$0 to $100M ARR Fast. How Gamma Scaled Quickly without a Sales Team

Get into my third pitch and 20 minutes in, you know, I finished my pitch and I'm waiting for the investor to start asking me some questions. Long pause. And eventually the investor says, "This has got to be the worst idea I've ever heard. Not only are you going up against massive incumbents, they have ultimate distribution. There is no way you will ever succeed." And so, of course, I'm a little shell-shocked in the moment. I'm trying to think about, okay, what is a really smart rebuttal I can give this investor? And before I can do that, he hangs up, leaves the Zoom call. And so in that moment, you know, I tried to internalize what he said because I think there is some truth to it, which is being in this category is incredibly hard. You can't just build a great product. You have to think about distribution from day one. Wow. Wow. What an honor to be here. Very glad to be here with you all. Excited to share a little bit of our story. We're going to talk about how we achieved $100 million in ARR profitably over the past couple of years with a team of 50. For those that don't know about Gamma, you can think of us as the anti-PowerPoint. A quick glance at Gamma. We passed $100 million ARR, again, a team of 50. And today I'm here to share a little bit about our story. I have 4 lessons, just 4 lessons, hopefully lessons that you can take, bring back to your organizations to help you fuel your growth as well. We're going to talk a little bit about product-market fit. We're going to talk about creator marketing. We're going to talk about community-led growth, and we're going to talk about dogfooding the future. Now, every early-stage startup has this question of how do we know if we've reached product-market fit? And it's an incredibly important question to answer. Now, unfortunately, this can be one where it's super easy to trick yourself or to fool yourself into thinking you might have it. And so I want to share kind of our story to talk about how we actually approach this ourselves. When we first started Gamma, we were setting out to try to solve the blank page problem. Part of this was informed by my own experience. I was basically at a different startup. We got acquired. I started advising early-stage startups, and one late night when I was preparing for a meeting the next day, I was pulling up Google Slides, trying to get my ideas onto this canvas, and just frustrated by the amount of time it took to sort of format and design rather than on the content itself. And that for me just felt backwards. What if we could reimagine this format from the ground up and really allow people to shape and share their ideas way more seamlessly? So we got to work. I ended up meeting up with two of my former colleagues from Optimizely, and we started building Gamma.

You're listening to the official Sastra AI podcast, brought to you by— Hey everybody, starting a business can get expensive fast. Website here, email somewhere else, business phone with another provider.

Provider.

Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete business identity in one place with free tools, resources, and built-in privacy from day one. Get more at northwestregisteredagent.com/saasrfree. That's northwestregisteredagent.com/saasrfree. S-A-A-S-T-R-F-R-E-E. Hey everyone, if you're listening to The Agents, then you need to be at Saastr AI Annual. We'll be back next May in 2027, the world's largest B2B and AI event, May 11th and 12th in San Francisco Bay Area. Look, most conferences and content these days are about what's possible. As you know from The Agents, we're all about what's happening now, the latest and greatest, and that's what we do even more so at SaaStr Annual. See the actual work where we bring together 10,000 founders, revenue leaders, and VCs, plus 200 of the very best speakers showing you the playbooks of what's already running in production behind the scenes, deep dive demos, and so much more. Plus over 5,000 scheduled one-on-one meetings so you can actually meet the people doing all this, not just hear from them. If you're a founder or revenue leader, or you're the one who has to make this all work with agents, this is where you want to be. You already know this from listening to the agents. That's Saastr AI Annual 2027. Go to saastraannual.com and use our code TheAgents for a special discount on your tickets. See you there.

