The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:26:11 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:26:11] S0: And go like, wow. This must be good content. We'll promote it to our larger audience. [00:26:15] S1: 100%. And what's interesting is when I speak to new founders, they're like, oh, Luke, but this is easy for you. You have a 200 person team. You have top investors. You have Harry as a mate who will share your stuff. And what I'd put back to them is like, okay. Chances are if you're, like, getting to launch a product, you've raised a bit of money, you have some friends, you know a few people in the industry, you should be shameless. I ran this through with someone recently, and we were like, let's take your Gmail. Let's literally get every single person you have sent an email to in the last five years. Great. You've now got 3,000 people. Then who's following you on Twitter? Who are you connected with on LinkedIn? Let's just manually go through and DM all of them to boost your launch, and you need to give your launch a big boost for these algorithms to actually care about it. [00:27:01] S0: I'm amazed by how nervous people are to ask, number one. I'm amazed by how nervous people are to do things that won't scale. For the first 50,000 Twitter followers I got, I personally DMed everyone, and I suggested that they follow our newsletter as well. Wow. But I was cross advertising channels [00:27:17] S1: Yeah. 100%. For 50,000. Wow. I'm going to do that after. On... No. Seriously, like, at the
00:27:17 · Luke Harries, Harry Stebbings
[00:27:17] S1: Yeah. 100%. For 50,000. Wow. I'm going to do that after. On... No. Seriously, like, at the [00:27:22] S0: end of every day, fifteen minutes, you just continuously cross promote other channels. Honestly, it's how we got to several 100,000 on news. For founders that are maybe not as versed, what makes a good tweet, Trev? What should they not do? How would you advise me? [00:27:36] S1: Yeah. So it's pretty simple. The first thing is, like, get the first word right. If you're doing a launch, use the word introducing or we're excited to launch. Make it really clear that you're launching a new product, introducing the world's best speech to text model. That's the first line. Make it simple. One line gets across exactly what you're launching with that keyword which flags it. Then have a space and then do either a bullet point list or a paragraph going into a bit more detail, maybe some of these secondary value props you want to get across, and then attach the launch video, which you spent lots of time working on. [00:28:10] S0: To the first one.
00:28:10 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:28:10] S0: To the first one. [00:28:11] S1: To the first one. Yeah. So that's then your first tweet. Then you could do a thread going into more information, maybe adding supplementary videos. And then the way that Twitter works is when you do a tweet, what will go out there and other people will see on their feeds will be the first tweet, then the others will actually be minimized, and then the last two. So you should put the call to action and the link in the very last tweet. And, actually, you should make that second last tweet great too. Don't put the link in the first tweet because Elon Musk has even said they actively down rank people when they do that. [00:28:43] S0: We do them for every show. Yes. And it's a real science in that respect. On the blog post side, people are going, hey. No one reads blogs. There's still a point to blog posts. [00:28:52] S1: Yeah. 100%. So two main points. The first one is for technical audiences. You need to go into the details. You need to show the benchmarks. You need to give a little bit the secret sauce of how you put it together. Go into those technical details. And the second one is SEO. Lots of people think SEO is dead, but it's really not. And so every time you do a launch, you want to have a key blog post or landing page that you push, and you get all the backlinks too, whether that's cross press, whether other people linking to it, whether from socials. SEO is not dead.
00:28:52 · Luke Harries, Harry Stebbings
[00:28:52] S1: Yeah. 100%. So two main points. The first one is for technical audiences. You need to go into the details. You need to show the benchmarks. You need to give a little bit the secret sauce of how you put it together. Go into those technical details. And the second one is SEO. Lots of people think SEO is dead, but it's really not. And so every time you do a launch, you want to have a key blog post or landing page that you push, and you get all the backlinks too, whether that's cross press, whether other people linking to it, whether from socials. SEO is not dead. [00:29:24] S0: No. Will it be in two to three years? When we see the shift in terms of users and where they come from, more and more, I think, you know, Guillermo from Vercel said it was one and a half, six months ago, and now it's four and a half. In two to three years, do you think we will see a much reduced SEO presence?
00:29:24 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:29:24] S0: No. Will it be in two to three years? When we see the shift in terms of users and where they come from, more and more, I think, you know, Guillermo from Vercel said it was one and a half, six months ago, and now it's four and a half. In two to three years, do you think we will see a much reduced SEO presence? [00:29:40] S1: With SEO, there's different types of SEO content. The first one is blog style content. This is, you know, long words, long form articles. That I think will increasingly die over time. But actually, it's not dead yet. If you look at Zapier, over 70% of their SEO traffic still goes to their blog. That's definitely not dead yet, but I think will die because you'll be able to have chat GPC give you a really great response. They will have scraped it, ingested it. But the part which I am confident will stick around for at least five years are tool pages. And so this is where, to give you an example, if you search text to speech Spanish, the first result will be ElevenLabs text to speech Spanish, which is a text box where you can type in any Spanish you want, choose a voice, and click play. And so that, like, requires some actual engineering work to make this text box. We do the same with speech to text. You create these mini tools often with proprietary data sources or some actual engineering work, and that's going to be a while before these LLMs are, like, spinning up whole dynamic pages. And by that point, maybe even better off because they're kind of replacing your product on the fly anyway.
00:29:40 · Luke Harries, Harry Stebbings
[00:29:40] S1: With SEO, there's different types of SEO content. The first one is blog style content. This is, you know, long words, long form articles. That I think will increasingly die over time. But actually, it's not dead yet. If you look at Zapier, over 70% of their SEO traffic still goes to their blog. That's definitely not dead yet, but I think will die because you'll be able to have chat GPC give you a really great response. They will have scraped it, ingested it. But the part which I am confident will stick around for at least five years are tool pages. And so this is where, to give you an example, if you search text to speech Spanish, the first result will be ElevenLabs text to speech Spanish, which is a text box where you can type in any Spanish you want, choose a voice, and click play. And so that, like, requires some actual engineering work to make this text box. We do the same with speech to text. You create these mini tools often with proprietary data sources or some actual engineering work, and that's going to be a while before these LLMs are, like, spinning up whole dynamic pages. And by that point, maybe even better off because they're kind of replacing your product on the fly anyway. [00:30:44] S0: How do you advise founders on mini tools to show the value of a product when it's actually an enterprise product? It's really difficult. If you have, like, an enterprise product Yeah. And, honestly, people won't buy without some sort of try. But it's pretty hard to try and commit the resources to doing that mini tool. [00:31:03] S1: Yeah.