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

0:00 I'm in my third pitch in. I get to the very end of the pitch feeling pretty good about myself. The investor pauses a little bit and then just says, That is a has to be the worst pitch. Worst idea I have ever heard. Not only are you trying to go against incumbents, you're going against incumbents that have massive distribution. You are never going to succeed. You guys are at over a hundred million ARR now, worth over two billion dollars. One of the most interesting ways you guys grew early on was influencer marketing. All the initial influencers I onboarded manually myself. I was jump on a call with each one of them. So that they understood what gamma represented, how to use the product, you want to be able to have them tell your story, but in their voice. I think a lot of people think influencer marketing and they'll think these big trendy creators, people that have a million followers, this is the wrong approach. You basically give them a script to read immediately feels like an ad. That product is not connected really to them in any way. You're much better doing the hard thing, which is hard to scale, finding the thousands of micro influencers that have an audience where your product may be is actually useful. People really trust what they say. That ends up becoming this wildfire that can spread really, really fast. Something you talk about there is actually a lot of ways to think experimentally even in the early stages. We would have an idea in the morning, come up with some sort of functional prototype.

1:12 Recruit a bunch of people that are legitimately good. Prospective users or have zero skin in the game. Ship that so people can start playing in the afternoon. We're already running pretty full scale experiments. You start actually hearing other people describe their usage of the product. We can also watch them struggle. By the evening or by the next day, we can actually go through all of it together and say, Okay, we're going back and we have to fix this. This is like not usable. And we've done that for everything. Today my guest is Grant Lee, CEO and co founder of Gamma. This is a really unique and inspiring And very tactically useful conversation because Grant is building something that is essentially the dream for most founders.

1:48 A massive AI startup that's profitable and has been for long time. That didn't raise a lot of money for a long time. and is a small team. It's just around thirty people, all who can fit in a small restaurant. Serving over fifty million users globally. If you're not familiar with Gamma, they're an AI powered presentation and website design tool.

2:06 They just hit 100 million ARR in just over two years. They're valued at over two billion dollars. And unlike a lot of the fast growing AI startups that you hear about. They're growing profitably. and sustainably, and in a category that most people did not believe had a huge business opportunity. As you'll hear in the conversation, one investor told Grant this is the dumbest idea that he has ever heard. In this conversation, Grant shares the very counterintuitive lessons that he's learned.

2:33 Finding product market fit. How he knew they had product market fit, the specific tactics that helped them grow, including a deep dive into influencer marketing, which blew my mind, also how they figured out their price, his thoughts on building a GPT wrapper company that is durable. A ton of hiring advice and so much more. This could honestly have been another two hours of conversation. I suspect we'll do another follow-up conversation next year. If you love this podcast, don't forget to subscribe.

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5:10 For your people. Grant, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Lani, so great to be here. Thank you for having me. I see your face. All the time in my LinkedIn feed. I don't know if you notice the thing on these JP Morgan Chase ads.

5:27 So curious if other people see this, or if it's just me. Did you know this was a thing? I I think it's maybe once a day now I get a text message and just just no message. It's just a screenshot or you know, a 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

5:48 Oh my god. I hope I hope you love them'cause it's like it's always you. There's no one else. It's like Grant. Can I tag to you can 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

6:03 Unlike a lot of super fast growing AI startups You are both growing like crazy. You are growing very profitably. We're gonna talk about this. You did not raise a ton of money when you started. You waited a long time to raise a bunch of money. You also built a business and a category that

6:20 I think most people never imagine there was this big of an opportunity. And you're basically you've achieved the dream of a lot of F founders these days a lot especially people building AI startups. So my goal with this conversation is essentially do uh an anthropological study. of a really successful AI startup.

6:39 Talk about how you found product market fit. how you grew, all the length all the lessons you've learned along the journey. And I'm gonna bring this conversation up kind of along the different milestones of the journey. Before we get into the first piece, is there anything that you think is important for people to hear kind of broadly about The story of gamma.

6:57 Yeah, maybe I'll just start with uh oh with a quick story if that's okay. And um it's really just a founding story. So You know, we started the company uh back in twenty twenty. This is peak pandemic. And you know, fundraising, even fundraising was just so different. So all of the fundraising was done over Zoom. You were kind of

7:14 you know, sitting in these Zoom meetings trying to pitch many investors you never met in person. So just a different era, right? And so for us, You know, first time founders. I was actually living in London at the time. And so you know, different time zone. I had to do all of my pitches at night. And you know, I have two little kids, so wait for them to go to bed eight PM

7:32 We had a pretty modest flat, so nothing big. I would basically Find this little corner. Uh between the kitchen net. And the laundry room that's kinda set up shot, far enough from the kids so they wouldn't you know be woken up.

