This is 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings.
Now 20.
Growth is the monthly show where we sit down with the best growth leaders to discuss growth tips, tactics and strategies from people who've built the best growth organizations on the planet.
Now, one of the fastest growing companies today is Eleven Labs.
And I'm so excited to sit down with Luke Harrys, head of growth at Eleven Labs, where he leads marketing, product, engineering, and developer experience.
And they've raised $281 million with their latest round, pricing them at $3.3 billion.
Previously, Luke held roles at Postdoc and Microsoft, and he's also an incredible angel investor, with investments in the likes of Lovable and Runner.
Luke's also a dear friend.
He's one of the kindest people in this business and I think he's going to be one of the best growth minds of the next 10 years.
This show was exceptional.
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You have now arrived at your destination.
Luke, I am so excited for this, dude.
Listen, we've been fortunate enough to get to know each other.
I so appreciate our relationship, by the way.
First, which is like a heartfelt start, which is unusual for a 20-year-old.
But thank you so much for joining me, man.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
Excited to be here.
Now, I was just chatting to Matty before this, actually, on my walk around the park.
And he said, ask him first, like, how did we first connect in terms of you and Matty?
And how did you first get to know about Eleven Labs?
Yeah, so we met when we were 19 and we did a hackathon at Cambridge.
We rocked up.
It's me, Matty, this guy called Philip who organized it.
He's Polish and he basically brought together his smartest friends and me to compete at this hackathon.
My top tip for any young people listening is do hackathons with your smartest friends.
Because what happened with that hackathon is, one, we end up winning the Microsoft Prize.
So we each won an Xbox and immediately put that on eBay.
So we got about 300 quid.
Two, it landed me my first job at Microsoft.
And then I also got to meet Matty.
And Matty and I, we stayed in touch pretty much every six months.
We catch up, we riff on startups.
And scroll forward about seven years.
So this is a year and a half ago.
Matty's like, hey, Luke, I've just started a new company.
Do you want to go catch up?
And I was angel investing then.
And we were swimming in the Hampstead Heath ponds.
And when I tell Americans this, they're like, oh, ponds, you mean like small, dirty puddle of water?
I'm like, yeah, but it's actually quite nice.
So we're swimming in this ponds and he taps the degrees.
He's like, oh, it's 11 degrees.
No way.
My company is called 11 Labs.
And he takes me through this grand plan of what he's going to do with Eleven Labs, which is step one.
They're going to build the world's best audio AI models.
And step two, they're going to sell it to everyone.
So for people listening on their way to work, for creators making audio books voiceovers, they're going to sell it to developers to make AI voice agents.
And I was like, that is a terrible go-to-market plan.
That's absolutely terrible.
I was kind of angel investing there, but I was like, this is nuts.
What do you mean step one?
You're going to build the world's best AI audio model, something no one else has ever done.
Anyway, so I did an invest.
Oh, this is the moment where you're like, this is a franchise.
You know, the supportive one.
I don't believe in it, but I just, I'll give you 10K or something.
I really should have.
I mean, that 10k would have done very well.
Anyway, we stayed in touch.
And then he phones me up about six months later being like, Luke, we've just hit a million users.
It's going incredibly well.
We're looking for someone to lead growth.
So that hackathon was a lot of fun.
Met Matty.
And also Philip, the guy who organized it.
He founded Wordware, which is the largest raise from YC ever.
I think it's about $40 million.
So yeah, that's a great hackathon to do.
No fucking way.
I didn't know that was the same Philip.
I love Philip.
Oh yeah, Philip's awesome.
And that's still my LinkedIn cover.
Photo is me, Matty and Philip packing over this computer when we're 19.
Oh wow, I met Philip recently and he is fantastic.
You have to have him on the pod.
Yeah, it's a very good shout.
There's a couple of things I just want to unpack, which is you very kindly?
Scrolled forward seven years.
Most of my American guests don't, and they painfully tell me about their Stanford second year and third year and every class that they did in between.
I do just want to touch on one thing that Matty also told me to touch on, which is Fellas, which is the company you started before joining Eleven Labs.
What are some of the big takeaways from that?
When you reflect on it and how it shaped, how you think about growth and product building?
I mean, Fela was a wild journey.
It's me and my friend Richie, and we just want to do a startup.
So we applied to YC.
We got into YC actually with an AI developer tool.
And we quickly realized we were trying to do like browser-based automation, where you automate tasks on people's behalf.
So, you know, you're sending an email and it like auto completes it.
But this was back in 2019 before LLMs were really a thing.
The transformer paper just came out, but like GPT-3 didn't even exist.
So we've gone to YC, we tried building a prototype and we're like, oh, this just isn't gonna work.
And a brief detour is, as we realized this wasn't gonna work, COVID hit.
And we were there trying to brainstorm the next billion dollar idea, whilst also seeing this like impending wave of what everyone thought was a killer virus crossing across the world.
So we set up a COVID testing clinic in San Francisco.
We were like one of the first people to realize COVID was going to hit.
We're following Balaji on Twitter.
And so we're like, okay, how do we actually set up all this testing?
So we set up a drive-through COVID testing.
We were very European.
We were like, of course, we're going to do it not for profit.
And this is a pandemic.
We found a company, AutoNYC, which was doing testing of, I think, sepsis.
They decided to pivot into COVID testing.
We distributed all their first tests.
And one key lesson, which is probably a bit niche, is don't do beta tests for pandemic testing.
Because we set up this drive-through clinic.
We just posted in Bookface saying like, hey, we're doing the first like 100 tests for free.
Just come through.
We want to check all our operations came out.
And we accidentally ended up with an entire car park full of San Francisco tech billionaires rocking up in like their Lamborghinis and Ferraris to get like the first COVID test.
So that was a lot of fun.
But we were like, okay, you know, not for profit.
The pandemic was hitting.
It turned out the company we partnered with took a different approach.
You know, they were some of the first people to do these testing, did incredibly well.
One of the fastest companies ever to $100 million in revenue.
And that company became Curative.
Fred Turner, incredible founder, and is now building one of the largest health tech companies in Texas.
Absolutely fucking nuts.
Yeah.
I remember we had the Hyrox founders on, you know Hyrox?
Yeah, yeah.
And they made money by turning a coffee shop into a COVID testing center in COVID because like Hyrox was happening.
And it was for not, they didn't do not-for-profit and it was like a fantastic business for them.
That is absolutely nuts.
So we did that detour and then we were like, we do actually want to build a big business.
So we started exploring different directions and Richie had really struggled with like binge eating, his mental health.
I think we actually spoke to you at the time about some of this stuff.
And so we were just going really deep on this kind of men's binge eating, men's weight loss space.
And we set up a digital CBT clinic around.
How do you help people who are struggling with these eating issues?
But the tricky thing with digital CBT is it's great for lots of people but it really only lasts about six weeks from a business point of view.
You can help them get to a great place.
But we wanted to have like a much bigger impact and build a much bigger business.
And so that's when we were exploring like OK, what are the health tech business models which can really grow and really make a lot of sense?
And it seemed to be kind of you needed a hardware piece or a medication piece.
And we're like, none of these quite make sense.
Until we read the GLP-1 paper the day it came out.
So this is semaglutide.
And we're like, wow, this is like the biggest thing in medicine since penicillin.
So we like race, we set up a clinic.
We're like how do we help people get access to this fantastic medication which reduces people's body weight by 15?
And we managed to get to about 300k of revenue, which was great.
And then it kind of flatlined.
And this was the first company I'd really started.
I was still pretty young.
And truthfully, I think I was just too impatient.
I was like, oh, we're only on like 200k a year of revenue.
