From 0 to $100M ARR in 2 Years: Gamma’s Growth Playbook | GROW EUROPE 2025 | HubSpot Live

Wow, it is so good to be back in London. My name is Grant Lee. I am one of the co founders and CEO of Gamma. It is really, really great to be here. I wanted to share a few things. So first, five years ago we started Gamma and I was actually living in London at the time. We started the company just a few months after my daughter was born. So the city will always have a special place in my heart and I'm just so pumped to be back. For those that don't know about Gamma, you can think of us as the anti PowerPoint. For anyone that's ever spent a late night trying to format, design a deck, trying to get things right, we're the tool for you. We're trying to replace all the mundane and tedious tasks so that you can get your ideas out there and create content much more effortlessly. Now we're pretty excited about what we've been able to accomplish so far. We actually, I have to update the slide. It's actually 100 million in AR that we passed and we've done so profitably with a team of 50. So today I want to share with you a few of the lessons that I think really have contributed to our ability to really hyperscale and grow really fast. So some of the things we're going to talk about one is just this topic of product market fit. We'll talk about scaling creator marketing, we're going to talk about building community and really leaning into your community as you scale. And then we're going to talk about dog feeding the future, dog feeding your own product. So I'll start with product market fit. Most early stage startups have this question that they ask themselves, how do I know if we've reached product market fit? And it's a great question and I think it's actually a very important question to get right because when you fool yourself, you can actually lead yourself down a really dangerous path. And so the question here is like, how do you actually know whether or not you have product market fit? I think particularly kind of difficult in this time is you'll get startup advice all the time that says you should do things that don't scale. And this can oftentimes kind of confuse founders as to like, what should we actually focus on? I'll share more by just telling our own story. So again, we started Gamma a few years ago to really start trying to solve this sort of blank page problem and give people a new way to create and present their ideas. This started with just trying to solve my own pain point. So I Started my career in consulting, investment banking, living in slide decks. More recently, after the startup I was at was acquired, I went back into my roots, which is consulting. And I consulted early stage startups. And so the tool I was using to communicate with my clients was Google Slides. And I remember, you know, one late night, trying to prepare for the meeting the next day, formatting, trying to get the boxes just right. Really feeling like I was spending all my time on the formatting and, and so little of the time on the content itself, which has felt backwards. So we started thinking about, okay, what if we could reimagine this format from the ground up such that you can spend much less time on the design and more time on the content creation itself. I tapped two of my former colleagues from a previous startup we worked at together to sort of start prototyping nights and weekends. And our prototype looks something like this on the left, which is this sort of hybrid document deck like medium, that allowed people to create stuff much quicker, but is also multimedia, rich and interactive. And we sort of eventually got this prototype to a good enough place where we used that prototype to use as our pitch deck. So our pre seed pitch deck was this prototype. For the first time in my career, I used something that wasn't slides to present. And it was a fun way to kind of start the journey at Gamma. Now this is me. This is a picture of me starting to practice my pitch again. I was living in London at the time and so I had to borrow some furniture from my kids because we didn't have much in our flat. This is me propped up during the daytime, starting to practice my pitch. Now due to the time difference, a lot of the investors I was pitching lived in the US So I'd have to do all of my pitches in the middle of the night. I would set up around 8pm so after we had, you know, got the kids to bed, I would pick up this little desk, move it to the far corner of the flat, far away from them so I wouldn't disturb them in the middle of the night and I'd start setting up. So it was between the sort of kitchenette that we had and this little laundry closet, put the desk, sit down, put a fake zoom background so that nobody knew where I actually was and I'd start pitching. And so these were back to back pitches from like 8pm to 2am every single night. The first day I start pitching, you know, I do my first two, they go pretty well. I'm like, okay, starting to feel pretty good about myself, you know, this thing isn't too hard. I get to my third pitch 20 minutes in, you know, deliver the pitch, and then wait for the investor to start asking me some questions. And so there's some silence and I'm waiting. And then he finally says, this has got to be the worst idea I've ever heard. Not only are you going up against massive incumbents, they have ultimate distribution. There is no way you will ever succeed. And so in my head, I'm thinking, grant, you gotta come up with a super smart rebuttal here. Come on, think of something smart to say. And before I can even respond, he hangs up on the zoom call. He leaves. And so I get up from my little desk, kinda take a deep breath. I didn't have much time to feel sorry for myself because I had to do the next pitch in about five more minutes. But what I was able to do is really just internalize this moment that he was right. Actually, this market that we're going into is incredibly difficult. So building a great product is not enough. We have to think about distribution from day one, from the very beginning. So it ended up being a sort of painful lesson to learn in that moment, but one learned nonetheless. We were fortunate. We ended up raising a little bit money, which allowed us to actually start building the product. And we spent two years basically building towards what we eventually launched as our public beta. We launched on Product Hunt, and we were fortunate. We ended up winning Product of the Day, Product of the Week, Product of the