7:45 In between eight PM like two AM I'm just pitching. you know, try my best, I'm like the fake Zoom background so people didn't know where I was. And just pitching and so You know, really the first day. Kind of I'm in my third pitch in.

7:56 Trying to tell the story of Gamma, obviously. Just trying 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

8:08 That is a has to be the worst pitch. Worst idea I have ever heard. Not only are you trying to go against incumbents You're going against incumbents that have massive distribution. You are never going to succeed.

8:22 And so like in my head, I'm already kind of shell shocked and thinking You know, what am I gonna ha what's my rebuttal? And before I could even ha you know, respond. He hangs up. And so I'm there sitting

8:34 You know, they're thinking about it and You know, before I could really get down on myself because I had to prepare for the next pitch I kinda just internalize this feeling that Yeah, maybe he's right. Yeah, maybe something about what he's saying is actually correct.

8:47 And so for me, I started thinking about If we're going to succeed in this category. We're gonna really have to think about growth from the very beginning. this category is going to be really, really hard to break into. And so we really kind of made this sort of kind of promise to ourselves that as we continue to build

9:02 Growth is going to be critically important. And so my thing to kind of, you know Your audience is that. You know, I don't come from a growth background. So if I can learn growth.

9:11 Anybody can learn growth? And I think especially in this sort of market, hyper competitive. Oftentimes very crowded. It's gonna be essential. That is such a fun story. Oh my God. How how bad th must this investor feel at this point? We won't name names.

9:26 Uh just to share some stats. I know this is gonna be by the time this launches This will be out, but you guys are Over a hundred million AR now, worth over two billion dollars. uh a business that again most people did not think was was gonna work in in this category. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, we feel

9:43 Super proud to have accomplished that and again, yeah, I I'm excited to share some of the, you know the growth tactics and things that worked for us'cause I think Hopefully it'll help others kind of on their journey as well. Okay. So let's dive into it. Let's talk about

9:55 Product market fit. Tell us the story of just how you found Product Market Fit and how you knew you found Product Market Fit. Yeah, I'll start by telling kind of the moment where we thought we maybe had product market fit. And I think a lot of founders you know ask themselves, do we have it or do we not? And I think there's a there's often a sort of temptation to come almost almost fool yourself into thinking you have it.

10:15 And so we sort of did our first public beta launch. Um, this is back in August of twenty twenty two. We launched on product hunt and you know, felt really good. We had it, you know, what we felt like was a great launch, ended up winning product of the day, product of the week, product of the month. And I was like, wow, we you know, I think we have something here.

10:32 And then we'd look at sign ups and You get that initial spike in sign ups. And then they sort of like flatten out. You're still getting new users every day. But it was clear we didn't have strong word of mouth. There wasn't strong organic virality. And so if we just kind of played things out.

10:47 You know, we knew that the the product wasn't gonna grow on its own. Like something was missing there. We didn't have that strong word of mouth so that the product could just continue growing. And so we really kind of asked ourselves, like, okay, what does what do we need to change? And the answer is like we we need to fundamentally change everything. It for us almost became the sort of bet the company sort of moment because

11:06 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 king was uh just over twelve people. And We said okay.

11:20 It's gonna be all hands on deck. We are gonna do everything we possibly can. to make the first thirty 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

11:33 Someone that goes through that onboarding. Is going to tell all their friends. And if we can get that right, then maybe we have a chance at actually, you know, doing something in this space. And so we spent three, four months actually, you know, after the product launch, we were like felt great, but we knew we had to go back to the drawing board. We spent the next like three, four months actually Revamping the entire onboarding experience.

11:52 And of course, this is also where You know, AI for us kind of played a big role. We actually rebuilt it so that AI was part of the the back to onboarding. So every single new user would experience this sort of magic in the first thirty seconds. And so we re- relaunched. This is end of March twenty twenty three. Інф суд, you know.

12:10 We'd go from a few hundred sign ups a day to now first there's like a couple thousand. And then the next day would be like five thousand sign ups, and then ten thousand sign ups a day. And then twenty thousand signups a day. And then it just kept going up. And we weren't doing any sort of marketing, no advertising. It was all sort of organic, word of mouth. virality of the product, people using the product and sharing with others. where we for the first time really felt this pull like we didn't have to do anything.

12:34 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 have product market fit. I think the temptation would have been, hey, let's just spend more on ads or spend more on marketing. Cause like, you know, we'll just fuel, you know, fuel the top of the funnel and everything else will work itself out. I think that would have been a trap. I think that would have let led us down to like this path of trying to brute force our way. Into product market fit.

