The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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.
00:31:03 · Luke Harries, Harry Stebbings
[00:31:03] S1: Yeah. [00:31:03] S0: How do you think about that? [00:31:04] S1: This is why I think right at the start, you should hire a growth engineer that's front end focused that can independently be focused on building these and exposing these small bits of value out so that people can get and experience the value as quick as possible. If you go to the ElevenLabs homepage today, we have one text box where you can type in text, play speech, but we also have all our products are in these little text boxes. These are outside of the login and that people can try. So the challenge I give to you is don't expose your whole product. Don't give it all away for free. But what are these small bits of value that you could give away for free so people can experience that wow moments as quick as possible? [00:31:42] S0: You said about distribution and cross posting everywhere. Yeah. Bluesky, wow, threads. I mean, okay. I'm glad someone posted that. My question to you on that is, should we not choose one or two channels to absolutely crush and focus on versus spray and pray? [00:31:57] S1: Do both. So first of all, choose the channels where your audience are. So for us, that's x and LinkedIn. Make sure those are really great. But then after, just repost it for the others because there are people on the other platforms who, for some reason, prefer Threads or Bluesky, and you want to reach them too. And, also, because other people are overlooking those channels, you have a much greater chance that you'll be able to own them and build an audience there.
00:31:57 · Luke Harries, Harry Stebbings
[00:31:57] S1: Do both. So first of all, choose the channels where your audience are. So for us, that's x and LinkedIn. Make sure those are really great. But then after, just repost it for the others because there are people on the other platforms who, for some reason, prefer Threads or Bluesky, and you want to reach them too. And, also, because other people are overlooking those channels, you have a much greater chance that you'll be able to own them and build an audience there. [00:32:18] S0: Is it the same audience on x and LinkedIn or different? [00:32:22] S1: Largely different. We see X as mainly for our creator and developer. We see LinkedIn mainly for our potential future employees, potential partners, and enterprises. But we write the content in a way which tries to cater towards both. [00:32:37] S0: Do you have TikTok, and do you think of TikTok as a [00:32:40] S1: group? And we've actually just hired our first in house creator whose only job is to create TikToks, YouTube videos, Instagram Shorts, YouTube Shorts for ElevenLabs. And the way we actually hired this guy is if you typed in ElevenLabs on YouTube, he had the most viewed video above us. And so we were like, okay. He's creating fantastic content. Let's actually hire him, supercharge him, and particularly for this creator audience And having someone who can speak to them as a creator will really supercharge growth. [00:33:10] S0: When you look back at the distribution, the channel strategy, what mistake do you think you made?