Pod Insights Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth $6.6B AI CEO: How to Make Your First $10,000 with AI | ElevenLabs CEO & Co-Founder, Mati Staniszewski About this episode In this interview, Mati Staniszewski, CEO & co-founder of @ElevenLabs, unpacks the future of voice AI—from real sales/support voice agents that speak any language in your voice, to a voice marketplace already paying creators millions, to the safeguards we’ll need as agents start calling… other agents. We dig into practical playbooks, real costs, the tools to use, and where the next $10k-a-month opportunities are hiding for solo entrepreneurs and SMBs.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:59 Speaker 02 We paid about $5 million to the entire community.
1:02 Marina Mogilko? Meet Mari, CEO and co-founder of Eleven Labs, a company that has grown into a $6.6 billion leader in the voice AI space, shaping how we talk, work, and even earn money. They've created an entire voice marketplace. Now, anyone can clone their voice and earn passive income. Can you name some opportunities that you see that can make people a decent amount of money so they can make a living like 10K a month? Something that's immediate?
1:29 Speaker 02 Business, and you just want to make good money. I would try to take those voice agents and go to, let's say, local doctor's office.
1:35 Marina Mogilko? Eleven Labs built the world's most realistic voice deck. The question is, can they control what happens next?
1:41 Speaker 02 Most of those companies just don't know this is possible. You don't have to be the coder. You just need to...
1:46 Marina Mogilko? If my voice is authorized to use my credit card to buy anything, and then somebody just uses the resemblance of it?
1:52 Speaker 02 I think it's going to happen, but...
1:56 Marina Mogilko? Hey guys, welcome to Silicon Valley Girl. We have one of the guests today whose product I've been using for a while now. So I'm going to ask a lot of technical questions as well. But please welcome Marty from Eleven Labs. Thank you so much.
2:08 Speaker 02 Thank you so much, Marina. Great to see you again and thanks for having me.
2:11 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, thank you. I feel like you're one of the pioneers of this AI industry. Because when I ask people like what apps they're using, when I'm talking about apps that I'm using, I always mention Eleven Labs because it's been a lifesaver. I wanted to start with a question about the role of voice in AI. So what it feels to me is that 2023, you know, we started adopting ChatGPT. It was all text. And then these voice capabilities became more and more powerful. It understands what I'm saying now, it understands my accent. If I mispronounce something, it still gets me. Do you feel like we're moving into the era where voice is our main tool to interact with AI?
2:48 Speaker 02 I mean, 100%. I do think that voice will be one of the key interfaces to the technology around us. And that shift is happening. Like you said, it's like a few years back, you wouldn't even dream of this being possible. And now I think it's becoming a reality where it allows you to transfer so much information, more than the text. You can get the emotionality, the inflection pattern, the imperfections reflected in the voice, which of course makes it easier for the, if it's an input, for the technology to understand a lot more about the setup or what you are trying to achieve. And then if you hear it back as well, I think it's a lot better and more pleasurable experience as well.
3:28 Marina Mogilko? How do you see voice transforming businesses? Do you have any cases where people are using voice to generate leads or convert leads?
3:35 Speaker 02 There's definitely a few different areas, whether it's on the more classic customer support use cases, where you, instead of having an old IVR system or no system, you can now deploy a voice agent that will take the calls instead and will both delight the customers on the other side because it understands you, it's quick, it's good. But then also just performs better. And then outside of customer support, we are seeing that across the entire lifecycle of the user journey. In some places where... It adds an experience that wasn't possible before. And a simple case is inside of the product or even outside of the product. And you might have seen back in the day, there was those widgets for chat.
4:21 Speaker 02 Now you could have a voice agent that helps you navigate through the product experience. So it becomes your like a partner programmer, product person that helps you navigate through that that lifecycle. And you also mentioned, so of course, some of the big pieces is in inbound and outbound. We actually use it ourselves in 11 Labs too, where, and where of course, we do have a standard flow. We have people that will answer the reply and take a phone call too. But if you want to go quicker, you can speak straight directly with our agents to understand our product offering, understand our pricing, understand what you, what you can do with the product, which helps you accelerate through the pipeline depending, and sometimes self disqualify if you are not the right fit for our product offering.
5:04 Speaker 02 And sometimes helps you accelerate, okay, this is exactly the set of use cases I can do, this is how I can deploy, and then roots it to other people.
5:12 Marina Mogilko? So it doesn't actually convert?
5:13 Speaker 02 It's, in some cases it does. In some cases, it's, as a quick step back, we have a few different tiers. We have like a business tier and an enterprise tier. So it does convert immediately sometimes to the business tier program.
5:25 Marina Mogilko? Because it's a preset.