13:00 And it would just always be sort of a fleeting sort of destination would never actually arrive. And so I think we made the tough call the right call. It was a sort of bet the company moment. And I think on the other side, it just felt so different. Grant, this is exactly what I wanted this conversation to be. I'm so I'm so excited. I have so many questions I have to follow up on the stuff you shared before we even get to the rest of the journey. So one is Essentially what you're describing is product market fit to you was when

13:25 Organic growth started to really take off and it was just growing through word of mouth. You weren't doing much because it was so awesome. People were telling their friends about it. Is there anything more there that might be helpful for people to share just to hear about just like, okay, here's what it actually looks like. Yeah, I mean I I'm my one piece of advice is that when you're early on You your mindset should almost be like you're trying to create a word of mouth machine. Right, like if you can get that part right, everything else becomes significantly easier.

13:51 And the the if you have any and and I think this applies to both like Pro Sumer, B to C as well as even B2B products. Like if you have a B2B product, even if you're not telling all of your you know all of your friends You should be telling colleagues where like that product is relevant. You should probably be telling, you know

14:06 you know, uh former co workers where hey, you've discovered something like oh, I wish we had this, you know, my in our prior lives. And like that should even be magical. And then you should see that in all the leads that are coming through, like or people coming through through your prospects and your existing customers. If you're not seeing a healthy chunk of those leads come through that way. I would go back, I'm like, Why? Why is that not happening? Because again, that's like the massive tailwind you need where Everything every single thing you do on top of that, all the marketing, all the sales, all the advertising, you're just gonna have like it becomes way, way easier.

14:36 How much of this was you described it as a word of mouth machine. How much of this was like word of mouth loops and virality features versus just the product itself. One was awesome and two is kinda innately shareable because it's, you know, presentations people share with each other. Yeah, totally. I think for us we do benefit from being in a category where, you know, by nature of it, if if you like gamma, you're sharing it, presenting it to the others. So

14:58 I think it for us it's it's a combination of both. And and ideally you have other ways where you know word of mouth or organic rurality can can happen in your product. So By nature of usage, like it's being shared. You know, we basically had an internal mantra that we go back to like the first thirty seconds. We want it to be dead simple for someone to create content. We want it to be dead simple for them to share it. And everything we did kind of for that first thirty seconds, or you know, call it the first few minutes is remove friction so that they can do both of those things. Create

15:25 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 making here is the story of You want product of the day on product hunt, which alone is so hard.

15:50 So many people try to win and Don't most most people don't. Like I've tried to help companies win and it's it's like a really hard thing to achieve. And then you want product of the week and product of the month. And still you're like no, this isn't Working. Most people

16:06 that achieve that are like, No, we got this and they would not have to bet the company there's no feel there wouldn't be a feeling if we have to rethink everything. What is it just what is it there that you're just like, no, we need this isn't gonna work as much as as exciting as this is, this isn't it. Yeah, I mean part of you know being a founder is being, you know, as self aware as you can and be your o your own worst critic, right? 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?

16:36 Like if this number goes up Does it mean the product is working? And I think that's where we looked at like okay, you know, felt good to win those things. We got we've 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.

16:52 That wasn't there yet. So essentially it kinda started to just plateau and And slow. It wasn't like this rocket ship that took off from that. Yeah, it was still like we were still getting sign ups. Like they're coming through. But you could just tell there wasn't like there there'sn't this like building momentum, you know? And I think that's that's where it's always hard to tell. 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 gonna be enough?

17:15 And it just really felt like it wasn't going to be good. The other point here is the power of onboarding. Which comes up a bunch on this podcast when you talk about Mm driving retention. So you so you launched ProductCon did great and then started kinda petering out.

17:29 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 thirty seconds, where'd you come up with that number? Yeah, I so for us, you know, the the onboarding and the product experience for us that's intertwined, right?

17:46 Um the analogy I always think about is you know, you 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 to you, you can order. Yeah, and of course the food has to taste good.

18:03 But if that entire like and then you finally get the bill and you leave, like is that entire experience something that feels delightful? Is it good enough for you to tell your friends about? If someone just came by and dropped the food on on your plate, you know, on the table and was like just left and never came with a bill. We're like, okay, maybe I'm not gonna recommend this to to somebody else. And so for us, like we thought about okay, the first moment someone walks through our door, we're you know, dropping into the product. What is what is something we can give them? Can we shorten that time to value as much as possible? A lot of this is inspired by, you know, like Scott Belski. He talks about kind of that first mile, the first fifteen minutes.

