0:00
I'm in my third pitch in.
Search this video
0:00
I get to the very end of the pitch feeling pretty good about myself.
0:02
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.
0:09
Not only are you trying to go against incumbents, you're going against incumbents that have massive distribution.
0:15
You are never going to succeed.
0:17
>> You guys are at over 100 million AR now worth over $2 billion.
0:20
One of the most interesting ways you guys grew early on was influencer marketing.
0:25
>> All the initial influencers I onboarded manually myself.
0:27
I would jump on a call with each one of them so that they understood what Gamma represented, how to use the product.
0:33
You want to be able to have them tell your story, but in their voice.
0:37
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.
0:44
You basically give them a script to read immediately feels like an ad.
0:48
That product is not connected really to them in any way.
0:51
You're much better doing the hard thing, which is hard to scale.
0:52
finding the thousands of micro influencers that have an audience where your product maybe is actually useful.
0:58
People really trust what they say that ends up becoming this wildfire that can spread really really fast.
1:04
>> Something you talk about there is actually a lot of ways to think experimentally even in the early stages.
1:08
>> We would have an idea in the morning, come up with some sort of functional prototype.
1:11
We recruit a bunch of people that are legitimately good prospective users that have zero skin in the game.
1:17
Ship that so people can start playing.
1:19
In the afternoon, we're already running pretty full scale experiment.
1:20
pretty full scale experiment. you start actually hearing other people describe their usage of the product when you 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
1:35
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
1:56
It's just around 30 people all who can fit in a small restaurant serving over 50 million users globally.
2:00
If you're not familiar with Gamma, they're an AI powered presentation and website design tool.
2:06
They just hit 100 million ARR in just over 2 years.
2:09
They're valued at over $2 billion.
2:12
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.
2:23
As you'll hear in the conversation, one investor told Grant this is the dumbest idea that he has ever heard.
2:28
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.
2:41
Also, how they figured out their price, his thoughts on building a GPT rapper company that is durable, a ton of hiring advice, and so much more.
2:50
This could honestly have been another two hours of conversation.
2:52
I suspect we'll do another follow-up conversation next year.
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With that, I bring you Grant Lee after a short word from our sponsors.
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5:15
>> Grant, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
5:19
>> Lonnie, so great to be here. Thank you for having me.
5:21
>> I see your face all the time in my LinkedIn feed.
5:23
I don't know if you know this a thing on on these JP Morgan Chase ads.
5:27
I'm so curious if other people see this or if it's just me.
5:28
Did you know this was a thing?
5:30
I >> I think it's maybe once a day now I get a text message and just there just no message.
5:35
message. which is just a screenshot or you know an image of me you know doing something in San Francisco on one of these uh uh ad 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
5:50
because it's like it's always you there's no one else it's like Grant >> I know can I tag I swap somebody out I mean that'd be great I I 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
6:06
You are both growing like crazy.
6:09
You are growing very profitably.
6:11
We're going to talk about this.
6:11
You did not raise a ton of money when you started.
6:15
You waited a long time to raise a bunch of money.
6:16
You also built a business in a category that I think most people never imagined there was this big of an opportunity.
6:22
And you're basically you've achieved the dream of a lot of founders these days, especially people building AI startups.
6:29
So my goal with this conversation is essentially do an anthropological study of a really successful AI startup.
6:37
Talk about how you found product market fit, how you grew, all the all the lessons you've learned along the journey.
6:43
And I'm going to break this conversation up kind of along the different milestones of the journey.
6:48
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?
6:54
Yeah, maybe I'll just start with uh with a quick story if that's okay.
6:59
And um it's really just a founding story.
7:01
So, you know, we started the company back in 2020. This is peak pandemic.
7:05
And you know, fundraising, even fundraising was just so different.
7:10
So, all of the fundraising was done over Zoom.
7:11
You were kind of, you know, sitting in these Zoom meetings trying to pitch.
7:15
Many investors you never met in person.
7:17
So, just a different era, right?
7:18
And so, for us, you know, we're first- time founders.
7:20
I was actually living in London at the time and so, you know, different time zone.
7:25
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 PM we had a pretty modest flat so nothing big.
7:34
I would basically find this little corner uh between the kitchenet and the laundry room kind of setup shot far enough from the kids so they wouldn't you know be woken up and between 8:00 p. m. like 2 a. m.
7:45
I'm just pitching you know trying my best like the fake Zoom background so people didn't know where I was and just pitching.
7:51
And so, you know, really the first day kind of I'm in my third pitch in trying to tell the story of Gamma.
7:57
Obviously, just starting to get the hang of the pitch and uh 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 have to be the worst pitch, worst idea I have ever heard.
8:10
Not only are you trying to go against incumbents, you're going against incumbents that have massive distribution.
8:19
you are never going to succeed.
8:21
And so like in my head I'm already kind of shell shocked and thinking, you know, what am I gonna what's my rebuttal?
8:27
And before I could even have, you know, respond, he hangs up.
8:31
And so I'm there sitting, you know, there thinking about it.
8:34
And, you know, before I could really get down on myself because I had to prepare for the next pitch.
8:38
I kind of just internalized this feeling that, you know, maybe he's right.
8:43
You know, maybe something about what he's saying is actually correct.
8:46
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.
8:53
This category is going to be really, really hard to break into.
8:56
And so we really kind of made this sort of kind of promise to ourselves that as we continue to build, growth is going to be critically important.
9:03
And so my thing to kind of, you know, your audience is that, you know, I don't come from a growth background.
9:08
So if I can learn growth, anybody can learn growth.
9:10
And I think especially in this sort of market, hyper competitive, oftentimes very crowded, it's going to be essential.
9:19
>> That is such a fun story.
9:19
Oh my god, how how bad must this investor feel at this point? We won't name names.
9:24
Uh just to share some stats.
9:26
I know this is going to be by the time this launches, this will be out, but you guys are at over 100 million AR now, worth over $2 billion.
9:34
Uh a business that again most people did not think was was going to work in in this category. >> Yeah, thank you.
9:41
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 because I think, you know, hopefully it will help others kind of on their journey as well.
9:52
>> Okay, so let's dive into it.
9:52
Let's talk about product market fit.
9:54
Tell us the story of just how you found product market fit and how you knew you found product market fit.
10:02
>> Yeah, I'll start by telling kind of the moment where we thought we maybe had product market fit.
10:05
And I think a lot of founders, you know, ask themselves, do we have it or do we not?
10:08
And I think there's a there's often a sort of temptation to go almost fool yourself into thinking you have it.
10:13
And so we sort of did our first public beta launch.
10:17
Um this is back in August of 2022.
10:19
We launched on product hunt and you know felt really good.
10:22
We had you know what we felt like was a great launch.
10:25
Ended up winning product of the day, product of the week, product of the month.
10:29
And I was like wow we you know I think we have something here.
10:31
And then we'd look at signups and you'd get that initial spike in signups and then they sort of like flatten out.
10:37
we were still getting new users every day, but it was clear we didn't have strong word of mouth.
10:42
There wasn't strong organic virality.
10:44
And so if we just kind of played things out, you know, we knew that the the product wasn't going to grow on its own.
10:49
Like something was missing there.
10:50
We didn't have that strong word of mouth so that the product could just continue growing.
10:54
And so we really kind of asked ourselves like, okay, what does what do we need to change?
10:58
And the answer is like we we need to fundamentally change everything.
11:02
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 you know what could be done and so we got everyone together at this point the team was uh just over 12 people and we said
11:19
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 it 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,
11:36
And if we can get that right, then maybe we have a chance at actually, you know, doing something in the space.
11:41
And so we spent three, four months actually, you know, after the product hunt launch, we like felt great, but we knew we had to go back to the drawing board.
11:47
We spent the next like three, four months actually revamping the entire onboarding experience.
11:50
And of course, this is also where, you know, AI for us kind of played a big role.
11:55
We actually rebuilt it so that AI was part of the the the actual onboarding.
11:59
every single new user would experience this sort of magic in the first 30 seconds.
12:04
And so we re relaunched, this is end of March 2023.
12:09
And all of a sudden, you know, we'd go from a few hundred signups a day to now first day it was like a couple thousand.
12:15
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.
12:21
And we weren't doing any sort of marketing, no advertising.
12:23
It was all sort of organic word of mouth, virality of the product, people using the product and sharing it with others where we for the first time really felt this pull like we didn't have to do anything.
12:33
Product was just growing and uh 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.
12:43
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.
12:51
I think that would have been a trap.
12:53
I think that would have let 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.
13:02
We never actually arrive.
13:04
And so I think we made the tough call, the right call.
13:05
It was a sort of bet the company moment.
13:07
And I think on the other side it just felt so different.
13:11
>> Grant, this is exactly what I wanted this conversation to be. I'm so I'm so excited.
13:14
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.
13:19
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.
13:28
You weren't doing much because it was so awesome.
13:31
People were telling their friends about it.
13:32
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?
13:38
>> Yeah I mean I my one piece of advice is when you're early on you your mindset should almost be like you're trying to create a word of mouth machine right?
13:46
Like if you can get that part right, everything else becomes significantly easier.
13:50
And the if you have any and and I think this applies to both like proumer, B TOC as well as even B2B products.
13:57
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.
14:03
You should probably be telling, you know, you know, former co-workers where, hey, you've discovered something like, oh, I wish we had this, you know, my in our prior lives.
14:12
And like that should even be magical.
14:14
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.
14:20
If you're not seeing a healthy chunk of those leads come through that way, I would go back. I'm like why?
14:24
Why is that not happening?
14:26
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.
14:36
>> How much of this was, you describe it as a word of mouth machine.
14:37
How much of this was like word of mouth loops and verality features versus just the product itself?
14:44
One was awesome and two is kind of innately sharable because it's you know presentations people share with each other. Yeah totally.
14:49
I think for us we do benefit from being in a category where you know by nature of it if if you like gamma you're sharing it presenting it to others.
14:56
So I think it for us it's a combination of both and and ideally you have other ways where you know word of mouth or organic verality can can happen in your product.