Month, and that felt great. It felt super rewarding. It felt like we had really accomplished something. And it was this moment. It was like, oh, maybe we've done it, maybe we've made it. But then we looked at signups, and initially we saw this huge spike in signups, but then they sort of plateaued out. And what this meant was that we didn't actually have strong organic growth. We had this level of interest immediately. But then the signups were flattening out. We were still getting new signups, but they weren't growing on their own. And so something fundamentally was not working for the product, even though it seemed like maybe we had product market fit. And so we were sort of this fork in the road. Do we invest more in marketing to drive top of the funnel, or do we go back and try to fix the product? And I think this is the area where a lot of startups might get hung up because they think, okay, I'm just going to do things that don't scale. I'm gonna try to market even harder. I'M gonna spend more on ad spend, I'm gonna sell harder, I'm gonna meet more clients, I'm gonna prove to them that this is a product they need. Unfortunately, that doesn't usually work if you don't have strong word of mouth organically, if people aren't already talking about your product. So we end up choosing the second option, which is we're going to go back and try to fundamentally re architect the product. We knew that word of mouth is a sort of magical gift. If you can get it right, everything else becomes easier and without it, everything else is just much harder. So we wanted to focus on just the first 30 seconds of the product. We were going to try to deliver as much magic in that small window of time, such that anybody that experienced it would go on and tell all their friends, family, colleagues about our product. And that was ultimately the goal. We only had a team of 12, so honestly we couldn't afford much else. Like that was all we could focus on. But it was all hands on deck. We crammed into this converted two bedroom apartment in San Francisco and we did a four month sprint. We worked as hard as we could just on the first 30 seconds of the product to get it just right. And at the end of the day, we ended up launching with something that basically allowed this sort of simple experience. Enter a prompt and you get a first draft of your presentation. You also had the ability to have basic, like AI chat, to be able to make some basic changes as well. And in March 2023 we launched, like many AI startups today, we launched by announcing on Twitter X. And originally I had started drafting this post and it was a little bit safe, maybe a little bit boring. And, and I realized, you know, we sat down with my two co founders and realized, well, this was sort of a bet the company moment because we're about a year of Runway left. And so this launch had to go well. We didn't really have a choice. And so we knew that in order to actually get some engagement from this post, we had to be maybe a little bit more provocative. So last minute we changed the hook. We said the most valuable skill in business is about to become obsolete. Which worked. We ended up getting Paul Graham to respond. He said, well, surely making the thing described by the slide deck is a more valuable skill than making the deck itself. And these are the sort of things where, you know, it was exactly as intended. We needed people to actually engage with the post. This sort of comment ended up boosting engagement. The post itself went viral, but more Importantly, the product itself went viral. So that little spark trigger drew basically a couple thousand signups on day one. And then on day two, we got like 5,000 signups. Then we got like 10,000 signups per day, then we got 20,000 signups per day, Then 30,000 signups per day, THEN 50,000 signups per day. And the number just kept going up. And this was all despite not doing any marketing, not any advertising. It was all word of mouth. People were using the product and sharing it with others. There was organic virality for the first time. We didn't have to do anything, that the product was just growing on its own. And so for us, it just. It was this realization that, you know, word of mouth is this thing where, if you get it right, everything else becomes easier. It's the only form of distribution that amplifies all other forms of distribution. And the only way you can earn it is by doing the hard work on the product. It is not a form of distribution that can be bought. Go back to the product, get that right. That was kind of the main lesson learned here. And for us, it was the starting point for us of this inflection of growth. Let's talk a little bit about creator marketing. So this Twitter post was my first foray into trying to pretend to be a creator. I come from a finance background. I know nothing about influencer marketing. And so for me, I wanted to really just try to understand what it takes. And doing this first kind of Twitter post, this creator moment, helped me understand that this is going to be incredibly important. If we can get this right, it could actually unlock more growth for us over time. But I have to learn, and I got to start with the basics. So the basics being everything everybody knows. Start posting regularly. You really want to try to build empathy with other creators and other influencers. How do you write a good hook? How do you create content that's actually engaging? These are incredibly hard and very not intuitive for me. And so just trying to practice that on a daily basis and really learn what it takes. It started off somewhat slowly, but then over time I got a little bit better and better. And today I have decent reach. So that when I do put out something, it gets a good level of engagement. And it's something I want to continue doing because then anytime I put something out about Gamma, I can be an amplifier for that information, that content we're trying to put out. And this led to kind of just building a foundation for how we think about influencer marketing in general. Oftentimes I hear like, Founders or other marketing teams treat this as very transactional. They'll have a budget, they go line up a bunch of influencers and they call it a day. For us, we started with just like the basics. This is a human to human interaction, this is a relationship we're trying to build. They're a creator, they have an amazing audience they're trying to reach. And, and so rather than treat it very transactionally, we spent time onboarding