2025-12-18 21:31:55
Elena Verna is the head of growth at Lovable, the leading AI-powered app builder that hit $200 million in annual recurring revenue in under a year with just 100 employees. In this record fourth appearance on the podcast, Elena shares how the traditional growth playbook has been completely rewritten for AI companies. She explains why Lovable focuses on innovation over optimization, how they’ve shifted from activation to building new features, and why giving away their product for free has become their most powerful growth strategy.
Listen on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts
Why 60% to 70% of traditional growth tactics no longer apply in AI
Why you have to re-find product-market fit every 3 months
The specific growth tactics driving Lovable’s unprecedented growth
Why giving away product is a growth strategy that beats paid ads
“Minimum lovable product” as the new standard (not minimum viable product)
Why activation now belongs to product teams, not growth teams
Whether you should join an AI startup (honest tradeoffs)
WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs
Vercel—Your collaborative AI assistant to design, iterate, and scale full-stack applications for the web
Persona—A global leader in digital identity verification
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elenaverna
• Newsletter: https://www.elenaverna.com
• Elena Verna on how B2B growth is changing, product-led growth, product-led sales, why you should go freemium not trial, what features to make free, and much more: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/elena-verna-on-why-every-company
• The ultimate guide to product-led sales | Elena Verna: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-ultimate-guide-to-product-led
• 10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/10-growth-tactics-that-never-work-elena-verna
• Lovable: https://lovable.dev
• Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people | Anton Osika (co-founder and CEO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-lovable-anton-osika
• Stripe: https://stripe.com
• What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (Amplitude, The Beautiful Mess): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-differentiates-the-highest-performing
• How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can’t copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-win-in-the-ai-era-gaurav-misra
• “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-50-people-built-a-profitable-ai-unicorn
• Eric Ries on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eries
• Elena’s post on LinkedIn about Lovable Missions: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/elenaverna_everythingispossible-lovableway-activity-7401627519646474242-hn6e
• SheBuilds: https://shebuilds.lovable.app
• Shopify + Lovable: https://lovable.dev/shopify
• The Product-Market Fit Treadmill: Why every AI company is sprinting just to stay in place: https://www.elenaverna.com/p/the-product-market-fit-treadmill
• Cursor: https://cursor.com
• The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-rise-of-cursor-michael-truell
• Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/frameworks-for-growing-your-career-bangaly-kaba
• The adjacent user: https://brianbalfour.com/quick-takes/the-adjacent-user
• Granola: https://www.granola.ai
• Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai
• I’m worried about women in tech: https://www.elenaverna.com/p/im-worried-about-women-in-tech
• Slack founder: Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/slack-founder-stewart-butterfield
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.
2025-12-16 21:45:33
👋 Hey there, I’m Lenny. Each week, I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. For more: Lennybot | Lenny’s Podcast | How I AI | Lenny’s Reads | AI/PM courses | Public speaking course
Annual subscribers get 19 premium products for free for one year: Lovable, Replit, Gamma, n8n, Bolt, Devin, Wispr Flow, Descript, Linear, PostHog, Superhuman, Granola, Warp, Perplexity, Raycast, Magic Patterns, Mobbin, ChatPRD + Stripe Atlas (while supplies last). Subscribe now.
Someone smarter than me once said, “AI won’t replace you, but a person using AI better than you might.” I believe this is exactly right. Right now, we all need to be building the skills that help us become that person using AI better. Lucky for us, Amir Klein is already that person and has written a guide for the rest of us. Though it’s targeted at product managers, the advice and workflows can be implemented by anyone in any function. Thank you, Amir, for giving us a glimpse into the future and the concrete steps to get there.
For more, follow Amir on LinkedIn. You can also listen to this post in convenient podcast form on Spotify / Apple / YouTube.
The first month in my new role at monday.com, I was tasked with building our first AI agent. The goal was to create an AI co-pilot, something users could turn to for insights, explanations, or building complex workflows they wouldn’t know how to create on their own. To build that, I needed a ton of context—all the internal knowledge, decisions, assumptions, and scattered inputs that shape any product direction. And gathering all of that felt completely overwhelming.
I was drowning.
All that context lives everywhere: Slack channels, Notion pages, Monday boards, decks, Google Docs. Hundreds of tiny fragments I could never quite piece together. I kept running into mental blocks, forgetting what I knew from where, and getting stuck. Instead of trying to keep all of that context in my head like I always had, this time I wanted to try something new. I dumped everything I had into a ChatGPT Project, word-vomited all that was on my mind, and asked if it could help me get started. And boy, did it.
