A (3:18)

And it's so powerful to be the first best customer of your API as well. And having those consumer products can be a superpower for the API. 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?

C (3:34)

Tenmai no, I think Jack nailed it. That's exactly it. 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.

D (3:45)

There's a few, you know, OpenAI being maybe the biggest example and it's kind of surpr. It violated what I expected was going to happen, which I thought all these companies were going to 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 like, I'm mostly an API backend company. I'm struggling here. Like, it's a lot, right? So like, how do, how do you both like, like balance the needs? Because it's very different, right, to build like, you know, obviously there's some overlap there.

B (4:17)

One thing that I'll say that I think is really unique about 11 Labs is people might think of 11 Labs as, as one enterprise or one, one scaling startup. But inside of 11 Labs, if you were to take a look at it, we really look like and feel like maybe 10 or 12 individual startups that are all building, shipping and 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 kind of 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 key things that I think from the outside looks really unique about 11 labs.

C (5:23)

Yeah. And it's definitely something 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 that we're currently gotten is just go ship, go ship fast. We trust you'll make the right decision and if there's any gaps along the line, we'll figure that out and we'll ship our way out of them as well.

A (5:46)

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 app was a spin out and chatgpt of course being the kind of main app. But how do you think about being a multi consumer app product company?

B (6:03)

One thing I think that's kind of part of 11 labs, 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 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 really what's the form factor 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 able to use a subset of 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 spread that far as far as what we can do as a platform. We, you, you kind of 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 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.

C (7:27)

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 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 11 labs, 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, Canvas 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, 2019, 2020. 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 acceptant, well, 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, 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 we almost double or quadruple our surface area for learning.

A (8:47)

And so just to be clear, Tenmai, you run the flagship app, the eleven. What's the called? Just eleven Labs.

C (8:54)

It's just got eleven Labs.

A (8:55)

Yeah. And then Jack, you run eleven Reader, which is the even more kind of consumer focused where you can upload a PDF and generate audio. Really cool app, by the way. 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 11 reader. 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.

B (9:22)

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, the Play Store and you type in 11 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 with, with 11 labs. 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 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, kind of 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.

A (10:28)

And how do you think about growth when with the two separate apps, you know, I'd imagine you're doing some ads and growth focus things very specifically for the reader app, which does have that very different kind of use case and product promise. And then with the 11 Labs app, I imagine you're doing very separate things, but then you can kind of like as a brand also kind of be the text to voice company. So yeah, how do you, how do you think about growth across both apps and the brand?

B (10:57)

There's a couple of shared parts that, that I think underpin both of the app's growth. Right. One is like from a fundamental building block level, we, we share a lot of the same technologies. Right. So when it comes to like having to stand up on a database, an MMP testing tools, these are a lot of the shared parts of the apps that we can kind of lend and move together. So when it comes to growth, we can also lend a lot of things between the two apps. So creating great UGC content to be able to boost on page or to be able to post on organic, a lot of times those creators or agencies are doing a lot of the Same things across a variety of brands and we can kind of pick and choose what, what seems to be working well on the other or I think a good example is in, in the MMP world, right? Like being able to map and define specific events between apps that show the greatest amount of signal, even though the, the, the underlying use case of the app is going to be different. So that, that's where I think it starts to change is really, you know, when you think of retention and engagement and monetization, that's where we, we diverge quite a bit is that you, you have to build specifically that audience.

C (12:13)

One of the things that this affords and this came from, you know, this came up in the super app conversation versus, you know, separate apps is we were really able to tailor paid plans or monetization directly to the value that, that ICP or that user seeks. So when we think about 11 reader, they don't think in terms of credits and tokens when it comes to, you know, a listening or consumption focused app. So, you know, Jack was able to really align the costs to an hour's sort of experience and a consumption focused experience versus in ElevenLabs flagship app, it's very, very creative focused and users to our benefit have been trained and primed to learn about credits and characters and all these sort of different, you know, digital economies. And so by separating out, we were able to really basically get license to go and try out a variety of different pricing and packaging in a really, really unique and useful way.

A (13:04)

Since we're on the topic of user acquisition, I am curious about how you all think about running paid and kind of building the engine of growth. And I know you'll use a lot of really polished videos. I heard another podcast that one of your colleagues was on that you even hired a motion designer specifically to get that kind of earned media that is these kind of big launches, but then you kind of trying to build a paid UA flywheel that runs continuously while also doing these kind of big launches. So tell me about how you think about those things and then how you actually execute.

C (13:37)

We always think about our launches as sort of two buckets. We have kind of, there's moments we go out and seek earned media and then we have those moments where you need to go and forecast sustainable month on month growth. Right? Both things have to be true at once. And that's something as a growth and product person you constantly have to do. And even within our earned media, we think about, you know, what level we kind of target that. Is this something that goes on all our channels. Is this something that go on email? You know, maybe people don't care about on our LinkedIn, the 11Labs flagship app, because it is short form creative focus. So understanding who fits where and why is really, really important. And then on the paid side we think about okay, well what is the channel, what is the product, what is the specific message that we're trying to do and how do we like you know, set the right sort of models so that we can figure out how to do this in a really sustainable way? Because we look at that as a sustainable growth channel and not as a let's go and launch continuously as well. So I think the gaps between launches aren't like a traditional company where it is once a year, once a, once every six months, we would probably do more than once a quarter to be honest. Or I would say monthly is probably the average cadence for a team in 11 lab. So we get a lot of opportunity to kind of explore these sort of viral upside moments while also having these continuous growth engines.

A (14:46)

What are the primary channels that you do use in Paid one?

