How ElevenLabs Ships So Fast With Small Teams

Yes, AI is everywhere. And if you spend time like us trying to evaluate benchmarks and per credit spend and and tokens and all of these things, 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 begin to abstract away from the AI complexity.

Hello, I'm your host David Bernard and with me today, Revenue Cat CEO Jacob Iding. Our guests today are Jack McDermott and Tanme Jane, both working on mobile growth at 11 Labs, the leading AI voice lab. On the podcast, we talk with Tame and Jack about how earned media can drive paid performance, building features that make for good tweets, and why stripping out your onboarding quiz might beat optimizing it. All right, we've got a special one today with two guests and Jacob with me as well. So, let's go one by one so people familiarize themselves with your voice. Jack, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today.

>> Hey, it's great to be here. Thanks for having us. and Tanme, nice to have you. >> Yeah, super psyched to be here as well. >> And Jacob, always great to have you on the podcast. >> I'm excited to be a fly on the wall today and with our we got big crew, but uh I'm super excited. I'm fan of 11 Labs and and all this stuff. You guys have been super ambitious in a bunch of areas. So, I'm excited to talk about uh yeah, what's been going on >> and that's exactly where I wanted to get started. 11 Labs is super ambitious and one of the cool things y'all are doing is not just being a foundation company and an API company servicing all sorts of apps and enterprise solutions but you're building consumer apps. So I wanted to start with why build consumer apps as a model company uh and I mean you know in some ways people listening might see it as competition like they're a developer they want to experiment with

voice like why are you competing with your uh customers on the API side but I think it's a really cool way to build a company so yeah I'd love to hear thoughts behind that. >> So I think an important part about 11

Labs is we we really think of ourselves as a research and product company. That's kind of how we we got our start that it all goes back to the research at the beginning and then at the end of it is being able to deploy that out as individual products and you you may be a developer that consumes that or builds on that through an API. You may be a creative person or creator who who builds on top of our web or on top of our mobile interface. Um and ultimately we're we're beginning to move towards consumers as well. So, so we really think one of the underlying parts a lot and labs do is kind of the blurred line between creator and consumer. We think that that line is beginning to blur a little bit. So, at the end of the day, we we want to have a direct relationship with users, with consumers, with creators, and ultimately with with developers at some of the biggest enterprises. So yeah, we we kind of

start from a the first point of being able to build on top of great research and then to deploy it in a variety of ways and products. >> It's so powerful to be the the first best customer of your API as well and uh having those consumer products can be a superpower for the API. It's it's a better API when internally you can be testing against it and know what the experience is of building against that API. Uh anything to add there, Ten?

>> No, I think Jack nailed it. That's exactly it. I 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. There's a a few, you know, open AAI being maybe the the biggest example. And it's kind of surprised 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 cuz 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 uh like balance the needs because it's very different right to build like you know obviously there's some overlap there. 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 uh a speedboat as we like to think of it as their own kind of self-contained uh 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 wi 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 the key things that I think from the outside looks really unique about 11 Labs. >> Yeah. And it's definitely it's definitely something I I noticed as well. Like I run the 11 Labs 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 recurrenly gotten is just go ship, go ship fast. we will figure, 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.

>> 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 spin out and Chat GPT of course being the kind of main app. Um, but how do you think about being a multi-consumer app product company? One thing I think that's kind of um 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 audio book 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 th 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 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 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. >> 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 end 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 canvas 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 accepted, 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 uh 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 pay walls 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.

>> And so just to be clear, Tenay, you run the the flagship app, the the 11, what's the it called? Just 11 Labs. >> It's just called 11 Labs. Yeah. >> And then Jack, you run 11 Reader, which is the even more kind of consumer focused 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 uh 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 crossunctional like not stepping on each other's toes but like incorporating those learnings across both apps? 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 allows you to turn anything into an audio book, you might not actually be top of mind 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 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. >> And how do you think about growth when with the two separate apps? you know, I would 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 the main 11 labs app. I imagine you're doing very separate things, but then then you can kind of like as a brand also kind of be the texttooice company. So yeah, how do you how do you think about growth across both apps and the brands? 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 the shared parts of the apps that we can kind of lend and have a

