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For more than 25 years, I’ve helped teams build marketing that cuts through noise and scales revenue.

Geoff’s Growth Guide is where I share the strategy, go-to-market frameworks, and execution systems that work in practice. Not theory. Not hype. Just the mechanics behind durable growth.

So for this edition, we went digging through her writing, interviews and talks to pull together some of the Elena-isms we think growth leaders should borrow.

Don’t copy blindly. (Elena would probably hate that.) But we encourage you to steal the thinking and apply it to your own situation where it makes sense. 

If you enjoy this post, I’d love to hear what you think. Just hit “reply” or click here. I read every response.

Elena Verna joined Lovable in May 2025 to lead growth across both product and marketing. At the time, the company had just crossed $50 million in ARR, just six months after launch. Elena described her job as turning that explosive early traction into something “predictable, sustainable, and defensible,” by improving acquisition, activation, retention and monetisation while building scalable growth loops.

What happened next was fairly ridiculous.

By November 2025, Lovable had reached $200 million ARR. By June 2026, the company said it had passed $500 million in annualised revenue. And in August, Lovable raised another $400 million with a $13.3 billion valuation, reporting more than 60 million projects created and more than 900 million monthly visits to apps built on the platform.

To be clear, Elena did not walk into Stockholm, sprinkle Growth Dust™ on the office and single-handedly produce those numbers. Lovable was already growing extraordinarily quickly when she arrived.
And that is actually part of what makes her tenure there so interesting.

She joined the company while the rocket was already taking off, rather than being brought in to rescue stalled growth. That was deliberate and the distinction matters, as many growth marketing leaders are called in after half the horses have already fled the barn.

In her announcement, Elena argued that the right time to invest in growth is not necessarily when growth slows, but while momentum already exists and can be turned into a repeatable system. (Say it louder for the folks in the back, Elena!) 

And then she did something even more useful for the rest of us: She started explaining the system and growing it in public. That takes exceptional confidence. It’s a thing of beauty, really.

Through Elena’s Growth Scoop, LinkedIn, podcasts and talks, she has documented what Lovable is trying, what is changing, what is working, and, occasionally, what she thinks the rest of us need to stop doing. And that public record has essentially turned Lovable into a live case study in growth.

Elena was already well known for product-led growth, monetisation and B2B growth systems. She has more than 15 years of experience across companies including SurveyMonkey, Miro, Amplitude and Dropbox, as well as advising companies including Superhuman, MongoDB, Sanity and VEED.

But Lovable appears to have changed some of her thinking too.

Six months into the job, Elena estimated that only around 30–40% of her previous experience transferred. Instead of spending most of her time optimising funnels and running experiments, she found herself inventing new loops, creating new product surfaces, testing new forms of distribution and working on growth problems that increasingly looked like product problems.
That gives us the first big theme running through her work.

One of the easiest mistakes to make with Elena’s advice is to pull out an individual tactic and treat it as The Elena Verna Trick: Build in public! Start a community! Give your product away!

Nope. That’s not the play. 

Her own explanation of Lovable’s growth is explicitly systemic. She describes six interconnected plays and each one feeds the next.  

• Empathy and emotion
• Shipping velocity
• Building in public
• Community
• Social distribution
• Generous product giveaways. 

Our Lovable deep dive reached the same conclusion: the six plays work as a flywheel rather than a menu you can cherry-pick.

That same systems thinking appears throughout Elena’s work long before Lovable:

• Activation affects monetisation and retention.
• Pricing affects conversion, churn and expansion.
• Product usage creates acquisition.
• Community creates distribution.
• Distribution creates more usage.
• Pull one lever and something else moves. 

This leads neatly to another recurring Elena theme.

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Elena has spent much of her career developing frameworks and she is now unusually vocal about throwing them away when the environment changes.

At Lovable, she shifted toward two- to three-week directional bets instead of quarterly planning, prioritising learning speed over certainty and shipping over polishing. Her underlying instruction is fairly brutal: assume your current mental model will expire.

Her 2026 experimentation work pushes the same idea further. Traditional growth experimentation often became a machine for minor tweaks and quick wins. In an AI environment where both product capabilities and customer expectations are moving faster, she argues for bigger bets and more foundational experimentation instead of endlessly optimising superficial surfaces.

So with that in mind, we have done something Elena would probably approve of: We borrowed the useful bits.

Elena defines activation as the journey from signup to an established habit around the product’s core value, moving through setup → aha → habit. Her argument is that companies frequently mistake signup, onboarding completion or basic engagement for genuine activation.

She has gone further and said activation problems are behind a huge share of downstream monetisation and retention problems. Her recommended sequencing for growth teams starts with activation, then monetisation, acquisition and eventually retention.

Borrow this tactic: Before spending more money filling the top of the funnel, map the path between signup and habitual value. Find where users fail to make that transition.

More traffic into a leaky bucket remains a leaky bucket. It is simply a busier one.

Elena is particularly unsentimental about companies hiring growth because the business has stopped growing.

You cannot outsource finding PMF, and you cannot expect a Growth hire to compensate for a product customers do not sufficiently want. Her advice is to establish initial traction first and then bring Growth in to accelerate something that already works.

Lovable itself is the inverse example: Elena joined while growth was already exploding because the company wanted to make that growth more sustainable and defensible.

Borrow this tactic: Before hiring someone to “fix growth,” identify whether the underlying problem is actually distribution, activation or monetisation.

If the real answer is people don't want this enough, that is not a growth job description.

