Productivity - Setup Guide

How to set up ElevenLabs

Otto's honest, no-fluff walkthrough. Every step here is what we'd actually do if we were sitting at your keyboard. Real gotchas first, real steps second, and a link to the personalized version at the bottom.

Read these before you start

• **Voice quality regressions**: ElevenLabs updates models frequently. Occasionally a new model changes how a cloned voice sounds. Keep a spot check step in your workflow before publishing.
• **Credit surprises on the API**: The low latency and higher quality models burn credits faster than the standard model. Teams launching voice agents on Starter blow through their allowance in a day. Move to Pro or Business before going live.
• **Voice cloning consent**: If the customer clones a voice they do not own (a celebrity, a former employee), ElevenLabs will suspend the account. Otto should never help set that up.
• **Compliance work**: HIPAA and enterprise SSO are Business/Enterprise tier only. A healthcare startup on the Creator plan is a landmine.

The 7-step setup

1. 1

   Create your ElevenLabs account

   Sign up at the link below. Free tier available - no card required. Use your business email so you can invite teammates later.

   Open ElevenLabs signup
2. 2

   Complete the initial onboarding

   Skip the marketing questionnaires when you can. Fill only the fields that actually configure the product - name, timezone, your first workspace or project. If ElevenLabs pushes you into a setup wizard, take it - it usually accelerates the first productive session.

3. 3

   Connect your existing tools

   Wire ElevenLabs into the rest of your stack. The integrations that most people set up first: - Retell AI, Vapi, Bland - the voice agent platforms that use ElevenLabs voices under the hood. If a customer is building a voice agent, they are probably using one of these plus ElevenLabs - Zapier - for workflow triggered TTS (e.g. new lead in HubSpot triggers a personalized voicemail drop) - Make.... Do these before importing data - clean integration first, data second.

4. 4

   Import your existing data (only what you'll actually use)

   Do NOT bulk-import everything. Import the last 30 days of the ONE workflow you're moving over first. Prove it works. Then import more. Big-bang migrations are how ElevenLabs deployments die in month 3.

5. 5

   Set up your first real workflow

   Pick the single most-frequent task you'll do in ElevenLabs - the daily-driver workflow. Configure it end-to-end. Use it live for a week. Do not touch any other feature yet. Adoption failure comes from teams trying to use everything on day one instead of the one thing that actually pays.

6. 6

   Add your team (if applicable) and set access

   Once your solo workflow works, invite one teammate at a time. Watch them use it. The friction points you missed are the ones they hit. Fix those before scaling to more users. Never invite 20 people at once - you'll get 20 confused people and 0 useful feedback.

7. 7

   Compound with the right pairings

   > Example: "For your 3-person real estate team running the after-hours voicemail follow up you described, ElevenLabs on the Creator plan at $22/mo gets you a clone of your own voice so the message lands as yours, not a robot. You will use around 40,000 credits/mo at your call volume, well inside the Creator allowance. Pair it with Retell for the actual call flow, and the whole voice agent stack lands under $100/mo before phone minutes."