15:06
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
15:24
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 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
15:43
>> 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.
15:48
So many people try to win and don't 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 won product of the week and product of the month and still you're like no this isn't working.
16:02
Those 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.
16:12
What is it just what is it there that you're just like no we need this isn't going to work as much as as exciting as this is this isn't it?
16:20
Yeah, I mean part of, you know, being a founder is being, you know, as self-aware as you can and be your own your own worst critic, right?
16:25
And so, you know, 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?
16:35
Like if this number goes up, does it mean the product is working?
16:37
And I think that's where we looked at like, okay, you know, felt good to win those things.
16:42
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.
16:53
>> So essentially, it kind of started to just plateau and and slow.
16:55
It wasn't like this rocket ship that took off from that point. >> Yeah.
16:59
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?
17:04
And I think that's that's where it's always hard to tell like you 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.
17:17
>> The other point here is the power of onboarding which comes up a bunch on this podcast when you talk about driving retention.
17:24
So you so you launched product hunt did great and then started kind of petering out.
17:28
How much did the product change after it things started to work versus onboarding just like how important was onboarding and then just tell us why the first 30 seconds where did you come up with that number? Yeah.
17:41
I So for us, you know, the the onboarding and the product experience, for us that's intertwined, right?
17:44
Um the analogy I always think about is, you know, you know, if you go into, you know, 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. Yeah.
18:01
And of course, the food has to taste good.
18:02
But if that entire like and then you finally get the bill and you leave, like is that entire experience something that feels delightful?
18:07
Is it good enough for you to tell your friends about?
18:09
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."
18:18
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 what is something we can give them?
18:25
Can we shorten that time to value as much as possible?
18:28
A lot of this is inspired by, you know, like Scott Bellski, he talks about kind of that first smile, the first 15 minutes.
18:33
And I think that's totally right.
18:35
And I think one approach is you think about new users as you almost have like a cynical view of them.
18:41
You have to think about them being selfish, vain, and lazy, right?
18:43
Like they're coming in, they have no desire to learn a new tool.
18:46
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?
18:52
And so for us, we knew that if we can't, you know, people's attention span is even shorter today than maybe 10 years ago.
18:58
And so what is it in that first 30 seconds?
19:00
can we actually show you something and uh earn the right to kind of you know keep kind of building that relationship with you.
19:07
We really thought a lot about that and and certainly that's that's all we could really afford at the time.
19:11
We only had 12 people building and so like we couldn't make a entirely you know revamped entire product.
19:16
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.
19:27
I love your point about how, you know, you could think of it as like, okay, it's onboarding versus the product.
19:31
The lens of how do we make this incredibly valuable and ahaish for the first 30 seconds almost informs what the product should be. >> Yeah.
19:39
It really helps you, you know, pull forward what is the most magical thing about your product, right?
19:45
Sometimes founders will think about like the five 10 features.
19:47
Well, maybe there's only like one thing that kind of differentiates you.
19:50
you know, I I try to learn a lot from, you know, you know, we we'll get into some of the marketing pieces of this, but even just having this sort of founder 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.
20:08
You throw them four or five eggs, they're probably going to drop all of them.
20:11
And like often times founders want to talk about the four or five features they have, maybe 10 features, and then the consumer is totally confused like why why do I need this thing?
20:19
We try to just give them that one egg, that one, you know, like first experience.
20:23
We're like, "Okay, you know, create a slide in seconds." That's that's the egg.
20:26
I'm going to throw you this egg.
20:28
Is that compelling to you?
20:29
Some people are still going to opt out, but for the people that catch that, you're solving like a real problem for them and then you can continue again kind of building on that over time.
20:37
Like you've given them enough so that they'll sit around and like keep playing with your product.
20:41
>> That is a hilarious metaphor I've never heard for for onboarding time to value.
20:46
Just focus on one egg at a time.
20:46
Just going even further back, what was the original insight that you had that led to Gamma and what Gamma is today?
20:54
>> After the last startup I was at was acquired, I I went back into kind of my roots which is consulting.
20:58
I was advising early stage startups and the sort of medium I was using was Google Slides.
21:05
So I just remember this, you know, 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.
21:16
And for me that just felt completely backwards.
21:18
You know, I should be spending 90% all the time on the content, 10% maybe on the design and formatting.
21:24
And so the question just was, you know, what if there was a better way?
21:27
What if we could reimagine this format from the ground up?
21:29
Slides have been around for almost 40 years as the default, you know, medium of choice for a lot of this.
21:34
And so we thought about, okay, if we had different building blocks, different primitives, so you're not locked into the fixed 16 by9, you know, slide, what could you, you know, what could we offer to new users?
21:45
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 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
22:05
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
22:18
the same sort of ambition or vision that we had and um 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 just so
22:26
>> It's such a cool other example just 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.
22:42
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.
22:48
I'm thinking we break it up.
22:52
I know these milestones aren't that clear, but kind of like zero to 100 million ARR, one to 10, 10 to 100, something like that.
22:59
And let's just kind of see how it goes.
23:05
How did you get your first set of users?
23:06
How did you get your say 100 first 100 users?
23:08
How'd you get to 100 million error from zero?
23:09
Our first hundred looks very different, I'd say.
23:11
So, this was even pre the sort of AI launch we had.
23:15
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.
23:20
Anybody that's ever made a slide deck, you're trying to talk to.
23:23
And I think early on, you know, your friends want to do you a favor, so they're going to try the product.
23:28
They're also going to lie to you.
23:29
They're going to tell you how great it is, and then you look at the usage and nobody's coming back.
23:32
nobody's coming back. And so I think our first hundred was sort of like gradually hard-earned post sort of the product hunt launch people learning like okay this is kind of becoming a little bit more useful usage were still pretty episodic so they weren't coming back every week and then I think do think you
23:46
know the 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 you know 10,000 users all came within a pretty short time period after that that initial launch. Awesome. Awesome.
24:03
We're going to talk about monetization pricing later, which is obviously an important part of actual getting to a millionaire and 10 million error. >> Yeah.
24:09
>> So, what I'm hearing essentially is the product HUD launch was a big part of just the first 10,000ish users.
24:12
I know there was also a a tweet when you first when you relaunched that helped in a big way. Talk about that. >> Yeah.
24:24
So, when uh we you know we did our AI launch, we we didn't do our AI launch on Product Tongue.
24:28
We just we we basically said, "Hey, let's just put it on out on Twitter.
24:31
See if we can get some virality."
24:33
And honestly, we kind of came up with kind of a clickbaity sort of, you know, tweet.
24:37
It was like, you know, the the most valuable uh skill in business is about to become obsolete.
24:43
And uh and so, you know, it was intentional in that we wanted to create a little bit of engagement.
24:47
We knew that having sort of a more provocative, you know, tweet would allow people to engage with it.
24:53
And so, um after a couple days, all of a sudden, it started getting a little bit more viral.
24:57
and uh a lot more engagement.
24:59
And we looked and it was basically because Paul Graham had commented and saying something like surely the thing that uh the slide deck is describing is more valuable than the slide itself, right?
25:09
And uh obviously you know it was fun just to see that comment.
25:13
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 uh the my first sort of learning moment going back to you know what does founderled marketing even mean?
25:30
It means like how do you actually break through the noise?
25:32
How do you get a chance to have people even engage with like a post like that?
25:36
Part of that is copywriting.
25:36
Part of that is like storytelling.
25:38
Part of that is just having like even like the right visuals to share.
25:41
And so it was uh for me kind of a moment just understanding, hey, to kind of do this, right?
25:45
You kind of uh you kind of have to do things that maybe you're not super comfortable with, but uh it makes a difference. >> Such a fun story.
25:52
So you intentionally set that announcement up to be controversial is what I'm hearing. >> Totally.
25:58
Yeah, I'd say provocative, a little spicy. >> That is so cool.
26:00
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.
26:13
It wasn't even him retweeting it. >> No, just a comment. Yeah.
26:16
And then others would, you know, pile on. >> Yeah.
26:19
It's interesting how much a comment can uh increase the distribution of a tweet versus them retweeting it or quote tweeting it. >> Totally.
26:26
And of course, the algorithms change all the time.
26:27
So part of it is just luck based on when it happened, how it happened, who who posted.
26:32
>> And I you use the term founder marketing, which I love and I'm already seeing it in action here.
26:36
This is you thinking about it's not like delegating to someone in marketing.
26:39
It's not hiring an agency.
26:41
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?
26:56
>> Yeah, I mean I think very you know most people today are probably familiar with founder sales which is still very very important.
27:01
I think before you hire your first, you know, salesperson or sal, you know, AE, it's great to for the founder to understand like what it takes and, you know, they're going to craft the right narrative, the right story.
27:10
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 going to meetings with a client or a prospect and saying, "Hey, this is why, you know, um, our product is interesting."
27:25
I think you know today there's there's so many AI startups that are much more either BTOC or consumer 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 you know I'll describe a few things where over time I think that skill set just really really helps you.
27:46
One is like you know you have a chance to kind of be a creator yourself these days.
27:50
I think a lot of founders are trying to, you know, be more active on social media.
27:53
And I think, you know, if you can kind of overcome the initial cringe factor of like seeing yourself and post things like, oh, this doesn't, you know, feel authentic.
28:02
If you can overcome that initial feeling, you you start investing into like, okay, how do I become a better copywriter?
28:08
You know, how do I uh articulate something that is um clear, not just clever, you know?
28:13
I think there's that saying where obviously if you can have that clarity, that's super important.
28:17
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.
28:24
So, how do you improve your own copywriting?
28:25
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?
28:35
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 um that just feels so much like an ad and
28:56
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 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
29:13
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.
29:19
You got to practice over and over.
29:21
>> I I definitely want to pull on this thread more because you tweeting the lessons you learned building gamma is what led to this conversation.
29:27
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 uh I love that that's example of that working get having this conversation so let me ask a couple
29:42
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 are that want to try to start sharing things on LinkedIn and Twitter. >> My advice is definitely just to try to
30:00
>> My advice is definitely just to try to start small.
