“Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO)

I'm in my third pitch in. I get to the very end of the pitch feeling pretty good about myself. The investor pauses a little bit and then just says that has to be the worst pitch, worst idea I have ever heard. Not only are you trying to go against incumbents, you're going against incumbents, have massive distribution. You are never going to succeed.

You guys are at over 100 million ARR now worth over $2 billion. One of the most interesting ways you guys grew early on was influencer marketing.

All the initial influencers I onboarded manually myself, I would jump on a call with each one of them so that they underst what Gamma represented, how to use the product. You want to be able to have them tell your story, but in their voice. I think a lot of people think influencer marketing and they'll think these big trendy creators, people that have a million followers, this is the wrong approach. You basically give them a script to read immediately feels like an ad. That product is not connected really to them in any way. You're much better doing the hard thing, which is hard to scale. Finding the thousands of micro influencers that have an audience where your product maybe is actually useful. People really trust what they say. That ends up becoming this wildfire that.

Can spread really, really f something you talk about. There is actually a lot of ways to think experimentally. Even in the early stages.

We would have an idea in the morning, come up with some sort of functional prototype, recruit a bunch of people that are legitimately good prospective users that have zero skin in the game, ship that so people can start playing with it in the afternoon. We're already running pretty full scale experiment. You start actually hearing other people describe their usage of the product. We can also watch them struggle by the evening or by the next day. We can actually go through all of it together other and say, okay, we're going back and we have to fix this. This is like not usable. And we've done that for everything.

Today my guest is Grant Lee, CEO and co founder of Gamma. This is a really unique and inspiring and very tactically useful conversation because Grant is building something that is essentially the dream for most founders. A massive AI startup that's profitable and has been for a long time, that didn't raise a lot of money for a long time and is a small team. It's just around 30 people, all who can fit in a small restaurant serving over 50 million users globally. If you're not familiar with Gamma, they're an AI powered presentation and website design tool. They just hit 100 million ARR in just over two years. They're valued at over $2 billion and unlike a lot of the fast growing AI startups that you hear about, they're growing profitably and sustainably and in a category that most people did not believe had a huge business opportunity. As you'll hear in the conversation, one investor told Grant this is the dumbest idea that he has ever heard. In this conversation, Grant shares the very counterintuitive lessons that he's learned finding product market fit, how he knew they had product market fit, the specific tactics that helped them grow, including a deep dive into influencer marketing which blew my mind. Also how they figured out their price, his thoughts on building a GPT wrapper company that is durable, a ton of hiring advice, and so much more. This could honestly have been another two hours of conversation. I suspect we'll do another follow up conversation next year. If you love this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of 16 incredible products including Devin, Lovable, Replit, Bolt, Nidan, Linear Superhuman, Descript, Whisper Float, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, Chapierd and Mavin. Head on over to Lenny'snewsletter.com and click product Pass. With that, I bring you Grant Lee. After a short word from our sponsors, my podcast guests and I love talking about craft and taste and agency and product market fit. You know what we don't love talking about Sock two. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta helps companies of all sizes get compliant fast and stay that way with industry leading, AI automation and continuous monitoring. Whether you're a startup tackling your first SoC2 or ISO 27001 or an enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta's trust management platform makes it quicker, easier and more scalable. Vanta also helps you complete security questionnaires up to five times faster so that you can win bigger deals sooner. The result? According to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers slashed over 4, $500,000 a year and are three times more productive. Establishing trust isn't optional. Vanta makes it automatic. Get $1,000 off@vanta.com Lenny did you know that I have a whole team that helps me with my podcast and with my newsletter. I want everyone on that team to be super happy and thrive in their roles. Justworks knows that your employees are more than just your employees. They're your people. My team is spread out across Colorado, Australia, Nepal, West Africa and San Francisco. My life would be so incredibly complicated to hire people internationally, to pay people on time and in their local currencies, and to answer their HR questions. 24.7But with JustWorks, it's super easy. Whether you're setting up your own automated payroll, offering premium benefits or hiring internationally. Justworks offers simple software and 24. 7 human support from small business experts for you and your people. They do your human resources right so that you can do right by your people. Just works for your people. Grant, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Lonnie, so great to be here. Thank you for having me.

I see your face all the time in my LinkedIn feed. I don't know if you know this, the thing on these JP Morgan Chase ads. I'm so curious if other people see this or if it's just me. Did you know this was a thing?

I think it's maybe once a day now I get a text message and just no message, it's just a screenshot or, you know, an image of me, you know, doing something in San Francisco on one of these ads that we're seeing. And so, yeah, kind of embarrassing, but also, you know, we're happy customers of JP Morgan Chase. So trying to represent.

Oh my God, I hope, I hope you love them because it's like it's always you. There's no one else. It's like, Grant, I know, can I tag?

You gotta swap somebody out. I mean, that'd be great. I'm totally fine with that.

Okay, so to get serious, the reason I'm really excited to have you here is unlike a lot of super fast growing AI startups, you are both growing like crazy. You are growing very profitably. We're going to talk about this. You did not raise a ton of money when you started. You waited a long time to raise a bunch of money. You also built a business and a category that I think most people never imagined there was this big of an opportunity. And you're basically, you've achieved the dream of a lot of founders these days, especially people building AI startups. So my goal with this conversation is essentially do an anthropological study of a really successful AI startup. Talk about how you found product market fit, how you grew, all the, all the lessons you've learned along the journey. And I'm going to break this conversation up kind of along the different milestones of the journey. Before we get into the first piece. Is there anything that you think is important for people to hear kind of broadly about the story of Gamma.

Yeah, maybe I'll just start with a quick story, if that's okay. And it's really just a founding story. So we started the company back in 2020. This is peak pandemic. And fundraising, even fundraising was just so different. So all of the fundraising was done over Zoom. You were kind of, you know, sitting in these Zoom meetings, trying to pitch many investors you never met in person. So just a different era. Right. And so for us, you know, we're first time founders. I was actually living in London at the time, and so, you know, different time zone. I had to do all of my pitches at night and, you know, I have two little kids, so wait for them to go to bed. 8:00pm, we had a pretty modest flat, so nothing big. I would basically find this little corner between the kitchenette and the laundry room to kind of set up. Shot far enough from the kids so they wouldn't, you know, be woken up. And between 8pm, like 2am, I'm just pitching, you know, trying my best. I'm like the fake Zoom background, so people didn't know where I was. And just pitching. And so, you know, really the first day, kind of, I'm in my third pitch in, trying to tell the story of Gamma, obviously just starting to get the hang of the pitch. And, you know, I get to the very end of the pitch feeling pretty good about myself, and the investor pauses a little bit and then just says, that is a has to be the worst pitch, worst idea I have ever heard. Not only are you trying to go against incumbents, you're going against incumbents that have massive distribution. You are never going to succeed. And so in my head, I'm already kind of shell shocked and thinking, what's my rebuttal? And before I could even respond, he hangs up. And so I'm there sitting there thinking about it. And before I could really get down on myself because I had to prepare for the next pitch, I kind of just internalized this feeling that maybe he's right. Maybe something about what he's saying is actually correct. And so for me, I started thinking about if we're going to succeed in this category, we're going to really have to think about growth. From the very beginning, this category is going to be really, really hard to break into. And so we really made this promise to ourselves that as we continue to build, growth is going to be critically important. And so my thing to kind of, you know, your audience is that, you know, I don't come from a growth background. So if I can learn growth, anybody can learn growth. And I think especially in this sort of market, hyper competitive, oftentimes very crowded, it's going to be essential.

That is such a fun story. Oh, my God. How. How bad must this investor feel at this point? We won't name names just to share some stats. I know this is going to be. By the time this launches, this will be out. But you guys are at over 100 million now, worth over $2 billion. A business that, again, most people did not think was. Was going to work in this category.

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, we feel super proud to have accomplished that. And again, yeah, I'm excited to share some of the, you know, the growth tactics and things that worked for us. I think, you know, hopefully it'll help others kind of on their journey as well.

Okay, so let's dive into it. Let's talk about product market fit. Tell us the story of just how you found product market fit and how you knew you found product market fit.

Yeah, I'll start by telling kind of the moment where we thought we maybe had product market fit. And I think a lot of founders ask themselves, do we have it or do we not? And I think there's often a sort of temptation to almost fool yourself into thinking you have it. And so we sort of did our first public beta launch. This is back in August of 2022. We launched on Product Hunt and felt really good. We had what we felt like was a great launch, ended up winning Product of the Day, Product of the Week, Product of the Month. And I was like, wow, I think we have something here. And then we'd look at signups, and you'd get that initial spike in signups, and then they sort of, like, flatten out. You're still getting new users every day. But it was clear we didn't have strong word of mouth. There wasn't strong organic virality. And so if we just kind of played things out, we knew that the product wasn't going to grow on its own. Like, something was missing there. We didn't have that strong word of mouth so that the product could just continue growing. And so we really kind of asked ourselves, like, okay, what do we need to change? And. And the answer is, like, we need to fundamentally change everything. It, for us, almost became the sort of bet the company sort of moment, because at that point, we were running low on Runway. You know, we knew we needed to make progress, and we didn't really know what could be done. And so we Got everyone together. At this point, the team was just over 12 people. And we said, okay, it's going to be all hands on deck. We are going to do everything we possibly can to make the first 30 seconds of the product feel magical. The moment you land into the product, it has to be great and has to be so great that someone that goes through that onboarding is going to tell all their friends. And if we can get that right, then maybe we have a chance of actually doing something in this space. And so we spent three, four months actually, after the product launch. We felt great, but we knew we had to go back to the drawing board. We spent the next three, four months actually revamping the entire onboarding experience. And of course, this is also where AI for us kind of played a big role. We actually rebuilt it so that AI was part of the actual onboarding. So every single new user would experience this sort of magic in the first 30 seconds. And so we relaunched. This is end of March 2023. And all of a sudden we'd go from a few hundred signups a day to now. First day was like a couple thousand, and then the next day would be like 5,000 signups and then 10,000 signups a day and then 20,000 signups a day. And then it just kept going up. And we weren't doing any sort of marketing, no advertising. It was all sort of organic word of mouth, virality of the product, people using the product and sharing with others where we for the first time really felt this pull, like we didn't have to do anything. Product was just growing. And it was just such a distinct difference between that feeling and, like, coming out of the product hub launch where we could have fooled ourselves into thinking we had product market fit. I think the temptation would have been, hey, let's just spend more on ads or spend more on marketing, because, like, you know, we'll just fuel, you know, fuel the top of the funnel and everything else will work itself out. I think that would have been a trap. I think that would have led us down to, like, this path of trying to brute force our way into product market fit. And it would just always be sort of a fleeting sort of destination. We never actually arrive. And so I think we made the tough call, the right call. It was a sort of at the company moment. And I think on the other side, it just felt so different.

Grant, this is exactly what I wanted this conversation to be. I'm so excited. I have so many questions I have to follow up on. The stuff you shared before we even get to the rest of the journey. So one is, essentially what you're describing is product market fit to you was when organic growth started to really take off and it was just growing through word of mouth. You weren't doing much because it was so awesome. People were telling their friends about it. Is there anything more there that might be helpful for people to share just to hear about just like, okay, here's what it actually looks like.

Yeah. I mean, one piece of advice is that when you're early on, your mindset should almost be like you're trying to create a word of mouth machine. Right. Like, if you can get that part right, everything else becomes significantly easier. And if you have any. And I think this applies to Both like prosumer B2C as well as even B2B products. Like, if you have a B2B product, even if you're not telling all of your, you know, all of your friends, you should be telling colleagues where like that product is relevant. You should probably be telling, you know, you know, former coworkers where, hey, you've discovered something like, oh, I wish we had this, you know, in our prior lives. And like, that should even be magical. And then you should see that in all the leads that are coming through like, or people coming through through your prospects and your existing customers. If you're not seeing a healthy chunk of those leads come through that way, I would go back, I'm like, why? Why is that not happening? Because again, that's like the massive tailwind you need where everything, every single thing you do on top of that, all the marketing, all the sales, all the advertising, you're just going to have like, it becomes way, way easier.