B (14:49)

We operate across a lot of the paid ad channels that you'd expect. Right. So we're operating across Meta, TikTok, Apple search ads, Google Play, Google Ads and really taking a fine tune approach to be able to looking at the results in the data in an incremental way each week or each month. Right. I think one thing that's kind of unique about 11 labs and again going back to that idea of like a horizontal platform that we have, is we're in a nice position where we don't need to always optimize for say day six conversion or day eight convert version or even day zero conversion. Right. We're in a position where we do have and we're trying to build a brand and we're trying to build an audience and we're trying to drive engagement that we, we ultimately want to capture a lot of value from. But one thing that's kind of nice about the position that we, we've been able to build with a great deal of brand work at ElevenLabs through all of these flagship launches where we announce new models and gain a good amount of earned media is it gives us a little bit more flexibility on, on paid to be able to test new creatives or to really not have to nail that, that week one payback, but to really allow ourselves a bit more flexibility in order to determin the right, you know, payback or altavated cac. So that, that's kind of the way that we, we thought about it and of course in the day it's a lot of work because each new channel is going to operate in its own way and you really get to understand what type of creative is going to perform, what's the right approach across each one. So that I think is an important part that we don't view it as just paid in the aggregate but, but really fine grain approach to each individual channel in the way that they layer up together toward growth.

C (16:33)

And, and I think earned media is something that a really underrate. Right. Like I think earned media is really a compounding effect. Right. Like every launch we do earns more eyeballs which means that the next launch earns more eyeballs and it is truly compounding and then it compounds. I believe like not that we've ever run the numbers on this, but I can say with confidence it's compounding down in our paid media as well. You know, the first place we start is 11 Labs branded search. It's the lowest hanging fruit. We get a lot of it because we do a lot of Arab media and we're able to go and scoop that up. And I'm pretty sure when people get hit with the ads, they've heard about us, they like us, they know that we provide the most expressive text to speech model. And so when we hit them with an ad about that in a really unique way, they're more likely to convert as well. And I think that results in better sort of, you know, CPA or cpi, whatever we're looking at.

D (17:23)

Yeah, it's hard to tell what the like efficiencies are. It's hard to measure obviously.

C (17:26)

Exactly.

D (17:27)

Brand is always really hard. But yeah, do you, do you all how like this is an old trick back in the day but like launches and coordinating with the platforms was like a huge advantage at the time. Like it used to be launches were bigger on the plat, like on the App Store for example. Do you think about cooperating or working with the platforms on like what they want to see, like your App Store reps or your Play Store reps. And are you thinking about that very much or is it more like. No, we're bigger than that but like that's not really our main lever.

B (17:57)

We do have great relationships with our reps and with the teams and I'm at both Apple and Google. But I think the way that we've approached things is like you have to start especially nowadays with, with the power of your own story of what, what the launch is and how you want to own it and tell it. And, and we've been able to really invest. We hired our own internal creator who's like on staff to be able to film and create short form content. I think for a long time the pendulum has been swinging from like, you know, who has the story to tell. Do, do you have to rely on a platform to be able to get on the front page of, you know, the App Store, or can you really create an organic or earned or paid approach to being able to get a really great story out there? So we spend a lot of time up front, probably, you know, one to two weeks of kind of refinement of what's the story that we want to go out and lead with. And there's so much noise out there, especially in our space where, where you're building and launching AI models that seem to be a new every week, state of the art benchmark every single week. Right.

D (19:03)

So change a name, put a number on the end, like cool beat some benchmark I've never heard of before. Great. Sounds awesome.

B (19:10)

Right? And then so, so I think in that, that specific environment, if you don't start with, with a very clear storyline yourself, then you're not going to be able to rely on it. I'm on. Anybody else?

A (19:22)

Yeah, 10 me. I'd. I'd love for you to dig deeper into that. You know, you were telling me at your time at Amazon, the whole idea of kind of write the press release first and how that's taken on a different form at elevenlabs. How do you plan for that?

C (19:37)

It was really interesting. I think six weeks in, had to go after my first launch. We don't have long onboarding processes here at elevenlabs and straight away got handed a doc and Jack was super helpful with this where it was like, okay, write out your core value promise your secondary value promises very succinctly, very tightly. But then the first thing you're going to do is turn that into a Twitter thread and we're going to think about, you know, what is the main headline, what's the interesting hook to get you to the second thing that gets you to the next subtweet and the next subtweet and how can you encapsulate that story in terms of a number of small Twitter threads that, you know, really capture the audience and drive that into media. And then the next activity is, well then how do you turn that into a video and how do you express that through video? Because video is so important. All of these channels where it's Driving so much more performance and organic impressions and you know, that looks like sometimes we go and make a motion graphic video where we have our in house team who are forever churning out the highest quality videos I've ever seen. And I don't know how they do that all the way to more, you know, people in camera sort of focused content. And it's something that as a company I feel like you get trained on because you spend a lot of time watching all the content that the team puts out across these various different sort of tiger teams shipping all this really great content. And then you also jump, just get refined. You know, you put a script out there, the creative team will give you some feedback. You write a Twitter thread. Jack or Luke, our head of growth will provide some really meaningful feedback. So you get a lot of opportunity to get these sort of reps out as well.

A (21:05)

I think it's such an underrated kind of product and growth lever. If you're working on a feature and it doesn't make for a good Twitter thread, like you better have like a really good reason to be.

D (21:16)

I get a lot of crap sometimes internally revenue cat because it's like, oh, we manage by Twitter interaction. And I'm like, well, you know, it's not the worst guiding force, you know what I mean? Like at least you know, somebody's mad or want something, right? And like it's true. Like if I, if we build something and I post it and like nobody cares, it's like most likely the future, you know, there's a correlation at least that like stuff that slaps on Twitter tends to be really well received and you know, replace X Twitter with like wherever your customers are. Like obviously it's just a, it's just a proxy for being where the users are and like staying really. It's the classic YC advice. Just talk to your customers. If what building doesn't resonate with them, why you building it? Right. Who's it for? Exactly. So I'm all for vibes based like product roadmap setting and stuff.

