The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:14:51 · Luke Harries
[00:14:51] S1: Yes. What it was? Yeah. When I joined, we were three people, all very junior, very specialist. 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's lovely. Your messaging's 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 it? Motion designers? Motion designers.
00:16:06 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:16:06] S0: I have not heard of this. Are we ring incarcerating Titanic? Like, why do we need motion designers? [00:16:11] S1: 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 mister 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 thirty seconds, and motion design is fantastic for this. Just digging in because a lot [00:17:08] S0: of people will love that. Like, short is, like, thirty seconds, like, three minutes?
00:17:08 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:17:08] S0: of people will love that. Like, short is, like, thirty seconds, like, three minutes? [00:17:13] S1: The way I would do it is actually, like, nearly all your attention for your videos should be on the first thirty seconds. Very quick intro, then get straight to the core value prop. 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 thirty seconds truly incredible. [00:17:34] S0: You mentioned some different types there. We've got the motion design ones which are more animated. Is that correct? Yes. [00:17:39] S1: Yeah. Exactly. [00:17:39] S0: And we've got the founder led kind of narrative. Any other types? [00:17:42] S1: So motion design, founder led, and screen share. Those are the three. [00:17:46] S0: What are the different use cases we would use them for? [00:17:49] S1: 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. [00:18:13] S0: Did you not like the staircase?
00:18:13 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:18:13] S0: Did you not like the staircase? [00:18:14] S1: The staircase the staircase was beautiful, but, you know, you're watching 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. [00:19:06] S0: Fascinating. How do you think about using humor? Is there any world where quirky humor, or is it actually like, no. No. No. This is a b to b sell, or this is a professional tool. Yeah. Don't try and be funny.
00:19:06 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:19:06] S0: Fascinating. How do you think about using humor? Is there any world where quirky humor, or is it actually like, no. No. No. This is a b to b sell, or this is a professional tool. Yeah. Don't try and be funny. [00:19:19] S1: I think it depends on the brand of your company. So ElevenLabs, we try and do the core ElevenLabs brand. It's, like, pretty serious, very concrete. We'd like to see ourselves among, like, Palantir and OpenAI 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. For 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. [00:19:54] S0: Can you do text to wife? [00:19:57] S1: When you have a wife, Harry, yes. [00:19:58] S0: This this would be a hilarious product actually for the next April fools. Have you ever done one which totally flopped and you're like, and there was a lesson tied to it?
00:19:58 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:19:58] S0: This this would be a hilarious product actually for the next April fools. Have you ever done one which totally flopped and you're like, and there was a lesson tied to it? [00:20:08] S1: 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 product 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. [00:20:38] S0: 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 wanna test. Is there a way to test in a non 50 to a 100 gram way of hiring a motion designer? [00:20:50] S1: Yeah. So most motion designers, they work with you on a specific project for about 5 to 10 k. And so that should be... For most people who have raised money, that should be enough to be able to test it. If you think of every launch we do, most launches get somewhere between 200,000 views and 700,000 views. And if you were to have to spend that on Facebook ads or any other medium, it's the CPMs, the CACs are gonna be way higher. So it's absolutely worth doing it.