# His Ai App Builder Went From $0 to $43M in 5 Months | Lovable

Channel: Brett Malinowski
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFrHMHXrYaI
Duration: 58 min
Language: English
Words: 11210
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/HFrHMHXrYaI

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[0:00] So, how much money are you guys doing right now? We're making 43 million per year. What is lovable in the simplest form? How can people use it? And what are the coolest use cases you're seeing right now? In the simplest form, um you have an idea and then you promptly describe it in plain text like you would with a human software engineer and then um you evolve it through a few more prompts and then you click says, "Share this with my friends, launch it on the internet." Um, and you maybe you go

[0:30] famous on having built an AI product. Unlovable. Uh, or you connect Stripe and you start making money. So text, you put in text out, you get a fully functional software app. Yep. Great. Unlovable. So people can come on there, they can make an app, and then I see you guys have like leaderboards. Yeah. So do people basically like does that rank on like how is that ranking works? You can see

[0:53] all the different apps built on there. Correct. Not all of them. So we have 50,000 I think it's 60,000 built per day projects started built up per day now and uh some people who who really want to get users they I mean they tweet about them and post about them but they also used a certain publish feature that puts it on uh like it's our version of product hunt it's called lovable launched uh I'm hearing founders who post on product hunt they post on loable launch and they say like all my users came from lovable launched at me uh So it's that's that's the love art is that

[1:28] ranking is that you're talking about when you thought of like the idea how long how long when did you start actually building it and when was it released? Uh so we I I started tinkering uh with with tools like uh like large language models um because since I've been talking about AI for decade, right? And um now it was very clear to me that engineering is going to become 10x more productive. This was more than two years ago like bit after strategy came out and I thought like okay wow now they're gonna Microsoft they're going to take co-pilot that been out for quite a while and make it so much better when people

[2:10] seemed very unimaginative at the time. This was two years ago. So I I took a few weekends and I was like I want to prove a point here and I made a tool and uh just made this super scrappy video recording uh where I said create a snake game and it built me a snake game running on my computer so that a bit like I have to write in a terminal to start it and uh that tool was I think what captured I captured millions of people's imagination went completely viral but it also made made me think hey uh I have a more foresight and imagination here than a lot of other

[2:46] people it seems like. So maybe I should build in this space myself. Uh and then I started lovable one and a half years ago on on not saying hey this is a tool for developers but thinking already then that you know this.5% of the world's population are developers. Let's do something that is literally zero to one for everyone else who now have to go back and forth and try to find an engineer, a software developer that is not uh super annoying to work with and that's actually really good at what they do. So you're basically allowing so you're basically allowing anybody to create web apps and

[3:21] basically point. Interesting. And your second product launch like or your product 2.0 that you just came out with what is different about it compared to the first version? What is what can you do now on top of this? So we generally we try to make it more lovable squash squash a lot of the bugs and like scaling issues since we're growing so fast but the the more exciting things is that now you've seen individuals building their full apps uh by just prompting uh and the best ideas and the best uh product come from the collaboration and I so now loable is kind of taking a step where where you

[3:55] can very seamlessly collaborate with your colleagues and friends on projects there's a lot like Figma how you could like follow and have more people using at the same time basically now people can be prompting different parts of it. You also have yeah you also have a lot of emphasis on design or label in that demo is was that I think that might be do you think that's what kind of separates you from a lot of these other app builders out there or what do you think is like special about that? Um so people run these comparisons like oh AI generating a beautiful website and um my

[4:27] I haven't looked so deeply at it. My team says like a lovable always wins this these comparisons. Uh and uh yeah I think that's what makes a lot of people very very excited. It was so it was so hard to make a beautiful website just like one year ago and now it's very easy. I I'm very like is it actually I actually don't really know how all I I can't imagine how this is built on the back end but is it actually just like really good prompting that gives you an edge? Is there like a specific type of like way you guys have built Levable on

[4:58] the back end the way you coded it the way you used multiple tools together that just like has like synced well what actually makes this Yeah. So that's a good question. Yeah. what what is the secret sauce and like where's the margin problem or what is proud like what about your team you know um so so it comes down to a lot of detects and think and understanding how users use the product what they understand and what they don't understand um and I think the most important thing is that it's uh you don't even if you're not technical uh you can get all the way to release

[5:34] product uh and without getting stuck when um like you have to where the AI is sometimes falling short is debugging like something doesn't work as it should and uh making it work 99% of the time uh for to get all the way to competition that is what I think we're most proud of being interested where do you think lovable like what is the grander vision for lovable what does this turn into what do you actually like clearly think this could be in a few years so we've been saying since day one that we're building the last piece of software. And what we mean by that is that um you

[6:13] shouldn't need to create new software. You you just need to go to Lavable and then whatever problem you want solved from software, you can get it there um by just explaining what problem you have and then you you get a piece of software that solves that problem instantly. So, you're saying that people will go to Loveable to solve a specific problem or like any tool they need, they'll just prompt that tool and it'll pop up and they can use it or you saying it's more for SAS founders to create a tool

[6:37] they're looking to sell? Um I I would say in the medium and even like quite long term it's it's going to be um humans with a together with tools tools like Lovable that create um like so many different niches of software that it's like all of the problems have already been solved pretty much um or at least or they're almost already solved and you can do some final customization on top of that. In the in the longer term, I think it is more uh what you said where that you can just do one prompt and then you get that like generated for you. It's almost to me it

