The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:37:34 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:37:34] S0: Do CACs go up or down over time? When you think about it being from Yeah. 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. Yeah. What have been your observations on cat going up or down over time? [00:37:55] S1: 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 can upsell 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 [00:38:31] S0: is, to your point there, at the end of the day, we all forget that everyone is a consumer, that every big Enterprise user is a consumer at some point. Is the future of Enterprise consumer
00:38:31 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:38:31] S0: is, to your point there, at the end of the day, we all forget that everyone is a consumer, that every big Enterprise user is a consumer at some point. Is the future of Enterprise consumer [00:38:39] S1: I actually really hate the word enterprise in general. Bold. For for a while within ElevenLabs, 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 ElevenLabs 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. [00:39:45] S0: So they're doing ABM, like personalized outreach, very tailored.
00:39:45 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:39:45] S0: So they're doing ABM, like personalized outreach, very tailored. [00:39:49] S1: 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. [00:40:08] S0: You mentioned to push in billboards and in podcasts and all these. How do you think about when's the right time to do brand marketing? [00:40:14] S1: 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 they 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. [00:40:56] S0: You said there about kind of founder putting themselves out there. Yes. How important is founder brand today?
00:40:56 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:40:56] S0: You said there about kind of founder putting themselves out there. Yes. How important is founder brand today? [00:41:01] S1: I think it's incredibly important. It's also, though, super tough and very distracting. It's a commitment. [00:41:07] S0: That's what people don't recognize. It's not like I'll do a post. No. It's like you post every day. [00:41:13] S1: 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 ElevenLabs, it's like, what channels really naturally resonate with the founders and do they get really excited by? And so for us, Mati is fantastic in person at large speaking events, at fireside chat, 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.
00:41:13 · Luke Harries, Harry Stebbings
[00:41:13] S1: 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 ElevenLabs, it's like, what channels really naturally resonate with the founders and do they get really excited by? And so for us, Mati is fantastic in person at large speaking events, at fireside chat, 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. [00:42:01] S0: I also always think that just because you focus on one channel, said of that, doesn't mean you can't go multichannel 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 shorts with Mati speaking at different events.
00:42:01 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:42:01] S0: I also always think that just because you focus on one channel, said of that, doesn't mean you can't go multichannel 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 shorts with Mati speaking at different events. [00:42:22] S1: You could do that, but you then constantly see yourself going virals 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 their long term gains, their ten year, twenty year long gains, and so you need to stay in that and also recognize, like, what do you personally get really excited by? [00:42:48] S0: Do you believe that there's no such thing as bad press? Essentially, relevance is everything. [00:42:52] S1: 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 $4,000,000? [00:43:06] S0: Oh my god. The fight... Yeah. Yeah. I saw it literally. What's it Roy something raised five points three [00:43:10] S1: from Susa. [00:43:11] S0: What's it called? It's the cheat on anything.