The Floor Redesign

When electric motors arrived in factories in the 1890s, most manufacturers did something logical — but missed a much bigger opportunity. They dropped an electric motor in the place where the steam engine used to be.

Output improved a bit. Everyone felt like they'd 'modernised'.

But the factories that really won threw out the old floor plan completely. They asked what a factory would look like if you designed it from scratch around the new capability. Electric motors meant you didn't need one central power source anymore — you could put a motor on every single machine independently. So you could lay out the factory around the workflow, not around the power supply. That led to smaller teams with less waste & faster production.

I cancelled a web hosting contract recently. To do so I had to call an offshore call centre and wait on hold. That same morning I'd built a new website by having a conversation with an AI. The call centre experience felt VERY '90's – like a steam engine with a motor bolted on. The other felt like someone had redesigned the floor.

The tool I used was Lovable. And I think it's a great example of what it means to redesign the floor.

If you don't know the story, Lovable is a Swedish startup. You describe the app or website you want — in plain English — and it builds it. It's really slick, handles the back end seamlessly and in my experience is in a different league to similar tools I've tried.

The thing I think is fascinating is that Lovable didn't invent the technology powering it. Claude (Anthropic's AI) does the thinking. React and Vite handle the frontend. Supabase runs the database and authentication. All of that was built by others.

Lovable is using the electricity — not generating it.

What they invented was the floor plan. The insight that if you wrap those ingredients together in the right way, you can remove the developer from the equation for a huge class of problems — internal tools, MVPs, client portals, prototypes. Things that have likely been stuck behind the developer bottleneck for thirty years.

The numbers are pretty hard to argue with...

Launched late 2024 — fastest growing startup in Europe within four weeks. $100 million ARR in eight months. $6.6 billion valuation by December 2025. 25 million projects built on the platform. Klarna, Uber and Zendesk as customers. Most SaaS companies take five to seven years to hit $100M ARR. Lovable did it in eight months.

That's what happens when you solve a problem that's been annoying people for decades and make it feel obvious in hindsight.

Anthropic, the open-source community, the infrastructure providers — they're generating the electricity. The $6.6 billion came from asking what to build with it.

What's your floor plan still built around?

Part 2 of the "Every Era Has Its Reboot" series. | redebuter.com Read more