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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?
00:06:03 · Jack McDermott
[00:06:03] S1: One thing I think that's kind of, part of ElevenLabs, right, is from the beginning, we've built a very horizontal platform. You can create speech. You can create sound effects. You can create music. You can create speech to read aloud an audiobook or to be able to play into an ad. So I think we we have a very horizontal set of use cases that you can build on top of. And one of the things that we try to think of when on our team when we build apps is is really what's the form factor and and what's the ideal use case that kind of meets an individual where they are. Right? And so if you're a short form video creator on the go, you may need or be be able to to use a subset of the... Those horizontal capabilities. Whereas if you're a consumer that... That's trying to convert a PDF into lifelike audio to be able to improve reading and comprehension on the go, like that... That's its own separate use case as well. So I think we we really try to start from when we're we're spread that far as far as what we can do as a platform. We... You you kinda have to force yourself to think about what does the ideal user persona need? What does that look like as a form factor? Is an app the the right approach to be able to take? And at least twice now, we we found that's just the right way to go about it and has allowed us to continue to move really quickly and be super super focused on on specific users.
00:07:27 · Tanmay Jain
[00:07:27] S2: Sorry. And to share to share an example, like, you know, I previously was at Canva, and that was a story where we actually had a super app, and they tried to spin out a a separate app and actually ended up coming back to bring it into the... You know, into one core app. And the reason behind that was, you know, compared to ElevenLabs, which is horizontal API focused, while Canva serves to be kind of the design tool for everyone and semi sort of horizontal, it is one product. And so they tried to spin out a version called, you know, Canva Stories focused on Instagram Stories. And the product was amazing. It won, you know, Apple Awards. It was beautifully designed. Very, very, you know, unique use case, which was very prevalent at the time, you know, twenty nineteen, twenty twenty. But it just could never crack those acquisition problems. It could never crack the retention. It could never crack, you know, brand awareness. People came to an executive, woah. We want Canva. This is only a unique set. You know, this is a subset. And so because of that, it just never really took off. And so it takes a very unique and a very unique and very precise company structure to make this succeed. And the benefit as well is we now have two different testing grounds for a bunch of different things for two very different use cases. And so so often, I will go and test something or Jack will go and test something, and we'll swap notes. For example, you know, we're testing paywalls right now, and we're going through an exercise where I'm testing a couple of hypotheses. Jack's doing the same. And we're curious to see... Almost double or quadruple our surface area for learning.