How much of this was. You describe it as a word of mouth machine. How much of this was like word of mouth loops and virality features versus just the product itself? One was awesome and two is kind of innately shareable because it's, you know, presentations people share with each other.

Yeah, totally. I think for us we do benefit from being in a category where, you know, by nature of it, if you like Gamma, you're sharing it, presenting it together. So I think for us it's a combination of both. And ideally you have other ways where, you know, word of the mouth or organic virality can, can happen in your product. So by nature of usage, like it's being shared, you know, we basically had an internal mantra that we go back to. Like the first 30 seconds. We want it to be dead simple for someone to create content. We want to be dead simple for them to share it. And everything we did kind of for that first 30 seconds, or you know, call it the first few minutes, is remove friction so that they can do both of those things, create and share. And I think other people, you know, when you look at your own product, you think about, okay, what is it? You know, what is it about my product and how it gets used to, can you remove friction such that it can actually spread? And even if it's locally within an organization or like, you know, within a workspace, like just be able to enable that as much as you possibly can.

The other really profound point you're making here is the story of you won product of the Day on Product Hunt, which alone is so hard. So many people try to win and don't. Most, most people don't. Like, I've tried to help companies win and it's, it's like a really hard thing to achieve. And then you want product of the week and product of the month, and still you're like, no, this isn't working. Most people that achieve that are like, no, we got this. And they would not have to bet the company. There was no feeling. There wouldn't be a feeling. If we have to rethink everything, what is it there that you're just like, no, this isn't going to work. As much as exciting as this is, this isn't it.

Yeah. I mean, part of being a founder is being as self aware as you can and be your own worst critic. Right. And so oftentimes you want to have these vanity metrics that feel good to celebrate, and you should celebrate. But you should know when it's a vanity metric versus is this core to our growth engine, like, if this number goes up, does it mean the product is working? And I think that's where we looked at like, okay, you know, felt good to win. Those things we got, we kind of put ourselves at least on the map. But it wasn't good enough to actually have this sort of feeling that we had a core growth engine we could just invest in and get better and better that wasn't there yet.

So essentially it kind of started to just plateau and slow. It wasn't like this rocket ship that took off from that.

Yeah, it was still like we were still getting signups like they're coming through, but you could just tell there wasn't like there wasn't this like building momentum, you know, And I think that's, that's where it's always hard to tell. You kind of have to, you know, me and my co founders, we sat down, we're just. We're trying to be honest with ourselves, like, okay, is this going to be enough? And it just really felt like it wasn't going to be good.

The other point here is the power of onboarding, which comes up a bunch on this podcast when you talk about driving retention. So you. So you launched Product Hunt, did great, and then started kind of petering out. How much did the product change after things started to work versus onboarding? Just, like, how important was onboarding? And then just tell us why. The first 30 seconds, where'd you come up with that number?

Yeah, so for us, you know, the onboarding and the product experience, for us, that's intertwined, right? The analogy I always think about is, you know, if you go into a restaurant and, you know, maybe the food is good, but when you really think about the user experience, it's like the moment you walk in the door, you get seated, the waitress, waiter comes by, greets you, you order, you know, and of course the food has to taste good. But if that entire, like, and then you finally get the bill and you leave, like, is that entire experience something that feels delightful? Is it good enough for you to tell your friends about? If someone just came by and dropped the food on. On your plate, you know, on the table and, like, just left and never came with a bill, we're like, okay, I'm not going to recommend this to. To somebody else. And so for us, like, we thought about, okay, the first moment someone walks through our door, you know, dropping into the product, what is something we can give them? Can we shorten that time to value as much as possible? A lot of this is inspired by Scott Belsky. He talks about that first mile, the first 15 minutes, and I think that's totally right. And I think one approach is you think about new users as you almost have a cynical view of them. You have to think about them being selfish, vain, and lazy. They're coming in, they have no desire to learn a new tool. And so what can you give them in that first 30 seconds that earns you the next 30 seconds and then the next 30 seconds? And so for us, we knew that if we can't, people's attitude, attention span is even shorter today than maybe 10 years ago. And so what is it in that first 30 seconds? Can we actually show you something and earn the right to kind of, you know, keep kind of building that relationship with you? We really thought a lot about that. And, and certainly that's. That's. That's all we could really afford at the time. We only had 12 people building. It's like we couldn't make a entirely, you know, revamp entire product. We knew that we had to at least put all of our energy into one spot. And so we made that coming into the door, come through the door, make that feel, that moment feel magical so that we can do a little bit more over time.

I love your point about how, you know, you could think of it as like, okay, it's onboarding versus the product. The lens of how do we make this incredibly valuable and aha ish for the first 30 seconds almost informs what the product should be.

Yeah, it really helps you pull forward. What is the most magical thing about your product? Right. Sometimes founders will think about like the 5, 10 features. Well, maybe there's only like one thing that kind of differentiates you. You know, I try to learn a lot from, you know, you know, we'll get into some of the marketing pieces of this, but even just having this sort of founder led marketing lens of like, what can I do to help a new user just understand, you know, there's this thing from like consumer advertising, which is you throw a consumer one egg, they can probably catch it. You throw them four or five eggs, they're probably going to drop all of them. And like oftentimes founders want to talk about the four or five features. They have maybe 10 features and then the consumer is totally confused, like, why do I need this thing? We try to just give them that one egg, that one first experience. We're like, okay, create a slide in seconds. That's the egg I'm going to throw you. This egg is that compelling to you? Some people are still going to opt out, but for the people that catch that, you're solving a real problem for them and then you can continue kind of building on that over time. You've given them enough so that they'll sit around and keep playing with your product.

That is a hilarious metaphor I've never heard for onboarding time to value, just focus on one egg at a time. Just going even further back, what was the original insight that you had that led to Gamma and what Gamma is today?

After the last startup I was at was acquired, I went back into kind of my roots, which is consulting. I was advising early stage startups and the sort of medium I was using was Google Slides. So I just remember this late night trying to prepare for next day's meeting, trying to format and figure out the right layout and spending hours just trying to get the Sort of look and feel right, rather than the content itself. And for me, that just felt completely backwards. You know, I should be spending 90% all the time on the content, 10% maybe on the design and formatting. And so the question just was, you know, what if there's a better way? What if we could reimagine this format from the ground up? Slides have been around for almost 40 years as the default, you know, medium of choice for a lot of this. And so we thought about, okay, if we had different building blocks, different primitives, so you're not locked into the fixed 16 by 9, you know, slide, what could you, you know, what could we offer to new users? And so that was really the, the starting point of all this.

Like, hearing this, I could see why investors would be like, you know, like, I guess so. But Slides has been around. PowerPoint has been around 40 years. Like, I get it, you know, I get why people would be. And specifically AI. Was that a part of the vision initially? Or did AI start to come up and then, wow, great timing, great timing.

It wasn't part of the original vision, although the spirit was there, which is we wanted to make it incredibly fast and effortless for people to create content. So it just so happened that AI was a magical gift that allowed us to do all those things along the same sort of ambition or vision that we had. And so we integrated it core to kind of all the building blocks. We were already building well before AI was part of the picture.

It's such a cool. Other example, there's so many examples of ideas that were not possible before are now very possible with AI. And it's a great opportunity for people to come after as you like, places, categories people think is an impossible place to build a big business. AI now allows it. Awesome. Speaking of that, let's talk about the growth journey and how you actually grew from nothing to 100 million ARR in just over two years. I'm thinking we break it up. I know these milestones aren't that clear, but kind of like 0 to 100 million ARR 1 to 10, 10 to 100, something like that. And let's just kind of see how it goes. How did you get your first set of users? How did you get your, say, hundred. First hundred users, How'd you get to 100 million? Error from zero.

Our first hundred looks very different, I'd say. So this was even pre the sort of AI launch we had, you know, the first hundred users. For a product like ours, you're. You're trying to Convince all your friends to use the product. Anybody that's ever made a slide deck you're trying to talk to. And I think early on, you know, your friends want to do you a favor. So they're going to try the product. They're also going to lie to you, they're going to tell you how great it is and then you look at the usage and nobody's coming back. And so I think our first hundred was sort of like gradually hard earned. Post sort of the product launch, people learning like, okay, this is kind of becoming a little bit more useful. Usage was still pretty episodic, so they weren't coming back every week. And then I think, do think, you know, the moment post sort of the AI launch is where all of a sudden, you know, we saw that sort of organic growth happening, people coming back to the product regularly. And so that's where it wasn't even the first hundreds. Like, I mean, the first 10,000 users all came within a pretty short time period after that initial launch.

Awesome. We're going to talk about monetization pricing later, which is obviously an important part of actual getting to a million ARR and 10 million ARR. So what I'm hearing essentially is the product HUD launch was a big part of just the first 10,000 ish users. I know there was also a tweet when you first, when you relaunched that helped in a big way. Talk about that.

Yeah. So when we did our AI launch, we didn't do our AI launch on product hung. We basically said, hey, let's just put it out on Twitter, see if we can get some virality. And honestly, we kind of came up with kind of a clickbaity sort of tweet. It was like the most valuable skill in business is about to become obsolete. And so it was intentional in that we wanted to create a little bit of engagement. We knew that having sort of a more provocative in a tweet would allow people to engage with it. And so after a couple days, all of a sudden it started getting a little bit more viral and a lot more engagement. And we looked and it was basically because Paul Graham had commented and saying something like, surely the thing that the slide deck is describing is more valuable than the slide itself. Right. And obviously, you know, it was fun just to see that comment. I think once that comment came through, like, you know, even more engagement on the post. And then that was really the whole intent of that post was just to be able to have, you know, that level of engagement so that people, you know, we have some level of reach. And so for me, it was almost like the. My first sort of learning moment. Going back to, you know, what does founder led marketing even mean? It means, like, how do you actually break through the noise? How do you get a chance to have people even engage with like a post like that? Part of that is copywriting. Part of that is like storytelling. Part of that is just having like, even like the right visuals to share. And so I always, for me, kind of a moment, just understanding, hey, so they kind of do this, right? You kind of. You kind of have to do things that maybe you're not super comfortable with, but it makes a difference.

Such a fun story. So you intentionally set that announcement up to be controversial is what I'm hearing.

Totally. Yeah. I'd say provocative, little spicy.

That is so cool. So essentially you got to 10,000 users through product hunt and then essentially one controversial tweet that ended up baiting Paul Graham to comment. Amazing. And was it a com. It was just a comment. It wasn't even him retweeting it.

No, just a comment. Yeah. And then others would, you know, pile on.

Yeah. It's interesting how much a comment can increase the distribution of a tweet versus them retweeting it or quote tweeting it.

Totally. And of course, the algorithms change all the time, so part of it's just locked based on when it happened, how.

It happened, who who posted, and I. You use this term founder led marketing, which I love, and I'm already seeing it in action here. This is you thinking about. It's not like delegating to someone in marketing. It's not hiring an agency. It's like, how do I tell a story that I think will break through the noise based on you building this company, having the insight to build this product? And I guess, is there anything more there you think is important for people to hear about the importance of the founder thinking through this stuff?

Yeah, I mean, I think very, you know, most people today are probably familiar with founder led sales, which is still very, very important. I think before you hire your first, you know, salesperson or sales or. It's great for the founder to understand, like, what it takes and, you know, they're going to craft the right narrative story. At my previous role, I was the COO at a startup where I was doing a lot of. I wasn't founder, but I was early. And so I was helping the founders go through this and. And really helping go into meetings with a client or a prospect and saying, hey, this is why you know, our product is interesting and I think, you know, today there's, there's so many AI startups that are much more either B2C or Per Sumer. And so you're not necessarily talking to individual prospects, but the idea that you can be, you know, really in control of the narrative on the marketing side is really, really important. And I think I'll, you know, I'll describe a things where over time, I think that skill set just really, really helps you. One is like, you know, you have a chance to kind of be a creator yourself. These days. I think a lot of founders are trying to, you know, be more active on social media. And I think, you know, if you can kind of overcome the initial cringe factor of like seeing yourself and postings like, oh, this doesn't, you know, feel authentic. If you can overcome that initial feeling, you, you start investing into like, okay, how do I become a better copywriter? You know, how do I articulate something that is clear, not just clever? You know, I think there's that saying where obviously if you can have that clarity, that's super important. And most people will try to get super, like creative with their, with their copywriting, but that's not usually the right way to break through and communicate something. So how do you improve your own copywriting? And then that allows you to actually have a higher bar when you start working with other marketers or in this case, like for us, like working with influencers. Right. If you're working with influencers and creators and you can totally empathize with like how they approach that work and you know what a good hook looks like or you know, how like a structure, a good post, like, you can only do that if you've kind of gone through it a little bit yourself and you know how hard it is. And I think too many founders will then just say, you know, they'll write something that just feels so much like an ad and then they'll give it to a creator to help amplify and then that just never works. Right. And so I do think part of founder led marketing is like going through this yourself, using your own platform. In the beginning, it's probably going to be super small, but as you get bigger, like you have, you have a platform that you have a voice and people listen and you're going to get better and better at your own storytelling. I think these are all skills you should invest in as early as possible because you know you're going to have to get better and better. It's like practice, you Got to practice over and over.

