Lovable was already the best no-code AI builder on the market when I joined, mostly because of our recent full-stack support and improved reliability. However, despite having a superior product, our growth was linear and slow. We were at $264,000 ARR and had already launched 2 times on Product Hunt under the name gpt-engineer.
Then something interesting happened. A competitor emerged seemingly out of nowhere. We were clearly better than them - our AI prompting system was more advanced and we had more integrations - but despite this they achieved unprecedented growth shortly after launch, reaching $4M ARR in just 4 weeks.
You can imagine our frustration - we had built the best product on the market, yet this new competitor managed to overtake our ARR in just a few days. Within weeks, they had 40x'd our revenue. Everyone was talking about Bolt, while Lovable remained relatively unknown. When I joined on November 11th, I knew we needed to change our approach dramatically. I immediately focused on two things:
• Creating organic content through channels I had previously grown. One TikTok video hit 1.1 million views and almost doubled our ARR in just 8 days.
• Manually reaching out to hundreds of influencers (turned out that Bolt had also done this and paid many of them, which probably explains a big part of their growth)
Organic content gave us lots of momentum coming into a third launch which was scheduled 9 days after the TikTok was posted. We also made the decision to rebrand from GPT-engineer to Lovable 2 days before the launch.
The timing couldn't have been better - our product had improved significantly, and combined with the momentum from our organic content, this launch became incredibly successful. It finally put Lovable in the spotlight and got people comparing it to other alternatives in the market (which was very good for us). I told the influencers to use the growth of our competitors and just piggyback off it to propel us even more forward, which worked really well.
Then we also shipped superfast and posted everything we shipped on X, this played and still plays a massive part in keeping up our fast growth.
Our ARR curve was now turned sharply upward, and interestingly enough, we also reached $4M ARR within 4 weeks of our third launch. Despite being the underdog - as most of our competitors had previous successful products and established followings - I still do not have any doubt in my mind that we will be way larger than all of our competitors on the market.
I think the takeaway is sometimes you need to be aggressive in getting your product the attention it deserves - especially when you know you've built something truly valuable and significantly better than the alternatives.
The latter is usually harder - but would like to hear your take on this?
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