A Lovable onboarding
Lovable is the fastest growing startup in Europe
Hey, this is Arttu 👋 Welcome to a new edition of the Euro SaaS Edge!
In this edition, I examine Sweden's Lovable, a rising star in the AI startup space. Lovable has received a lot of attention lately, and for a reason. In 3 months after launching, Lovable has added:
17 m ARR, 2 m ARR each week,
Supported the creation of 20,000 app per day
Has now 30,000 paid subscribers
Lovable is an app that uses your prompt as input to create web applications. This category of products is now called Vibe Coding. Wikipedia defines it as:
Vibe coding is an AI-dependent programming paradigm in the field of computer programming where a person describes a problem in a few sentences as a prompt to a large language model (LLM) tuned for coding.
The growth story of Lovable is well covered by Pierre-Jean Hillion in his recent post. I will not reiterate his great post here, but instead, I will concentrate on Lovable's onboarding process, which is... lovable.
Getting to “aha”
My Lovable customer journey started even before I searched for the site. As I heard the word "lovable" used more and more, I began to wonder what kind of product would dare to use such a bold name, and I had to see it for myself.
When you open their site, you see the page above with the simple value prop and a prompt. The first onboarding instructions are provided by the changing text inside the prompt box. You are prompted to enter the description of the app you want to make. After signing up using a Google or Github account, Lovable begins the design and coding based on your prompt. No additional information is required for signup.
After my first visit and prompt, I thought I would get just a rough engineering design, which is technically what I requested. The amazing and lovable fact is that also the design is well thoughtfully crafted.
My first prompt:
After a few minutes, a functional prototype app is made available for testing on the Lovable page.
At this point, the user has landed at the “aha” moment. The entire process, from landing to the front page and creating your first prototype, takes no more than a few minutes if the original prompt had a reasonable and clear request for building. A few minutes from "search to aha" is a great outcome for any SaaS app, but it is impressive that the app created a unique application specifically for the user in a few minutes.
Hitting the free subscription limit
After getting to the first prototype, you can tweak the application by giving clear and explicit instructions either to the design or functionality. All happen using the prompt and automatic code generation in a few minutes. Below is an iteration with a different font, dark mode, and the week start changed to Monday.
You can continue iterating in this way until you reach the free subscription limit of five prompts per day or thirty per month. Paid subscriptions start at $20 for 100 prompts per month. Due to the very addictive nature of Lovable, it is likely that a user moves quickly to a paid subscription.
Following prototyping
After you are happy with the design, you can move the generated code to your Github repository by one button press. You can then edit the code either manually, continue to use Lovable for tweaking the design, or a mix of both.
Also, there is a one-button integration with Supabase that provides backend services like persistent storage and authentication for the app.
Conclusion
There are a lot more features in Lovable, like Figma integration, but the point here was to evaluate the onboarding, which is clean and lovable, and not do a full product review. Additionally, I have not examined the quality of the code or how maintenance is carried out over time or with larger projects. We will learn more about this in due time. At this time, it is worth noting that Lovable publishes a list of products built using Lovable, which builds their credibility.