with Lovable. So this is Lovable. Lovable, earlier was always creating new projects on GitHub when someone used Lovable and we asked them, “Is it fine? How was the limits here?” They said, “Oh, there are no limits.” But once we started creating 15,000 projects per day, so there were a lot of usage. Then some engineer when was on call, maybe they woke up in the night and they saw their servers were taking too much load because of us. So then they shut off down completely and we got this email that said, “Oh, you broke some kind of rules and we didn’t know what was going on.”
Lenny Rachitsky: That’s similar to a story I heard when ChatGPT was originally being trained, Microsoft servers blocked it because they thought it was some crawler and it was just actually the very first version ChatGPT being trained on data. Anyway, keep going.
Anton Osika: So I built this tool called GPT Engineer and I was thinking about we’re seeing the biggest change humanity will ever see, I think, where before you had the manual labor being taken over by machines, but now it’s actually cognitive labor being done better than humans by machines and what’s the best way to have some kind of positive impact here? It’s not to make engineers more productive, which there’s a lot of companies using AI to make engineers more productive, Microsoft did with co-pilot and so on. But it is to enable those who have such a hard time finding people who are good at creating software that’s been their absolute bottleneck and let them take their ideas and their beliefs into reality. So enabling more entrepreneurship and innovation by building the AI software engineer for anyone. And then I grabbed a previous colleague of mine who has also been a founder, Fabian, and I said we should build something like GPT Engineer but it has to be for the people who don’t write code and that’s the story.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. And then that became lovable? There’s the shift from open source into a product that anyone can use but also pay for. Makes sense. Okay, so from that point I saw a stat that you started making a million dollars in ARR per week and once you launched lovable, is that true?
Anton Osika: Yeah, so launched, we actually called the first version of the product like GPT Engineer app and it was very different in some ways and we launched that under a waitlist and said like, Oh yeah, we have this waitlist and we got a lot of feedback and iterated. Finally, when we thought the product was really good we said okay, now we have a Lovable product. And it was mainly on the AI that we did a lot of improvements, once we launched that, that was 21st of November, so that’s almost three months ago. We just hit 1 million ARR in a week and then it kept growing at that pace. It still growing at even faster than that pace.
Lenny Rachitsky: Faster than 1 million ARR per week. Holy shit.
Anton Osika: Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, that sounds like product market fit to me. You said that you did a lot of work on the backend. I saw you tweet about this that you guys figured out some kind of unlock on scalability, like a new scaling law that allowed you to build something like this. What can you talk about there that on the technical element allowed you to build something new and the successful?
Anton Osika: There are many scaling laws I would say when you build AI systems and this one in particular is about when you put in more work, the product reliably gets better and better. And what you’ve seen generally when you have AI building something is that it can get stuck in some place. It is super good in the beginning and then it gets stuck. What we did was to painstakingly identify places where it got stuck and there is different approaches but address different ways how we do it but address the places where it gets stuck, tune the entire system quantitatively and having a very fast feedback loop to improve it in the areas where it got stuck. The most important areas, it still does get stuck sometimes, but that’s the scaling law and we’re still early in that scaling law, I would say.
Lenny Rachitsky: And so when you talk about things getting stuck, it’s like the AI agent just saying, I don’t know what to do from this point or they introduce some kind of bug. Is that an example of getting stuck?
Anton Osika: Yeah. It introduces some kind of bug and then it’s not smart enough to figure out how to get out of that bug.
Lenny Rachitsky: I see. And this is a common problem people have with tools like this is they get to a certain point and then it’s like, “Well I don’t know what to do. I’m not an engineer, here’s a bug it’s running into or the infrastructure’s built the wrong way.” And so it sounds like one of the paths to solving that is what you’re describing is you make the AI smarter to avoid more and more of these places they get stuck. Another is people just learning how to get AI unstuck. This is something when we had Amjad on the podcast from Replit, he said that this is the main skill that he thinks people need to learn is how to unstuck AI when it runs into a problem. Just thoughts there, I don’t know anything along those lines come up as I say that.
Anton Osika: This is something that is a problem today and the frontier of where this is a problem is very rapidly receding back. So what we did was we identified the most important areas, so specifically adding login, creating data persistence, adding payment with Stripe. Those are the things that we made sure it doesn’t get stuck on, for example. And the places where it gets stuck today is currently something that you can use being very good at understanding and getting unstuck, but in the future it won’t be so important. This experience just going to not get stuck.
Lenny Rachitsky: And I know you’re not talking super in-depth about this because this is one of your unfair advantages, this kind of stuff you figured out. So I’m not going to push too far. I know you want not everyone’s into exactly the same stuff. So I want to zoom back to the pace of growth that you guys have seen. One of the big stories, everyone’s always looking at you guys of like 15 people, 10 million ARR in two months. That’s absurd. I don’t know if it’s ever been done in history. If so, it’s maybe a couple other AI startups recently. How have you been able to do this? What have you done that has allowed you to grow this fast with so few people?
Anton Osika: I’d like to take credit of having done everything end to end in the product, but we are building on top of taking the oil here, which we have discovered oil, which is are the foundation models and then what we’ve done is that we’re obsessed about what’s the right way to present this to a user. What’s the interface for the human to get as much out of this as possible? Packaging together, I showed you in the demo how you can add authentication and making this work seamlessly together as a whole. That’s what we’ve done. And then people love the product. That’s the driver of the growth. For getting awareness, we’ve mainly been posting what we’ve shipped on social media, that’s how people know about us.
Lenny Rachitsky: So building in public is how people usually describe that. So I think it’s like you guys have the advantage of the demos are just like, “Holy shit, you can do that.” And then you guys share the numbers that you guys are growing at. So it’s innately interesting and shareable, but I imagine most people have something interesting to share. I guess is there anything that you think you did that other companies maybe haven’t done that make the product so lovable?
Anton Osika: I mean the team is everything in building a great product, so I just give a big shout-out to the team that has written the code. I haven’t written much of the code recently, I would say. You want people who can ship really fast and have good taste for what this simple, what’s the right abstractions and I think that’s what we’ve done differently and have this obsession for us making it better and better and better.
Lenny Rachitsky:
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Okay, I want to come back to the team. I know you have a lot of thoughts there in terms of writing code, how much do you guys actually use AI to write the code that is building Lovable? How does that work on your team?
Anton Osika: We have set up lovable so that we can change lovable with itself. We have done that. There is a lot of hyper-specific things in terms of running a separate… We spin up a dedicated computer for each user. It doesn’t do everything. Lovable doesn’t do everything. So we use the tools that are for developers, not for the 99%, most of the time. And everyone uses AI all the time in writing code. It’s also in great course for experimentations.
Lenny Rachitsky: And are there tools like Cursor and stuff like that? Like any tools you can share right now?
Anton Osika: Yeah. I think Cursor is the one that almost everyone uses in the team.
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah. Okay, cool. I did a survey recently on tools that my listeners and readers use in cursor. 17% of all people that read my newsletter use Cursor already, which is absurd and you guys are in there, too. Okay, so kind of along these lines, there’s obviously other competitors and companies in this space, so everyone’s always wondering, you, Bolt, Replit, Cursor is a different kind of thing. What’s the simplest way to understand maybe how Lovable might be different from say Bolt and Replit, which I think are probably the closest.
Anton Osika: The packaging for non-technical people is what we aim for and I showed you in the demo that you can edit the text, you can change the colors and so on instantly without having to go into the code editor and without having to wait about 30 seconds for the AI do the full change. So that’s the big way that we think about packaging it. And then for making sure that this can be used as productively as possible in a larger team. Something that’s different from I think all the other tools is that it is synchronized with GitHub and that means that you can use Cursor, or the people in your team that want to be more low-level, they can use Cursor and while the people who don’t want to mess and set up their local file system and commit to GitHub and so on, they can use Lovable’s.
Not getting stuck is I think the most important thing for people. And that’s why we entered this space late, we haven’t done the same type of marketing as many others and we still, from the people that I talked to, ranked as the one that works most reliably.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love it. Okay. So this point about how you can just use Lovable to build a lot of it for you and then get into Cursor to edit and tweak is a really big point. And you’re saying other companies aren’t as good at that. I don’t know if any other does that.
Anton Osika: Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: I don’t think they let you do that. Amazing. Okay. And then what’s the vision for Lovable? What’s the end state of this? Is this everybody can build anything they want sort of thing? What’s the simplest way to understand where you’re going in the next, I don’t know, five, 10 years.
Anton Osika: I have to say. So we’re building the last piece of software and it is inherently very hard to predict how the world looks like in five years. These days it’s very hard. But the last piece of software, how I see that is that it’s almost instant to go from what you want to change in the product or what product you want to build to having it fully working end-to-end, integrated with any of your existing systems or integrated with the very powerful third-party providers. Already today you can just ask, add and chat with OpenAI and then you get the chat with OpenAI in your product. But that’s just working perfectly is something that’s coming in the coming two years, I would say. And then after that there is a lot of things in building a product that is not just the engineering side, right? And I think an AI can be very useful in aggregating and understanding your users.
So, if you use the analytics tools, you know that there is something quite common which is to see how users have interacted with the product. AIs can do that on an absolutely massive scale and propose changes to a human to say, “Oh, yeah, that sounds like a good change to make it a bit more intuitive.” And it can also automatically run A-B tests so that you can see the data, all these improvements to the product. I think that’s on the horizon as well, quite.
Lenny Rachitsky: What’s interesting about this in one way is people wonder just what jobs will be more important, what skills will be less important? Let me share a thought I have and then I want to get your take and see where you go with this. It feels like what is getting more valuable is being good at figuring out what to build and then knowing if the thing you had built is correct and good and ready. So it’s like discovery, ideation, idea, part of the step of launching a product and then it’s like taste and craft. Just like is this the thing? Is this going to solve people’s problems because the building now is being done more and more and it’s interesting, it used to be the reverse engineering was the hardest, most valuable skill and now it’s figuring out what to build.
You could sit there and you could just tell it what to build and a lot of people get to your screen I’m sure and they’re like, “I don’t know what to build, I don’t know what people want.” And it’s like that’s the thing now. So just reactions to that and thoughts on what’s skills will matter more and less.
Anton Osika: I mean if you’re a founder or you want to build something. Yeah, I totally agree that figuring out what are pain points and seeing there are often currently solutions, some kind of solution to everything. How can you make this 10X better somehow figuring that out is super important when you have an existing product. Then I think taste and tasting what is good is even more of the important part. The engineer skill set is still going to be important because that helps you understand what are the constraints, so what you can build and I just think a lot of software engineers are probably a bit scared now like, “Okay, am I out of a job? What’s going to happen?” But they should see themselves as the people who translate the problems that are stated a human, probably, to technical solutions, but they do have to abstract themselves up a few steps, not just looking at in their tech stack like oh I can just do the front end changes. Engineers or technical people are very good at understanding what are the constraints technically and they should see themselves as that translators.