5:26 Speaker 02 Because it's preset, it's self-serve. On the enterprise side, we all still run KYC checks, so it doesn't do that immediately. But, but on the business one, it does. And then we've seen some of those voice agents also from, from a lot of the technology and platform we built, help in a completely different, non-commercial aspects too.
5:45 Marina Mogilko? Quick follow-up question for, like about the, the sales process. Have you measured the conversion percentage into sales with the AI voice salesperson?
5:55 Speaker 02 We did, but given it was, and I don't remember the number off the top of my head, but given there was alternative before, I would have been just waiting. So it was just a net new amount of leads, and we received so much inbound of, of using a lot of the products, which we are lucky to have, that it helped us just convert so many more leads that we would have otherwise taken weeks, months. Or maybe never gotten into.
6:19 Marina Mogilko? How can I set this up for my company?
6:21 Speaker 02 The easiest one would be to register on our platform. So that that part of offering, and we have two key offerings, is our agentic platform offering. You jump into the platform and we help you abstract two elements. The first one is all the research or experience complexity. So we help you connect the speech, the L L M elements, the text to speech elements. So so the agent speaks in a smooth and a a a quick way. So it's a very low latency, a reliable part on that side. And then there's the second part where you will need to spend a little bit more time on bringing your business logic in place. So example could be what's the knowledge base of how your business operates? Or what are the questions you want to be asked? What are the materials you want to surface? So you would bring that into the platform.
7:07 Speaker 02 Then we have a set of workflows that you can set up effectively. Imagine like if this happens, this happens, or if this happens, I want this function to trigger. This could be if someone is calling me and I want to appoint a schedule an appointment. We have a predefined workflow for you to be able to do it. So it can look into your calendar.
7:26 Marina Mogilko? Okay, I'm selling a course, basically, like what Linguatur does, we sell we sell courses. So basically, we'll be able to sell courses to people. Can I do it in different languages using my voice?
7:35 Speaker 02 You can.
7:37 Speaker 02 So you could, you could. And so so it's selling the courses and the people would call in, buy the course and off off to the go. And maybe they onboard with the agent later on to help.
7:47 Marina Mogilko? How do they, how do they buy over the phone? Do you send them a link, ask for their email or they just, yeah?
7:53 Speaker 02 Depends, but the simplest would be what you suggest, which is we do have an omni-channel solution where you effectively get a link as part of that and you can leave additional details. Or you have a follow up on the email of like a checkout subscription for the course. So both of those would be possible. Or you could, depending on how that website is set up, you could effectively embed the agent on your website. So it helps you redirect to the subscription page. It guides you through it and they check out themselves live with the agent that helps them.
8:23 Marina Mogilko? Wow.
8:24 Speaker 02 Fulfilling the forum. But like you said, one of the great things on the function side. Is that you can you can you can switch languages, you can hand over like.
8:31 Marina Mogilko? That's fascinating for my business.
8:33 Speaker 02 So it's I mean, you've been pioneering a lot of that language learning work. And I think this would be amazing because both it would switch the language and it would switch it with your own voice. If that was your own voice, it continues speaking in that same manner. And then, of course, the last piece is all the integration. So we support.
8:49 Marina Mogilko? I didn't know you had it. Congratulations.
8:52 Speaker 02 Thank you. It's one of the big. So it's maybe that's a good cue for me as well, because when we started the company, we of course started from pioneering of the research on the speech side. So text to speech voices, and then we expanded to speech to text orchestration models, now music. But as we think about the research, it's always how we can push the audio frontier forward.
9:12 Marina Mogilko? I love how you found this new opportunity and now it's bigger chunk of your business, as far as I understand. How much would it cost for a business like mine, small business, to have AI answer the calls and sell?
9:23 Speaker 02 I think the and of course, depends on the volume, but I think what hopefully will happen is that both you will see more people coming through. And if we set it up in the right way, maybe this will mean even opening up the channel, which over time hopefully means even more calls. But I think to start, it would be in order of hundreds of dollars per month.
9:41 Marina Mogilko? So so IP calling, right? Is integrated in that?
9:45 Speaker 02 Yes. So we integrate with Twilio or or telephony systems.
9:49 Marina Mogilko? So whatever.
9:49 Speaker 02 So you can bring, yeah, you can bring any phone number that you already have and it works. I don't know who currently do you already accept any of the calls coming through the telephone too, or it's all on the website?
10:00 Marina Mogilko? We mostly try to navigate them to WhatsApp because a lot of people who are calling, they don't speak English, so they don't feel comfortable. But if we advertise that it's, you know, Marina's voice, AI, nobody's judging your accent. Because I feel like when people even talk to me, they're non-native speaker, they first, the first thing they do, they're like, I'm sorry, my English is not as good as you're like. It doesn't matter. But I feel like even like using English to make a phone call is such a huge barrier for non-native speakers. And I feel like if you understand that you're talking to AI, it just makes it so much easier.