Now, our very early version of Gamma was this prototype you're seeing, which is sort of a hybrid document slash deck. And we really want to make it kind of dead simple for you to sort of flip between these different formats. And we spent a lot of time just trying to get this right, where we got to the point where this prototype was our pre-seed pitch deck. We used it instead of using Google Slides for the first time. Rather than using slides, I was able to present with a different medium. Now, I was living in London at the time, so Uh, this is me trying to practice our pitch, you know, during the daytime. We didn't have a lot of furniture, and so I had to borrow my kids' little desk during the daytime to do all of my practicing. And because we were in London, I had to, you know, do all the pitching in the middle of the night. So come 8 PM, I would tuck my kids into bed. I would pick up this little table, move it to the far corner of the flat. Which was tucked in between our kitchenette and our laundry room. And I would sit down, put up a fake Zoom background so nobody knew exactly where I was, and I'd start pitching. And, you know, first-time founder, so I'm getting into pitch mode, you know, get through my first two pitches, they go pretty well. I'm like, okay, how hard can this thing be? Get into my third pitch and 20 minutes in, you know, I finished my pitch and I'm waiting for the investor to start asking me some questions. Long pause. And eventually the investor says, this has got to be the worst idea I've ever heard. Not only are you going up against massive incumbents, they have ultimate distribution. There is no way you will ever succeed. And so of course, I'm a little shell-shocked in the moment. I'm trying to think about, okay, What is a really smart rebuttal I can give this investor? And before I can do that, he hangs up, leaves the Zoom call. And so in that moment, you know, I tried to internalize what he said because I think there is some truth to it, which is being in this category is incredibly hard. You can't just build a great product. You have to think about distribution from day one. So fortunately, we were able to raise a little bit of money and actually get to work and really think about how do you intertwine distribution and product at the same time. 2 years later, we launched our public beta. For anyone that's building today, that feels like a lifetime. I would advise you to probably compress that by an order of 10 or more and really try to get to market much faster. It took us a couple of years. We launched our product on— we ended up winning product of the day, product of the week, product of the month, and we felt really great about ourselves. We're like, hey, Maybe we actually did it. But unfortunately, signups spiked and then they plateaued. And so what we realized is that we did not have strong organic growth. We did not have a product people were telling their friends about. We did not have strong word of mouth. And so we were basically at a fork in the road. What should we do? Should we invest more in marketing? Or should we invest more in product? You know, there's a saying of, hey, you should do things that don't scale. And I think a lot of founders, they hear this and they say, okay, well, maybe that means I can brute force my way into sales and marketing and really just fill the top of the funnel. The alternative maybe is what if you went back to the drawing board and really thought about the product and really broke the product all the way back down and thought about what would it take to build a product that had much more organic growth? And so the question is, what would you do? For us, we decided to invest in the product. We went back and said, we have to make the first 30 seconds of this product feel magical. It has to be so magical that people tell all their friends about. It cannot just be good enough. And so we got the team together, 12 of us at the time, and really treated this as a sort of all hands on deck. We were crammed in a converted 2-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, and we got to work. We gave ourselves 3 months to re-architect the entire onboarding experience of the product so that we can deliver that magic, that first 30 seconds, so that people would tell all their friends about it. The version of the product was pretty simple in the beginning. You entered a prompt and you get a first draft of your presentation. From there, you can continue to edit with AI. To get you further along on the journey of creating content. Like most startups today, we basically tried to basically launch by announcing this via tweet. And we sat down, you know, this is again 3 months in, heads down building this product. We thought about, okay, what would we say if we wanted to announce this to the world? And in the very beginning, we had a pretty sort of conservative, conservative, safe sort of message. But then we realized as founders, like, okay, sitting down, we needed something a little bit more provocative, right? You need to be able to have something that actually created engagement. And so in many ways, you know, you're trying to lean into, you know, this, this, this feeling that maybe you're going to be a little bit clickbaity, but that's okay. You need that initial engagement. So we ended up coming up with this, which is the most valuable skill in business is about to become obsolete. And yes, a little bit of clickbait, but it worked. We got Paul Graham to respond, throwing a little shade at us, and the tweet ended up going viral. And so, uh, it was for us a moment of realization, like, okay, let's get that engagement, let's get that virality. And more importantly, the product went viral. So in the very beginning we had, you know, 