Comment by Frannky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Frannky | Hacker News Reader

When I don't understand why things happen, I assume the problem is my mental model. In this case, I can't build a model where pouring $400M into Lovable makes sense.

Who are the users? What are the problems? And why would people pay for Lovable instead of Claude/OpenAI/Grok, etc.? Do they have something those companies don't,something that lets them get chosen vs the competition?

I'm very confused. I'm not saying the valuation doesn't make sense, but I have a hard time explaining it. The best answer I can come up with is that they're betting on people building apps without knowing how to code—that this alone will be enough to leverage LLMs and turn a profit, capturing a market that's scared away from tools like Claude Code.

And I assume they're not betting on the thing actually working. They're betting on people wanting to build an app and pouring money into it, hoping it'll eventually work—and on Lovable not getting eaten by CC-like tools, thanks to distribution and brand.

I used it in the past and it was terrible. Claude Code from scratch, or even a template tweaked via CC, was way better.

So the assumptions seem to be: - Lovable has data that delivers results people want and can't get otherwise. - Marketing, brand, and distribution are enough to keep users on Lovable, which under the hood just leverages normal LLMs guided in some smart way. - LLMs will get good enough to deliver fully working, enterprise-level products—and Lovable will be the frontend delivering that result

The problem with your mental model is that you're thinking the product is "code" when the product is "a finished product"

CC is a horrible product for building a finished website. With CC you still have to host it somewhere. On Vercel, get a DB somewhere or tell it to use SQLite, which no one knows what that is. You have to install it and use a terminal which no one knows how to do. Even if you already know how to code, surely you can imagine a product that is EXACTLY CC but also has hosting, infra, etc built in. e.g. CC + Supabase. You might not use it, but for sure it is easier.

In terms of what products get built and how it's sustainable, think internal tools and what people who can't code would like to build but weren't able to.

Internal tools, things like CreatorIQ is ~$30k a year. It would be nice to make an internal tool just to manage the creators you have and save that money External Projects, A friend built a fantasy leauge for niche sports is making money on it.

I would love to hear the argument as to why CC is better for those two use cases when the products work great, its cheaper than CC (both are subsidizing so that is not a good rebuttal), and there is less maintenance (in the future, you could imagine loveable automatically sweeping projects for deps, security issues, etc)

> The best answer I can come up with is that they're betting on people building apps without knowing how to code—that this alone will be enough to leverage LLMs and turn a profit, capturing a market that's scared away from tools like Claude Code.

With Claude Code etc. you still have to decide on a tech stack, frameworks or libraries to build on. Lovable is basically an agentic harness with Tanstack Start and Supabase setup for you + quick integrations for services online businesses typically use.

Basically like a JS dev boilerplate + agent in a box.

Their main advantage is they were kind of a first mover in that space before harnesses or agents etc. were even discussed.

My personal mental model is that this is the AI version of the low-code web app tools that have existed for a while (like Outsystems, Power Apps...). Those tools are a bit of a nightmare for devs to work with and they have all sorts of limitations. Yet they still carved themselves a fairly significant niche in the market, as they allow building apps fairly quickly and cheaply... as long as you stick to simple apps. I don't know if Lovable will be able to capture that market, but that's how I try to make sense of this.

My hypothesis based on my discussions with non tech friends. If you can go from (prompt > website > deployment), such that you have a site on the web basically from behind one login.

That's very valuable, I basically think (we) devs often overestimate the average persons willingness to learn tech. Similar to dropbox back in the days.

Of course nothing is stopping OpenAI, Claude to do literally the same, maybe they already have? I don't follow the scene that much.

If you're a non technical person and just want to vibe code a website, I would suspect that Codex/Claude Code is far too intimidating for them. It requires a level of pre-existing knowledge. Lovable definitely caters to making these things accessible to a non-technical audience, which there's definitely a market for.

The beauty of venture capital is that VCs don't really know either but they allow themselves to be presuaded by the founders.

Its a beautiful thing.

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