each influencer one by one, showing them the product, helping them understand the product, helping them see the aha moment within the product as well, so that when they're talking about it, they're actually authentically talking about a product they would actually use. And so we started with that as like the sort of rough foundation. And that gave us a chance for us to be able to have influencers that were able to tell our story but in their voice. And so that's, you know, we ended up accumulating a lot of these great sort of foundational, you know, posts that allowed us to continue to build on this sort of traction over time. What we also learned is that there is this thing called the halo effect, which many of you may have heard, you have probably also heard of this thing called Dunbar's number, which is your network consists of 150 people roughly, right? And the thing with your network, you trust your network more than the average stranger. And so how this works with influencers, why influencers are able to be so successful is that oftentimes they'll give you a peek into their life so that you feel like they are actually part of your network. And so then when they recommend things, whether it's tips, tools, products, you trust their advice generally much more so than the average person. And if they really authentically gravitate towards your product as well, then it's even better. And what we found is that every time we invested in influencer marketing, it'd be 1.5 multiplier into how many times people say they heard about Gamma through a friend. And so people that authentically resonate with this sort of content and it just makes everything so much easier. It's been a great way for us to sort of fuel up growth along the way. As we got to 50 million users, I think the big question in our head was, do we have everything it takes to reach the next 500 million users? And for us, the one thing that always felt like was sort of holding us back was brand. Because oftentimes a creator will say, hey, can you send me some brand assets? I can use and our original brand was sort of pretty limited in DNA. We just didn't have so much to actually offer them. So it was actually hard to actually make it easier for them to showcase Gamma. And so we made the tough decision to do a complete rebrand. Now at 50 million users, this is a pretty risky proposition because it can cause a lot of confusion. But for us, we really felt like this was the right long term investment. We knew again, we weren't just satisfied with the 50 million we needed to reach the next 500 million. And so what was going to make that easier, we ended up actually changing the entire art direction of the product. The visuals, the typography, everything. We ended up actually open sourcing kind of all of how you can actually emulate our brand. If you go to brand Gamma app now creators have an entire tool set where if they wanted to even create their own branded Gamma assets, they can do so we teach them exactly how. And now they have plenty to go with anytime they want to post and amplify our news, our launches. And this makes it dead simple for them to pick up something and use. And so this realization that, you know, every step of the way you do have to take some bigger bets. You have to find ways to kind of reinvent yourself in many ways. And for us, this took shape in a rebrand earlier this year. Now let's talk about community led growth. Community is a word that gets thrown out there quite a bit these days. And I just want to share kind of our perspective and what's worked for us. This starts with user testing. You know, sometimes people say the trick to really expand upon, you know, your growth is like be close to the customer, like voice of the customer has to be very, very prominent in how you make decisions. We end up taking this quite literally. We actually wanted to hear the voices of our customers and to do so, we run a lot of user tests and this has been something we've done from the very beginning. And the way we run user tests is we'll recruit users to try out the product, sometimes a new feature, sometimes a new product that we're about to ship. And we'll have them screen share so they'll show us exactly what they're doing with the product. And then we'll actually have them describe what they're trying to do. We'll give them a task like, oh, complete X, Y and Z. And we'll have them describe what they're seeing on the screen where they're getting stuck. And hearing their voice is just like a Complete unlock because you can hear how much they're struggling when things are not right, you hear how confused they are when the product is confusing. And you can then take that and go back and actually try to re engineer things, fix it such that you're not fooling yourself into feeling like, oh, we shipped a great product, but hey, nobody can figure out how to use it. And so this has been with us from day one. Whether it's a landing page to in the product, an onboarding experience, a new feature, these are things we do. We recruit users to help us understand where they're getting stuck. As soon as we had started having repeat users, we wanted to bring all those power users into a separate workspace. We put them in a separate Slack workspace and we started a program called the Gambassador program, which is again for our power users in the Slack workspace. We share with them and early access to new features and they're oftentimes posting when they run into bugs, run into issues, or when they have feature requests. And for me, it's still a chance. It's still a workspace I visit daily so that I can be close to the customers, understanding where are they getting stuck, where can we provide more value? And it's something that you, as you continue to scale, being close to them, just having the Slack workspace has been an awesome way for us to just maintain that close contact. The temptation as you scale is like you want to start removing yourself and like adding more layers between you and the end customer because frankly it's too much work, right. And you end up, your customer base ends up becoming this sort of faceless blob. Like you don't really know them on an individual level, but they generally like these sort of things. I think that's a risky thing for a startup to allow to happen. So instead we've tried to lean in the opposite way, which is we want to get them even closer. Recently we launched a program called Gamma Lab, which is we flew users from around the world to spend two