10:31 Speaker 02 That's true. It doesn't judge. You can make mistakes, which is maybe, you know, like, there's a completely. Other aspect what you've of course been helping people learn languages for a long time. But maybe there's even an aspect where they could practice speaking their language with you, which would be like a, you know, kind of a slightly different, of course, deployment, but completely possible where you can give them tips, improve, and effectively create a marinas duolingo that people
10:59 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, yeah.
10:59 Speaker 02 have dynamic experience with, which is another kind of incredible area that's growing in the tech space.
11:05 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, let's, let's talk about that part. So we talked about deploying 11 Labs to work as a sales agent. Let's talk about like, I have this number here where you paid $2 million in royalties to people who kind of shared their voices with 11 Labs. Can you talk about that? How can people start making money by sharing their voice with 11 Labs?
11:26 Speaker 02 So it's, it's one of the efforts we launched in the early days where we, we effectively created a voice marketplace, voice ecosystem, where every person can create their own voice, go through authentication flow. You need to record roughly 30 minutes or more of you speaking. Then you have a perfect replica of your own voice that speaks in the language you recorded, plus all the language we support. So you have usually 30 or so different variations. Now with the new model we are releasing, it will be 70. So, so you have the voice that that's now available for your own use. And then if you decide, you can share it to our marketplace. And if you share it to your, to our marketplace, a specific period of time,
12:07 Speaker 02 specific conditions of what you are sharing it for, then other people can use it across 11 Labs ecosystem. And when your voice is being used, you get paid back as a result. This way, we have now almost 10,000 voices that people shared and created. What is incredible is it spans so many different languages, accents, different styles. So like now, if you are logging to the, to the, to the platform, you just have this incredible plethora of voices and we pay, pay voice, pay voice down back. So it was, I think, $2 million at the beginning of the years that we paid back. And now, I think last time I checked, it was a few months ago, we paid back $5 million to the entire community.
12:47 Marina Mogilko? How much does average, an average voice creator make?
12:51 Speaker 02 It depends. Of course, you know, like, so it's like the, the, like, Probably in total approaching close to ten million dollars and we have close to ten ten thousand voices. So that would be like, you know, if you if you if you take the average. But I think it's especially given a lot of the voices got are kind of new and it takes a little bit of time before they take attention. You also to actually make it successful, ideally you try to engage some of the community around that they can see the voice, whether it's the Discord, the Reddit, some of the other forums. It definitely helps break through that initial. And if not, over time, we also try to surface new voices and and and get them out in the audiences. So it really depends. I think it'll be a lot of people in like
13:34 Speaker 02 a few hundred dollar per month category. And that's probably what you could expect if if you if you do a little bit of that effort and what you could what you could earn. However, the you know, it's it's I think it's true that it's if your if if your voice sounds very similar to other voices, it's very
13:49 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. How many voices like in general do you
13:51 Speaker 02 And how many can you distinguish?
13:53 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
13:53 Speaker 02 But if you if you have a unique voice,
13:55 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, if you're a creator, right?
13:57 Speaker 02 Exactly. Then then it can it can be it can be incredible. Our first voice, one of our first voices that got shared, and it was a Spanish voice that had a very deep way of of speaking, the deep prosody. And that voice became one of the most popular, not in Spanish, but in English speaking countries, and became like our top ten voice, and where where where it was just such a unique and different
14:23 Marina Mogilko? Interesting. Let's talk about the nuances of cloning your voice. Because for example, so what happens sometimes in my team, we clone my voice using all the different mics that I have. But sometimes we insert it, and it's still slightly different from the video. Because the way we use it is that, you know, we recorded something here. I recorded some brand deal or whatever. And then I start traveling and they're like, could you re-record this phrase? So we just take a piece from the video, redo it with a phrase that the brand asked for. But then we insert in the video, and it's slightly different. Like the it sounds in a different way. Are there any ways to fix it? Yes, of course, we re like, ask it to remake it again. But it's still like, not Exactly what we recorded.
15:07 Speaker 02 No, it's it's it's um it's of course a tricky problem where when you create a voice, you most likely take the voice throughout the entire video and then you create that voice. And then it is effectively the average of how you spoke around that video. But in a given scene, you will have maybe changed the intonation pattern a little bit or the emotional pattern slightly off that average. And the ideal way would be to affect for us to do more of the conditioning on of like what you do pre and post in the video. So we take that more of as an input and we try to morph it in in a slightly better way. And then there's a second thing, sometimes even though I know you'll try to clean up the voice and then add the background sounds, background effects, they might be by just
15:52 Speaker 02 the process be mixed in and then it doesn't smooth entirely. So from our side, what we hope to do over time is that as you insert those videos, we can precondition it after three seconds after and it will sound better.