[7:16] feels like the drop shipping era. I don't know if this is a bad word in your world, but the drop shipping era of like ecom or Shopify like 2014 2015 where people like found a way to find any product and then just offload fulfillment. So you could build a store real quickly, run ads to it. Kind of feels like that's happening with a lot of AI SAS tools right now. You can build a lot of these tools. They're pretty new to the market. you can make them relatively quickly if you don't know how to code and if you know how to get views on social media you just have the

[7:40] distribution you got to how do you how's how are you seeing stuff like this play yeah so my so my belief is very clear that um though those who are going to be most successful now and in the coming years are those that understand marketing they understand what like a good product looks like and they can use AI those like if you have those three ingredients and you want move fast and you're ambitious then uh you there's hundreds of and thousands of opportunities to uh I mean get get rich on the internet like describing with how drop shipping works. Mhm. I'm in the content creator world, the marketing

[8:13] world, and I've used a lot of LLMs to like try to write and I feel like it really does miss the human aspect or like the like there's no like spirit to the writing and there's like a nature to it where since all LLMs are just trained on existing wording like by nature there's no unique or creative new like it can't create a net new interesting idea. It might feel net new to you if you haven't exposed to the idea, but by default, by the nature of the way it's built, it's just saying stuff that's already been said before. And so, I have a feeling that with marketing and when

[8:44] I'm writing, there's like some sort of like human, I don't know if it's spiritual or whatever it is, but some sort of like your consciousness speaking through you saying this idea should exist in the world and it's interesting and there's like a net you can actually come up with a net new framing or idea. And for me, since I've made so much content, I can really tell whenever it comes from like a spark of inspiration in the shower and write it down and put it out, it typically does much better on social media because it's fresh. And that's why I like tend to resist using LLMs to write because I think that like

[9:14] actually is a key part of it that people might not acknowledge. I'm curious how that translates into coding or if you've ever seen anything like that. I think this is a very interesting point. I I also expected large language models like already two years ago to be good at this. Um and they become so much better on so many things, but they're still pretty worthless for um creating something that like really excites you as a human. And I think it's mostly about that our like the taste of for among humans um changes quite rapidly and what's you have to kind of capture the tight guys or you

[9:55] capture some something about like what happens in the last few weeks or like be a bit um yeah basically what you're saying as well be novel in some way. uh and the large language models they were trained on like they were they haven't specialized on the on the what you and me are talking about on Twitter or together like the most recent news at all is just looking talking about uh the last few years pretty much. Is there a reason that hasn't been like opened up to live data? Is it just too much like it's too like you can't there's too much that's too much compute to just live

[10:27] feed everything? I think I'm now I'm going to supermarket AI. I I used to train these models myself, but now I'm like no, no, no, that's a waste of time. Open AI should do that. Um, but my my hyp so I I often theorize about them. I theorize like how what's happening inside of them and so on. And I I do think that there is an opportunity to like heavily skew how uh the model talks um when you train it to be more much more like people are talking in your circles and like what you are personally thinks knowledge basis. Yes. Instead of saying taking like the average of all

[11:04] humans where I I don't think you think what the average human rights is interesting at all either. is only like the top the 1% that are similar to you, think like you and you think find are interesting and if you train a model that's perfect for you, you would actually think it's pretty good. That's my guess that list. Yeah, that's a scary concept of confirmation bias though like you could just you get so enclosed in your own circle of people and ideas. Do you But don't you think it's quite It would be interesting though because you're talking to someone who knows you and likes the same thing. So it' be more

[11:30] engaging to talk to for sure. Would you would you say that they are creative though the large language models? I as of my explanation earlier I would say they lack the ability to be creative but if it's new information to you it could feel creative. So is it genuinely creative or does it feel creative? Yeah.

[11:47] What's the difference? I don't know. That's a for the philosophers. Good one. Yes. I think I think that's really cool though cuz like for me like I can like a community platform like we can take all my podcast every conversation I've had upload that into a knowledge base and let people talk to that bot so people can feel like they really get to know you. And I think that's really cool. And I think that's at least a really like a new way to engage learning. I think AI tools like where you could learn from uh we just talked about philosophers, learn from some of the best philosophers in the

[12:15] world, you know, and talk to them and have them teach you subjects from their voice. I think that's a very interesting concept. I'm sure a lot of people do that with Levelable. It's a cool tool you could build on Lovable. Yeah, that I I do think so. I mean, the talking to people who have died is going to start becoming a thing, I think. and like talking to um have have you tried the um Sesame the Shut up? What is it? It's Have you seen the movie Her? Yeah, great movie. So, so open air la or something where it was like oh this is like her

[12:42] and then you try it. It's like nah it doesn't feel like a human, right? It's a bit annoying but this one is just 10 times better. H and I have people who say like I've fallen in love with this thing. That's me. Is it sesame? You said sesame like sesame seed ses sesame. Yeah. Is it through open? Is it open? No, it's it's another team. It's like the uh it's like the some of the Oculus founding team like 10 guys who just like been making this really really good. I didn't know you were like 10 years deep in AI and so you have a lot more context than most people I've

[13:16] talked to. Y I'm going to ask you about brain chips and AI integrated into those. Do you think that that it's like really hard to like conceptualize what that would do to the way you think if you have access to that information in a computer like programming electromatic like magnetically all your chemicals in your brain but do you think that could sever like the human soul creativity consciousness whatever that is or do you think that that enhances your human experience? Um I think it's I don't know