days with us in San Francisco working alongside our team. And there we got to show them a preview of all the things we're working on and they can give us immediate feedback. We actually even got their input on something we're designing completely from scratch, which was Gamma University, like a school certification program, and getting their input on how can we design this program to be the most effective for future Gamma users and getting their input in real life. And I think these sorts of things, these little moments really have helped us create Just a lot of organic product love over time because these users really believe and feel like they're part of the journey. They're helping build Gamma just as much as we're helping to build Gamma from an engineering perspective. We also try to bring together our local community. So we recently had this big drone show in San Francisco. It was pretty awesome. We had 4,000 attendees just within San Francisco, including the mayor himself came out. And again, these are these sort of moments. Even though this was pretty focused on just the little market in San Francisco, it was awesome just to meet users and customers in person, and then many of them would share it on socials. We ended up getting many social, millions of social views as well. So, again, these are like the small things you can do just to make sure that when you talk about nurturing your community, you're doing the hard work to actually do it, whether it's in real life, whether it's virtual and slack. Just investing in that a little bit, a little bit each day, as much as possible. I'll end with one last thing we have done, which is dogfooding our product. Is dogfooding even a term out here? Is that something people say? Yeah. Well, for those that don't know, dogfooding means you're actually using your own product. So for instance, for us at Gamma, we use Gamma daily for all sorts of things, and oftentimes you're using things that haven't even shipped to end users, and so you're trying to taste all the flaws in your product well before you ship it to end users. And it's something that we've been doing from the very beginning. A quick story I mentioned, we started about five years ago. We actually originally had two different ideas we worked on at the same time. One was this reimagining of presentations from the ground up, which is the product that it is today. And the second was actually a virtual office. Now, we were really passionate about just this idea of transforming how businesses communicate. But again, this was peak pandemic, and we felt like there was actually an opportunity to change how virtual teams communications communicated being in a virtual office, to try to emulate the sort of in office experience. And so for six months, the team worked on both products simultaneously, in parallel. And after the six months, we asked ourselves, which product did we have more conviction for? And it ended up being the presentation tool. A lot of dogfooding is about building conviction. Like, is this product good enough to go out into the world and serve and help users? And for us, when we thought about the presentation tool. There was a million different things that we wanted to build and had so many ideas for for the virtual office. We actually ended up getting stuck in this notion of, you know, what we're ultimately competing against in real life work, and being able to work shoulder to shoulder with someone you like. It's hard to actually go above that. Like you might be able to get close, but never above it. And so for us, mentally, we're also sort of capped at our own level of conviction. And so we ended up building the presentation tool instead. And so today that obviously takes shape in different ways. No longer are we entirely dogfooding different products, but more so at the feature level before we ship a feature to users. Does this feel good enough? Is it actually useful? Is this something that someone would want to use every day? And more recently, we've been dogfooding our own API. So our API is a way for you now to combine all the different tools you may use. Maybe granola for notes, HubSpot, combine all that and be able to then say, hey, I wanna personalize a deck for a specific client. I'm gonna pull data from different sources, personalize a deck. And we think this is gonna be super powerful for our sales team. We think it's gonna be super powerful for many sales teams that want to automate this content creation at scale. And so doing so allowed us to actually then create our own prompt guide which we recently released as well. And these are basically all the prompts we think that are going to be super useful by comparing that with API, such that again, any sales or marketing team out there can then start pulling some of these ingredients into their own workflows. And only learning by doing ourselves, could we actually put together this pretty comprehensive set of resources that I think our customers are going to find super useful. So those were the sort of big lessons learned, the four big ones being one, if you're a founder or your early stage startup, don't fool yourself into thinking of product market fit. Be sure, have strong word of mouth, have strong organic virality before you invest in anything else. Second is, you know, scaling creator marketing. If you can start by learning by doing, doing it yourself, putting yourself out there and then building relationships with other creators, other influencers so that they're really in it to help amplify your business. Third is do all the small things to build that community from the ground up, whether it's again the slack and virtual workspaces or it's doing things in person. Find whatever flavor works for you or do all of them, and I think those will pay dividends. And the last if you have a product that you're lucky enough to be one that you can be a user of, then dog food the hell out of it. Do it all the time. Make sure that you're testing things well before you put it into hands of users. Make sure that's excellent. We all want to be tastemakers of the best technology. Start with your own product. Make sure that you're shipping something you're super proud of. And I'll just end by saying, you know, for any founders or startups in the room here today, I'm your biggest cheerleader. I want to see you succeed. I'd love to connect. If you ever want help or get stuck, want a riff, want to brainstorm, please reach out. I love to be of help in any way I can. Thank you so much.