I definitely want to pull on this thread more because you tweeting the lessons you learned building Gamma is what led to this conversation. I was reading, I'm like, okay, he's sharing a bunch of stuff, but there's so much more I want to hear. And we're going to talk through this and go a lot in a lot more depth than what you've shared on Twitter. But I love that that's example of that working get having this conversation. So let me ask a couple questions here. One is just how do you find time as a founder CEO of a very fast growing, hectic, crazy startup? We have so much to do. How do you just like allocate the time to do this and then any just key lessons you've learned about doing this well beyond what you've already shared. For people that want to try to start sharing things on LinkedIn and Twitter.

My advice is definitely just to try to start small. Don't let it become so intimidating that you just don't get started. For me, it was like just having a notepad or, you know, Google Doc around in the beginning where I would just constantly jot down, okay, this is something I learned or something I observed or something that worked well, something that was unintuitive but worked, and just start creating a log of that. And then once I had enough of those and I'd spend basically every week I'd block off a few hours to go a little bit deeper. I take a lot of those bullet points and try to say, is there enough here to turn this into maybe a post or, you know, something that can be shared broadly? And in the beginning, I didn't have enough. It was all sort of scattered thoughts. But over time, you start accumulating some interesting themes. And then I would start stress testing some of that. So I would tell, you know, my teammates like, hey, this is something interesting. Like, do you find this interesting? And if, if there were enough, like, oh, yeah, that's, I would not have expected that, or that's not something I've never heard before, then I, then I'd actually start crafting the initial post and then, and then you actually just put it out there. I think what I've learned is, you know, even for LinkedIn versus Twitter, the audiences want different things and so you almost have to then have different tones of voices or like, you know, even nuggets are sharing. For me, I invested much more in LinkedIn early on just because it felt a little bit more natural for me. And then over time I said, okay, well I'm going to start packaging certain content for Twitter that's actually different than what I would post on LinkedIn. Sometimes on Twitter you get even more tactical or even more into the weeds. And so I found that, that to be helpful. But honestly, I'm still learning. So like every time you post, you go back, you know, after a couple weeks you go and say, okay, what things are actually being engaged with? Like, are things actually creating, like ideally you're creating enough value where people are either bookmarking it, sharing it, retweeting it, you know, these, these things that are signals for there's something valuable there. And, and then you just go back and you start you collecting your own sort of, you know, these are my all star posts. Like, these are the ones that I've actually, you know, broken through. And then you go back and try to understand, okay, what about that post do I think was actually useful? It was that the actual content, was it the structure of the content, was it some sort of contrarian advice? And you start thematically bunching that together such that as you're brainstorming every week, you just have a good sort of body of work to work off.

This is so interesting and valuable. So let me mirror back a few of the lessons that I heard here that I think is easy for people to miss. So one is just what to share what I heard here, and I completely agree with this and this is what I try to do is pay attention to things you've learned, things that you find interesting, things that are unintuitive to you. Just like have a doc and just put these there. And every time you learn something, find something interesting, just add it to the doc. Or yeah, I haven't heard before is a good one too. So it's essentially just like if you find it interesting, people on social media will also find it interesting. And one approach is just share it as it's happening, which is what I try to do. Just like, oh, hey, just learn this thing with clock code, with clockcode, check it out or save it up for a big long post. The other interesting. I've never heard this before. Post different things to LinkedIn and Twitter. I just copy and paste the same thing. I love that you do something different for the two platforms.

I think we all kind of have intuition that there's different audiences. And so if you know that kind of fundamentally, then the question is how do you package up the story the right way so that there is the audience is ready to receive it? And I Think this can differ by, you know, by the type of creator or the founder, whoever's posting it, and of course the actual content itself. And so for me, I'm still tweaking, but I do find that just copy and pasting, you know, from one to the other doesn't usually work. It really, like, you almost need to be in the right mindset of like, okay, what do I think will be more engaging on Twitter? And then what do I think will be more engaging on LinkedIn? And then kind of, you know, test, test a bunch, see what actually works, Go back and re iterate a little bit.

So if you had like one bullet point tip for what works on Twitter versus LinkedIn, you shared maybe more tactical on. On Twitter. Is there anything more there you can share?

Yeah, that's what I've found is like tactical. Oftentimes more contrarian on Twitter and also I would say technical too. People really like to know, you know, again, going into getting, going back to like getting into the weeds, like, is this something I feel like I could replicate? And I'm not going to give you credit. Like, there's no credibility if you just give like a blanket statement or something that feels generic. Like, I really need to know if you can show me the metrics. Even better, I feel like that versus, like LinkedIn, it's, it's more oftentimes more even just, you know, either more aspirational or aspirational or like, like a topic or a theme that just feels like relevant at that point in time. And you can just kind of make more of a, you know, broader statement. It doesn't need to be as tactical. It's more like inspirational. It's like, oh, okay, now I need to go and learn a little bit more about pricing and packaging, for instance. And that could be the sort of spark that somebody needs. And you don't need to, you know, spell it completely out. Part of it is Also that on LinkedIn you can't really do threads. And so, you know, doing like a super long form post isn't as practical. Maybe that changes in the future where maybe the tactical pieces, you know, that element might, might actually change.

And last piece is you said you just block off time. Is there like a specific time of the week you do this? How do you actually. Because everyone's like, oh, sure, I'll block off time and then, oh, no, okay. But I actually got to do all this other stuff, so I'm not going to use it this time or maybe next week.

For me, it's usually two Times of the day, very first thing in the morning and last thing at night. And partly is because of kids. It's almost like I need time, but there's just zero distraction and there's no noise in the house. And so I can actually think. And, and then, you know, I think in the mornings it's about where are you finding inspiration? Like where, where are you? Like, what are, what are topics you're energized by? And then I think at night it's about reflection. Like, what are the things you actually went through that day? You can almost pull up your calendar and be like, okay, I talked to X, Y and Z people and was there anything from those conversations that might be relevant? That's where, you know, write some of those things. It's more of a recap of actually.

What happened and what I, what helps me to not feel like this is some cringy, self promo egotistical stuff is just, it's useful stuff that I've learned that ends up being helpful to people. And people in the comments are just like, oh, that is really cool and useful. Thank you. It's not like self promotion. It's not just like, look how amazing I am. Look, check out my amazing products. Like, here's the thing I learned, you might find it useful.

That's exactly right. I think one way of thinking about it, with founder led sales, it's always about exchange of value. You want to be able to give them, the customer, this feeling that they're getting an amazing product. In exchange they're going to pay you money for it. I think with founder led marketing, it's almost this mindset of you want to give people a ton of content, maybe it's a value in the content. So you're sharing something, maybe some, you know, some secret tactic or you know, you're giving them something where they, you know, inherently there's value in it. And in exchange you sort of get goodwill back. You're not necessarily getting money back. You get goodwill, they're going to follow you, they're going to engage with their post, they're going to tell others about it and then over time you can exchange maybe some of that goodwill for like actually talking about my product and like announcing it and, and they're going to help amplify the news. And I think that's magical. You kind of, kind of bank the goodwill for a long period of time by providing just a ton of value with no expectation of anything immediately in return.

The book I always point people to when they're struggling with this sort of thing. And like, okay, I did this and no one, like, no one cared. Didn't do any good. Is there's a book by Scott Pressfield, I think is his name called nobody wants to read your shit. Yeah. Which is exactly what is right. Nobody wants to read it. The bar for people to care is very high. There's so much stuff to read and process. And so this book gives you a really good lens of just like, okay, the bar is very high and nobody wants to read your shit, so you have to try really hard to make it really good.

Great reminder.

We'll link to that in the show notes. Okay, let's get into. Let's come back to the growth of Gamma. So we've talked about how you got your first tens of thousands of users, essentially product hunt, rethinking onboarding, making it really magical. And then this very controversial tweet that Paul Graham commented created some buzz. Let's talk about the next phase and maybe, I don't know, tell us kind of the ARR at that point through 100 million, just like broadly, what should we know?

So when we got to about 10 million in ARR, I think there's this feeling for me which was we knew we needed ways to help just continue to amplify and spread the word about Gamma. I think it was already working in terms of the organic virality was there. And so we did feel like it was time to start amplifying some of this. And I think the main blocker in my mind that I started feeling was that our initial brand was sort of holding us back. And I think a lot of people will discount, you know, whether or not a rebrand is valuable. And I think sometimes it is, sometimes, sometimes it isn't. For us, you know, there's a few different things we looked at. So one, our initial brand was. Was almost more of a placeholder brand because we created it the moment we sort of incorporated the company, which is again, like late 2020, beginning of 2021, where we needed something so that as we built, we could at least share it with people. We could put up a landing page and just feel like, okay, there's something here. But we didn't invest a whole lot into it. And so it was pretty limited in sort of what I call kind of the DNA of the brand. There wasn't that many. Like, the art direction was very limited in scope. There wasn't much when it came to, like, voice and tone. And so, you know, it was. It was something that we. We knew was Good enough to start, but it wasn't scalable. And when I think about something that could be scalable, it's almost like you can take the ingredients of a brand and replicate it a ton. Like you're kind of, you know, this DNA is something where you can, you can imagine creating tons of content around and all feeling pretty cohesive. And I don't, I think that needs to be done by design. Like you're really think being thoughtful about every single element. Like what is the art direction you want to go with? What is the voice and tone such that as you're creating, you know, thousands of pieces of copy, it all feels pretty cohesive. And so we kind of went back to the drawing board and we spent many months kind of rethinking what would be the, you know, the brand. What is, what is this, this vision that we have longer term. Our creative director internally partner with Smith and diction, an amazing agency that has helped, you know, you know, folks like Perplexity also do their rebrand or their initial brand. And we weren't, we were spent many months just like really trying to craft kind of what we think is like the core DNA of the brand and doing so in a way that we could replicate it as much as possible. Replication piece of it comes into play because as you start scaling, you're going to have to create a ton of content, your own content on social media, ads for performance marketing assets for influencers to be able to use and showcase in their content. And so you're going from tiny pieces of content to all of a sudden every week we're testing thousands of pieces of creative and you cannot do that if you don't feel confident that as you're replicating, like you have that sort of cohesive feel. So for us that we realized it was going to be necessary and why we invested so much and ended up becoming way more expensive, way more time consuming than I would have imagined. But I think coming, you know, on the other side of it being the right investment, feeling that that was the right time to do it.

I love how many things you did that feel like this wouldn't, this will not work out. Building a startup within the presentation space, doing a whole rebrand in the middle of scaling, also just reworking the entire product after you launched and just like rethinking the whole thing. Like all these things, everyone's always like, no, this is not how we went and interestingly worked out for you guys. I want to come back to the brand stuff. But one of the most interesting Ways you guys grew early on was influencer marketing, which a lot of people hear about and talk about. I haven't heard of much of, like how to actually do this and what actually works. Talk about that as a broad growth lever for you guys. And then I want to get into just like what tools did you use, who actually was really helpful there, things like that. So yeah, just give us the big picture.

