The Death of the Funnel & Other Fashionable Catastrophes

There is a particular species of software that ought not to exist and yet thrives magnificently. You know the one. You log into it, a single brain cell quietly expires, and you wonder — as Elena Verna invites you to — how is this thing alive? It holds a monopoly no one can dislodge. It is, by any reasonable aesthetic standard, terrible. And it is worth several billion dollars. The lesson, delivered with the cheerful ruthlessness of someone who has run growth teams for ten years, is that the world does not reward the beautiful. It rewards the distributed.

Verna — Head of Growth at Lovable, alumna of Dropbox and a self-described refugee "from SQL monkey to growth junkie" — opened her keynote by announcing that she is "actively trying to eliminate my job so I can do farming," having already acquired seven chickens. It is the sort of line that disarms a room before it is asked to confront an unpleasant truth: that most of the loving craftsmanship poured into products is, commercially speaking, beside the point.

Great product is not enough

Verna draws a clean line down the middle of every company. On one side sits the product — the thing the beautiful product managers build. On the other sits distribution — the machinery that gets the thing to people. These, she insists, are not the same, and confusing them is fatal. "There's millions of products," she notes, "that have been developed over the last couple of decades that we have never heard of… that were absolutely amazing." They are dead. Meanwhile the brain-cell-killers endure. The moral is not that quality is worthless — a great product "makes everything so much easier" — but that quality without distribution is a slow, dignified death.

What, precisely, is distribution? Verna reduces it to four questions she claims to lose sleep over nightly: How do we acquire customers? How do we activate them? How do we monetize them? How do we retain them? This is the traditional funnel. But the ability to answer those four questions "in a predictable, sustainable and competitively defensible way" is what separates the companies that win from the ones that quietly disappear. It is also, she suggests, a question every employee should be able to answer about their own company — because the tighter the internal alignment on acquisition and activation strategy, the less mysterious growth becomes.

Loops, not funnels

Here the talk turns almost theological. "The fastest growing companies all have one thing in common," Verna says. "They don't grow via funnels. They grow via loops." A funnel leaks — pour customers in the top, watch most of them dribble out the sides. A loop compounds. An input (a new user) performs an action that produces an output that can be reinvested to produce another input. It is a flywheel, and it is the difference between renting your growth and owning it.

The canonical example is Dropbox, where Verna spent last year. Its original viral loop — give storage to get storage — "took off like a wildfire" and carried the company to nearly its first billion dollars with almost no marketing spend. Today, she reports, 60% of Dropbox acquisition is still powered by a product loop: a user uploads content, shares it, and some fraction of recipients sign up. "Your users doing your own marketing for you," she says. "The best case scenario." Crucially, it comes not from marketing or sales but from product people building it into the experience.

Lovable, only ten months old at the time of the talk, is "still working on our loops" — but leans hard on word of mouth, which Verna calls "the really best way to kick off growth." The mechanism is disarmingly simple: the first generation experience is "so magical that people go, I need to tell the world about it." Hence her instruction to obsess over activation and the first two minutes: "put in those love marks," because that window is "make it or break it for your word of mouth loop."

The four shifts that birthed product-led growth

Five years ago everyone began obsessing over product-led growth, a movement Verna cheerfully admits was "somewhat overhyped" — "we did too good of a job advertising for it." But PLG did not appear from nowhere. It was the product of four tectonic shifts:

Shift 1. Users became buyers

B2B software used to be sold to enterprise buyers ticking checklists, who then shoved the product down onto end users who hated it and went looking for their own solutions. PLG was born in that gap — self-serve, prosumer, consumer-like B2B products that actually solved the problem, then climbed up-market.

Shift 2. Channel lifecycles collapsed

A marketing campaign is now "lucky if they get a week out of it." Compare Coca-Cola, which once ran a single campaign for a year. Attention spans have shrunk to a sliver — "we see something once and we never want to see it again" — and the market is simply too crowded.

Shift 3. Data became available

Product dashboards let teams see what is actually happening inside their products, rather than relaying whatever salespeople claim. Companies could finally make experiences better on evidence.