16:04 Marina Mogilko? So you have that feature. So upload the video.
16:06 Speaker 02 So we are working on that, not yet.
16:08 Marina Mogilko? Okay, no, yeah.
16:09 Speaker 02 But it's going to be the big piece.
16:10 Marina Mogilko? We need that feature.
16:11 Speaker 02 We definitely need to bring it there. I think in the in the short term, what you mentioned is what we see as the most common pattern, which is redoing and regenerating. But the other thing you could try is try to, instead of taking longer audio sample across the video, just take few, even few seconds, which I know sounds like maybe it will be worse result. But if you just take few seconds from that fragment and create that lower quality version, it actually can could could sound pretty good.
16:40 Marina Mogilko? Okay, thank you. So where do you see all of this going with people recreating their voices? Will everybody have a clone in two or three years? Like, because we couldn't, we could have thought about, you know, Eleven Labs when I heard about it like two or three years ago, right? I couldn't think about a salesperson using my voice. Now we have it. What do you think is going to happen in two years? What is this new use case that this all is going to unlock?
17:04 Speaker 02 Interesting question. Of course, we are seeing like kind of entirely new ways of interacting with voices. So I do think, yes. You will have your digital AI voice. And I think even step further, you will have your own digital voice agent that does things for you. But you want to make sure it's authenticated, people know you operate. So, you know, like, we spoke about the example of how people can call in, you can configure a voice agent. But I think the other side will be also true. I will have my voice agent.
17:32 Marina Mogilko? Calling the bank? Because they use voice authentication, right? It's gonna change.
17:36 Speaker 02 I think that's not the best mechanism for the future.
17:38 Marina Mogilko? Anymore.
17:39 Speaker 02 Not anymore. But like, say, you want to book a restaurant or follow up about appointment in a healthcare. And you want to make sure that they know your most recent details or that it's confirmed. I think you will want an authenticated version of voice agent. I'm saying the authenticated because like you say, most of the verification if they don't will fail. And you want to know that it's a permissioned voice. So you will need to start embedding watermarks and metadata around that. But I think the, to kind of go back to your question of like where it all evolves. I think there will be like an interesting pattern where, and I think it will happen on both sides. As a user, but also as a business, you will be able to serve so many different voices to your customers.
18:24 Speaker 02 Or you as a customer can decide what voice speaks to you. So to speak for specific examples, we are working with a company in Korea, Korea and Japan. It's a multinational company there, which has a very different age groups calling in. Instead of older patients and then much younger set of people. And they want to serve, depending on the data, the number that is calling in, serve different voice to that group. Both in terms of how it speaks, or how it sounds, but also the style and how it speaks. Of course, it's a, you know, it's a generalization, but roughly they wanted that if you, if an older person is calling in, the voice speaks much slower, much calmer, less emotionality.
19:09 Speaker 02 It's a younger person, much quicker, a lot of higher amplitude of emotions. And I think this same pattern will start happening across everything where if you are calling in a specific region, you might have an accent of that region. If you are calling. Restaurant that's maybe representing a specific cuisine, you get a voice of that cuisine speaking with you. And maybe there are like variations of all those different types. Which which which which can work and then separately as a person calling in to any of those services. You could pre select that too. So if you are calling a bank and you enjoy speaking always with the voice of this specific style. Then you can select it and that voice will be the voice of your preference.
19:50 Speaker 02 We've seen this happen in a company and also in Asia where they created a effectively a travel agent or like a Google Maps competitive product. Where you can select a voice that narrates your direction. And one of the voices they selected became like viral and everybody wants to use it now and and the travel directions because it just made for such a better experience.
20:18 Marina Mogilko? That's so.
20:18 Speaker 02 So if I extrapolate in the future, I think there will be a lot more both personalization, but also selection that you can choose into. I think hundred percent true, you will have your own authenticated voice that you can use for your voice agent, for your content.
20:32 Marina Mogilko? That has all the information.
20:34 Speaker 02 That has all the information that you can.
20:36 Marina Mogilko? That's very interesting. I like that part, like having my voice call and be authorized to use my data. How do you talk about impersonation with voice like if there is if my voice is authorized to use my credit card to buy anything? And then somebody just uses the resemblance of it. Will there be any metadata that could be detected by other systems and how would it, what would it look like?
20:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's so I think first of all, I think it's it's going to happen like I think the assumption we should be going with is that where where you know, you will have good actors, good technology trying to avoid it. But then there will be also more permissive and technology and bad actors trying to abuse it with any technology shift. And already now there is a lot of open source technology, other commercial technology, which doesn't have the same safeguards that could clone your voice and create a mimicking and that sounds like you. So I think. System that we think about devising in the future kind of needs to assume that you can create a clone of a voice and and and and make it a perfect replica.