Yeah, I think a lot of founders assume that with influencer marketing, it's almost like turnkey. You set aside a budget, you find some creators, you figure out the right campaign or the right moment of time to do it and it's all done, you're ready to go. And I think the reality is like going back to this founder led marketing mindset is like, well, you're going to set yourself up for success if you actually are super involved in that entire process. So for us what this meant was like all the initial influencers I onboarded manually myself, we would find, I would spend time, I would jump on a call with each one of them so that they understood what Gamma represented, how to use the product. You want to be able to have them tell your story, but in their voice. Right. And they can't do that if you're not willing to put in that investment. And so we would spend a lot of time like going through. It wasn't my job to tell them how to pitch Gamma, but it was my job to make sure that they understood what Gamma was as a product. And so we'd spend a lot of time like me just walking through the product, them asking questions, us like just kind of brainstorming what could the hooks be? And me just giving them some initial feedback and like saying, oh yeah, this one, I love that. I figure it's going to work great for your audience, but not trying to be super prescriptive and working with a ton of micro influencers, people that don't have massive followings but are committed to giving, going back to giving value to your audience. Like they're committed to giving value to their audiences. They want to be able to showcase tools that actually they would use or they are using. And how do you do that in an authentic way? Like you can't really fake that. You really need to spend the time doing that. And just like you would onboard a customer, you onboard an influencer the same way you want them to be an extension of your team. And I think they can feel whether or not you're willing to put in the work. And, and if, if you're not, then they're just going to treat it like, you know, any other project, ship it and be done with it. If you invest in that relationship, you know, guess what? They'll. They'll be back to actually post about you again. And like, you're all of a sudden having this sort of, you know, this relationship actually can build over time. I think that's really where. Where the magic is, like, too many people discount that initial piece.

This is awesome. To be clear, influencer marketing, essentially a person with a following on, say, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever, gets paid in some way to promote your product. That's. How do you describe. That's the simple way to understand influencer marketing? Yeah.

Yes, that's definitely the simple way. And I'd say, you know, there's definitely different, you know, levels. I think a lot of people think influencer marketing and they'll think, you know, these, these big trendy creators, people that have like a million followers, for instance, and their, their idea is that, okay, we're going to carve out a really big budget. We're going to, you know, choose like five or six that we feel like are really like the tastemakers in the space and put all of our money into, like, just help, you know, having them talk about our product. And I, I think usually this is. This is kind of the wrong approach because many of them, you know, they do have massive audiences. And for you, you're basically like. You basically give them a script to read and it immediately feels like an ad, right? Like, they don't feel like that product is not connected really to them in any way. It's just something that they're, you know, for this week, they happen to be working with you, and then they move on with their life. And it never feels organic or authentic. And you wasted a ton of money doing so. I think you're much better doing the hard thing, which is hard to scale, but it's like finding the thousands of micro influencers that have an audience where your product maybe is actually useful. And for instance, you know, for us, like, early on, it'd be, you know, educators, people that, for them, part of their job is creating slides every day because they need to engage their students. And so, like, for them, you know, having a tool that actually saved them a ton of time was something they love talking about. And if you can find some of these pockets, we call them echo chambers, where if you find a pocket, like educators, teachers love telling other teachers about products they love using during summer break, they all come together and talk about, okay, what are the things that are going to actually improve my job next, next school season? And obviously during this AI wave, a lot of those have been, okay, what are the AI tools that just saved me a ton of time. And so if you can start actually tapping into these pockets of echo chambers, that's even better like that. It doesn't have to be this flashy, well known influencer. It's actually just this person that has an audience where people like really trust what they say. And, and that's amazing. That ends up becoming this sort of, you know, wildfire that can spread really, really fast.

And what's like the dollar amount these folks get? It's like a few hundred bucks, few thousand bucks, something like that.

Yeah, Few hundred to low thousands. Low single digit thousands.

What are, how do you find these folks? Are there tools they use? Is it just like a bunch of manual searching and looking?

Yeah, in the very beginning it was all manual. A lot of cold outreach. And then we ended up finding a couple different things. One is a platform, a YC company called First Collab that has been amazing. They basically do all of the automated outbound for you, plus you can help them, you know, actually create profiles or Personas of different creators. So like for instance, educators being one, and then they'll go out and actually, you know, based on that profile, find all the right creators for you. So they've been amazing, really great to work with. And then we've also found small agencies also help kind of augment that. Like I look for, you know, agencies that are super young and hungry. These are people that, you know, are social, they're native to social media. And so, you know, they really understand it and they can really be able to bring in creators that, you know, are great to work with. And I think part of it is like if you find creators are great to work with every, everything else becomes easy. So we've had a few. One is AKG Media out in, actually out in the UK and they've been fantastic to work with as well. So you kind of find a few different things, either agencies or platforms that can help you actually scale this thing up.

And these, when they post, they're generally transparent about this is a paid promotion. Right? They're not just pretending. I found this tool and I love it. Cool.

Yeah, exactly.

Right, okay. And so how about how much impact did this lever of influencer marketing have on your growth? Say from 10 to 100? Like is this the biggest lever of growth other than just word of mouth? People continue to share it yeah, so.

Word of mouth has definitely been the biggest. So we look at kind of all kind of new subscriber growth. Over 50% of this is word of mouth. It's either people searching direct, coming direct entering Gamma app, or going through search and typing in Gamma, like a branded keyword search where they're looking for Gamma, they've heard about Gamma. But I think for us, social media and influencers specifically has always been an amplifier. So every time we invest in influencer marketing, we actually see word of mouth increase even more. And it's always like, you can just, you can just see it. Like basically anytime you spend, you know, a little bit of money, you start seeing people come through influencer. The word of mouth factor is actually one point. We'll get another 1.5 additional users on top of that, which has been really interesting to see. And I think part of this is just recognizing that and I think we kind of understand it. But like with influencer marketing, because why it's so effective, you know, we all know, you know, Dunbar's number, which is, you know, have this number of like 150 people that you call kind of your network. And your network you trust more than the average stranger down the street. Like, if they tell you something, you know, they recommend something, there is a sort of halo effect, right? You learn to trust them. There are a lot of these influencers, the reason why they share so much about their lives is because they want to be in your network. They want you to feel super close. And once you feel super close, you trust them to actually share things are going to be useful. And so when they recommend a tool, there is a sort of payload effect where it doesn't feel like it's coming from a stranger, it feels like it's coming from a friend. And that's where every time we've spent money there, you actually see this amplification. Like, okay, that's kind of interesting. You wouldn't necessarily expect that, but for us it's been this sort of amplifier from the very beginning.

This is so fun to hear about. I've not heard this level of detail on how influencer marketing works and how to make it work. A few more questions here. So you said there's maybe a few thousand people you ended up working with, roughly influencers over the course of.

Yeah, like a year. It wasn't all in the same time. It was like, you know, you find basically in the beginning, you do. In the very, very beginning, we had a small budget. It was like, you know, 20 creators a month and then you start increasing that to like 50, then 100 and then, you know, we're, we're still not, I don't, we're not definitely not fully scaled at this point, but I could easily see a point where, you know, you're working with many, many creators every single month and that gives you a chance to actually test a variety of, you know, again, content hooks, ways to talk about the product value. Props.

Amazing. And you said the key here is you spend time with every one of these creators, influencers early on to help make sure they understand what you're doing, get excited about. It isn't just like a thing you outsource.

I think there's a lot of value there. It's hard to, again, hard to quantify. And most creators feel like they're pro or most founders probably feel like they're too busy to allocate that time. But I think it was a good investment because going back to, you want them to feel like an extension of your team. They're not going to feel like an extension of their team if one, they've never met you and two, you've never even told them really how the product works. They're just, they're forced to kind of go to your website to figure it all out. Those are going to be, you know, not a whole lot of love that they're feeling from, from, from the outset.

So what I'm hearing is quality over quantity, especially when you're getting started. And then there's this other piece of niche which I think is very counterintuitive. Instead of going to large, large influencers with a huge audience, it's good at folks that are small. What's like a audience size roughly that you think is ideal for this sort of what niche just means?

Honestly, I don't think there's a minimum because even with platforms like TikTok, they oftentimes are giving you credit for a brand new account. They want to help amplify that new account because, you know, obviously, you know, if they're thinking from a creator perspective, you know, if that new creator feels like, oh, coming to TikTok is like a massive win for me, they're going to be more invested in it. And so there really isn't a minimum. A lot of these platforms are trying to shift to kind of the same thing where they really reward new creators on the platform. And so you could have a small audience, it doesn't really matter. You can have 10,000 followers. That's also good. I think as long as the Content feels, you know, again, engaging, authentic to that, to the, to the people you're talking to. I think that was a really good chance of actually taking off.

That's such a good point with TikTok where it's not follower related. It's, it's. If it's useful and people find it clickable or whatever, likable, viewable, it'll, it'll, the algorithm will spread it to a lot of people. Such a good point.

Totally.

Okay, there's a couple more points you made in the tweet that I want to make sure we highlight. So one is you made this point that 90% of your reach in influencer marketing comes from less than 10% of people. Is there anything there that you think is important for people to hear?

Yeah, I mean, this just goes back to. It's hard to know where that 10% is going to come from. So you kind of just have to cast a super wide net. Right? You can sort of, I think, try to again trick yourself into thinking you're great at picking creators or you're great at telling them how to like post about your stuff. But the reality is like, even for me, I could never guess. Like I kind of had some idea, but I just had to make sure that I was meeting enough creators broadly such that when you meet enough, they're all posting. There's some pocket that end up just taking off. And I was not a good predictor of that. I was not smart enough to actually know which ones to take off. I just knew that we had to play the sort of numbers game to make it work.

So one of your tips here is, is people fail often in this because they start too small or their budget's a little too small. You recommend 10 to 20,000amonth over six months. And just trying this, it sounds like you were doing like 20 to 30 creators a month. Is that the right framework for how to just start this thing and explore?

Yeah, totally. And I'd say it's not just that the budget's too small. It would be that they put all their eggs in one basket. So you can also easily blow that 20k on just one bigger influencer and then be like, oh, that didn't work. So I'm going to try it again. That didn't work. Okay, I give up. And I think rather than doing that, you should be like, okay, that 20k. I could actually probably work with 40 different influencers and see what actually works and we'll cross the 40. I'm going to try to find a Variety of Personas, a variety of use cases, spend a lot of time with them and then actually see, you know, what's working, what's not. And then next month take those learnings and, you know, double down. Like, if educators are working, go with educators. If consultants are working, go with consultants. Find more consultants because there's going to be more there. I think that's where the putting all your eggs in one basket is just probably the surest way to fail because, like, you're going to miss a ton and it's going to take you way too long to learn and you're going to come to the conclusion that it's a waste of time.

I feel like this whole podcast conversation could be just about this one lever. So much I want to keep talking about. But there's more questions here because this is so useful and interesting. You had this line in your tweet about how reality is not an accident and that this approach is how you figure out what actually works. And then once you do that, then you start leaning into that messaging talk about that.

This goes back to. Obviously if you're testing a bunch, you'll finally find that sort of post or set of posts that actually go viral. Going back to, yeah, just the fundamentals, like make it easy for your influencers to be able to tell your story and their voice. One thing we did, you know, we open sourced our, basically our entire brand. We have brand Gamma app, which is everything about our brand, our voice and tone, our art direction, what we use in mid journey to create the sort of art direction that we have so that a creator can, can do the same. Right? And they can actually just copy all of that so that they don't have to reinvent the wheel every time they're trying to post about Gamma. They have all of that. And I think that going back to like, this notion of like, just make it dead simple for them, remove friction. They already have enough to like on their plate to have to figure out. Don't make it any harder than it is. And if you remove friction, then it's like, oh, you get into this rhythm of adding creators is easy. Having them post as crazy easy, reviewing what's working, what's not as easy. And if you're able to do that relentlessly over many, many months, then all of a sudden, like hitting those sort of viral posts is easy because you're going to have enough at bats there where some are going to, you know, some are actually going to pop off, but you kind of only can get there after you've like done all the hard work before that to make, you know, you know, kind of remove friction from the process and feeling like it's almost like a, you know, well oiled machine at that point.

Is there a platform you find most helpful for the stuff you guys are doing? Is it like TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, something else?