Lenny Rachitsky: Is it almost like you want to learn the eng manager skill of overseeing engineers versus the actual engineering skill or you think it’s still going to be really important to learn how to code and be really good at that?
Anton Osika: I mean doing a bit of everything. Being a generalist is I think much more important than it used to be. And if I’m putting together a product team today, I would re-obsess about getting as many skill sets as possible for each person I hire. They should know how architecting a system works, preferably they should know the sign, they should have product taste, they should know how to talk to users. I think everyone should know a bit of all of that, preferably.
Lenny Rachitsky: Easier said than done. It’s hard to find people that know all these things. So let’s segue to hiring and how you hire. How many people do you have at this point? Is that something you share?
Anton Osika: Yeah, now we’re at 18.
Lenny Rachitsky: 18. Okay. Wow. I love that you… It sounded like you’re about to say, “Oh, we have a hundred people now.” No, 18. Okay, so you went from 15 to 18. Okay, great. So what do you look for when you’re hiring people? The way I saw you describe it on Twitter is you look for cracked engineers, the best crack team in Europe, things like that. I guess just specifically what are you looking for when you’re hiring?
Anton Osika: I think the most important thing is that people care a lot and they’re not just like, “Oh, I’m here for a job. I’m here for being just a passenger on this journey,” but everyone should really care about the product, the users and care a ton about the team, how the team works together and that you’re always contributing to making the team work more productively together and that care or preferably obsession gets you a very long way and then you do often want to have absolute superpower in some dimension to be able to understand and do as many possible things as possible, have this generalist brain that quickly learns any skill but be super, super good in one dimension. And for us that’s mostly cramming as much out of AI, out of the large language models and understanding the entire parameter space of what you can change to make our product perform better.
Lenny Rachitsky: So, how do you actually test for these things? Some of these things describe, I think everyone’s looking for, they care about the user, they want to collaborate well. Because you have 18 people building in a company that’s growing more than a million ARR every week. That’s an absurd scale and the people you have found are clearly world-class and I think a lot of people are going to want to hire the type of people you’re hiring. So when you’re actually interviewing, how do you suss out some of these things like their AI cramming skills, their team building collaboration, what do you actually do?
Anton Osika: I ask people what they’ve done before and these people that I’m describing, they have often done something where they care a lot about what they’ve done before and dig into details about the technical things that they did. And then we do the normal thing of showing a very hard problem that is a bit unorthodox that someone hasn’t seen before preferably and see how they think through thinking research through that. Then something that I think is more uncommon is that we do, I pretty much always have people join the work simulation for at least a day, often a full week.
Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. Okay, so work trial. That’s awesome. So basically they work with the team for at least a day. You said sometimes a week, and I love this point you made about they care deeply about something they previously worked on and you look for just obsession with the thing that they built last or something they worked on. What percentage are engineers of these 18?
Anton Osika: So 12 at least write code at least part-time.
Lenny Rachitsky: 12 out of 18. Okay, cool. When we were setting up, you’re like, “Oh, our engineer’s creating content now.” I think that’s a cool example of how people do a lot of different things. Also. Okay, so I have your job posting that you shared once of the actual job description. I’m going to read a few lines from it. It’s very inspired by Shackleton, right?
Anton Osika: Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: Would you agree? Cool. I love it. By the way, did you write this or did you have AI write this job description where you create an engineering job description? In fact, let me read it to you. I don’t even know, you may not know what M you’re referring to. I’ll read a few lines here. “Long hours, high pace, candidates must thrive under a high urgency under AGI timelines approaching, difficult mission ahead, honor and recognition in case of success, those seeking comfortable work need not apply.” And then there’s a few other things, “Collaboration with other exceptional minds, purpose larger than any normal engineering role, generous share in the venture success.” Amazing.
Anton Osika: Thank you.
Lenny Rachitsky: Thoughts?
Anton Osika: Yeah, so I did get some help with the formatting of this, but then it was mostly me doing the exact phrasing of the different sentences.
Lenny Rachitsky: So good. And I love that to some people it’s going to be like, “Holy shit, I’m not signing up for this.” But to a lot of people, the people you want is like, “Yes, this is exactly what I want to be doing.”
Anton Osika: Great.
Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing.
Anton Osika: Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, cool. So it feels like one of the elements of hiring here is, create a really good filter to be clear about just how intense this is so that the people that want that are the ones drawn to you. Okay. And then you’re also, you’re in Sweden, fastest growing startup in Europe ever thoughts on building in Europe slash Sweden versus the US slash San Francisco?
Anton Osika: Yeah, so this ambition level that you’re talking about in the job ad is more uncommon in Sweden and I think that is the biggest unlock that someone like me, sees that this is the time in human history when you have the most impact for a worked hour and that’s why we have to be super ambitious, just up the ambition level and then we can maybe retire and have AI take care of most things in society and inspiring people to be this ambitious in a place where the average ambition is lower but the talent, the raw talent is much more available, is a great recipe. I think that’s a great recipe. And that’s, I think it’s some kind of advantage there. It is a bit of a double-edged sword but it’s some kind of advantage.
Lenny Rachitsky: So what I’m hearing is there’s incredible people in Europe, they’re just not, they’re harder to find and what I’m hearing is the key is how do you suss them out and get them to want to talk to you?
Anton Osika: Most people in Europe, they haven’t thought that, “Oh, going on an extremely ambitious mission is what I want to do.” So that’s figuring out who those are is a big part of it.
Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. Okay. I want to talk about prioritization. I imagine all these things that I just shared about just how ambitious this mission is, how much you’re doing the last piece of software, you must have a bazillion things that people ask you to build that you want to build. What’s your approach to deciding what to prioritize and actually build?
Anton Osika: Just top line? I think identifying what is the biggest bottleneck, what’s the biggest problem and iterating fast on saying, “Okay, this is the biggest problem, let’s really, really solve that problem.” And then picking in the next one and not overthinking, not dreaming out the long roadmap, that’s my [inaudible 00:48:41]. There’s a very, very simple algorithm. Understanding what is the, mostly the biggest problem is not always a simple problem I think. Yeah, so we spend time as one should on talking to users, reading up on what people are writing. We have the feature board for where people do a lot of requests, as you say. And then when we pick one of the problems, we are quite engineering-led. For a product like ours, it’s hard to be have product managers that are not engineers say, oh, this is what we should do now because the right solution to the problem might be entangled in things that are technical details.
They might be entangled in technical details of like, “Okay, yes, this is the biggest problem, but we should have this larger technical initiative that’s going to solve all of these problems.” So it’s quite engineering-led compared to many other product companies.
Lenny Rachitsky: As it should. I’d be worried if you guys had a product manager at this point, that wouldn’t make no sense right now. I imagine the answer is it’s chaos and there’s no actual defined process, but just what does it look like generally? What’s kind of the cadence you guys operate on? How do you take an idea to build it, spec it, launch it? Just what does that look like if you have something?
Anton Osika: If you look back three months, we mainly said, “Okay, let’s do this weekly planning.” We do have a big jam board where we have all the main problems and then we have kind of ranked them which else do we focus or when we focus on next or this week? And then we have a demo where we say, “Okay, these are things we ship this week.” So to get everyone on the same page, we do have a bit more of a roadmap now, where we say we are going to make so sure you can support custom domains. Next, they’re going to add collaboration after that. And the biggest problem now or the biggest initiative now that solves the biggest problem is making the system more agentic and that has a bit of a longer roadmap, but we still do the cadence of weekly planning. These are the things we’re focusing on. This week, it’s mostly… There’s a good word for this that I would want your help with, but polish, we were fixing the bugs and polish this week and that was the planning on Monday.
Lenny Rachitsky: That was actually this week was polish, polish week. I love that. How far is this roadmap that you are now having?
Anton Osika: I mean it’s clear over the coming month, but it stretches out three months, but in one month it’s probably going to look a bit different.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. And then what are the tools you use just for folks that want to understand the latest tools? So you said FigJam, what else is in that stack of tools?
Anton Osika: I mean we do so many things in our company in Linear because it’s just amazing product. So we do talent application tracking in Linear and after going through and this thing, lot of the other custom-made tools for that Linear and then FigJam.
Lenny Rachitsky: So simple. How soon until one of your engineers is an agent engineer, an AI Engineer, do you have a sense?
Anton Osika: I love to dig into what does that question actually mean? I think we’ve been talking about, Oh, AI that would require something playing chess, that’s AI. If a computer can play chess, that’s AI and now that’s like, Oh no, that’s a chess program and which always shifting this forward and forward. I think anything that a human doesn’t do is just a smart computer system, right? When is an software engineer and agent, I think it’s always going to be just we’re building in… Lovable is just an interface that humans interact with to create the software that they want and then how we solve that, we said going to be an agent under some definition. Yeah, sure. I think so, but that’s less important to me.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, I like that. Let me ask this, you guys are moving super fast, scaling like crazy. You described a little bit about your process, weekly planning, FigJam board of ideas and now there’s a roadmap that you’re kind of thinking out in the future. Is there anything else that you found helps you move this fast that gives you a lot of leverage over the small team you have to ship quickly and move fast that you haven’t already mentioned?
Anton Osika: We work from the office most of the time. I think it’s pretty nice. Then you can say like, “Hey, I think we’re thinking wrong about this thing,” or, “Shouldn’t we actually do this other thing?” And especially I think lunch, eating lunch together is a pretty productive hour where you’re cross pollinating. I mean people are constantly thinking subconsciously as well about how to solve these different problems and which the most important ones are. And then being in office has this focus or most of the time usually focus, but you also have this high bandwidth where everyone has to be down structured communication.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love that. The answer to the CEO of a company that’s one of the most advanced AI tools in the world is one of your answers to how to move fast is lunch together. I love that. That’s so human and so it makes all the sense in the world, but I love that that’s still a part of this.
Anton Osika: Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. You talked about this kind of on the same thread you talked about if you were to start a team, like a new product team today, say you were head of product somewhere or head of RPM, VP of product somewhere building a new product team, scaling a product team, what would you do going forward that’s different from what people have done in the past in terms of who you’re hiring, how you’re structuring them, that kind of thing? Just what do you think people should be thinking as they build product teams going forward? Knowing tools like Lovable exist and all the other stuff that’s going on.
Anton Osika: I mean everyone should be excited about using AI. I think that’s a pretty big ones. And then the team working really well together is, like the lunch, you have to sit down and solve problems together. The bottleneck for most products these days is not going to be as much on engineering, but having good taste, good intuition about your users. And that, engineers and everyone preferably in the team should have that willingness at least to want to go through that motion and listen to the users and truly understand what they care about.
Lenny Rachitsky: Well it’s kind of like the background of most of the engineers and people you’ve hired. Is there anything in common? Are they just super impressive humans generally, like champions of programming contests, stuff like that? I don’t know. What are some attributes of the folks you’ve hired so far?
