Sub Club by RevenueCat
00:00:01 · David Barnard, Jack McDermott, Tanmay Jain
[00:00:01] S0: Welcome to the Sub Club podcast, a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors, and builders behind the most successful apps in the world to learn from their successes and failures. Sub Club is brought to you by RevenueCat. Thousands of the world's best apps trust RevenueCat to power in app purchases, manage customers, and grow revenue across iOS, Android, and the web. You can learn more at revenuecat.com. Let's get into the show. Hello. I'm your host, Barnard. And with me today, RevenueCat CEO, Jacob Eiting. Our guests today are Jack McDermott and Tanmay Jain, both working on mobile growth at ElevenLabs, the leading AI VoiceLab. On the podcast, we talk with Tanmay and Jack about how earned media can drive paid performance, building features that make for good tweets, and why stripping out your onboarding quiz might beat optimizing it. Alright. We've got a special one today with two guests and Jacob with me as well. So let's go one by one so people familiarize themselves with your voice. Jack, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today. [00:01:22] S1: Hey. It's great to be here. Thanks for having us. And Tanmay, nice to have you. [00:01:25] S2: Yeah. Super psyched to be here as well. [00:01:27] S0: And Jacob, always great to have you on the podcast.
00:01:27 · David Barnard, Jacob Eiting
[00:01:27] S0: And Jacob, always great to have you on the podcast. [00:01:30] S3: I'm excited to be a a fly on the wall today, you know, with our... We got a big crew, but I'm super excited. I'm a fan of of ElevenLabs and all this stuff. You guys have been super ambitious in a bunch of areas, so I'm excited to talk about, yeah, what's been going on. [00:01:45] S0: And that's exactly where I wanted to get started. ElevenLabs is super ambitious, and one of the cool things y'all are doing is not just being a foundation company and an API company servicing all sorts of apps and enterprise solutions, but you're building consumer apps. So I wanted to start with why build consumer apps as a model company. And I mean, you know, in some ways, listening might see it as competition. Like, they're a developer. They wanna experiment with voice. Like, why are you competing with your customers on the API side? But think it's a really cool way to build a company. So, yeah, I'd love to hear thoughts behind
00:02:19 · Jack McDermott, David Barnard
[00:02:19] S1: So I think an important part about ElevenLabs is we we really think of ourselves as a research and product company. That's kind of how we we got our start that it all goes back to the research at the beginning, and then at the end of it is being able to deploy that out as individual products. And you you may be a developer that consumes that or builds on that through an API. You may be a creative person or creator who who builds on top of our web or on top of our mobile interface. And ultimately, we're we're beginning to move towards consumers as well. So so we really think one of the underlying parts of ElevenLabs do is kind of the blurred line between creator and consumer. We we think that that line is beginning to blur a little bit. So at the end of the day, we we wanna have a direct relationship with users, with consumers, with creators, and ultimately with with developers at some of the biggest enterprises. So, yeah, we we kinda start from the first point of being able to build on top of great research and then to deploy it in a variety of ways and products. [00:03:18] S0: It's so powerful to be the the first best customer of your API as well. And, having those consumer products can be a superpower for the API. It's a it's a better API when internally you can be testing against it and know what the experience is of building against that API. Anything to add there, Tanmay?
00:03:18 · David Barnard, Tanmay Jain, Jacob Eiting
[00:03:18] S0: It's so powerful to be the the first best customer of your API as well. And, having those consumer products can be a superpower for the API. It's a it's a better API when internally you can be testing against it and know what the experience is of building against that API. Anything to add there, Tanmay? [00:03:34] S2: No. I think Jack nailed it. That's exactly it. I... We're an AI research lab, but we're actually not. We're a research... Product and research company. And we're, like, very deep on the product, very, very deep in the craft. There's a few, [00:03:46] S3: you know, OpenAI being maybe the the base example. And and just kind of surprised, it violated what I expected was gonna happen, which I thought all these companies were gonna be behind, back of the scenes enterprise, API companies. Traditionally, that's been where the focus is and where the scale is. So have you found it hard to be both? Like, how does the company... Because I... I'm mostly an API back end company. I'm struggling here. Like, it's a lot. Right? So, like, how do how do you both, like, balance the needs? Because it's very different. Right? To build, like... You know, obviously, there's some overlap there.
00:04:17 · Jack McDermott
[00:04:17] S1: One thing that I'll say that I think is really unique about ElevenLabs is people might think of ElevenLabs as as one enterprise or one one scaling startup. But inside of ElevenLabs, if you were to take a look at we really look like and feel like maybe 10 or 12 individual startups that are all building, shipping, then iterating all at once. And so we keep our teams intentionally really small. Our mobile team is about 12 people right now and growing. But each team that we kind of set up as a pod or a speed a speedboat, as we like to think of it, as their own kind of self contained development, design, growth product, and can kind of freely operate within that. And that's true across all things kind of voice agent to a creative platform to research team, which against some of the bigger labs is surprisingly small. And so we kinda like to find and play on that specific balance of small teams with big goals and big opportunity. And that's been one of the the key things that I think from the outside looks really unique about ElevenLabs.
00:05:23 · Tanmay Jain, David Barnard
[00:05:23] S2: Yeah. And it's definitely it's definitely something I I noticed as well. Like, I run the ElevenLabs sort of flagship app on mobile. There's a lot of times where we have to think about how does this behave in web? How does this behave in mobile? How do we manage that sort of crossover? And the guidance I've currently gotten is just go ship go ship fast. We will fit... You know, we trust you'll make the right decision. And, you know, if there's any gaps along the line, we'll figure that out, and we'll ship our way out of them as well. [00:05:46] S0: One of the interesting things y'all are doing as well is creating multiple apps. And we do, you know, we do see this with OpenAI creating Sora. The health app was a spinout, and ChatGPT, of course, being the kind of main app. But how do you think about being a multi consumer app product company?