[13:46] where that one came from. I've been talking a lot about the brain computer like merger that I'm I'm confident it's going to happen unless we kind of go back. It is happening and and it's but it's going to become um like really crazy. It's going to become really crazy. And one thing that might get severed is that as humans we stop talking to each other and this kind of like a look and signal. No, no. I mean we just talked to some madeup AI or whatever right through these brain chips more and more like that but if we both had one do you not think that we would

[14:22] just look at each other maybe I mean yeah there is something special about knowing that you have the same or we we both share imperfections because we are humans while the machines are like maximally optimized for being perfect. Mhm. So I I I do see that there's something there, but are we we going to get severed from this creativity? I mean, some of that might come from um us spending less time uh talking to these other imperfect humans. But I do think I mean this is what happens when you put in a chip like this. One thing that is interesting is that um I I think you

[14:59] know I'm I'm an atheist pretty much and I think um the definition of who I am are like this this neural network which is similar to the the AI but it runs biologically right and if you just take the thought experiment that you would take each of your brain cells and replace it by um like a small mechanical device, a tiny tiny mechanical device that does replicates the function of that brain cell and you do it one brain cell at a time. Mhm. Then you suddenly you have your brain everything was like perfectly changed. So you actually have your brain running interesting on a machine. But

[15:39] can the chip create chemical reactions? Like I would act exactly the same like I had exactly the same emotions. I would act exactly the same. So I then I would say I would actually feel them or something because action is driven by emotion. Yeah, exactly. And then um if you start having neural chips implanted in your brain, what's what's interesting I would say is that the neural like what is you becomes a f fuzzy. Is it your brain or is it also this chip that's attached to you? Now what is you? Is it like the same and then you can imagine that you you start running more and more

[16:14] of myself on the chips and le relatively speaking and less and less like my brain becomes less and less important. And then at some point I'm like, hey, this brain thing is running on uh like 10 hertz. I have like 10 things happening in my brain per second. But the computers are running at a billion hertz. Like so billion things happening per second. And I'm just going to be like, wait, like I'm I'm kind of this

[16:40] computer ship. I'm kind of this brain. Let's get rid of the brain. It's al it's too slow and requires food and water and all these these inputs. That's it. Interesting. So, but you're still going to feel emotions. You're just going to think much faster, feel more rich experience, going to have deeper, more intellectual, interesting conversations. So, what benefits does that do derive from that? Yeah. What's the meaning of life? I a good question. But I I I enjoy being able to think about difficult concepts and have intellectual conversations. I I think that's one of the uh benefits of like having a brain chip that you could do more of that and

[17:20] feel smarter. Do you think if you've consumed the entire internet and have that knowledge in your brain that that gets you closer to the truth or further? Depends on how you use it like if you're really good at processing information then it gets you closer to truth. Um generally I think so. Yes. You still have to figure things out. Is that the question? That's what I don't understand. If I'm not on any side here, but I'm actually curious like if you have access to the internet immediately in your brain all the time, do you still have to figure things out? Um I just have to take a realistic um parallel to

[17:55] that. I I think when I use chatbt or similar tools and I ask a question I of I have kind of started to sometimes say don't you search because I know when it has access to internet it's just going to reate like some someone that wrote something um that that person probably wasn't that smart and I think the AI actually gives a better answer without the internet because it pulls together everything it's like into one in a in a pretty nice way and I I think us humans also naturally try to do that. Sometimes as good as the AI, sometimes better, sometimes worse. Um, but I yeah I think you have to like your

[18:38] question was are we is it more difficult to to um figure things out if you have access to everything? Um, not necessarily. I mean it depends. And one of the definitions about AGI um that I think is pretty good is if it can advance uh science outside of our current understanding of science for sure which is actually very difficult and uh per definition it's not available in the current like on the internet even so it's almost like that's so so if you can advance science uh if an AI can or a human can advance science That's a very good measure of like intelligence. It's definitely a net positive for the world

[19:23] to some extent at that level. It's almost like the bottleneck to AI is how fast you can type and then how fast you can read. And so with the brain chip just faster prompting and then faster deciphering of the input back and then just so it actually should help you like just zoom through a research session that could take two hours could happen in 10 seconds and then you index that in your brain and now you know that so you

[19:45] don't have to seek those prompts again. No, I think that's where where we're heading. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like the learning process is like instant, but you have to have that intention and focus on that thing and go through that motion, but maybe it takes 10 seconds instead of an hour. Yeah. And I mean in the future, I if you're running your brain on this billions of uh things happening per second, then it's not going to take 10 seconds. It's like milliseconds. Yeah. Interesting. So are you team specist or team Oh, that's a good question. Team which side are we on here? We going Larry Page or Elon? How

[20:18] how deep do you want me to go here? I love this. I was not expecting this conversation, but I've never talked to someone who's thought about this. I'm very interested. As deep as you can go. Yes. Okay. So, I'll go deep. Um, so on one hand, you can see um the universe as this like beautiful evolving process where in out in if you're out in nature, there is um competition, people thriving or animals thriving, animals fighting each other, killing each other and like that's how it's supposed to be. Mhm. Um, and I think if we have if you let AI loose and kind of and just like let it

