The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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.
00:20:50 · Luke Harries, Harry Stebbings
[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. [00:21:15] S0: 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. And we have teams of video 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. [00:21:33] S1: 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 livestreams. I'm not sure if you've actually seen any time someone does a livestream, their entire audience has a bright red bar on top of the Twitter screen saying, bloody blah, it's 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.
00:21:33 · Luke Harries, Harry Stebbings
[00:21:33] S1: 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 livestreams. I'm not sure if you've actually seen any time someone does a livestream, their entire audience has a bright red bar on top of the Twitter screen saying, bloody blah, it's 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. [00:22:09] S0: 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?
00:22:09 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:22:09] S0: 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? [00:22:24] S1: 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 would care about. And we have tier three, which is basically just put on the change log. 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 did 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 choose 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 time stamps. It supports 99 languages. That's actually what we spend a lot of time on is really nailing that messaging.