How ElevenLabs Built Its Creator Program on the Way to $600M ARR

ElevenLabs’ creator program began with its co-founder cold emailing YouTubers before there was a product, and it has grown into an affiliate program, an in-house creator, an Ambassador Program and a team posting every launch together. Creators sit next to paid ads that had plateaued at around $20M a year, on the way to ElevenLabs passing $600M ARR at the end of June 2026.

The headline numbers come from James McAulay, who led creator growth there through 2025. On his own account, one feature drove more than 1M ElevenLabs-branded videos a year, creator tutorial views went from zero to 600,000 a month in 12 weeks, and affiliate revenue doubled.

We mapped every founder, employee and creator posting about ElevenLabs and read what the team has said about it in public. Here’s how the program was built, step by step.

How Did ElevenLabs Use Creators Before It Had a Product?

In 2022 co-founder Mati Staniszewski scraped YouTubers’ email addresses and sent thousands of personalised pitches for a dubbing product that would put their videos into every language. He says on this interview that roughly 15% of the first batches replied.

What they wanted was simpler: a good voice to narrate their videos. So ElevenLabs put dubbing aside, built that first, and “started lining up more of those users, more of the AI influencers to help us distribute the message” through the beta before launching publicly.

That’s the part I’d underline. The first creator outreach doubled as customer research, and the creators told ElevenLabs which product to build.

Mati has since built a LinkedIn audience of about 197,000 followers.

Why Does Everyone at ElevenLabs Post About Launches?

One founder’s feed wasn’t enough for a company shipping as often as ElevenLabs does. Luke Harries joined when the company was about 20 people and now leads growth at a company of more than 800, and he calls organic LinkedIn “the most underappreciated growth channel I see”, because the bar to stand out there is so much lower than on X.

His launch playbook is that “your own team should be the first and most active supporters of your launches”. Everyone sits in an amplify channel on Slack, every launch link goes in at once, and the team likes, comments and reposts together so the algorithm sees “30, 40 likes in the first five minutes”.

That’s why you’ll see Gillian O’Brien posting about voice agents for retail, Ashley Kramer on enterprise deals, Marcos Valera on hiring, Emmanuelle Benoliel on marketing leadership, Ruta B. on voice AI in India and Connie Yao on the creators they work with. James McAulay counted 65 launches in his first 11 weeks there, so the channel gets a lot of use.

How Did a Creator End Up on the ElevenLabs Payroll?

Alec Wilcock joined the affiliate program in 2023, and his tutorial became the video people found when they searched YouTube for ElevenLabs. Luke put it simply: “Alec’s video on his personal account ranks #1 on YouTube when you search ElevenLabs.”

So in April 2025 they hired him as their first full-time, in-house creator, whose only job is making TikToks, YouTube videos and Shorts for ElevenLabs. In Luke’s words, “he’s creating fantastic content. Let’s actually hire him.”

Connie Yao then took over influencers and affiliates and launched an Ambassador Program. On LinkedIn, Alex Wang, Tom Goodwin, Lukas M. Ziegler, Justin Bateh, Michael Yan, Alex Banks, Vishakha Sadhwani, Helen Yu and Ayush Shukla have partnered with ElevenLabs. On YouTube it’s Gary Simon, Jordan Orme and Taylor Jackson, and on Instagram Nandini Shukla, Manish Kumawat and Mariana Antaya. The 27 creators on our map have about 12.4M followers between them, about 63 times Mati’s LinkedIn audience.

Is ElevenLabs Still Scaling Its Creator Program?

Yes, and its own Influencer Marketer job ad explains why: “many of the world’s best creators already talk about our products organically. It’s time to turn that signal into a real program.”

The role signs creators “whose audiences match our creator, marketer, and developer segments” and works with the paid team on “whitelisting and amplifying top creator content”. That’s the organic and paid loop we run for clients, written into an ElevenLabs job description.

Paid still matters to them. The company’s own blog says English-language paid ads “had plateaued around $20M a year” until the team localised its creative into new languages. Creators are what they’re adding on top, with a product where every creator video doubles as a demo.

What Can B2B Companies Learn From ElevenLabs?

Three things I’d take from it:

1. Use your first creator conversations as research. Mati’s emails told him which product to build before they told him who would promote it.
2. Make your team the first wave of every launch. An amplify channel costs nothing and gives every creator post that follows a running start.
3. Watch who already ranks for your name. ElevenLabs hired the creator whose video outranked its own channel, and the best creator for your program is often already making content about you.

When the product is the content, creators are the best people to show it off, and that’s the kind of program we build and run at CreatorWorks. Our GoMarble case study shows the same loop in short-form video, where the best creator content became the creative for their ad account, and our case studies page has the rest.

For a company that took the opposite route on paid, read our Lovable teardown.