move together. So when it comes to to growth, we can also lend a lot of things between the two apps. So creating great UGC content to be able to to boost on paid or to be able to post on on organic. A lot of times those creators or agencies are 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 to that use case and to that that audience. 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 11 Labs 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 licensed to go and try out a variety of different pricing and packaging in a really really unique and useful way. >> Since we're on the the topic of user acquisition, I I am curious about how you all think about running paid UA and kind of building the the engine of growth. And I know you you'll use a lot of really polished videos. I 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 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 how you think about those things and then how you actually execute.

>> We always think about our launch as sort of two buckets. We have kind of those moments we go out and seek earned media and then we have those moments where you need to go and forecast sustainable month-to-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 own media, we think about, you know, what level we kind of target this at. 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 11 Labs flagship app, because it is short form creator 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 or once a once every 6 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 labs so we get a lot of opportunity to kind of explore these sort of viral upside moments while also having this continuous growth engines What are the primary channels that you do use in paid

>> one? We we operate across um a lot of the paid ad channels that you'd expect, right? So, so we're operating across Meta, Tik Tok, Apple Search Ads, Google Play, Google Ads, and really taking a fine-tune approach to be able to looking at the 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 where we don't need to always optimize for say day six conversion or or day eight conversion or even day zero conversion, right? We're we're in a position where we do have and we're 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 11 Labs through all of these flagship launches where where we announce new models and 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 or to really not have to nail that that week one payback, but to really allow ourselves a bit more flexibility in order to determine and test into the right, you know, know payback or elevated CAC. So that that's kind of the way that we we thought about it and of course the end of 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.

>> And and I think earn media is something

that a lot of companies really underrate, right? Like I think earn 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. Like not that we've ever run the numbers on this, but I can say with confidence it's 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 earned 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. >> Yeah. It's hard to tell what the like efficiencies are. It's hard to measure obviously. Exactly. A brand is always really hard, but uh 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 um 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 bigger than that but like that's not really our our main lever. We we do have great relationships with our reps and with the teams at 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 of 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 upfront 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 uh especially in our space where where you're building and launching AI models that seem to be a new >> state-of-the-art benchmark every single week right so >> change a name put a number on the end

like cool beat some benchmark I've never heard of before great sounds awesome >> right and then so so I think in at 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 anybody else. >> Yeah. Tenm, I' I'd love for you to dig deeper into that. You you were telling me at your time at Amazon, you the whole idea of kind of write the press release first and how that's taken on a different form at uh 11 Labs. How how do you plan for that?

>> It was really interesting. I think 6 weeks in had to go after my first launch. you know, we don't we don't have long onboarding processes here at 11 Labs. And straight away got handed a doc and like Jack was super helpful with this where it was like, okay, you know, write out your value like your core value promise, your secondary value promises very succinctly, very tightly, but then the first thing you're 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 this the the next subweet and the next subweet? and how can you encapsulate that story in terms of a number of small Twitter threads that um you know really capture the audience and drive that earned 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 just get refined. You know, you put a script out there. The creative team will give you some feedback. You write a Twitter thread. You Jack or Luke, our head of growth, will write some really meaningful feedback. So, you get a lot of opportunity to get these sort of reps out as well. 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.

>> I get a lot of crap sometimes at internally at Revenue Cat because it's like, oh, we manage by Twitter interactions. 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 wants something, right? Uh, and like I I it's true like if I if we build something and I post it and like nobody cares, it's like most likely the fe you know there's a correlation at least that like stuff that slaps on Twitter tends to be really wellreceived 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 you're building doesn't resonate with them why you building it right who's it for exactly Uh, so I'm all for vibes based like product road map setting and stuff.