30:02
Don't let it become so intimidating that you just don't get started.
30:05
For me, it was like just having a notepad or uh 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 but worked and just start creating a log of that.
30:21
And then once I had enough of those, then I'd spend basically every week I'd block off a few hours to go a little bit deeper.
30:28
I'd 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.
30:37
It was all sort of scattered thoughts.
30:38
But over time, you start accumulating some interesting themes.
30:42
And then I would start stress testing that some of that.
30:45
So I would tell, you know, my teammates like, "Hey, this is something interesting.
30:48
Like, do you find this interesting?"
30:49
And if if there were enough like, oh yeah, that's that 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.
30:57
And then and then you actually just put it out there.
30:59
I think what I've learned is, you know, even for LinkedIn versus Twitter, the audiences want different things.
31:04
And so you almost have to then have different tones of voices or like, you know, even nuggets are sharing.
31:09
For me, I invested much more in LinkedIn early on just because it felt a little bit more natural for me.
31:14
And then over time I said, "Okay, I'm going to start packaging certain content for Twitter that's actually different than what I would post on LinkedIn."
31:20
Sometimes on on Twitter, you get even more tactical or even more into the weeds.
31:25
And so I found that that to be helpful.
31:27
But honestly, I'm still learning.
31:28
And 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?"
31:34
Like, are things actually creating?
31:36
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 uh and then you just go back and you start 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
31:52
through and then you go back and try to understand okay what about that post do I think was actually useful was it the actual content was it the structure of the content was it some sort of contrarian advice and you start you know thematically bunching that together such that as you're brainstorming every you just have a good sort of bo, you know, body of work to to work off. >> This is so interesting and valuable. So,
32:10
>> This is so interesting and valuable.
32:10
So, let me mirror back a few of the lessons that I heard here that I think is easy for people to miss.
32:15
So, one is just what to share.
32:18
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.
32:28
Just like have a dock and just put these there.
32:31
And every time you learn something, find something interesting, just add it to the dock.
32:36
uh or yeah haven't heard before is a good one too.
32:38
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 I just learn this thing with clock with clock code and check it out or save it up for a big long post.
32:54
>> The other interesting I've never heard this before of like post different things to LinkedIn and Twitter.
32:57
I I I just copy and paste the same thing.
32:59
Uh I love that you do something different for the two platforms.
33:03
I I think we all kind of have intuition that there's there's there different audiences, right?
33:07
And so if you know that kind of fundamentally, then the question is, you know, how do you package up the story the right way so that there is um you know, the audience is is ready to receive it.
33:17
And I think this can differ by, you know, by the type of creator or the founder, whoever is posting it.
33:23
And and of course, the actual content itself.
33:25
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.
33:33
Um, it it 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 and then kind of, you know, test test a bunch, see what actually works, go back and and re uh iterate a little bit.
33:49
>> So, if you had like one bullet point tip for what works on Twitter versus LinkedIn, you shared maybe more tactical on on Twitter.
33:54
Is there anything more there you can share?
33:55
Yeah, I that's what I found is like tactical oftentimes more contrarian on Twitter and also um I would say technical too.
34:03
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 like there's no credibility if you just give like a blanket statement or something that feels generic.
34:16
Like I I really need to know if you could show me the metrics even better.
34:20
Uh, 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 a like a a topic or a theme that just feels like relevant at that point in time.
34:34
And you can just kind of make more of a, you know, broader statement.
34:36
It doesn't need to be as tactical.
34:38
It's more like inspirational.
34:39
It's like, oh, okay, now I need to go and learn a little bit more about pricing and packaging, for instance.
34:43
And that could be the sort of spark that somebody needs.
34:46
And, uh, you don't need to, you know, spell it completely out.
34:48
Part of it is also that on on LinkedIn you can't really do threads and so you know doing like a super long form post isn't as practical.
34:55
Maybe that changes in the future where maybe the the tactical pieces, you know, that element might might actually change.
35:01
>> And last piece is you said you just block off time.
35:02
Is there like a specific time of the week you do this?
35:04
How do you actually because everyone's like, "Oh, sure.
35:06
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. Oh, maybe next week."
35:12
>> For me, it's usually two times of the day.
35:14
Uh very first thing in the morning and uh last thing at night.
35:16
And partly is because of kids.
35:19
It's almost like I need time where there's just zero distraction.
35:22
Uh and there's no noise in the house and so I can actually think and uh and then you know I think in the mornings it's about where are you finding inspiration like where where are you energ 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?
35:39
You can almost pull up your calendar and be like okay I talked to X Y andZ people and was there anything from those conversations that might be relevant?
35:45
That's where you know write some of those things.
35:47
It's more of a a recap of of actually what happened.
35:50
>> And what I what helps me to not feel like this is some cringy self-promoy 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 always just like oh that is really cool and useful. Thank you.
36:02
It's not like self-promotion.
36:02
It's not just like look how amazing I am.
36:06
Look at check out my amazing product.
36:07
It's like here's a thing I learned.
36:07
You might find it useful. >> That's exactly right.
36:11
>> That's exactly right. I I think you know one way of thinking about it you know with like founder le sales it's it's always about like exchange of value right you want to be able to give you know them the customer this feeling that they're getting an amazing product in exchange they're going to pay you money
36:25
for it I think with like founder marketing it's almost this mindset of you want to give people a ton of content maybe it's like you know 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 there inherently there's value in And in exchange, you sort of get goodwill back. You're not
36:43
You're not necessarily getting money back. You get goodwill.
36:46
They're going to follow you.
36:47
They're going to engage with her post.
36:49
They're going to tell others about it.
36:50
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.
36:57
And I think that's magical where 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.
37:04
The book I always point people to when they're want when they're struggling with this sort of thing and like, "Okay, I did this and no one like no one cared.
37:10
It didn't do any good is there's a book by uh Scott Presfield, I think is his name, uh called Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit." >> Yeah.
37:19
Which is exactly what is right. Nobody wants to read it.
37:22
The bar for people to care is very high.
37:25
There's so much stuff to read and process.
37:27
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 So you have to try really hard to make it really good. >> Great reminder.
37:38
Y >> we'll link to that in the show notes.
37:40
Okay, let's get into let's come back to the growth of Gamma.
37:43
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.
37:55
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?
38:07
>> So when we got to about 10 million in ARR I think there's this feeling for me which was we we knew we needed ways to help just continue to amplify you and spread the word about gamma.
38:16
spread the word about gamma. I think it was already working in terms of the organic virality virality was there and so we do 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
38:35
valuable and I think sometimes is sometime 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 started incorporated the company which was again like back 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
38:55
We could put up a landing page and just feel like okay you 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.
39:04
There wasn't that many like the art direction was very limited in scope.
39:07
there wasn't much when it came to like voice and tone.
39:11
And so, you know, it was um it was something that we we knew was good enough to start, but it wasn't scalable.
39:18
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.
39:23
Like you're kind of, you know, this this DNA is something where you can you can imagine creating tons of content around it all feeling pretty cohesive.
39:30
And I don't I think that needs to be done by design.
39:32
Like you're really thinkful about every single element like what is the art direction you want to go with?
39:37
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
39:54
creative director internally partner with Smith and Diction and amazing agency that has helped you know you know folks like Perplexity also do their rebrand or their initial brand and we work we 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
40:14
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 on, you know, for performance marketing assets for influencers to be able to use and showcase in their content.
40:28
And so you're going from like, you know, tiny pieces of content to all of a sudden every week we're testing thousands of pieces of of creative.
40:34
And you cannot do that if you don't feel confident that as you're replicating like you you have that sort of cohesive feel.
40:41
So for us that we realized it was going to be necessary and it's why we invested so much and ended up being I mean way more expensive way more timeconuming 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.
40:55
>> I love how many things you did that feel like this wouldn't this would will not work out.
40:59
uh building a startup within the presentation space, doing a whole rebrand in the middle of scaling.
41:05
Uh also just reworking the entire product after you launched and just like rethinking the whole thing.
41:11
Like all these things everyone's always like, "No, this is not how we went."
41:14
And interestingly worked out for you guys.
41:17
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.
41:27
I don't I haven't heard of much of like how to actually do this and what actually works.
41:32
Talk about that as a broad growth uh 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.
41:42
So yeah, just give us the big picture.
41:44
>> Yeah, I think a lot of founders assume that uh with influencer marketing, it's it's almost like turnkey.
41:48
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 it's all done. you're ready to go.
41:58
And I think the reality is like going back to like this founder marketing mindset is like well you're going to set yourself up for success if you actually are super involved in that entire process.
42:09
So for us what this meant was like all the initial influencers I onboarded manually myself.
42:13
Um 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.
42:23
You want to be able to have them tell your story but in their voice, right?
42:27
And they can't do that if you're not willing to put in that investment.
42:31
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.
42:40
And so we would 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.
42:50
I figure it's going to work great for your audience."
42:52
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.
43:05
They want to be able to showcase tools that actually they would use or they are using.
43:10
And how do you do that in an authentic way?
43:12
Like, you can't really fake that.
43:14
You really need to spend the time doing that.
43:15
And just like you would onboard a customer, you onboard an influencer the same way.
43:19
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 if if you're not then they're just going to treat it like uh you know any other project, ship it and be done with it.
43:30
If you invest in that relationship, you know, guess what?
43:34
They'll they'll be back to actually post about you again.
43:36
And like you're all of a sudden having this sort of uh you know this relationship that actually can build over time.
43:41
I think that's really where the where the magic is.
43:43
Like too many people discount that initial piece. >> This is awesome.
43:46
To be clear, influencer marketing essentially uh a person with a following on say Tik Tok, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever gets paid in some way to promote your product.
43:54
That's how you describe that's the simple way to understand influencer marketing. Yeah. >> Yes.
44:00
That's definitely the simple way.
44:01
And I I'd say you know there's definitely different um you know levels you 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.
44:14
we're gonna, you know, choose like five or six that we feel like are really like the taste makers in the space and put all of our money into like just help, you know, having them talk about our product.
44:23
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?
44:39
Like they don't feel like like that product is not connected really to them in any way.