18:34 And I think that's totally right. And I think one approach is you think about new users as you almost have like a cynical view of them. You have to think about them being Selfish, vain, and lazy, right? They're coming in. They have no desire to learn a new tool. And so what can you give them in that first thirty seconds that earns you the next thirty seconds and then the next thirty seconds. 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. And so what is it in that first thirty seconds? Can we actually show you something? and uh earn the right to kind of, you know, keep kind of building that relationship with you. We really thought a lot about that. And and certainly that's that's that's all we could really afford at the time. We only had twelve people building. And so like we we couldn't make a entirely, you know, revamp the entire product. We knew that we had to at least

19:19 put all of our energy into one spot. And so we made that coming into the door, come through the door, make that feel that moment feel magical so that we can do a little bit more over time. I love your point about how you know you could think of it as like, Okay, it's onboarding versus the product. the lens of how do we make this incredibly Valuable and

19:35 Aha ish. for the first thirty seconds almost informs what the product should be. Yeah, it really helps you you know, pull forward what is the most magical thing about your product, right? Sometimes founders will think about like the five, ten features. Well Maybe there's only like one thing that kinda differentiates you. Yep.

19:52 I tr I try to learn a lot from, you know, but you know, we'll we'll get into some of the marketing pieces of this, but even just having this sort of founder led marketing lens of like What can I do to help a new user just understand? You know, there's this thing from like consumer advertising, which is You throw a consumer one egg. They can probably catch it. You throw them four or five eggs, they're probably gonna drop all of them. And like oftentimes founders wanna talk about the four or five features they have, maybe ten features, and then the consumer is totally confused. Like, why why do I need this thing?

20:20 We try to just give them that one egg, that one you know, like first experience, we're like, Okay You know, create a slide in seconds. That's that's the egg. I'm gonna throw you this egg. Is that compelling to you? Some people are still gonna opt out. But the 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. 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. Just focus on one egg at a time. Just going even further back, what was the original insight that you had that led to gamma and what gamma is today. After the last start I was at was acquired, I I went back into kind of my roots, which is consulting. I was Advising early stage startups.

21:02 And the sort of medium I was using w was Google Slides. So I just remember this, you know, late night trying to prepare for next day's meeting. trying to format and f figure out the right layout and spending hours just trying to get the sort of look and feel right rather than the content itself. And for me that just felt completely backwards. You know, I should be spending ninety percent all the time on the content. ten percent maybe on the design and formatting.

21:24 And so the question just was, you know. What if there's a better way? What if we could reimagine this format from the ground up? Slides have been around for almost forty years as the default you know, medium of choice for a lot of this. And so we thought about okay, if we had different building blocks, different primitives, so you're not locked into the fixed sixteen by nine, you know, slide, what could you, you know, what could we offer to new users? And so that was really the the starting point of all this. Like hearing this, I could see why investors would be like, eh, you know, like I guess so. But slides has been around. PowerPoint has been around for forty years. Like I get it, you know, I get why people would be and specifically AI, was that a part of the vision initially, or did AI

22:01 start to come up and then wow. Great timing. Great timing. It wasn't part of the original vision, although the spirit was there, which is we want 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.

22:17 Along 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. There's 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 s like places. Categories people. think is an impossible place to build a big business. AI now allows it.

22:42 Awesome. Speaking of that, let's talk about the growth journey and how you actually grew from Nothing to Hundred million R R In just over two years. I'm thinking we break it up. I know these milestones aren't that clear, but kind of like zero to a hundred million ARR.

22:57 One to Ten. Ten to a hundred. Something like that. And let's just kinda see how it goes.

23:04 Well how did you get your first set of users? How'd you get your say hundred first hundred users? How did you get to a hundred million error from zero? Our first hundred looks very different, I'd say, so this was even pre the sort of AI launch we had. You know, the first hundred users for a product like ours, you're you're trying to convince all your friends to use the product. Anybody that's ever made a slide deck you're trying to talk to. And I think early on, you know you

23:25 Your friends wanna do you a favor, so they're gonna try the product. They're also gonna lie to you. They're gonna tell you how great it is, and then you look at the usage and nobody's coming back. And so I think our first hundred was sort of like gradually hard earned post sort of the product con launch. People learning like okay, this is kind of becoming a little bit more useful. usage was still pretty episodic, so they weren't coming back every week. And then I think do think, you know, the the moment post sort of the AI launches 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 probably the first, you know.

23:57 Ten thousand users all came Within a pretty short time period after that that initial launch. Awesome. We're gonna talk about monetization pricing later, which is obviously an important part of actual getting to millionaire and ten millionaire.