Anton Osika: I think raw cognitive capability is the strongest, the strongest correlate of being at Lovable. But there is this startup mindset that I think is also very strong. Being much more interested in moving very fast and iterating fast, then having a lot of structure, a lot of process and thinking about the business as a whole. More than thinking about my specific profession, my specific craft that I’m seeing myself wanting to dig into on me.
Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. Okay. So smart, very smart entrepreneurial, acts like an owner, isn’t just like, this isn’t just a job. But they feel like they actually have agency. Okay, this is great. There’s something you said kind of along these lines that I think is important that one of the things that gets you excited about what you’re building is giving people super powers and especially people that don’t add a code, basically 99% of people. Is there anything along those lines that you think is important to share?
Anton Osika: It’s very clear to most people who have been engineers or been founders, that there’s so many that have failed in their endeavors because they didn’t have someone that know how to solve the technical parts. And now that we’re close to having people know that this exists and they solve everything, it’s going to be an Cambrian explosion of entrepreneurship and better software product. We’re not going to settle for all the annoying bad technology that we use today. And everyone who has an idea is going to say, “Okay, I’m going to build this thing and show you that this is the best version of the product or what our company should be doing,” instead of having long meetings or writing up documents. So it’s going to be empowering across a lot of different professions and places in the world.
Lenny Rachitsky: What’s next for Lovable? What’s the next few things they might launch as this episode comes out?
Anton Osika: As I mentioned this agentic behavior, and when I say agentic, what it means is that you give more freedom to the system to decide what happens next. It might want to write a test, run those tests and say like, “Oh, the test failed, let’s fix those.” So that’s one of the big unlocks for getting further faster. And then there’s some more obvious things that you want to do to go all the way to easily go all the way to making money with Lovable. And that’s like how do you set up so that it’s hosted on your specific domain? How do you collaborate there seamlessly with your team and making that is here so that those are just obvious things and something we’re thinking about is to help founders succeed after they built their first version. And how do they get more users? How do they get feedback? How do they get the word out if they build something useful?
Lenny Rachitsky: I was just going to say that and that’s exactly where my mind went is everyone’s going to be building all these things. No one’s ever going to get any traction with these tools. No one knows how to find users, get anyone to basically go to market. And growth is a whole different skill. So that is so cool that you’re thinking about that. How do we run some paid ads for you? How do we think about SEO? How do we think about word of mouth, reality referrals? That is very cool. Okay.
Anton Osika: Yeah, we already have playbooks that we help the people building with how do you do those things that you can find up on our blog?
Lenny Rachitsky: Interestingly, this makes me want to buy some meta stock because all these apps that everyone’s building, they’re going to be running paid ads on Facebook and Google. Oh my god, what a good business those other guys get. I want to come back to, you said that you can work on your existing code base. This is actually a big question for a lot of people. They see all these tools, they’re all amazing for prototypes and concepting. You talked about how you can actually do this within your existing code base, use Lovable.
Anton Osika: Let me correct you there. You cannot use it on any existing code base.
Lenny Rachitsky: Got it.
Anton Osika: We kind of have a research preview of importing your code base, but what you can do is if you start in Lovable, then you can have engineers editing it in whatever tool they want to use for editing it.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, cool. That’s great clarification. So I guess just for people, because most listeners here are not building something brand new, they’re working within an existing product. So you’re saying that that is coming, you can use Lovable in the future in some form with your existing app and product?
Anton Osika: Correct.
Lenny Rachitsky: Wow, that’s huge. Okay. Because basically most people, so that’s going to be a big deal. Okay. Final question. We have the segment on this podcast called Failure Corner, where most people come to this podcast, they show all these stories of success and everything’s going great, and here’s all the things always winning. You guys, this is a good example, just up into the right, the fastest growing product ever. What’s an example when something totally failed in the course of your career and what did you learn from that?
Anton Osika: I am a bit hard-pressed to find something that totally failed, but I think there’s a bit of a product lesson where I was the first employee at an AI startup here in Stockholm called Summer Labs, and the premise was just, okay, so humans learn in different ways. If you personalize, then you get two standard deviations more effective learning. So there are a lot of products like education software that helps you learn that is not personalized. And we were building an API to personalize learning and the AI and so on, it was pretty good.
But the thing that we were doing in the end was to say like, Okay, here’s this product. Someone has to build a product or some way to learn or be it like English thing Duolingo, and then the people that have that product have to use this advanced AI API to start making it personalized. And it is very hard retrofitting like, oh, you have to switch out the engine and put in this AI. And the big learning here is that it didn’t work very well for the company. I mean, the company wasn’t super successful in this. The big learning is that you have to start with how is this product working end-to-end and then add AI or think where should we add AI? So that was a big learning for me that you really want to see what does the big picture of the user, what’s the big picture of how do you think the user experience should be? And then add something with AI to solve specific problems. And now Summer Labs is doing great, but it’s not on top of that product specifically.
Lenny Rachitsky: I think it’s a lot of people hear this and they’re like, of course, but I think it’s so hard to actually remember this point when you have some cool tech and you’re like, “Holy shit, everyone needs to try this. They’re going to love it.” And then you don’t realize no one actually cares if it’s not solving a problem for them. There’s a lot of novelty products that everyone want to use for a little bit and then forget instant, I don’t actually need this often. And so what this makes me think about is, there’s all these product lessons for what is likely to help your product be successful. And an app like a tool like Lovable can help you do this because if someone is building something, you can guide them, Okay, what’s the problem you’re solving for somebody? How many people have this problem? How much does this matter to them?
Anton Osika: Maybe we should add the Lenny mode. It activates in Lovable, it activates this product coach. That would be infinite questions, like, “No, no, wait, hold on, why are you doing this?”
Lenny Rachitsky: Absolutely. Let’s take a step back. Everyone’s going to be like, “[inaudible 01:04:55], get out of my way.”
Anton Osika: [inaudible 01:04:57].
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, exactly. What’s your experiment plan? I think there’s actually a big opportunity there to save people. There’s a play around with this thing and then there’s like, okay, but really is this anything people actually want?
Anton Osika: I love it. Can we call it Lenny mode? Is that fine with you?
Lenny Rachitsky: 100%.
Anton Osika: Awesome.
Lenny Rachitsky: Let’s do it. I’ll license you no cost.
Anton Osika: Sure.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. Okay. We made a deal here. Let’s do it. Okay, Anton, is there anything else that you wanted to share? Anything you want to leave listeners with before I let you go and go to sleep?
Anton Osika: I think, again, the world is changing quickly and it’s very fun. You should see that’s like have fun in all of this change, and the best thing you can do for your current profession or if you want to have a new job is to be in the top 1% in knowing how to use AI tools. So go out there, use Loveable, use other AI tools, and become… Make sure to understand or try to understand as much as possible in how to use them productively. That’s something I tell all my friends generally, and I love the audience to know as well.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. Well, I got to try to make this even more specific for people. How do you know if you’re in the top 1%? What’s a heuristic almost slash how do you get there? Is it just use it a hundred times a day? What else? What can you recommend?
Anton Osika: Yeah. I think if you spend a full week on trying to reach an outcome, the best way to learn is I want to do this thing and then I want to use AI to do that thing. And you’ve spent a full week, you are in the top 1% in the global population. And if you surround yourself with friends who have this obsession or they also care a lot about this, then you’d be quickly in the top 0.1%.
Lenny Rachitsky: So what I’m hearing is find a problem that can be solved, find a problem, a pain point for yourself or someone, and then end-to-end fully solve that problem. Spend a week getting from idea to a thing that somebody’s actually using and you’re in the top 1%.
Anton Osika: Yeah. I think… At the top, yeah, the top 1% by just spending a full week and asking AI if you don’t understand. So making sure that you understand.
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, that’s the thing people forget. You just ask. Would you ask the chat feature of Lovable in this case or would you go to Cloud or ChatGPT to ask for advice?
Anton Osika: I mean, my recommendation here, if you’re in product is to use Lovable to build software and learn that AI tool and then you should use ChatMode and ChatMode, I have to add, is something you activate in your user profile. It’s not launched in the main product, so it’s in labs, but if you add that flag, then you can use ChatMode. If you want to learn some other AI tool, then you should ask that tool or ask Cloud, ChatGPT about how that topic, that domain works.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, amazing. Where can people find you? Where can they find Lovable and how can listeners be useful to you?
Anton Osika: Lovable posts updates, and memes on Lovable underscore dev on Twitter, we post things on LinkedIn as well, and there are a lot of things coming out and changing in how we build software, so you can follow Lovable underscore dev and you can follow me at AntonOsika at Twitter. I’d love more feedback on where people see this is a huge change for them. There are a lot of people posting about that on Twitter, but we have a Discord where you can share like, “Oh, this is how I use Lovable. It was super useful to me.” And feedback.lovable.dev can ask for new features. There’s a lot of people asking and uploading what features you want next. And that’s super useful. That’s the most important thing for us. We just want to solve people’s problems.
Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. Anton, you’re doing incredible work. What a journey. I’m excited to have you back someday when we see more chapters of this journey.
Anton Osika: I have a lot more to learn.
Lenny Rachitsky: As do we all. That’s why people listen to this podcast. Anton, thank you so much for being here.
Anton Osika: Thank you so much, Lenny.
Lenny Rachitsky: Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny’sPodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
Glossary
| English | 中文 |
|---|---|
| A/B tests | A/B 测试 |
| Amjad | Amjad |
| ARR | 年经常性收入 (Annual Recurring Revenue) |
| backend | 后端 |
| Bolt | Bolt(AI 应用构建平台) |
| Copilot | Copilot(微软 AI 编程助手) |
| Fabian | Fabian |
| GitHub | GitHub |
| GPT Engineer app | GPT Engineer app |
| minimum lovable product | 最小可喜爱产品 |
| mockup UI | 模拟界面 |
| Replit | Replit |
| Stripe | Stripe |
Reformatted by reformat_english.py
构建Lovable:15人团队60天达成1000万美元年经常性收入 | Anton Osika(CEO兼联合创始人)
访谈实录
Anton Osika: ……Lovable 是你的个人 AI 软件工程师。你描述一个想法,然后就能得到一个完全可用的产品。我们的初衷是帮助那些一直很难找到优秀软件开发者的人——这曾是他们绝对的瓶颈——让他们把自己的想法和梦想变成现实。
Lenny Rachitsky: 你们在头四周就达到了 400 万美元的年经常性收入 (ARR),头两个月仅靠 15 人就达到了 1000 万美元的年经常性收入 (ARR)。你们是全欧洲增长最快的创业公司。你们是怎么决定用 Lovable 这个名字的?太甜了。
Anton Osika: 形容一个出色产品最好的词就是 lovable。我经常使用的一个术语是强调我们应该追求的是:构建一个最小可喜爱产品(minimum lovable product),然后构建一个可喜爱产品,再构建一个绝对可喜爱产品。所以我把这个术语带入了公司名字。
未来技能趋势
Lenny Rachitsky: 人们会好奇,哪些工作会变得更加重要,哪些技能会变得不那么重要?