Finally, I felt like I could smell a roadmap on the horizon, a direction was forming, and things began to click. Even better, I felt somewhat in control without being stressed about storing everything in my head. I could store it in the AI instead—a second brain. Instead of all that information overloading my own brain and pulling my attention in a hundred different directions, I could finally focus on the product work I love and need to get right to be successful: understanding the problem, shaping the vision, and building something meaningful.
My good friend Tal taught us how to think with AI. I’m building on Tal’s post by showing what happens when AI becomes an extension of your mind—when it carries your context, grows alongside you, and ultimately amplifies what you’re capable of as a PM.
No matter what we’re doing, we’re constantly trying to hold way too much information in our heads. I always imagine it like carrying a giant basket filled with random things like eggs, water bottles, watermelons, toy cars, a cactus (I hope you’re picturing a Dr. Seuss scene). And I’m on the go, so things are rocking all around the basket, and more things keep being added, and then an egg falls and cracks, one of the water bottles starts to spill over, a toy car keeps banging into one of the watermelons . . . basically anxiety in a metaphor.
That’s what it feels like trying to hold all the context required to do product work. But the hardest part isn’t just carrying it; it’s that none of these pieces arrive neatly fitted together. Context comes in fragments: user feedback, metrics, market changes, internal constraints, past decisions, intuition. As PMs, our job is to assemble those pieces into a clear picture—shaping the problem, forming the hypothesis, and defining the solution space.
When you can pull that together, you build products that solve real problems so well that customers change habits for them, pay for them, and genuinely feel the impact. But doing that synthesis in your head, and doing it over and over again, can literally feel impossible.
That’s where AI comes in. When you feed in all of that context that you’ve been trying to juggle yourself, your ChatGPT Project becomes a second brain that can store the information and synthesize it for you. That means that it can know and retrieve the right piece of data for the right problem—like an instantaneous librarian—and even use what it knows to run analyses and generate recommendations, like an associate PM.
It’s important to say: using a second brain doesn’t dull your role but actually sharpens it. Your reasoning, product sense, knowledge, and taste are still doing the real work; AI just amplifies them. You can’t outsource judgment or creativity. This isn’t AI thinking instead of you—it’s you thinking with more clarity because all the mental overhead is gone. You still make every decision; the second brain just clears the path from your insight to the output.
If someone were to ask you, “Hey, do you want a really smart, eager, motivated, capable person by your side who knows what you know and is super-enthusiastic to tackle anything you want?” you’d probably say yes in a heartbeat. Well, you’re in luck, because that’s exactly what Projects can be.
At monday.com, I had all of this information (my ever-growing basket) that I was in dire need to create a plan from. So I turned to ChatGPT, opened a Project, and got started. Cue the music.
If you’re trying this yourself, Projects live in ChatGPT’s left sidebar under “New project.”
(I’ll share how to do the same thing in Claude and Gemini later on.)
Once you’re inside, if you approach Projects like a second brain that you’re growing, you want to first make sure it thinks in the way you think. In other words, you need to build its personality. Each Project has an instructions section where you can first define this “personality” in plain language.
A really awesome way of doing this is with the help of ChatGPT (of course). Open a new chat and describe what you want. For example:
I’m a Monday PM working on AI agents. I’m building a ChatGPT Project to be my thought partner, something that’ll work with me on my initiatives, something that’ll know how to challenge me in all the right places, push back on areas that feel weak, and creatively think of alternatives with me. This Project’s “personality” has to be sharp, smart, fun, and not always agreeing with everything I come up with. It also needs to be a pro at product management—this includes product sense and product execution, with a strong sense for product taste and delight. Can you help me write the instructions for this project? :) Cheers!
It’ll output instructions for what you want:
Tweak what you want or just copy the whole thing as is into the instructions page, and your second brain is now eagerly waiting for you to feed it information!
Now comes the fun and legitimately relieving part: feeding it all that context that you are barely holding onto. Go to “Add files” and just dump it in.
I think the biggest “whoa” moment for me is realizing that everything is essentially text. The classics, like PRDs and docs, are a given, but decks, websites, Excel/CSV sheets, dashboards, and Slack channels all contain text too. They just need to be exported into PDFs and then you can upload them into the files section too.
Once you see everything as text, you start to understand how much context you can actually give your second brain. Here’s what that looks like in practice:
I’ll scroll through a massive Slack channel that’s gotten impossible to navigate. I’ll export it or, if that’s not possible, I’ll copy and paste the entire channel’s contents into a doc and save it as a PDF. Then I drop it into the Project. Now ChatGPT knows what has already been discussed, what decisions were made, and what issues keep resurfacing.