5,000 signups a day, then 10,000 signups a day, then 20,000 signups a day, then 50,000 signups a day, and it kept on going up. And this was a moment in time where we're doing zero marketing, zero sales. It was people telling each other, people using the product, that sort of organic growth that we were kind of seeking from the very beginning. And we felt that pull. So really quickly, before I move on to the next topic, this is the reminder that I'd have for anybody that's building today. Before you spend any money on marketing, build a product that has strong word of mouth. Because word of mouth is the only form of distribution that can help amplify everything else you're doing. Until you have it, I would not worry about anything else. Word of mouth is super hard earned. It cannot be bought. And so go back to building the product that actually has this before you actually worry about the rest of marketing. We'll talk a little bit now about creator marketing, because for me, that tweet I mentioned, that was my sort of first foray into trying to become a creator. I realized that being a creator, I had a chance to help amplify everything we were doing at Gamma. So I wanted to say, okay, if we know creator marketing can be a channel for us, how do we tap other creators? And I'm a finance person. I had zero idea how to become a creator, how to, how does creator marketing work? So I wanted to learn and I'd wanted to have deeper empathy by actually going through the journey of becoming a creator myself. So this meant doing the basics, posting regularly, trying to understand the fundamentals of being a creator, learn what it takes. And in doing so, I was able to finally gain a little bit of traction. I tell founders today, or anybody in startups, if you want to do this, you have to go through Cringe Valley for a bit. You're going to put stuff out there that feels just terrible, but that's the whole point. You learn, you put yourself out there, you build the audience. And today I have a little bit of a bigger audience where Anytime I announce stuff for Gamma, it gets a little bit more of pickup and you kind of keep on building that over time. And these are things where I can now take that, what I've learned, into helping us actually build a much more effective creator marketing program. I can go in and say, when we sit down with a creator, really help them understand how can they tell Gamma's story in their voice to their audience, because I understand the process myself. And I think a lot of people treat creator marketing or influencer marketing as very transactional. They put a budget, they signed up a big creator, and they said, okay, that's it, we're done. We treated it as something where every single creator we would manually onboard, I would sit down with them, and guess what? Many of them struggled to create presentations on their own in the past because this wasn't something they learned on the job. And so how could they actually leverage our tool? They ended up falling in love with using Gamma. And so when they go out and tell, you know, their audience how to use Gamma, it was much more authentic. It was something they were actually using. You don't earn the right to do that until you've actually invested in building that, you know, community of creators that can actually, you know, sing your praises. For us, what we found is that there's this massive benefit. Anytime creators would amplify, you know, what we were building, there was this halo effect. There was even more word of mouth. So not only were they able to tap their audiences, there was this multiplicative effect of going out, creating content, and it was really creating this flywheel for us. When we think about basically what got us to 50 million users, the real big question is for us, it was like, okay, we got to 50 million users. Do we have everything we need to reach the next 500 million users? And when we're asking that question, we really felt like one key ingredient was sort of missing. We didn't feel like we had a brand that could actually reach the next 500 million users. And the reason was because our first brand was more of a placeholder. The DNA was very limited. So the number of assets we could create was very limited. And if you want creators or even your own content team to really start amplifying content, you need a much richer set of ingredients is what I call like the DNA of a brand. So at 50 million users, it's pretty risky to say, hey, we're going to do a complete rebrand because you can cause a lot of confusion in the market. People see, you know, one version of your logo or, you know, your, your color palette and like, oh, you're trying to do something different. We felt like that was the right long-term bet because again, we needed that universe, that DNA that people can then tap into so that they can help amplify our message. And so we did a complete rebrand. We chose a very different art direction, different vibe, something that felt like it really matched our values and what we wanted to be and represent. And we actually even ended up open sourcing this so that at brand.gamma.app, a creator can pull all the assets they need And even more importantly, they can actually create their own Gamma-branded assets so that they can further amplify our message out there. And so this was a huge investment, but we felt like, again, at 50 million users, the bigger risk was not to do this, because if we wanted to reach the next 500 million users, we had to get this fundamentally right. I'll talk a little bit about community-led growth, which is— community, I know, is a term that gets thrown out there all the time, right? And so what does this— actually mean? For us, it meant many different things. One was, you know, we talk