Anton Osika: 什么都懂一点。成为一个通才,我认为比以前重要得多。如果我今天组建一个产品团队,我会非常执着于让每一个招进来的人都尽可能具备更多的技能组合。
Lenny Rachitsky: 你们做了什么,才能以这么少的人实现这么快的增长?
Anton Osika: 人们喜爱这个产品。这就是增长的驱动力。
嘉宾介绍
Lenny Rachitsky: 今天我的嘉宾是 Anton Osika。Anton 是 Lovable 的联合创始人兼 CEO,Lovable 本质上是一个 AI 工程师,接收一段英文提示词就能在几分钟内为你编写出一个产品。然后你可以与它对话、迭代产品,再将其发布给全世界。这是历史上增长最快的产品之一,也是欧洲有史以来增长最快的创业公司。正如 Anton 所描述的,他们对 Lovable 的目标是让它成为任何人都需要编写的最后一块软件,因为它将能够为我们创造所有未来的产品。他们在几个月前刚刚上线,头四周达到了 400 万美元的年经常性收入 (ARR),头两个月突破了 1000 万美元的年经常性收入 (ARR),全部仅靠 15 个人。不可思议。在我们的对话中,我们涵盖了很多内容,包括 Lovable 的现场演示、他们的团队如何运作、如何招聘、是什么让他们的团队能以如此少的人如此快速地扩张、使用 Lovable 的进阶技巧、这一切是如何开始的、在存在此类工具的情况下他建议你未来如何组建产品团队、未来哪些技能会更重要、哪些会更不重要。以及如何看待 Lovable 与竞争对手的对比,还有更多内容。如果你正在试图理解随着 AI 工具的兴起产品构建将如何改变,这一期是必看的。如果你喜欢这个播客,别忘了在你最喜欢的播客应用或 YouTube 上订阅和关注。另外,如果你成为我邮件通讯的年度订阅者,你现在可以获得 Perplexity、Notion、Superhuman、Linear 和 Granola 各一年的免费使用权。详情请访问 Lenny’snewsletter.com。话不多说,我为大家请出 Anton Osika。
Lenny Rachitsky: Anton,非常感谢你来到这里,欢迎来到播客。
Anton Osika: 很高兴和你对话,Lenny,很荣幸来到这里。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我不知道你怎么有时间做这个播客。你们以这样的速度扩张,再加上 AI 每天都在发生那么多变化,你这些天的生活一定很疯狂。所以我格外感谢你抽出时间。你说过我们现在录制的时间是你那边十点半,对吧。
Anton Osika: 我有点累,是的。主要是因为一切都以疯狂的速度运转,但确实如此。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这将是一场令人振奋的对话,你会睡不着觉的。
Anton Osika: 是的,我相信。我相信。
Lovable 是什么
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的,对于那些可能对 Lovable 有点了解或者完全不了解的人,什么是 Lovable?最简单的理解方式是什么?
Anton Osika: 我会说 Lovable 是你的个人 AI 软件工程师。你描述一个想法,然后 AI 就能给你一个完全可用的产品。这意味着如今创业者真的可以把他们的想法变成真正的生意。我们有很多设计师和产品经理创建他们产品想法的第一个版本来展示给团队,其中一些人正是因为这种赋能成为了创始人,但开发者本身也确实在更快地编写代码或创建产品。原因对我来说很明显,但我会明说一下,我们做 Lovable 的原因是——我不知道你妈妈怎么样,但我妈妈不会写代码,而且——
Lenny Rachitsky: 一样。
Anton Osika: ……我这一生中几乎所有的朋友都会来找我帮忙,说:“Anton,我需要做个东西,怎么才能找到一个优秀的软件工程师?“我们正在为那 99% 不会写代码的人群而构建。目前,如果你有技术背景,你能走得更远,但随着时间的推移,自然而然地,构建软件的方式就是直接与 AI 对话。这就是我们的愿景。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我很喜欢你们描述它的方式,你没有提到这一点,但我记得是”构建最后一块软件”。你们是怎么说的?
Anton Osika: 对,我们说我们正在构建最后一块软件。
Lenny Rachitsky: 最后一块软件。好,我们接下来要做一个现场演示,不过首先,你能不能分享一下目前这个业务的规模数据?因为确实非常惊人。
Anton Osika: 好的。Lovable 上线不到三个月,现在我们有 30 万月活跃用户,其中 3 万是付费用户,而且增长率一直保持同样的水平,几乎完全靠有机口碑传播。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好。我来补充几个收入方面的数据,让大家了解一下,我们也会放在片头介绍里。你们在前四周就达到了 400 万年经常性收入 (Annual Recurring Revenue),前两个月达到了 1000 万年经常性收入 (Annual Recurring Revenue),团队只有 15 个人。你们是全欧洲增长最快的初创公司,而且你们最近不得不重写整个代码库,有一段时间无法发布任何新功能。是这样吗?
Anton Osika: 没错。当时人们还在说”你们发布速度真快”,但我们内部其实非常焦虑,因为我们最初用一种脚本语言写的服务端,随着规模增长,我们意识到必须把所有东西推倒重来,用更高性能的方式重写。
基于 Lovable 诞生的公司
Lenny Rachitsky: 好,在进入演示之前,最后一个问题。你提到已经有一些公司在 Lovable 上诞生了。我之前都不知道。能举几个例子吗?有哪些公司或业务是在 Lovable 上创建的,现在已经真正成为一家公司了?
Anton Osika: 我之前提到设计师在使用 Lovable。我们的早期用户之一 Harry,他开始直接给客户交付真正的 Web 应用,而不仅仅是设计方案。后来他说,好,等等,我要创办一家 AI 初创公司。他的公司已经在 Product Hunt 上发布,也在赚钱——做的产品是让任何人上传自己的照片库,然后 AI 会自动解析和分类。如果你访问 launched.lovable.app,这本身也是一个用 Lovable 构建的应用,类似 Product Hunt 的形式,你可以在上面看到很多企业或小型 SaaS 被展示出来。
现场演示:构建一个 Airbnb 克隆
Lenny Rachitsky: 好,很酷。这些我们稍后再回来聊,先进入演示环节。我这个播客很少做演示,但我觉得让人们亲眼看到这些产品的实际操作非常重要,因为在很大程度上,这就是产品构建的未来。很多人听到”AI 来了”,但我认为大多数人并没有真正看到最新工具的能力。所以我非常喜欢在播客上展示这类东西。
Anton Osika: Lenny,我在想,你有没有考虑过做一个复刻版,搭建一个自己的 Airbnb?
Lenny Rachitsky: 我还没想过,但你说下去。
Anton Osika: 要不我们就来做这个?
Lenny Rachitsky: 来吧,我们来做。好,我们来搭建自己的 Airbnb。
Anton Osika: 好。我刚刚输入了第一条提示词,做一个 Airbnb 克隆。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好。提示词是什么?给没在看视频的朋友们说一下。
Anton Osika: 两个词:Airbnb clone。这就是提示词。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好。
Anton Osika: 先从简单的开始,然后你会看到 AI 说,好,我来梳理一下一个漂亮的 Airbnb 克隆应该是什么样的,它会做一些设计决策。我把画面缩小来看整体效果。我们得到了这样一个界面——它有你对 Airbnb 克隆所期望的所有细节:不同的分类、来自 Airbnb 的房源列表、登录按钮等等。到目前为止它还没有 Airbnb 的功能,只有界面。我现在可以要求改进某些功能,比如切换分类时显示不同的房源。但如果你对我们接下来应该构建什么有想法,可以告诉我。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好,你这是预加载好的,所以我们没看到实际需要多长时间。正常情况下,让它写完所有代码并呈现给你,大概需要多久?
Anton Osika: 第一条提示词大约 30 秒。
Lenny Rachitsky: 30 秒?好。而且这确实是一个非常出色的 Airbnb 复刻。我很喜欢你不需要给它展示设计稿,只要说 Airbnb,它就知道了。好,你问的是我想在自己的 Airbnb 版本上加什么功能——我一直想在浏览房源的时候看看这个地方是否在出售,就像,“这个在卖吗?“所以如果我们加一个购买房源的功能,看看体验会怎样——就是一种直接购买房源的方式。
Anton Osika: 好。那我们加一个——提示词在这里很重要,所以要具体一点。我们来写:在房源上加一个按钮,显示”购买此 Airbnb 房屋”。这样可以吗?
Lenny Rachitsky: 完美。
Anton Osika: 好,我来加上。我再说得更具体一点——点击后弹出一个弹窗来购买该房源。
Lenny Rachitsky: 完美。我很喜欢——你打字的时候我分享一些想法。你让这个 AI 工程师构建的网站,其实是一个可以正常浏览的、有功能的网站,不仅仅是一个设计稿。当然,这里没有真正的房源,没有真正的房子。但假设你真的想构建 Airbnb,想开始接入真实的房源数据,那这一步怎么实现?
Anton Osika: 正如你所说,目前这只是一个模拟界面,但它是可交互的。如果我想加上登录功能和房源管理功能,我们就需要连接所谓的后端——也就是存储数据的地方、存储用户登录信息的地方。我可以演示怎么做。不过我们先看看刚才那条简短提示词的效果。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好,来看看。
Anton Osika: 它加了购买房源的功能,但没有完全按我的想法来。我让它加一个按钮,但没指定按钮上的文字,结果它写的是”立即预订”,点进去是一个预订确认。AI 大概觉得你想在 Airbnb 上买房源这件事有点出乎意料,所以它还是显示”预订房源”,但弹出了一个相当漂亮的弹窗,我可以点击确认和支付,然后显示”预订已确认”。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我想说,这其实是一个非常好的例子,说明了为什么做一个优秀的产品经理很重要。当你不清楚自己要解决的问题是什么、为什么要解决它的时候,会浪费大量时间。所以这个场景很酷——你必须非常擅长解释你想要什么。而且有意思的是,你不需要跟这个 AI 解释”为什么”。人类会想理解”这件事为什么重要”,而 AI 大多只需要你非常清楚地说明你要做什么——我觉得这恰恰是一项很强的 PM 技能,优秀的 PM 在这方面非常擅长。所以我们……
Anton Osika: 嘿。准确描述你期望的结果以及当前不满足预期的地方,跟 AI 打交道时比跟人打交道更加重要。接下来我要接入更多实际功能,但首先我给你看一个东西。修正刚才的错误最快的方法是——它创建了写着”立即预订”的按钮,而我想让它们显示”立即购买”。我可以选中这个元素然后说”改成立即购买”。但我们刚刚发现,你其实可以直接可视化编辑这个产品,就像在 Squarespace 和 Wix 里那样操作。我直接把文字改成”立即购买”,然后它立刻就变了。它实际上是深入到代码库里做了修改,但操作起来非常快。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我觉得听这期节目、看到这段演示的人,如果你不知道的话——这就是目前这类工具的最前沿。据我所知,没有其他任何工具能让你从 AI 工程师生成代码之后,直接去修改其中一个小元素。其他所有工具都需要你跟 agent 说”帮我做这件事”,然后祈祷它做对了。所以你刚才展示的这个功能是一个巨大的突破,对吧?
