ElevenLabs' Horizontal Strategy: Engineers Own Product, Sharded Growth Teams
TL;DR
- ElevenLabs' horizontal product strategy, enabled by foundational AI audio models, succeeds by sharding the company into discrete teams with specialized growth functions, rather than a single overarching growth team.
- Eliminating Product Managers allows engineers to own the full product lifecycle from idea to analysis, accelerating iteration loops and leveraging their direct user interaction for better roadmap decisions.
- Motion design videos are crucial for product launches, capturing attention within the first 30 seconds by focusing on core value propositions, making them a worthwhile investment even for early-stage companies.
- Organic LinkedIn content offers a lower competitive bar than platforms like Twitter, enabling founders to stand out and build an audience more effectively by focusing on authentic, valuable posts.
- For B2B companies, paid marketing should be deferred until after achieving product-market fit, as early investment in funnels distracts from the core task of building an exceptional product.
- CAC to payback period is a more actionable metric than CAC to LTV for growth teams, guiding aggressive investment when favorable and providing flexibility for strategic bets when unfavorable.
- Conversational AI agents can effectively replace inbound SDRs by handling data collection and initial screening, accelerating the process of booking qualified leads for sales teams.
Deep Dive
ElevenLabs' rapid ascent to a $6.6 billion valuation is powered by a growth strategy that deliberately eschews conventional wisdom, embracing a horizontal product approach and a product team structure devoid of traditional Product Managers. This unconventional yet effective model, detailed by Head of Growth Luke Harries, hinges on empowering engineers to own the product lifecycle end-to-end, fostering agility and direct customer feedback loops. The implications are profound for how companies can scale rapidly, particularly in the AI-driven landscape, by prioritizing deep product ownership and specialized, yet integrated, growth functions.
ElevenLabs operates on the principle that engineers should directly own product development, eliminating the need for a separate Product Management function. This empowers engineers to move from idea generation to shipping and analyzing results without intermediaries, accelerating iteration speed and ensuring product decisions are grounded in technical understanding and direct customer interaction. This is complemented by a growth function that absorbs many traditional PM responsibilities, focusing on marketing, awareness, and acquisition. This structure is maintained by keeping growth teams lean, preventing them from overstepping into engineering's domain, and by rigorously vetting engineers for their product-building capabilities through comprehensive product challenges. The consequence of this model is a more cohesive and faster-moving product development cycle, where the people building the product are also responsible for its market success, leading to more informed and rapid decision-making.
The company's success with a horizontal product strategy, offering foundational AI audio models via API and then branching into consumer apps and creator tools, challenges the traditional advice of hyper-focusing on a single Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). ElevenLabs achieves this by sharding the company into distinct product-focused teams, each with its own specialized growth function. This allows for tailored marketing and growth strategies for diverse audiences, from developers to consumers, while leveraging the core strength of their advanced AI models. The implication is that a broad, foundational technology can support multiple, seemingly disparate product lines, provided there is dedicated ownership and specialized execution for each. This approach, while not universally recommended, demonstrates that a horizontal strategy can be effective when paired with a robust organizational structure that allows for focused execution across different market segments.
Furthermore, ElevenLabs emphasizes a "loud" and pervasive distribution strategy, advocating for cross-posting across every available channel, including emerging platforms like Threads and Blue Sky, alongside established ones like X and LinkedIn. This "surround sound" approach aims to leverage social algorithms by creating immediate engagement signals, thereby amplifying reach. The firm also champions the strategic use of video, particularly motion design, for launches, emphasizing the critical importance of the first 30 seconds to capture attention. This aggressive distribution, coupled with a focus on product readiness and clear, concise messaging, has enabled them to achieve significant viewership on their launches, underscoring the necessity of multifaceted and persistent outreach in today's crowded digital landscape. The takeaway is that even for a company with a strong product, visibility requires a deliberate and broad-reaching marketing effort that maximizes engagement across diverse platforms.
Action Items
- Create a 7-part launch playbook: Define 3 tiers of launches (Tier 1, 2, 3) and assign specific growth lead responsibilities for each.
- Build a mini-tool strategy: Develop 3-5 small, free tools exposing core product value to drive user acquisition and demonstrate product capabilities.
- Audit video content strategy: Analyze 5-10 recent launch videos for effectiveness, focusing on the first 30 seconds and core value proposition delivery.
- Draft a sharded growth team structure: Define roles and responsibilities for 2-3 specialized growth pods (e.g., consumer, developer, enterprise) with clear KPIs.
- Implement a copywriting training program: Conduct 2-3 workshops for the growth team focusing on persuasive language for various channels (LinkedIn, Twitter, landing pages).
