May 23, 2025 · 1h 15m · 20vc
20VC: ElevenLabs Head of Growth on Why You Do Not Need PMs | The 7-Part Launch Playbook That Gets 700K+ Views Per Product | The Truth About CAC, Payback & Performance Marketing in AI with Luke Harries
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In this episode of 20 Growth, host Harry Stebbings interviews Luke Harries, Head of Growth at ElevenLabs, to unpack the operational strategies driving the voice AI leader's $3.3 billion valuation. Luke shares actionable frameworks on scaling horizontal products without PMs, executing tiered product launches, managing payback periods, and driving viral distribution.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 32.6% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 4.2 Guest teaching 4.7 Guest disagreement 2.0 Harry pushing back 3.3
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 1:01:45 Shutting down paid ad message testing
Luke directly dismisses Harry's suggestion to use paid ads for messaging tests, asking if Harry has ever actually seen that work and forcing Harry to admit it was a bad suggestion.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 55:35 Challenging AI startup revenue sustainabilityHarry forcefully pushes back against Luke's bullish stance on AI revenue quality, pointing out that 10-15 direct competitors per category make discerning real winners much harder.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 36:45 Reframing CAC LTV to CAC Payback PeriodLuke corrects Harry's framing on unit economics by explaining why growth teams ignore LTV metrics in favor of actionable 12 to 36 month payback periods.
Harry holds his own ▶ 48:15 Calling TBPN the Clubhouse of our eraHarry demonstrates media authority by analyzing TBPN's distribution mechanics, accurately diagnosing high Twitter engagement paired with poor audience retention.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Connecting with Mati Staniszewski and Discovering ElevenLabs | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Harry opens with a warm intro and asks about Luke meeting Mati Staniszewski. Luke shares how he initially thought Mati's go-to-market plan was terrible while swimming in Hampstead Heath pond before joining later. | |
| Lessons from Fela, COVID Testing Clinics, and GLP-1 Telehealth | 3 | 3 | 0 | 1 | Luke recounts his previous startup Fela, running drive-through COVID testing in SF, and launching a GLP-1 clinic early. Harry connects this with a story about Hirox and emphasizes market timing. | |
| Scaling ElevenLabs' Horizontal Product Strategy | 5 | 4 | 2 | 5 | Harry questions how a horizontal strategy can succeed when venture consensus preaches tight ICP focus. Luke defends ElevenLabs' platform expansion across developers, reader apps, and creators. | |
| Structuring and Hiring Early Growth Teams | 4 | 5 | 1 | 4 | Harry presses on operational focus across multiple product lines. Luke details their organizational structure of sharded product teams backed by channel specialists. | |
| Leveraging Motion Design and Launch Video Formats | 2 | 6 | 2 | 3 | Harry expresses skepticism about needing motion designers. Luke outlines launch video archetypes and critiques long founder monologue videos like Superhuman's staircase launch. | |
| The Seven-Part Product Launch Playbook | 3 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Harry asks about humor in B2B marketing and contractor trade-offs. Luke explains why spending $5k to $10k on motion design beats paid ad CPMs for product launches. | |
| Tactical Distribution and Social Algorithm Mechanics | 5 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Harry shares algorithm knowledge regarding early engagement windows and unscalable founder tactics. Luke breaks down primary versus secondary product messaging across channels. | |
| Technical Blog Posts, Modern SEO, and Mini-Tools | 5 | 5 | 2 | 4 | Harry questions whether SEO will die in 2-3 years due to LLM discovery shifts. Luke counters by differentiating longform blog content from interactive tool pages. | |
| Multi-Channel Social Strategy and Growth Hiring Mistakes | 4 | 4 | 2 | 4 | Harry asks whether companies should focus on 1-2 core social channels rather than spraying content everywhere. Luke pushes back, advocating for automated cross-posting to capture underutilized platforms. | |
| Measuring Enterprise Marketing Impact and Modern Webinars | 4 | 5 | 1 | 3 | Harry questions attribution on high-volume organic social content. Luke explains geo-lift measurement and using marketing-sourced sales qualified leads as a North Star metric. | |
| CAC, Payback Periods, and Growth Reinvestment | 5 | 6 | 2 | 5 | Harry challenges the validity of CAC to LTV metrics. Luke corrects the premise, explaining that growth teams operationalize CAC to payback period rather than LTV. | |
| Enterprise Acquisition Strategy and Brand Building | 4 | 5 | 3 | 3 | Harry asks if consumer entry is the future of enterprise acquisition. Luke rejects the word enterprise as vague, identifying engineering managers and product leads as real buyers. | |
| Founder Personal Brands, Viral PR, and Trust Risks | 5 | 5 | 4 | 4 | Harry suggests viral PR stunts can build brand awareness that founders can pivot past later. Luke strongly disagrees, arguing that gimmick marketing destroys trust required for enterprise sales. | |