21:43 Speaker 02 Now, of course, if you're like, as I think about 11 labs, we can and we do add safeguards as you create a voice, so you cannot do that. Or if you do, we detect it and moderate and can flag it internally if we are not sure.
21:56 Speaker 02 So whether it's it's being able to trace everything back to to the account or moderate what text was used, whether it was trying to do a scam. But to core of your question, like, as you think about the future, the ideal system and it would require cooperation from a number of parties would have three different layers. And then the first layer is instead of trying to check for AI, you actually check for human. That's easy for me to say, of course, there's like, how do you check for humanness? But a a simpler step or original step could be that you on the devices that you use, so on my telephone or on my laptop. I am encoding that this is my phone, my my laptop. When I'm calling from it, it's being decoded on the other side, they know that this is the device I use, so most likely this is me.
22:41 Speaker 02 That's the first layer. Second layer is actually what we spoke about earlier, where and that's that's possible, you watermark authenticated AI. So if I'm using a specific tooling, the tool, the tools that can add this watermark are known. And I watermark that within the content. It's not super straightforward, especially in audio, because you if you add a watermark in content, it can affect the quality of the content itself. But it's roughly roughly good. And and that's the second layer, so you check for authenticated AI. And then the third layer is by default is AI and you assume it's AI. So if it didn't pass the first or second layer and you see content that hasn't been authenticated or proved for being a human, it's AI by default and you don't trust it.
23:26 Speaker 02 And then you can add more mechanisms on top of that third layer where you like, try to explicitly check or add additional signal of like, ah, this is real. But that would be a mindset shift where today, if you look for content, you're like, oh, maybe this is AI. It should be the opposite where it's like, oh, no, this is definitely AI. Is it maybe human or is it maybe AI that was created with creator's permission? And then you have those cases in between that will be interesting as as you, of course, create the content, you mentioned that sometimes if you. Need to re-record, you might create an AI voice with, of course, with your, with your, with your, with your permission. But then do you do that across the clip? And maybe you do that like 1% or 5% of the content is AI voice. Maybe in the future it will be 30 or 50%.
24:10 Speaker 02 And at what stage would you say this is like your AI delivery or human delivery?
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25:15 Marina Mogilko? You're a founder in AI. How do you sleep at night when everything is moving so fast? What are your main fears or what keeps you up at night?
25:23 Speaker 02 You know, like I think there are two parts to it. I think the first part that I need to mention is that it's, it's, it's such an incredible opportunity with the shift. Like it's the biggest shift or maybe bigger shift than the internet. And we are at 11 labs. So I'm happy and lucky to be part of that shift and be leading on the voice frontier. So I think that, and I think that the team and all of us are feeling that, that we have a unique opportunity that never happens in your life, that you can create a technology, define how it will be used and hopefully create value across, across whether it's voice agents and how a voice interface will look in the future, whether it's making content global, whether it's making content available in audio. But of course, with all of that, as you think about being at the frontier,
26:07 Speaker 02 it like also makes us carry some of the responsibility for how we define that. So, so a lot of our parts will stem from that. I think the first one is, we still think there's innovations on the research level that you can bring into the space, at least one or two big ones in audio. And we've been able to do it so far in text to speech, speech to text, recently in music. But we still want to continue leading and continue being better than some of the biggest labs in the world, whether it's some of the new AI companies or all in humans. We think we have that opportunity and that is motivating. But of course, definitely causes less sleep at night. The team is super hardworking too, which makes for shorter nights.
26:51 Speaker 02 Then from the risks perspective, we spoke about some of those. We, we do feel like it's our responsibility to make sure that we avoid some of those risks. So we are trying to invest a lot of time in developing safeguards around it. Then, of course, the third one, with a lot of the technology, how the economy or how the jobs in that economy will change. And we would like to do it in a way which brings a lot of the people in that economy together with the change, rather than it's change that will just affect it and disrupt it. But how can some of the people that want to be part of it be part of that disruption too? That's the voice ecosystem that we built is part of that, that, that reason.
27:29 Speaker 02 But yeah, of course, I think we need to, we need to keep hiring amazing people, keep, keep pushing ahead. As while so much is happening, I still think it's very early. I may be biased and self-serving here, but, but it's, it's still very early.
27:41 Marina Mogilko? You mentioned jobs that are being replaced with voice technologies. What do you think are the jobs that are at most risk? I guess like customer support and what should these people be doing now to not get replaced in a couple of years?
