The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:12:01 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:12:01] S0: Fucking nuts. Also, importance of market timing. Yes. Like, if you'd done Valor five years before and no Ozempic. [00:12:08] S1: Oh, yeah. It wouldn't have been a thing. [00:12:09] S0: There's no business there. Yeah. I totally get you. Fascinating. Dude, I have to then skip to another bit that you said there, which is that you were in the lake when he was pitching you with Mati. This is for ElevenLabs. And it's like, we're gonna be everything for everyone. This sounds bad. Like, I like a tight ICP where we can market to, we know which channels we're selling to, we can craft a product for them. How has a horizontal product offering worked so well when it is completely counter the narrative that we're always told?
00:12:37 · Luke Harries
[00:12:37] S1: I 100% agree. And actually, when I worked for PostHog, part of the magic was you have one ICP, which is a product engineer, and you're selling multiple products into it. So you're selling product analytics, selling session recording, feature flags all in. And each new product you add, it gives you another entry point. It enables you to, like, integrate the products to do completely new use cases, which couldn't be done before. We don't have any of that in some ways. And so with ElevenLabs, because we have the best AI audio models, so turning text into speech, speech into text, for making sound effects, voice learning, voice isolator, this is like a very horizontal foundational layer, which we sell as an API. So that's kind of your first product, the developer product. And then you can sell that API at scale. So you can sell it to enterprises. You can build around workflows doing conversational AI. So that's fantastic. But then because the team is super ambitious, you know, Mati and Peter literally want to build a bigger company than Google. They want to build something absolutely massive. And then they see like, oh, we could actually build this to build a reader app for your phone to read articles. So that's now a product. Then we're also building a creator platform. So this text box, which anyone can type in text, that's now creating whole audiobooks and voiceovers. But the interesting thing is it's actually really working for us. And I think the reason we've managed to get it working is because we've started with these incredible audio models. All these people come naturally to us. We've then been able to raise money, hire incredible founder type peoples who really own these individual products and grow them. And so, yeah, it's definitely not the norm. I'm not sure I'd recommend it, but for ElevenLabs, it seems to be working really well.
00:14:15 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:14:15] S0: When I listen to you, sounds fantastic. Yep. I'm also going, woah. Woah. Focus. Like, reader apps, communities. How would you advise founders on focus when it comes to product expansions? [00:14:26] S1: If I was to advise people, it would be choose your one ICP and build all the products around it to have them compound. However, that's not actually what we're doing. Instead, we're building discrete products, and the way we then tackle that is we basically shard the company. So we have a consumer app focused team, which has an entire growth team with a growth marketer, with paid ads, with community. We have created growth with their own paid ads, affiliates, and so forth. We have developer marketing, which is standalone. [00:14:56] S0: And so all of these sharded teams have their own growth elements to them? [00:14:59] S1: Yes. Yeah. Exactly. [00:15:00] S0: So there's not a horizontal growth team which sits on top of them?
00:15:00 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:15:00] S0: So there's not a horizontal growth team which sits on top of them? [00:15:03] S1: There is. So the structure we've set up is we have horizontal growth team, which are channel specialists. So we have a head of performance marketing who used to lead performance marketing for Shopify. We have a SEO expert who used to do most of this for Canva. We have, like, incredible individual specialists. But then within each team, we have a product growth lead who's responsible. They're basically CMO for their product, and they're thinking about all the metrics, the activation, the awareness, and then they have their own sub teams which are specialized just for them. Wow. Yeah. It's pretty funky. Our enterprise marketing team by the end of this year will be 20 people, and that's just for enterprise marketing. And then separately, our mobile app will be its own five to 10 person growth team. [00:15:47] S0: Wow. What was this like when you joined? And, like, if you were to advise founders on the scaling of that team and that structure
00:15:53 · Luke Harries
[00:15:53] S1: Yes. What what was it? Yeah. When I joined, we were three people, all very junior, very specialist. Hadn't actually done a growth role before, and this is the advice that I normally give. Start with one generalist growth marketer, and they should be responsible for everything from messaging and positioning, working with the founder, up to awareness and setting up channels and testing. The reason why you need them to do all of that is if you only hire a product marketer, great. Your positioning's lovely. Your messaging's lovely, but no one's heard of it. Or if you only hire someone who's very quantitative and channel focused, then they're only going to be focused on getting out there, but no one's actually gonna convert or resonate. So hire one generalist person, and the most important thing is that they really understand your product. And so this means if it's a technical product, they need to be technical. If it's a consumer product, they should really get the consumers and the virality. So it depends on the person. But start with a growth marketer. Normally, the second hire I recommend is a growth engineer who's front end leaning. And so this is like a software engineer who's hacky, who's running into metrics, and they should be setting up landing pages for SEO. They should be doing mini tools. They should be doing automated outreach. And then you can keep growing from there. Other great ones are like motion designers, back end focused growth engineers. What's that? Motion designers? Motion designers.
00:17:08 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:17:08] S0: I have not heard of this. Are we ring castrating Titanic? Like, why do we need motion designers? [00:17:13] S1: So video is hugely underrated as a medium for growth. And so every launch video we do, the keystone marketing piece we ship with it is the video. There's different types of videos you can do. You can do motion design, which is basically animated graphics. You could do a founder led video where they're speaking to the camera. You could do a more like screen share style video where they're kind of recording and interacting, and it's very product focused. But why I love motion design is it's abstract, so you can really focus on what are the core value props. You can make it catchy and attention focused and mix in the abstract UI elements. And the big mistake that I see with most people's videos is that they put the founder themselves. They do a full five minute monologue themselves about the company mission. And unless you have the editing skills of mister beast, you're just not going to keep people for the launch video. So make it sure, get the key message across in the first thirty seconds, and motion design is fantastic for this. [00:18:09] S0: Just digging because a lot of people will love that. Like, short is, like, thirty seconds, like, three minutes.