| Counter-Positioning Strategy in Competitive Markets | 5 | 5 | 2 | 4 | Luke breaks down 7 Powers counter-positioning using Ramp vs Brex. Harry applies this to podcast formats and critiques TBPN's low viewer retention. | |
| Operating Without Product Managers (PMs) | 4 | 6 | 2 | 4 | Harry asks why ElevenLabs operates without PMs. Luke explains how product engineers own the full lifecycle from Figma mockups to system architecture. | |
| Evaluating AI Startup Revenue Quality and Retention | 6 | 6 | 3 | 6 | Harry challenges AI startup revenue quality, citing competitive density and Lovable's monthly churn rates. Luke reframes individual seat retention versus account-level NRR. | |
| AI Web Development, Lovable, and Angel Investing | 5 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Harry and Luke discuss co-investing in Lovable and the future of AI web development, with Luke arguing legacy internal tool builders like Retool are falling behind. | |
| Quick Fire: Early Marketing Mistakes and Growth Channels | 4 | 6 | 5 | 4 | Harry suggests using paid marketing to test product messaging. Luke shuts down the idea, asking if Harry has ever seen that work, leading Harry to concede his suggestion was bad. | |
| Quick Fire: Copywriting, Premature Products, and Voice AI | 4 | 5 | 3 | 2 | Luke emphasizes copywriting mastery and criticizes Apple for marketing unreleased AI features. Harry compliments Luke on repeating question prompts for short-form clips. | |
| Quick Fire: Automating Inbound SDRs with Voice AI | 5 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Harry shares a funny story about forgetting an investment in Captions. Luke explains how Voice AI agents automate BANT screening to replace inbound SDRs. |
Statements from this episode (52)
Stebbings: ElevenLabs Raised $281M at a $3.3B Valuation
“They've raised two hundred and eighty one million, With their latest round, pricing them at 3.3 billion dollars.”
Harries Passed on Angel Investing in ElevenLabs Over Terrible GTM Plan
“And I was like, That is a terrible go to market plan. That's absolutely terrible. I was kind of angel investing them. I was like, this is not something I want to invest. What do you mean step one? You're going to build the world's best AI audio model, somethin…”
Harries: Wordware's $40M Round Is the Largest Y Combinator Raise Ever
“And also Philip, the guy who organized it, he founded Wordware, which is the largest raise from YC ever. I think it's about forty million dollars.”
Harries: Curative was one of the fastest companies to reach $100M revenue
“The company we partnered with took a different approach. You know, they were some of the first people to do these testing, did incredibly well. One of the fastest companies ever to a hundred million dollars in revenue. And that company became curative.”
Harries: GLP-1 medications are the biggest medical breakthrough since penicillin
“This is, like, the biggest thing in medicine since penicillin”
Harries: Former startup Fela generates over $30M in annual revenue
“Richie has done an incredible job, and that company's now doing over thirty million dollars a year in revenue, helping thousands of patients”
Harries: ElevenLabs Founders Aim to Build a Company Larger Than Google
“Matty and Peter literally want to build a bigger company than Google. They want to build something absolutely massive.”
Harries: Scaling horizontal AI products requires foundational models and founder-type product leads
“And I think the reason we've managed to get it working is because we've started with these incredible audio models, all these people come naturally to us. We've then been able to raise money Hire incredible founder type peoples who really own these individual …”
Harries: ElevenLabs enterprise marketing team will reach 20 people this year
“Our enterprise marketing team by the end of this year will be 20 people, and that's just for enterprise marketing. And then separately, our mobile app will be its own five to 10 person growth team.”
Harries: First growth hire must be a generalist spanning positioning and distribution
“Start with one generalist growth marketer, and they should be responsible for everything from messaging and positioning, working with the founder, up to awareness and setting up channels and testing. The reason why you need them to do all of that is if you onl…”
Harries: Second growth hire for early startups should be a front-end growth engineer
“Normally the second hire I recommend is a growth engineer who's front-end leaning. And so this is like a software engineer who's hacky, who's really into metrics, and they should be setting up landing pages for SEO. They should be doing mini tools. They should…”
Harries: Long founder-led monologue launch videos fail to retain viewers
“And the big mistake that I see with most people's videos is that they put the founder themselves, they do a full five minute monologue themselves about the company mission, And unless you have the editing skills of Mr. Beast, you're just not going to keep peop…”
Harries: Superhuman's Staircase Launch Video Loses Viewer Attention Due to Pacing
“The staircase was beautiful, but you're watching Rahul walk down this beautiful staircase, and by the time he's walked to the bottom, kind of, you've moved on. And so then, in this, like, attention economy, you really need to make it short and snappy.”