I want to have like much bigger impact to technical product.
I think we probably need to like pivot to B2B.
And Richie was like, no, Lou, I think we just need to like focus as is, like the wave will come.
And so I stepped back, joined PostHog, kind of moved on.
But Richie has done an incredible job.
And that company is now doing over $30 million a year in revenue, helping thousands of patients.
So that's been really cool.
But like big lesson for me is like commit for the long term, be patient.
And Ozempic had a much, much bigger wave after.
We were actually quite early on.
Fucking nuts.
Also, the importance of market timing.
If you'd done Vela five years before and Noah's NPIC.
Oh, yeah.
It wouldn't have been a thing.
There's no business there.
I totally get you.
Fascinating.
Dude.
I have to then skip to another bit that you said there, which is that you were in the lake when he was pitching you.
Matty, this is for 11 Labs.
And it's like, we're going to be everything for everyone.
This sounds bad.
I like a tight ICP where we can market to, we know which channels we're selling to.
We can craft a product for them.
How has a horizontal product offering worked so well when it is completely counter the narrative that we're always told?
I 100% agree.
And actually when I worked for PostHog, part of the magic was you have one ICP which is a product engineer, and you're selling multiple products into it.
So you're selling product analytics, you're selling session recording, feature flags all in, and each new product you add it gives you another entry point.
It enables you to like integrate the products to do completely new use cases which couldn't be done before.
We don't have any of that in some ways.
And so with Eleven Labs, because we have the best AI audio models.
So turning text into speech, speech into text for making sound effects, for voice cloning, voice isolator.
This is like a very horizontal foundational layer which we sell as an API.
So that's kind of your first product, the developer product.
And then you can sell that API at scale.
So you can sell it to enterprises, you can build around workflows, doing conversational AI.
So that's fantastic.
But then because the team is super ambitious.
You know, Matty and Peter literally want to build a bigger company than Google.
They want to build something absolutely massive.
And then they see like oh, we could actually build this to build a reader app for your phone to read articles.
So that's now a product.
Then we're also building a creator platform.
So this text box which anyone can type in text, that's now creating whole audio books and voiceovers.
But the interesting thing is it's actually really working for us.
And I think the reason we've managed to get it working is because we've started with these incredible audio models.
All these people come naturally to us.
We've then been able to raise money, hire incredible founder type peoples who really own these individual products and grow them.
And so, yeah, it's definitely not the norm.
I'm not sure I'd recommend it, but for Eleven Labs, it seems to be working really well.
When I listen to you, it sounds fantastic.
I'm also going, whoa, whoa, whoa, focus.
Like reader apps, communities.
How would you advise founders on focus when it comes to product expansions?
If I was to advise people, it would be choose your one ICP and build all the products around it to have them compound.
However, that's not actually what we're doing.
Instead, we're building discrete products.
And the way we then tackle that is we basically shard the company.
So we have a consumer app focused team which has an entire growth team with a growth marketer, with paid ads, with community.
We have creator growth with their own paid ads, affiliates, and so forth.
We have developer marketing, which is standalone.
And so all of these sharded teams have their own growth elements to them?
Yes.
Yeah, exactly.
So there's not a horizontal growth team which sits on top of them?
There is.
So the structure we've set up is we have horizontal growth team, which are channel specialists.
So we have a head of performance marketing who used to lead performance marketing for Shopify.
We have a SEO expert who used to do most of this for Canva.
We have like incredible individual specialists.
But then within each team, we have a product growth lead who's responsible.
They're basically CMO for their product.
And they're thinking about all the metrics, the activation, the awareness.
And then they have their own sub teams, which are specialized just for them.
Wow.
Yeah, it's pretty funky.
Our enterprise marketing team by the end of this year will be 20 people.
And that's just for enterprise marketing.
And then separately, our mobile app will be its own five to 10 person growth team.
Wow.
What was this like when you joined?
And if you were to advise founders on the scaling of that team and that structure.
Yes.
Yeah.
When I joined, we were three people, all very junior, very specialists.
I hadn't actually done a growth role before.
And this is the advice that I normally give.
Start with one generalist growth marketer.
And they should be responsible for everything from messaging and positioning, working with the founder, up to awareness and setting up channels and testing.
The reason why you need them to do all of that is if you only hire a product marketer great, your positioning is lovely, your messaging is lovely, but no one's heard of it.
Or if you only hire someone who's very quantitative and channel focused, then they're only going to be focused on getting out there, but no one's actually gonna convert or resonate.
So hire one generalist person.
And the most important thing is that they really understand your product.
And so this means if it's a technical product, they need to be technical.
If it's a consumer product, they should really get the consumers and the virality.
So it depends on the person.
But start with a growth marketer.
Normally, the second hire I recommend is a growth engineer who's front-end leaning.
And so this is like a software engineer who's hacky, who's running into metrics, and they should be setting up landing pages for SEO.
They should be doing mini tools.
They should be doing automated outreach.
And then you can keep growing from there.
Other great ones are like motion designers, back-end focused growth engineers.
What's that?
Motion designers?
Motion designers.
I have not heard of this.
Are we reincarcerating Titanic?
Why do we need motion designers?
So video is hugely underrated as a medium for growth.
And so every launch video we do, the keystone marketing piece we ship with it is the video.
There's different types of videos you can do.
You can do motion design, which is basically animated graphics.
You could do a founder-led video where they're speaking to the camera.
You could do a more like screen share style video, where they're kind of recording and interacting and it's very product focused.
But why I love motion design is it's abstract.
So you can really focus on what are the core value props.
You can make it catchy and attention focused and mix in the abstract UI elements.
And the big mistake that I see with most people's videos is that they put the founder themselves.
They do a full five minute monologue themselves about the company mission.
And unless you have the editing skills of Mr Beast, you're just not going to keep people for the launch video.
So make it short, get the key message across in the first 30 seconds.
Fantastic for this.
Just digging in, because a lot of people will love that like short is like 30 seconds, like three minutes.
The way i would do it is actually like nearly all your attention for your videos should be on the first 30 seconds.
Very quick intro, then get straight to the core value props.
If you actually want to keep building out the video onto that, to make it five minutes long, that's absolutely fine, but just recognize the majority of drop off will happen after that.
So make sure you make that first 30 seconds truly incredible.
You mentioned some different types there.
We've got the motion design ones which are more animated.
Is that correct?
Yeah, exactly.
Then we've got the founder-led kind of narrative.
Any other types?
So motion design, founder-led, and screen share.
Those are the three.
What are the different use cases we would use them for?
Any big launch, we lean towards motion design.
You can get very complex products across quickly.
The founder-led one, personally, I think those are really risky because it can become quite egoful.
To slightly call out Superhuman, they are an incredible, I know you're good friends with them.
Truthfully, Superhuman are incredible at growth generally, but their most recent launch video is about five minutes very founder-led.
Did you not like the staircase?
The staircase was beautiful, but you know I was another Titanic scene.
I was waiting for Rose to come.
The staircase was beautiful, but you're watching Rahul walk down this beautiful staircase and by the time he's walked to the bottom, kind of you've moved on.
And so then, in this like attention economy, you really need to make it short and snappy.
I think that can work.
Maybe if you have like a more boring product, like a consumer packaged goods or you're doing some sort of lifestyle, or if you have like a prominent creator behind it, already fantastic.
But in general, I'd be quite cautious of those.
And then the third type is the more like screen share.
And I think this really works well if you're selling to a technical audience who they basically want to nerd out on the details and the product itself and the craft.
Then those are great.
They're very quick to make.
Screen Studio is a fantastic piece of software to use for that fascinating.
