The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
01:00:49 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[01:00:49] S0: Have you? I mean, it... [01:00:50] S1: I've seen people waste a lot of time. [01:00:52] S0: It runs on immediate business on, like, different title optimization True. And different color optimization, different font optimization. [01:01:00] S1: Yes. But when you were making your first episodes Yeah. Should you have spent more time AB testing different podcasts and maybe Harry instead of 20 VC could have lent more into product or growth earlier? [01:01:11] S0: No. It's just like No. Brute force more shows. Yeah. [01:01:14] S1: Exactly. Build a better product first Yeah. And then lean into paid. [01:01:18] S0: Totally. That was a shitty suggestion, Harry. What's the most underappreciated growth channel today? What do people not do that you like? [01:01:25] S1: 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 [01:01:36] S0: Ackman. Yeah. [01:01:37] S1: Bill Bill Ackman. Like, it's really tough. On LinkedIn, you're competing against Freddie from Deloitte who got a promotion. And so the bar to creating great content and standing out and being authentic is so much lower. [01:01:50] S0: That is so true. LinkedIn is unbelievable as a content engine today. [01:01:54] S1: Think 100%. [01:01:55] S0: Really. What's the most polluted channel that you're like, ugh, stay away?
01:01:55 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[01:01:55] S0: Really. What's the most polluted channel that you're like, ugh, stay away? [01:01:59] S1: Actually, LinkedIn ads. So LinkedIn organic is 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 have been running LinkedIn ads. You're doing enterprise. You're doing heavy products with long sales cycle. It's really tough to get that working, and instead, I would just focus on the organic side. [01:02:30] S0: What's your advice to someone starting a new role in growth tomorrow? [01:02:34] S1: 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 is 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.
01:02:34 · Luke Harries, Harry Stebbings
[01:02:34] S1: 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 is 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. [01:03:01] S0: It's fucking 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 see what I mean? Yeah. Say...... In mind. Totally. But you say the biggest problem people make with x. [01:03:22] S1: Yes. [01:03:22] S0: Because the worst thing is when people just go, oh, they do this. Yes. That's really hard to short formify. Do you see what I mean? 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? [01:03:36] S1: I'd most like to... You've made me aware [01:03:39] S0: I'm Fuck. Now doing Come on. Exactly.
01:03:39 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[01:03:39] S0: I'm Fuck. Now doing Come on. Exactly. [01:03:41] S1: 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. [01:04:10] S0: And it's not coming out until 2026. [01:04:11] S1: 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. [01:04:19] S0: They did kind of change their whole AI team, I think, as a result of What have you changed your mind on in the last twelve months?
01:04:19 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[01:04:19] S0: They did kind of change their whole AI team, I think, as a result of What have you changed your mind on in the last twelve months? [01:04:26] S1: The biggest thing I changed my mind on in the last twelve months is whether voice AI agents or conversational AI agents actually work. And so when I joined ElevenLabs, we had this fantastic box where you could type in text, generate life like speech. And Matti 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 two hundred millisecond interactions. I was completely wrong. And so on about the twentieth customer that us at ElevenLabs 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.
01:04:26 · Luke Harries, Harry Stebbings
[01:04:26] S1: The biggest thing I changed my mind on in the last twelve months is whether voice AI agents or conversational AI agents actually work. And so when I joined ElevenLabs, we had this fantastic box where you could type in text, generate life like speech. And Matti 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 two hundred millisecond interactions. I was completely wrong. And so on about the twentieth customer that us at ElevenLabs 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. [01:05:25] S0: You also don't have to be fake polite. You know what I mean? You're like, I know that you don't have feelings. It's like, what's this? What's that? Yeah. Yeah. I totally percent. When does the infrastructure layer become the application layer? And what I mean by that specifically is, like, you could be Synthesia. Mhmm. You could be, hey, HeyGen. Yes. Why does the infrastructure layer not become the application?