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View Episode Notes →Key Quotes
"My top tip for any young people listening is to do hackathons with your smartest friends because what happened with that hackathon is, one, we ended up winning the Microsoft prize, so we each won an Xbox and immediately put that on eBay, so we got about 300 quid. Two, it landed me my first job at Microsoft. And then I also got to meet Matty."
Luke Harris highlights the significant benefits of participating in hackathons, emphasizing how they can lead to tangible rewards like prizes, job opportunities, and valuable networking connections. This quote demonstrates his early career trajectory, directly linking a specific event to multiple positive outcomes.
"I was kind of angel investing then, but I was like, 'This is not something I'd invest in.' I was like, 'What do you mean step one, you're going to build the world's best AI audio model, something no one else has ever done?' Anyway, so I didn't invest."
Luke Harris recounts his initial skepticism towards Eleven Labs' ambitious plan, revealing his hesitation to invest despite being an angel investor at the time. This quote illustrates a moment of missed opportunity and underscores the difficulty in recognizing groundbreaking ideas early on, especially when they challenge conventional approaches.
"Fella was a wild journey. It's me, my friend Richie, and we just wanted to do a startup. So we applied to YC. We got into YC, actually, with an AI developer tool. And we quickly realized we were trying to do like browser-based automation where you automate tasks on people's behalf. So, you know, you're sending an email and it auto-completes it. But this was back in 2019 before LLMs were really a thing. The Transformer paper had just came out, but GPT-3 didn't even exist. So we're going to YC, we tried building a prototype and we're like, 'Ah, this just isn't going to work.'"
Luke Harris describes the early stages of his previous startup, Fella, and the challenges encountered due to the nascent state of AI technology at the time. This quote illustrates the importance of technological readiness and market timing, as their ambitious AI developer tool concept was ahead of the available LLM capabilities.
"If I was to advise people, it would be choose your one ICP and build all the products around it to have them compound. However, that's not actually what we're doing. Instead, we're building discrete products. And the way we then tackle that is we basically shard the company. So we have a consumer app focused team, which has an entire growth team with a growth marketer, with paid ads, with community."
Luke Harris contrasts conventional advice on product strategy with Eleven Labs' approach, explaining their method of building discrete products and sharding the company into specialized teams. This quote highlights their unique growth strategy, which involves creating dedicated teams for each product to manage its specific growth elements, rather than a single, overarching growth function.
"So video is hugely underrated as a medium for growth. And so every launch video we do, the keystone marketing piece we ship with it is the video. There's different types of videos you can do. You can do motion design, which is basically animated graphics. You could do a founder-led video where they're speaking to the camera. You could do a more like screen share style video where they're kind of recording and interacting and it's very product focused."
Luke Harris emphasizes the critical role of video in growth strategies, particularly for product launches. He outlines various video formats, including motion design, founder-led narratives, and screen shares, underscoring his belief that video is an essential and often underestimated tool for capturing attention and communicating value.
"The biggest advice I give to growth people is you need to be loud. You need to get it across every single channel. And then we actually have an amplifier channel in our Slack where the entire team's in. And when we do a launch, we post all the different links for the different tweet thread, the LinkedIn, and everyone else will then share, they like, they comment, they do their own threads. And the idea is we want to surround sound for that day, getting that core messaging across."
Luke Harris advocates for an aggressive, multi-channel distribution strategy for product launches, stressing the importance of being "loud" and utilizing every available platform. He details their internal "amplifier channel" on Slack, which mobilizes the entire team to amplify launch content, creating a "surround sound" effect to maximize visibility and engagement.
"The biggest mistake as early founders making, particularly for B2B, is doing paid marketing too early because if you don't have PMF yet, you're not going to get paid marketing working. And you're going to spend all your time and all your engineering time optimizing funnels and conversion and creating these different creative and ads and caring about your rankings and your meta metrics. None of that actually matters and apart from just building an incredible product."
Luke Harris identifies a common and costly error for early-stage B2B founders: engaging in paid marketing before achieving product-market fit (PMF). He argues that such efforts are premature and divert resources from the crucial task of building an exceptional product, which is the true foundation for sustainable growth.
"The most underappreciated growth channel I see is organic LinkedIn. On Twitter, you're competing against the best writers in the world. You're competing against Harry Stebbings running shorts, Bill Ackman. Yeah, Bill Ackman. Like, it's really tough. On LinkedIn, you're competing against Freddy from Deloitte who got a promotion. And so the bar to creating great content and standing out and being authentic is so much lower."