How do you think about using humor?
Is there any world where quirky humor or is it actually like no no, this is a b2b sell or this is a professional tool?
Yeah, don't try and be funny.
I think it depends on the brand of your company.
So 11 labs we try and do.
The core 11 labs brand is like pretty serious, very concrete.
We'd like see ourselves among like palantir and open ai and spacex, as we're like mission driven, we're going all in to build the world's ai audio models.
If instead, you have a quirky brand yes, lean into it and we try and get like glimpses of humor.
The april fools we did text to bark, which was a imaginary product where you type in text and you can speak to your dog through barking or bark to text and you can translate it.
So yeah, i think it can work, but if you're not funny, don't use it.
Can you do text to wife When you have a Wi-Fi?
This would be a hilarious product actually for the next April Fools.
Have you ever done one which totally flopped and you were like huh, and there was a lesson tied to it?
At the start, we didn't have good motion design contractors.
We didn't have anyone in-house.
And so the main way it flopped was trying to work with contractors who just didn't have good enough contractors set up.
And so I really actually recommend bringing in video in-house really quick, because when you're doing launches you need to move super quickly.
You have like a week from the products getting ready where you're running all this different marketing.
So bring it in-house.
Yeah, the main mistakes are when we just don't have the right team in place to execute.
I so agree with you on bringing it in-house.
But then founders say to me, I get it, but you have the resources and I want to test.
Is there a way to test in a non 50 to 100 gram way of hiring a motion designer?
Yeah, so most motion designers, they work with you on a specific project for about 5 to 10k.
And so that should be.
For most people who have raised money, that should be enough to be able to test it.
And if you think of every launch we do, most launches get somewhere between 200000 views and 700000 views.
And if you were to have to spend that on Facebook ads or any other medium, it's the CPMs, the CACs are going to be way higher.
So it's absolutely worth doing it.
Fucking nuts.
Do you worry that the value of video is going down with the explosion of supply?
It's something that I do worry about.
We have teams of people, but everyone is fucking doing video.
And I just worry that actually, with the increase in supply it becomes harder and harder to discover.
Maybe.
I don't think we're there yet and I still think it's the most effective medium in order to get your message across, to keep people's attention.
People don't want to read blog posts now, instead have a crisp video.
The platforms also love it and they boost it.
The way I could potentially See it moving is like Twitter now with their live streams.
I'm not sure if you've actually seen any time someone does a live stream, their entire audience has a bright red bar on top of the Twitter screen saying blah-de-blah is live streaming.
I could see the shift towards live streaming, but unsure whether that makes sense for launches.
Maybe like post follow-up to launches is another great way to grab attention.
I love this in terms of video being a core component.
It's a core component of, as you said, launches.
200, 700,000.
You do launches really, really well.
When you think about what you do to make them successful.
What are your biggest lessons on how to do launches?
Well, every time we ship a major product or feature, we run into a checklist, and so we have three tiers of launches.
We have tier one.
This is the big new model or the massive new product line.
We have tier two, which is like major feature that customers will care about.
And we have tier three, which is basically just put on the changelog.
Tier one is where we put the majority of our attention for the launches.
And this is led by normally the growth lead for that particular product.
The first thing they need to work out is like, what are we actually launching?
For who?
Why do they really care?
And we distill this down into audience, KPIs, the core value props you want to get across.
And then we turn that into like, what's the consistent messaging?
What are those short lines we want to get across?
So to use an example, we launched speech to text, which is the world's best transcription model.
So you can say stuff like this and then they'll transcribe it super accurately.
And the key messaging we wanted to get across is it's the most accurate speech to text model.
It's feature complete.
So it does diarization.
It does character level timestamps.
It supports 99 languages.
That's actually what we spend a lot of time on is really nailing that messaging.
How many messages can we have?
So if we want most accurate, fastest and cheapest, is that too much?
So we always have a primary one.
So the primary one, which you'll hear me Matty, the entire team and all our messaging time and time again is the most accurate speech to text model.
And then there's secondary ones, so the three that I've said.
We then take these core messaging and we turn those into the core assets.
We always start with the tweet thread.
What's the tweet thread?
What's that core hook?
That's what we make sure we nail first.
And then we make the video as well, which corresponds with the messaging, with the tweet threads.
Sometimes there's multiple videos, but particularly for tier one, we want a fantastic motion design video.
We take normally that tweet thread.
We also create a blog post, particularly for the more technical launches.
And then the next thing we think about is distribution.
The way that we see it is we like to cross-post absolutely everywhere.
So we post on X, we post on LinkedIn, we post on Blue Sky, we post on Threads.
Every single channel Product Hunt Reddit, Hacker News.
Be real.
I mean, at that rate, you're fucking going into the crowds, aren't you?
The biggest advice I give to growth people is you need to be loud.
You need to get it across every single channel.
And then we actually have an amplified channel in our Slack where the entire team's in.
And when we do a launch, we post all the different links for the different tweet thread.
The LinkedIn and everyone else will then share their like, their comment, their do them, their own threads.
And the idea is we want to surround sound for that day, getting that call messaging across.
And then, I'm pretty certain, the social algorithm see 30, 40 likes in the first five minutes and go like wow, this must be good content.
We'll promote it to our larger audience.
100%.
And what's interesting is, when I speak to new founders they're like oh Luke, but this is easy for you.
You have a 200 person team.
You have top investors.
You have Harry as a mate who will share your stuff.
And what I'd put back to them is like okay, chances are, if you're like getting to launch a product, you've raised a bit of money.
You have some friends, you know a few people in the industry.
You should be shameless.
I ran this through with someone recently and we were like, let's take your Gmail.
Let's literally get every single person you have sent an email to in the last five years.
Great.
You've now got 3000 people.
Then who's following you on Twitter?
Who are you connected with on LinkedIn?
Let's just manually go through and DM all of them to boost your launch.
And you need to give your launch a big boost for these algorithms to actually care about it.
I'm amazed by how nervous people are to ask, number one.
I'm amazed by how nervous people are to do things that won't scale.
For the first 50000 Twitter followers I got.
I personally DM'd everyone and I suggested that they follow our newsletter as well.
Wow.
I was cross-advertising channels.
Yeah, 100%.
For 50,000.
Wow.
I'm going to do that after.
No, seriously.
At the end of every day, 15 minutes, you just continuously cross-promote other channels.
Honestly, it's how we got to several hundred thousand on the newsletter.
Wow.
For founders that are maybe not as versed, what makes a good tweet thread?
What should they not do?
How would you advise me?
Yeah, so it's pretty simple.
The first thing is like, get the first word right.
If you're doing a launch, use the word or introducing, or we're excited to launch.
Make it really clear that you're launching a new product, introducing the world's best speech-to-text model.
That's the first line.
Make it simple.
One line, get across exactly what you're launching with that keyword which flags it.
Then have a space and then do either a bullet point list or a paragraph, going into a bit more detail maybe some of these secondary value props you want to get across.
And then attach the launch video, which you spent lots of time working on.
To the first one.
To the first one.
Yeah, so that's then your first tweet.
Then you could do a thread going into more information, maybe adding supplementary videos.
And then the way that Twitter works is when you do a tweet, what will go out there and other people will see on their feeds will be the first tweet, then the others will actually be minimized, and then the last two.
So you should put the call to action and the link in the very last tweet.
And actually, you should make that second last tweet great too.
Don't put the link in the first tweet, because Elon Musk has even said they actively downrank people when they do that.
We do them for every show.
Yes.
And it's a real science in that respect.
On the blog post side, people are going, hey, no one reads blogs.