27:54 Speaker 02 I think the trope, and I think it's very true, is that the people who will be replaced will be replaced by people that use AI. So I think this is the key message that like you should effectively go into trying a lot of those tools and products. So you stay at the frontier. And then the people that are in any of those jobs that use AI, I think can actually benefit a lot, a lot too. And even in customer support, of course, a lot of that will shift. But for example, what we are seeing is that the simple manual tasks of appointment, taking or doing and processing a simpler refund, all of that is like very manual, very recipe based in most cases.
28:37 Speaker 02 But then as you go to the more complex parts, you need a human expert to help close that gap. And that part of the process is actually even more in need, whether it would be debugging a harder problem that you have in the product, whether it's understanding your, what happens after the appointment, there's a specific thing you receive, then you want to decide whether you need the X or Y help, which of course needs to go through some of the regulation too. But for all of those, you, the kind of the pattern is that the expertise is even more valued. And of course, over time, I think that AI will start shifting and taking more of that. So there will be like some percentage that goes across. But that'll be my main piece of like, if you understand how the AI works, you can become
29:22 Speaker 02 more of the expert and better knowledgeable yourself and help. And that's also true in a creative space too. I think so much, you can do so, you can iterate so much more frequently, you can produce to the wider audience.
29:38 Marina Mogilko? You have to move faster and faster. That's what I'm feeling with this.
29:40 Speaker 02 You can definitely do faster iterations.
29:42 Marina Mogilko? You have to run to stay where you are. I don't know if you get this feeling, but for me, it's like the world is speeding up every single day.
29:50 Speaker 02 I do think it's speeding up, but at the same time, I think it's not zero sum where it's not.
29:57 Speaker 02 By speeding up in this category doesn't take away from another category. I think the entire economy is just growing as well with a lot of that adoption. So there will be more creative opportunity than it ever was before. And yes, to be part of that creative opportunity, you probably need to move faster with a lot of the innovation than you might have needed to before. But I think still like a wide set of people can and will benefit. But of course, you know, it's going to, a lot of the repetitive, manual, non-talented intelligence, like basic intelligence-based work will be replaced with AI workflows. And the best way to avoid this is by learning a lot of the AI tooling.
30:42 Speaker 02 So you yourself are better. And maybe just to finish off and maybe to summarize the customer support piece, thinking about it slightly differently and outside of customer support is that frequently, if you have a domain expertise, whichever domain that is, then that's where you can deliver even more value. So combining your domain expertise with AI is much higher value and output. And if you don't have domain expertise, then you probably want to gain that domain expertise, which would be.
31:17 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, I've seen a lot of graphs for like future of jobs reports. And there's this section like your expertise plus AI. And it goes like this in terms of demand.
31:27 Marina Mogilko? What would be the tools that you would recommend everyone to start using now? Name top three AI tools.
31:33 Speaker 02 Top three AI tools. Okay. Outside of 11 Labs, which you do need to try and use.
31:41 Speaker 02 I would say I really like Black Forest Labs for their image work. I mean, the mid journey has been cranking out for so many years, but Black Forest Labs I really like as a kind of the new iteration. I think they have a good realism and I think they will go through a set of additional iterations that are great. From the.
32:03 Speaker 02 Classic ones, I mean, Anthropic's Claude Code, I think is incredible, where I think it helps you be another level engineer, or even if you're not engineer, try to be a little bit more of the engineer. And then last one, I really like Lovable. But similarly, I mean, V-Zero, Replit are great.
32:23 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
32:24 Speaker 02 But given we are in Europe, I feel Lovable deserves the...
32:30 Marina Mogilko? They're from Sweden, right?
32:31 Speaker 02 They're from Sweden, yeah. But all of them, I mean, it's just so incredible to see like our go-to-market teams try, whether it's Lovable, V-Zero, Replit.
32:40 Speaker 02 I think Figma also launched theirs, I haven't tried it yet. But that's...
32:46 Speaker 02 It's fun to see how like people that haven't been traditionally on the engineering front are closer, and they understand the product, pain points, they understand the use case a lot better. So there's both this path of like prototyping, showing the clients, which is amazing. But then also, by extension, they are effectively getting closer to what is behind the scenes on the product side too.
33:05 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, and when you mentioned Lovable, do you build something for yourself or for Eleven Labs?
33:10 Speaker 02 Both. So on the go-to-market side, we frequently will do a demonstration to a customer of like, let's say we were doing the use case that you mentioned, we could build a prototype on a mock-up website of how the checkout would look like, how the agent would interact with you. That type of use case all the time, whether it's on the conferences or with the client calls. But also on the personal side, I recently tried with my two nieces to... They are five and seven years old, so I have the best job of being an uncle or trying to be. And they were, we were speaking about how they could potentially create a story generator for themselves, where you would type in the character names and the story would be created.