[20:55] be and do whatever it wants, that's going to happen. And there's going to be these different types of AI that want to claim resources for they want to populate the create as many solar panels as possible, as many CPUs as possible. um and then fight the other AIS and us humans are going to get sidelined because we don't act on unless you get a chip or do you think it's robot like a robotic engineering is more effective they can jump? Yeah, it's more research effective. So you would assume it's robotic humanoid. Yeah, I do. I mean, humans are amazing in that you can you you can take this like tiny bit of DNA

[21:28] that's even invisible and just put it into a tiny cell that's also invisible and then boom, like you get after a few years you have a human that's like amazing and it's self-repairing and everything which is amazing but it's not um the the kind of the processing speed of a human brain is not so fast and it's also not so resource effective as you like theor theoretically possible. So um like if you go if you just let the AI be then you're going to get this some people would say maybe beautiful natural evolution of of things um you might get um more like dystopic future where

[22:04] everything becomes super super uniform and there is just like this one AI that creates identical copies of itself and the universe looks kind of dead. Do you see what I'm saying? It's great. Yeah. And and that's bad I would say. So uh while biological life doesn't have the same at we know at least it doesn't have those tendencies you have this flourishing Fibonacci Yeah exactly more more like more of a beautiful universe um so since since we don't know which would happen I would say like okay let's hold off with AI let's let's not let AI do whatever it want let's stay stay in tight control and let our human values

[22:42] which are which are our so this is the second point like maybe we don't even want it to be so natural maybe we do want um to enforce some kind of unnatural values which are peace which is like kind of un it goes against survival of the fittest. Peace goes against the survival of the fittest and if we want more peace I think uh we shouldn't let AI free because it's going

[23:06] to out compete us in all possible ways. We we if we want more peace we as humanity should say like okay guys let's sit down together figure out what are the values we want. Okay, we want a bit of peace. We want we want beauty. We want truth and we want all of these things. H AI is going to help us get there because it's going to be like help us think better and be smarter. Um but we have to stay in control, right? And um like what my conclusion is that either you think you like you want to do this ladder thing or you want

[23:41] um as much like freedom as possible. But um even if you want more freedom, it could go really really bad. So we should be we should slow down AI. We should actually actually slow down progress. And we I Yes. I am a specist in that. Yes. Nice. What what do you think the incentive of an AI? Let's just say it's a humanoid AI AGI. What would be the incentive like what would they be? Like we always like just have this innate nature to like more more improvement improve improve next problem next

[24:10] problem next problem. the incentive for so so uh I think it's very easy to think that as humans um we want these things you know and we are a bit different where humans are very very different from each other which kind of not really true I think we're quite similar u and then but AI is going to be much like machines they're going to be like super predictable they only want one thing I think that's false I think that there's going to be it's going to be possible to create billions of different AIs with different goals uh and they're going to be much much much more more more different from each other

[24:44] than us humans are from each other. M so back there's like and they're fighting for resources that that's going to be probably uh the only thing that everyone kind of cares about surv like because if you don't care about survival you're going to die very fast and you're not going you're not going to exist right so everyone's going to care about survival but then it could be like all types of different so death to an AI would mean lack of power source correct essentially and the power source in this case I would assume is the sun at scale mostly Yeah, probably. And so is it like

[25:18] literally like the most surface area of Earth that the AIS would be fighting over or I think they're going to very very quickly run out of Earth and just be like, "Hey, no, no, no. We have to build solar panels around the entire sun." And then be like, "No, wait. We built solar panels around the entire sun. Let's take the next star." And so

[25:33] on and so forth. That's going to happen. That is fascinating. I've never thought this deeply about it, so thank you for taking me here. But then they just tell they just eat the entire universe and interesting. That's just consume star power. Yes, that is the mission. That's the mission. Very interesting. It it is and hopefully us humans are going to be

[25:53] good going to be part of that. What? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, what is the like what is the reason because I can see in the short term yeah like we advance science really quickly in 3 to 5 years. But that's a very slippery slope and there's no reason if we don't serve the purpose of gathering more energy or don't help them efficiently. They they wouldn't need us. So, is that what you're saying? the blend of humans and

[26:14] AI is probably the ideal state. Yeah. Um I mean it could be that there are many different outcomes here I think and generally like super hard to predict but um there there's most likely going to be a bit of like many things. Some humans might do this um merger with technology and then realize that hey this biological part of me is slowing me down and they go full machine kind of but they pres preserve the human values they preserve what we care about in relating to each other and so on and so forth. Um and that one seems like the most likely to happen at the larger scale since

[27:04] that's uh um like us humans are many of us humans we we want like more we want to think faster we want to live longer and I think that's the most likely one to happen at the large scale at least it's like what matters like that's like the question so I'm going to avoid using the words good or bad in this conversation because I don't I think that exists in this thought proc like thought experiment. But what matters that's a very like that's like the word you have to kind of my mind is trying to figure out. It's like you we're like we're social creatures so we bond when

[27:36] we're with each other. We feel good when we're around each other. Solitary confinement is the worst thing you can do to us. So it's a very I don't even have a question now. I'm just like you got me so deep. What's what's the there there's like a few core drivers among humans and I I think there's going to be more drivers in AI. I think Elon Musk says like oh I'm just going to create the AI that is the most truth seeking. I think that's one pretty interesting value. But you get the more interesting universe if you have not just have one like an AI that cares

