In this episode, Paid’s Manny Medina sits down with Luke Harries, Head of Growth at ElevenLabs, to break down how one of the fastest-growing AI companies in the world thinks about growth when everything is crowded, noisy, and competitive. Luke joined ElevenLabs when there were about 20 people. Today, it’s approaching 500, and pushing hard from best-in-class model to full-stack product company. Luke and Manny go deep on why traditional marketing channels are the wrong mental model, how ElevenLabs treats launches as systems, and why video quietly became their highest-leverage growth input. They also unpack hiring mistakes, why onboarding should feel like a video game, and which classic startup roles are being squeezed hardest by AI-native teams. “The overall approach we take at ElevenAds is to try and build growth systems. And so these are, like, treating each channel as its own system and really optimizing it.” Growth Is a System, Not a Channel At the core of Luke’s thinking is a framework that replaces vague channels with concrete systems. “When we break down what actually is a growth system, there’s three main parts. There’s the actual system itself, so that’s the people, the checklist, the automations, the code. There’s your model for the system and the analytics, and then there’s the goal.” Instead of asking how to incrementally improve performance, ElevenLabs sets aggressive output targets and works backward. “Let’s say we’re only getting two meetings booked per month from webinars. We’re like, how do we go from two to 200?” The work then becomes identifying and scaling the inputs that make that output possible. “How do we max out every single one of those inputs?” Why B2B Growth Feels Slower Than Self-Serve Luke contrasts his background in self-serve growth with the realities of B2B. “I come from much more of a self-serve high-volume game where everything can be an AB test. Everything now with B2B is much more like, Okay, over a quarter, we spend this amount of money, we do a shot this way, how did it work?” In B2B, learning cycles are longer, and bets are bigger. “Use your intuition, learn from what worked in the past, put your foot down hard, and give it your best shot.” Why Video Became the Highest-Leverage Growth Hire One of Luke's earliest and most unconventional growth hires at ElevenLabs was a motion designer. The reason? Leverage. “We realized the biggest lever for these launches is just really good engaging videos.” As an audio-first company, ElevenLabs couldn’t rely on text alone. “You really need to show audio through video. You can’t just rely on text.” After experimenting with agencies and contractors, the overhead became obvious. “Contractors and agencies, there’s so much overhead. They need to learn the style, the brand.” Bringing motion design in-house turned launches into a repeatable system instead of a scramble. Treat Case Studies As Launches Luke explains why most companies underutilize their strongest proof. “Lots of companies, maybe you’d like to create a case study, but you don’t do that push in the launch.” When ElevenLabs published a case study with Revolut, they treated it like a full launch moment, and it showed. Hiring, Onboarding, and When It Doesn’t Work Out The biggest lever for improving hiring outcomes is onboarding. At ElevenLabs, onboarding is designed to build momentum fast. “We try to do onboarding where it’s kind of like a video game where you, like, start small tasks which build up, which have an impact.” Early, direct feedback is non-negotiable. “I try early on to give concrete feedback because then not only do you help shape the person to the company and get the best output, but also you’re building that muscle together if I'm going to give you feedback.” From Model Company to Product Ecosystem Luke describes ElevenLabs’ evolution in two phases. “The first is the zero to one billion ElevenLabs.” The next phase is depth and surface area: orchestration, integrations, and enterprise readiness. “Then there’s the whole orchestration, then you do integrations with Salesforce, with HubSpot.” Voice orchestration itself is technically complex. “There’s speech to text, text to speech, and the hand taking, and that has to happen in microseconds.” Final Advice Luke’s advice for marketers and operators trying to stay relevant? You can just do things. Proof of work matters more than credentials. And for anyone hesitating: “Jump headfirst. Don’t think too much about it.” Companies Mentioned ElevenLabsRevolutPostHogSalesforceHubSpotGoogle GeminiAnthropicLovableRetoolSemrushDeutsche TelekomPagBankMetaResendSupabaseStripeAnthropicY CombinatorOpenAI See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