Shift 4. Roles began to blur

"Just being a product manager is starting to be very quickly not enough." Everyone now wears a marketing hat, an analyst hat, a PM hat. Verna calls this "the most beautiful thing" because it hands people agency and autonomy — even as it makes them stressfully responsible for monetization and acquisition outcomes. Her shortcut for enterprises chasing PLG: "just copy what consumer products are doing." They have been responsible for company outcomes all along; the industry simply "rebranded it and put it as something new."

And then AI came for the channels

If the four shifts explain the last five years, the last eighteen months belong to a single acronym. ChatGPT arrived, the LLM wars broke out, and every company scrambled aboard the gravy train. Verna's favorite artifact of the era is a tweet she paraphrases with relish: "Just change your loading states to thinking and you are an agentic AI startup now." Product roadmaps, she observes drily, now consist of "companies, and then there's AI" — features nobody asked for, "definitely not customers," bolted on so a company can call itself an AI company.

But beneath the comedy sits a genuine emergency: AI is killing distribution channels. Verna's exhibit A is G2 — the B2B review site, a "Trust Pilot for B2B" — whose growth ran chiefly on SEO. Since ChatGPT, its acquisition has fallen 80 to 90%, and the trend has only continued. The cause is a shift in consumer habits so obvious it stings: you no longer Google your questions. You ask ChatGPT or Claude, because conversational AI answers you directly instead of handing you a page of links to sift.

Social is no rescue. "Algorithm giveth and then algorithm taketh away," Verna says, and increasingly it taketh. Networks optimize for intensity of use as a retention tactic, so posting a link to drive traffic off-platform earns you "no more traffic, no more impressions." Search has withered; social throttles the exits. The two great outbound channels of the last decade are, respectively, dying and clamping shut.

When your customer becomes your competitor

Then comes the twist that gives the talk its edge — and, Verna concedes, its shameless plug. At Lovable and across vibe coding generally, the friction of building software is collapsing. Instead of paying for "bloated subscriptions," people are building their own tooling. Internally, Lovable calls it, lovingly, the "SaaS replacement" use case. If the functionality someone uses is simple, they simply rebuild it.

Go to one of those vibe-coding platforms and try to rebuild your product's main functionality. If it's easy, I'd freak out. If it's hard and you're unable to do it, you're a little bit more in a safer zone.— Elena Verna

Because if it is easy, "you all of a sudden overnight are going to start competing not against other companies but against your own customers that are leaving you and building their own replacements for you." Signatures, forms, landing-page generators, scheduling tools, no-code builders, dashboards, internal tooling — "formally defensible functionality" — is being commoditized. The commoditization bar is rising, and any company still monetizing beneath it should, in her phrase, "get yourself out of that zone."

To locate yourself, Verna offers a 2×2 (she loves a 2×2): functionality simple-to-complex against low-to-high utilization.

The danger zone is real, and litigious. Verna reports that DocuSign threatened legal action against one Lovable user who replicated its e-signature functionality. "If you have to start going in the legal route as the way to defend your product market fit, that's also not the best way to grow" — though sometimes, she allows, it is the only lever left.

Seven moats for a channel-less world

So if search is dying, social is closing, and customers can rebuild you over a weekend, how does anyone grow? Verna's answer is to stop outsourcing growth to marketing and sales and to treat the product itself as a distribution channel — "almost like a marketing channel where you can advertise to your own users." Product loops remain paramount. Around them she arranges a fuller arsenal:

The thread binding all seven is a rejection of the utilitarian. When software becomes democratized and a hundred interchangeable options appear, Verna argues, "people are no longer going to use the tools that are just utilitarian in nature. They're going to use the tools that speak to them, that make them feel — because we as humans want connection." Brand, socials, creators, loops: each is a way of being felt rather than merely used.

Put the pressure on the product

Verna ran out of time before she ran out of conviction. Her parting instruction is to stop betting on SEO and SEM, stop delegating growth to a marketing team down the hall, and load the pressure onto the product itself — "the most defensible channel that you have." Because distribution, in the end, is not a growth-team nicety. It is what converts an amazing product into a surviving company, and what makes the equity you own actually worth something.

It is a bracing message, delivered by someone who dreams of chickens. The channels that carried the last decade are collapsing; the customers you serve can now build their own escape hatches; and the only durable answer is to make something people feel compelled to talk about, invite others into, and refuse to leave. Great product, in other words, is table stakes. Distribution is the game. And the game, as Elena Verna would remind you before returning to her farm, has just changed all of its rules.