When I need it to understand our product’s capabilities, instead of rambling on to it about how my product works, I go to our support or docs site, hit Command + P, and save the entire page as a PDF to drop in. That way, whenever I mention a feature, my second brain already knows how it works.
I do the same with research data like transcripts, interviews, surveys, CSVs. Everything becomes fuel. Each file adds depth to the brain.
In the case of the first initiative I led at monday.com, I started with a few decks that different colleagues of mine had made, downloaded PDFs of monday.com documentation pages explaining how specific things work, and added a bunch of CSV files containing Reddit threads of conversations thousands of people had about monday.com in relation to AI and our competitors. This was enough to get the ball rolling and start formulating a plan. The beauty of Projects is that you’ll start creating new artifacts from it. Whatever it is you’re creating—whether it be PRDs, overview docs, or strategy decks—once finished, you can take those, put them in a doc, download them, and feed them back into your second brain. Each new thread you open will be up to date with you on your work. It becomes a living thing.
This is what my Project ended up containing after hundreds of threads:
There’s no one specific thing to use Projects for. As your second brain becomes more and more knowledgeable about your work, you can lean on it for everything that you don’t want to do but needs to get done. For example:
1. Sign-up forms
I needed to create a sign-up form for users to get early access to the agent we were building. This is a classic case of something that seems pretty easy at first but ends up making you bang your head against a wall. How should I phrase what I want to ask? How do I make the output from the form clear and purposeful for me without making filling out the form exhausting for users? Your second brain can now swoop in to save the day as it holds all the context on your initiative. In this case, I asked:
I’m sending out a form to users to sign up for a waitlist for our first agent. I want to put 2-3 questions on the form which gauges their expectation to ensure we’re aligned on what we’re building and to receive another level of verification around the pain point. These questions should be concise, and the user’s answer will be open-ended (free text).
My sign-up form looked like this:
2. Prototypes
2025-12-16 18:02:14
If you’re a premium subscriber
Add the private feed to your podcast app at add.lennysreads.com
In this episode, Amir Klein, from monday.com, shares a practical, battle-tested system for building a PM “second brain”. In this episode, Amir explains exactly how to set up a ChatGPT Project with a clear personality, feed it the messy context scattered across your tools, and then put it to work—drafting sign-up forms, spinning up prototypes, and tailoring comms for every audience.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
Why context is the PM’s heaviest mental load
How to build a second brain that challenges you and mirrors your taste
The wealth of information your second brain can absorb
A simple loop to keep your second brain fresh
Three end-to-end use case examples
References
2025-12-16 00:02:14
Here’s a weekly recap of new episodes across Lenny’s Podcast Network:
Every Monday, host Claire Vo shares a 30- to 45-minute episode with a new guest demoing a practical, impactful way they’ve learned to use AI in their work or life. No pontificating—just specific and actionable advice.
Brought to you by:
Cortney Hickey, executive assistant to the CEO of Zapier, shows what happens when you stop using AI as a sidekick and start using it as infrastructure. Instead of manually prepping meetings, chasing context, or giving ad hoc feedback, Cortney built AI agents that do the repetitive work automatically, freeing her up to operate at a much higher level. The big idea: AI doesn’t replace EAs but turns them into force multipliers who scale executive thinking, culture, and strategy across the company.
Biggest takeaways:
If you’re doing a repeated task every week, spend that time automating it instead. Rather than manually prepping for meetings each Friday, invest that time in building an agent that can handle the process going forward. The initial investment pays dividends every week thereafter.
Create an AI version of your executive to help teams stress-test their communications. Cortney built a GPT that thinks like her CEO, allowing anyone to get feedback on strategic documents before formal review meetings. This improves document quality, saves executives time, and increases team confidence.
Start with “progress over perfection” when building AI workflows. Cortney emphasizes starting with basic functionality and iteratively improving: “I started this one with just a quick digest, and then over time I was like, oh, here’s something else that might be helpful.” This approach prevents perfectionism from blocking automation progress.
Make company strategy accessible and interactive with AI knowledge bases. Cortney built a strategy companion in NotebookLM that ingests all strategy documents and allows employees to query it conversationally, take quizzes, and even listen to AI-generated podcasts about the strategy—making static documents dynamic and engaging.
▶️ Listen now on YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts
More shows coming soon. . . 👀
If you’re enjoying these episodes, reply and let me know what you’d love to learn more about: AI workflows, hiring, growth, product strategy—anything.
Catch you next week,
Lenny
P.S. Want every new episode delivered the moment it drops? Hit “Follow” on your favorite podcast app.