44:42
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.
44:54
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
45:12
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
45:30
They all come together and talk about, okay, what are the things that are going to actually improve, you know, my job next next school season?
45:36
And, you know, obviously during this AI wave, a lot of those have been, okay, what are the AI tools that just save me a ton of time?
45:42
And so, if you can start actually tapping into these pockets of like echo chambers, that's even better.
45:46
Like that it doesn't have to be this flashy, you know, like well-known influencer.
45:50
It's actually just this person that has an audience that where people like really trust what they say and uh and that's amazing that that ends up becoming this sort of you know uh wildfire that can spread really really fast.
46:02
>> And what's like the dollar amount these folks get?
46:04
It's like a few hundred bucks, few thousand bucks, something like that. >> Yeah.
46:07
Few hundred to low thousands, little single digit thousands.
46:11
>> What are how do you find these folks? Is there tools they use?
46:12
Is it just like a bunch of manual searching and and looking?
46:17
>> Yeah, in the very beginning it was all manual.
46:19
uh a lot of cold outreach and then we ended up finding a couple different things.
46:24
One is a platform, a YC company called First Collab.
46:25
Um that has been amazing.
46:28
They basically do all the automated outbound for you.
46:29
Plus, you can help them, you know, actually create profiles or personas of of different creators.
46:36
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.
46:42
So, they've been amazing, really great to work with.
46:44
Um, and then we've also found um, small agencies to also help kind of augment that.
46:50
Like I look for, you know, agencies that are super young and hungry.
46:54
These are people that, you know, are are uh, social, they're native to social media.
46:58
And so, you know, they really understand it and they can really be able to bring in uh, creators that, you know, are great to work with.
47:04
And I think part of it is like if you find creators that are great to work with, every everything else becomes easy.
47:09
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.
47:16
So you kind of find a few different things either agencies or platforms that can help you actually scale this thing up.
47:22
>> And these when they post they they're generally transparent about this is a paid promotion, right?
47:26
They're not just pretending I found this tool and I love it. >> Cool. >> Yeah. Exactly right. >> Okay.
47:32
And so how about how much impact did this lever of influencer marketing have on your growth say from 10 to 100?
47:39
like is this the biggest lever of growth other than just word of mouth people continuing to share it?
47:44
>> Yeah, so uh word of mouth has definitely been the biggest.
47:45
So when we look at kind of all kind of new subscriber growth over 50% of this is is word of mouth.
47:52
It's either people searching you direct coming direct entering gamma.
47:54
direct coming direct entering gamma.app app or going through search and and typing in gamma like a branded keyword search um where they're looking for gamma they've heard about gamma but I think for us social media and influencer specifically has always been an amplifier so every time we invest in
48:11
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 will get another 1.5
48:24
actually one point will get another 1.5 five 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 uh understand it but like with influencer marketing because why it's so effective you know we we all know you know Dumbar's number which is you know
48:39
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 recommend something there there is a sort of halo effect right you learn to trust them there a lot of these influencers the reason why they share care so much about their lives is because they want to be in your network. They want you to feel
48:58
They want you to feel super close.
48:59
And once you feel super close, you trust them to actually, you know, share things that are going to be useful.
49:05
And so when they recommend a tool, there is this sort of halo effect where it doesn't feel like it's coming from a stranger.
49:10
It feels like it's coming from a friend.
49:11
And that's where every time we've spent money there, you actually see this amplification.
49:15
It's like, okay, that's kind of interesting.
49:18
You wouldn't necessarily expect that, but um for us, it's been this sort of amplifier from from yeah, the very beginning.
49:23
This is so fun to hear about.
49:25
I've not heard this level of detail on how influencer marketing works and how to make it work.
49:28
A few more questions here.
49:30
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.
49:36
It wasn't all in the same time.
49:37
It was like you know you find basically in the beginning you do in the very very beginning we had a small budget.
49:41
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.
50:03
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.
50:16
>> I think there's a lot of value there.
50:17
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.
50:29
They're not going to feel like an extension of their team if if one, they've never met you, and two, you've never even told them really how the product works.
50:36
They just they're forced to kind of go to your website to figure it all out.
50:39
Those are going to be, you know, uh, not a whole lot of, you know, love that they're feeling from from from the outset.
50:46
>> So, what I'm hearing is, uh, quality over quantity, especially when you're getting started.
50:50
And then there's this other piece of niche, which I think is very counterintuitive.
50:53
Instead of going to large large influencers with a huge audience, it's good to folks that are small.
50:58
What's like a audience size roughly that you think is ideal for this sort of what niche just means?
51:05
>> Honestly, I don't think there's a minimum because even with, you know, platforms like Tik Tok, they often times are giving you credit for a brand new account.
51:11
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 Tik Tok is like a massive win for me, they're going to be more invested in it.
51:25
And so there there really isn't a minimum.
51:26
A lot of these platforms are trying to shift to to kind of the same thing where they really reward new creators on the platform.
51:32
And so you could have a small audience, it doesn't really matter.
51:35
You could have 10,000 followers, that's also good.
51:36
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 has a really good chance of actually taking off.
51:46
>> That's such a good point with TikTok where it's not follower related.
51:47
It's it's if it's useful and people find it uh clickable or whatever, likable, viewable, uh it'll it'll the algorithm will spread it to a lot of people. Such a good point. >> Totally. >> Okay.
52:00
There's a couple more points you made in the tweet that I want to make sure we highlight.
52:02
So, one is you made this point that 90% of your reach in influencer marketing comes from less than 10% of people.
52:07
Is there anything there that you think is important for people to hear?
52:11
>> Yeah, I mean this just goes back to it's it's you hard to know where that 10% is going to come from.
52:15
So, you kind of just have to cast a super wide net, right?
52:18
you can sort of I think uh try to again trick yourself into thinking you're you're great at picking creators or you're great at telling them how to like post about your stuff.
52:26
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 I was not a good predictor of that.
52:42
I was not smart enough to actually know which ones would take off.
52:44
I just knew that we had to play the sort of numbers game to make it work.
52:49
>> 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.
52:54
You recommend 10 to 20,000 a month over 6 months and just trying this.
53:00
It sounds like you were doing like 20 to 30 creators a month.
53:01
Is that the right framework for how to just start this thing and explore? >> Yeah, totally.
53:07
And I'd say it's not just that the budget's too small.
53:09
It would be that they put all their eggs in one basket.
53:12
So you can also easily blow that 20k on just one, you know, 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."
53:20
And and I think rather than doing that, you should be like, "Okay, that 20k, I could actually probably work with, you know, 40 different influencers and see what actually works." and across the 40.
53:30
I'm going to try to find a 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 and, you know, double down.
53:42
Like, if educators are working, go with educators.
53:43
If consultants are working, go with consultant, find more consultants because there going to be more there.
53:48
I think that's where the uh putting all your eggs in one basket is just probably the shest 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.
54:00
>> I feel like this whole podcast conversation could be just about this one lever.
54:03
So much I want to keep talking about, but there's more questions here because this is so useful and interesting.
54:07
you had this line in your tweet about how verality 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 leading into that messaging. Talk about that.
54:20
>> This goes back to obviously if you're you're testing a bunch you'll finally find that sort of you know post or set of posts actually go viral.
54:26
Going back to yeah just the fundamentals like make it easy for your influencers to be able to tell your story and their voice.
54:32
One thing we did, you know, we open sourced our basically our entire brand. We have brand. gamma.
54:38
app which is everything about our brand, our voice and tone, our art direction, what we use in midjourney to create the sort of art direction that we have so that a creator can can do the same, right?
54:49
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 that they have all of that.
54:55
And I think that going back to like this notion of like just make it dead simple for them, remove friction.
55:00
they already have enough to like on their plate to have to figure out.
55:04
Don't make it any harder than it is.
55:06
And if you remove friction, then it's like, okay, you get into this rhythm of adding creators is easy.
55:11
Having them post is create easy, reviewing what's working, what's not is easy.
55:14
And if you're able to do that relentlessly over many, many months, then all of a sudden, like hitting the sort of viral post is 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.
55:25
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 welloiled machine at that point.
55:38
>> Is there a platform you find most helpful for the stuff you guys are doing?
55:41
Is it like Tik Tok, Instagram, LinkedIn something else?
55:45
>> 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 sub substantially higher.
55:53
substantially higher. 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
56:06
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
56:22
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.
56:29
You'll figure out many of these things will follow the power a power law.
56:33
So, it's like, you know, one or two channels are going to be the most important for you.
56:36
Uh, for instance, Twitter for us hasn't been that impactful.
56:38
And I think for tools like notion, they've been really really impactful.
56:42
You're not going to really know.
56:43
And so, just test and then double down on the ones that really move the needle for your product.
56:48
>> I think that many people listening now are like, "Wait, LinkedIn posts are sponsored sometimes? I didn't know that.
56:52
Uh what's like how do you know if it's a sponsored post or like a hashtagsponsored or something like that?
56:56
How do they communicate this?
56:57
>> Usually they'll say, you know, they're a partner or yeah, basically it is sponsored in some form or you know they'll they'll hashtag, you know, ad or you know something along those lines.
57:06
So um that's probably the the way you'll you'll see it the most. >> Cool.
57:12
By the way, I don't do this sort of stuff.
57:13
If you ever see me on LinkedIn, I'm not doing any paid stuff, just so people know.
57:16
And I don't plan to do that.
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58:30
Let's come back to this brand point.
58:30
So, one of your big lessons is invest in brand before you go heavy into paid ads and performance marketing.
58:37
I imagine you do some ads at this point on Facebook and Google and things like that. Yeah, we run ads.
58:42
Uh, 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.
58:52
I very much follow kind of the the sort of the thought that brand marketing is performance marketing.
58:57
Like everything is some form of performance marketing.
59:01
It just not might have not be as attributable.
59:03
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.
59:12
And I think um as a company scales, you have to invest in both.
59:14
And ideally, they work really, really well together.
59:17
Like the more you invest in brand marketing, it strengthens your performance marketing.
59:20
This goes back to like having enough creative to even test.