There's still a point to blog posts.
Yeah, 100%.
So two main points.
The first one is for technical audiences.
You need to go into the details.
You need to show the benchmarks.
You need to give a little bit the secret sauce of how you put it together.
Go into those technical details.
And the second one is SEO.
Lots of people think SEO is dead, but it's really not.
And so every time you do a launch, you want to have a key blog post or landing page that you push and you get all the backlinks to whether that's across press, whether other people linking to it, whether from socials.
SEO is not dead.
No.
Will it be in two to three years?
When we see the shift in terms of users and where they come from more and more.
I think you know Guillermo from Vercel said it was one and a half six months ago and now it's four and a half.
In two to three years, do you think we will see a much reduced SEO presence?
With SEO, there's different types of SEO content.
The first one is blog style content.
This is, you know, long words, long form articles.
That, I think, will increasingly die over time.
But actually, it's not dead yet.
If you look at Zapier, over 70% of their SEO traffic still goes to their blog.
That's definitely not dead yet.
But I think will die because you'll be able to have ChatGPT give you a really great response.
It will have scraped it, ingested it.
But the part which I am confident will stick around for at least five years are tool pages.
And so this is where to give you an example if you search text-to-speech Spanish, the first result would be 11 Labs text-to-speech Spanish, which is a text box where you can type in any Spanish you want, choose a voice and click play.
And so that like requires some actual engineering work to make this text box.
We do the same with speech to text.
You create these mini tools, often with proprietary data sources or some actual engineering work.
And that's going to be a while before these LLMs are like spinning up whole dynamic pages.
And by that point maybe even bets are off, because they're kind of replacing your product on the fly.
How do you advise founders on mini tools to show the value of a product when it's actually an enterprise product?
It's really difficult if you have like an enterprise product.
Yeah.
And honestly, people won't buy without some sort of try.
But it's pretty hard to try and commit the resources to doing that mini tool.
Yeah.
How do you think about that?
This is why I think, right at the start, you should hire a growth engineer that's front end focused, that can independently be focused on building these and exposing these small bits of value out, so that people can get and experience the value as quick as possible.
If you go to the Eleven Labs homepage today, we have one text box where you can type in text play speech.
But we also have all our products are in these little text boxes.
These are outside of the login and that people can try.
So the challenge I give to you is don't expose your whole product.
Don't give it all away for free.
But what are these small bits of value that you could give away for free so people can experience that wow moment as quick as possible?
You said about distribution and cross-posting everywhere.
Yeah.
Blue Sky.
Wow.
Threads.
I mean, I'm glad someone posts that.
My question to you on that is should we not choose one or two channels to absolutely crush and focus on, versus spray and pray?
Do both.
So first of all, choose the channels where your audience are.
So for us, that's X and LinkedIn.
Make sure those are really great.
But then after, just repost it for the others.
Because there are people on the other platforms who, for some reason, prefer Threads or Blue Sky over.
You want to reach them too.
And also because other people are overlooking those channels, you have a much greater chance that you'll be able to own them and build an audience there.
Is it the same audience on X and LinkedIn or different?
Largely different.
We see X as mainly for our creator and developer.
We see LinkedIn mainly for our potential future employees, potential partners and enterprises.
But we write the content in a way which tries to cater towards both.
Do you have TikTok and do you think of TikTok as a group?
Yes.
And we've actually just hired our first in-house creator whose only job is to create TikToks.
YouTube videos.
Instagram shorts.
YouTube shorts for Eleven Labs.
And the way we actually hired this guy is if you typed in Eleven Labs on YouTube, he had the most viewed video above us.
And so we were like, okay, he's creating fantastic content.
Let's actually hire him, supercharge him.
And particularly for this creator audience, having someone who can speak to them as a creator will really supercharge growth.
When you look back at the distribution, the channel strategy, what mistake do you think you made?
The mistake I think we made is not hiring early enough.
We had super strong PMF right from the start.
We had channels working right from the start, but we didn't actually have anyone focused on certain channels.
So for example, affiliates, we set up over a year and a half ago.
And that now is bringing in over, you know, tens of thousands of dollars of MRR per month.
But this was set up a year and a half ago by one engineer in one week and then no one's touched it since.
And what we should have done is, once we've seen signs of life given we already have PMF overall staff, one person who can focus on growing that one product and those one set of KPIs, and nothing else keep them laser focused.
So yeah, overall, I wish we had staffed up more channels with more dedicated people sooner.
When we think about a channel working, what does that mean?
I had this conversation with our team because we have, I think, 300000 followers on TikTok and millions of views a month.
Honestly, the conversion back to the main pod, not clearly attributable.
Maybe it's there, but not clearly attributable.
Is that working?
I think social channels are tougher.
For core performance marketing channels, it's very clear.
Is the CAC less than the predicted LTV of the person?
So for say affiliates, for different paid marketing, that's super clear.
With organic and particularly enterprise marketing.
Trying to gauge that relationship is much harder overall.
And instead the way I do it is, you have to look over a longer time horizon and and allow for more fuzzy attributions.
So for example, we're going to be doing a big enterprise marketing push in San Francisco.
We're doing billboards, we're doing podcasts, we're doing newsletters, we're doing events on the ground.
And we're not going to measure any one channel in isolation, but instead we'll look over the campaign.
What was the relative lift in number of leads in that geo compared to a comparable like New York or Seattle?
So it's converted dollars, it's site visits in that geo.
Yeah.
How do you think about Northstar, which actually determines value?
What we've landed on for the marketing.
So this is the enterprise marketing team with the enterprise part of our business.
What we've landed on as our North Star metric.
There is number of marketing sourced sales, qualified leads.
Marketing has identified a lead.
Someone signed up for a webinar or an email, or even signed up from the product.
We've managed to get them to book a call with an SDR.
And then that SDR has said, yes, this person's great.
And so that's our North Star metric.
And the entire marketing team is focused on how do we drive that number up.
Webinars yes, that's still a thing.
It is a thing it makes me think of, like you know, the kind of phones for you customer support with the microphone going down.
Hello, this is Greg, you've reached your webinar.
Yeah, so webinars do definitely work.
The key issue with webinars is the name webinars.
And so I would argue that what we're doing now is basically a webinar on growth.
The only thing that actually we're probably missing is like, one, we're not live streaming it.
Two, we're not doing email capture.
But then you can then take this podcast and then you can repurpose it and push it on all the different platforms.
I think OpenAI did something quite smart recently, where they called it OpenAI Academy, which is basically a webinar platform.
They're putting on videos for businesses or videos for educators and they're doing email capture.
They're effectively doing webinars, but because you're calling it Academy and it's focused on giving value, I think it goes down a lot better.
So yeah, I think we'll be rebranding 11 Labs webinars to something else soon.
I'm going to throw out some bold statements on topics we mentioned.
You said cat to LTV.
Yes.
Does cat to LTV matter because it's so inaccurate and transient?
Reason being, your cats go up and down very quickly over time.
And your LTVs, as you expand product lines, can significantly expand.
I come in as an entry product and suddenly I'm using four or five.
Does it really matter?
And can it not mislead you?
Actually, the day-to-day metric and ratio we're really thinking about is CAC to payback period rather than CAC to LTV.
We set different payback periods depending on which product line and how aggressive we want to be.
But these vary between, say, 12 months, 24, maybe even 36 months for that payback period.
And the 36 would be for the heavy enterprise?
Yes, exactly.
Where you know the customer is going to retain, they're maybe even signing multi-year deals.
And the way we set it up is each different channel has a marketing lead and they're thinking about this ratio.