2025-12-15 21:03:34
Cortney Hickey is the executive assistant to the CEO at Zapier, where she’s leveraging AI to transform traditional EA responsibilities into scalable, organization-wide systems. In this episode, she demonstrates how she’s built AI workflows that automate meeting preparation, reinforce company culture through automated feedback, and democratize strategic knowledge across the organization. Her approach shows how EAs can use AI not to replace their roles but to elevate them—working on higher-impact initiatives while creating systems that benefit the entire company.
Listen or watch on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts
How to build an automated meeting prep system that researches participants, checks CRM data, and delivers actionable insights before important meetings
A framework for creating AI-powered culture reinforcement through automated meeting feedback aligned with company values and operating principles
How to develop an AI-powered document review system that helps teams align with executive expectations before formal reviews
A strategy for creating a centralized knowledge base that makes company strategy accessible and interactive for all employees
Why “progress over perfection” is the key mindset for building effective AI workflows that evolve over time
How EAs can use AI automation to work themselves out of repetitive tasks and into higher-impact strategic roles
WorkOS—Make your app enterprise-ready today
Brex—The intelligent finance platform built for founders
(00:00) Introduction to Cortney
(02:48) Overview of meeting prep automation with Zapier Agents
(04:43) How the meeting prep agent works
(10:21) An example of the meeting prep agent in practice
(12:16) Creating a culture reinforcement system through meeting feedback
(15:45) EAs’ unique position to leverage these tools
(18:12) Building an automated meeting coach
(24:03) Developing an executive document review system
(33:15) Creating a centralized strategy companion in NotebookLM
(36:18) How AI is transforming the EA role, not replacing it
(40:00) Lightning round and final thoughts
• Zapier: https://zapier.com/
• Zapier Agents: https://zapier.com/agents
• Todoist: https://todoist.com/
• Slack: https://slack.com/
• HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/
• ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/
• Google NotebookLM: https://notebooklm.google/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cortneyhickey/
ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/
Website: https://clairevo.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
2025-12-14 21:31:26
Alexander Embiricos leads product on Codex, OpenAI’s powerful coding agent, which has grown 20x since August and now serves trillions of tokens weekly. Before joining OpenAI, Alexander spent five years building a pair programming product for engineers. He now works at the frontier of AI-led software development, building what he describes as a software engineering teammate—an AI agent designed to participate across the entire development lifecycle.
Listen on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts
Why Codex has grown 20x since launch and what product decisions unlocked this growth
How OpenAI built the Sora Android app in just 18 days using Codex
Why the real bottleneck to AGI-level productivity isn’t model capability—it’s human typing speed
The vision of AI as a proactive teammate, not just a tool you prompt
The bottleneck shifting from building to reviewing AI-generated work
Why coding will be a core competency for every AI agent—because writing code is how agents use computers best
WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs
Fin—The #1 AI agent for customer service
Jira Product Discovery—Confidence to build the right thing
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/embirico
• OpenAI: https://openai.com
• Codex: https://openai.com/codex
• Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-chatgpt-nick-turley
• Dropbox: http://dropbox.com
• Datadog: https://www.datadoghq.com
• Andrej Karpathy on X: https://x.com/karpathy
• The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-rise-of-cursor-michael-truell
• Atlas: https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-atlas
• How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-block-is-becoming-the-most-ai-native
• Goose: https://block.xyz/inside/block-open-source-introduces-codename-goose
• Lessons on building product sense, navigating AI, optimizing the first mile, and making it through the messy middle | Scott Belsky (Adobe, Behance): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/lessons-on-building-product-sense
• Sora Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.openai.sora&hl=en_US&pli=1
• The OpenAI Podcast—ChatGPT Atlas and the next era of web browsing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdbgNC80PMw&list=PLOXw6I10VTv9GAOCZjUAAkSVyW2cDXs4u&index=2
• How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-measure-ai-developer-productivity
• Compiling: https://3d.xkcd.com/303
• Jujutsu Kaisen on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81278456
• Tesla: https://www.tesla.com
• Radical Candor: From theory to practice with author Kim Scott: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/radical-candor-from-theory-to-practice
• Andreas Embirikos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Embirikos
• George Embiricos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Embiricos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Embiricos
• Culture series: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WLZZ9WV
• The Lord of the Rings: https://www.amazon.com/Lord-Rings-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0544003411
• A Fire Upon the Deep (Zones of Thought series Book 1): https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Upon-Deep-Zones-Thought/dp/1250237750
• Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity: https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Candor-Kick-Ass-Without-Humanity/dp/1250103509
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.