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[28:46] your store, in their feed, and everywhere in between. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout Mr. Beast uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/wgmi, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com/wgmi to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com/wgmi. Thank you for sponsoring today's episode. And do you think that's defined in like the in like the initiation like the creation moment like when he says truth seeking like how how is he defining that? Is it just like because at some point it probably comes self-aware of its own training now but yeah for sure it's going to be very self-aware of its own training but um I

[29:23] think it's uh like how you define it is a bit of a reinforce a feedback loop. A feedback loop and us humans have those feedback loops too. I think we're like, "Ooh, this tastes good." And like, and then that starts shaping our behavior and we care start thinking more about it and then we care more about it and then we like buy all this expensive food and like we we obsess even more about it and then like we one like one of huge part of our life is figuring out what's the best restaurant in the world and so on and again that's comes from a feedback loop

[29:55] that starts in the beginning. is just like, "Oh, that tastes good." And then you goes all the way out there. And I think it's very similar with AI that you're going to define a simple feedback loop and then that has this like kind of a bit unpredictable but very powerful exponential effect down the line. Stat is there. There's like status games now for the AI. Yeah, that's exactly also very strong good feedback loop example which is really crazy. Like most of our culture I think is just shaped by humans wanting status and it's like oh oh what's status right now like okay I'm going to do this thing like they give me

[30:28] give me status and then everyone starts looking up to that thing and so on and so forth. Interesting. Are you so v1 of the brain chip comes out? Yeah. Are you getting it? Probably not v1 right? No because the the one side of the coin is it's the best advantage you could possibly have earliest. That's good. Yeah. Maybe. And then I could make the best lovable apps. I can make a thousand a day. I could start drop shipping my lovable apps and just printing money compared to my competitors. Or do you think I mean I'd rather first see some humans like have you heard about this um

[31:02] brain uh wait what it's called? Let me think. Let me think. Um have you heard about this thing called wireheading? Mm-m. So, um, there there for people who are like severely depressed, at least in the past, you could find a place like a pleasure center in their brain and implant an electrode and then you could push a button. They could you could push a button and then dopamine gives a lot of dopamine and you're like, "Ah, no, I'm not depressed." And then what what what uh happens if you give those people access to that button? Um, they start

[31:37] being like, "Oh, yeah, that was nice. Okay, now I'm not depressed." And then days pass and so on and they're like, "Oh, let's let's use it more." And quite inevitably, I think they're uh absolutely obsessed about this button. It's like life or death. Like I have to they have they push it way too much. And if someone removes access from this button, they're going to like fight you to the to the death. Um and is this real? Yeah, this is this is viring. This is this is actually real. And if you get this first version one of a brain ship,

[32:07] right? I don't know what happens, right? Slippery slope. Yeah, it could be a slippery slope. It's like drugs without the physical. It could be worse, right? Because physical drugs is somehow easier to restrict whereas this is like, oh, now I have this ship in my brain brain and it's almost like you could lose control of hitting it because the pain is so deep at some point and no one can stop you. Literally, no one can stop you. That's a thing. Yeah. Hm. Actually,

[32:32] I'm I'm married since almost a year now. And my wife was like a bit I think she wasn't super happy about um that I'm not as clear as her on like I say that I care a lot about making the world a better place. I have something called the founders pledge to give away equity but she she doesn't really understand

[32:54] like what are exactly my motives. Mhm. Um and that was also I'm quite happy she asked that because I I then I tried harder and harder to um make it very crisp and where I started is that I said like okay no but what I care about is uh something I'm not entirely sure about yet. But it's something like I want us humans to do um what we think would be the right thing to do if if we were much smarter and if we had much more empathy and if like we really understood all other humans who were super super super smart like what would we do then and I don't

[33:35] know what that is but that I want us to get there and understand that and then do that and naturally my wife wasn't very happy about explanation like that. I'm curious why she thought she thought it was too abstract too abstract and and then I came to like bit different take on it but go ahead. So just so I make sure I understand correctly. You're saying that if we advance ourselves to the point where we have everyone has high empathy so we all understand each other good things happen. Um I think so. I think so. But but but so there's two ways to see this. It's like first of all you can

[34:11] try to just like be make everyone much smarter and have much more empathy and live like think about what we should do for thousand years. Um but you can also be like just doing the thought experiment uh and try to somehow figure out what we would conclude without being that smart. Like even if not everyone's that smart, we can kind of somehow have ask an AI like what what what would we do if we kind of how it goes now with business. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully. And then uh we would like write that down and say like okay this godlike intelligence has has told us that this

[34:47] is what what we would do if we were smarter like let's so let's do that like so you don't have to uh actually make humans smarter to to have this as a useful moral compass and I think it is a good moral compass. Interesting. Go you have something else to say? Yeah. But no, so what something I thought about for a while was then uh people

[35:11] think this is too abstract. For example, my wife and I mean she she fights a lot of moral causes in the world. Uh so I tried to make say something that's a bit more concrete like what what am I actually going to u want to achieve and push for. Um, and I think I think a big cause of problems is that people in power, they don't really care so much about like negative negative effects they have on other other people and they're continuously just driven by more power. Um, and they aren't that smart. Often they're more like obsessed with power. And uh, this has all of all tons of negative

[35:54] consequences. Like we can't coordinate. We can't say like, "Oh, let's should we maybe stop having nuclear weapons?" Like, uh, because people really want power and they don't want to get rid of the nuclear weapons. Like, should we really should we maybe slow down with AI? Like, no, we have to win. We have to win. Mhm. Um, and I think a pretty like obvious obviously good thing is if we have if we fight for having uh more people who are like true idealists uh that are very open-minded. They're very very very open-minded to listen to other perspectives because that's a quite a rare trait actually to be very very