59:23
If you're too limited in scope and you don't have a brand, you feel like you can actually amplify.
59:27
You're handicapping your ability to actually have a good performance marketing program.
59:32
I love that heristic of how do you know if you are underinvested in brand is if you're limited in the number of ideas you can try in performance marketing like is are your totally >> 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.
59:52
Yeah, it's like bas b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b 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 and you kind of have to go back to the drawing board?
1:00:04
>> 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.
1:00:09
That's like the fear I think everyone has when they hear this, like, oh, I don't have time for a rebrand. Well, >> yeah.
1:00:14
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.
1:00:24
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 it'll probably be all right.
1:00:31
Yeah, I mean I I do think it's probably more geared toward anything that's a little bit more uh proumer 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 is happens way before they even drop into your product.
1:00:48
It might be they see an ad or they see a billboard or they see something.
1:00:51
I was like, "Okay, that piqu my interest a little bit."
1:00:55
And then you need some sort of like symmetric messaging and that they see there's some symmetry in that they see the ad, they then they drop into the product, they land on your website, they it feels cohesive and it feels like, okay, this is this is interesting.
1:01:07
I'm going to go all the way through to sign up and then maybe actually start using the product.
1:01:10
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.
1:01:18
They might just hear about it through you know colleague and and then sign up for it and then go through huge procurement process and then it's like okay may maybe it matters but probably not so much as as like for a product where the brand can have so many different touch points.
1:01:33
>> I want to talk about some uh kind of broader things that have worked to help you grow.
1:01:37
But before we do that I just want to visualize the pie chart of how gamma grows say post 10 million ARR.
1:01:40
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 GMA. Go check it out. Sign up.
1:01:52
Then it feels like the second biggest bucket is influencer marketing kind of social stuff.
1:01:57
And then is the third performance/paid marketing? >> Yep, that's right. Yeah. >> Cool.
1:02:04
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?
1:02:18
>> I I would just have two recommendations.
1:02:20
Like one, going back to my initial piece of advice, which is don't invest until you have word of mouth.
1:02:25
Don't fool yourself into thinking that you'll solve other problems by just starting to ramp up a performance marketing program.
1:02:30
Like just get the word of mouth piece first.
1:02:34
so that you have you're coming into this program with some tailwinds and then start ramping it up.
1:02:38
The second piece is like set some constraints.
1:02:40
You don't want your product to h to be at a point where more than 50% of your your acquisitions are coming through paid acquisition.
1:02:49
I think if that is happening, your core growth engine is broken.
1:02:54
And it, you know, feeds right back to point number one, which is like if you if your core growth engine is broken, you just have this leaky bucket.
1:03:03
you're trying to spend so much money building top of the funnel, people are not making it all the way through.
1:03:08
Something else should be fixed before you really try to dial it up.
1:03:09
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 c core growth engine is actually working.
1:03:17
>> When you said the first point about uh 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.
1:03:29
And like 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 if 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.
1:03:44
>> 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 be for you to feel like okay we actually have organic growth as a major growth engine.
1:03:54
Yeah, I mean I think this comes back to maybe just how maybe aggressive you want to be.
1:03:58
You know, I think just rough, you know, heristic is the more the better.
1:04:02
If it's over 50%, I think that's great.
1:04:04
If it's like approaching that, good.
1:04:05
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.
1:04:11
But everything else becomes harder and harder.
1:04:16
If you re rely on paid acquisition to be the main growth engine, you should be prepared for things like CAC, like customer acquisition cost to keep going up and the the more you're trying to reach like a new audience.
1:04:27
It gets more and more expensive.
1:04:29
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.
1:04:33
And so that's where it's it's like 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.
1:04:44
And so anticipate that and give yourself a better chance at actually being able to sustain that growth long term. >> Important advice. Okay.
1:04:50
There's a couple more elements you've shared that were key to Gamma's growth.
1:04:55
One is sharing prototypes with users before you ship.
1:05:01
What does that look like? What does that mean? Why is that so powerful?
1:05:04
>> Yeah, I mean this for us was a huge unlock.
1:05:06
You know, going back to like early days when you're just trying to get your product into anybody's hands.
1:05:12
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.
1:05:17
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 um but have zero skin in the game.
1:05:30
They do not care at all whether or not your product succeeds.
1:05:34
They're just in it to test it.
1:05:37
And you you know for us it was like people that have made slide decks or make slide decks regularly.
1:05:40
Let's drop them into Gamma.
1:05:42
Give them very little context.
1:05:43
We just tell you, hey, this is an alternative to PowerPoint. Go ahead and try it.
1:05:47
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.
1:05:52
Like describe what you're seeing.
1:05:54
Tell us what you're trying to do.
1:05:56
We'll give you maybe a few different tasks like oh create, you know, create a piece of content.
1:06:01
And when you watch them do that and also hear what they're saying, you just immediately feel the pain.
1:06:07
Like all the places they're struggling and all the places are so confused by like what they're seeing.
1:06:15
And you sort of then can internalize that pain and say, "Okay, we're going back and we have to fix this.
1:06:21
This is like not usable."
1:06:21
Like we, you know, we oftentimes are dog fooding everything.
1:06:25
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.
1:06:30
But when you start actually hearing other people describe their usage of the product, that's like a gift.
1:06:35
Like you're all of a sudden you're like, "Okay, now I know where to actually spend the time."
1:06:38
People aren't even getting to the third screen.
1:06:41
They're stuck on the first screen because they can't even find the button that we think is like so dead obvious.
1:06:46
And so let's go back and actually re-engineer, rearchitect that piece of it.
1:06:49
And we've done that for for everything.
1:06:51
Landing pages, onboarding experience, new feature launches, you know, export, sharing, every single piece of that such that, you know, we can actually see where things are working, we're not.
1:07:01
And then every time we'll learn something that's kind of painful, but obvious.
1:07:08
How do you scale this sort of thing?
1:07:08
How do you run every new big idea, new feature change by people?
1:07:12
Do you have like a closed beta group?
1:07:14
Uh do you use some platform?
1:07:17
How do you actually do this?
1:07:19
There's a couple great platforms.
1:07:20
So, um, voice panel, which is also YC company, full disclosure, angel investor, and then there's also, um, you know, platforms like user testing that really help you, um, source and, you know, find find these people that fit again that persona or profile you're looking for.
1:07:36
So, in our case, like people that are in a specific job function or, you know, create decks regularly.
1:07:40
And so, you can use those platforms to really scale up these programs pretty fast.
1:07:44
And then once your team knows how to use those platforms like we would we would have an idea in the morning and in the afternoon we're already running you know a pretty full scale experiment or like you know a research study and and by the evening or by the next day we can actually go through all of it together.
1:07:59
So it's pretty fast once you have it set up.
1:08:02
It's more about like how do you get the program uh you know onboarded the right way.
1:08:05
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.
1:08:13
We called it the gambitor program which is uh we put put them into a separate slack workspace and that was a place for us to kind of share very very early prototypes like wire flame wireframes sometimes they're functional prototypes and get them to get some get some initial feedback as well.
1:08:30
feedback as well. This definitely helps with more sort of you know 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
1:08:46
functionality and then we can also watch them struggle and hear how they're struggling with the product and so that was 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 build a prototype. Do you build it with
1:09:04
Do you build it with like like AI prototypy tools like cursor lovable something like that? >> Yeah. Yeah.
1:09:11
That or it could be Yeah.
1:09:11
I mean uh we're lucky a lot of our you know designers also know how to code.
1:09:15
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.
1:09:24
So you you have an idea in the morning, you build a prototype using various tools.
1:09:28
You 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.
1:09:45
I mean I think this is even more probably helpful for you know 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.
1:10:07
I I feel like that's like it's almost like a a way to speedrun a lot of that early sort of you're in the idea maze.
1:10:14
You think you have something that could kind of work.
1:10:15
How do you actually break through so that you know people are actually finding value in what you're building?
1:10:20
>> 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.
1:10:26
It sounds so hard and heavy lifty and in the way you're describing it is like very automated, very very quick to do.
1:10:33
You don't have to go think about finding random people to in a coffee shop.
1:10:38
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 Yeah.
1:10:44
helps you just move way faster.
1:10:47
>> 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.
1:10:53
>> I I don't think any of the ones where we, you know, we always try to kind of chunk it down.
1:10:58
So like none of the things we're testing earlier on are like these massive features.
1:11:01
They're always like an inception or like a starting point of like this could be something interesting.
1:11:06
And then we take that initial learning and actually then build the the product around it.
1:11:09
It's never like, oh, we spent like four months working on this thing.
1:11:12
Let's see if anybody actually wants it.
1:11:13
It's almost like we always start super early and a bunch of ideas die right away, but they're still pretty small ideas.
1:11:18
And then the ones that kind of pass the initial test, you start building towards something that could be hopefully more gamechanging or much more value ad.
1:11:25
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.
1:11:33
What's really interesting about you and the way your company operates, you guys are exoptimizely people.
1:11:38
So you're very uh versed in experimentation.
1:11:41
A lot of people talk about AB testing experimentation as something that doesn't make sense for a startup because the scale is so low.
1:11:49
What I'm hearing here and I know this is something you talk about is just the there is actually a lot of way to a lot of ways to think experimentally even in the early stages.
1:11:57
Is there something more there you think is important for people to hear?
1:12:00
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.
1:12:10
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.
1:12:18
You know, as a founder, you're always trying to build conviction.
1:12:22
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.
1:12:33
And sometimes you have enough data to be statistically significant.
1:12:37
Sometimes it's more of a, hey, we at least were able to gut check this a little bit and get some qualitative feedback.
1:12:41
I think that's still valuable.
1:12:43
It shouldn't be this sort of like all or nothing like it has to be stat sig for it to be useful.
1:12:46
I don't think that's true.
1:12:48
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.
1:12:55
And we actually had two different ideas.
1:12:58
We were uh parallel pathing kind of at the same time.
1:13:02
So, of course, we had, you know, presentations reimagining how people were creating presentations and we al actually had the separate idea which we called uh the lobby which is a virtual office.