24:09 So what I'm hearing essentially is the product cut launch was a big part of just the first Ten thousand ish users. I know there's also a a tweet when you first When you relaunched that helped in a big way, talk about that. Yeah, so when uh we you know we did our AI launch

24:27 We we didn't do our AI launch on Product Tongue, we just we we basically said, Hey, let's just put it on out on Twitter. See if we can get some virality. And and honestly, we we kind of can't came up with kind of a clickbaity sort of, you know, tweet. It was like, you know, the the most valuable uh skill in business is about to become obsolete. And uh and so, you know, we it was intentional in that we wanted to create a little bit of engagement. We knew that having sort of a more provo provocative you know, tweet would allow people to engage with it. And so um after a couple of days, all of a sudden it started getting a little bit more viral and uh a lot more engagement. And we looked and it was basically because Paul Graham had commented

25:03 And saying something like Surely the thing that uh the slide deck is describing is more valuable than the slide itself, right? Yeah, but uh obviously, you know. It was fun just to see that comment. I think once that comment came through like, you know, even more engagement on the post. And then that was really the whole intent of that post was just to be able to have. you know, that level and the engagement so that people, you know, have some level of reach. And so for me it was almost like uh

25:25 The f my first sort of learning moment back to You know, what does founder led marketing even mean? It means like how do you actually break through the noise? How do you get a chance to have people even engage with like a post like that? Part of that is copywriting, part of that is like storytelling, part of that is just having like even like the right visuals to share. And so it was uh for me kind of a moment just understanding, hey So they kinda do this right. You kind of uh you kinda have to do things that maybe you're not super comfortable with, but uh it makes a difference.

25:52 Such a fun story. So you intentionally set that announcement up to be controversial, is what I'm hearing. Totally. Yeah. I'd say provocative, a little spicy. That is so cool. So essentially you got to ten thousand users. Through product hunt. And then Essentially one controversial tweet that ended up baiting Paul Graham to comment.

26:11 Amazing. And was it a com it was just a comment. It wasn't even him retweeting it. No, just a comment. Yeah. And then others would you know, pil on. Yeah. Uh increase the distribution of a tweet versus them retweeting it or quoteing it. Totally. And and of course the algorithms change all the time. So part of it's just locked based on when it happened, how it happened, who who posted. And I you look using this term founder led marketing, which I love and I'm already seeing it in action here. This is you thinking about it's not like delegating to someone in marketing. It's not

26:41 hiring an agency, it's like how do I Tell a story that I think will break through the noise based on You building this company, having the insight to build this product. And I guess is there anything more there you think is important for people to hear about?

26:54 Importance of the founder thinking through this stuff. Yeah, I mean I think very you know most people today are probably familiar with founder led sales, which is still very, very important. I think before you hire your first you know, salesperson or sales you know, AE it it's great to for the founder to understand like what it takes and you know, they're gonna craft the right narrative, the right story. Uh, my previous role, I was the COO at a startup where I was doing a lot of I wasn't founder, but I was early. And so I was helping the founders go through this and and really helping go into meetings with a client or or a prospect and saying, Hey, this is why you know um our product is interesting.

27:26 I think you know, today there's also there's so many AI startups that are much more either B to C or Persumer. And so you're not necessarily talking to individual prospects, but The idea that you can be, you know, really in control of the narrative on the marketing side is really, really important. And I think I'll, you know, I'll describe a few things where over time I think that skill set just really, really helps you. One is like, you know, you you have a chance to kind of be a creator yourself these days. I think a lot of founders are trying to, you know, be more active on social media. And I think, you know,

27:57 If you can kind of overcome the initial cringe factor of like seeing yourself and posting is like oh this doesn't, you know, feel authentic, if you can overcome that initial feeling, you you start investing into like, okay, how do I become a better copywriter? You know, how do I uh articulate something that is um clear, not just clever. You know, I think there's that saying where obviously if you can have that clarity, that's super important. And most people will try to get super like creative with their with their copywriting, but that's not usually the right way to break through and communicate something. So how do you improve your own copywriting? And then that allows you to actually have a higher bar. When you start working with

28:32 other marketers or in this case, like for us, like working with influencers, right? If you're working with influencers and creators and you can totally empathize with like how they approach that work. And you know what a good hook looks like, or you know how like a to 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.

28:56 And and then they'll give it to a creator to help amplify. And then that just never works, right? And so I do think part of founder led marketing is like going through this yourself. Using your own platform in the beginning is probably gonna be super small, but as you get bigger, like you have You have a platform to have a voice and people listen and you're gonna get better and better at your own storytelling. I think these are all skills you should invest in as early as possible, because you know you're gonna have to get better and better. It's like practice. You got to practice over and over. I I definitely want to pull on this thread more because You

29:24 Tweeting. the lessons you learn building gamma is what led to this conversation. I was reading, I'm like, Okay, he's sharing a bunch of stuff, but there's so much more I wanna hear. And we're gonna talk through this and go a lot in 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.