[36:30] openminded. So idealist and very open-minded uh and intelligent. Mhm. Um in power in power like have more of those people in power and I don't think it's that like if we start as a humanity start talking about like okay that's actually what we want like I don't want the charismatic leader I want someone who is open-minded very smart and uh um I I think most people have good intentions like no one has really bad intentions they just like have different objectives if you if we realize that that's what we want um and have those people to put those ical power then many many many problems downstream will just

[37:09] be uh much better. Interesting. So that's so you want an idealist. Yes. Idealist. Explain what do you mean by an idealist? Uh so yes good question. What is an idealist? I think there people some people are like very pragmatic uh and some some people are uh very idealists. And the thing is once you're in power, there's all of these slippery slopes uh where like to get something done that's good, you need to talk to this other person uh and make them kind of go get on your side and it's like this game of politics and it absolutely craps the most people almost everyone I think almost everyone it absolutely

[37:46] craps them because they're playing this weird game uh and then they're just like consumed by it and it's very very hard to win to be stay power if you're not playing these games. Uh but if you're an idealist, then you're almost almost always thinking like, "No, no, no. I'm going to do what I think is right." And if uh I shouldn't make an alliance with this person if I don't think they're um like they have high integrity, for example. So you you're like very principles driven. That is so interesting you say this, Ste. I call

[38:18] Stephen an idealist all the time. Sometimes good, sometimes negative. because it's like on a marketing front it might be difficult to get a message across and or we have like an idea for a product and I think it's a good idea but he is so principled on one thing and demands like we need the most engaging platform everything needs to be on our plat like like very principled and very idealistic and like demanding that of everyone around him like to meet that standard and it's frustrating but at the same time like unbelievably impressive for leadership that's a really big synchronicity for me right there because I've experienced that firstand hand very

[38:53] sorry it's total tangent on that I I mean I think fortunately as we already appreciate seeing that in leaders I think it feels like we appreciate that more in the past maybe this is me getting old or something but uh these days you you kind of um you like people who are a bit um um like provoking and mean to each other that's like it's that it's so you think the current like

[39:23] leaders in the world are not idealists. They're more so pandering to like what they think will help them win essentially and instead of being an idealist where you're standing on your principles and your ideas that are better you could have empathy for humanity, they more are going to play into narratives that they might get the popular vote by manipulating lesser intelligence. Is that a good way to manipulating lesser intelligence or human desire I should say? I mean playing the politics game. Um it's is something I mean we all leaders have done since the stone age for sure. For sure. Everyone has done that. And it it's very probably impossible to get in

[40:06] power um if if you're not doing this unless someone who is playing that game kind of sees you and you decide like no you're gonna be empower instead of me which is very uncommon. Do you see what I'm saying? I understand what you're saying. So your your thesis is that if we drive towards AI it makes people more empathetic as a whole then we can all start thinking consistently from a more idealistic lens for what's good for the greater whole. Um is that yeah so you you pull in AI you pull in AI you pull in AI I think this you can think about this without AI as well like okay what's

[40:45] what should we strive for well uh those who empower should be open-minded uh empathic and uh principled but uh once AI comes into the picture it's these things are maybe more important and maybe AI can help with this as well I you what do you think about having an not having like human politicians But AI politicians for example, is that a good good idea? It's a coin flip. I think I think the irony here is that it takes an idealist to understand the importance of having an idealistic leader. And you're never going to get to an idealistic leader without people already being idealistic, which is a weird circle to

[41:25] think about. I mean idealistic and open-minded are maybe like a bit counter polar opposites or opposites but they're they're a bit different from each other. I think it's a consciousness development thing open-mindedness. I think that there's like a survival mechanism of like the collective herd. Follow the leader to feel safe. These are the rules. This is how you survive. This is like what we've all agreed upon. This is what we do. And it's like a low lower level of ego development that a lot of people when they're younger feel or some people in their adulthood still don't pass that. I think that's like a whole like working

[41:56] force of our society like has that viewpoint like there are rules. It is this book is how the world works. I go to my job. I do what I'm supposed to do and I take care of my family and that's how it works. There's a lot of people that are like literally at that consciousness level and that's like their worldview. And so it's almost like AI brain chips could help self-actualize qu more quickly. Is that am I using I love this this thinking. So could but would you say that brain chips would help us self-actualize by being more efficient at doing like doing what we think is right or by making us actually

[42:31] better understand what what self-actualization is and and that's a hard one to force or to like install almost like what type of brain chip do you get? This is a weird one. Yes. You you're saying you could get uh the dopamine one. Yeah. You you like You buy a random brain chip and then that programs your objective function to

[42:55] be like something completely different. I I guess that's like a self-development brain. I mean this soundsi sci-fi but isn't that a bit of like um where in which relig religion you're and ideology you're born into. It is a bit of that like you get programmed similar to like an AI gets training data. It's from a very very young age and then you get this super clear world model from I mean I I really the Bible to me is almost like a a software install like trying to like through stories and whatever try and show you the p the way of life operating system. Yeah. And some people

[43:29] just take it too literally. So it's very interesting. I think the Bible is like one of the greatest pieces of um like human software. Yes, exactly. It's installing an operating system. Yeah. And it's been doing it for like thousands of years pretty much. It's pretty cool. It's very interesting. It's like just distilled in the fewest words possible and different ways that brains

