For the love of god, stop comparing your startup to Lovable
Its growth is based on four unfair advantages you can’t just copy-paste
New experiment: thought piece on the weekend where I reflect on what’s happening in the market and world. Do you like it? Let me know in the comments.
Lovable is the most shared startup this period for its unprecedented growth
A lot of people are pointing at it as being inspiration
Take all the energy you can, but watch out you don’t set out for disappointment
Lovable has some hard-to-copy aspects, listed below.
Four things your startup can’t easily copy
🌍 Extremely broad target market: anyone who needs a site or app
It competes with Wordpress (532M websites), Webflow (230k), Substack (75k), to name a few. Apple and Play store show about 1M new apps per year. TAM literally in the billions, without distribution issues.
➡️ Take-away: If your product targets a super niche, such as a segment or region, don’t expect such growth.
👤 Single decision maker
If you want to try Lovable, you can just buy it. Compare it to installing Salesforce in your organisation. That has 10 stakeholders involved that need to say yes.
➡️ Take-away: If your startup targets complex organisations, don’t expect such growth.
💰Doesn’t cost a lot of money
Only €25 per month, that is easy to try. Especially if a customer website easily costs couple thousand, and an app over €10k. Cheap is not the right word here: buying a brand new Ferrari for €10k is cheap, yet for a lot of people €10k is a lot of money. €25 euro is not a lot of money for most people.
➡️ Take-away: If you are either expensive or the amount of money doesn’t evoke an impulse buy, don’t expect such growth.
🚀 Immediately installed and accessible
You don't need complex tooling or training. DaVinci Resolve is free and on par with Adobe Premiere to many, yet without training making videos is too hard. Lovable is more accessible than setting up Wordpress. ChatGPT is as easy as a Google Search
➡️ Take-away: If your product requires extensive onboarding, requires deployment across 100 devices, 50 people, don’t expect such growth.
What can you control?
✅ Make it work
After being set up, Lovable is, from what I've heard, extremely easy to use. It delivers. So problem-solution fit is high. Complain about vibe coding all you want, it does the job pretty well for a lot of use cases.
➡️ Take-away: Make sure your product delivers better value per buck than your competition. That’s your only moat.