29:41 So let me ask a couple of questions here. One is just how do you find time as a founder, CEO of a very fast growing Cactic 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 w not want to try to start sharing things on LinkedIn and Twitter.

30:00 My advice is definitely just to try to start small. Don't let it become so intimidating that you just don't get started. For me it was like just having a no pad or uh you know, Google Doc around in the beginning where I would just constantly jot down, okay, th this is something I learned. Or something I observed, or something that worked well, something that was unintuitive that about but worked.

30:20 And just start creating a log of that. 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. I take a lot of those bullet points and try to say, is there enough here to turn this into maybe a post or You know, something that can be shared broadly.

30:36 And in the beginning I didn't have enough. It was all sort of scattered thoughts. But over time you start accumulating some interesting themes. And then I would start stress testing that some of that. So I would tell, you know, my teammates of like, hey, this is something interesting. Like, do you find this interesting? And if if there were enough like, Oh yeah, that's uh I would not have expected that or that's not something I've never heard before, then I then I'd actually start crafting the initial post. And then and then you actually just put it out there. I I think what I've learned is, you know, even for LinkedIn versus Twitter. The audiences want different things. And so you almost have to then have different tones of voices or like, you know, even nuggets or sharing.

31:10 For me, I invested much more in LinkedIn early on just because it felt A little bit more natural for me, and then over time I said, Okay, well, I'm gonna start packaging certain content for Twitter, that's actually different than what I would post on LinkedIn. Sometimes on on Twitter you get even more tactical or even more into the weeds. And so I found that that to be helpful, but honestly I'm still learning. And so like every time you post, you go back you know, after a couple of weeks you go and say, Okay, what things are actually being engaged with? Like Are things actually creating like ideally you're creating enough value where people are either bookmarking it.

31:40 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 c collecting your own sort of, you know These are my all star posts. Like these are the ones that I've actually, you know, broken through. And then you go back and try to ar understand, okay, what about that post do I think was actually useful? Is it

31:58 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 week, you just have a good sort of bot you know, body of work to to work off. This is so interesting and valuable. So let me mirror back a few of the lessons that I heard here that I think is easy for people to miss. So one is just what to share. what I heard here, and I completely agree with this, and this is what I try to do is

32:23 Pay attention to Things you've learned. Things that you find interesting. Things that are unintuitive to you. Have a dock and just

32:32 Put these there. And every time you learn something, find something interesting, just add it to the doc. Uh or haven't heard before is a good one too. So it's essentially just like if you find it interesting, people on social media will also find it interesting. And one 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 code with claw code and check it out. Or save it up for a big long post. The other interesting, I've never heard this before. I've like post different things to LinkedIn and Twitter. I I n I just copy and paste the same thing. Uh

33:01 I love that you do something different for the two platforms. I I think we all kind of have intuition that there's just there are different audiences, right? 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.

33:19 And I think these can differ by, you know, by the type of creator or the founder, whoever's posting it. And and of course the the actual content itself. And so for me, I'm still tweaking, but I do find that Just copy and pasting, you know, from one to the other. Doesn't usually work. 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 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. Is there anything more there you can share? Yeah, I I that's what I found is like tactical, oftentimes more contrarian uh on Twitter. And and also um I would say technical too. People really like to know You know, again going into the getting going back to like getting into the weeds, like is this something I feel like I could replicate? And I'm not gonna give you credit like there's no credibility if you just give like a blanket statement or something that feels generic. Like I I really need to know. If you can 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, uh either more aspirational or aspirational or Like a a like a a topic or a theme that just feels like relevant at that point in time. And you can just kind of make more of a, you know, broader statement. It doesn't need to be as tactical. It's more like inspirational. It's like, oh, okay, now I need to go and learn a little bit more about pricing and packaging, for instance. And that could be the sort of spark that somebody needs. And uh you don't need to, you know, spell it completely out. 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. Maybe that changes in the future, where maybe the the tactical pieces, you know, that element might might actually change.

35:01 And last pieces you said you just block off time. Is there like a specific time of the week you do this? How do you actually'cause Everyone's like, Oh sure, I'll block off time and then Oh no, okay, but I actually gotta do all this other stuff, so I'm not gonna use it this time. Oh, maybe next week. For me it's usually two times of the day. Uh very first thing in the morning. And uh lasting at night.

