“it's so powerful to be the first best customer of your API... having those consumer products can be a superpower for the API... it's a better API when internally you can be testing against it and know what the experience is of building against that API”

Consumer apps are the best dogfood for your API product

ElevenLabs builds consumer apps in part because they make the API better. Internally using the product surfaces quality issues, latency problems, and UX friction that external API customers experience but rarely report clearly. The consumer product and API product become mutually reinforcing: shipping a better consumer experience reveals model improvements needed, which compounds the technical moat for API customers as well.