>> Were any lessons from your time at Canva Tanme? Like what was that like a a way you approached things at Canva as well? >> Can'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 preI before we had you know GPD 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 3 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. I'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 11 Labs, it's launch fast, launch often, really nail it and understand what resonates. >> Yeah, that's got to be a lot of fun. Um, moving to more of that startup. I 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. Um, and so I love that kind of flexibility and focus for 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, you know, speaking of that, one of the unique things I was reading about um the team structure at 11 Labs is that engineers that you hire are are filtered against having a solid product instinct. You almost think of the engineers more as the PM and then the the more PM type folks are more growth leads. So h how

does that work? Yeah, one thing that we've seen is is we we have a belief, right, that that we we want to either be building or or growing, right? And we we kind of view th those two sides is the key two 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 for myself and for Tanme as well, like we 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 a company by far. And then on the engineering side, we we look and we screen for those that that build side projects on their own that can identify a user painoint and like really build and be obsessed with that. A lot of engineers that join our team just love the 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 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. >> Where where do you slot in there Tanme? Are you a growth product manager or are you an engineering product manager? What what's your role specifically? >> Yeah. Um me and Jack have had multiple conversations about this and it is whatever it takes to you know >> that's why I'm always like what's my job? I'm like I don't know help developers make more money figure it out >> quite quite quite literally. I I will merge sometimes very questionable PRs that my engineering team loves. I will review Figma designs. I'll ship payw wall 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. >> Yeah. Well, I was going to ask and follow up with that is like what have you done or what does the company do to kind of, you know, I guess 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 found because I find it's hard like people that build stuff. They want to build stuff they don't and often their own stuff, right? To get them to like jump on a team is tough. So what does 11 Labs do to get folks to to come into the Borg? You know, it's good environment probably. Uh which I guess is Tammy.

It's kind of what you were hinting at. >> Yeah, it's I I can I can say like what the cell to me was. I've only been here for about 4 months now, but you know, when I came in, it was super fresh and like the cell was very much be a founder, right? Like be a I've I've been at big companies. I've been at slightly smaller companies. Um my wife works at a PM at a large, you know, fang company as well. I see her dayto-day. The last thing I'd want to do is spend my life in PR and legal reviews. uh as a 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+ 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

catnet for a founder like the only rate limiter really is your own capability Right. Yeah. It's tough to set up. How do you I was going to 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 cuz like some I something I think we sometimes I don't say struggle like but it's I I do like setting teams to just do whatever but then the challenge sometimes is consistency right and like the voice like how does how do you do that in that setting?

>> Yeah. One thing that's been nice too, so we we have all of these small pods that that build and grow individual pro, you know, like individual products or apps. And then of course there there's a set of shared or orwide roles that that help to bring everything together. So think of everything from operations to a 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 matrixed 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 that goes into 11 Labs to make sure that there's standards and guidelines around you know brand and and and s and and ops like the the ability to to do that now on a really small team too cuz you you 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. M so you can just like grab off the shelf like the hey here's our standard how we do this and then like maybe maybe you mess it up and has to be corrected 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 to do a a weekl long offsite that we've done the past couple of years. >> The whole team like everybody. The whole company. >> The the whole Yeah. The whole company. So in the hundreds probably, right, if I'm guessing. >> Yeah. Now we're we're up to about 300 four 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.

>> 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 the engineers I've had the most fun working with like on 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 the job wreck the the interview process? >> We take a good hard look at uh public GitHub profiles to see who like who's engaged in what and we look at specific companies too that that we know have really strong kind of like product building cultures and and try to to attract folks that that want to join a company like it.

>> I was saying as well it just it becomes a referral flywheel, right? >> Yeah. the people that come in then they also know people like themselves, >> people they want to work with, right? Yeah. Exactly. It's it's a crazy thing like um you know there was a period I know people go like oh you're just going to be drawing from a limited pool of folks but like the riskreward is just so high to like do that right. Um and you have to be careful cuz 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? As 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 Tim as you were 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. And 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 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 or it's less existential than than moving right and so it's like okay how do a balance and that takes I don't know I mean I assume founders and leaders who are at the company who are tolerant to like mistakes and risk right is probably one thing um 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 in in the world