Anton Osika: 是的,现在它显示的是”立即购买”了。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的,这太厉害了。这是你们刚上线的功能吗?
Anton Osika: 对。我们几天前刚上线这个功能。接下来我不会演示完整功能的搭建,但大致流程是这样的——你连接一个开源的 backend as a service,叫做 SuperBase。我有一个实例可以连接,完全是空的,一键就能设置好,然后它就连接上了后端。它会自动生成一些代码,并解释接下来可以做什么。我接下来会做的就是说——“加上登录功能”,对,加上登录。
后端部署与架构
Lenny Rachitsky: 那实际部署在哪里?后端以及整体的基础设施是怎么样的?
Anton Osika: 所有东西都可以一键部署,然后就能跑起来了。托管在一个云服务商上,它托管了互联网上很大一部分流量,叫 Cloudflare。后端也托管在一个不错的云服务商上,叫 SuperBase。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太棒了。好,我们结束演示吧,已经……除非你还有什么特别重要的想展示的?
Anton Osika: 没有了,我就说一下接下来我会做什么。我会说,好,加上登录功能。让房源可以被用户编辑,这样用户就能上传房源。这会花更多时间,但只要有耐心和好的 prompt 技巧,你最终能搭建出一个完整可用的 Airbnb。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这个补充非常好。所以基本上,这已经到了一个跟真正的 Airbnb 差别不大的地步了。人们可以登录,可以添加自己的房源,你可以添加内部工具让销售团队、运营团队来添加房源。本质上它让你能够搭建一个看起来很像 Airbnb 的市场平台。太厉害了。好的,谢谢你的演示。我觉得对很多人来说——有些人可能会想”嗯嗯,这种东西我见过了”——但对大多数人来说,反应是”卧槽”。这太不真实了……我们几乎已经开始把这当作理所当然的事了。你可以让一个应用帮你搭建一整个网站,成本大概只有几美分,花了五分钟。而如果要走传统方式,仅仅是做一个原型,可能需要几万美元、好几周甚至好几个月。
工具的未来与建议
Anton Osika: 我的意思是,正如我们在这里看到的,这些工具已经非常好了,看起来也很不错。但更重要的是,它们在非常非常快地变得更好。我认为目前比较大的一个瓶颈是,它们还没有很好地集成到你现有的产品和开发流程中去。但因为它们进步得这么快,我觉得对于对此感兴趣、或者想参与未来经济形态的人来说,最好的建议就是亲自动手、深度使用这些工具。因为在使用它们方面做到前 10%,绝对会在未来几个月、几年里让你脱颖而出。
Lenny Rachitsky: 顺着这个话题说下去——假设你有魔力,能坐在每一个第一次使用 Lovable 的人身边,在他们耳边悄悄说一个建议,帮助他们成功使用 Lovable,你会说什么?
Anton Osika: 掌握像 Lovable 这样的工具需要付出很多,保持好奇心和耐心非常重要。我们有一个叫 chat mode 的功能,你可以直接提问来理解——“这是怎么工作的?我得不到我想要的结果,我是不是遗漏了什么?我该怎么做?“这是最高效的工作方式,也是学习软件工程如何运作的最佳方式之一。你不再需要自己写代码,但理解构建产品是怎么一回事还是很有用的。所以耐心和好奇心超级有用。第二点就是我们之前谈到的——如果我坐在你旁边,我可能会说”嘿,你在这里表达得不够清楚”。比如,不要只说”它不工作”。要准确说明你期望的结果是什么,哪些部分是正常的,哪些部分不对。很多人天然地不会这样做。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我很喜欢这一点。当你和一个工程师合作时,沟通失误的成本非常高——误解需求、忘记某个功能、遗漏一个更好的需求。而在这里——你犯了错,30 秒后你就意识到”哦好吧,抱歉,搞错了”,然后直接重新来过。
Anton Osika: 没错,跟人合作的成本可能更高。
关于 Lovable 的命名
Lenny Rachitsky: 好,所以第一步是 chat mode。你的建议是跟……你们怎么称呼它?叫 agent 吗?跟你对话的那个东西,术语是什么?
Anton Osika: 对,Lovable 就是一个 agent。
Lenny Rachitsky: 就叫 Lovable?
Anton Osika: 对。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好。顺便问一下,你们是怎么决定用 Lovable 这个名字的?太可爱了。
Anton Osika: 我觉得核心就是做一款出色的产品。我希望更多人能做这件事,而形容一款好产品最好的词就是 Lovable。我喜欢用的一套说法,用来强调我们应该追求什么——先做一个最小可喜爱产品(minimum Lovable product),然后做一个 Lovable 产品,最后做一个绝对 Lovable 的产品(absolutely Lovable product)。所以我把这个理念带进了公司名字里。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太好了。“绝对 Lovable 产品”,ALP 是新的 MVP。好,我们来谈谈你们目前达到的规模——我猜已经远超一千万年经常性收入 (Annual Recurring Revenue) 了。你现在愿意分享这个数字吗,还是暂时保密?
Anton Osika: 我们不锚定具体数字,但我可能很快会发一条 2X 的推文来聊这个。嗯。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好,所以目前已经远超一千万年经常性收入 (Annual Recurring Revenue)。这是历史上增长最快的初创公司之一,也是欧洲增长最快的初创公司。我想把时间线拉回到最初。Lovable 的起源故事是什么?一切是怎么开始的?走到今天的历程是怎样的?
Lovable 的起源故事
Anton Osika: 我觉得我对人们用大语言模型做的事情并不太满意,尤其是在我早期使用它们之后。但当 ChatGPT 出来的时候,它们开始变得非常擅长接收人类指令然后输出代码。我团队的成员——当时我在一家 YC 投资的初创公司做 CTO——他们觉得”哦,Anton,你夸张了,这在未来几年不会改变什么”。所以我想证明一个观点,就创建了一个开源工具叫 GPT Engineer——你写一句类似”创建一个贪吃蛇游戏”的东西,然后它就会吐出一堆代码、好几个不同的文件,然后打开贪吃蛇游戏。我发了一条推文附上演示视频。GPT Engineer 至今仍是展示大语言模型创建应用能力的最受欢迎的开源工具,在 GitHub 上有五万多颗星,还有几十篇学术论文引用了它。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我补充一下——GitHub 把你们封了,因为他们以为这是某种攻击,因为你们获得的星数和使用人数太多了——
Anton Osika: 对,没错。不过那是后来的事了,是 Lovable 的事。说到 Lovable,早期每当有人使用 Lovable,它就会在 GitHub 上创建新项目。我们去问他们”这样可以吗?有什么限制吗?“他们说”哦,没有限制。“但等我们每天开始创建一万五千个项目的时候,使用量就非常大了。然后某天值班工程师大概半夜被叫醒,发现服务器因为我们的原因负载过高,就直接把我们的服务关掉了。我们收到一封邮件说”你们违反了某些规则”,但我们当时完全不知道发生了什么。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这让我想起一个类似的故事——ChatGPT 最初训练的时候,微软的服务器也把它封了,因为他们以为是什么爬虫,实际上那只是第一个版本的 ChatGPT 在训练数据。好了,请继续。
Anton Osika: 所以我做了 GPT Engineer 这个工具,然后我开始思考——我认为我们正在见证人类有史以来最大的变革。过去是体力劳动被机器取代,而现在是认知劳动被机器做得比人类更好。在这种情况下,怎样才能产生某种积极的影响?不是让工程师更高效——已经有很多公司在用 AI 让工程师更高效,微软做了 Copilot 等等。而是去帮助那些在找人做软件方面困难重重的人——找优秀的软件人才一直是他们的绝对瓶颈——让他们能够把自己的想法和信念变成现实。所以,通过为所有人打造 AI 软件工程师,来推动更多的创业和创新。然后我找来了我以前的同事 Fabian,他也是一位创始人。我说我们应该做像 GPT Engineer 那样的东西,但必须面向不会写代码的人。这就是我们的故事。
从开源到产品:Lovable 的诞生
Lenny Rachitsky: 明白了,然后这就变成了 Lovable?从开源项目转向一个任何人都能用、但也需要付费的产品。说得通。好的,那之后我看到一个数据——你们一上线 Lovable 就开始每周新增一百万美元的年经常性收入 (ARR),这是真的吗?
Anton Osika: 是的。产品上线的时候,我们其实把第一个版本叫作 GPT Engineer app,它在某些方面和现在很不一样。我们以候补名单的方式发布,说”对,我们有这个候补名单”,然后收到了大量反馈并不断迭代。终于当我们觉得产品真正好的时候,我们说——好了,现在我们有了一个 Lovable 产品。主要的改进在 AI 方面,我们做了大量的优化。产品上线是在 11 月 21 日,差不多三个月前。我们只用了一周就达到一百万 ARR,然后就一直以那个速度增长,甚至现在增长得比那还快。
Lenny Rachitsky: 比每周一百万 ARR 还快。我的天。
Anton Osika: 是的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好吧,这听起来就是产品市场匹配了。你刚才说你们在后端做了大量工作。我看到你发推文提到过,说你们在可扩展性方面找到了某种突破,像是某种新的扩展定律,让你们能够构建这样的东西。你能谈谈在技术层面是什么让你们能够做出这个全新的、成功的产品吗?
技术突破:解决 AI 卡住的问题
Anton Osika: 我觉得构建 AI 系统时会涉及很多扩展定律,而这个特别之处在于——当你投入更多精力,产品会可靠地变得越来越好。你通常看到的情况是,AI 在构建东西的时候容易卡在某个地方。一开始做得超级好,然后就卡住了。我们的做法是,煞费苦心地找出它会卡住的地方——方法各不相同,针对不同的情况采取不同的策略——但核心是针对那些卡住的点,对整个系统进行量化调优,并且建立非常快的反馈循环来在卡住的地方持续改进。最重要的那些领域,现在它偶尔还是会卡住,但这正是我们所说的扩展定律,而且我认为我们在这个扩展定律上还处于早期阶段。
Lenny Rachitsky: 那么你说的”卡住”,是指 AI agent 就是说”我不知道接下来该怎么办”,还是它引入了某种 bug?这是卡住的例子吗?