SEO. SEM. Meta. TikTok. LinkedIn.
Useful? Absolutely.
Yours? Nope.

Elena describes much of conventional acquisition as renting someone else’s audience. Algorithms change, competition increases and the platform controls the pipe. Her preference is to build earned and owned growth through mechanisms such as word of mouth, virality, user-generated content and product-led acquisition.

At Lovable that has become even more explicit. Elena argues that organic distribution has shifted toward social: what leaders say, what employees publish, what creators discuss and what customers voluntarily share.

Borrow this tactic: Look at your acquisition mix and ask a slightly uncomfortable question:

If Google, LinkedIn or Meta stopped sending us traffic tomorrow, what growth engine would still belong to us?

Build that one.

Elena is not anti-paid.

She is anti-throw-money-at-it-and-pray.

Her paid marketing decision tree starts with PMF, strong landing pages, existing lower-cost traffic, owned channels, reliable data infrastructure and enough budget to learn properly. Only then does paid become the accelerator it is supposed to be.

And at Lovable, where the company is helping create a new category, she has said traditional performance marketing is not a meaningful growth lever because there is not enough existing demand to capture. The challenge is creating demand in the first place.

Borrow this tactic: Before increasing paid spend, identify what exactly you are accelerating.

If you cannot answer that without saying “traffic,” keep your credit card in your pocket.

This one sounds almost sacrilegious coming from somebody who literally taught experimentation.

But Elena's point is not that testing is bad.

Testing without strategic value is bad.

She recommends formal A/B testing when precision matters, you can get an answer in a reasonable timeframe or the risk of simply shipping is significant. Otherwise, ship, measure the before-and-after impact and keep moving.

Her newer AI-era thinking pushes even further away from micro-optimisation and toward larger, more foundational bets.

Borrow this tactic: Add a question before every proposed experiment:

What decision will this result actually change?

If nobody knows, congratulations. You may have just cancelled three weeks of work.

One of Elena's favourite growth levers is also one many companies are terrified to touch.

Pricing.

Her argument is that your first price is almost certainly wrong, because pricing isn't something you divine in a workshop and then laminate forever. It needs to be tested and iterated based on actual customer behaviour across conversion, churn, retention, expansion and cost.

In 2026 she made the framing even clearer: pricing and packaging should be treated like product development, not an occasional corporate policy decision.

Borrow this tactic: Put pricing into the growth roadmap.

Give it an owner, metrics, hypotheses and an iteration cycle.

Then stop acting like changing the pricing page requires a papal conclave.

Conveniently for us, Elena published a fresh version of this argument today.

Lovable deliberately gives significant amounts of product away even though every use of an AI product creates real cost. Elena's reasoning is simple: customers need to experience the thing that makes the product remarkable before they can properly value it. Hiding that experience behind the paywall protects margin while potentially destroying acquisition.

That is consistent with the broader Lovable strategy she has described: give users enough product to reach the “blow my socks off” moment, then allow usage, advocacy and word of mouth to compound.

Borrow this tactic: Identify the moment in your product that makes somebody say:

Oh. NOW I get it.

Seriously consider why you’re  making people pay before they can experience whatever it is you’re selling.

This may be the most Elena Elena-ism of the lot. Growth loops decay. Channels get crowded. Products mature. Markets move. Competitors copy you. And when it comes to AI, all of that happens much faster.

At Lovable, Elena says the response has been to bias toward invention over optimisation, continually search for new distribution windows and treat existing mental models as temporary rather than permanent truths.

Her earlier growth-framework work makes the same point through S-curves: sustainable growth requires continually adding new loops, channels and products as existing engines lose momentum.

Borrow this tactic: Take your strongest growth channel and write down:

1.  Why does it work?
2. What could make it stop working?
3. What are you building now that could replace it?

Do that before the graph bends downward.

If there’s one thread running through all eight of these tactics, it’s this:
Don’t get too attached to the thing that worked last time.

That might be the hardest part of growth because once something works, we build processes around it. We hire for it. We create dashboards for it. We put it in the strategy deck and called it “our playbook.”

And then the market moves. The channel gets crowded. Customer behaviour changes. The product evolves. A new technology turns yesterday’s advantage into table stakes.

Elena’s work is interesting because she has built a career on growth frameworks while remaining unusually willing to throw those frameworks out when the evidence changes.

At Lovable, that has meant less fixation on tiny optimisations and more emphasis on shipping, invention, product-led distribution, community, emotion and creating entirely new loops.

But the takeaway isn’t that everyone should copy Lovable. In fact, that would miss the point.

Steal the principles. Steal the questions. Steal the willingness to unlearn.

Fix activation before buying more traffic. Make sure there’s something worth accelerating before you turn on paid. Let people experience the value before you optimise the monetisation out of it. Build distribution you actually own. And never assume that today’s best-performing growth engine has earned a permanent place in tomorrow’s strategy.

The best growth leaders aren’t the ones with the thickest playbook.
They’re the ones who know when to rewrite it.

Have you found success with Elena’s strategies? A different one? I’d love to hear more about how you’re handling these challenges. Hit reply and tell me or simply click here and share your experiences. I respond directly, and the strongest topics often shape future editions.

See you in the next edition,
Geoff

The best marketing ideas come from marketers who live it. That’s what The Marketing Millennials delivers: real insights, fresh takes, and no fluff. Written by Daniel Murray, a marketer who knows what works, this newsletter cuts through the noise so you can stop guessing and start winning. Subscribe and level up your marketing game.

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