1:13:12
virtual office. Uh 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 would feel pretty magical and we worked on both for six months we
1:13:28
worked on both the virtual office and the presentation product for for six months we would dog food both so like oftentimes we'd be in the virtual office presenting the the presentation tool and kind of use both and after six months we came to this conclusion usion that we wanted to go all in on the presentation tool. And the reason was when we looked
1:13:46
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 experience, like actually being able to work shoulder-to-shoulder with our colleagues and having this environment where, you know, you really feel like you're building together.
1:14:04
Like virtual office could get pretty good, but we would never beat that.
1:14:07
And so we were almost like limited in our own imagination about how good could this product be versus the the the presentation product.
1:14:15
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.
1:14:22
And we were just so like so energized by it.
1:14:24
And so for us that was like uh 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 would pour sort of you know all of our blood sweat and tears into making it great because we saw the potential in it.
1:14:42
>> 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 co times.
1:14:47
I'm like okay this is the future we're all going to be remote and let's work remotely and >> virtual offices.
1:14:52
There's a startup in 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.
1:15:02
>> It was just like these little avatars.
1:15:04
It was like a little game where you walk around go to little virtual >> we had some Yeah, it was it was a fun product to work on.
1:15:08
So uh but yeah >> yeah it's interesting how we just reverted to the base back to like the mean of just like people are in offices again.
1:15:16
That was a fun fun experience although things have changed.
1:15:18
So just to uh highlight this point you made that I think is really powerful.
1:15:24
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.
1:15:33
that make it super easy. We always hear okay you have you have a mock you have a prototype yeah testable 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
1:15:51
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 >> uh 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 user research sessions, things like that. Super cool. Super cool. Okay.
1:16:14
Is there any other big lesson or lever that has helped you grow to today's hundred million R2, $2 billion company?
1:16:24
We've talked about influencer marketing.
1:16:26
We talked about testing prototypes, uh, investing in brand and a little bit of paid growth. Anything else?
1:16:30
Certainly for us the ability to sort of adapt and move fast in this environment.
1:16:35
You know I attribute a lot of you know what we've been able to accomplish to a few things.
1:16:40
One is we do have a small team and a lean team one that's able to move really fast.
1:16:46
I think that is that means by by default like we have to look for a lot of levers where a small team can do a lot of different things.
1:16:53
lot of different things. So we can talk one you know obviously about like how do you construct like 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 it's been a huge unlock right because it allows you to not only you know test things and like you know iterate a ton allows you
1:17:12
to build much more efficiently and so we've been 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 of experimentation was in kind of core infrastructure to us because the temptation would be you just throw the most expensive model at, you know, every job and assume that's going to work. And the reality is that never
1:17:31
And the reality is that never is the case.
1:17:33
And so for us to be able to actually test across, you know, 20 different models in production today, always trying to align kind of value we're delivering to our customers with, you know, our ability to actually scale this operation.
1:17:45
this operation. that's been at the sort of in the background and not always things that are easily you know quantifiable or things that you know you're sharing broadly but it is kind of core to our DNA and again going back to a team that came from optimiz you know probably not surprising but I do think that's been part of our sort of ability
1:18:01
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 AB tests like you data can create really beautiful products and experiences that aren't just feeling like some kind of microoptimized flow. >> Totally. Yeah. And just going back to >> Totally. Yeah.
1:18:19
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.
1:18:29
I'm not going to kind of uh kind of throw in whether or not yes or no but I do think it makes a difference.
1:18:34
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.
1:18:40
of our team was product designers. And I think that's like a un sort of uh 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 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
1:19:00
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
1:19:11
solve them in a novel way and u 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 >> Okay.
1:19:21
I definitely want to spend more time on hiring before we get to that.
1:19:25
>> You've touched on this kind of uh concept that you guys are what many describe uh a GPT rapper company.
1:19:29
You essentially sit on top of other models do some cool stuff uh charge for that.
1:19:38
There's historically and there's been a big shift here.
1:19:40
Historically, there's a sense that, okay, uh, you're just this thin layer on top of the model.
1:19:44
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 uh, charging you guys to do all this AI work?
1:19:55
Uh, 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 a place you can build a business anymore.
1:20:06
talk about just what you've learned about this concept of being a GPT rapper and how maybe what people may not be understanding about the business opportunity there.
1:20:14
>> You know, when you think about maybe just um literally only being a rapper on like you know, one model or you know, one provider, yeah, maybe there's only, you know, limited amount of utility or value ad, 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.
1:20:30
It's maybe 20 plus models powering all different parts of the product.
1:20:34
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 you know models that have
1:20:45
been around that are cheaper like you're doing a lot to really you know your your job is to again like align value you know maximize the value you're delivering to to the end user uh in a way that's sustainable for you as a business. And so there's a lot more to
1:20:58
And so there's a lot more to that.
1:21:00
And so for us, you know, we've always been passionate about being very close to our our customers, our users who for them their job to be done is, you know, visual communication, visual storytelling.
1:21:10
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.
1:21:23
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?
1:21:30
Uh what would that earn you in terms of a customer that wants to come back to your product?
1:21:34
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 you're delivering on that promise of a product experience that's way better than the the status quo.
1:21:50
And I think if you can be laser focused on it doesn't matter if you're a rapper or not.
1:21:53
Like what is the technology you're doing in applying that um makes a real difference.
1:21:58
So that's the that's the ultimate goal.
1:22:01
>> 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 let's just I'll keep using that term.
1:22:08
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.
1:22:15
So what I love about what you're describing here is kind of like the almost like a heruristic that'll tell you if there's if there's an opportunity how to be successful as a GPT rapper company.
1:22:26
I'm putting in air quotes.
1:22:26
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.
1:22:37
>> I mean I think the most important thing is you know before you even talk about the technology.
1:22:41
So we're we're we're skipping to the part where you're trying to, you know, apply the most interesting models or technology to solve some problem.
1:22:48
Start with solving the problem you actually care about.
1:22:51
You know, I think it's very tempting right now to chase shiny objects.
1:22:54
Like a founder might be able to gain some initial traction by literally being that GPT rapper and like solving any sort of problem and like you starting to see some traction and then you just go with that.
1:23:04
But before you do that, you should think about is this a problem I can invest 5 to 10 years into actually solving?
1:23:10
do I care deeply enough about it?
1:23:12
Uh because if you can't, 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.
1:23:23
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.
1:23:30
Um we really feel like this idea of like visual communication, visual storytelling matters.
1:23:36
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
1:23:50
you know uh the favor of their their manager or their boss and so we felt like that that was the wrong you know that didn'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
1:24:06
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.
1:24:12
And of course, AI has been again like this gift where yes, you can apply that to solving this job.
1:24:18
You can also apply that, you know, AI to many different jobs.
1:24:20
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 endto-end workflow.
1:24:28
the sort of endto-end 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 and the moment they
1:24:41
start creating it to the moment they ship it and send it to you know their boss that endto-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. So some of the elements
1:24:55
So some of the elements I'm hearing here is one is just like uh 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.
1:25:12
>> Um two is understand the problem really really deeply and have real empathy for the people trying to solve this problem.
1:25:18
you had this problem that you uh creating presentations at your previous job.
1:25:21
So you understood it and I imagine you genet understand even more deeply now that you work on this.
1:25:25
So essentially like care really deeply uh 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.
1:25:43
talk a little bit more about that just because you know people may think oh okay like I could just go to open just chat to btr 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
1:25:59
every step of you know the creation process for for a user so the moment of the initial idea to maybe creating an outline of of what you want to you know present or articulate to creating the first draft like what do we you know show you there to edit ing the content like, okay, I have a first draft, but it's only 60% of the way there. How do I
1:26:15
How do I get it to 100% of the way there?
1:26:17
Those are all things that might require different models.
1:26:21
different models. like the initial outline might be better served by something that's purpose-built for actually creating, you know, the best outline, the best narrative, the best story arc versus one where you're actually going back and saying, you know, Gamma, our agent, can actually go
1:26:35
and review your entire deck and say, actually, if I were to add suggestions, I would say, you know, you may want want to change the visual layout on these set of cards, and you may want to actually change the imagery or the visuals for for these cards to match, you know, everything else. These are things that
1:26:48
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
1:27:04
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 uh it's I don't know imagining some kind of storyboard and then it's figure out the model and level of model and prompt for for that model to achieve each of these steps uh as best as possible. >> Totally. Yeah. And it applies to you >> Totally. Yeah.
1:27:23
And it applies to you know even on the visual side finding the right image.
1:27:26
I think certain models have great at photorealistic output versus others you know want more of the artistic vibe or like a you know something that feels more abstract.
1:27:33
And so again you can choose the right model for the right job.
1:27:37
It doesn't mean that you'll never use other models.
1:27:39
you'll never use other models. is just like as you're going through that workflow certain the the content might dictate you know what's the best use case in that particular you know 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
1:27:55
>> which models are you finding most uh useful uh in in the work like 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 um and so this is where you almost You have to have the mindset that you can be adaptable. We're just getting
1:28:12
We're just getting to the point where there's going to be more personalization to is going back to like, you know, a consultant's going to have different needs than an educator.
1:28:21
If an educator is trying to engage their students, they might want to have, you know, language or visuals are more animated and that that makes sense.
1:28:28
Consultant can't get away with that.
1:28:29
They might need something that, you know, is much more structured or information dense.
1:28:32
And so, again, like how do we actually be the same tool that can serve both of those needs?
1:28:37
I think that's where it becomes interesting.
1:28:38
And it's almost like there is isn't necessarily even a quote unquote best model.
1:28:42
It's like what's the right model for that right for that particular user.
1:28:46
That's actually much harder problem to solve and we're just starting to you know trying to embrace some of that.
1:28:48
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.
1:28:58
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 for us was was pretty powerful >> there. Okay.
1:29:06
There's two more things I want to talk about. One is pricing.
1:29:07
how you guys figured out your approach to pricing.
1:29:11
You guys started monetizing really early and that feels like such an important piece to AI startups because you're spending real money on an inference and other things.