Anton Osika: 对。它引入了某种 bug,然后又不够聪明,想不出怎么从那个 bug 中走出来。
Lenny Rachitsky: 明白了。这也是人们使用这类工具时常遇到的问题——走到某个阶段就像”我不知道该怎么办了,我不是工程师,这里有个 bug,或者基础设施搭建得不对”。所以听起来,解决这个问题的路径之一就是你刚才说的——让 AI 更聪明,避免越来越多卡住的情况。另一个路径是人们学习如何帮 AI 解困。我们之前请 Amjad(来自 Replit)上播客的时候,他说他认为人们最需要掌握的核心技能就是当 AI 遇到问题时如何帮它解困。对此你有什么想法吗?
Anton Osika: 这确实是当前存在的一个问题,但这个问题的边界正在非常迅速地后退。我们的做法是找出最重要的那些领域——具体来说,比如添加登录功能、创建数据持久化、接入 Stripe 支付。这些就是我们确保它不会卡住的东西。目前它还会卡住的地方,暂时还需要你善于理解问题并帮它解困,但未来这一点就不那么重要了。这个体验最终不会卡住。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我知道你不太想深入谈这个,因为这是你们的竞争优势之一——你们摸索出来的东西。所以我也不会追问太多。我知道你不想让所有人都掌握完全一样的东西。那我们回到你们的增长速度这个话题吧。
小团队高速增长的秘诀
大家一直在关注你们的一个焦点——15 个人,两个月做到一千万 ARR。这太疯狂了。我不知道历史上是否有过这样的先例,如果有的话,可能也是最近极少数几个 AI 初创公司。你们是怎么做到的?你们做了什么才能在这么少的人手下增长这么快?
Anton Osika: 我很想说产品的端到端全是我一个人做的,但实际上我们是在”开采石油”——我们发现了石油,那就是基础模型——我们是在此之上构建的。我们所做的事情是,我们痴迷于思考:什么是向用户呈现这些能力的正确方式?人类应该通过什么样的界面才能从中获取最大价值?把各种能力打包在一起——比如我在演示中展示的,你可以添加身份验证,让这一切作为一个整体无缝协作——这就是我们做的事情。然后人们就喜欢上了这个产品。这就是增长的驱动力。在获取用户认知方面,我们主要就是把我们发布的东西发到社交媒体上,人们就是这样认识我们的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 所以”公开构建”就是大家通常描述这种做法的说法。我觉得你们的优势在于演示效果就是让人——“我的天,还能这样?“然后你们又分享增长数据,这些本身就很有话题性、很容易被传播。但我想大多数人都有一些值得分享的东西。你觉得你们做了什么是其他公司可能没做的,才让产品这么令人喜爱?
团队与产品品质
Anton Osika: 我的意思是,打造一款优秀产品,团队就是一切,所以我要向写下这些代码的团队致以崇高的敬意。最近我自己没写太多代码,我得这么说。你需要的是能极快交付的人,并且对什么是简洁、什么是正确的抽象有良好的品味。我认为这就是我们做得与众不同的地方——对让产品变得越来越好有一种执念。
AI 工具在团队中的使用
Lenny Rachitsky: 好,我想回到团队这个话题。我知道你在写代码方面有很多想法。你们在实际中到底有多少是在用 AI 来编写构建 Lovable 本身的代码?在你们团队中这是怎么运作的?
Anton Osika: 我们已经把 Lovable 设置成可以用它自身来修改 Lovable。我们确实这么做了。在运行一个独立的……我们为每个用户启动一台专属计算机,这里面有很多超具体的技术细节。它并不能做所有事情。Lovable 不是万能的。所以我们大部分时间使用的是面向开发者的工具,而不是面向那 99% 普通用户的工具。团队里每个人在写代码时都在使用 AI。它也非常适合用来做各种实验。
Lenny Rachitsky: 你们用的是 Cursor 之类的工具吗?有什么可以分享的?
Anton Osika: 是的。我觉得 Cursor 是团队里几乎所有人都在用的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 嗯,好的,很酷。我最近对我的听众和读者做了一次工具使用调查,我 newsletter 的读者中已经有 17% 的人在使用 Cursor,这太夸张了,你们也在其中。
与竞品的差异
Lenny Rachitsky: 好,顺着这个方向说,这个领域显然还有其他竞争对手和公司,所以大家一直在好奇——你和 Bolt、Replit 相比,Cursor 是另一类东西。最简单的方式来理解 Lovable 和 Bolt、Replit 的不同是什么?我觉得它们可能是最接近的竞品。
Anton Osika: 我们的目标是为非技术人员做好封装,我在演示中给你看过,你可以编辑文本、更改颜色等等,即时完成,不需要进入代码编辑器,也不需要等大约 30 秒让 AI 完成全部修改。这就是我们在封装方面最大的差异化思考。然后在更大的团队中尽可能高效地使用这一点——有一个我认为与其他所有工具都不同的地方,就是它与 GitHub 同步。这意味着团队中想要更深入底层的成员可以使用 Cursor,而那些不想折腾本地文件系统、不想手动提交到 GitHub 的人,可以使用 Lovable。
不被卡住,我认为这对用户来说是最重要的事情。这也是为什么我们进入这个领域比较晚,我们没有像许多其他公司那样做大规模营销,但在我交谈过的人当中,我们仍然被评为运行最可靠的那一个。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我很喜欢这一点。关于你可以先用 Lovable 让它帮你构建大部分内容,然后再进入 Cursor 去编辑和调整——这一点非常重要。你是在说其他公司在这方面做得不如你们。我不确定有没有其他产品能做到这一点。
Anton Osika: 是的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我觉得他们不允许你这么做。太棒了。
Lovable 的愿景
Lenny Rachitsky: 那么 Lovable 的愿景是什么?最终状态是什么样的?是所有人都可以构建任何自己想要的东西吗?最简单的方式来理解你们未来五到十年的方向是什么?
Anton Osika: 我得说,我们正在构建的是最后一块软件。本质上很难预测五年后世界会是什么样子,现在尤其困难。但最后一块软件,我的理解是:从你想在产品中做什么改动,或者你想构建什么产品,到拥有一个端到端完全运行的版本,与任何现有系统集成,或与非常强大的第三方服务商集成——这几乎是即时的。今天你已经可以直接说”添加一个与 OpenAI 的聊天功能”,然后你的产品里就有了与 OpenAI 的聊天。但要让这一切完美运行,我预计会在未来两年内实现。在那之后,构建一个产品还有很多不仅仅是工程方面的事情,对吧?我认为 AI 在汇总和理解用户方面可以发挥很大作用。
如果你用过分析工具,你会知道有一个很常见的功能,就是查看用户与产品的交互方式。AI 可以在绝对庞大的规模上做到这一点,并向人类提出修改建议:“哦,对,这个改动听起来不错,可以让它更直观一些。“它还可以自动运行 A/B 测试,让你看到数据,看到产品所有的这些改进。我认为这也在不远的将来。
未来哪些技能更重要
Lenny Rachitsky: 这件事有趣的地方在于,大家都在好奇哪些工作会变得更加重要,哪些技能会变得不那么重要。让我先分享一个我的想法,然后听听你的看法。感觉越来越有价值的能力是擅长搞清楚该构建什么,然后判断你构建出来的东西是否正确、是否足够好、是否可以发布。所以是发现、构思、想法——产品发布流程中的这一环节——然后是品味和工艺。就像判断:这是不是那个对的东西?这能不能解决人们的问题?因为构建这件事现在越来越多地被代劳了。有意思的是,过去恰恰相反,工程是最难、最有价值的技能,而现在变成了搞清楚该构建什么。
你可以坐在那里,告诉它要构建什么,但我相信很多人到了你的界面面前会说:“我不知道要构建什么,我不知道人们想要什么。“而现在这就是关键所在。所以想听听你对这些的反应,以及对哪些技能会变得更重要、更不重要的想法。
创始人与工程师技能的演变
Anton Osika: 我的意思是,如果你是创始人,或者你想做点什么的话——是的,我完全同意,找出痛点所在非常关键。而且你会看到,目前几乎所有问题都有某种解决方案,而你要想办法让它好上十倍,搞清楚这一点超级重要,尤其是当你已经有了一个现有产品的时候。然后我觉得,品味——辨别什么是好的东西——甚至是更重要的部分。工程师的技能集仍然会很重要,因为它帮助你理解约束条件,也就是你能构建什么。我只是觉得很多软件工程师现在可能有点害怕了,心想:“好吧,我是不是要失业了?接下来会怎样?“但他们应该把自己看作是这样的人——把人类表达的问题翻译成技术解决方案的人。只不过他们确实需要把自己往上抽象几个层级,不能只盯着自己的技术栈说”哦我只会做前端改动”。工程师或者说技术型的人非常擅长理解技术上的约束条件,他们应该把自己看作这样的翻译者。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这有点像是,你更需要学的是工程经理那种统筹工程师的能力,而不是实际的工程技能?还是说你觉得学会写代码、并且精通它依然非常重要?
Anton Osika: 我的意思是,每样都懂一点。做一个通才比以前重要得多。如果我今天要组建一个产品团队,我会非常执着于让我招的每个人都尽可能拥有更多的技能组合。他们应该知道系统架构是怎么回事,最好也懂数据科学,应该有产品品味,应该知道怎么跟用户交流。我觉得每个人都应该对所有这些方面多少懂一些,最好是这样。
Lenny Rachitsky: 说起来容易做起来难。要找到同时懂这些东西的人很难。那我们转到招聘的话题,你是怎么招人的?你们现在有多少人?这个数字可以分享吗?
Anton Osika: 可以,我们现在 18 个人。
团队规模与招聘理念
Lenny Rachitsky: 18 个。好的。哇,我喜欢你这个——听起来你好像要说”哦我们现在一百人了”,结果不是,18 个。好的,所以你从 15 个到了 18 个。好的,很好。那你招人的时候看什么?我在 Twitter 上看到你描述的是,你在找”cracked engineers”,欧洲最强的精锐团队之类的话。具体来说,你招人的时候到底在看什么?
Anton Osika: 我觉得最重要的东西是,这个人真的非常在乎,而不是那种”哦我就是来上班的,我就是这段旅程上的一个乘客”。每个人都应该真正在乎产品、在乎用户,同时非常在乎团队——团队怎么协作,而且你始终在为让团队更高效地一起工作做出贡献。这种在乎,或者最好是那种执念,能让你走得很远。然后你确实通常还希望某个人在某个维度上有绝对的超能力,这样才能尽可能多地理解和做到尽可能多的事情,拥有这种通才型的大脑,能快速学习任何技能,但在某一个维度上又超级、超级强。对我们来说,这个维度主要就是从 AI、从大语言模型中尽可能榨取更多价值,理解你能调整的整个参数空间,让我们的产品表现更好。
Lenny Rachitsky: 那你实际上怎么测试这些东西呢?你描述的这些特质,我觉得每个人都在找——他们在乎用户,他们想好好协作。因为你们只有 18 个人,却在做一家每周增长超过一百万年经常性收入的公司。这是一个极其离谱的规模,你找到的那些人显然是世界级的,我觉得很多人都会想招你正在招的这种类型的人。所以你在面试的时候,实际上怎么甄别这些东西,比如他们的 AI 榨取能力、团队协作能力,你具体是怎么做的?