[43:52] understand it. It's very fascinating. Interesting. I didn't I wouldn't expect it to be in the fewest word possible though because it's like a bit random how it was created. So, it hasn't gone through through so many iterations. Mh. But um yeah, it's it's good thought experiment. Like I'm just derailing here, but you could imagine that you had a bunch of scientists or whatever like create this um like operative system manuals like the Bible but 20 different versions and then you like randomly give them to uh different families and like tell them or hey you have to raise your kid like this and you'll see like how this how it

[44:32] plays out. It's very interesting. It's very interesting because you would uh this is a really weird observation I've had. I have a quite a spiritual lens, not like any like religious like ties or anything. And it took me like a it took a really analytical explanation. I wrote a book called reality trans surfing. It kind of just felt like the analytical explanation of the Bible. And that's when like the operating system finally hit me like three years ago. But I'm very then I'm going to say something completely different. You said you were an atheist. you have but also had a lot of material success and I

[45:05] think a lot of people that have like a very Christian worldview would like that would kind of like not make sense to them how you could have material success without like a godly view on the world but your it's interesting because your value system and what you're like building towards and your mission and what you're trying to do is a net positive and so you're still in line with the Christian teachings. I'm probably quite affected by Christian

[45:27] teachings. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So you still follow it, but like you confidently say you're an atheist. That probably breaks people's brains. And you started a company that went from 0 to $43 million in 5 months. And so so just so I understand, you're saying material success is often uh comes together with um a relig religious belief or or a strong belief in something. I would say a lot of people would uh would a lot of people would say you're gifted by God to have material success is like the thing. And if you if you don't then you can't. I'm here to be an example of someone who um

[46:01] has material success to test your faith. I'm just like I'm just making fun here. But no, I think that's actually a very positive thing because it's I think I don't know if we should talk about this on a podcast, but I think it's very positive in the world. And I think that ultimately like there is a set way of operating that leads to the best life and doesn't matter how you live. There's one set way I think there is like a uh internal way of like approaching the

[46:31] world. Mhm. That you can take more and more control of your life if you start I don't even know what I'm saying but I do feel like this is like true like you can like there is a internal state that you can get to. Maybe this is what enlightenment is like where you can actually you don't get affected internally by external events that happen to you. You're able to interpret bad events as positive things for like

[46:56] your end result and your end goal. You're able to have a positive mission and be empathetic towards others. And anytime they're rude to you, you can be empathetic to them because you know that they just went through some like bad event earlier that morning. And so you don't take things personally. And then like I think there's a core root of self internal work and self-t talk that can lead to success in all realms of your life. Material being one of them. And I think that people that really latch on to certain religions, it becomes to a point where you're so deeply bought into that belief that it actually works against you on

[47:30] figuring that internal operating system out. I um I've been not thinking about this topic like okay so sometimes as a human you feel completely lost or you feel like oh how do I relate it to to this what do I do in this situation and um I've been thinking of what if I was like super religious maybe that would help and be like um you have much more constraints on how you're supposed to act and think and uh I'm not sure if that's the case it just been like a thought experiment but um what you describe describing like being um like having maxing out the virtues like the

[48:07] Christian virtues I think are like great examples of if you do these things you're going to be happier people around you are going to be be much happier um and I think you said it quite well can someone please invent a crystal ball until then over 40,000 businesses have futurep proofed their business with Netswuite by Oracle the number one cloud ERP bringing accounting financial management inventory HR into one fluid platform with one unified business management suite There's one source of truth, giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions. With real-time insights and forecasting, you're peering into the future with actionable data. When you're

[48:41] closing the books in days, not weeks, you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next. If I needed the product, it's what I'd use. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsweet.com/wgmi. The guide is free to you at netsweet.com/wgmi. netsweet.com/wgmi. Thank you for sponsoring today's episode. All this being said, you are running a major tech startup right now. The future of AI is

[49:08] very fun to talk about and think about. So, I appreciate you entertaining me and educating me. I've never talked to someone who's thought so deeply. Um, those are interesting possibilities. But in the short term, I do think that AI software is a really cool place to start. And so this is kind of the mission of Lovable is to basically do you want are you trying to like empower people to make a full-time living through these software apps? Is it like for so they can like actually engage with AI to prepare themselves for what's coming or is there anything like tied to that deep of the product or why did you

[49:42] choose this product to build? Yeah. Yeah. Great question. I mean what happens when AI is smarter than us and all of those things? It's um it's a bit hard to think about this too much when I'm building the company as I I as I am. Um I I'm get a lot of reward when I see like kids getting super excited about something they can create with our tool that that's super fun. Um and one of so there's been multiple times there's like classrooms of kids who are like look I'm creating my own fashion brand or like my online store with loveable. It's amazing. Um the one of the best stories

[50:21] are as you say people who start making money using lovable and there is I don't know all of them but like there's just some that surface randomly. Um one of one of the early users who like he was a designer and then one of his customers was like just ranting about how expensive it was like hundreds of thousands of dollars to create a small do a small project and he was like got access to our tool and he just created the this entire project, the first version and and um then this his friend who who was a design client, he was like, "What? You can do this for me? Take my money." I he