>> 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 does an amazing job because there there's often, you know, blips in the model that that might come up or specific, you like very important things, but things that you 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 guiding principle and ethos then then it's pretty clear that you know moving quicker is is more important than

ensuring that there's like mey coverage of every little thing. And so I I think that that's why the these things the small team sizes the founder background the speed like they all need to fit you they all need to fit together right >> you need people who are like take responsibility too right >> 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 that'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 ship move, then I think that's where you really start to get harmony and and you can kind of deliver bigger results. One of the challenges with with moving fast and then and then even, you know, as much as I praised it, like building toward the Twitter thread or the viral Tik Tok 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? >> 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 a couple of the features or or growth campaigns that that we've built and launched that might might in hindsight look like a flash in the pan. One thing that our um CEO and and co-founder Mati told me a couple weeks ago, it's he he encouraged a quote from Brian Armstrong at 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. >> When we think about these launches, it's not we're launching for launching sake. 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 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 shipped this thing? 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 where we've developed or built or or 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, 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. Um, 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.

>> Yeah. On on that note, Tanya, 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. >> Yeah, I 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 rap will 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 rap. Mine uh 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. Uh >> yeah. Yeah, that's how you know when rap has gone beyond mainstream. Um and post

post cool is probably um >> I love Phil's coffee, don't get me wrong, but maybe we didn't need a wrapped. This is fine. >> 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 sharable experience, right? People generally resonate and identify themselves around the music they listen to and you present it 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. It's only, 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 sharable 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, sky put a screenshot of their skyline out there or I think even like the revenue cat team, you'll put like the billboard up on like Time Square and then people will like go and stand in front of it and take a photo.

>> That one is gone by the way. I think everybody's figured that out that 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. 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 hand it 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 stripe you've hit this sort of like you know milestone these are natural sharable moments that align with the value that the user gets from the platform that they are personally very proud of and that then they are willing to share and actually going and figuring that out is really important you It was 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 sharable feature we ever built was just building a mobile app because then people could easily screenshot like and and I guess this was 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. 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, you know, clearly we knew that virality would go up with the mobile app, but like um and also just we had a miss there on not having a mobile app for as long as we didn't, right? Uh and like I kind of thought it as like this toy just kind of like, oh yeah, it's we're a business to be. Why do we

need a mobile app? And I maybe 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 beyond a certain stage, but like I totally missed 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 ignored it. But it's exactly to your point right is I was like being like h like wrong you know what other people do duh rather than just being like why user yell today? Okay I build that.

would have been the better algorithm and would have got me to like this like sort of unlock much sooner, right? But yeah, it's just like surprising sometimes the second order effects you get, you know? I'm sure the uh Spotify people never knew rap would become the thing it did, right? >> Yeah, it's hard to manufacture those sharable 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 flighties. Flighty kind of does a wrap like the year-end like flights and and that has gone, you know, fairly viral and a lot of people post and that kind of thing. Um, >> but it's a little more compelling than how many coffees did I order this year.

>> Absolutely. But but Ryan even talked about on uh 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 to this launch where he talked about like they struggled with that like that they they went through multiple iterations before they landed on something that was actually truly sharable and and I mean I think that's was kind of your point Tanme with that post and kind of what you're saying is like you got to iterate towards that real sharable 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 sharable moment. And then then you keep iterating and you find that sharable moment. It's very analogous to like um 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 happening 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 what 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 one 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. >> Yeah. Have y'all found any key unlocks in the consumer apps at 11 Labs? The are there sharable moments? Are you still iterating toward finding that kind of loop?

>> 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, um, etc. And and have seen some pull like for for us. I think the the aha is when you 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 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 trying to get out of the way a little bit and trying to shorten the 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 Kaine 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 thing for us and one that we we're beginning to put a little bit more more fuel on on the consumer side.

>> It's all fair use if a c if a user does it, right? So it's like uh but yeah those are the those are the 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 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 sure natural virality and growth that way.

One thing that ties the two apps together a little bit in in part of 11 Labs is just the the importance and the centrality of voice as like a medium and a 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 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 the consumer side as well.

>> Yeah. When when uh when do I get um custom voice portability to other LLMs? I want that because I tell you the uh I'm I'm so much more tolerant of like the standard sort of like 5.2 like behavior and answers when I'm reading it. But once it starts talking to me, the person 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 GBT you were talking about but like the standard chat GBT 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 is 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. Um, 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. Just 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.