35:18 And partly is because of kids. It's almost like I need time where there's just zero distraction. Ah, and uh 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 where are you energi like what are what are topic you're energized by? And then I think at night it's about reflection. Like what are the things you actually went through that day? You can almost pull up your calendar and be like, Okay, I talked to X, Y, and Z people and

35:43 Was there anything from those conversations that might be relevant? That's the where I you know, write some of those things. It's more of a a recap of of actually what happened. And what I what helps me to not feel like this is some cringy self promo y egotistical stuff is just It's useful stuff that I've learned that ends up being helpful to people and people in the comments are just like, Oh, that is really cool and useful. Thank you. It's not like

36:04 Self promotion. It's not just like look how amazing I am. Look at check out my amazing products. Like Here's the thing I learned. You might find it useful. Uh that's exactly right. I I think, you know, one way of thinking about it, you know, with like founder led sales It 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

36:22 They're getting an amazing product. In exchange, they're gonna pay you money for it. I think with like founder led 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 they know they're the inherently there's value in it. In exchange, you sort of get goodwill back.

36:44 You're you're not necessarily getting money back, you get goodwill. They're gonna follow you, they're gonna engage with their pose, they're gonna tell others about it. And не 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 gonna help amplify the news. And I think that's magical. You kinda kinda bank the goodwill for a long period of time. By providing just a ton of value with no expectation of anything immediately in return. The book I always point people to when they're want when they're struggling with this sort of thing and like, Okay, I did this and no one

37:11 Like, no one cared, didn't do. Any good. Is there's a book by uh Scott Pressfield, I think is his name, uh called Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit. Yeah. Which is exactly what is right. Nobody wants to read it. The bar for people to care is very high. There's so much stuff to read and process.

37:29 And so this book gives you a really good lens of just like okay, the bar is very high and nobody Wants to read your shit. So you have to try really hard to make it really good. Great reminder. Yep. We'll link to that in the show notes. Okay. Let's get into let's come back to the growth of gamma. So we've talked about how you got your first

37:46 Tens of thousands of users essentially Product kinds. rethinking onboarding, making it really magical. And then the Very controversial tweet that Paul Graham commented created some buzz.

37:57 Let's talk about the next phase and maybe I don't know, tell us kind of the ARR At that point. Through A hundred million just like Broadly, what should we know?

38:07 So when we got to about ten 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. Yeah. uh and spread the word about gamma. I think it was already working in terms of the organic viral virality was there. And so we do f 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

38:29 Our initial brand was sort of holding us back. And I think a lot of people will discount, you know, whether or not a rebrand is valuable. And I think sometimes it is, sometimes it sometimes it isn't. For us, you know, there's a few different things we looked at. So One, our initial brand was was almost more of a placeholder brand because we created it The moment we sort of incorporated the company, uh, which is again like Late twenty twenty, beginning twenty twenty one, where we needed something so that as we built, we could at least share it with people. We could put up a landing page and just feel like, okay, there's something here.

39:00 But we didn't invest a whole lot into it. And so it was pretty limited in sort of what I call the kind of the DNA of the brand. There wasn't that many the like the art direction was very limited in scope. There wasn't much when it came to like voice and tone. And so, you know, it 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, like you're kind of Yeah, d this this DNA is something where you can you can imagine creating tons of content around and all feeling pretty cohesive. And I don't I think that needs to be done by design. Like you're really think being thoughtful about every single element, like what is the art direction you want to go with? What is the voice and tone, such that as you're creating, you know, Thousands of pieces of copy, it all feels pretty cohesive. And so we kinda went back to the drawing board and we spent

39:47 many months kind of rethinking what would be the you know the brand. What is what is this this vision that we have longer term. our creative doctor internally partner with Smith Indiction, an amazing agency. That has helped, you know, what you know, folks like Perplexity also do their rebrand or their br initial brand. And we weren't we were spent many months just like really trying to craft kind of what we think is like the core DNA of the brand.

40:10 And doing so in a way that We could replicate it as much as possible. replication piece of it comes into play because as you start scaling, you're gonna have to create a ton of content. Your own content on social media. ads on you know for performance marketing.