33:55 Marina Mogilko? You're an entrepreneur. You started this company, spotted this opportunity. Do you see any other areas, aside from voice, where people should be doubling down? Because one of the founders I had on this podcast told me that, actually co-founder of Hugging Face, he told me that in the next five years, you'll have to be an entrepreneur or you're done. So a lot of people are learning how to become an entrepreneur. Can you name some opportunities that you see that can make people decent amount of money? So they can make a living like 10K a month, something that's immediate, something that you see a gap in the market?
34:27 Speaker 02 It will be voice specific, but I think it's so, so early that I think it's a huge one is there's definitely a lot of the infrastructure being built for the voice agents. We build it, but other companies are too. And I think there is a big gap between voice agents and then actually deploying them in a lot of those businesses. And you don't have to have the engineering expertise to deploy those voice agents. The platform now frequently will support a relatively self-serve manner of taking it. But you can easily take that voice agent and deploy that in a specific domains. And most of the businesses in the world still don't know about it. If it's, you know, not venture scale business and you just want to make good money.
35:09 Speaker 02 I would try to take those voice agents and go to, let's say, local doctor's office and help them appointment schedule for the dentist so they can take appointments more easily. And they can then focus more on their work instead of nurse doing that in between or missing appointments. That's actually one of the most common, I don't know the percentage, but so frequently those appointments don't get booked because there's no one on the phone and can take them. You can go to local mechanics and help them take appointments. And I think there's, all of these require slight variation of the domain piece that you need to know. And all of those businesses are in thousands to tens of thousands of dollars per month. If you get it to the few, the infrastructure is there, you just need to bring it to those domains.
35:54 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, it's like B to B automated businesses with AI.
35:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, and small businesses all around the world.
36:00 Marina Mogilko? You don't have to be a coder.
36:00 Speaker 02 You don't have to be the coder, you just need to spend the time, call them and ask or go to them. And I think this is like this category which might not be taken off by some of the biggest companies that will focus on bigger enterprise elements, like the classic, this is like small medium businesses rather than the enterprise segment. And at the same time, most of those companies just Don't know this is possible. So like next year too is just an incredible opportunity to do it. And of course, you know, startups in English speaking, but I think the same is true for so many of the of the countries and languages, which which might be
36:39 Speaker 02 given so much of that work isn't always localized. I think in our case, we're doing a pretty good job there. You can you can bring it to a local market and do exactly the same, the same work.
36:50 Marina Mogilko? Absolutely love it. Thank you.
36:52 Speaker 02 Thank you.
36:52 Marina Mogilko? So if you were a certain company today and you're a brand new entrepreneur, what would be your advice for anyone who's starting out?
36:59 Speaker 02 The first advice would be that you deeply understand your your user and the problem that you're trying to fix. Like, I think that would be the first piece. It's like, do I know the problem and do I know people have that problem?
37:11 Marina Mogilko? Because you you started Eleven Labs because you were you didn't like the transcribing, the translation of.
37:18 Speaker 02 This is a super, super crazy piece that in Poland, if you watch a movie, all the characters, whether it's a male or female character, are narrated with one single voice.
37:29 Marina Mogilko? With no intonation, right?
37:30 Speaker 02 No intonation, it's flat. Exactly, exactly.
37:32 Marina Mogilko? I think it was the same in post-Soviet times in Russia.
37:36 Speaker 02 Exactly. And it still continues today. You know, it was it was kind of obvious when we started looking into the audio space and then realized that this is still a problem, something we grew up with, something that you ask any Polish person or most of Polish people, and they will tell you how bad of an experience that is, as you can likely imagine. It's pretty bad. And it will it will it will change. And and it was second obvious. Okay, if you think about the future, you will have all different or different
38:05 Speaker 02 original voices represented. So if the movie is streamed, you will just hear exactly the same language. Of course, it expanded from the dubbing to to just voiceovers and speech, because so much of the content isn't available in audio in the first place. And and now a lot of voice it and stuff, but it was a very clear problem. And I think as I think about starting a company or if I were to start a company again, I would try to obsess about the problem. And then the second one is. Do people actually have that problem? Is it actually burning a problem? And in dubbing, it was a good example where we we thought the dubbing is the biggest problems. But before we actually solved the dubbing, we realized from a lot of conversation with users that there are so many other problems that they would like to fix first. The most common one is actually one you mentioned, where people just wanted to repair lines
38:50 Speaker 02 after recording or just being able to deliver voiceover without speaking. And that was like the most common thing after we tried to reach out to people like, wow, before we had it ready, it's like, hey, we are almost finished with our dubbing product. Would you like to dub your movies? And then most likely, we would get some small percentage of replies. And then inside of those replies, it would be, yes, this would be interesting. But actually, if you could help me with just the post-production.