And if it's positive, that basically means they should be putting their foot on the gas as quickly as possible.
You're exactly right, though, that over time you may be able to increase your payback period sooner.
So, for example, you may layer in an enterprise product and then you can sell your creators onto your enterprises.
The way I would think about this for other companies and as well as for Eleven Labs, is you set this goal?
If you're above that ratio, if the ratio is looking great, you should absolutely be putting your foot on the pedal and be trying to grow as quickly as possible.
Some people go, oh, we'll just raise our performance marketing spend by 20% a week.
Well, no, like take advantage of the opportunity, grow it as quick as you can.
On the other side.
If it's actually below, you could give yourself more freedom, because maybe you've got a bet on the thesis of how it will play out, where still you're like okay yes, we are losing money over the first two years for this product, but that's a bet we want to make.
But actually if your marketing is going very well, which for lots of these great AI companies there are then actually it's more just like clear permission to grow as quickly as you can.
Do CACs go up or down over time?
When you think about it from different purviews that you've had.
Brand marketing becomes a thing, word of mouth.
You can see virality in communities.
One would think it goes down, but then also you saturate your core audience and you move to a less defined ICP.
Maybe it goes up.
What have been your observations on CAC going up or down over time?
So for specific channels, they do tend to go up.
But when you look at it broadly, and as you're adding new channels, when you're increasing the virality, when you're improving your activation rate, your conversion to paid yes, you can kind of get that overall blended cat to hopefully even just stay flat.
But, exactly as you said before, because you're able to layer in say, enterprise products you cannot sell to.
Or we actually have done this funky move of we've layered in a consumer product which enables us to get the CAC incredibly cheap and then people may move up to creator or even enterprise.
Is the future of enterprise consumer entry?
And what I mean by that is to your point there.
At the end of the day, we all forget that everyone is a consumer.
Every big enterprise user is a consumer at some point.
Is the future of enterprise consumer entry?
I actually really hate the word enterprise in general.
Bold.
For a while, within Eleven Labs, there was this phrase of like we need to sell to enterprises, but who are the enterprises?
And I was like, let's work together.
Let's refine who exactly they are.
And we basically worked out.
They're normally like engineering managers or product leads at these larger companies.
Sometimes the CIOs or CTOs are involved too.
But first step is like, okay, let's actually define who are we selling to.
And then you do realize okay wait, they have so much overlap with our developer audience and our developer marketing.
And maybe it's not about doing long white papers and executive dinners.
Maybe it's actually more about this bottoms up approach.
But zooming out, the bit we've actually landed on at Eleven Labs is we want to grow super quickly.
We want to try and get and work with all the best companies in the world.
Why not do both?
And so what we've done is spin up separate teams.
So we have an enterprise marketing team, which is just focused on going in on the top.
They're like, how do I get these SQLs, which are marketing sourced?
They're doing executive dinners.
They're doing the events.
They're doing the webinars, which you love.
So they're doing ABM, like personalized outreach, very tailored.
Yes, very tailored.
And then on the other end, we have a developer's team, which is developer advocates, which are focused on this much kind of broad scale awareness.
We're doing hackathons.
We're doing different events from the bottoms up.
And so they have completely different goals, but kind of work in tandem with these roughly overlapping audiences.
You mentioned the push in billboards and in podcasts and all these.
How do you think about when's the right time to do brand marketing?
Ideally, you're doing it right from the start.
If you're trying to build a massive company, you want people to join you for your mission.
And now how that may look like over time may switch.
But right at the start, I'd really be thinking about engaging with your community.
Like you said earlier, you messaging every single person on Twitter that follows you.
That's you building your brand.
That's you as a person being related to.
So ideally, you have right at the start and it comes from the founder of them putting themselves out there, being authentic, then building it.
And then, yes, over time, you can scale that into different brand awareness campaigns.
And I think you just need to choose that ratio of spend, which you're happy with.
Maybe that's 20%, maybe that's 70%.
I think it depends how well your other channels are working.
You said there about kind of founder putting themselves out there.
Yes.
How important is founder brand today?
I think it's incredibly important.
It's also, though, super tough and very distracting.
It's a commitment.
That's what people don't recognize.
It's not like, I'll do a post.
No.
You post every day.
You post every day.
You're getting the dopamine of likes on your LinkedIn posts, likes on your X threads.
I think it's quite risky because you can spend all this time actually then optimizing for the wrong thing.
The way we think about it at 11Labs.
It's like what channels really naturally resonate with the founders and do they get really excited by.
And so for us, Matty is fantastic in person, at large speaking events, at fireside chats.
And so that's what he really leans into.
Equally, he's not that excited about being active on Twitter or X.
He naturally isn't that active on those platforms and that's fine.
And the way that we've done it is we basically kind of have other people within the company which are instead active and pushing.
So I'm quite active, the developer team's quite active and instead we're pushing the company mission through channels we get really excited by.
I also always think that just because you focus on one channel speaking say, at events doesn't mean you can't go multi-channel with that.
And so I would be like hey, how do we get video editors to go to every single thing that he does, get him speaking for I don't know 10 a month say, and just fucking pummel TikTok Instagram, YouTube shores with Matty speaking at different events.
You could do that, but you then constantly see yourself going viral on these channels.
Maybe you're getting negative comments largely positive comments but still putting yourself out there.
And so actually, if you're not naturally that excited by it, it's a big distraction.
And the way I view startups is they're long-term games.
They're 10-year, 20-year long games.
And so you need to stay in that and also recognize like, what do you personally get really excited by?
Do you believe that there's no such thing as bad press?
Essentially, relevance is everything.
I think there is such thing as bad press, particularly if you're trying to sell to enterprises.
Deal would be bad.
Yeah, deal.
They're in a tough spot.
Another good example is, have you seen this company which raised $4 million?
Oh my God, I saw it literally.
Roy something raised $5.3 million.
What's it called?
It's the Cheat on anything.
Yes yes, so they've done, gone for cheat on anything.
Their founder-led marketing is him getting offers for amazon, for palantir, for google, and then telling them actually, oh wait, i cheated on it using my tool and that gets fantastic marketing.
But he's also putting a big black X on himself if he ever actually wants to sell to enterprise sales teams where you're like oh, do I really trust this person?
You know, I think it's a risky move.
Do you think so?
Or do you think it's just a good entry point to build that brand?
Because actually, do you know what?
In six to 12 months time, when he's got experienced sales reps in there who are actually selling real products going hey, we work with Rippling and we work with 11 Labs, you can get away from it.
Maybe, but I think the core of your brand needs to be authentic and it needs to come from a place where you really believe in and everyone is going to remember that company as the one which helps you cheat on their different tests, which is fine.
If he leans into okay, I want to sell the more consumer type.
I help people in their day-to-day life.
Maybe that's absolutely fine.
But I think if you're trying to do large-scale enterprise sales, where you want to be seen as the trusted partner which often you do and that's the differentiator then I think it is a more risky play.
People often forget how difficult it is to shift a tag being calm.
Everyone goes to the meditation company.
Yes.
And it's like that is not what they are for them.
They really try and move away from that.
And it's just very difficult, when you become very well known for something, to lose that original tagging.
So I think you need to be really intentional right from the start.
What's the different messaging?
Who do you want to resonate with?
Who do you want to stand for?
And for us at Eleven Labs, we want to be the super trusted player in the space, both for voice actors and the large enterprises.
How do you think about competition and how do you advise founders on competition?
I think it's a great way to counter position against other brands.
Pretty much every space you go into, there will be existing large players.
There's a couple of different options which works.
The YC1 approach, which often works really well, is basically just kind of ignore them.
Put on your blinkers.
