The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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.
00:22:24 · Luke Harries, Harry Stebbings
[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. [00:23:31] S0: How many messages can we have? So... If we if we want most accurate, fastest, and cheapest, is that too much?
00:23:31 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:23:31] S0: How many messages can we have? So... If we if we want most accurate, fastest, and cheapest, is that too much? [00:23:38] S1: So we always have a primary one. So the primary one which you'll hear me, Matti, 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 Bluesky. We post on threads. Every single channel, Product Hunt, Reddit, Hacker News. [00:24:33] S0: Be real. I mean, at that at that rate, you're fucking going into the crowds, aren't you?