Luke Harris points to organic LinkedIn as a significantly underappreciated growth channel, contrasting it with the highly competitive landscape of platforms like Twitter. He explains that the lower barrier to entry and less intense competition on LinkedIn make it easier for founders to create authentic content and gain visibility.
"The reason we don't have PMs is our overall thesis is that engineers are building the product and they should be responsible for the product. And with AI now, we're seeing much more like different traditional roles merging. And so engineers are going towards product and engineers or engineers towards growth engineers. And what's fantastic is when you have product engineers and the engineers who are actually building the product, they own the roadmap. They can go from idea, and chances are the ideas are better and more right because they're the ones speaking to users and understand the context."
Luke Harris explains Eleven Labs' decision to forgo Product Managers (PMs), attributing it to a core belief that engineers should own product development. He highlights how the merging of roles due to AI allows engineers to directly manage the product roadmap, leveraging their direct user interaction and contextual understanding to drive better product decisions.
"Actually, the day-to-day metric and ratio we're really thinking about is CAC to payback period rather than CAC to
Resources
External Resources
Books
- "The Transformer paper" - Mentioned as the paper that had just come out prior to LLMs becoming prevalent.
Articles & Papers
- "The GLP 1 paper" - Discussed as a significant development in medicine, comparable to penicillin.
People
- Bill Gates - Mentioned as someone the speaker followed on Twitter for insights into the pandemic.
- Brett Turner - Mentioned as the founder of Curative, a company that became a large health tech company.
- Elon Musk - Mentioned in relation to Twitter's downranking of posts with links in the first tweet.
- Freddie from Deloitte - Mentioned as an example of someone whose content on LinkedIn is less competitive than on Twitter.
- Guillermo from Persell - Mentioned in relation to the shift in SEO traffic from blog-style content to tool pages.
- Harry Stebbings - Mentioned as a prominent writer on Twitter whose content competes with others.
- Jason Calacanis - Mentioned for tweeting a picture of donuts and receiving a sarcastic response from Brian Johnson.
- Luke Harries - Mentioned as the Head of Growth at ElevenLabs and the guest on the podcast.
- Matty - Mentioned as the co-founder of ElevenLabs and a friend of the speaker.
- Peter - Mentioned as a co-founder of ElevenLabs, responsible for world-class models.
- Rahul - Mentioned in relation to Superhuman's launch video.
- Richie - Mentioned as a friend and co-founder of Fella and a previous company focused on men's binge eating.
- Steve Jobs - Mentioned as a historical beacon of marketing, product, and engineering.
- Susan - Mentioned as an investor in "Cheat on Anything."
- Victor - Mentioned as the founder of Synthesia, who discussed the potential of AI voices.
Organizations & Institutions
- 11 Labs - Mentioned as the company where Luke Harries is Head of Growth, valued at close to $7 billion.
- AngelList - Mentioned as a company that trusts Secureframe.
- Apple - Mentioned for pushing marketing for "Apple Intelligence" before it is fully functional.
- Cambridge - Mentioned as the location of a hackathon where Luke Harries and Matty met.
- Coda - Mentioned as a company that trusts Secureframe.
- Curative - Mentioned as a company that pivoted into COVID testing and became a large health tech company.
- ElevenLabs - Mentioned as the company where Luke Harries is Head of Growth.
- Fella - Mentioned as a startup founded by Luke Harries and his friend Richie.
- Forbes - Mentioned for its list of top startup employers.
- Google - Mentioned as a top-tier investor in Secureframe and as a company ElevenLabs aims to surpass.
- G2 - Mentioned for its best software awards.
- High Rocks - Mentioned as founders who made money by turning a coffee shop into a COVID testing center.
- Klarna - Mentioned as a company that trusts Secureframe.
- Microsoft - Mentioned as the company where Luke Harries got his first job after winning a hackathon prize.
- Nasdaq - Mentioned as a company that trusts Secureframe.
- OpenAI - Mentioned as a company ElevenLabs sees itself among and as a company that recently launched "OpenAI Academy."
- Palantir - Mentioned as a company ElevenLabs sees itself among and as a potential enterprise client.
- Pendo - Mentioned as a software experience management platform.
- Pro Football Focus (PFF) - Mentioned as a data source for player grading.
- Ramp - Mentioned for its marketing strategy of counter-positioning against Brex.
- Realtor.com - Mentioned as a company that trusts Secureframe.
- Rippling - Mentioned as a company that works with Captions.
- Secureframe - Mentioned as a company that simplifies information security and compliance.
- Slack - Mentioned as an example of a company with strong enterprise growth.
- Superhuman - Mentioned for its growth strategies and launch video.