Well, yeah, I was just going to say we we did a quick analysis on on the consumer side and 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, you know, 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 read great audio book great audiobook content and uh no single voice h has more than 10 or 12% of use and so the the tail is extremely long right like the median amount of use is probably close to 1 or 2% right when 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 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 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 chat GPT do uh 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 and but 11 Labs it's like that's where you lead and that's where you stand out and it seems like that's one of the differentiation points but yeah how do you think about competing with these other labs? 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 our expertise and have I continued to double down there. And so there's lots of great models in video and image and yeah, you know, of course in text, right? But but we we have continued to double down each turn to be able to to move fast and keep our edge and stay ahead when it comes to voice. I think that we're all aware though that that you know to to continue to add and gain value, you you need to do more than just one thing. And so I think that's part of why we we've tried to build 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 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 got to 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 like one of the many ways I've been wrong in the last two years and I think a lot of people have was that 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 I think of Amazon is 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 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 the advantages acrew into the 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 mo you know they may be able to clone a passible 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 the audiobook stuff last year and you were saying that there there might be, you know, more to that coming. Like who's going to build like a a plat 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 that 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. 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 what you were just saying Jack like that that kind of promotes a like humanentric 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

>> 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. >> 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 going to try the good one and then maybe we'll look at the cost or whatever. But like yeah, certainly like that that certainly is going to give you some sort of advantage as long as it's >> true. I mean it goes back like just media is compounding, right? Every time someone thinks about voice or speech and audio, 11 Labs 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 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 earn 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 mode. Maybe it's old school would call that brand or you know brand almost seems too simplistic.

You know what I mean? In 2026. Yeah. >> Well, I 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? I think the biggest uh win that that we've had um on the app that that I lead is is really to not lose sight of the fact that yes, AI is everywhere. And if you you spend time like us trying to evaluate benchmarks and per credit spend and like in tokens and 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 with some SAS apps like there's real cogs there there's real costs that you need to be smart about but that shouldn't mean that 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.

>> I think for us it's just been simplicity as well, like a version of simplicity. Um, and that's been 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 old days where everyone had these supplementary apps that were either really really like bare bones or they were just basically the desktop dashboard squished into like a tiny form factor. 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 for variety of

reasons across Apple and play store limitations but even just as a mobile app we want it to be very simple 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 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. >> All right, a fun one. What's your biggest fail of the year? What did you screw off that was an incredible lesson that to to your comment earlier, Jack, that provided a lot of information even if it didn't provide a huge uh win.

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 what's the what's the base case like what what what happens if you just have a sign up 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 overro 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 fun, 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 5 days and see what's the opportunity size there. And so that was a big fail. We we probably spent too many too many cycles, too many experiments and um 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. 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, "Oh, 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 $1,000 price point. So you go, 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. >> All right, last question. Growth would be easier if all my competitors gave up. Sorry, I'm not supposed to be I was going to say if there weren't over two 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 on this too is just the number of tools that are used in a modern growth sack in the right way has began 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 then then we we would save a lot a lot of time 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 at least actually do start talking to each other.

>> I mean, my engineer was like, "Why can't we just cursor this?" And I'm like, "Well, this MMP isn't codebase isn't in cursor and you know, the meta ads API isn't in cursor, so sorry, dude." But I think I think I mean we hijack the lightning round, but I think we that might be a big you know, last 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 it's not a crazy wish list item I think anymore like we're we're maybe not far. Yeah. I 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 four 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 things aren't coming through in this platform why is it not okay let's talk to the infra team and And it's 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.

>> All right. Well, this has been so much fun. I know you guys are hiring. Any uh specific jobs you wanted to to shout out or anything else you wanted to share 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 web. We also have native SDKs to be able to build voice agents and voice experiences into native mobile and our team is 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.

>> Awesome. Thanks so much. And we'll we'll drop a link in the show notes for folks. But uh thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. This is uh a lot of fun. A really fun conversation. >> Awesome. Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. This is great. 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.