A (22:06)

Any lessons from your time at Canva Tanmay? Like what was that? Like a way you approach things at Canva as well?

C (22:13)

Canva's a bit different, so my time was a bit earlier in the process. It was, you know, 2019, 2020, 2021 to 2022. So very different time. You know, in terms of the market, this is very much pre AI before we had, you know, GPT 3.5 became a big thing and so there it was much more kind of old school. I mean we still had like earned media but you know, when we launched the video product we had a 12 month run up, we spent three months figuring out our messaging and yes, we had a great video on the back end. We had a lot of the same things that you we do now. But that time period and that time horizon was extended massively and it was all about, you know, we're launching on this day and we've got the, you know, news articles going on exactly that day. We've lined all these sort of big ticket items up and you know, I can't speak to what's happening internally now, but definitely in ElevenLabs it's launch fast, launch often, really nail it and understand what resonates.

A (23:06)

Yeah, that's gotta be a lot of fun moving to more that startup. I love the way Jack described it early on, it's just such a cool way to operate a company, especially a multi product company, is that you're almost like little startups inside the company. And so I love that kind of flexibility and focus for teams to be able to focus on the individual products they're working on and move fast. So that's really cool. And then speaking of that, one of the unique things I was reading about the team structure at 11 Labs is that engineers that you hire are filtered against having a solid product instinct. You almost think of the engineers more as the PM and then the more PM type folks are more growth leads. So how does that work?

B (23:47)

Yeah, one thing that we've seen is we have a belief that, that we want to either be building or growing.

D (23:54)

Right.

B (23:55)

And we kind of view those two sides as the key to cogs in the wheel to kind of drive our ultimate growth. And so what does that mean? On one hand I think that means that what we see at 11 labs, and this is true for myself and for Tanme as well, like we have a lot of former entrepreneurs, a lot of former startup founders on the team, probably the highest amount that I've been at, at least in the company by far. And then on the engineering side we look and screen for those that build side projects on their own that can identify a user pain point and like really build and be obsessed with that. A lot of engineers that join our team just love the ability to kind of like the freshing feel of being able to engage end to end and own a product cycle from like idea stage all the way to through han execution. So it's been a bit successful as well, like kind of self selecting the types of engineers that want to Build and own in that style of a culture and I think it's self selected on the growth side as well.

A (24:57)

Where do you slot in there? Tanmay, are you a growth product manager? Are you an engineering product manager? What's your role specifically?

C (25:05)

Yeah, me and Jack have had multiple conversations about this and it is whatever it takes to, you know, that's what I'm always succeed.

D (25:13)

People are like, what's my job? I'm like, I don't know, help developers make more money. Figure it out.

C (25:18)

Quite literally. I agree. Will merge sometimes very questionable PRs that my engineering team loves. I will review Figma designs. I'll show paywall experiments myself. I'll be reviewing creative content that our agencies are putting out. It's everything that needs to happen and you just kind of figure it out. And I think that's why it is like catnip to founders or former founders.

D (25:39)

Yeah, well, I was going to ask and follow up with that. It's like what have you done? Or what does the company do to kind of, you know, I guess like, like broad scope there is one thing but like is there something they. Obviously being just at 11 labs is exciting. It's good to be at a company that's growing and doing something unique. But is there anything they do to like get. Because I find it's hard. Like people that build stuff, they want to build stuff, they don't then often their own stuff. Right. To get them to like jump on a team is tough. So what does 11 labs do to, to get folks to, to come into the Borg? You know, it's a good environment probably. Which I guess is Tammy. That's kind of what you were hinting at.

C (26:11)

Yeah, it's. I can, I can say like what the sell to me was. I've only been here for about four months now but you know, when I came in it was super fresh and like the sell was very much be a founder. Right? Like be a founder. I've, I've been at big companies. I've been at slightly smaller companies. My wife works at a PM at a large, you know, FAANG company as well. I see her day to day. The last thing I'd want to do is spend my life in PR and legal reviews. As a former founder who you would ship something and get feedback the next day and then you come to a place like 11 Labs, it's like, hey, we are a successful company. We have amazing quality talent who take extreme ownership on everything that they do and you get to go and join this a class set of people who you then get to and you get given full autonomy to go own a space and move as quickly as you humanely can and want to. It's like catnip for a founder. Like the only rate limiter really is your own capabilities.

D (27:06)

Right? Yeah, it's tough to set up. How do you, I was gonna ask, do you have like an overarching like for example, marketing function that's like setting like okay, how do we talk? Like, you know, you're doing a growth campaign and they look at it or something or because like some, I mean something. I think we sometimes, I don't really say struggle like, but it's. I do like setting teams just do whatever. But then your challenge sometimes is consistency. Right. And like the voice, like how does, how do you do that in that setting?

B (27:31)

Yeah, one thing that's been nice too. So we, we have all of these small pods that, that build and grow individual, you know, like individual products or apps. And then of course there, there's a set of shared or org wide roles that, that help to bring everything together. So think of everything from operations to creative and brand to SEO and our web development side. So at the end of the day that there are some things that are important enough and that are wide enough in their scope that we want a cohesive brand or we want a fully operate, like a fully operational organization. But so it's trying to find the, I think it's trying to find the balance between like where does a traditional hierarchical or matrix or kind of work? Where do you need that, that shared support. So every little, you know, team is not having to rebrand themselves, but there, there's kind of that, that shared set of guidelines and there's also just a lot of work that goes into 11 labs to make sure that there's standards and guidelines around brand and comms and ops. The ability to do that now on a really small team too, because you have access to a ton of AI tools to help you expand that impact. So there are a ton of shared roles that can drop on and you don't have to reinvent the wheel each time.

D (28:55)

So you can just grab off the shelf, hey, here's our standard how we do this. And then maybe, maybe you mess it up and it has to be corrected.