about learning from the voice of the customer. We took this pretty literally, which is we actually wanted to hear our users going through the product and struggling along their journey. So we, what we do is use tools like Voice Panel and user testing and actually have users walk through the product and describe everything they're seeing on the screen. And this is where you can really start feeling like, where is their true confusion in using the product, or where is their true delight? And you can start leaning into that much more. We felt like this was fundamental in really understanding how our customers perceived our product. As we started getting more and more power users, we developed a program called the Gambassador Program, which is we have this separate Slack workspace. We pull them in, they get early access to new features, they give us feedback. They're oftentimes the first people to report bugs.. And we have this ongoing dialogue. In the very beginning when we're just setting this up is like every single day I'm the first one to log in to check, you know, people responding or asking questions there and treating that community as one where they can really help us shape the future direction of, of Gamma. We felt that was super important. The bigger you get, the easier it is to treat your user base as a sort of faceless entity, right? And I think as a startup grows and has traction, you have to do everything you can to resist that. They are not a faceless entity. They are real users with real problems. And so we've always tried to lean much more into this. In September, we ran a program called Gamma Lab, which is we invited users from around the world to work out of our office in San Francisco. We flew them into San Francisco. They could work alongside our team. We could show them what exactly we were working on. And as we were developing our own education program, we could get their immediate feedback so that we can make sure that future users learning Gamma could learn it the right way. And so this was, of course, a big investment, a huge time suck because you're like, you're really trying to carve out time in your day. But again, for us, a no-brainer worthwhile investment. More recently, we had a program called Gamma Everywhere where we visited our users in Seoul, in London, in São Paulo. And again, this was so critical because what you can take for granted is that each of these users, these user bases, may need something different out of what your tool offers, right? And so how do you build a product that feels truly native to the users in those regions? You can't do that unless you're not actually spending time with them, running workshops, working alongside them. Again, huge investment for us, a no-brainer. The last thing I'll talk about is dogfooding the future. For those that know or are not familiar with the term, dogfooding means you're oftentimes testing early versions of the product yourself before it ever goes into the hands of users. And for us, this has been a critical part of the learning journey from day one. I'll share a story, which is when we first started Gamma, our passion, our sort of mission was to help people change the way they communicate. Communicate their ideas, to be more effective at it. And we actually had two different ideas. The first idea was to reimagine presentations as a category, which is very much the product you see today. The second was actually to create a virtual office and like, what if, you know, virtual office allowed people to collaborate just as if they were in a real office? And that for us was also interesting, especially in the moment in time where we're coming out of the pandemic. Hybrid virtual work was all sort of being, you know, reimagined from the ground up. And so we gave ourselves 6 months running these 2 products in parallel. And when I think about dogfooding, it is all about building conviction for your product. And so we wanted to say, okay, after 6 months, which product do we, do we actually have more conviction on? And more importantly, which product were we more energized by? And it just became so clear with the virtual office, we were sort of almost like there was a ceiling in terms of what we imagined could be possible. We couldn't imagine actually being better than in real life, you know, work. And so we're like, okay, that seems limiting. We can't actually imagine what's needed. Whereas presentations, there was just so many things that we wanted to build and there was energy pulling us in into that category. So 6 months in, we ended up sunsetting the virtual office, going all in on presentations as this category, and we continue to do that today. So Gammon Imagine is a more recent launch where People can design anything, one-pagers, infographics, and we oftentimes are dogfooding these sort of things internally a lot before we actually release it to the world. We've also recently released connectors to different platforms, and for us, dogfooding internally just allows us to see what if Gamma lives in other tools and other workflows where our customers are already using us? What would that look like? How would that feel? So these are just the 4 lessons, hopefully some that either resonate or can inspire something for you all to think about as you bring all the learnings from this conference back to your organizations. I'll just lead by saying this. For anyone that's building a startup, I'm cheering you on. Honestly, I know there's going to be ups, there's going to be downs, but the journey is worth it. It can be daunting. I'm here for you. I would love to be helpful in any way possible. Connect with me on LinkedIn, on X. I'm here to learn as well. So really appreciate the time here. We're going to do a little bit of—