Anton Osika: 我会问人们之前做过什么,而我描述的这种人,他们通常做过一些他们非常在乎的事情,然后我会深入挖掘他们做过的技术细节。然后我们也会做通常的事情,就是给一个很难的、有点非传统的问题,最好是对方没见过的那种,看他们怎么思考、怎么研究这个问题。然后还有一点我觉得不太常见的是,我们基本上都会让人参加工作模拟,至少一天,通常是完整一周。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太棒了。好的,所以是工作试用。这很好。基本上他们跟团队一起工作至少一天,你说有时候是一周。我很喜欢你说的这一点——他们对自己之前做过的东西有深深的在乎,你会寻找那种对上一次构建的或参与过的东西的执念。这 18 个人里工程师占多少比例?
Anton Osika: 至少有 12 个人至少兼职写代码。
Lenny Rachitsky: 18 个里面有 12 个。好的。我们刚才准备的时候,你说”哦我们的工程师现在也在做内容创作”。我觉得这是一个很好的例子,说明大家都在做很多不同的事情。好的,我这里有你之前分享的一份招聘帖,是实际的职位描述。我给你读几行。这个很有 Shackleton 风格,对吧?
Anton Osika: 是的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 你同意吧?很酷,我很喜欢。顺便问一下,这个是你自己写的还是让 AI 帮你写的这个职位描述?你创建一个工程职位描述的时候。其实让我念给你听,我甚至不知道——你可能不知道我指的是哪个版本。我读几行这里的内容。“工作时间长、节奏快,候选人必须能在 AGI 时间线逼近的高紧迫感下蓬勃发展,艰巨的使命在前方,成功后将获得荣誉与认可,寻求舒适工作的人请勿申请。“然后还有几条,“与同样卓越的头脑协作,超越任何普通工程岗位的使命感,慷慨分享创业成功的回报。“太精彩了。
Anton Osika: 谢谢。
Lenny Rachitsky: 有什么想法?
Anton Osika: 是的,所以这个格式方面确实得到了一些帮助,但具体的措辞,那些不同句子的精确表达,主要是我自己写的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太好了。而且我很喜欢这一点——对某些人来说,这会让他们觉得”我去,我才不签这个”,但对于很多人——也就是你想要的那种人——他们会说”没错,这正是我想做的事”。
Anton Osika: 没错。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太棒了。
Anton Osika: 是的。
在瑞典与欧洲创业的思考
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的,酷。感觉招聘中的一个要素就是,打造一个非常好的筛选机制,把这份工作的强度说清楚,这样那些真正想要这种强度的人就会被你吸引过来。好的。然后你——你在瑞典,是欧洲有史以来增长最快的创业公司——关于在欧洲、在瑞典创业与在美国、在旧金山创业,你有什么想法?
Anton Osika: 是的,所以你在那个招聘广告里谈到的这种雄心水平,在瑞典是比较少见的。而我觉得这是最大的突破口——像我这样的人看到了,这是人类历史上一个工作小时能产生最大影响力的时代,这就是为什么我们必须超级有雄心,把雄心水平提上去,然后也许我们就可以退休,让 AI 来处理社会中的大部分事情。在一个平均雄心水平较低但原始人才更加充裕的地方,去激发人们拥有这样的雄心,是一个很好的配方。我觉得那是一个很好的配方。这也是——我觉得这里面有某种优势。它有点像双刃剑,但确实是某种优势。
Lenny Rachitsky: 所以我听到的是,欧洲有非常优秀的人才,只是他们比较难找到,而关键在于如何把他们甄别出来,让他们愿意跟你交流?
Anton Osika: 大多数欧洲人并没有想过,“哦,去参与一个极其有雄心的使命,这就是我想做的事。“所以找出那些这样想的人,本身就是很大的一部分工作。
Lenny Rachitsky: 很好。好的,我想聊聊优先级排序。我想各位听众从刚才我分享的这些内容中也能感受到,这个使命有多雄心勃勃,你们正在打造最后一块软件——你们一定有无穷无尽的东西是别人要求你们做的、你们自己想做的。你们决定优先做什么、真正去构建什么的思路是什么?
工程师主导的优先级决策
Anton Osika: 简单来说?我觉得就是识别最大的瓶颈是什么、最大的问题是什么,然后快速迭代,说:“好,这是最大的问题,让我们真正彻底地解决这个问题。“然后挑下一个,不要过度思考,不要空想出一条长长的路线图,这就是我的做法。有一个非常非常简单的算法。不过弄清楚最大的问题是什么,这本身并不总是一个简单的问题。所以我们花时间去跟用户交流,去看大家写了什么,这是理所应当的。我们有功能看板,大家在那里提很多需求,就像你说的。然后当我们选定一个问题之后,我们是比较工程师主导的。对于我们这样的产品,很难让不是工程师的产品经理来说,哦,我们现在应该做这个,因为问题的正确解决方案可能与技术细节纠缠在一起。它可能与技术细节纠缠在一起,比如:“好的,没错,这是最大的问题,但我们应该推进这个更大的技术方案,它会一并解决所有这些问题。“所以我们比许多其他产品公司更偏工程师主导。
Lenny Rachitsky: 理应如此。如果你们现在有产品经理,我反而会担心——现在这完全说不通。我猜答案是,一切都是混乱的,没有真正定义好的流程,但大致来说是什么样子?你们的节奏是怎样的?一个想法从提出到构建、到写规格、到上线,大致是什么样的流程?如果你们有这样的流程的话。
开发节奏与路线图
Anton Osika: 如果你回头看三个月前,我们主要是说:“好,我们做周计划。“我们确实有一个大的看板,上面列出了所有主要问题,然后我们做了排序,先聚焦哪些、接下来聚焦哪些、这周聚焦哪些。然后我们有一个演示环节,说:“好,这些是我们这周发布的东西。“为了让所有人步调一致,我们现在确实有了一个更像路线图的东西,比如我们会确保支持自定义域名,接下来会加上协作功能。而现在最大的问题,或者说解决最大问题的最大举措,是让系统更加 agent 化,这个方向有一条稍长一点的路线图,但我们仍然保持着每周计划的节奏。这是我们这周聚焦的事情。这周主要……有一个很好的词可以形容,但我想让你帮我找——打磨(polish),我们这周在修 bug 和打磨,这就是周一做的规划。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这周确实是打磨周,打磨周。我喜欢这个。你们现在这条路线图有多远?
Anton Osika: 未来一个月是比较清晰的,但它可以延伸到三个月,不过一个月之后它可能看起来会有点不一样。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的。那你们用什么工具?给那些想了解最新工具的人说说。你刚才提到了 FigJam,还有哪些工具在这个工具栈里?
Anton Osika: 我们公司很多很多流程都跑在 Linear 上,因为它就是一款非常棒的产品。我们连人才申请追踪都在 Linear 里做,在试过各种其他专门为招聘做的工具之后,Linear 加上 FigJam 就够了。
Lenny Rachitsky: 就这么简单。你们的工程师什么时候会变成 agent 工程师、AI 工程师?你有概念吗?
关于 AI Agent 的定义
Anton Osika: 我很想深挖一下这个问题到底是什么意思。我觉得我们一直在说,“哦,AI 得能下棋,那才是 AI。如果一台电脑能下棋,那就是 AI。“然后现在变成了,“哦不,那只是一个下棋程序。“标准一直在不断往前移。我觉得任何不是人来做的事情,就只是一个聪明的计算机系统。什么时候一个软件工程师变成了 agent?我觉得它永远只会是——我们在 Lovable 里构建的,就是一个人类与之交互来创建他们想要的软件的界面,至于我们怎么实现这一点,我们可以说它是一个 agent,按某种定义的话。是的,可以这么说,但对我来说这没那么重要。
快速迭代的秘诀
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的,我喜欢这个。让我换个问法——你们速度飞快,规模扩张疯狂。你刚才描述了一些流程,每周计划、FigJam 的想法看板,还有现在你们在构思的路线图。除了已经提到的这些,还有什么帮助你们这么快地推进、给你们这个小团队带来如此大杠杆效应、能够快速交付、快速前进的东西?
Anton Osika: 我们大部分时间在办公室办公。我觉得这挺好的。然后你可以说:“嘿,我觉得我们对这个东西的想法有误,“或者”我们是不是应该做那个?“尤其是午餐时间,一起吃午饭是相当高效的一个小时,大家可以交叉碰撞想法。我的意思是,人们也在潜意识里不断思考怎么解决这些不同的问题、哪些是最重要的。而且在办公室工作有一种专注感——大多数时候是专注的——但你也有这种高带宽的沟通环境,而不需要把一切都写成结构化的文字。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我喜欢这个。一家拥有世界上最先进 AI 工具之一的公司 CEO,关于如何快速推进的回答之一,竟然是一起吃午饭。我喜欢这个。这太有人情味了,而且完全说得通,但我很喜欢这仍然是其中的一部分。
Anton Osika: 是的。
未来产品团队的构建
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的。顺着这个话题——你之前谈到过,如果你今天要组建一个团队、一个新产品团队,比如你是某个地方的产品负责人或者产品副总裁,在组建新的产品团队、扩展产品团队,你觉得在招什么样的人、怎么组织他们这些方面,跟人们过去做的有什么不同?你觉得大家在构建产品团队时应该思考什么?在知道像 Lovable 这样的工具存在、以及其他正在发生的一切的前提下。
Anton Osika: 我觉得每个人都应该对使用 AI 充满热情,这一点非常重要。然后团队之间能很好地协作——就像刚才说的午餐那样——大家得坐在一起解决问题。如今大多数产品的瓶颈不会那么偏工程方面了,而是要有好的品味、对用户有好的直觉。而且,工程师和团队里的每个人,至少应该有这种意愿,愿意去走那个流程,去倾听用户的声音,真正理解他们在乎什么。
团队招聘的核心理念
Lenny Rachitsky: 那么你招的大多数工程师和其他人的背景是怎样的?他们有什么共同点吗?是不是都是那种超级厉害的人,比如编程竞赛冠军之类的?你目前招的人有哪些特质?
Anton Osika: 我觉得纯粹的认知能力是在 Lovable 工作最强的、最强的相关因素。但同时,创业心态也非常重要——对快速行动和快速迭代更感兴趣,而不是追求大量结构、大量流程,或者把自己局限在某个特定职业、特定手艺上只想钻研自己的那一块。
Lenny Rachitsky: 非常好。所以就是聪明、非常聪明、有创业精神、像主人一样行事,而不是仅仅把这当作一份工作。他们觉得自己真正拥有自主权。很好。你之前说过一句话,跟这个话题相关,我觉得很重要——让你对正在做的事情感到兴奋的一点是赋予人们超能力,尤其是那些不会写代码的人,基本上就是 99% 的人。这方面你还有什么想分享的吗?