B (29:01)

But yeah, or, or like, hey, what, what does great look like in SEO, right? Like, oh, well, there's, you know, a few folks here that, that have decades of, of experience in that specific area that, that might lend well to work that we're trying to do. On, you know, mobile, web to app or the way that we're, we're trying to solve a specific problem. Right. So being able to be very collaborative, like at the end of the day, I think we all view ourselves as part of the 11 Labs team and have a really tight knit group. It helps off site that we've done the past couple of years.

D (29:34)

The whole team, like everybody. The whole company.

B (29:35)

The, the whole. Yeah, the whole company.

D (29:37)

So in the hundreds probably, right, If I'm guessing.

B (29:39)

Yeah. Now we're, we're up to about 304, going up to 400 right now. And we, we just got everyone together in Italy this fall for a week. The year before that we, we all met up in Croatia. So to build both kind of the human connection and then to let great people operate I think has been, has been the key.

A (29:58)

Yeah. As Jacob was alluding to, it does seem like it's a really hard thing to build those kind of teams and get that kind of founder mindset. And I'll say personally, the engineers I've had the most fun working with like on my own products are those really like product minded engineers. How do you filter for that? Is there a specific, like the way you frame the job rec, the interview process?

B (30:21)

We take a good hard look at public GitHub profiles to see who's engaged in what. And, and we look at specific companies too that we know have really strong kind of like product building cultures and try to attract folks that want to join a company like it.

C (30:39)

I was saying as well, it becomes a referral flywheel. Right? Yeah. The people that come in then they also know people like themselves, people they.

D (30:46)

Want to work with.

C (30:46)

Right? Yeah, exactly.

D (30:48)

It's a crazy thing. There was a period people go like, oh, you're just going to be drawing from a limited pool of folks. But the risk reward is just so high to do that. And you have to be careful because like sometimes people refer, oh, I knew this person from college. I never really work with them. You got to dig a little bit and be like, okay, how do you actually know them? Like maybe like bonus referrals kind of maybe creates that issue. But yeah, it's just, it's often really hard to tell until you've like worked with somebody. Right. Like even somebody says they've done right. Obviously we know the Internet, everything's a lie. Right. Nobody knows I'm a dog. But like it's very imperfect. But yeah, it does like just unlock a ton. And you know, I think about engineers and product folks too kind of Just everybody, they get so conditioned at other places as temper talking about like just waiting for the PR review or like the legal review and like become so conditioned to not take risks and things like that. It sounds like you all operate in this sense, which is like especially in a period where the growth is so rapid. Like if, if 11 labs like has a hiccup or like doesn't iterate for a quarter, you're done. Like there's somebody coming way fast. You know, there's so much to be gained right now that like there's somebody right behind you ready to take the that space. And so it's not that you don't have time. I mean it's not that legal and PR review and all that's not important. It's just that it's, it's maybe not existential. It's or it's less existential than, than moving. Right. And so it's like, okay, how do we balance? And that takes, I don't know, I mean assume founders and leaders who are the company who are tolerant to like mistakes and risk, right Is probably one thing. And then like making sure that folks know it's like you can do, you can just do things, you know, which is not typical corporate culture. I think in a, in, in the world.

B (32:27)

The one thing I was just going to say on that note is like we hear this a lot, right, that, that you know, speed is becoming the moat. Right. And I think that we kind of live by that and, and have tried to really embrace just the speed and size of iteration and the amount that we ship. And so to some extent it's like to your point, Jacob, like understanding what, what bricks might fall, right. And our support team doesn't an amazing job because there's often, you know, blips in the model that might come up or specific. You like very important things, but things that you often need to make a trade off between. Are we going to get this model, you know, 105% fine tuned or are we good to move quicker and to continue to push the edges? And so I think when that becomes the company's like like guiding principle in ethos, then then it's pretty clear that, you know, moving quicker is, is more important than ensuring that there's like me see coverage of every little thing. And so I, I think that that's why the these things, the small team sizes, the founder LED background, the speed, like they all need to fit together. You know, they all need to get together, right.

D (33:40)

You need people who are like take responsibility too. Right, right.

B (33:42)

The advice is like not to go out and, and just find a bunch of former founders and bring them into a very hierarchical culture. Like it's not going to work. You're going to have a lot of clashes and they're going to leave and there, there's going to be lots of ideas that, that compete. But when you create systems that fit together, right, small teams with driven product minded engineers and founders that fit with like this, go fast and shift move, then I think that's where you really start to get harmony and you can kind of deliver bigger results.

A (34:15)

One of the challenges with moving fast and then even as much as I praised it, like building toward the Twitter thread or the viral TikTok is that you can sometimes end up building kind of flash in the pan gimmicky things. How do you think about balancing that kind of moving fast and creating those big launches, but then also kind of building toward this more retentive use cases, a product that is going to be used for years and meaningful for years versus just kind of moving quick and slapping out a bunch of features that don't end up getting used.

B (34:46)

It's a really good question. It's one that I can already reflect on. You know, over the last year and a half, a couple of the features or growth campaigns that we've built and launched that might, might in hindsight look like a flash in the pan. One thing that our CEO and co founder Mati told me a couple weeks ago, it's he, he encouraged a quote from Brian Armstrong on Coinbase, where action gets information. And so I think at the end of the day, like if you're willing to take action, you're going to ultimately get more information. You know, you're going to have more information about your market, about your users, about your pricing model than, than just not pursuing that. So I do think that like the, the way to think about it, right, is that in hindsight it might be a flash in the pan, but in forward sight it might actually help guide your future decisions. So I think that that's been one thing that I felt to be, be true here.

C (35:38)

When you think about these launches, it's not we're launching for launching sake week, it's actually about what is the most impactful thing that we can build that is going to provide a better user experience. How can we build it as furiously as quickly as possible and express the value of it in the best possible way? Right. Like we deeply think about what are the next things we launch. We sure some of them might Hit some of them might fail. But we're always coming from the lens of like, how does this improve the user experience? Not, wouldn't it be cool if we ship this thing?