Okay, I've got a lot of questions. And then for—

for—

well, you got a big crowd up here. I was just saying to you backstage how I used Gamma last night to create the Pokémon cards I made for our opener this morning.

And there's— not only are they so cute, it did it instantly.

And when I gave it feedback, I didn't even say in the prompt, make me Pokémon cards. I was like, hey, I want to make our AI agent stack and I want to just visualize it for everybody at Saastr because this whole week Amelia, Jason, what's your stack?

What's your stack?

Show us the whole stack. And I was like, okay, I'll show you. I'll try and show you some of the stack. I don't even know if I can show you all the things because we have like 30 agents. And so I just went into Gamma and I said, hey, here, here's the list of my agents I want to show. Make me something to show people the stack. And it was Gamma Create. And it asked me like, that was literally the prompt. Just make me an image to show people the stack at SaaStr. And it said, do you want it like Western style, like wanted posters? Do you want there was some like more like infographic style in the middle. And then I was like, or do you want Pokémon cards?

Like, no brainer. Pokémon.

No brainer. I was like, gotta catch 'em all. So that was super fun. But I just, I've been using Gamma for a little bit now, both myself, but also our, one of my agents also uses Gamma. So one of the things I wanted to ask you was you've built such a product that is, you know, for humans being creative. But I know you were saying though, like you have now more customers that are using the Gamma API. How are you, how are you balancing that?

Right.

I mean, I think this applies to almost most categories, which is everyone building today needs to have kind of that to those two mindsets. Or how do you build for the human as well as prepare for a world where many of more of your users are agents? And I think that's a journey we're on today, which is we do want to serve both. We think they can be deeply intertwined because a lot of our biggest customers do have both end users using Gamma as well as a ton of automation leveraging our API. And so it's part of the fun. It is sort of changing the mindset though, and you almost have to go from like the fundamentals, like how do you make a product that could hopefully be great at both, but also maybe not alienate one or the other as you're trying to innovate, you know, along the way.

Yeah. And then another thing I want to ask you, when you were talking about your gambassadors, right? So you have users around the world that you've brought in, you put them together, like how, how much of that are they asking you for features they want and then features their agents want?

Today it's still very heavily like features they want because I think, you know, the reality is most people are still— I think this is brought like one realization coming back from this world tour was that, you know, we're still so early days, right? Like obviously being in San Francisco, being in the Bay Area, we have front row seats to the latest and greatest. And of course, there's almost a little bit of an echo chamber here. But when you look broadly, one, the market's super fragmented. There is no, you know, not one person, one, one, you know, team or one product is dominating everywhere. And two, the sort of the adoption curve, like most people are still stuck at just getting the basics right and trying to understand like, how do I actually fit this into my work life? And so today a tool like Gamma, you know, slots in and I think most people are just trying to even take their first step into being more of an AI-forward or AI-first thinker. And many of the features they're imagining are ones where we can just make it a little bit simpler than that first step, a lot simpler. Yeah.

So you guys got to the first $100 million, no sales team, still no sales team or some sales team now?

Growing sales team, actually. Some of our folks here. Yeah, growing sales team. You know, our first part of our journey was really just this prosumer motion, which is still our core growth engine. But we recognize like our ambition is to build a product that could be ubiquitous, right? Could be a new standard. And to be a new standard, you not only need to win individuals or small teams, you need to be able to fit in into a much larger context of an organization. How do you win businesses at any scale. And so our sales team is here to help make sure that we can fulfill the second part of this journey, which is actually being a core business tool across organizations of all sizes.

Some of the debate here this week has been, do you still distinctly hire a sales team, a marketing team, or since everything's becoming blended, do you just hire now for go-to-market where they do a little bit of everything?