- Synthesia - Mentioned as a customer of ElevenLabs and a company that could potentially use AI voices.
- TechCrunch - Mentioned in relation to the vibe of TPBN.
- The High Rocks Founders - Mentioned for turning a coffee shop into a COVID testing center.
- Twitter - Mentioned as a platform where Luke Harries is not naturally active, but where content can be amplified.
- YC (Y Combinator) - Mentioned as an accelerator where Fella was accepted and where Curative was a participant.
Tools & Software
- Framer - Mentioned as a tool that unifies design, CMS, and publishing.
- Figma - Mentioned as a tool for sketching wireframes.
- Google - Mentioned as a top-tier investor in Secureframe.
- Pendo - Mentioned as a no-code software experience management platform.
- Secureframe - Mentioned as a tool for simplifying information security and compliance.
- Screen Studio - Mentioned as a piece of software for creating screen share videos.
Websites & Online Resources
- 11labs.com - Mentioned as the website for ElevenLabs.
- Framer.com/design - Mentioned as the website to start creating with Framer.
- Pendo.io/20product - Mentioned as the website to start for free with Pendo.
- Secureframe.com - Mentioned as the website to learn more about Secureframe.
Other Resources
- AI Audio Models - Mentioned as the core offering of ElevenLabs.
- AI Developer Tool - Mentioned as the initial focus of Fella.
- Apple Intelligence - Mentioned as a feature being marketed by Apple before its release.
- B2B - Mentioned in the context of paid marketing and product market fit.
- Brand Marketing - Discussed as an ideal strategy to implement from the start.
- CAC to LTV - Discussed as a metric that can be inaccurate and transient.
- CAC to Payback Period - Discussed as a more relevant metric than CAC to LTV.
- Conversational AI Agents - Mentioned as a feature ElevenLabs is building, with Luke Harries initially skeptical but now a proponent.
- COVID Testing Clinic - Mentioned as a venture started by Luke Harries and Richie during the pandemic.
- Creator Platform - Mentioned as a product being built by ElevenLabs.
- Digital CBT Clinic - Mentioned as a previous venture focused on men's binge eating.
- Enterprise Marketing - Discussed as a separate team within ElevenLabs with specific goals.
- Founders - Mentioned in the context of advice on focus and product expansion.
- Growth - Mentioned as a key function within ElevenLabs, often merging product and marketing roles.
- Hackathon - Mentioned as the event where Luke Harries and Matty first met.
- Information Security and Compliance - Mentioned as areas simplified by Secureframe.
- Inbound SDR - Mentioned as a role that can be replaced by conversational AI agents.
- Launch Video - Discussed as a crucial marketing piece for product launches.
- LLMs (Large Language Models) - Mentioned in the context of their emergence and impact.
- Longevity - Mentioned as a focus of Brian Johnson's brand.
- Marketing Sourced Sales Qualified Leads - Mentioned as the North Star metric for the enterprise marketing team at ElevenLabs.
- Medication Piece - Mentioned as a component of health tech business models.
- Mini Tools - Discussed as a way to expose product value for enterprise products.
- Motion Design - Mentioned as a type of video content for growth.
- North Star Metric - Discussed in relation to enterprise marketing.
- Organic LinkedIn - Highlighted as an underappreciated growth channel.
- Paid Marketing - Advised against for early-stage B2B founders without product-market fit.
- Product Engineering - Mentioned as a role that engineers are moving towards.
- Product Market Fit (PMF) - Discussed as a prerequisite for successful paid marketing.
- Research Engineering - Mentioned as a type of work where AI-generated code is not used.
- Screen Share Video - Mentioned as a type of video content suitable for technical audiences.
- SEO - Discussed in relation to blog posts and tool pages.
- Software Experience Management Platform - Described as Pendo's offering.
- Speech to Text Model - Mentioned as a product launched by ElevenLabs.
- Text to Bark - Mentioned as an imaginary product for April Fools' Day.
- Text to Speech - Mentioned as a core offering of ElevenLabs.
- Tier 1 Launches - Described as major new models or product lines requiring significant attention.
- Tier 2 Launches - Described as major feature updates.
- Tier 3 Launches - Described as minor updates for the changelog.
- Tools Pages - Mentioned as a type of SEO content that is expected to remain relevant.
- Transformer Paper - Mentioned as a foundational paper for LLMs.
- Tweet Thread - Discussed as a core asset for product launches.
- Video - Highlighted as a hugely underrated medium for growth.
- Voice AI Agents - Mentioned as a feature ElevenLabs is building.
- Webinars - Discussed as a still-relevant marketing tactic, though the name might be rebranded.