赋予所有人超能力
Anton Osika: 对于做过工程师或创始人的人来说,这一点很清楚:有太多人因为身边没有一个能解决技术问题的人,最终在创业路上失败了。而现在,当人们知道有这样一个能解决一切的工具存在时,将会迎来一次创业的寒武纪大爆发,以及更好的软件产品。我们将不再忍受今天使用的那些烦人的、糟糕的技术。每个有想法的人都会说:“好,我来把这个东西做出来,给你看这才是最好的产品版本,或者我们公司应该做的方向。“而不是开漫长的会议或写文档。所以这将赋能全球很多不同的职业和地方的人。
Lovable 的下一步
Lenny Rachitsky: Lovable 接下来有什么计划?在这期节目播出的时候,你们可能会推出什么新功能?
Anton Osika: 就像我提到的这种 agentic 行为——我说的 agentic,意思是你给系统更多自由来决定下一步做什么。它可能想写一个测试,运行这些测试,然后发现”哦,测试失败了,我来修复一下”。这是让你走得更远更快的一个重大突破。然后还有一些更显而易见的事情,需要做到让人能轻松地一路走到用 Lovable 赚钱——比如怎么设置才能托管在你自己的域名上?怎么让你的团队在那里无缝协作?这些都是很自然要做的事情。我们还在思考的是,如何帮助创始人在构建了第一版产品之后取得成功——怎么获得更多用户?怎么获得反馈?如果他们做出了有用的东西,怎么传播出去?
Lenny Rachitsky: 我正想说这个,我脑子里想的就是——每个人都会用这些工具来构建各种各样的东西,但没有人能获得任何吸引力。没有人知道怎么找到用户、怎么让任何人来用,基本上就是上市的问题。而增长是一项完全不同的技能。所以你在思考这件事真的很酷。我们怎么帮你跑一些付费广告?怎么考虑 SEO?怎么考虑口碑传播和推荐?非常棒。
Anton Osika: 是的,我们已经有实操指南来帮助那些在使用我们平台构建产品的人——怎么做好这些事情,可以在我们的博客上找到。
Lenny Rachitsky: 有意思,这让我想买一些 Meta 的股票了。因为所有人都在用这些工具构建应用,他们将来都会在 Facebook 和 Google 上跑付费广告。天哪,那些家伙的生意得多好啊。我想回到你之前说的,你说可以在现有代码库上工作。这对很多人来说其实是个大问题。他们看到所有这些工具,对于原型和概念验证都很棒。你之前谈到过可以在现有代码库中使用 Lovable。
现有代码库支持
Anton Osika: 让我纠正一下。你目前还不能在任何现有代码库上使用它。
Lenny Rachitsky: 明白了。
Anton Osika: 我们有一个导入代码库的研究预览版,但你目前能做的是——如果你在 Lovable 上开始一个项目,那么工程师可以用他们想用的任何工具来编辑它。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的,这个澄清很重要。因为这里的大多数听众不是在做一个全新的东西,他们是在现有产品中工作。所以你是说这个功能即将到来,未来你可以以某种形式在现有应用和产品中使用 Lovable?
Anton Osika: 对的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 哇,这很重大。好的。因为基本上大多数人——所以这将会是一件大事。好的,最后一个问题。
失败角落
Lenny Rachitsky: 我们的播客有一个环节叫”失败角落”。大多数来这个播客的人都在展示各种成功的故事,一切都很顺利,都是不断赢。你们也是一个很好的例子——一路向上向右,增长最快的产品。在你的职业生涯中,有什么事情彻底失败了,你从中学到了什么?
Anton Osika: 要说彻底失败的事情我还真有点难找,但有一个产品方面的教训。我当时是斯德哥尔摩一家叫 Summer Labs 的 AI 创业公司的第一个员工,它的基本理念是——人的学习方式各不相同,如果做个性化,学习效果会提升两个标准差。当时有很多教育软件帮助你学习,但它们都不是个性化的。我们在构建一个 API 来实现个性化学习,AI 等等,做得还不错。但最终我们在做的事情是说——好,这里有一个产品,有人得先做一个产品或某种学习方式,比如像 Duolingo 那样的英语学习产品,然后拥有那个产品的人得使用这个高级 AI API 来让它变得个性化。而事后加装是非常困难的——你要把引擎换掉,把这个 AI 加进去。这里最大的教训是,这对公司来说效果不好。我的意思是,这家公司在这件事上并不算很成功。最大的教训是,你必须从产品端到端怎么运作开始思考,然后再加入 AI,或者思考应该在哪里加入 AI。这对我来说是一个很大的教训——你真的需要先看到用户的整体图景是什么,你设想的用户体验应该是怎样的全局图景,然后再用 AI 来解决特定的问题。现在 Summer Labs 发展得很好,但不是在基于那个产品的基础上。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我觉得很多人听到这个道理会觉得,废话,当然是这样。但实际上当你手上有很酷的技术时,你真的很难记住这一点——你会觉得”天哪,所有人都得试试这个,他们一定会爱上的”,然后你意识不到,如果这东西没有在解决人们的问题,其实根本没人在乎。市面上有大量新奇产品,大家都想玩一小会儿,然后很快就忘了——我其实并不经常需要这个东西。所以这让我想到,关于什么能帮助产品成功,有很多产品方面的经验教训。像 Lovable 这样的工具其实可以帮助你做到这一点——当有人在构建什么东西时,你可以引导他们:你到底在解决什么问题?有多少人有这个问题?这对他们来说有多重要?
Anton Osika: 也许我们应该加一个 Lenny 模式。在 Lovable 里激活它,就激活了这个产品教练。会有无穷无尽的问题,比如”不不不,等等,你为什么要做这个?”
Lenny Rachitsky: 绝对要加。大家到时候会说”烦死了,别挡我的路”。
Anton Osika:(笑)
Lenny Rachitsky: 对,就是。“你的实验计划是什么?“我觉得这里其实有一个很大的机会可以拯救人们。大家玩一玩这个东西,然后就该想想——这到底是不是人们真正想要的?
Anton Osika: 我喜欢这个主意。我们能叫它 Lenny 模式吗?你没意见吧?
Lenny Rachitsky: 百分百同意。
Anton Osika: 太好了。
Lenny Rachitsky: 就这么定了。我免费授权给你。
Anton Osika: 好的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好,成交。Anton,还有什么想分享的吗?在你去睡觉之前,还有什么想对听众说的吗?
拥抱 AI 工具
Anton Osika: 我想说,世界正在快速变化,这非常有趣。你应该享受这一切变化带来的乐趣。无论是对你现有的职业,还是如果你想找一份新工作,你能做的最好的事情就是成为最懂如何使用 AI 工具的前 1%。所以走出去,用 Lovable,用其他 AI 工具,确保去理解——或者尽可能地去理解——如何高效地使用它们。这是我跟我所有朋友都说的,也希望听众们知道。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好,我得试着给大家更具体一点的建议。你怎么知道自己是不是前 1%?有没有一个经验法则,或者怎么才能达到那个水平?就是每天用一百次吗?还有什么?你有什么建议?
Anton Osika: 我觉得如果你花一整周的时间去尝试达成一个目标,最好的学习方式就是——我想做这件事,然后我用 AI 来完成这件事。你花了完整一周,你在全球人口中就是前 1% 了。如果你身边的朋友也有这种痴迷,他们也特别关注这件事,那你很快就能到前 0.1%。
Lenny Rachitsky: 所以我听到的是,找一个可以解决的问题,找你自己或某个人身上的一个痛点,然后端到端地彻底解决这个问题。花一周时间从想法到一个有人真正在用的东西,你就进入前 1% 了。
Anton Osika: 对。我觉得……是的,只要花一整周的时间,不懂就问 AI,你就能到前 1%。确保你真正理解了。
Lenny Rachitsky: 是的,这是人们容易忘记的一点——你直接问就行了。在这种情况下,你是问 Lovable 的聊天功能,还是会去 Claude 或 ChatGPT 问建议?
Anton Osika: 我的建议是这样的,如果你是做产品的,用 Lovable 来构建软件、学习那个 AI 工具,然后你应该使用 ChatMode。另外我要补充一下,ChatMode 是在用户个人资料里激活的,它还没有在主产品中正式发布,而是在 labs 里,但如果你开启那个标记,就可以使用 ChatMode。如果你想学别的 AI 工具,那就去问那个工具,或者问 Claude、ChatGPT 关于那个主题、那个领域是怎么回事。
去哪里找到我们
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的,太棒了。大家可以在哪里找到你?在哪里找到 Lovable?听众怎样才能帮到你?
Anton Osika: Lovable 会在 Twitter 上的 lovable_dev 发布更新和表情包,我们也在 LinkedIn 上发布内容。关于我们如何构建软件方面会有很多新东西出来,也会不断变化。你可以关注 lovable_dev,也可以在 Twitter 上关注我 @AntonOsika。我很希望得到更多反馈,了解大家在哪些方面觉得这是一个巨大的改变。有很多人在 Twitter 上讨论这个,我们还有一个 Discord,你可以在里面分享”哦,我是这样用 Lovable 的,对我超级有用”。feedback.lovable.dev 可以提新功能需求,有很多人在那里提交想要的功能。这对我们来说超级有用,也是最重要的东西——我们就是想解决人们的问题。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太棒了。Anton,你做的事情令人惊叹。多么精彩的一段旅程。期待有一天你再次回来,我们一起见证这段旅程的更多篇章。
Anton Osika: 我还有很多要学的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我们都是。所以大家才听这个播客。Anton,非常感谢你来。
Anton Osika: 非常感谢你,Lenny。
Lenny Rachitsky: 大家再见。非常感谢收听。如果你觉得这期节目有价值,可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或你喜欢的播客应用上订阅。也请考虑给我们评分或留言评价,这真的能帮助更多听众找到这个播客。你可以在 LennysPodcast.com 找到所有往期节目或了解更多关于这个节目的信息。下期见。
术语表
| 原文 | 中文 |
|---|---|
| A/B tests | A/B 测试 |
| Amjad | Amjad |
| ARR | 年经常性收入 (Annual Recurring Revenue) |
| backend | 后端 |
| Bolt | Bolt(AI 应用构建平台) |
| Copilot | Copilot(微软 AI 编程助手) |
| Fabian | Fabian |
| GitHub | GitHub |
| GPT Engineer app | GPT Engineer app |
| minimum lovable product | 最小可喜爱产品 |
| mockup UI | 模拟界面 |
| Replit | Replit |
| Stripe | Stripe |
此文档由 AI 分片翻译(translate_long_document)