Yeah, I mean this is one where you know, for us we, we cast a pretty wide net too. But it's very clear, you know, LinkedIn the conversion rates are just substantially higher. They're, they're 4x, maybe 5x higher than other platforms. And I, I, I think a lot of people are probably still sleeping on LinkedIn frankly. And so it's one where, you know, the, some of the, some of the influencers there or creators there can be a little bit more costly. But if you can be highly high, you know, eventually be more targeted, knowing that hey, this type of creator is, is pretty impactful for, for, you know, our product then working with them, it's just like, oh that's, that's great. Like the conversion rates are just so strong and it really feels like we're, we're like just getting started there. So, you know, if you're in the beginning, you're not sure, it's always helpful to cast a pretty wide net and then you know, similar to sort of just the influencer strategy like test and iterate. You'll figure out many of these things will follow the power, a power law. So it's like, you know, one or two channels are going to be the most important for you. For instance, Twitter for us hasn't been that impactful and I think for tools like Notion, they've been really, really impactful. You're not going to really know and so just test and then double down on the ones that really move the needle for your product.

I think that many people are sitting now are like, wait, LinkedIn posts are sponsored sometimes. I didn't know that. What's like, how do you know if it's a sponsored post? Is it like a hashtag sponsored or something like that? How do they communicate this?

Usually they'll say, you know, they're a partner or yeah, basically it is sponsored in some form or you know, they'll hashtag, you know, ad or you know, something along those lines. So that's probably the way you'll see it the most.

Cool. By the way, I don't do this sort of stuff. If you ever see me on LinkedIn, I'm not doing any paid stuff just so people know, and I don't plan to do that. This episode is brought to you by Miro. Every day, new headlines are scaring us about all the ways that AI is coming for our jobs, creating a lot of anxiety and fear. But a recent survey from Miro tells a different story. 76% of people believe that AI can benefit their role. But over 50% of people struggle to know when to use it. Enter Miro's Innovation Workspace, an intelligent platform that brings people and AI together in a shared space to get great work done. Miro has been empowering teams to transform bold ideas into the next big thing for over a decade. Today, they're at the forefront of bringing products to market even faster by unleashing the combined power of AI and human potential. Guests of this podcast often share Miro templates. I use it all the time to brainstorm ideas with my team. Teams especially can work with Miro AI to turn unstructured data like sticky notes or screenshots into usable diagrams, product briefs, data tables and prototypes in minutes. You don't have to be an AI master or to toggle yet another tool. The work you're already doing in Miro's canvas is the prompt. Help your teams get great work done with Miro. Check it out@miro.com that's M I R O.com Lenny let's come back to this brand point. So one of your big lessons is invest in brand. Before you go heavy into paid ads and performance marketing. I imagine you do some ads at this point on Facebook and Google and things like that.

Yeah, we run ads. You know, performance marketing. You know, I think there's this, this, like the stigma that, you know, brand marketing and performance marketing are sort of at odds with each other. I very much follow kind of the sort of the thought that brand marketing is performance marketing. Like everything is some form of performance marketing. It just might not be as attributable. So, like, the ability to actually map back to every single dollar spent is a little bit harder, but it doesn't mean that it's not impactful. And I think as a company scales, you have to invest in both. And ideally they work really, really well together. Like, the more you invest in brand marketing, it strengthens your performance marketing. This goes back to like having enough creative to even test. If you're too limited in scope and you don't have a brand, you feel like you can actually amplify, you're handicapping your ability to actually have a good performance marketing program.

I love that heuristic of how do you know if you are under invested in brand is. If you're limited in the number of ideas you can try in performance marketing? Like, are your. Is your design system just like, is everyone having to redesign things from scratch and come up with all these frameworks every time they run an ad?

Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like basically you kind of have a feeling for, you know, if I were to scale this up to a thousand pieces of creative, would it still feel cohesive or is it kind of all over the place? And it feels like it's all over the place, then you kind of have to go back to the drawing board.

You said when you talked about the rebrand that it took a lot longer than you expected, that it was more expensive than you expected. That's like the fear I think everyone has when they hear this. Like, oh, I don't have time for a rebrand. I also imagine because your product is so visual that it makes more sense to invest there and to spend the time and money for the typical founder, do you have any just, I don't know, thoughts of just like, here's when it makes sense, Here's a sign you really need to invest here heavily versus, like, nah, it'll probably be all right.

Yeah, I mean, I do think it's probably more geared toward anything that's a little bit more prosumer or consumer. Because so much of your product, you're trying to create, you know, this feeling for a user, like, what are they experiencing? And the experience happens way before they even drop into your product. It might be they see an ad or they see a billboard or they see something. It's like, okay, that piqued my interest a little bit. And then you need some sort of like symmetric messaging and that they see there's some symmetry in that they see the ad, then they drop into the product or land on your website. It feels cohesive and it feels like, okay, this is, this is interesting. I'm going to go all the way through to sign up and then maybe actually start using the product. That's a little bit different when it's like a B2B product or, you know, where there's a. There. There isn't as much reliance on, you know, that. That initial moment, they might just hear about it through, you know, colleague and, and then sign up for it and then go through a huge procurement process. And then it's like, okay, maybe it matters, but probably not so much as, as like, for a product where the brand can have so many different touch points.

I Want to talk about some kind of broader things that have worked to help you grow. But before we do that, I just want to visualize the pie chart of how Gamma grows. Say, post 10 million ARR. If I have it correctly in my head, it's over 50%. Just word of mouth, organic, people sharing it, doing presentations for each other. Oh, it's Gamma. Just go check it out, sign up. Then it feels like the second biggest bucket is influencer marketing, kind of social stuff. And then is the third performance paid marketing?

Yep, that's right. Yeah.

Cool. So on that last piece, is there anything else there for people that are starting to explore performance marketing? Essentially, Facebook ads, Google Ads, all these other platforms. Is there anything else that you think might be helpful for people to hear or learn? Just to get started down this road?

I would just have two recommendations. One, going back to my initial piece of advice, which is don't invest until you have word of mouth. Don't fool yourself into thinking that you'll solve other problems by just starting to ramp up a performance marketing program. Just get the word of mouthpiece first so that you have. You're coming into this program with some tailwinds and then start ramping it up. The second piece is like, set some constraints. You don't want your product to be at a point where more than 50% of your acquisitions are coming through paid acquisition. I think if that is happening, your core growth engine is broken and feeds right back to point number one, which is if your core growth engine is broken, you just have this leaky bucket. You're trying to spend so much money building top of the funnel, people are not making it all the way through. Something else should be fixed before you really try to dial it up. And it doesn't mean, like, you don't spend a little bit of money, but just don't dial it up until you feel like your core growth engine is actually working.

When you said the first point about wait until you have word of mouth before investing in performance marketing, is that essentially like a large chunk of your growth should be coming from word of mouth direct, organic.

Yep. Yeah. And for us, even at scale, again, going back to more than 50% of, you know, new signups still come through word of mouth. Like we. That. That for us is a sign. Like, okay, you know, something is still working. People are using the product, telling other people, and you want that feeling before you really start dialing anything else up.

Is there like a percentage that you think is helpful for people to think about? Just like, is it like 25% or more, something like that, of just word of mouth before you to feel like, okay, we actually have organic growth as a major growth engine.

Yeah, I mean, I think this comes back to maybe just how maybe aggressive you want to be. You know, I think just rough heuristic is the more the better. If it's over 50%, I think that's great. If it's approaching that good. And just going back to like, don't fool yourself into thinking just ads is going to be the way you grow, because you can do that. But everything else becomes harder and harder if you rely on paid acquisition to be the main growth engine. You should be prepared for things like cac, like customer acquisition costs to keep going up. And the more you're trying to reach like a new audience, it gets more and more expensive. So don't assume it's going to be flat. And then all of a sudden you're running on this treadmill that's actually running faster and faster. And so that's where it's easy to get hooked on that early on when you're just investing a small amount of money. And then it's almost impossible to get off that treadmill when you're too far into it. So anticipate that and give yourself a better chance at actually being able to sustain that growth long term.

Important advice. Okay, there's a couple more elements you've shared that were key to Gamma's growth. One is sharing prototypes with users before you ship. What does that look like? What does that mean? Why is that so powerful?

Yeah, I mean, this for us was a huge unlock. You know, going back to, like, early days when you're just trying to get your product into anybody's hands. You're getting to your, you know, friends trying to use it, and again, they're going to lie to you, tell you how great it is, and then never come back to using the product. I think what you want to be able to do, you know, the, the ideal situation is you recruit a bunch of people that could, you know, that are legitimately good prospective users or customers of your product, but have zero skin in the game. They do not care at all whether or not your product succeeds. They're just in it to test it. And you, you know, for us it was like people that have made slide decks or make slide decks regularly. Let's drop them into Gamma, give them very little context. We just tell you, hey, this is an alternative to PowerPoint. Go ahead and try it. And then as you're going through the onboarding Flow and testing the product. Just tell us everything that's going on in your head. Like describe what you're seeing, tell us what you're trying to do. We'll give you maybe a few different tasks like oh, create a piece of content. And when you watch them do that and also hear what they're saying, you just immediately feel the pain. Like all the places they're struggling and all the places are so confused by like what they're seeing and you sort of then can internalize that pain and say, okay, we're going back and we have to fix this. This is like not usable. Like we, you know, we oftentimes are dogfooding everything. And so you can get to the point where you're so familiar with your own product, everything kind of feels kind of easy and you, you know where things are. But when you start actually hearing other people describe their usage of the product, that's like a gift. Like you're all of a sudden you're like, okay, now I know where to actually spend the time. And people aren't even getting to the third screen, they're stuck on the first screen because they can't even find the button that we think is like so dead obvious. And so let's go back and actually re engineer, re architect that piece of it. And we've done that for everything. Landing pages, onboarding experience, new feature launches, export sharing, every single piece of that such that we can actually see where things are working or not. And then every time we'll learn something that's kind of painful but obvious that we need to fix and we go back and fix it.

How do you scale this sort of thing? How do you run every new big idea, new feature, change by people? Do you have like a closed beta group? Do you use some platform? How do you actually do this?

There's a couple of great platforms, so Voice Panel, which is also YC company full disclosure, angel investor. And then there's also, you know, platforms like user testing that really help you source and you know, find, find these people that fit again, that Persona or profile you're looking for. So in our case like people that are in a specific job function or create decks regularly. And so you can use those platforms to really scale up these programs pretty fast. And then once your team knows how to use those platforms, we would have an idea in the morning and in the afternoon we're already running a pretty full scale experiment or a research study and by the evening or by the next day we can actually go through all of it. Together. So it's pretty fast. Once you have it set up, it's more about how do you get the program onboarded the right way. I think the other sort of mechanism we did early on was once we had some repeat users, we created a sort of a program for our power users. We called it the Gambassador program, which is we put them into a separate Slack workspace. And that was a place for us to kind of share very, very early prototypes, like wireframes. Sometimes they're functional prototypes and get them to get some initial feedback as well. This definitely helps with more sort of later stage or like, you know, features or things that aren't going to be necessarily important as part of onboarding. But like, once you understand Gamma, like, oh, how do you share it? For instance, like, this was a great way to start testing some of that because they already understand Gamma, but now you're adding net new functionality and then we can also watch them struggle and hear how they're struggling with the product. And so that has been a great way just to have a separate Slack workspace. Anytime we're thinking about something, they're the first to hear about it, give us some early indication if we're on the right track or not.

I love this workflow that you shared of. You have an idea in the morning, you built a prototype. Do you build it with like, like AI prototyping tools, like Cursor lovable, something like that?

Yeah, yeah, that or it could be. Yeah. I mean, we're lucky. A lot of our, you know, designers also know how to code. So even before the recent tools, like, you know, kind of come up with some sort of functional prototype and then, and then be able to ship that so people can start playing with it.

Yeah. So you, you have an idea in the morning, you build a prototype using various tools. By the end of the day, you are getting feedback from real people using one of these platforms, voice panel or user testing. And just like that loop saves you, I imagine, potentially months of just building the thing nobody wants and shipping it, launching it, and then just failing.