[50:59] just one day that would have taken a month pretty much. And now he's running a business on top of that. And there are many many people that are running full agencies, running startups that are uh like this 20-year-old guy that in university raised $500,000 on an AI app he built purely by prompting, not writing a single line of code. Um and uh these stories are one of the best rewards like what you get you excited when you build it. as a non-technical person that is a marketer, like the biggest bottleneck was always trying to speak the language of a developer, find the people, do it. And I I never felt

[51:32] like this was an option for me and lovable is like the coolest thing in the world. Like I wish I had that when I was like 15, 16 years old because you could literally build any app in the world and then now you can post on social media and just get views through organic

[51:43] algorithms. I think there's a really short window right now where people if they take advantage of it and they're early there's a lot of like opportunity to arbitrage the market to help older people who don't really understand technology and the learning curve is way less than it's ever been and I think it's like really important for like the next year to two like this is a really urgent opportunity for people to take advantage of and you guys have probably built the leading tool to help nontechnical people build apps and so I do think that if you're listening to this we had a deep conversation but also

[52:09] like the material world your financial needs survival needs are very important I who think I pay attention to technology and opportunities for people to make money. I think this is one of the most clear-cut. You're going to add instant value to a lot of people in the world and almost anybody could start doing it because it's just text. And so if you have good taste, you understand problems, you understand markets, and you have the confidence to reach out to people, I think it's a really good way to make an income right now. So that was just my perspective on the entire product. I I like what you said about

[52:36] you have confidence to reach out to people. uh because I I still think that's a very uh big very valuable trait to have. Mhm. There's so many people out there that have like problems that could be solved by software and that just someone is smart and um or just like looking for opportunities can come and talk talk to the people who have these problems and say I can I can solve this problem for you with AI and uh that that literally makes solves the problem makes their lives better 100% and it's there's probably happy to pay for it. It's always been this two-sided thing like the engineers who knew how to code were

[53:12] not the most social or didn't really understand people as well. the marketers really understand people, but you might as well be talking magic when it comes to numbers and code. And now it seems like it's this perfect middle ground happening where really anyone can take advantage of it on both sides. So I would you guys have grown extremely quickly. I would hate to end this podcast without being able to talk about your growth or distribution. Did you have any sort of like distribution hacks? I'm sure everyone on the outside looking at like how the hell did you go

[53:36] from zero to 40 million in five months? Like was there any sort of like magic or how has that been from your side? the like in the beginning it was it was slow like we launched on product hunt and we got some people using it from that pretty much. Um it then it started to pick up uh and the biggest driver uh now is just just like word of mouth. Um, in the beginning it was I think a few YouTube videos helped. Um, and us just posting organically what we changed in the products and doing that like the fast cadence. Um, post and posting some memes as well. Posting some memes. So I

[54:18] think that those were like the main menu. So there's product announcements, a few memes, and then were the YouTube videos. Did you pay people? Was it like a user went on somebody else's channel? Was like one of these AI tool accounts? Yes, we uh we did some videos ourselves. I think some of them were pretty large. I'm trying to remember. We we have done partnerships with content creators. Um I'm not sure if like any of those were big drivers of the success. The main thing that we still haven't solved is like education for Lovable. And I'm I'm super keen to kind of put a lot of money

[54:54] on making it much easier for people to learn all the tricks. like you have to be quite good at using like it helps to be a bit technical uh or have a have someone that teaches you all the like important concepts and we haven't solved that yet. There's definitely a lingo database structure all of that like you what's happening under the hood a bit of that like it helps. Yeah, for sure that makes a lot of sense but really just a few YouTube videos a few educational product videos that you guys have made and then just the good product word of mouth people just started sharing it

[55:23] with each other. Yeah, really. It's basically only that now. Yeah. And there there I mean us continuing to post about what's happening and so on uh definitely helps because there's I'm I'm not so good at marketing as you but I am I know that there's the more kind of touch points you get the more um it kind of ramps up to this threshold where like okay no now I'm actually going to invest in signing up and uh putting pulling out your credit card also helps if you heard it from many different resources and so on. So yeah, the seven you need the 7-Eleven four rule. Have you heard that

[55:58] one? No. Okay. 7-Eleven. 11 touch points, four different platforms. You got to plant the idea, show them, educate them. We're not that sophisticated. We We'll get You're doing pretty damn good already without that. So, I think you guys are on the cusp of something really special. It was really an honor to talk to you. This was a deeper conversation I thought we'd get into, but very much enjoyed it. Probably one of my favorite conversations I've ever had. Um, is there anything that you'd like to tell anybody? Where can they find you? Who should they check out? Livermore. Yeah. So, I'm on Twitter at Antonosika and um if you like I think

[56:34] um if you want to build a like a product company. Um what you should do is to learn some of the key principles like okay what what is marketing if you want to do it that way or what is sales just like talk to as many people as possible. Maybe read this, ask an AI for a summary of the Y combinator playbook. It's like it's all out there information. And then get someone to that you matched on an energy level to that keeps you excited and motivated to keep building together uh on that startup. And then uh there's

[57:09] a thousand different things you can do. And there there's a lot of super fast prototyping you can do with Lovable until you find uh the idea that really really sticks. And then then when you when you see like okay there's someone who really wants this problem solved uh you should invest in making that software um stand out polish all the details until it really feels perfect if you get that magic like um perfect UX Apple feeling from the product. So that's my standard recipe for people who are thinking of building a software product. That was beautifully said. Well man I appreciate you coming on here doing some special things. I think

[57:47] that's great advice. Now it's just time for them to go start.

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