39:15 Marina Mogilko? Just take my voice and do it, yeah?
39:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, that would be much, much better. So then we're like, OK, there's this incredible opportunity. That's smaller component of the technology we want to build that we should we should do instead first. And and and we did. And then we validated that again. And people were, yes, that's that's that's something we would love. And then, given we started from creators on on on social media,
39:41 Speaker 02 after we heard this, but then we realized that there are actually other people not on social media that also want voiceovers, being the biggest group for us was book authors initially. Everybody just couldn't record.
39:51 Marina Mogilko? Audiobooks.
39:52 Speaker 02 Exactly.
39:52 Marina Mogilko? Because that's like a few days in the studio.
39:54 Speaker 02 Few days in the studio, very expensive. So many people get tired with the voice, so it's never as as expected initially. So it takes more than that. And then that turned out to be like second of the first biggest biggest ones. So.
40:08 Marina Mogilko? But you actually built the dubbing product first and you realized nobody wanted to pay for it.
40:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, so we we did a prototype.
40:14 Marina Mogilko? In the prototype.
40:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's like, it was a little bit of a, like, you know, like a stitch up of not. Not, it did have a lot of our own research, but it wasn't, it wasn't months of work. It was like, we created a prototype. We, while we were building the prototype, we were reaching out to customers, like we were working on this. Do you want it? We had a good waiting list. Then we tried to show them what it, how it looks. And they were like, oh, this quality isn't as good. If you could actually help me with this and this instead, it would be better. Which is the same technology, because people noticed that if you dub, you can hear the voice of the person in the other language, it still sounds the same. And it turned out that the problem was even earlier. It was like, oh, just my voice is great.
40:59 Marina Mogilko? I love that. I love how you started with the surface and you went deeper and built the whole technology that solved so many problems that were in the surface as well.
41:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's all. So I think, yeah, I think the entrepreneur is building today. If they understand the problem, then, and of course, I'm in a very lucky position where I know my co-founder now for 15 years. And now it, now I know him inside out and he's the genius behind a lot of the work we do. But I think that would be my second piece where like you want to really pick your co-founders and the early team as carefully as you, as you can. As these will be the people you will spend most of the nights and years ahead. Success depends all of that. The culture depends on that. So, and then similarly, we're very, very happy to have some of the best early joiners, like to, one of the person on the growth side.
41:47 Speaker 02 We trusted inside out and two of our engineers turned out to be some of the most hardworking and smart engineers we have, which set up the culture bar very high.
41:56 Marina Mogilko? Nice, nice. Okay, I'm gonna wrap up with this question. As a person who's been advocating learning languages, will people still learn languages in three years? If they can have their AI authorized voice speaking any language, join any Zoom call? The only thing that's left is maybe a one-on-one conversation, but then maybe we have a device that translates everything.
42:18 Speaker 02 The interesting one, I think they will, but not always the primary purpose will be for for understanding others. It will be frequently for just developing yourself as a more of an enjoyable thing you want to do for your own sake.
42:35 Marina Mogilko? Like horse riding, right? From a necessity to a hobby, right?
42:39 Speaker 02 To more of a hobby. And of course, there are like parts that by learning language, you learn the culture, you learn and your kind of your perspective opens. I think that still will be true.
42:49 Marina Mogilko? Or if you're moving to another country.
42:51 Speaker 02 Are you moving to the country?
42:52 Marina Mogilko? I mean, like, if you want to move to the US, you would still learn some English, right?
42:56 Speaker 02 Hopefully, you will not need to do it, and you will still be able to understand a culture and level that you never could before. So
43:02 Marina Mogilko? With the device or?
43:03 Speaker 02 The hitchhiker's guy, it will be like a double fish variation, like headphone, maybe device, maybe Neuralink. But even in those cases, there will be some processing time involved because you need to finish speaking for the device to pick it up and then translate it. So language natively speaking will be better. But yes, I do think most of that need will disappear for you to be able to interact and understand, which I think will be a beautiful thing. And then hopefully, you can you can learn it for other purposes.
43:34 Marina Mogilko? Interesting how the whole industry is like might disappear or might transform completely. But it's happening not to just language learning, it's happening to everything.
43:43 Speaker 02 Hundred percent. But I think it will stay. It's definitely it will morph. But but some of that will definitely stay.
43:53 Marina Mogilko? Thank you so much, Marty. It was very inspiring and very practical. I love that.
43:57 Speaker 02 And thank you so much for being an early user and all the feedback as well.
44:00 Marina Mogilko? Thank you. And I'm hoping we're going to integrate the sales part. I'm excited about that. I'm going to talk to my team right now.
44:04 Speaker 02 Thanks.
44:05 Marina Mogilko? Thank you. Thank you.
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