Luke Harries on Why ElevenLabs Doesn't Use Product Managers for Growth

Hire One Generalist Growth Marketer, Not a Specialist

Most founders mess up their first growth hire. They bring in a product marketer who crafts beautiful positioning that no one sees. Or they hire a performance marketer who drives traffic to pages that don't convert.

Luke Harries started with three junior people when he joined ElevenLabs. His advice now: start with one generalist.

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 only hire a product marketer, great, your positioning's lovely, your messaging's lovely, but no one's heard of it.

— Luke Harries

The second hire? A front-end leaning growth engineer. Someone hacky who can ship landing pages for SEO, build mini tools, and run automated outreach. After that, consider motion designers and backend-focused growth engineers.

The 30-Second Rule for Launch Videos

ElevenLabs gets 200,000 to 700,000 views on every major launch video. The secret isn't production budget. It's ruthless focus on the first 30 seconds.

Most founders make the mistake of putting themselves on camera for a five-minute monologue about company mission. Unless you have MrBeast-level editing skills, you've lost your audience.

Luke recommends three video types: motion design (animated graphics), founder-led (camera direct), and screen share. For big launches, motion design wins because it's abstract, focuses on core value props, and keeps attention.

The majority of drop-off will happen after that. So make sure you make that first 30 seconds truly incredible.

— Luke Harries

Bring video in-house fast. Motion designers work on projects for $5,000 to $10,000. When you're moving quickly on launches, you can't wait on contractors. At ElevenLabs, the enterprise marketing team will be 20 people by year-end, and the mobile app will have its own 5 to 10 person growth team.

How to Run Launches That Actually Get Distribution

ElevenLabs runs every launch through a three-tier checklist. Tier 1 is big models or product lines. Tier 2 is major features. Tier 3 goes straight to the changelog.

For Tier 1 launches, the growth lead nails the messaging first. When they launched speech-to-text, the primary message was simple: the most accurate speech-to-text model. Secondary messages included feature completeness and 99 language support.

Then they build assets in order: tweet thread first, then video, then blog post. The tweet thread hook matters most. Use "Introducing" or "We're excited to launch" in the first line. Add a space, then bullet points or a short paragraph. Attach the launch video to the first tweet, not buried later.

The biggest advice I give to growth people is you need to be loud. You need to get it across every single channel.

— Luke Harries

Cross-post everywhere: X, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Threads, Product Hunt, Reddit, Hacker News. ElevenLabs has an Amplify Slack channel where the entire 200-person team shares launch links. Thirty to forty likes in the first five minutes signal to algorithms that the content deserves distribution.

For new founders nervous about asking for help, Luke's advice is direct: pull up your Gmail, find every person you've emailed in the past five years, check your Twitter followers and LinkedIn connections, and manually DM them. You need 3,000 people to give your launch the initial boost.

Why Horizontal Products Work When You Shard Your Teams

ElevenLabs breaks every rule about focus. They sell APIs to developers, build enterprise conversational AI, ship a consumer reader app, and run a creator platform for audiobooks and voiceovers.

Luke's first reaction when Matty pitched him in the Hampstead Heath ponds? "That is a terrible go-to-market plan."

The reason it works: they shard the company. Each product has its own growth team with dedicated growth marketers, paid ads, and community. The consumer app team has an entire growth function. Creator growth has its own affiliates. Developer marketing runs standalone.

On top of that, ElevenLabs has horizontal channel specialists—a head of performance marketing from Shopify, an SEO expert from Canva. Each product has a product growth lead who acts as CMO for their vertical, thinking through metrics, activation, and awareness.

Luke wouldn't recommend this structure to most founders. The standard advice is better: choose one ICP and build all products around it so they compound. But when you have the world's best AI audio models and founder ambition to build something bigger than Google, the rules change.

SEO Isn't Dead, But Blog SEO Is Dying

Blog-style SEO content—long-form articles—will die as ChatGPT gets better at scraping and ingesting information. Over 70% of Zapier's SEO traffic still goes to their blog, so it's not dead yet. But the clock is ticking.

What will stick around for at least five years? Tool pages. These are mini tools that require engineering work, like ElevenLabs' text-to-speech Spanish page where you type text, choose a voice, and click play. Or their speech-to-text tools with proprietary data sources.

LLMs won't be spinning up dynamic pages anytime soon. And if they do, they're probably replacing your product anyway.

Luke's challenge to founders: go to the ElevenLabs homepage. Every product is exposed in a little text box outside the login where people can try it immediately. If you have an enterprise product, hire that front-end growth engineer early to build these mini tools that show value fast. No one buys without trying first.