We're still at a stage where, you know, we hire different teams. They're, they're probably much leaner than they would have been, you know, 5, 10 years ago. And they're highly collaborative, right? There is a tight feedback loop between what is a customer hearing or what are you hearing from customers to how can we ensure we're talking about the product the right way? And of course, product is another team that has a seat at the table to ensure, hey, we are trying to build the future for them. Let's make sure we're building in a direction that solves real customer problems. So it just ends up being like super flat, very collaborative. Teams are probably much leaner than they used to be. And of course, you're trying to plug into your own sort of context engine to have like all the data, all the customer transcripts and making sure everyone is informed about where things are going.

Yeah.

And since you started, right, with a PLG motion, where did you inject the sales team, right? Was it just enterprise? Like, who gets to talk to a human now?

Yeah, this is definitely stuff we're still evolving. In the very beginning, you know, we have the benefit of having a ton of inbound already. And so just fulfilling inbound, we haven't even really begun the process of, you know, all of our self-serve customers, like actually going and engaging them. Of course, that was probably going to be sort of next phase. And then eventually, you know, you're going to be doing much more outbound. We are candidly like early on the journey and like really trying to think and be thoughtful about, okay, we have— we believe this massive opportunity in front of us. How do we sequence it the right way?

I know it sounds crazy, but for folks that are dealing maybe with similar issues or they start to ramp and they also get too much inbound, do you have all humans on that? Do you have any agents on inbound?

It's a split right now. We have both humans, but then you know, agents, AI can help us also prioritize the right conversations and ensure that they're getting some touch. Right now, oftentimes that's not even the case. So I think, you know, we're working through like, how can we give the ones that maybe aren't as qualified some level of touch, ensure that we can proactively go out to the ones where they definitely, you know, could deserve more support. So it is just a chance of like, obviously the amount of information you have today, you can actually do much more of than you could have in the past. And we're in the process of trying to really automate as much of that as possible.

And how does that bleed into onboarding, right? Do any of your customers get an FE at Gamma?

Oh yeah, they will. So we have different versions of basically either like what we call a forward deploy designer, someone that can actually help them with some of the design translations as well as, yeah, more technical folks that can help set up different things like, like our API, for instance.

That's pretty cool. You guys also hit, correct me if I'm wrong, 600,000 paying subscribers. That's a lot at 100 million. When did you realize, like, what customer were you like, okay, we can't just be self-serve anymore. We need to have some humans on the sales side.

I mean, it really came to when the inbound was just, you know, we just felt like we were dropping so much. There's so many people asking us for how do I get my entire team or my entire department?

Yeah.

And, and we felt like we were, we were just missing a huge opportunity. It for us in many ways, you know, we've, we've always, for better or worse, been sort of reacting to the sort of inbound or like the situation we're at. And I would advise maybe not do that. Like you should probably, you know, try to be more proactive if possible. But even with us, when we first launched our self-serve product, we launched— I mentioned kind of like the all hands on deck, just getting something out there. We launched and we didn't even have monetization figured out. There was no way to pay for the product. And so we, we had this credit-based system and all of a sudden, you know, chat was blowing up saying, how do I buy more credits? And we had no way of actually charging for credits. And so we spent a couple of weeks of actually figuring out pricing and packaging, again, reacting to the situation rather than trying to be a little bit more proactive. And similar stuff happened on the B2B side.

So actually, I want to talk about pricing a little bit, actually, if you don't mind, because when I noticed this morning when I was making all the Pokémon cards, it was like generate for, I don't know, like a lower amount of credits and then a higher amount. I think I did the higher amount. Yeah, because they looked good. But like, how do you think about that when the base price is I mean, for on-premise purposes, pretty low to be a Gamma user.

Yeah. Pricing and packaging is another area where I think startups in the past used to say, hey, we'll put something up, set it and forget it. I don't think you can do that anymore. I think pricing and packaging is something you need to revisit constantly. And so, you know, today I think many startups are going on a journey of how much should be seat-based versus consumption-based, usage-based versus, you know, an API that is all completely usage-based. So candidly, we're still going on that journey and we're doing our best to sort of align, you know, price to value, which is the fundamentals of pricing and packaging, but also doing it in a way that is sustainable. And I think, you know, we have not taken the— I think some startups go down the path of we will, you know, sell at all costs, negative margins. We've run a profitable business, so we want to make sure the exchange of value also ensures we can do so in a way that is soft enough to the underlying business that we have.

