Hype isn't a dirty word if you do the groundwork: Lessons from Thor at ElevenLabs

When it comes to getting developers on board with your tool or platform, hype is good, if it's justified and balanced with solid DevRel groundwork that converts into long-term usage.

For Thor Schaeff, Head of Developer Experience (DevEx) at ElevenLabs (previously Supabase and Stripe), hype is fine—if you can deliver.

And that’s where DevRel comes in.

ElevenLabs is an audio AI platform that gives developers APIs for audio generation. From text to speech, to conversational AI and voice cloning (and even sound effects), developers can plug into the ElevenLabs APIs and add advanced audio generation capabilities to their apps.

Making content available in any language, dialect, accent, or voice—so people can communicate and understand each other better—is a big part of ElevenLabs' mission.

Thor’s job is to make that accessible to developers who want to build and ship with voice, and show them how to use it. The goal is clear: help developers get to that moment when something just clicks.

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One of the best parts of DevRel is that you get to deepen your own understanding by turning what you learn into content that helps others build. It’s a great space for people who are naturally curious. And when you hit that ‘aha!’ moment yourself, you just want to share it so others can get there too.

Developers are an incredibly big audience, and you can't reach every one. Thor’s focus is on the individual, self-serve developer—the person signing up and trying things on their own. That’s the north star metric: not just signups, but how many developers go from trying it to shipping something with it.

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If you nail the DevEx for the individual developer, and they’re genuinely delighted, they’ll talk about you—and they’ll be the ones talking about your product from the bottom up inside their company.

And that’s not theory, Thor saw it happen at Stripe and Supabase. This means creating content that developers can pick up for a hobby or side-project. They try it out, are impressed by how the product works, and when the time comes that functionality is needed in an enterprise project they're working on, they advocate for it. It's organic hype that stems from that first 'aha!' moment.

AI platforms promise a lot. Developers know that. That’s why hype alone doesn’t move the needle anymore.

But letting developers validate the claims? That works. Just let them use your tool to prove the hype is actually grounded in reality — but this comes at a cost. Audio AI isn’t cheap. Compute costs pile up quickly, especially when testing real conversational use cases.

But rather than the individual developer investing to try out your product, Thor thinks it's up to ElevenLabs to carry this cost and give each developer the opportunity to successfully build something and validate an idea.

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How can we get the developer community to try this out and build things that they will be successful with, make money with, so that we can also make money ourselves?

The catch is free tiers can’t carry everyone forever. The best approach is giving them meaningful use cases to get started that don’t burn through credits too fast. It’s not about free for the sake of free—it’s about removing just enough friction so developers can hit MVP before hitting limits.

‘Free’ on its own won’t sell a developer product. It’s about creating a moment that developers want to talk about. The whole idea of SaaS APIs is abstracting away complexity. In this case it's AI sound and voice generation, something that isn't just complex, but practically unreachable for the individual developer because of the research and infrastructure required.

If a dev builds a voice interface in 20 minutes at a hackathon, they’re going to tweet about it. If your docs and SDKs helped them do that, you’ve earned more than usage—you’ve earned advocacy.

The thing that gets users from 'never touched this product before' to talking about it in their developer communities is your developer experience groundwork. This includes the APIs and SDKs for the platforms they will be developing for, as well as the documentation, tutorials, examples, and other developer-centric content that explains how to get the most out of them.

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It's incredibly rewarding because when you nail that experience, and you get people to that 'aha!' moment, they will talk about it!

Voice as a user interface is still considered 'niche' by many, but Thor disagrees, and thinks voice will soon become part of every app, in a similar way responsive design opened up new possibilities for apps running in different scenarios.

This adds an additional motivation for ElevenLabs to give developers a chance to see how their app works: Showing them what their apps can do that they didn’t expect, and enabling mobility and accessibility with new use-cases.

Agree with Thor on spicy food or not, you may disagree with his take on hype. Some will want to jump on every hype train, while others will want to avoid it rather than embrace it. Instead, he says it should be balanced.

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I think that is inherently our challenge in DevRel now, as everything is moving so quickly, finding that balance of some hype, some groundwork.

That groundwork is not as glamorous as hype, but it's incredibly important for DevRel. Good documentation won't get millions of views, but it's foundational and has a compounding effect on adoption. Once those baselines are in place, you can see what hype translates into usage compared to the long-term groundwork.

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I think it's the toughest thing I think right now is just juggling all this hype. Some people want to jump on every hype train, right? But the problem is, if you if you do that, you end up not having time to build a lot of the foundational work, the tutorials, the documentation, kind of this foundational stuff.

OK, our fireplace prop didn't arrive in time for DevRelCon, but you get the idea.

To finish with something less spicy, we think this statement really summarizes why ElevenLabs is seeing success in the developer community.

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This goes down for anyone working on developer experience: The main goal is, no matter if it's a web developer, if it's a mobile developer, if they are working in Flutter or React Native, you meet them wherever they are. You make sure that it's the best experience that they can have when they're building.

What does this mean in practice? We think it means solving real problems with AI, as well as designing a freemium model that is sustainable while allowing developers to get to MVP, providing tools that fit into their existing workflows, and great content to support and explain them.

Thanks again to Thor for sitting down with Appsmith at DevRelCon 2025!