Mindaugas Petrutis built product, got hired
- Mindaugas Petrutis says Lovable rejected his application, then hired him months later after he built a job-search product with Lovable and posted it publicly. - The product got paying customers fast, and Lovable later brought him in to solve influencer marketing — a role that became part of its growth engine. - It matters because early-stage AI startups are rewarding visible proof of taste, distribution, and execution more than polished applications.
Startup hiring is getting weirder — and more legible at the same time. A normal application got Mindaugas Petrutis rejected by Lovable. Then a very public side project built with Lovable’s own tool helped get him hired anyway. That sounds like a cute founder-economy anecdote, but it lands because Lovable is not some tiny unknown app anymore — it raised $330 million at a $6.6 billion valuation in December 2025, and Petrutis says he joined as one of its first 50 hires. (lovable.dev) ### What did he actually do? Petrutis had already decided he wanted to work at Lovable. After getting rejected, he kept building with the product instead of disappearing. The thing he built was a self-service job-search sprint platform — basically a guided system that turned his advice, voice notes, and writing into a structured product for job seekers. He shared the work online, got customers, and kept talking about wha(lovable.dev)ater, Lovable reached out. (africa.businessinsider.com) ### Why did that matter more than the application? Because the project answered the real hiring question better than a resume did. Not “can this person say smart things in an interview?” but “can this person make something people want, ship it fast, and create attention around it?” Petrutis didn’t just claim product instinct. He showed product instinct, distribution instinct, and follow-through in one artifact. For an early startup, that bundle is gold. (africa.businessinsider.com) ### What job did Lovable bring him in for? The opening was influencer marketing. That sounds narrower than the story really is. On Petrutis’s own portfolio, he says he built Lovable’s influencer and cultural distribution engine during hypergrowth, scaled it past 111 million organic views in nine months, on(africa.businessinsider.com)he scope fast — which is very startup. (yahoo.com) ### Why is Lovable the right company for this story? Because Lovable sells the idea that non-engineers can build real software. Its own March 2025 profile of Petrutis leaned hard into that point — no formal coding background, quick prototype, paying users within days. So his hiring story doubles as a demo for Lovable’s pitch: the best proof of ability is often a thing you built in public, not a credential you list in private. (lovable.dev) ### Is this just a one-off hustle story? Not really. It fits a broader early-stage pattern. Startups — especially AI startups — are compressing the distance between “candidate” and “contributor.” If tools make building cheaper and faster, then companies can ask a harsher question: why tell us what you might do when you can show us this week? The catch is that this favors people with time(lovable.dev)l is much cleaner. (africa.businessinsider.com) ### What’s the real lesson here? The lesson is not “ignore applications.” It’s that applications are now the weakest possible proof for certain jobs. Petrutis seems to have won by collapsing three roles into one demonstration — builder, marketer, and taste-maker. That is especially potent at a company like Lovable, where the product, the audience, and the hiring filter all revolve around making things quickly and showing the result. (africa.businessinsider.com) ### So what changed? A rejection used to end the story. Here, the rejection was just the point where the real audition started. That is the part worth noticing. In parts of tech now, the interview can happen after the work is already visible. ### Bottom line Petrutis didn’t talk his way past a no. He built his way past it. And for startups chasing people who can ship, that may be the whole hiring model in miniature.