Harries: Screen-share launch videos work best for technical audiences using Screen Studio
“And I think this really works well if you're selling to a technical audience who they basically want to nerd out on the details and the product itself and the craft, then those are great. They're very quick to make. Screen Studio is a fantastic piece of softwa…”
Harries: Freelance Motion Designers Charge $5K to $10K Per Product Launch
“Most motion designers, they work with you on a specific project for about five to 10 K.”
Harries: Most ElevenLabs Product Launches Achieve 200K to 700K Views
“Most launches get somewhere between 200,000 views and 700,000 views.”
Harries: Product launches require immediate manual engagement to trigger social algorithms
“You need to give your launch a big boost for these algorithms to actually care about it.”
Stebbings Personally DM'd His First 50,000 Twitter Followers to Drive Subscriptions
“For the first 50,000 Twitter followers I got, I personally DM'd everyone, and I suggested that they follow our newsletter as well.”
Stebbings: Daily 15-minute cross-promotion grew 20VC newsletter to hundreds of thousands
“At the end of every day, 15 minutes, you just continuously cross-promote other channels. Honestly, that's how we got to several 100,000 on the newsletter.”
Harries: Over 70% of Zapier's SEO Traffic Goes to Its Blog
“If you look at Zapier, over 70% of their SEO traffic still goes to their blog.”
Harries: Interactive SEO Tool Pages Will Remain Effective for Five Years
“The part which I am confident will stick around for at least five years are tool pages”
ElevenLabs Hired Its Top YouTube Reviewer as First In-House Creator
“Yes, and we've actually just hired our first in-house creator, whose only job is to create TikToks, YouTube videos, Instagram shorts, YouTube shorts for 11 Labs, and the way we actually hired this guy is, if you typed in 11 Labs on YouTube, he had the most vie…”
ElevenLabs' One-Week Affiliate Program Build Generates Tens of Thousands Monthly
“So for example, affiliates, we set up over a year and a half ago, and that now is bringing in over, you know, tens of thousands of dollars of MRR Per month. But this was set up a year and a half ago by one engineer in one week, and then no one's touched it sin…”
Harries: Dedicate a full-time person to any channel showing early traction
“And what we should have done is, once we've seen signs of life, given we already have PMF overall, staff one person who can focus on growing that one product, and those one set of KPIs, and nothing else. Keep them laser focused. So yeah, overall, I wish we had…”
ElevenLabs Launching Multi-Channel Enterprise Marketing Push in San Francisco
“We're going to be doing a big enterprise marketing push in San Francisco. We're doing billboards, we're doing podcasts, we're doing newsletters, we're doing events on the ground, and we're not going to measure any one channel in isolation, but instead, we'll l…”
ElevenLabs Uses Marketing-Sourced SQLs as Enterprise Marketing North Star
“What we've landed on as our North Star metric there is number of marketing sourced sales qualified leads.”
Harries: ElevenLabs Tracks CAC Payback Period Over CAC to LTV
“Actually, the day-to-day metric and ratio we're really thinking about is CAC to payback period, rather than CAC to LTV.”
Harries: ElevenLabs Targets 12 to 36 Month CAC Payback Periods
“We set different payback periods depending on which product line and how aggressive we want to be, but these vary between, say, 12 months to 24, maybe even 36 months for that payback period.”
Harries: Multi-Channel Growth and Conversion Optimization Keep Blended CAC Flat
“So for specific channels, they do tend to go up, but when you look at it broadly, and as you're adding new channels, when you're increasing the virality, when you're improving your activation rate, your conversion to paid, yes, you can kind of get that overall…”
Harries: ElevenLabs Uses Consumer Entry Point to Acquire Cheap Leads
“We actually have done this funky move of we've led in a consumer product, which enables us to get the CAC incredibly cheap, and then people may move up to creator or even enterprise.”