Totally. Yeah. I mean, I think this is even more probably helpful for certainly a lot of folks that are starting to do much with Vibe coded apps. Like, yeah, that's great. Like, you've lowered the, you know, amount of time to get something out there. Now prove that it's useful to, like, some set of users. And this should be, again, like every day, every week, you should be able to go through a ton of these and, and then build on the things that seem to be working. I, I feel like that's like, that's almost like a, a way to speed run a lot of that early sort of you're in the idea maze, you think you have something that could kind of work. How do you actually break through so that you know, people are actually finding value in what you're building?

Yeah, I love it because so many people hear this idea of just like run your stuff by users before you ship. You know, do the user research. It sounds so hard and heavy lift y and in the way you're describing it is like very automated, very, very quick to do. You don't have to go think about finding random people in a coffee shop. It's just like these platforms exist where you could go plug in your thing, get feedback by the end of the day.

Totally, yeah. And that helps you just move way faster.

Is there a feature that you were super excited about that you built and ran through this and just like, okay, that was a huge failure.

I don't think any of the ones where we always try to kind of chunk it down. So none of the things we're testing earlier on are these massive features. They're always an inception or a starting point of this could be something interesting. And then we take that initial learning and actually then build the product around it. It's never like, oh, we spent four months work on this thing, let's see if anybody actually wants it. It's almost like we always start super early and a bunch of ideas die right away, but they're still pretty small ideas. And then the ones that kind of pass the initial test, you start building towards something that could be hopefully more game changing or much more value add. And by the time you're actually shipping like you've gone through, you know, 10 different layers of actually testing and iteration before it actually sees the light of day.

What's really interesting about you and the way your company operates, you guys are X optimizly people, so you're very versed in experimentation. A lot of people talk about a b testing experimentation as something that doesn't make sense for a startup because the scale is so low. What I'm hearing here, and I know this is something you talk about is just there is actually a lot of way to a lot of ways to think experimentally even in the early stages. Is there something more there you think is important for people to hear?

Yeah, I mean I really think it's more of, you know, the mindset you go into to almost any problem or opportunity is, you know, the, the saying of, you know, strong opinions, weakly held. I think it's totally fine to have like some of these assumptions or like hypotheses going into a lot of these things. But you should always know that there's a way to start trying to validate some of this. You know, as a founder, you're always trying to build conviction. And so you build conviction by, you know, not, you know, having it all live in your head, but getting it out there and start testing this with users, prospect customers, and starting to see, like, what are the things that actually feel right. And sometimes you have enough data to be statistically significant. Sometimes it's more of a, hey, we at least were able to gut check this a little bit and get some qualitative feedback. I think that's still valuable. It shouldn't be this sort of like all or nothing, like, oh, it has to be stat sig for it to be useful. I don't think that's true. In fact, I'll just share kind of the very early story of, you know, when we first started Gamma, we knew we wanted to help change the way people communicate. And we actually had two different ideas. We were parallel pathing kind of at the same time. So of course we had, you know, presentations, reimagining how people were creating presentations. And we also actually had the separate idea which we called the lobby, which is a virtual office. This is a place where, you know, this is again, peak pandemic. Much more hybrid work, much more virtual work. And so this was a place where everybody on the team, whether you're in the same office or not, could gather, collaborate. It'd feel pretty magical. And we worked on both for six months. We worked on both the virtual office and the presentation product for six months. We would dog food both. So, like, oftentimes we'd be in the Virtual Office presenting the presentation tool and kind of use both. And after six months, we came to this conclusion that we wanted to go all in on the presentation tool. And the reason was when we looked at the Virtual Office tool, we were sort of always competing against what we thought was something we'd never be able to surpass, which is in real life, expectations experience, like actually being able to work shoulder to shoulder with your colleagues and having this environment where you really feel like you're building together. Virtual Office could get pretty good, but we would never beat that. And so we were almost like limited in our own imagination about how good could this product be versus the presentation product. We ended that with like a million more ideas. We Thought we could actually introduce that could be better than how you work in PowerPoint today. And we were just so, like, so energized by it. And so for us that was like, you know, this sort of AP test of like testing these two things that we invested equally amount of equal amount of time into and coming out at the other end realizing that one was going to be the product we were pour sort of, you know, all of our blood, sweat and tears into making it great because we saw the potential in it.

There's. I didn't know that about you guys that you explored that other idea that there's so many startups that did that during COVID times. I'm like, okay, this is the future. We're all going to be remote and let's work remotely. And virtual offices. There's a startup and I'm a tiny investor in Lindy that is now a big AI agent company. And they did the same thing, I imagine, you know, that was their whole first concept. There was just like these little avatars. It was like a little game where you walk around, go to little virtual meeting room.

We had some, yeah, it was, it was a fun product to work on. So.

But yeah, yeah, it's interesting how we just reverted to the base back to like the mean of just like, okay, people are in offices again. That was a fun, fun experience. Although things have changed. So just to highlight this point you made that I think is really powerful. I haven't heard it described this way before. Just the power of testing prototypes very, very, very early using these platforms that make it super easy. We always hear, okay, you have, you have a mock, you have a prototype. Yeah, test it with users. Always feels like this heavy thing. You got to have a user research team go do interviews, do one on ones like what you're describing is something. I don't know why everyone's not doing this. And with AI tools, it's so easy now, have an idea, build the prototype, test it with. I don't know, is it like dozens of people? How many people actually run through a prototype on average?

20.

20 people. So 20 people look at this thing, give you a bunch of feedback, you realize this was very dumb. Or here's the nugget that we want to lean into and instead of building the thing, instead of doing all these research sessions, things like that. Super cool. Okay. Is there any other big lesson or lever that has helped you grow to today's 100 million ARR, $2 billion company? We talked about influencer marketing, we talked about testing Prototypes, investing in brand and a little bit of paid growth. Anything else?

Certainly for us, the ability to sort of adapt and move fast in this environment. You know, I attribute a lot of what we've been able to accomplish to a few things. One is we do have a small team and a lean team, one that's able to move really fast. I think that means by default we have to look for a lot of levers where a small team can do a lot of different things. So we can talk one, obviously about how do you construct a team like ours and what I think has worked. And then two, going back to experimentation being this sort of thing where for us has been a huge unlock. Right. Because it allows you to not only test things and iterate a ton, it allows you to build much more efficiently. And so we've been in a startup where we've had great unit economics from the very beginning. We run profitably, we have really strong margins. I don't think that would be possible if experimentation wasn't kind of core infrastructure to us because the temptation would be you just throw the most expensive model at every job and assume that's going to work. And the reality is that never is the case. And so for us to be able to actually test across 20 different models in production today, always trying to align kind of value we're delivering to our customers with our ability to actually scale this operation that's been at the sort of in the background and not always things that are easily quantifiable or things that you're sharing broadly, but it is kind of core to our DNA. And again, going back to a team that came from Optimiz, probably not surprising, but I do think that's been part of our ability to actually execute at this level.

I love that the product is so beautiful and such a good experience. It's such a good example of experimentation and being really obsessed with running experiments. A B test like the data can create really beautiful products and experiences that aren't just feeling like some kind of micro optimized flow.

Totally, yeah. And just going back to like one part of the team, part of that plays a huge role, which is, you know, you want to build a product, you know, where people talk about taste and you know, brand and all these things are they emote? So I'm not going to kind of throw in whether or not yes or no, but I do think it makes a difference. And for us, at some point, you know, more than a quarter of our team, or about a quarter of our team was product designers and I think that's like a sort of unintuitive level of investment or at least that's not common. Like you don't see many startups like on our stage or early stage, you know, where a quarter of the team's product designers. And I think that was an important investment for us because when you think about, you know, with AI companies, so many companies are trying to invent new surface areas or, you know, new user experiences and that's not possible if you're not really getting the foundation right, but really thinking deeply about, you know, user problems and how can you solve them in a novel way. And, and so for us, like we made that investment in the very beginning, even if it was counter to what other startups would do because we actually felt like it was the right thing.

Okay, I definitely want to spend more time on hiring before we get to that. You've touched on this kind of concept that you guys are what many describe a GPT wrapper company. You essentially sit on top of other models, do some cool stuff, charge for that. There's historically, and there's been a big shift here historically, there's a sense that, okay, you're just this thin layer on top of the model. How is there any sort of motor leverage or long term business model here when it's just the model that is doing the thing and charging you guys to do all this AI work? It feels like people have started to realize maybe that is where the all that is the only place money will be made because the models are just so hard to compete with and that's not a place you can build a business anymore. Talk about just what you've learned about this concept of being a GPT wrapper and how maybe what people may not be understanding about the business opportunity there.

When you think about maybe just literally only being a wrapper on one model or one provider. Yeah, maybe there's only limited amount of utility or value add. But then when you start thinking about, okay, I'm going to go really deep into this one workflow and it's not just one model, it's maybe 20 plus models powering all different parts of the product and then you're thinking about the orchestration that's required and you're thinking about obviously if you're experimenting like constantly being able to test across the newest models versus models that have been around that are cheaper, you're doing a lot to really, you know, your job is to again like align value, you know, maximize the value you're delivering to the end user. In a way that's sustainable for you as a business. And so there's a lot more to that. And so for us, you know, we've always been passionate about being very close to our customers, our users, who for them, their job to be done is, you know, visual communication, visual storytelling. And the default tool today is going into like a PowerPoint or Google Slides, where the amount of effort to create something, you know, we've all been there late at night trying to format a deck, trying to find the right layout, all this manual and tedious work. Well, what if you could abstract all that away and give them something that feels a little bit more delightful, a little bit easier, much more effortless? What would that earn you in terms of a customer that wants to come back to your product? And so that's everything that we focus on is like, you need to go deep into the workflow, be empathetic to the user and their job that you're trying to solve, and of course, apply the best technology possible so that you're delivering on that promise of a product experience that's way better than the status quo. And I think if you can be laser focused on that, it doesn't matter if you're a rapper or not. Like, what is the technology you're doing in applying that makes a real difference. So that's the ultimate goal.

This is a really cool framework for how to think about what it takes to build a successful rapper company. That is, I don't know, I'll keep using that term. I don't know if it's truck or not, but just like, you know, some ideas don't work because these model companies are launching their own products here and there. So what I love about what you're describing here is kind of like the, almost like a heuristic that'll tell you if there's, if there's an opportunity, slash, how to be successful as a GPT wrapper company. I'm putting in air quotes. It sounded like maybe there's three here. But talk about, just like, if you think about the bullet points of what you need to do to build a successful business on top of existing models.

I mean, I think the most important thing is, you know, before you even talk about the technology. So we're skipping to the part where you're trying to apply the most interesting models or technology to solve some problem. Start with solving the problem you actually care about. I think it's very tempting right now to chase shiny objects. Like a founder might be able to gain some initial traction by Literally being that GPT wrapper and solving any sort of problem and you start to see some traction and then you just go with that. But before you do that, you should think about, is this a problem I can invest five to 10 years into actually solving? Do I care deeply enough about it? Because if you can, you're never going to go sort of actually think about like overcoming the variety of different hurdles, whether it's other startups or other, you know, incumbent tools that are trying to start doing the same thing. And so for us, like we, we go back to like, you know, we've started this company because we really care about helping change the way people communicate their ideas. We really feel like this idea of like visual communication, visual storytelling matters. It helps elevate everybody and it gives people much more opportunity to do the things that, you know, in the past, if you weren't great at making slides, your ideas might have died. And someone else that was able to actually articulate their ideas better ended up winning, you know, the deal or winning the, you know, the favor of their manager or their boss. And so we felt like that was the wrong, you know, that doesn't feel right. And, and so could we help democratize visual storytelling? Visual communication, that was sort of our North Star. And then you go back into thinking, okay, every step of the way, what are the tools and technology I can apply to help solve that and actually move the average person closer to that long term vision of ours. And of course, AI has been again like this gift where yes, you can apply that to solving this job. You can also apply that, you know, AI to many different jobs, figure out what is the problem, you care deeply enough to go deep. Because going back to this sort of idea, like you need to own the sort of end to workflow a customer needs to have you like you want you to live, you want your product to live in their brain somewhere where when they think about, hey, I have to create a presentation, they come to you as the default tool. And the moment they start creating it to the moment they ship it and send it to their boss, that end to end experience needs to feel magical, needs to feel great. And I don't think you can really do that unless it's actually a workflow. You either know deeply yourself or you care deeply to actually help solve for somebody else else.

