“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 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. You guys are at over a hundred million ARR now, worth over two billion dollars. One of the most interesting ways you guys grew early on was influencer marketing. All the initial influencers I onboarded manually myself. I was 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. 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 may be is actually useful. People really trust what they say. That ends up becoming this wildfire that can spread really, really fast. 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 or have zero skin in the game. Ship that so people can start playing in the afternoon. We're already running pretty full scale experiments. 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 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 long time. That didn't raise a lot of money for a long time. and is a small team. It's just around thirty people, all who can fit in a small restaurant. Serving over fifty million users globally. If you're not familiar with Gamma, they're an AI powered presentation and website design tool.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript, segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

10 free credits is 10 episodes like this one a month. Episodes nobody has transcribed yet cost their length in hours, because we have to actually transcribe them.