This week, I broke my streak of publishing an article every Wednesday for 13 weeks.
On Tuesday – the day I should have scheduled my publication – I felt completely overwhelmed. We were preparing to run a 2-hour workshop on Friday at the Copenhagen Developers Festival, and launching our experimental product, Little Parrot, on the same day.
Even though it’s now Saturday – three days past the publication day I committed to – I’m still determined to consistently improve my writing, share my thinking about building products, and experiment with different ways to engage with people.
I’m writing this on a plane from Copenhagen to Lisbon. Since I became self-employed last year, I’ve been reminded of the importance of consistency so often.
We live in an overnight-success culture. We see startups reach super high revenue over only a couple of months since launch, claims that lucrative products are built in a day with vibe coding, and content creators going viral. All these do happen, but not overnight.
What we tend to forget when looking at those stories is the consistent work that was essential to those successes.
Consistency In Building a Company
Take the example of Lovable. Currently, it’s one of the hottest European startups, and a darling of the vibe coding scene. They reached $100 million annual recurring revenue in less than a year.1 The headlines say that GPT Engineer – the initial product that turned into Lovable – acquired hundreds of paying users overnight.2
But if you look into it, you’ll discover the consistent work that preceded Lovable’s rapid growth and overnight-success status.
First, Lovable’s co-founder Anton Osika has been coding since he was a child.3 He has put countless hours into learning his craft.
Second, building a valuable network in tech was essential for his company to reach this level of success. I mean, Stewart Butterfield (co-founder of Slack), Nik Storonsky (co-founder of Revolut), and Sebastian Siemiatkowski (co-founder of Klarna) were among Lovable’s early angel investors.4 Just imagine the multiplying effect these people have.
Third, Osika was the founding engineer at Sana Labs, an AI startup where he gained valuable experience. Then went on to co-found Depict, a Y Combinator backed machine learning startup for e-commerce where he expanded his network further.
Osika cemented his reputation in the AI scene by giving talks, and organising events. Now, I’ve only organised a handful of tech meetups so far, but I can tell you, it’s a lot of work. He also has been consistently posting on LinkedIn and Twitter about the journey Lovable is on since the early days. One year ago, most of his LinkedIn posts gathered less than 100 reactions, but his most recent post has over 2,000.
He kept putting in the work for years: consistently building his skills, his network, and his influence.
And he’s not alone in reaching immense success partly because other influential people amplify his message. I heard on a podcast that Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code was only able to launch her NGO successfully because Jack Dorsey (co-founder of Twitter and Square) backed her initiative early on.5
Saujani recalled, “At the start, I borrowed a friend’s conference room for the first program and paid for pizza for the girls on my credit card. My husband’s assistant built our first website by putting up a splash page. It was all very bootstrap. I did not walk into this on day one knowing that I would help to build a movement or having any idea that four years later we would have reached 40,000 girls in nearly every state.”6
This was possible because Saujani had taken small, consistent steps to build ties with Dorsey during her run for Congress,7 eventually convincing one of the tech world’s most famous faces to back her initiative with both his money, credibility, and activating his network.
Consistency In Public Speaking
I used to be terrified of public speaking. In primary school, I remember I almost fainted once when I had to speak in front of my class. This week, I ran a workshop at a developer conference that had some unexpected elements. Over the years, I ran many workshops in companies, gave talks at meetups, and also a handful of conference talks. But this was the first workshop I ran at a conference, and I didn’t know the participants at all.
I was nervous in the days leading up to the workshop, and I wasn’t sleeping well. On the day, I got that stomach churning feeling, the one where you think you might throw up. But then the workshop started. I cheerfully greeted the attendees, and we dove in. They were nice, interested, and engaged. I felt good during the workshop; I was in a state of flow.
After it ended, I was super tired, mainly because of all the worrying that happened the days before about the culmination of the workshop, and our product launch. But I was happy I applied for this opportunity 8 months ago. And in October, I’m doing it all over again, at two other tech conferences.
All this to say is that I keep practising public speaking, challenging myself and it’s getting less uncomfortable every time I do it. No magic trick here, just consistent practice.
Remember: It “Only” Took Consistency
Next time you see an overnight success story, instead of feeling behind or inadequate, just question the headlines and the clickbait claims. Masses of people don’t magically discover a new product or a video that ends up going viral. A lot of work and many small, consistent acts go into getting a product to that magical point. But that might not be as newsworthy as sudden product-led growth.
I’ll leave you with a mindset shift from the organisational psychologist Adam Grant that has really helped me. He suggests reframing a challenge: “Instead of saying ‘I’m here to prove myself,’ say ‘I’m here to improve myself.’ It’s a learning experience.”8 I hope keeping this in mind will help with your next challenge.
Lovable blog: $100M ARR & Lovable Agent (23 July 2025), https://lovable.dev/blog/agent
EU-Startups (7 Oct 2024): Stockholm-based Lovable raises €6.8 million to make everyone a software engineer, https://www.eu-startups.com/2024/10/stockholm-based-lovable-raises-e6-8-million-to-make-everyone-a-software-engineer/
EU Tech Future (7 Sep 2025): Lovable AI: The Swedish Unicorn Revolutionising Software Development, https://www.eutechfuture.com/startups/lovable-ai-the-swedish-unicorn-revolutionising-software-development/
Financial Times (28 Aug 2025): AI start-up Lovable receives funding offers at $4bn valuation, https://www.ft.com/content/a97dd70c-e6ba-41b1-909d-90436a41d5f2
Confessions of a Female Founder with Meghan: The Long Game with Girls Who Code’s Reshma Saujani, https://lemonadamedia.com/podcast/the-long-game-with-girls-who-codes-reshma-saujani/
The Legacy Lab: Girls Who Code – A conversation with Reshma Saujani, https://www.thelegacylab.com/interviews/girls-who-code
Masters of Scale: Tap into collective genius, https://mastersofscale.com/tap-into-collective-genius/
Dare to Lead (15 February 2021): Adam Grant on The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, https://brenebrown.com/podcast/brene-with-adam-grant-on-the-power-of-knowing-what-you-dont-know/