Speak to your customers, make an incredible product.
I think that's really smart for product development.
But I think what Ramp has done with their counter positioning against Brex is just genius marketing.
So you say counter positioning twice.
I love seven powers.
And so like for me, it's like, you know, incredibly exciting.
But what is counter positioning for us?
Counter positioning is where you take what someone else is like core messaging or core positioning in the market.
And you take the exact opposite and you use that as your strength rather than your weakness.
And so the example with Brex is Brex really stood for like hey, spend as much money on your card as possible?
We give you all these fantastic points.
And it's kind of like, look how many like extra points and rewards and stuff we're giving.
And then Ramp took the exact opposite approach, which was hey, we're not going to give you any points.
Points are a waste of money.
Points you end up spending on stupid things.
Instead, we're going to pump that all back into software.
As soon as they made points an actual bad thing and got the whole market to think about points being bad, let's use it to invest in great software and the focus instead being on saving money and almost reducing the number of these imaginary points you're getting.
They were really well counter-positioned to basically every time Brex would do something they'd be able to riff off the other way.
I'm just thinking how we could use counter-positioning effectively.
Yes.
I'm just like in a world of like really long podcasts where like three and a half hours of Joe Rogan pontificating about, you know, planetary evolution.
You could do like a three minute episode.
Do you know what I mean?
Like just the best bits.
Yeah.
Well, I think you did that right from this.
You were 20 VC.
You were short.
You were concise.
You were counter-positioned at the start.
The interesting thing is you're now kind of the incumbent and people have moved on or not moved on.
No, totally.
The amount of people I get that message me, like, we're going to start the 19 minute VC.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm like, you can keep going.
I'll do the 18.
I saw one great example recently was the, I think it's TP and the new.
TBPN.
Yeah.
Yes.
Terrible name, but great content.
And they were like... Okay, so this is interesting.
Yes.
And I'm going to get in trouble for this, but fuck it.
I think it's Clubhouse of our era.
Interesting.
And so they have brilliant channel market fit.
Yes.
Which is they crush it on Twitter for very specific clips.
When you look at any of their view rates, very little.
When you look at their retention on engagement rates, fuck all.
But they have brilliant... And this is not a criticism of them.
They crush channel market fit.
Yeah.
They have brilliant for Twitter for certain types of videos, but they also do volume.
It's a spray game.
Clubhouse.
We will see.
I think they're still evolving what their actual product is, but they found this, as you said, like channel fit.
And to jump back to the counter positioning, they've done the really the funky thing of they're like OK, they've counter positioned against All In where All In was like no ads.
They're like, we're going to be all ads.
And they're like TechCrunch is going more the vibe or maybe not TechCrunch, but traditional media is going more the vibe of being like anti-tech.
They're like, no, we're going to be completely pro-tech.
Others are going like, oh, we're only polish button up the clean cuts.
They're like, no, we're going to be like streaming live content, the raw stuff.
And also they're like smartly dressed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like no tech bro hoodies and stuff.
They're like shirts and they look really formal.
I think they've been really smart.
So I didn't mean that as a takedown, but I think it's interesting.
Dude, we were breaking down the teams earlier.
Yes.
You have a weird element, which is, and you said this to me before, you don't have PMs.
Yes.
Why?
Explain this to me.
This is like the holy grail of product teams, no?
And for context, Harry asked me this in front of an audience of about 90%.
Of only PMs, do you remember?
Of only PMs, yeah.
You raised your hand and it was like, oh God.
So...
The reason we don't have PMs is our overall thesis is that engineers are building the product and they should be responsible for the product.
And with AI now, we're seeing much more like different traditional roles merging.
And so engineers are going towards product engineers or engineers towards growth engineers.
And what's fantastic is when you have product engineers and the engineers who are actually building the product, they own the roadmap.
They can go from idea and chances are their ideas are better and more right because they're the ones speaking to users and understand the context.
So they can have better ideas.
They then ship the product.
They then get the results and analyze them.
And they do that entire loop without needing anyone else's permission or anyone to slow them down.
So that's why I think it's the ideal setup is engineers own the product and they're responsible for it.
Now we then, instead of having PMs or a separate marketing function, which is kind of like three separate functions engineering, product marketing instead we've merged a lot of product with a lot of marketing and called that growth.
And most of the team actually is ex-PMs who are now doing growth.
And so they're responsible for the marketing as well.
And so now each different product has an engineering lead which is responsible for how great is the product overall, and they partner with the growth lead which is responsible for particularly the awareness, the acquisition, and then they collab on the activation and retention pieces.
How do you prevent the growth role, which is a lot for PMs, just slipping into a PM role again and trying to actively manage product and kind of over-engineer with the engineers?
We keep the growth teams pretty small.
And so, frankly, there's just not enough time to be meddling in the different engineers' work.
You're not going to be doing wireframes or going to be doing like large numbers of user interviews, because you're too busy running the launches or running the channels for that particular product.
So that's one is like we keep it pretty busy and lean.
And the other one is if you hire great engineers, they just don't need it.
And so the best engineers we hire, we put everyone through a product challenge, which is where we give them an imaginary product and we ask them step one, work out what features you should build like.
Imagine I'm a customer.
Imagine you're doing research.
They will actually go through on Google and find competitors and use that to shape the features.
So step one is work out what features to build.
Step two they're then gonna turn that into the actual wireframes and they'll be sketching out in Figma of like okay, this is what I think the product should look like.
And then step three is you have system architectures.
So they're like, okay, this is the different backend, the API design.
And if you hire an engineer who one you know is really strong at coding, because you've screened for that before.
And two, you've then tested them through this full product loop.
Like you, have confidence that they're able to take those products and those features from idea to launch.
Do you think we will see PMs reduce as a role in future tech companies, with AI becoming more and more prominent?
Yeah, I think PMs move to either growth.
So you combine the PM role with marketing and, depending on your size and how strong your engineers are, you do more or less of the PM.
Or many PMs will actually move towards product engineering, which is they're somewhat technical already.
They can actually upskill themselves using tools like Cursor or Lovable and actually go and ship full end-to-end products.
Can I ask you today, when you think about 11 Labs code, how much of it do you think is AI generated?
So I still write code probably 20% of the time.
The only code I write is through Curta, where I'm describing in the chat what I want done, and then it executes on my behalf.
And I'm probably more the extreme because I'm often doing like growth features which are adding on top of the core of the product.
In terms of core engineering, i would say probably 60 70 percent of code now is ai written.
So still like the majority, where we don't do any ai written or ai generated code is our research engineering, where it's just like research engineering and research, where it's a very different style of work and also these code bases are so sensitive.
When you think about the initial 11 labs launch and how quickly we got to a billion dollars of revenue, That's pretty much Peter's models being world-class.
And so that we just don't want to go through any sort of LLM.
Was that a million dollars of revenue?
I said billion dollars of valuation.
And I think truthfully at that point it was like probably half the enterprise value of the company was Peter's model.
Nuts.
Yeah.
Unbelievable.
Can I ask you, we mentioned, I'm really jumping around, but fuck it, I enjoy it so much.
We mentioned like the enterprise discussions that you had earlier, moving into enterprise.
The big concern with a lot of essentially these Gen AI companies today is that they're sugar high revenues.
They're unsustainable.
We've seen them both.
They hit 50 million ARR.
Wow, wow, wow.
But it's like, is it real revenue?
How do you think about?
Do we have a generation of companies where it's pretty synthetic revenue or not?
Yeah.
It probably varies by product to product.
But if they're solving a real problem and the retention is strong, I see no reason why these aren't real revenues.