1:29:19
And then I want to talk about hiring.
1:29:21
So in terms of pricing, when did you decide it was time to really start charging?
1:29:26
And then how did you pick your approach to pricing, your actual price?
1:29:32
>> Yeah, so uh we kind of stumbled into having to do pricing and packaging.
1:29:34
Um, I mentioned our big AI launch in in March 2023. This was pre-revenue.
1:29:38
So, we wanted just to get the, you know, we focused all of our effort on the first 30 seconds.
1:29:45
Literally all hands on deck just trying to get that right.
1:29:48
And we spent zero time on actually monetization.
1:29:51
So, we, you know, we had a credit system.
1:29:54
All new users get 400 credits.
1:29:56
Once they burn through those credits, there was actually nothing more you could do with AI.
1:30:00
It kind of just got cut off.
1:30:01
And so intercom for us was just blowing up with people saying how do I purchase more credits like I I want to keep using this thing and a very fair question.
1:30:10
So basically all of April we ended up having to do a quick you know sort of pricing and packaging exercise.
1:30:17
Uh we did a couple different things.
1:30:17
We we did run a form of van westonorp which is just understanding what is the overall willingness to play >> and willingness to pay and so we we did use that.
1:30:27
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 survey a lot of our early users and and kind of ended up coming to a price point that was in the beginning we only had one plan type it was roughly like 20 bucks a month part of this was
1:30:46
also just realizing we we almost didn't need to overthink it too much because this is when the the initial wave of like AI companies and startups are coming out and products were coming out and you're almost uh end up becoming anchored buy what does chatbt charge because everyone becomes familiar with that price point and so we asked ourselves like how complicated do we
1:31:04
want to make it we always default to remove friction make it as easy as possible for a user to understand and so we end up coming up with like a similar price point and kind of ship that as the the v1 basically end of May 2023 and for us we wanted to see a couple things like okay we we have the initial price point is it uh economical for us like at the price point are we actually making money
1:31:25
and we monitor there for that for 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, you know, obviously headcount, but then also, you know, investing even more into inference costs, whatever we wanted to do to experiment broadly with AI. And so we've
1:31:43
experiment broadly with AI. And so we've always had that like you know pricing and packaging is is not only it does it not only need to be easy to understand for a user you know obviously you have to have like strong conversion rates but
1:31:55
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
1:32:05
>> What's interesting we had the head of Chad JBT on the podcast and he shared the way they picked Chad JBT's prices the Van Westonorp survey that they ran in Google forms. >> Totally. Yeah.
1:32:14
Yeah, I listened to that one.
1:32:15
Yeah, it was a great one.
1:32:16
>> What a that survey, man.
1:32:16
What a And not only just that survey being the It's like I'm imagining that XKCD comic with like the open source little uh I don't know block holding up the entire world like this one little piece of code.
1:32:30
Uh that's like the survey just like behind everything.
1:32:35
Uh but it's interesting how that one decision just created this ripple effect on all AI startups. 20 bucks a month.
1:32:40
Of course, that's what everyone's doing. >> Totally.
1:32:42
Who knows what would happen if they chose a different number, but here we are.
1:32:46
>> Everyone would be so much more rich.
1:32:48
It's just like 25 bucks someone.
1:32:48
Imagine the >> the GDP of growth. >> Yeah. >> From that. Oh man. Okay.
1:32:54
And then the way So is Ben Westonorp helped you pick a price point and then you said this conjoin analysis.
1:33:00
I 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.
1:33:07
>> And you started charging.
1:33:07
So was post product launch.
1:33:10
You launched with no paid features.
1:33:13
People were just like, I want to pay.
1:33:14
I want to keep using this.
1:33:16
You're like, okay, I guess we got to start charging. >> That's right. Yep.
1:33:19
>> Is there anything looking back, I guess, just like you'd wish you'd known uh 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?
1:33:28
>> Yeah, I mean, that's one that one's hard.
1:33:29
I think, you know, you you never want to obviously just throw something together without giving it much thought.
1:33:35
But for us, you know, we 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.
1:33:43
And I think there's there's maybe like two checkpoints of thinking about whether or not you feel like you have product market fit.
1:33:48
I think one checkpoint is organic growth.
1:33:52
The second is are people willing to pay for the product.
1:33:53
And I think if you pass both those, you feel like you've you've you've at least within some pocket of the market, you have some PMF.
1:33:59
Um so I I think you know those are both important questions to ask depending on your resources.
1:34:05
Ideally you can do kind of both and experiment a little bit along you know um 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.
1:34:15
>> 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.
1:34:19
It's not obvious with AI companies.
1:34:23
>> Well we also didn't have a choice because at that point runway was also low you know.
1:34:26
So it's like if we weren't making money well, you know, we would actually be in a tough spot.
1:34:31
>> 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.
1:34:36
Just we will deal with it and we'll figure out how to make money later. >> Totally. Yeah.
1:34:40
Within a couple months we had hit uh a million in ARR and became profitable.
1:34:44
And so those were 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.
1:34:53
I'm so excited to be telling the story. Uh, okay.
1:34:55
Final uh topic I want to talk about is hiring.
1:34:59
You have some really hot takes on hiring.
1:35:01
Clearly, it's worked out for you guys.
1:35:03
What are some things you've learned about hiring?
1:35:05
Well, what is your approach to hiring?
1:35:08
>> Yeah, so we had this mantra internally.
1:35:11
I mean, even before you know the the sort of AI launch for us, which was hire painfully slowly.
1:35:15
painfully slowly. And I think you know the temptation is once start you know things start working you to start let's 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
1:35:34
have high you know 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 So I think a lot of people hear this advice of stay lean, be efficient. You have some even more
1:35:49
You have some even more concrete pieces of advice here of just like what that looks like.
1:35:53
You have a huge uh I don't know philosophy of just like huge leverage per person.
1:35:57
You focus a lot on revenue per employee. Talk about that.
1:36:02
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 northstar.
1:36:07
It's not something that dictates our strategy per se.
1:36:11
Same thing with like profitability.
1:36:13
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 is like we care a ton about you know adding the right team members.
1:36:24
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.
1:36:29
If your goal is to double in headcount and like add 100 people to the company then that becomes the goal, right?
1:36:35
The goal is no longer to add the best people.
1:36:37
It's no longer to maintain a high quality bar.
1:36:38
the goal is to hit 100 people and that's that's everything everyone's focused on. So then guess what?
1:36:44
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 100 because 100 is going to help us get to the next phase of growth and the next phase of growth.
1:36:55
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 to really be, you know, this the type of person that represents Gamma.
1:37:07
our first 10 to 12 employees.
1:37:10
We spent so much time like really getting the DNA right.
1:37:12
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.
1:37:22
But that 10 needs to be all super cohesive.
1:37:23
You need to have the shared same shared values, same principles, same ambition, same vision.
1:37:28
And if you don't then like what are you even replicating? Right?
1:37:31
At that point you're just adding headcount.
1:37:32
And you know, you can easily just be adding headcount because they're chasing the next shiny startup to join.
1:37:37
And so for us, we really focused on that first 10.
1:37:39
That allows us to really have this, you know, this sort of community of of of like a teammates that that basically, you know, want to stick around.
1:37:52
A lot of founders think about, you know, not wanting to have a leaky bucket on the product side, but the same thing applies on the the team size, right?
1:37:57
If you have a leaky bucket, people are just constantly leaving revolving door.
1:38:02
That's a huge amount of cost.
1:38:02
The continuity cost is is massive and it's really hard to quantify and that you I mentioned our first 10 employees all 10 of them are still here today five years later, right?
1:38:11
And so that sort of continuity means that you have this tribal knowledge that sticks with you.
1:38:16
It means that people can continue building and having that sort of cohesive feeling.
1:38:20
So I think that's one piece is just like it's hard to quantify but I do think you know startups I would advise just to really be thoughtful about that like get that to a point where you really feel confident that as you're adding the next 10 and next hundred you're actually replicating the same DNA and not actually just adding a bunch of random people to the company.
1:38:39
>> One of your very specific piece of advice is hire generalists versus someone that's just like really deep in one thing.
1:38:44
Why why is that so important?
1:38:46
What does that look like?
1:38:46
This very much feels like the age of the generalist or the rise of the generalist.
1:38:49
Right now, when we think about, you know, uh a team that can be really flat, you want people that can you you you still want people that can be very spiky in certain areas.
1:39:00
So, for instance, obviously, you know, a product designer that knows how to code. That's great.
1:39:04
It allows you to actually span across many different domains.
1:39:05
And again, a 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 by default a lot of different hats.
1:39:15
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.
1:39:22
Each person plays a huge role.
1:39:24
They don't need to wait and ask for permission.
1:39:26
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 always sees it through.
1:39:32
And so for us, I do think this rise of the generalist is going to be important.
1:39:36
You can always augment that by working with contractors or agencies that are hyper specialized in certain areas.
1:39:42
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.
1:39:56
You know, we our head of marketing more recently launched this cool drone show uh in San Francisco.
1:40:00
We had like 4,000 people in San Francisco come. The mayor came by.
1:40:04
she created that entire project and managed that entire project end to end or herself, right?
1:40:11
While also managing the entire uh marketing team and so it's like this idea that a generalist is able to play all these different roles can still uh you know be super high impact for us.
1:40:19
It also goes handinhand with I I mentioned sort of this other um role which is the player coach.
1:40:26
Traditional management layer is like a manager manages a ton of people and that's kind of their c core focus.
1:40:32
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.
1:40:40
Um, this analogy came from or this mindset came from something I borrow from just the sports world in general because there's a lot of sports that just move incredibly fast like football for instance.
1:40:51
It moves really really fast.
1:40:52
And so you might have a coach that has that's calling in a play but the quarterback can actually make a last minute adjustment based on what he's seeing the defense do, right?
1:40:58
And so you want a player that is on the field that can adapt as needed.
1:41:02
And that way the coach doesn't have to call every single thing in.
1:41:06
He's just kind of giving you the general intent of what you want to run as the play.
