Sub Club by RevenueCat
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.
00:08:47 · David Barnard, Tanmay Jain
[00:08:47] S0: And so just to be clear, Tanmay, you run the the the flagship app, the the 11... What's the... It it called just ElevenLabs? [00:08:54] S2: It's just called ElevenLabs. [00:08:55] S0: Yeah. And then, Jack, you run ElevenReader, which is the even more kind of consumer focus where you can upload a PDF and generate audio. A really cool app, by the way. I I... My my son and I have been playing with text to voice, and he was tinkering with wanting to build an app. And we went right to ElevenReader. I was like, oh, man. This is so good. So how do you all think about that kind of cross functional, like, not stepping on each other's toes, but, like, incorporating those learnings across both apps.
00:09:22 · Jack McDermott
[00:09:22] S1: Well, I think one thing that's been interesting for us is, like, we... We've actually had to intentionally kind of create a bit of space between the two apps. Because when you go into the App Store or the Play Store and you type in Eleven Labs, you might be expecting to get a specific result when when you're doing a branded search like that. And if you're trying to find an app that that allows you to turn anything into an audiobook, you might not actually be top of mind with with ElevenLabs. But so we... We've tried to really intentionally create our own brands and our own kind of look and feel for each app, but we share like a common design system, a common set of technologies. A lot of our developers have have worked on on both apps by now and have a lot of experience between the two. And then have a few others that that are kind of in the test phase or in a a small bet right now that we're incubating. So I think it's just being very clear about the role of each app and the role of each audience that you're trying to serve and and being smart about, like, to what extent do you have to disintermediate or pull... Kinda pull the two apps apart and and run them both. And I'd expect that we'll build and launch a lot more as we go forward too.