B (36:10)

And I tend to find, you know, I think you brought this up, Jacob. Like, I tend to find the like X for Y to lead you down the wrong path. Like, when I think of the times where we've developed or built or grown tools that haven't worked, it tends to be applying ideas or concepts from somewhere else and being like, wouldn't it be cool if. Or, you know, did you see that? Could we do that? Right? And that direct one for one application versus starting with of, you know, what's our unique take? Or what's our unique story on this? Or what are the capabilities that we have at 11 labs that no one else has? And I think when you get back to that space, you start to unlock a lot more creative ideas that, that ultimately, you know, move beyond the flash in the pan stage and actually allow you to build, you know, compound growth over time.

A (37:04)

Yeah. On that note, Tanmay, you had a really great post on LinkedIn about, like, don't just build another Spotify Wrapped. I mean, it's a perfect example of what Jack was saying about how, like, you know, everybody thinks, well, how can I build this Spotify Wrapped of my product? But. But your post was great about, like, that's not a great way to think. Tell me more about that.

C (37:23)

Yeah. Saw this pattern. I feel like it becomes truer and truer every year. I thought like, every year people would learn, but it only becomes truer and truer is that, you know, every year, Spotify Raptor Drop like clockwork. And it's amazing. And a random product out there, you know, not to name names, will do their version of a wrapped.

D (37:39)

Mine. Mine this year is Phil's Coffee. I got a Phil's Coffee wrapped in the mail this year, which. That's how I knew it had jumped the shark. Yeah.

C (37:49)

Yeah. That's how you know when wrapped has gone beyond mainstream and post. Post cool is probably.

D (37:55)

I love Phil's Coffee, don't get me wrong. But maybe we didn't need a wrapped. This is fine.

C (37:58)

Yeah, maybe. Maybe we skip this year. So I think the reason Spot people forget why Spotify Wrapped really took off. Right. It took this, like, passive consumption, user behavior, and then it turned it into this natural shareable experience. Right. People generally resonate and identify themselves around the music they listen to. And you present in this beautiful format and you share it and it goes viral. And it's all around, you know, a compressed time period and you know, for a growth PM that's catnip. You've taken a single user experience and you've added like a viral factor around it. So I mean, you know, you've got like a K factor you can measure and it's, it's super fantastic. But what people miss is like, you have to think about what your natural shareable moment in your product is. Right. And you know, to. I think I put in the post some of the products that I think do this really well. The GitHub skyline, it's probably something that didn't take that long for someone to implement, but it's consistently sat there and occasionally every so often you'll see people do the, you know, put a screenshot of their skyline out there or I think even like the revenuecat team, you'll put like the billboard up on like Times Square and then people will like go and stand in front of it and take a photo and then that one is gone. By the way.

D (39:07)

I think everybody's figured that out. The trick out. I think it's, it's. But it's all right. It's how it goes, right? It's that, you know, everything becomes wrapped eventually and you have to move on to something else.

C (39:16)

Exactly. Like everything becomes wrapped and there's a short hop life but you have to find what resonates or even, you know, in the 11 Labs team we handed out to people who are building on the agents platform, this is how many hours of agents interaction you've had, right? Very similar to like the YouTube. You know, you've hit 100k or, or stripe, you've hit this sort of like, you know, milestone. These are natural shareable moments that align with the value that the user gets from the platform that they are personally very proud of and that then that they are willing to share and actually going and figuring that out is really important for you.

D (39:45)

You know, it was really interesting. We've built various versions of like share this screenshot or share this chart in our dashboard over the years. Never, almost never saw them in the wild. The biggest shareable feature we ever built was just building a mobile app because then people could easily screenshot like and, and I guess this is not intentional, but making the like home screen of that like fairly aesthetic and fairly easy to like screenshot and share and 100x the number of times I saw our product on, on X like overnight and it wasn't even a sharing feature. Right. You know what I mean? I mean, maybe we should have thought. I mean, obviously in hindsight we could say, yeah, clearly we knew that virality would go up with the mobile app. But like, and also just we had a miss there on not having a mobile app for as long as we didn't. Right. And like, I kind of thought it as like, like this toy just kind of like, oh yeah, we're a business. B2B. Why do we need a mobile app? And I may be taking it from Stripe, like they have a mobile app, but it's like, how big of important is that for me, it just never was that important. Be on a certain stage. But like, I totally miss this. And then in hindsight now, like, it's, it's obvious. Like it has almost the same usage on a daily basis as our dashboard. Like, it's a. You know what I mean? And people were yelling at me for years to do it. I just was like, David included. But I just ignore it. But it's exactly to your point, right? Is I was like being like, like wrong. You know, what's that? What other people da da da, da da. Rather than just being like, why user yell today? Okay, I build that. That would have been the better algorithm and would have got me to like this, like sort of unlock much sooner.

C (41:09)

Right.

D (41:09)

But yeah, it's just like surprising sometimes the second order effects you get. You know, I'm sure the Spotify people never knew wrapped would become the thing it did. Right?

A (41:18)

Yeah. It's hard to manufacture those shareable moments. Often they. They end up coming more naturally than. Than you anticipate. And when you try and build for it, you screw it up. Even one that I think has worked really well. Is flight flighty? Kind of does a wrap like the year end like flights and. And that has gone, you know, fairly viral. A lot of people post and that kind of thing, but it's a little.

D (41:40)

More compelling than how many coffees did I order this year?