1:41:10
And then the quarterback quarterback can still make the the adjustments.
1:41:12
And so all of our people leaders, our management layer is all folks that actually can make those adjustments.
1:41:18
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.
1:41:24
And they're still doing the work themselves, too.
1:41:28
they're so close to that they understand like what is the relative prioritization at all times.
1:41:31
at all times. So though both of those I think have been you know when I think about founders they they oftentimes think about innovation in the sense like we're going to innovate on product 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
1:41:50
company we want to build today what does it mean and when it comes to like the management later what 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 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
1:42:07
>> So what I'm hearing here is manager there's no pure managers at Gamma and your plan is to not have people that are just managing.
1:42:13
The idea is everyone even a manager is doing their own IC work. >> Yes.
1:42:19
>> And then the other piece of advice here is just generalists.
1:42:21
People that can do a lot of stuff.
1:42:22
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.
1:42:29
designers need to build stuff, market stuff, write some BRDs probably >> and I think I mean just one thing to add is like you know that's for where we are where where we are at today.
1:42:37
I think being adaptable means that you know certain things may evolve and change and like how the player coach model evolves you know and maybe in certain functions or as the team scales like that's not going to be practical everywhere.
1:42:49
I think the reality is like you just have to know and be willing to kind of adopt like different frameworks over time and like being honest with ourel with what's working, what's not.
1:42:59
I think we're constantly trying to, you know, learn and and evolve ourselves because I think, you know, we're doing it in a way that we don't believe it really has been done before and so we have to kind of pave our own path over time.
1:43:09
>> I love that giving yourself an out when when the time comes when you need to just hire managers.
1:43:14
>> A year later when you invite me back, I'll say, "Yeah, this is what we learned."
1:43:16
>> Yeah, that you know that makes sense.
1:43:18
That's probably going to happen.
1:43:18
It's like people are like, "We don't need product managers." And then, "Okay, I see. Maybe we do."
1:43:22
Uh, yeah, it makes sense.
1:43:24
One last piece I want to talk about is you have this really cool quote that you shared on Twitter.
1:43:28
When you find someone exceptional, bet big on them.
1:43:32
This is a big part of your philosophy is just like bed big on the people that are doing super well.
1:43:35
Just talk about what that looks like and why that's so important.
1:43:40
>> Yeah, I mean, this starts top of the funnel, which is like you meet candidates, you you decide who you know, you actually hire.
1:43:45
And so if you don't start with a high bar there, you know, going back to what is the goal?
1:43:49
The goal is to hit a hiring target versus like, you know, maintaining a super high quality, you know, hiring bar, you know, those are different goals.
1:43:57
And I don't think we've ever kind of dropped our bar.
1:44:00
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.
1:44:05
When they're when they're thriving, you just give them more and more resources.
1:44:09
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.
1:44:22
Like you never see a star player that says, "Actually, I want less playing time."
1:44:25
They want more time on the field.
1:44:27
They want to actually go after the hardest problems.
1:44:28
They want to be able to feel like they're making a huge impact.
1:44:31
And so if you have fewer, you know, exceptional teammates, um, 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.
1:44:49
And I think that for us has always been something that um, goes beyond just, you know, almost everything else.
1:44:55
Like we give people a chance to really thrive in this environment.
1:44:58
and um and we try to nurture that as as much as humanly possible every step of the way.
1:45:03
>> 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?
1:45:12
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 um when you're pitching u a potential candidate like does this feel like something where you're actually committed the
1:45:27
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
1:45:41
they'll go off and then the company you know 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 this sort of AI era you know folks like Dylan or Melanie Figma Canva you know Ivan at notion they've
1:45:59
been doing this for over a decade now they had many chances to just you know leave and you know 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 can kind of tell like is this something like the founders even care about? And um I think you're
1:46:14
And um 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.
1:46:24
>> Oh man, I feel like I keep saying this.
1:46:26
I feel like we could have at least five more hours of stuff to talk about.
1:46:28
Uh that'll be good content for when you come back and you're making a billion dollars a year.
1:46:33
Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, Grant, is there anything else that you think uh is important for people to hear?
1:46:43
Any last I don't know lesson you want to double down on?
1:46:46
Anything you want to leave listeners with?
1:46:48
>> Yeah, I mean just going back to the original story of um that was probably the ultimate low point.
1:46:51
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.
1:46:58
You know, I think throughout the journey, there's going to be those low moments.
1:47:01
And when I think about, you know, being a founder and uh working at a startup, you're honestly just trying to increase your luck surface area as much as possible.
1:47:10
And for me, luck surface area has two dimensions.
1:47:12
The first dimension is people.
1:47:15
Who are you surrounding yourself with that share your same ambition, share the same values, same principles, and find those people?
1:47:27
and then give yourself enough time to prove that you guys can, you know, accomplish great things.
1:47:31
I'm lucky to have two amazing co-founders.
1:47:33
We've been working on this thing for five years.
1:47:36
There's 0% chance we'd be where we are if I didn't have them.
1:47:38
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.
1:47:48
>> Well, it's clearly showing in the success you guys are having.
1:47:49
Grant, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? >> Yep. Yes.
1:47:56
All right, I've got five questions for you.
1:47:58
First question, what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people? >> Yeah.
1:48:06
So, I'll give um one that's for pre-product market fit folks and the one post product fit.
1:48:11
Pre-product market fit, I would say, is Shoe Dog, >> which is written by Phil Knight, founder of Nike.
1:48:17
And you know he talks about two things like one you should tra chase your sort of crazy ideas but these are these should be ideas you're you're you're passionate about like he was an athlete and so not surprisingly he focused a lot about you know creating tools or you know shoes in this case for for other athletes and was passionate about that.
1:48:36
And the the second thing he taught me was going back to the team thing.
1:48:39
He surrounded himself with other people that were super passionate about athletics and shoes as well.
1:48:43
And so the folks that he had as his as his his initial startup crew were all that.
1:48:47
And I think that gives gives you a chance of like 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.
1:48:57
Uh postp productduct 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.
1:49:05
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.
1:49:13
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.
1:49:21
>> Hamilton was on the podcast.
1:49:21
We'll link to that episode.
1:49:23
Uh I also love that book. Many people mention it. Next question.
1:49:27
Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed? >> Yeah.
1:49:31
Uh the Lazarus Project is one I'm a I'm a huge sucker for uh time travel and sci-fi.
1:49:37
So, this is one I just started watching and for me it has like all the right ingredients for a fun show.
1:49:44
>> Is there a product you recently discovered that you really love?
1:49:47
>> Yeah, I mentioned this already um voice panel.
1:49:49
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
1:50:01
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 uh wasting time on on kind of the wrong ideas or ideas where there's no market. >> Is there a life motto that you often
1:50:13
>> Is there a life motto that you often find yourself coming back to in work or in life? Yeah.
1:50:17
So there's this uh Chinese idiom that my mom used to say.
1:50:21
It's a gin zwa which the translation is a frog at the bottom of a well.
1:50:25
And the story is like there you know there's a frog at the bottom of the well.
1:50:30
He looks up every night and he sees the world and he imagines he you know he he knows everything about the world.
1:50:35
And then one day a bird comes along and describes all the things that he sees.
1:50:40
the ocean, the mountains, and the frog realizes that what he sees is just such a limited part of the world.
1:50:48
And you know, the bird asks like, "Do you want to come join me and kind of see the rest of it?" And so frog goes along.
1:50:53
And so for me, you know, I came from, you know, a pretty modest childhood.
1:50:57
You know, my parents, we we didn't have a whole lot.
1:50:59
And I think it would have been very easy to kind of have a very narrow kind of lens on the world, be like, "Oh, this is this is what it is."
1:51:06
But my mom never allowed me to do that.
1:51:08
She always pulled me to dream much bigger to say, "Hey, the world is vast.
1:51:13
It's your opportunity to seize it."
1:51:15
Like you have to go out there.
1:51:16
Don't have a narrow, you know, view of of what's possible. Always dream bigger.
1:51:21
And so for me, that's always carried through.
1:51:23
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.
1:51:30
>> That is so good and so important and so valuable in today's world where so much more is possible.
1:51:34
more is possible. just like most of what limits people it 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 is possible so that's such valuable thinking okay final question you help
1:51:49
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 uh consumer advertising uh concept which is you know one idea at a time. So, you
1:52:04
So, you know, this this notion of you give them one egg, someone can catch it.
1:52:09
Give them too many eggs, they're going to drop it.
1:52:12
So, don't try to uh uh throw too many concepts all at once. Keep it simple.
1:52:18
People will appreciate it.
1:52:18
And so, with every sort of presentation, like break it down into the core concepts.
1:52:21
Try to make sure you're covering one at a time.
1:52:25
And uh I think once you sort of see the through line there, then it becomes easy for it to package up in something that feels more cohesive.
1:52:32
>> Less is more, as they say. Totally.
1:52:35
>> Grant, two final questions.
1:52:35
Where can folks find you online?
1:52:37
Where can they find Gamma? What should they know?
1:52:38
Let's just like plug anything you want.
1:52:40
And then how can listeners be useful to you?
1:52:44
>> Yeah, so you can find me on both Twitter and LinkedIn DM's open.
1:52:46
Uh I uh honestly here just knowing how hard the the journey is in general, whether you're just thinking about a startup idea or you're deep into startup land.
1:52:54
Uh I want to be hopefully helpful.
1:52:56
Uh I'm going to be your hopefully your biggest cheerleader.
1:53:00
So let me know how I can help.
1:53:02
And then for us, like you know, we're always looking for feedback.
1:53:04
So if you're trying Gamma, it's falling short of your expectations, let us know.
1:53:07
We'd love to help in terms of just trying to make it better.
1:53:11
And uh yeah, really appreciate, you know, all the feedback and support along the way.
1:53:16
>> Grant, this was awesome.
1:53:16
I really appreciate you making time.
1:53:18
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 this. >> Thanks, Lenny. It's been a blast.
1:53:25
>> It's been a blast for me, too. Bye, everyone.
1:53:29
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1:53:29
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1:53:41
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1:53:49
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