And the thing that I've spoken to a few VC friends.
I don't understand why they're not upping the rate of their investing.
They're seeing companies which are now.
They're like it's already on 6 million MRR in like one year.
And I'm like, why aren't you investing on it?
And they're like, well, there's this other one, which is now on like $10 million of MRR.
You're like, surely now is the time.
Like the wrong time to be the tiger global play of investing quickly was back in the COVID boom.
The exact right time is now when, I think, you have this unlock of capabilities with the AI models, which has meant new products which just couldn't exist before.
I think the hardest thing is before there were two to three competitors.
Yes.
Now there is literally 10 to 15.
Yes.
On everything.
And so discerning winners is much harder when all of them have relatively impressive traction and revenue.
But as long as they're solving real problems and scaling quickly and the customers are retaining particularly if you're doing B2B or enterprise you're going to get that cohort of customers for a while.
And so if you're already on 10 million of revenue if we think that it used to be, the threshold for IPO was like oh, let's get to 100 million of ARR you actually have entire waves of companies which are now reaching those thresholds.
What is good retention?
This is a hard point, which is like in traditional enterprise, it was very, very high, very high.
And you'd look at like a lovable with like, I think that 86%, I think Anton said on the show.
In traditional SaaS, that's still shit.
You're churning 14% a month.
I think people largely think about retention for consumer and pros team of wrong.
So for enterprise it's very clear, which is you sign one contract, say you sign a large enterprise, hypothetically Slack, and you land then one seat and then you expand.
And then you can look through and be like oh, our NRR after one year is we're now on 150 NRR.
Great, that contract's grown.
If you think about the way it's actually grown underneath, it's like seat expansion within Slack.
I'm sure lots of those individuals have churned.
On an individual user, they're probably not growing that individual user's revenue more than 100 instead of you're growing within that account base.
And I think when you look at consumer and prosumer yes, for that individual user you may only be on 87 revenue retention.
But what then happens is you build a product on Lovable.
You then share it with a bunch of your friends.
A handful more people sign up to Lovable.
And so, when you take into account the natural virality rates, I think your overall NLR of that one account you've grown may actually be a lot higher.
You should still look at the individual like seat retention.
I think it's fine to have it below the 100% on the individual level.
And then when you zoom out and taking into account the organic growth which comes because of it that you do want to be over 100.
You know, what was nuts is actually the fact that the revenues are growing so fast that by the time the rounds are done.
Yes.
I mean, when we did Lovable, I think it trebled its revenue by the time the round had completed.
And I was like, I would want to retrade on price.
It was only a 10x revenue multiple when we did it.
Yeah, yeah.
Fucking nuts.
Yeah we, we both invested in lovable and um at the end of q1 on 11 labs.
We did very well.
We had like our best quarter ever.
We had more enterprise using it.
We had more consumers, more prosumers.
I was like tapping myself on the back.
You know, growth team.
I was like we did pretty well.
And then we got the uh email from lovable with their latest results.
I was like okay, we need to up our game a bit.
Back to what no one leaves the office.
No one leaves.
Don't let matty see this email.
Don't let matty see this email.
What do you actually think happens there?
Does Lovable become a 10 billion company and change the way that we create websites?
Does it do Squarespace, Wix, adopt similar processes?
What happens?
I think there's a few ways they could go.
Overall, though, I'm just very bullish.
I don't see a reason that the level of intelligence in these AI models will slow down.
And so, given that it will keep rising, I think you're going to see more and more engineering.
We're already at say, 60 of all our code being AI generated.
Then you have the broader lifecycle of all the testing, deployment, infrastructure.
There's no reason why any of that couldn't be all done by AI as well.
And so I think Lovable's in a fantastic place to own that core stack.
The tricky bit, I think, at the start is how do you make it super secure?
How do you get enterprises to build it?
How do you do full apps?
And I think Retool is kind of dead at the wheel at the moment.
I don't hear the recent things they've been launching.
And so I could imagine Loveball going in that direction.
You're cringing.
No, I'm with you totally.
I remember when they were the hottest company.
Yes.
Yeah.
I haven't heard anything.
Yeah, it's tricky.
It's tricky.
But I could imagine you know Loveball you sell to a large enterprise, you get behind their firewall and you just keep it as an internal app.
Then you can like massively expand within that with far less risk.
Maybe make it read-only seats as the primary use case.
But Anton's super smart.
I'm sure he'll work out.
I totally agree.
I love Loveball and I think they're fantastic.
Do you enjoy angel investing?
It's fun.
I missed 11 Labs, so I'm not sure how good I am.
We had Runner, the running app, and they just did fantastically well.
That's my first exit.
They just sold to Strava.
Incredible team.
So I just find it as a really fun way to partner with people who I really back.
Dude, I want to dive into a quick fire.
So I say a short statement.
You give me your immediate thoughts.
Does that sound okay?
Great.
Number one, what's the most common or expensive mistake that you see early founders making?
The biggest mistake I see early founders making, particularly for B2B, is doing paid marketing too early.
Because if you don't have PMF yet, you're not going to get paid marketing working and you're going to spend all your time and all your engineering time optimizing funnels and conversion and creating these different creative and ads and caring about your rankings and your meta metrics.
None of that actually matters apart from just build an incredible product.
And I think the core loop of do incredible launches and build an incredible product is enough for any B2B or prosumer product to get that initial product market fit.
And then you can start testing out different pay channels.
The caveat though, I'd say is if you are a consumer distribution with B2B, you basically know, if you build an exceptional product, you can staff the sales team to it and they'll be able to scale it.
So distribution is not as much of a risk.
With consumer, it's very different where distribution is a key part.
You could create an incredible product, but if no one hears about it, then you can't scale it.
And so instead, you may want to consider performance marketing earlier.
But again, I would try and lead to other channels, which also increase brand.
I totally agree with you.
The one thing I find paid really helpful for is if you're strategic around how you use it for testing.
And so if you use it for testing on different messaging...
I've never seen that work.
Have you?
I've seen people waste a lot of time.
It runs our media business on, like different title optimisation and different colour optimisation, different font optimisation.
Yes, yes.
But when you were making your first episodes, should you have spent more time A-B testing different podcasts and maybe Harry, instead of 20VC, could have lent more into product or growth earlier.
No, just like brute force more shows.
Yes, exactly.
Build a better product first and then lean into paid.
Totally.
That was a shitty suggestion, Harry.
What's the most underappreciated growth channel today?
What do people not do that you like?
The most underappreciated growth channel I see is organic LinkedIn.
On Twitter, you're competing against the best writers in the world.
You're competing against Harry Stebbings running shorts.
Bill Ackman.
Yeah, Bill Ackman.
Like, it's really tough.
On LinkedIn, you're competing against Freddie from Deloitte who got a promotion.
Right.
And so the bar to creating great content and standing out and being authentic is so much lower.
That is so true.
LinkedIn is unbelievable as a content engine today.
100%.
Really.
What's the most polluted channel that you're like, oh, stay away?
Actually, LinkedIn ads.
So LinkedIn organic is fantastic.
The bar's so low you can get stuff super viral.
LinkedIn ads, the CPMs are so high.
Yes, you can do great targeting, but actually, I would argue, invest a lot more time into creating excellent content that you distribute organically.
Maybe you want to layer on ads on top, but particularly the kind of people that are then running LinkedIn ads.
You're doing enterprise, you're doing heavy products with a long sales cycle.
It's really tough to get that working and instead I would just focus on the organic side.
What's your advice to someone starting a new role in growth tomorrow?
The biggest advice I would give is get great at copywriting.
When you think like the actual writing copy, writing words, how do you make something engaging?