So some of the elements I'm hearing here is one is just like care actually really care about solving this problem not come from, oh, wow, this cool thing happened and it worked. Wow, maybe I could sell this thing to people because you may end up having to work on this thing for 10, 20 years.

Totally.

Two is understand the problem really, really deeply and have real empathy for the people trying to solve this problem. You had this problem that you creating presentations at your previous job, so you understood it. And I imagine you understand even more deeply now that you work on this. So essentially, like, care really deeply, go really deep on the problem, have real empathy for the people facing this problem. And then there's this, like, actually be able to solve this problem using the technology out there. And you made this point about how you guys use 20 different models to do what you do. Talk a little bit more about that just because, you know, people may think, oh, okay, like I could just go to open to ChatGPT or Cloud and it'll create an awesome presentation for me. Why does it take 20 different models? Why is that such a big part of the success here?

Yeah. So going back to the workflow, you know, you're trying to go and break down every step of, you know, the creation process for a user. So the moment of the initial idea to maybe creating an outline of what you want to, you know, present or articulate to creating the first draft, like, what do we show you there? To editing the content, like, okay, I have a first draft, but it's only 60% of the way there. How do I get it to 100% of the way there's. Those are all things that might require different models. Like, the initial outline might be better served by something that's purpose built for actually creating the best outline, the best narrative, the best story arc, versus one where you're actually going back and saying, gamma, our agent can actually go and review your entire deck and say, actually, if I were to add suggestions, I would say, you may want to change the visual layout on these set of cards and you may want to actually change the imagery or the visuals for these cards to match, you know, everything else. These are things that, again, like, every model might be better served for different things. And so knowing how that actually breaks down into the end user sitting down, working on the product, working on, working on, you know, their presentation. How do you help them? I think you can only do that by understanding that workflow and then breaking that down into finding the right tool for the right job.

That is super interesting. Essentially, there's like, here's the things that AI has to do for us. I don't know, imagining some kind of storyboard. And then it's figure out the model and level of model and prompt for that model to achieve each of these steps as best as possible.

Totally, yeah. And it applies to, you know, even on the visual side, finding the right image. I think certain models have great at photorealistic output versus others, you know, want more of the artistic vibe or like, you know, something that feels more abstract. And so again, you can choose the right model for the right job. It doesn't mean that you'll never use other models. It's just like as you're going through that workflow, the content might dictate what's the best use case in that particular use case. And so you're always trying to map to that. What is the end user trying to accomplish in that certain moment.

Which models are you finding most useful in the work? I don't know. Is there anything surprising about, oh, wow, this model is actually really good at this and this is really bad at that?

Yeah, I think surprising or not surprising, the leaderboard is constantly changing. And so this is where you have to have the mindset that you can be adaptable. We're just getting to the point where there's going to be more personalization too, because going back to like, you know, a consultant's going to have different needs in an educator. If an educator is trying to engage their students, they may want to have, you know, language or visuals are more animated and that, that makes sense. Consultant can't get away with that. They might need something that, you know, is much more structured or information dense. And so again, like, how do we actually be the same tool that can serve both of those needs? I think that's where it becomes interesting. And it's almost like there isn't necessarily even a quote, unquote, best model. It's like, what's the right model for that? Right. For that particular user, that's actually a much harder problem to solve. And we're just starting to, you know, trying to embrace some of that now.

Is there one that's just like, oh, this is actually really cool? For some that we didn't expect early.

On, things like creating the outline, perplexity was actually great. You know, not one that people talk about as often, but creating the outline and doing web search and, you know, actually integrating some of those elements together for us was, was pretty powerful.

Okay, there's two more things I want to talk about. One is pricing. How you guys figured out your approach to pricing. You guys started monetizing really early and that feels like such an important piece to AI startups because you're spending real money on inference and other things. And then I want to talk about hiring. So in terms of pricing, when did you decide it was time to really start charging? And then how did you pick your approach to pricing, your actual price?

Yeah, so we kind of stumbled into having to do pricing and packaging. I mentioned our big AI launch in March 2023. This was pre revenue, so we wanted just to get the, you know, we focused all of our effort on the first 30 seconds, literally all hands on deck, just trying to get that right. And we spent zero time on actually monetization. So we, you know, we had a credit system. All new users get 400 credits. Once they burn through those credits, there was actually nothing more you could do with AI. It kind of just got cut off. And so Intercom for us was just blowing up with people saying, how do I purchase more credits? Like, I want to keep using this thing? And a very fair question. So basically all of April, we ended up having to do a quick, you know, sort of pricing and packaging exercise. We did a couple of different things. We did run a form of Van Wessendorp, which is just understanding what is the overall willingness to play, what willingness to pay. And so we did use that. We did kind of integrate some forms of, like, conjoint analysis, which is just like trying to understand, you know, what are the features or things that people actually value in your product. And so we'd survey a lot of our early users and kind of ended up coming to a price point that was in the beginning, we only had one plan. Type was roughly like 20 bucks a month. Part of this was also just realizing we almost didn't need to overthink it too much, because this is when the initial wave of, like, AI companies and startups are coming out and products are coming out. And you almost end up becoming anchored by what does ChatGPT charge? Because everyone becomes familiar with that price point. And so we asked ourselves, like, how complicated do we want to make it? We always default to remove friction, make it as easy as possible for a user to understand. And so we ended up coming up with like a similar price point and kind of shipped that as the V1, basically end of May 2023. And for us, we wanted to see a couple things like, okay, we have that initial price point. Is it economical for us, like, at the price point, are we actually making money? And we'd monitor for that for many, many months, realizing that, yes, like, actually at that price point, we could still generate pretty good margins, and that would allow us to reinvest that profit back into growing the business continue to add, obviously headcount, but then also investing even more into inference costs. Whatever we wanted to do to experiment broadly with AI. And so we've always had that like pricing and packaging is not only. It doesn't not only need to be easy to understand for a user. You know, obviously you have to have like strong conversion rates, but it should be something where you feel like you could build an enduring, durable business off of. And if it's not right, then you can always go back and try to tweak things. But it's something you should be monitoring, you know, as early as possible.

What's interesting, we had the head of ChatGPT on the podcast and he shared the way they picked ChatGPT's prices. The van Westendorp survey that they ran in Google forms.

Totally. Yeah, I listened to that one. Yeah, it was a great one.

What a. That survey, man. What a. And not only just that survey being the first. It's like I'm imagining that XKCD comic with like the open source little, I don't know, block holding up the entire world like this one little piece of code that's like the survey just like behind everything. But it's interesting how that one decision just created this ripple effect on all AI startups. 20 bucks a month. Of course, that's what everyone's doing.

Totally. Who knows what would happen if they chose a different number.

But right here we are. Everyone would be so much more rich if it's just like 25 bucks. Someone imagine the. The GDP growth.

Yeah.

From that. Oh man. Okay. And then the way so is Ben Westendorp helped you pick a price point and then you said this conjoint analysis. We actually have a guest post that I think describes how to do this well and if not, we'll find point people to how to actually approach this. And you started charging. So post product hut launch, you launch with no paid features. People are just like, I want to pay. I want to keep using this. You're like, okay, I guess we got to start charging.

That's right. Yep.

Is there anything looking back, I guess just like you wish you'd known when you were approaching pricing for folks that are doing this now, like, oh, we should have done this differently or should have thought about this.

Yeah, I mean that's one. That one's hard, I think. You know, you never want to obviously just throw something together without giving it much thought. But for us, you know, we, with limited resources, we focused on the only thing we thought mattered, which was like getting some initial users and having that organic growth. And I think there's maybe like two checkpoints of thinking about whether or not you feel like you have product market fit. I think one checkpoint is organic growth. The second is, are people willing to pay for the product? And I think if you pass both those, you feel like you've at least within some pocket of the market, you have some pmf. So I think those are both important questions to ask. Depending on your resources, ideally you can do kind of both and experiment a little bit along at the same time. And then by the time you actually have paying users, you've. You sort of check some of those boxes for yourself.

By the way, I love that you like you launch pricing. You're like, okay, let's figure out if we're actually making money or not. It's not obvious with AI companies.

Well, we also didn't have a choice because at that point, Runway was also low. You know, so it's like, if we weren't making money, well, you know, we would actually be in a tough spot.

That's such a good point that you did not have a huge amount of money sitting around to spend on, like, the way a lot of companies in AI do. Just, we'll deal with it and we'll figure out how to make money later.

Totally, yeah. Within a couple months, we had hit a million in ARR and became profitable. And so those are both two exciting milestones for a company that months prior were, you know, heads down, figuring out how we. How we even survive.

What a story. I'm so excited to be telling the story. Okay, final topic I want to talk about is hiring. You have some really hot takes on hiring. Clearly it's worked out for you guys. What are some things you've learned about hiring? Well, what is your approach to hiring?

Yeah, so we had this mantra internally. I mean, even before the sort of AI launch for us, which was hire painfully slowly. And I think the temptation is once things start working, you just start blood scaling this thing and start adding more and more headcount. And for us, that always, I don't know, they didn't feel right. We wanted to build the team very thoughtfully, be lean, but also be a team that every individual feels like they have high amount of impact that they can, that they have on a daily basis. And. And so for us, yeah, that was from sort of the very beginning. And so even, you know, as we've scaled up, I think we've been super efficient by nature of just being a very lean team.

So I think a lot of people hear this advice of stay lean, be efficient. You have some even more concrete pieces of advice here of just like what that looks like. You have a huge, I don't know, philosophy of just like huge leverage per person. You focus a lot on revenue per employee. Talk about that.

So we actually, I mean we, we, we obviously, we look at things like revenue per employee, but we never let that be the sort of North Star. It's not something that dictates our strategy per se. Same thing with like profitability. I think by being efficient like that ends up becoming like a side effect of, yeah, we, we are profitable and growing. But I think for us more it was like we care a ton about, you know, adding the right team members. So, you know, it's, it's easy. You can almost sort of shoot yourself in the foot as a founder by just setting the wrong goals. If your goal is to double in headcount and like add 100 people to the company, then that becomes the goal, right? The goal is no longer to add the best people, it's no longer to maintain a high quality bar. The goal Is to hit 100 people. And that's, that's everything everyone's focused on. So then guess what? If that's the goal, then the thing that ends up dropping is, okay, maybe we'll settle for employees that are good enough. And we're going to make sure we get to that hundred because 100 is going to help us get to the next phase of growth and the next phase of growth. And I think we've tried to resist that temptation, which is we want everybody that comes through the door and joins our team to really be, you know, the type of person that represents Gamma. Our first 10 to 12 employees, we spent so much time like really getting the DNA right. I think Brian Chesky talks about this like, your goal is like, you get that first 10 and you want to be able to then replicate the next 10 and then replicate the next 10. But that 10 needs to be all super cohesive. You need to have the shared same shared values, same principles, same ambition, same vision. And if you don't, then like, what are you even replicating? Right? At that point you're just adding headcount and you can easily just be adding headcount because they're chasing the next shiny startup to join. And so for us, we really focused on that first 10 that allows us to really have this sort of community of teammates that basically want to stick around. A lot of founders think about not wanting to have A leaky bucket on the product side. But the same thing applies on the team size. If you have a leaky bucket, people are just constantly leaving revolving door. That's a huge amount of cost. The continuity cost is massive and it's really hard to quantify. And I mentioned our first 10 employees, all 10 of them are still here today, five years later. That continuity means that you have this tribal knowledge that sticks with you. It means that people can continue building and having that sort of cohesive feeling. So I think that's one piece just like it's hard to quantify. But I do think startups, I would advise just really be thoughtful about that. Get that to a point where you really feel confident that as you're editing the next ten and next hundred, you're actually replicating the same DNA and not actually just adding a bunch of random people to the company.

One of your very specific piece of advice is hired generalists versus someone that's just like really deep in one thing. Why? Why is that so important? What does that look like?

