Adapted from Chris Donnelly’s Step by Step edition “Everything I Learned At Lovable”. Core ideas credited to Donnelly, with additional operator framing for UAE teams.
Chris Donnelly spent time inside Lovable and wrote up what he saw as a repeatable growth pattern: ride the right wave early, shorten the distance between feedback and change, and let community carry more weight than your paid channels can. The original newsletter is his work. This is a reader-friendly re-cut of the same playbook, with a few notes from how we see similar dynamics play out in implementation work.
Lovable began with a good market insight and a focused idea and then committed to moving fast as the signal strengthened. That is the part most teams skip and argue internally until the moment has passed. Recognise this moment.
Operator takeaway: treat trend detection as a discipline, then attach a proof mechanism to it.
Deloitte’s Consumer Tracker and ConsumerSignals are built to show how confidence, spending decisions, and coping strategies shift in real time, and that is often the first thing that changes before budgets or procurement language does.
How we will use this more going forward: not as a quote source for a slide, but as a monthly rhythm for deciding what to prioritise, what to postpone, and what to message with care.
A counter-mission is a clear stance against an old default belief in your market. It is a decision rule that makes your choices easy to understand.
Donnelly’s framing describes Lovable as challenging the long-running assumption that only technical founders can build software products. That stance pulls in customers who want the new possibility, and it pulls in staff who want to build it.
If the stance is not something you can prove through behaviour, it is not a counter-mission. It is just copy.
This section feels familiar to us; we are die-hards of building talented teams. The Lovable story emphasises high-agency people who do not wait around for permission to move. That combination, capability plus autonomy, is what produces speed without chaos.
It is also consistent with how Lovable’s growth has been reported publicly. TechCrunch, for example, reported Lovable reaching $200M ARR and highlighted founder commentary about choices that supported execution.
It is about agency.
Our day-to-day approach: We act. We make mistakes. We learn. We go again.
The outcome is speed, but the process is not. The point is keeping the cost of being wrong low, so you can afford to discover reality early.
When that loop is visible to customers, something important happens: they start to feel like participants, not ticket numbers. Donnelly describes that dynamic as part of what made Lovable’s community energised and vocal.
We love building a community building in the UAE. We treat it properly and it is not a soft brand exercise for us. It is a distribution engine that also improves delivery quality, because you get sharper feedback and better pattern recognition.
Donnelly’s point is that community can carry three jobs at once: feedback, distribution, and even hiring.
In B2B, “viral” rarely looks like a public share button. It looks like an artefact that moves internally because it is useful. Or, it sounds like moment where a respected exec gets caught cheating at a big sporting event.
Donnelly describes Lovable’s virality as being built into the product and amplified through stories users wanted to share.
If someone forwards the output without rewriting it, that is virality in a suit.
This is the quiet lever: people become believers when they experience value quickly enough that it surprises them.
Donnelly describes Lovable offering a small free experience that lets a non-technical person feel the shift immediately.
Your first interaction should produce something the user can take into a meeting the same day.
In our practice, in the context of AI readiness and implementation, that can be a short diagnostic, a prioritised list of use cases, a risk map, or a workflow prototype that demonstrates time saved. The exact artefact matters less than the speed and clarity.
The Lovable story is compelling because it is operational: a stance people can repeat, a team trusted to act, a tight loop between feedback and change, and a community that does real work.
We give credit to Chris Donnelly for capturing the original playbook. But it is up to us (and you) for execution.