How do you get your message across?
It's so fundamental to any bit of growth you do.
So, whether you're running linkedin ads, if you're doing organic linkedin, if you're doing a blog post, a tweet thread, if you're doing copy for your landing pages, get great at copy, as that's the foundation for all other growth.
It's fantastic podcast.
You know why.
You're actually a brilliant podcast guest as well, and this would be a big advice that i should actually tweet and i probably will do later.
You repeat the question at the start of your statement, which is so helpful for shorts.
Do you see what I mean?
You have to have distribution in mind.
Totally.
But you say the biggest problem people make with X. Yes.
Because the worst thing is when people just go, oh, they do this.
Yes.
That's really hard to short formify.
Yes.
Do you see what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Many reasons why I'm single.
It's because I get excited by that.
What would you most like to change about the world of growth?
I'd most like to...
You've made me aware I'm now doing it.
Come on.
The thing I'd most like to change about the world of growth is you just should not launch products which aren't actually ready.
The biggest villain I see doing this at the moment is Apple.
And so we've always held Steve Jobs in our mind as, just like this, beacon of marketing and product and engineering.
And now you have Apple pushing that.
The reason you should upgrade to the newest iPhone or upgrade to the newest laptop is because of Apple intelligence.
Well, as no one actually knows what Apple intelligence is, or how to use it, or gets any value from it.
It's not coming out until 2026.
It's still not out.
So why are they pushing in their marketing?
Instead, make sure your product is actually ready, that it performs great, and then ship it and push it hard.
They did kind of change their whole AI team, I think, as a result of that.
What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?
The biggest thing I changed my mind on in the last 12 months is whether voice AI agents or conversational AI agents actually work.
And so when I joined at LeatherNavs, we had this fantastic box where you could type in text and generate lifelike speech.
And Matty was saying like oh, soon you'll be able to have full AI agents that you can have natural conversations and it'll sound really human-like.
And you could use that for sales and for customer support and for relationship coaching.
And I was like, that will never work.
The latency will just be too high.
You won't be able to have these sub 200 millisecond interactions.
I was completely wrong.
And so on.
About the 20th customer that Asset11 Labs had helped build these conversational AI agents.
We were like okay, let's actually turn this into a proper platform and build conversational AI as a feature.
And now it's.
I actually prefer speaking to an AI customer support agent than a real person because they're more knowledgeable.
They know exactly how to solve your problems.
They can escalate, they know all the policies.
You also don't have to be fake polite.
You know what i mean.
Like i know that you don't have feelings that's like what's this, what's that?
Yeah, i totally agree.
When does the infrastructure layer become the application layer?
And what i mean by that specifically is like you could be synthesia, you could be hey gen.
Yeah, why does the infrastructure layer not become the application layer?
I think it does, but you, as the infrastructure player, really need to partner with companies and be very explicit around which areas you want to go deep on.
We want to build the best platform to make these end-to-end conversational AI agents, but we explicitly don't want to be building full digital avatar platforms.
So that way, we're able to be trusted partners to companies like HeyGen, Synthesia Captions, who rule customers, but we're able to build these fantastic infrastructure layers on top.
You know, i invested in captions.
Really yeah, they're doing great, so i i invested in captions.
This is this shows how theory driven i am as an investor and um invested when it was basically a be real competitor, wow.
And then, like a year later, a friend of mine text me saying like we've got to invest in this company captions, And so I found the founder on LinkedIn.
I messaged him.
I, oh my God, would love to find a way to invest.
We love captions.
And he's like, dude, you already invested.
And I'm like, say what?
And he's like, we're a pivot.
You remember me?
You remember me?
I'm Gaurav.
And I was like, oh, shit.
But I'm sure you really helped him through that pivot.
And it was very useful having your advice.
Listen, I don't want to say I'm like a co-founder, but it was up there.
Why is inbound SDR as a role dead?
If you think about the actual function of most inbound SDRs.
So with an enterprise sales cycle, someone fills in a form, they then need to speak to an inbound SDR who basically goes through BANT screening.
So they work out, do you have the budget?
Do you have the authority?
Do you have the need?
Do you have the timing?
If yes, they then book you into another call with the AE, which actually closes the deal.
And so the function of an inbound SDR.
I'm sure the best ones are persuasive and they're friendly, but really the function is data collection.
And so instead, one, why don't you just add that to the form in the first place?
Well, the reason is people don't really want to go through this back and forth and go into more detailed questions and trying to design these complex flowcharts of forms.
And so instead you can switch out to a conversational AI agent, which can completely replace that role, and then get the people who should be booked in with AEs much quicker.
You could even clone the voice of the AEs, so it's like them almost pre-screening for their own deal flow.
I love that as an idea.
That'd be very funny to do.
You could do a lot of very funny things with your promotional videos, by the way.
Yes.
What should we do?
Well, I think you might also get in the realm of like copyrighted problems.
But like I don't know if you're allowed to like use, like Trump's voice and Obama's voice and like just rip.
We're not.
And actually we do a whole bunch of different safety work to make sure like it's explicitly used where people give permission for their voice on the platform.
Don't do that, kids.
Yeah.
Yeah, I remember when I met Victor from Synthesia the first time, like five, six years ago.
He was like, imagine we could have like Trump declaring this and doing this.
And I remember being like, no, no, no, that's a bad idea.
And I didn't invest in the seed.
Oh, I know.
Well, he's done great.
And I know they take safety very seriously as well.
No, they do.
Absolutely.
Sorry.
That sounds terrible.
He's so good.
I like him and Stefan a lot.
Final one.
What's the best growth strategy that you've just been really impressed by in the last 12 to 18 months?
Yeah.
The best growth strategy I've seen is what Brian Johnson is doing.
His marketing is so good that they made a Netflix show about his marketing.
And I do think Brian Johnson's actually being authentic.
Like he really does care about longevity, about creating great products, but he's put himself one, is like it's just super controversial what he's doing.
If you look at the way he dresses, it's like definitely not normal clothes.
And if the things he's doing, he's doing like bloodletting and blood transfers with his son.
One.
He's just generating a lot of controversy, such that you know we're speaking about him now on this podcast.
Two is they've really dialed in the messaging.
So like the don't die is super catchy and they've built a brand around it.
They built a community like their brand building is just fantastic.
And then their distribution.
He's constantly on Twitter.
Like anytime someone talks about doing a late night or eating junk food or pulling an all-nighter to ship a feature, he's there, like telling them off.
He's there.
In the comments, like wouldn't have done that if I'm you.
Yeah, I saw that.
Or he's quite sarcastically funny.
Jason Calacanis tweeted like a bitch of donuts.
And he was like, sign me up.
I'll take the box.
Yeah.
And it's just really funny to see him engaging in that way.
Yeah, 100%.
And you feel it is really authentic.
Like he genuinely does care.
I think he's genuinely doing it in a good way.
I have that longevity shake.
Is it good?
It's fucking brilliant.
Wow.
And I'm on a subscription.
It's £60 a month.
Yes, yeah.
So I'm £7.20 a year.
No way I'm fucking sure.
And I guess I take it when I travel.
I look like a drug dealer.
I've got cellophane bags of his stuff.
But it's amazing.
I'm totally with you.
Dude, this has been so much fun.
Thank you so much for doing this.
And it's been so good to have you in the studio.
Cool.
Thank you so much, Harry.
I have to say, the joy for me of doing vertical shows is just learning so much from amazing operators like Luke.
If you want to see the show, you can find it on Spotify by searching for 20VC.
I always love your thoughts on the show.
You can let me know by emailing me harry at 20VC.com.
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