A (41:43)

Absolutely. But Ryan even talked about on it was either on his app growth annual. Yeah, I think it was his app growth annual interview with Charlie that was released in the launch, the sister podcast of this launch where he talked about like they struggled with that. Like they, they went through multiple iterations before they landed on something that was actually truly shareable. And I mean, I think that's was kind of your point Tanmay with that post. And kind of what you're saying is like, you gotta iterate towards that real shareable moment and then try stuff. And if people aren't sharing then, then it's not because you didn't surface it well enough or whatever. It's like that's just not a shareable moment. And then, then you keep iterating and you find that shareable moment.

D (42:23)

It's very analogous to like April Fools as like a marketing gimmick, right? Like that was such a big deal for a number of years and then I don't remember when it was, but at some point it just jumped the shark and it became cringe to do it. You know what I mean? It still happens, but I feel like it peaked and then, you know. But I guess that's more of these things having halfway. It's in anything in the attention economy, right? It's like you find something unique, it's able to get attention, then you're going to attract a million follow fast followers to that space and then it's gone in two years. But that's, I mean that's so keeps it interesting, right? That's why it's growth hacking. It's not just like, it's not formulaic or whatever. You have to like constantly be thinking of cool stuff to do. We're always like, yeah, we borrow stuff obviously from other brands and platforms, but then we're just always coming up with the most unhinged, as unhinged and weird as we possibly can dream. A lot of it never makes the light of day, but 1 out of 10 stupid things somebody says, we're like, actually, you know what, maybe we can do this. Right? And then you guys multiply that across, you know, multiple products too. For you guys, it's like, you know, you can, you can kind of go in a lot of directions, which is cool.

B (43:28)

Yeah.

A (43:28)

Have y' all found any key unlocks in the consumer apps at 11 labs? Are there shareable moments? Are you still iterating toward finding that kind of loop?

B (43:38)

Yeah, we're, we're still iterating a bit. One, one thing that I've tried to look at and that we, we look at a lot are just, we do a lot of like social monitoring. So we, we take a good hard look at mentions across Reddit, Discord X etc and, and have seen some poll like for, for us. I think the, the aha is when you can bring your own ebook or epub or PDF file and then pick a specific voice, the voice in your head that you want to be able to read that, that story or that book to you. So I think the, the, the main goal is, you know, I know that a lot has kind of been made of, of the, the trend around onboarding quiz quizzes and, and if you, you introduce goal set, you know, goal setting and that type of thing, we've actually found more success in and trying to get out of the way a little bit and trying to shorten the time between like I have a piece of content that I want to read and I've got a voice in mind and can we help you kind of find that voice quickly? And we do see like screenshots and video and screen caps of people with, with a specific voice being like, oh, I didn't know that Michael Caine could read me like Dickens or could read me my chemistry PhD homework or whatever. And so I think that that's kind of becoming a unique, unique thing for us and one that we were beginning to put a little bit more, more fuel line on the consumer side.

D (45:03)

It's all fair use of a cut if a user does it right. So it's like. But yeah, those are the best moments. I mean, I guess that just comes with like giving people powerful tools, right? They will, you know, like a lot of. I don't know if you call this earned or just virality, but like I talk about the US people posting our screenshot of our app, right? It wasn't like a thing we were trying to make happen. We just did our job right and got people to value really quickly. And then, you know, it just, it just creates, it creates make sure natural virality and growth that way.

B (45:35)

One thing that ties the two apps together a little bit in part of 11 Labs is just the, the importance and the centrality of voice as like a medium and a tone and a quality to it. And so I think the more that we are, we're currently doing a great deal of work around a redesign to make kind of the, the voice orb experience feel more emotive, right. Like what would a voice look like and how can we kind of bridge the gap between what you hear and the way when, when you're going to choose a voice or being able to create a voice clone that would represent your own voice. Like can we begin to experiment in that specific area? Because it is a pretty magical experience to be able to, to create, create new audio in voice tones. And so I think that that's been been one core loop across voice agents, across our core app and across the consumer side as well.

D (46:32)

Yeah, when do I get custom voice portability to other LLMs? I want that because I tell you the. I'm so much more tolerant of like the standard sort of like 5.2 behavior and answers when I'm reading it. But once it starts talking to me, the first thing gets so annoying when they start messing stuff up. You know what I mean? And, like, I need to tweak this. Just. It's so funny. This is. I mean, this is sort of a tangent, but my wife heard I had the stand. This is chat GPT we're talking about. But, like, the standard chat GPT, like voice agent versus she has, like, the Australian one. And she's like, why is yours so annoying? And I was like, I think whatever. She's like, listen to mine. And I was like, yeah, you know what? Right. Yours does sound less annoying for some reason. Right. But it's, I mean, it's, It's. It's an example of what you're talking about where, like, voice is such a important. You know, it goes beyond just text, right. It's like, it humanizes, like, information. And it's like the most natural interface for these, like these token brains in a box. Right? It's a very natural way to humanize them, which, I don't know, just obviously tons of surface area for you guys to invent new and interesting experiences off of, which is. Which is pretty cool. How unhinged would it be if I could clone my own voice and make that my chat GPT? You know, just like talking to myself? That would be very strange. That would upset somebody.

B (47:50)

Well, yeah, I was just gonna say we. We did a quick analysis on. On the consumer side, and we can look at just what's the frequency of voices that people choose, Right. And are there clusters or do they tend to congregate? Because most apps. Right. Would allow you either no selection or two or three options. We have over 600 voices on our consumer app, and it allows you to pick your own voice narrator to read great audiobook content. And no single voice has more than 10 or 12% of use. And so the tail is extremely long. Right. Like, the median amount of use is probably close to 1 or 2%. Right. When you think of just how, you know, people perceive voice and want that. That type of selection and my, My preferred voice is not the same as David's, is not the same as anybody else. And so I think that's one thing.