This very much feels like the age of the generalist or the rise of the generalist. Right now when we think about, you know, a team that can be really flat. You want people that can, you still want people that can be very spiky in certain areas. So for instance, obviously you know a product designer that knows how to code, that's great. It allows you to actually span across many different domains. And again, an organization that's super flat. When you're wearing a lot of different hats, that means every individual, if you're a generalist, you can wear by default a lot of different hats. And that's helped us like just maintain this idea that the work, you know, the opportunity in front of us, it continues to expand. Each person plays a huge role. They don't need to wait and ask for permission. They can go after and pick up a piece of work because it's there and they can at least get it started even if they're not the one that ocs it through. And so for us, I do think this rise of the generalist is going to be important. You can always augment that by working with contractors or agencies that are hyper specialized in certain areas. And this is where like for instance, going back to influencer marketing, you might work with an agency rather than kind of scale up your own influencer, you know, marketing team. You work with like a hyper specialized team there. But my marketing team is all generalists. You know, we are head of marketing more recently launched this cool drone show in San Francisco. We had like 4,000 people in San Francisco. Come the mayor came by, she created that entire project and managed that entire project end to end herself. Right. While also managing the entire marketing team. And so it's like this idea that a generalist is able to play all these different roles can still be super high impact for us. It also goes hand in hand with I mentioned sort of this other role which is the player coach. Traditional management layer is like a manager manages a ton of people and that's kind of their core focus. All of our people leaders are player coaches in that they still do the end work themselves and they can like mentor and coach those around them. This analogy came from or this mindset came from something I borrowed from just the sports world in general. Because there's a lot of sports that just move incredibly fast. Like football for instance, it moves really, really fast. And so you might have a coach that's calling into play, but the quarterback can actually make a last minute adjustment based on what he's seeing the defense do. Right? And so you want a player that is on the field that can adapt as needed. And that way the coach doesn't have to call every single thing in. He's just kind of giving you the general intent of what you want to run as the play and then the quarterback can still make the adjustments. And so all of our people leaders, our management layer is all folks that actually can make those adjustments if they're seeing something that doesn't feel right on a daily or weekly basis. They're kind of adjusting priorities for that team and they're still doing the work themselves too. They're so close to it that they understand like what is the relative prioritization at all times. So both of those I think have been, you know, when I think about founders, they oftentimes think about innovation in the sense like we're going to innovate on products or innovate on technology. I think every founder today has a chance to innovate on org design. And that starts by just thinking about what is the type of company we want to build today, what does it mean? And when it comes to like the management later, what sort of leaders do we hire? What does it mean when it comes to hiring specific roles and specific functions? All that is a chance for you to be very thoughtful and build a company that you're excited to be at for hopefully many, many years to come.

So what I'm hearing here is manager. There's no pure managers. Again, your plan is to not have People that are just managing. The idea is everyone, even a manager, is doing their own IC work.

Yes.

And then the other piece of advice here is just generalists, people that can do a lot of stuff. And I hear this a lot on this podcast, just like everyone is. There's no more. Just like, you're a designer, that's all you're going to do. Designers need to build stuff, market stuff, write some PRDs, probably.

And I think, I mean, just one thing to add is like, you know, that's for where we are at today. I think being adaptable means that certain things may evolve and change and how the player, coach, model evolves, maybe in certain functions or as the team scales. That's not going to be practical everywhere. I think the reality is you just have to know and be willing to adopt different frameworks over time and being honest with yourself, with what's working, what's not. I think we're constantly trying to learn and evolve ourselves because I think we're doing it in a way that we don't believe really has been done before. And so we have to kind of pave our own path over time.

I love that. Giving yourself an out when. When the time comes when you need to just hire managers.

A year later, when you invite me back, I'll say, yeah, this is what we learned.

Yeah, you know, that makes sense. That's probably going to happen. It's like, people are like, we don't need product managers. And then, okay, I see. Maybe we do. Yeah, it makes sense. One last piece I want to talk about is you have this really cool quote that you shared on Twitter. When you find someone exceptional, bet big on them. This is a big part of your philosophy, is just like, bet big on the people that are doing super well. Just talk about what that looks like and why that's so important.

Yeah, I mean, this starts top of the funnel, which is like, you meet candidates, you decide who you actually hire. And so if you don't start with a high bar there, you know, going back to what is the goal? The goal is to hit a hiring target versus, like, you know, maintaining super high quality. You know, hiring bar. Those are different goals. And I don't think we've ever kind of dropped our bar. And so then you bring somebody in that you think is exceptional that brings something unique to the table that can be a good teammate. When they're. When they're thriving, you just give them more and more resources. I think what you realize going, you know, another sports analogy is like, you know, when you're, when you're on a, you know, an, A team, for instance, or a team that you feel like is exceptional, you know, a players want actually more playing time. Like, you never see a star player that says, actually, I want less playing time. They want more time on the field. They want to actually go after the hardest problems. They want to be able to feel like they're making a huge impact. And so if you have fewer, you know, exceptional teammates where you can just throw almost anything at them and they'll figure it out, that feels that for, you know, you as a team just feels great because then they, they get what they find rewarding, which is the ability to go after hard, hairy problems and to be able to come out through the other end feeling like they've accomplished something. And I think that for us has always been something that goes beyond just, you know, almost everything else. Like, we give people a chance to really thrive in this environment and, and we try to nurture that as, as much as humanly possible every step of the way.

Is there anything else around hiring that you think is really important or a big lesson you've learned or lesson you share that you. That we haven't talked about yet?

I mean, there's some of these intangibles, which is, you know, for the founding team, does this feel like this could be your life's work, right? Like, when you're pitching a potential candidate, like, does this feel like something where you're actually committed? The unfortunate side of a lot of the, you know, what's happening in the AI world broadly is I think you're coming to learn which founders are sort of missionaries versus mercenaries. And many that were just chasing maybe just a big outcome or like something shiny or like something to feel good about themselves, they'll go off and then the company, I guess, doesn't live on or maybe has to find a different way, a different path. And so, you know, something I admire is like, you look at some of the founders, obviously before the sort of AI era, folks like Dylan or Melanie, Figma, Canva, Ivan at notion they've been doing this for over a decade now. They had many chances to just leave and sunset off into doing whatever they wanted to do, but they care so much about the mission they've stuck it through. And I think when you're talking to candidates, candidates can kind of tell, like, is this something like the founders even care about? And I think you're going to have a better chance of attracting, you know, true missionaries, people that want to build with you for the long haul, if it's authentic and it's something you actually care about.

Oh, man, I feel like I keep saying this. I feel like we could have at least five more hours of stuff to talk about that'll be good content for when you come back and you're making a billion dollars a year. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, Grant, is there anything else that you think is important for people to hear? Any last, I don't know, lesson you want to double down on anything you want to leave listeners with?

Yeah, I mean, just going back to the original story of that was probably the ultimate low point. You know, having an investor that spent 20 minutes listening to my pitch telling me that it was the worst thing, worst idea in the world. You know, I think throughout the journey there's going to be those low moments. And when I think about, you know, being a founder and working a startup, you're honestly just trying to increase your lux surface area as much as possible. And for me, lux surface area has two dimensions. The first dimension is people. Who are you surrounding yourself with that share your same ambition, share the same values, same principles, and find those people and then give yourself enough time to prove that you guys can accomplish great things. I'm lucky to have two amazing co founders. We've been working on this thing for five years. There's zero percent chance we'd be where we are if I didn't have them. And we've had to overcome a lot, but I guess for us it's like creating that own luck over a long time horizon has been the only way that, you know, it's been possible.

Well, it's clearly showing in the success you guys are having. Grant, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

Yep. Yes.

All right, I've got five questions for you. First question, what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

Yeah, so I'll give one that's for pre product market fit, folks. And the one post product market fit.

Perfect.

Pre product market fit, I would say, is Shoe Dog, which is written by Phil Knight, founder of Nike. And he talks about two things. Like, one, you should chase your sort of crazy ideas, but these should be ideas you're passionate about. Like, he was an athlete and so, not surprisingly, he focused a lot about creating tools or shoes, in this case for other athletes and was passionate about that. And the second thing he taught me was going back to the team thing. He surrounded himself with other people that were super passionate about athletics. And shoes as well. And so the folks that he had as his initial startup crew were all that. And I think that gives you a chance of overcoming a ton where you're focused on problems you actually care about solving, and you're doing with a team that shares the same ambition as you. Post product market fit. There's a book called Seven Powers by Hamilton Helmer where I think when you think about how to build a durable business, there's so much in there. I think there's a lot that you can kind of read and reread as you kind of evolve and kind of hit new milestones yourself. And so much of that can be both tactical, but also like zooming out and thinking about what are the big picture strategic questions you as a founding team need to be thinking about. So both are great.

Hamilton was on the podcast. We'll link to that episode. I also love that book. Many people mention it. Next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?

Yeah, the Lazarus Project is one I'm a huge sucker for time travel and sci fi, so this is one I just started watching and for me it has all the right ingredients for a fun show.

Is there a product you recently discovered that you really love?

Yeah, I mentioned this already. Voice panel. So again, a full disclosure, angel investor. But we've been using it and going back to kind of being a cheat code for folks that are, you know, starting to experiment a ton with different ideas, vibe coding, maybe some of these, like, get this into the hands of users, hear what they think about it. I think, and honestly can help speed up a lot of things and save you time from wasting time on. On kind of the wrong ideas or ideas where there's no market.

Is there a life motto that you often find yourself coming back to in work or in life?

Yeah. So there is this Chinese idiom that my mom used to say. It's jing di zihua, which the translation is frog at the bottom of a well. And the story is like, there's a frog at the bottom of the well. He looks up every night and he sees the world. And he imagines he, you know, he knows everything about the world. And then one day a bird comes along and describes all the things that he sees. The ocean, the mountains. And the frog realizes that what he sees is just such a limited part of the world. And the bird asks, do you want to come join me and kind of see the rest of it? And so frog goes along. And so for me, I came from a pretty Modest childhood. My parents, we didn't have a whole lot. And I think it would have been very easy to have a very narrow kind of lens on the world and be like, oh, this is what it is. But my mom never allowed me to do that. She always pulled me to dream much bigger, to say, hey, the world is vast. It's your opportunity to seize it. Like, you have to go out there, don't have a narrow view of what's possible. Always dream bigger. And so for me, that's always carried through. And every time I feel like I'm thinking too little or too small, I try to zoom out and remind myself that there's much more out there to.

Go after that is so good and so important and so valuable in today's world, where so much more is possible. Just like most of what limits people feels like now is just, I don't know what idea I have. Like, I don't know what to do now. You could get things done so much quicker and so much more as possible. So that's such valuable thinking. Okay, final question. You help people present better. You know, your tools basically help people become better presenters. What's like one tip you've learned or one tip you teach people to become better presenters? That might be helpful to listeners.

Yeah, I mean, I'll go back to the consumer advertising concept, which is, you know, one idea at a time. So, you know, this, this notion of you give them one egg, someone can catch it. You give them too many eggs, they're going to drop it. So don't try to throw too many concepts all at once. Keep it simple, people will appreciate it. And so with every sort of presentation, like break it down into the core concepts, try to make sure you're covering one at a time. And I think once you sort of see the through line there, then it becomes easy for it to package up into something that feels more cohesive.

Less is more, as they say.

Totally.

Graham, two final questions. Where can folks find you online? Where can they find Gamma? What should they know? Just like plug anything you want. And then how can listeners be useful to you?

Yeah, so you can find me on both Twitter and LinkedIn. DMs open. I honestly hear just knowing how hard the journey is in general, whether just thinking about a startup idea or you're deep into startup land, I want to be hopefully helpful. I'm going to be your, hopefully your biggest cheerleader. So let me know I can help. And then for us, like, you know, we're always looking for feedback. So if you're trying Gamma, it's falling short of your expectations. Let us know. We'd love to help in terms of just trying to make it better. And yeah, really appreciate, you know, all the feedback and support along the way.

Grant, this was awesome. I really appreciate you making time. I know you're trying to build a crazy fast growing startup with a lot going on, so I really appreciate you making time for the this.

Thanks Lenny. It's been a blast.

It's been a blast for me too. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show@lennyspodcast.com See you in the next episode.