When it comes to hiring at Gamma, what is that process like on the go-to-market side versus the engineering side?

You know, we hire a lot of strong generalists. I think generalists that can spike, of course, in different areas. But, you know, the whole mindset— and I think this applies to engineering too— is like the whole mindset of there is no job too small. We're all sort of— the benefit of being a very lean team is that each person has just so much ownership and doesn't need to be told exactly what to do. There's just like a problem space of things that can be done, and we arm them with as many tools as they need, and we trust that they can make a lot of progress. I think every company today has to just be super adaptable. You know, I think that is something we also hire for is like, how willing are you to both learn but potentially unlearn everything that's built your career to this point? So it is hard. You know, I think we are part of being able to dogfood the product is actually just having that intuition too, because, you know, we have so many power users of Gamma internally that are manually creating slides and presentations. That may not be the same mix going forward. We might have a ton more automation, we won't build good intuition unless we're doing it ourselves. So going back to like how— why dogfooding is just so important, you need to have like that deep level of empathy to see like where are things even heading? Are things even valuable to your own internal team? And, you know, if you can do that for your team, I think that's a good, hopefully, signal for what others are going to need as well.

The last thing I want to wrap on for folks is you've carved out your own piece of a very crowded market, right? Like there's, there's a lot of other folks who do either portions of gamma or like some pieces of, you know, I think some people still have have to use PowerPoint because they're forced to use PowerPoint. Like, how have you guys— but you've grown so fast and with such virality, to your point. Any last words of advice if they want to try and duplicate kind of the recipe and keep it consistent?

Yeah, I think there's a few things that, you know, just general advice because, you know, everybody's journey is different. Advice number one is just make sure you really think about why you're building the company you're building. Because even for us, you know, we're 5 years into the journey and you have to sort of stay committed to like, where are you even going, right? It's so tempting today, given how much AI is changing, to kind of chase shiny objects. You can go and say, hey, I'm going to bolt this on, I'm going to bolt this on, keep doing more and more. But when you think about why are your customers choosing you, why are you building your company, what is your long-term aspiration for, for, you know, what you're delivering back to your customers, you need to stay grounded there. And hopefully that also just becomes a massive flywheel for you because no one else is going to be willing to go as deep into that problem as you. Everybody else might be chasing, you know, becoming a super app or trying to do all these different things. If you can stay grounded on what's important to you, I think that just gives you longevity, longer chance. And then the second question, like every product builder should be thinking about is like, how does your product actually grow? Is it by use of the product or is it some other dynamic that as you grow, as the product gets used, is there some sort of flywheel that happens and like double down on that flywheel?

Yeah.

Make sure that every step of the way, like if you're building a product, like you're removing friction from that flywheel spinning faster and faster. And that's just, you know, sometimes people just get caught up into trying to compete with a competitor or like trying to again, like bolt on the latest and greatest when they forget, like, what does that product loop actually look for your own product?

Last follow-up question. How do you decide now what gets into the product at Gamma?

You know, I think people used to have like 1 or 2 year roadmaps, right? No way.

Now it's like 2 weeks of even—

Ah, sorry. It is, you know, part intuition, part customer input, and then part just seeing like what's going on on a macro level. You know, what are the things when it comes to like AI where innovation's happening so fast that you cannot afford to ignore?

Yeah.

I think those 3 ingredients are always at tension, but it's your chance to kind of be the cook and go to work.

Thank you so much for doing this and being here.

Thank you.

You're listening to the official SaaStr AI podcast, brought to you by— Costs can add up quickly when you start a business, so stop paying for 5 different services. Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete business identity in one place with free tools and resources to actually launch your business for real. Get more at northwestregisteredagent.com/saastrfree. That's northwestregisteredagent.com/saastrfree. A-A-S-T-R-F-R-E-E.