ElevenLabs splits growth into distinct top-down enterprise and bottom-up developer teams
“What we've done is spin up separate teams. So we have an enterprise marketing team, which is just focused on going in on the top. They're like, how do I get these SQLs, which are marketing sourced? They're doing executive dinners, they're doing the events, the…”
Harries: Controversial viral growth stunts destroy trust needed for enterprise sales
“He's also putting a big black X on himself if he ever actually wants to sell to enterprise sales teams, where you're like, ah, do I really trust this person? You know, I think it's a risky move.”
Harries: Ramp's counter-positioning strategy against Brex is genius marketing
“I think that's really smart for product development, but I think what Ramp has done with their counter positioning against Brex is just genius marketing.”
Stebbings: TBPN Is the Clubhouse of Our Era With Poor Retention
“I think it's Clubhouse of our era, and so they have brilliant channel market fit, which is they crush it on Twitter for very specific clips. When you look at any of their view rates, very little. When you look at their retention on engagement rates, fuck all.”
Harries: Traditional PMs Will Shift Into Growth or Product Engineering
“Yeah, I think PMs move to either growth, so you combine the PM role with marketing, and depending on your size and how strong your engineers are, you do more or less of the PM, or many PMs will actually move towards product engineering, which is they're somewh…”
Harries: 20% of work is coding, written exclusively via Cursor
“So I still write code probably 20% of the time. The only code I write is through cursor, where I'm describing in the chat what I want done, and then it executes on my behalf.”
Harries: 60% to 70% of Core Engineering Code at ElevenLabs Is AI-Written
“In terms of core engineering, I would say probably 60, 70% of code now is AI written, so still like the majority.”
Harries: Current AI wave, not COVID boom, is right time for aggressive VC investing
“The wrong time to be the tiger global play of investing quickly was back in the COVID boom. The exact right time is now, when I think you have this unlock of capabilities with the AI models, which has meant new products which just couldn't exist before.”
Harries: Sub-100% user retention in prosumer AI is acceptable if viral expansion keeps NRR over 100%
“And I think when you look at consumer and prosumer, yes, for that individual user, you may only be on 87% revenue retention, but what then happens is you build a product on Lovable, you then share it with a bunch of your friends, a handful more people sign up …”
Stebbings: 20VC Invested in Lovable at a 10x Revenue Multiple
“When we did Lovable, I think it trebled its revenue by the time the round had completed, and I was like, I would want to retrade on price. Like, it literally was only a 10 X revenue multiple when we did it.”
Harries: Retool Is Dead at the Wheel Compared to AI App Builders
“And I think Retool is kind of dead at the wheel at the moment. I don't hear the recent things they've been launching, and so I could imagine Loveball going in that direction.”
Harries scores first angel exit as running app Runner sells to Strava
“Runner, the running app, and they just did fantastically well. That's my first exit. They just sold to Strava.”
Harries: Paid marketing before PMF is early B2B startups' biggest mistake
“The biggest mistake I see early founders making, particularly for BtoB, 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 …”
Harries: Organic LinkedIn is today's most underappreciated growth channel
“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 a short. Bill Ackman. Like, it's really tough. On LinkedIn, you're competin…”
Harries: Avoid LinkedIn ads due to excessively high CPMs
“LinkedIn ads, the CPMs are so high. Yes, you can do great targeting, but actually I would argue invest a lot more time into creating excellent content that you distribute organically. Maybe you want to layer on ads on top, but particularly the kind of people t…”
Harries: Apple Is Marketing Unfinished AI to Drive Hardware Sales
“The biggest villain I see doing this at the moment is Apple. And so we've always held Steve Jobs in our mind as just like this beacon of marketing and product and engineering. And now you have Apple pushing that the reason you should upgrade to the newest iPho…”
Harries: AI customer support agents perform better than human representatives
“I actually prefer speaking to an AI customer support agent than a real person, because they're more knowledgeable, they know exactly how to solve your problems, they can escalate, they know all the policies.”
Harries: ElevenLabs Won't Build Digital Avatars to Avoid Competing With Clients
“We want to build the best platform to make these end-to-end conversational AI agents, but we explicitly don't want to be building full digital avatar platforms, so that way we're able to be trusted partners to companies like Hey Jen, Synthesia, Captions, who a…”
Stebbings invested in Captions when it was a BeReal competitor
“I invested in Captions... Invested when it was basically a Be Real competitor.”
Harries: Conversational AI agents can completely replace inbound SDRs
“Really the function is data collection, and so instead, one, why don't you just add that to the form in the first place? Well, the reason is people don't really want to go through this back and forth and go into more detailed questions and, you know, trying to…”