A (48:49)

That we're seeing that actually kind of leads into the next question I was going to ask. I'd be remiss to not kind of voice what everybody in the industry is kind of concerned about. And I think 11 labs, I'm sure, is thinking about this as well. But do the biggest big three LLM companies, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google do they just subsume everything? You know, do all apps are all apps just become a little Interface inside of ChatGPT. Do is all voice subsumed and I think that's a good example of your 600 quality voices. And I mean same thing with Jacob. Like I'm not a huge fan of the voices of some of the other LLMs, but 11 Labs is like that's where you lead and that's where you stand out and it seems like that that's one of the differentiation points. But yeah, how do you think about competing with these other labs?

B (49:38)

So I think there's a few things that come to mind. One is I think that we have continued to increase speed over time, right. And so we have continued to focus on voice, speech and audio being our expertise and have continued to double down there. And so there's lots of great models in video and image and of course in text. Right. But we have continued to double down each turn to be able to move fast and keep our edge and stay ahead when it comes to voice. I think that we're all aware though that to continue to add and gain value, you need to do more than just one thing. And so I think that's part of what, why we, we've tried to build, I'll take our voice agents platform as a good example, right. It's not just pick your voice and, and talk. We, we've built in custom evals and workflows and integrations that allow you to begin to concentrate a lot of your, your work around that, that specific voice experience. I think the same holds true a little bit of, of what we're doing with the apps, right. Like if you get, get greater lock in and greater relationship when it comes to the brand that you have. If you've got a creator suite that extends to mobile, if you've got a set of enterprises that, that build a great text content that can then reach consumers. Part of the approach is that you gotta begin to build a bit of an ecosystem and have a lot of interlocking parts if you want to be able to continue to advance again.

D (51:14)

Like one of the many ways I've been wrong in the last two years, I think a lot of people have was that like, like I think I would have guessed like, oh, you'll just be the best voice model and like that will be your edge. But like you can kind of extrapolate far enough that you know Amazon. Yeah, I think of Amazon as like the sort of like Costco, of like computer services. Like, at some point they will have like Amazon Web Services will have a, a model that's probably pretty good. And it's maybe not as good as like the very like top edge, whatever, but it's probably good enough. And so you might lose that edge. And then it feels like, at least from where I'm standing two years into this like crazy hype cycle, it does feel like what you're saying, it's like the advantages accrue into the application layer, right? It's like what and how. And that's where Amazon Web Services is never going to be able to clone a voice. You know, they may be able to clone a passable voice model, but they're not going to have all the little, like all the little application layer tricks. And you know, I was saying before the, you know, call, I played with the audiobook stuff last year and you were saying that there might be more to that coming. Like, who's going to build the best platform for using a voice model to do audiobook, like generation, right? Who's going to do that? Maybe some people. But now you've compounded an edge that honestly it's like stuff that can be like tokens in, tokens out, gradient descent and like can. Can be taught that way is going to become commoditized. The stuff that's not is like interacting with the people, actually using these tools, understanding their human needs. I don't know, I don't know how you guys feel. I'm constantly going back between, like, my job is over forever and like humans will actually be the dominant, like software creators. Like, I still don't know. Every day I go back and forth. But that's kind of, I mean, following what you were just saying, Jack, like that that kind of promotes a like, human centric version of the future of software development, which is like talking to the people and figuring out how the models actually fit into their needs might become the edge, right? Because everybody will have the models, right? Like everybody will have the. And then that's on the building side too. Code generation and all those things.

A (53:08)

And also the brand side. I mean, the fact that Jacob and I both recognize 11 labs as being like the best voices in the industry by far.

D (53:16)

Certainly I'm not going to go to AWS first, you know what I mean? Like, like I've heard of the good one. I'm gonna try the good one and then maybe we'll look at the cost or whatever. But like, yeah, certainly like that, that certainly is gonna Give you some sort of advantage longer.

C (53:28)

I mean it goes back like just anime is compounding. Right. Every time someone thinks about voice or speech and audio, Elevenlabs is the name that floats to mind immediately. Right. And sure the, the model providers will go make their best effort to release something but, but our mix of focus of relentlessly beating the drum and launching often and you know, pushing the edges faster than anyone else in the market and compounding that on the earned media and compounding that with like you know, a smart growth model that really enables that and really empowered engineering teams, all of that just stacks up so that you have this moat. And I, I don't know what you call that moat. Maybe it's old school, we call that.

D (54:08)

Brand or you know, brand almost seems too simplistic, you know what I mean? In 2026.

C (54:13)

Yeah.

A (54:13)

Well, I think that's a great place to wrap up. I've got three questions though, I've been asking every guest now and either both of you can answer each one or one of you can take it, but what's the most impactful experiment or change you've implemented this year? What's the biggest win you've seen this year that you think people could take a lesson from?

B (54:30)

I think the biggest win that we've had on the app that I lead is really to not lose sight of the fact that yes, AI is everywhere. And if you spend time like us trying to evaluate benchmarks and per credit spend and like in tokens and all of the these things when, when you go to meet a consumer who's trying to think about hey, I want to consume a certain amount of content and audio, they're often not going to start from the point of tokens and credits and that type of thing. So the biggest one is just being able to convey or being able to communicate in simple pricing plans and simple storylines that kind of like begin to abstract away from the AI complexity which is real. Like there are unlike in the past with some SaaS apps like there's real cogs, there's real costs that you need to be smart about, but that shouldn't mean that you communicate that way out to a consumer. The biggest win that we had on our side was just we stripped out an entire pricing tier. We switched over to be able to communicate with the amount of hours that you spend, to be able to play great content and beginning to abstract away from a lot of the fine tuned details that go into an AI model I think has just been the biggest one on our end.

