Anton OikaCo-Founder & CEO

Vibe works for a demo. It captures that feeling of building something quickly and intuitively without writing code. But we are way past that stage. People are running their businesses on our platform. A word like vibe signals something casual, something experimental. That is not what this is anymore. Sabrin, one of our founders, is building a startup called Plink that helps people verify trust in the context of dating. She has reached tens of thousands of dollars in revenue. That is not vibes. That is a real business built on a serious platform.

Most people on our platform have more than 11 years of professional experience. They have spent their careers deeply close to a specific problem. They were frustrated that they could not solve it because they lacked the technical skills to build software. Now the barrier is gone and the person most qualified to solve that problem, the one who understands it better than anyone else, can actually go build the solution. That is one of the biggest unlocks of this technology. There are also a lot of younger founders who bring the advantage of seeing things for the first time with completely fresh eyes. We see serious builders across every age group, every continent, and every country.

You do not need to invent something that has never existed. You can take a fresh angle on something that already exists and go find the people who have not yet adopted a solution. The key is to solve something connected to the real world, not just something that lives on the internet. The most compelling businesses are usually a combination of a service and a product working together. That combination adds layers of value that a purely digital product cannot replicate. You can also personalize something that exists elsewhere and make it so exciting for a specific group of people that they adopt it when they would not have before.

Damian built a website called Surrealism World. He does not just generate an image of your dog. He prints it and sends it home to you as a physical portrait. Entrepreneurship is almost always about combining new capabilities into a service or solution that did not exist before in that specific form. The image generation part you could do with a prompt anywhere. But combining the website, the payment system, the physical product, and the marketing into one seamless customer experience is what makes people care enough to pay. That is the insight most people miss. They see the component and think it is trivially replicable. The business is in the combination.

Get in front of ten customers or potential customers and do not pitch. Ask questions. Find out what pain they are experiencing, what they are excited about, what problems they would pay to have solved. Then try to make one of those ten people actually buy. If someone is willing to pay, that is real signal. Free is not signal. You need the friction of payment to know they actually care. Then hope that those first buyers spread the word. Make them feel special. The goal is to build a small group of people who love the product enough to tell other people about it, and then figure out how to scale that distribution from there.

Everything that involves structured data belongs in an app. If you need a visual interface to oversee what is in the data, to see dashboards, manage records, and track what is happening, then you want a graphical user interface, which is what Lovable builds. We recently added agent integrations so every app you build on Lovable can connect directly to any agent harness. So the boundary between app and agent is actually merging. You can use Lovable as the data layer that your agent talks to. The way I think about it is: the app holds and organizes the data, the agent decides what to do with it.

It usually comes down to one thing. How hard are you willing to work to make it work and are you able to make customers care? Both outcomes are valid. Building a personal tool that makes your own life easier has genuine value. But building a business requires you to get out and talk to people, find out what they care about, and bring them into something that is exciting enough that they want to be part of it. The founders who turn Lovable projects into serious companies are the ones who treat customer conversations as non-optional, not as something they do after the product is ready.

I still struggle with this myself. The skill is learning to diagnose the bottleneck that is preventing the idea from working. Is it that you are not talking to enough people? Is it a marketing problem? Is it bugs and product issues that prevent retention? Or is it a fundamental mismatch between what you built and what the market actually needs? When you get good at spotting that specific bottleneck, you get much better at answering the real question: is this idea not working yet, or is this idea just not working? Those have completely different implications for what to do next.

Creativity is becoming the most important differentiator. It used to be that execution was the hard part and ideas were easy. Now execution is becoming easy and the quality of the original idea, the creativity behind it, is what determines the outcome. The good news is that creativity is not a fixed trait. It is a skill you develop through iteration. The feedback loop of building, testing, seeing what works and what does not, and then refining your thinking based on that — that is what refines creative ability. Everyone has creativity in them. The best way to develop it is to put your ideas to the test over and over again.

The line exists and it is moving. If you are building something that needs to handle hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users at a global scale, that is outside the current boundary. If you are building something like Facebook at its current scale, you need infrastructure beyond what Lovable provides today. But for the vast majority of software that most people actually interact with day to day, it can be built on Lovable. The thing I hear from customers is that they end up with a better, more thoughtful product than if they had worked through slow handoff cycles with a development team, because they are the person closest to the user and the closest to the problem.

I think we are moving toward a world where making money and optimizing for your career becomes less central to how most people define meaning. The focus will shift toward being a good person in your community and to the people around you. But building a business will still be one of the key ways of developing yourself, learning skills, and creating something genuinely valuable for others. What we are working toward at Lovable is making the overhead of running a business so low that there can be vastly more companies in the world, not fewer. The goal is abundance of creation, not scarcity.

Start with a problem from your own life or from someone you are close to. Find an idea for how to solve it. Go find a small number of people who are willing to pay for your solution and when they actually pay, that is your first real signal. Then make sure they keep coming back, that it was not just initial excitement. When you have gone through those steps, you have an early form of product market fit. Then the question becomes: who are more customers like these customers, where do they go to find new products, and what is unique about your story that will make them care? Answer those questions and you have the beginning of a real business.

We have added a lot of primitives that make Lovable a real platform for running a company, not just creating one. You can store data inside your apps, handle incoming and outgoing emails, integrate payments, connect to your existing tools, and now with agent integrations you can plug any app directly into any agent harness. You can set up Slack notifications when something important happens inside your system. You can do end-to-end automated testing and deep security scans before publishing anything to the internet. And we have built-in SEO and AEO optimization so that apps get found by both search engines and AI agents. The idea is that you can run the entire operational backend of a business from inside Lovable.

You want to find ten people who are genuinely big fans of what you are building. And the way you know they are real fans is that you do not make it too cheap and you definitely do not make it free. Free users do not tell you anything useful. If someone is willing to pay their hard-earned money for what you built, that is real information. That payment creates friction, and friction filters out the people who are just curious from the people who actually need your solution. Then you want those paying customers to feel special enough that they spread the word. Word of mouth from people who genuinely paid is the most credible and most scalable early growth channel you have.

A big part of it is the built-in SEO and AEO optimization. When you publish an app on Lovable, we give you the tools to make it discoverable for both traditional search and for AI agents crawling the web. We run a full scan and tell you exactly what to improve for discoverability. And because there are now so many apps being built and published on the platform, the aggregate traffic is enormous. More than a third of the people building businesses on Lovable are already making money. That means these are not demo projects. They are real products that real people visit repeatedly. That is what drives a billion visits a month.

I think the best ideas usually start from something personal, a frustration you have or something the people close to you experience. The challenge when ideas come easily is knowing which one to pursue seriously. The framework I use is to ask two questions about each idea. First, how big could this actually become? And second, why is it not working the way I want it to yet? If the answer to the second question is something fixable, like you need to talk to more people, improve your marketing, or fix specific product bugs, then keep going. If the answer is that the fundamental problem you thought existed does not actually exist for enough people, that is the signal to move on to the next idea. Learning to tell those two apart quickly is one of the most important skills a founder can develop.