C (55:46)

I think for Us it's just been simplicity as well, like a version of simplicity. And that's come up in a few different ways. Working on the app that I do, we try and bring over the best of web to the mobile app. And so so often we talk about distilling it down and not just porting the whole thing over and squishing it down into a mobile form factor. I think it kind of reminds me of the ye old days where everyone had these supplementary apps that were either either really, really like bare bones or they were just basically the desktop dashboard squished into like a tiny form factor. And we, we think about how can we make it like super simple and pick the best of what is working on web, what's really resonating with the audience and bringing that down. And then that went through as well with our pricing, you know, the web we offer I think upwards of five plans and on mobile it just didn't make sense. You know, variety of reasons across Apple and Placer limitations. But even just as a mobile app we want it to be very simple in the different pricing structures we offer. And so we offer one price, you know, we, we test with that and we test with different, you know, incentives around it. But it keeps us, it keeps things very simple. And it means as well that we hold ourselves very accountable when we pick the next thing to work on.

A (56:53)

All right, a fun one. What's your biggest fail of the year? What did you screw up? That was an incredible lesson that, to your comment earlier, Jack, that provided a lot of information, even if it didn't provide a huge, huge win.

B (57:06)

First impressions count and you need to spend a lot of time to be able to get onboarding right in the form of being optimized and being performant, which can mean a lot of things. We probably have spent too much time trying to smooth out and trying to optimize with within onboarding. And ultimately some of the things that, that I would have done in hindsight is like, like what's the, what's the base case? Like what, what, what happens if you just have a signup form that goes directly into your zero state product? What is the incremental amount of retention or amount of engagement or amount of monetization that this flow is going to unlock when it comes to group of consumers that you serve? Right. And so I think without that really trying to assess that scale of incrementality, you're sort of just like betting blindly compounding, right? You're like trying to double down on something that you've Already tried to double down on and so we just overwrote. I think we over rotated a lot in that specific area because there's a lot out there. You read tons of blog posts about, you know, this quiz and this onboarding, you know, this onboarding funnel. But I think if you don't compare it to a base case of like, just strip it out entirely for 10% for five days and see what's the opportunity size there. And so that was a big fail. We probably spent too many, too many cycles, too many experiments and. And ultimately just being simple, clear and direct about who the app is for and trying to get you to that. Aha. With fewer screens has proven to be the bigger one.

C (58:39)

Yeah, I would say mine is more about my former past as a founder, which is making your price cheaper won't drive meaningful retention if people don't care about the product. Right. Like sounds super obvious when you say it out loud. But you go, at this price point, maybe we've maxed it out. You know, you do the typical YC thing of first we charge, you know, 100 bucks a month and then 200 and 400 and then somehow you end up charging, you know, a couple grand and then you see, suddenly it flattens and maybe people are churning at the, you know, the thousand dollar price point. So you go, ooh, okay. They tell me there's budgetary constraints. Maybe, you know, dropping the price will mean that we're able to kind of retain people better. Maybe you retain them an extra month, but if they just don't care about your product, they're not going to stick around. They'll be happy to walk through, you know, walk over fire or walk over coals to use your product, even if it's super expensive. And that sounds, yeah, super obvious in hindsight, but in the moment you can kind of get really academic about it and mess it up.

A (59:33)

All right, last question.

D (59:34)

Growth would be easier if all my competitors gave up. Sorry, I'm not supposed to be.

B (59:39)

I was going to say if there weren't over 2 million apps on the App Store. I think one, one that I was going to say is, you know, and I know that we've spent a lot of time in this two times is just the number of tools that are used in a modern growth sac in the right way has begin to proliferate. Which, which is good. Getting all of the tools to talk to each other and to kind of have true north when it comes to, especially around attribute, you know, especially around attribution. And like that's well, well written about and well known about but I think at the end of the day, like if tools could talk as well as our voice models can talk, then we, if they could talk to each other that then we, we would save a lot, a lot of time.

D (60:19)

That, that may not be as a high in the sky wish, you know, in another year that's obviously when pigs fly. But you know, this might be the year these tools actually do start talking to each other.

C (60:29)

I mean my engineer was like, why can't we just cursor this? And I'm like, well this MMP isn't code base isn't in cursor and you know, the meta Ads API isn't in cursor. So sorry dude.

D (60:39)

But I think, I think, I mean we've hijack the lightning round but I think we, that might be a big, you know, last this past year we saw agents come to code, right. And with some tooling, I think more and more products are going to become like native so that people can bring their own agent and they can coordinate across agents and like either they'll have their embedded agent or you'll be running Claude on your. Or who, whichever agent you want on your local and it will be doing this stuff for you. So like I, I don't know, it's not a crazy wish list item I think anyway, more like we're maybe not far.

C (61:08)

Yeah, I would say my, like my sort of response is a version of what like Jack said, which is we went through this recent experience and maybe this was recency bias to our answers, but we had three or four different people that understood 40% of this vast growth stack that we needed to implement. And we all understood a different 40% and we all described it slightly differently and the amount of times it just talked to be like, oh well, you know, this thing's not coming through in this platform. Why is it not? Okay, let's talk to the infra team. And then like, well, how do I translate this question that you asked me to the info team? So I think with growth and like the vast array of tools you have to use and the places you have to communicate, I wish there was just like a mega translation app.

A (61:50)

All right, well, this has been so much fun. I know you guys are hiring any specific jobs you wanted to shout out or anything else you wanted to share.

B (61:57)

As we're wrapping up, we're growing as a mobile team. So I mean a lot of people think of Alum Labs for, for the API and what you build on on web we also have native SDKs to be able to build voice agents and voice experiences into native mobile. And our team's growing, so we're we're hiring across iOS and Android as well as web full stack as well as growth folks. So would would love to connect with those who are on the pod.

A (62:23)

Awesome. Thanks so much. And we'll we'll drop a link in the show notes for folks, but thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. This is a lot of fun, a really fun conversation.

C (62:31)

Awesome. Thanks for having us.

B (62:32)

Thanks for having us. This is great.

A (62:36)

Thanks so much for listening. If you have a minute, please leave a review in your favorite podcast player. You can also stop by chat.subclub.com to join our private community.