40:25 Assets for influencers to be able to use and showcase in their content. And so you're going from like, you know, s tiny pieces of content to all of a sudden Every week we're testing thousands of pieces of of creative. 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. So for us that we realized it was going to be necessary and why we invest so much, and ended up being, I mean, way more expensive, way more time consuming than I

40:49 would have imagined, but I think coming out you know, on the other side of it being the right investment, feeling that that was the right time to do it. I love how many things you did that feel like this wouldn't this would will not work out. Uh building a startup within the presentation space, doing a whole rebrand in the middle of scaling. Uh, also just reworking the entire product after you launched and just like rethinking the whole thing. Like all these things, everyone's always like, No, this is not

41:15 How we went and Interestingly worked out for you guys. I wanna come back to the brand stuff. But one of the most interesting ways you guys grew early on was influencer marketing. Which a lot of people hear about and talk about. I don't I haven't heard of much

41:30 of how like how to actually do this and what actually works. Talk 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. So yeah, just give us the big picture. Yeah, I think a lot of founders assume that uh with influencer marketing it's it's almost like turnkey. You set aside a budget, you find some creators.

41:53 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 you're ready to go. And I think the reality is like going back to like this founder led marketing mindset is like Well, you're gonna set yourself up for success if You actually are super involved in that entire process. So for us what this meant was like

42:11 All the initial influencers I onboarded manually myself. Um I 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.

42:24 You want to be able to have them tell your story. But in their voice. Right, and they can't do that if you're not willing to put in that investment. And so we would spend a lot of time like going through it wasn't my job to tell them how to pitch gamma, but it was my job to make sure that they understood what gamma was as a product. And so we'd spend a lot of time, like me just walking through the product, them asking questions, us like just kind of brainstorming what could the hooks be. And me just giving them some initial feedback and like saying, Oh yeah, this one, I I love that. I figure it's gonna work great for your audience.

42:53 But not trying to be super prescriptive. And working with a ton of micro influencers, people that don't have massive followings But are committed to giving going back to giving value to your audience, like they're committed to giving value to their audiences. They want to be able to showcase tools that actually they would use or they are using. And how do you do that in an authentic way, like You can't really fake that. You really need to spend the time doing that. And just like you would onboard a customer

43:19 You onboard an influence are the same way, you want them to be an extension of your team. And I think they can feel whether or not you're willing to put in the work. And if if you're not, then they're just gonna treat it like uh you know any other project. ship it and be done with it. If you invest in that relationship, you know, guess what? They'll they'll be back to actually post about you again. And like you're all of a sudden having this sort of uh you know, this relationship that actually can build over time. I think that's really where the where the magic is. Like too many people discount that initial piece. This is awesome.

43:47 To be clear, influencer marketing essentially Uh a person with a following and say TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever gets paid in some way to promote your product. That's How you described it, that's the simple way to understand influencer marketing, yeah. Yeah, so it's definitely the simple way 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 uh they're their ideas that okay, we're gonna carve out

44:15 A really big budget. We're gonna, you know, choose like f five or six that we feel like are really like the tastemakers in the space. and put all of our money into like just how you know having them talk about our product. And I I think usually this is this is kind of the wrong approach.

44:29 Because many of them, you know, they do have massive audiences. And for you, you're basically you like the you basically give them a script to read. And it immediately feels like an ad, right? Like they don't feel like that product is not connected really to them in any way. It's just something that they're you know, for this week, they happen to be working with you and then they move on with their life and It never feels organic or authentic.

44:53 And you wasted a ton of money doing so. I think you're much better doing the hard thing, which is hard to scale, but it's like finding the thousands of micro influencers that have an audience where your product maybe is actually useful. And for instance, you know, for us like early on it'd be you know educators. People that for them

45:10 Part of their job is creating slides every day because they need to engage their students. And so like for them, you know, having a tool that actually saved them a ton of time. Well, something they love talking about. And if you can find some of these pockets, we we call them echo chambers, where if you find a pocket like educators, Teachers love telling other teachers about products they love using. During summer break, they all come together and talk about okay, what are the things that we're gonna actually improve, you know, my job next next school season. And you know, obviously during this AI wave.

45:39 A lot of those have been, okay, what are the AI tools that just saved me a ton of time. And so if you can start actually tapping into these pockets of like echo chambers, that's even better. Like that the it doesn't have to be this flashy, you know, like well known uh influencer. It's actually just this person that has an audience of where people like really trust what they say. And uh and that's amazing. That that ends up becoming the sort of you know, uh wildfire that can spread really, really fast. And what's like the dollar amount these folks get? It's like a few hundred bucks, a few thousand bucks, something like that. Yeah. Few hundred to low thousands.

46:09 Single digit thousands. What are how do you find these folks? Are there tools they use? Is it just like a bunch of manual? Searching and and looking. Yeah. In the very beginning it was all manual. Uh a lot of cold outreach. And then we ended up finding a couple of different things. One is a platform, a Y C company called First Collab. Um that has been amazing. They basically do all of the automated outbound for you.

46:31 Plus You can help them. You know, actually create profiles or personas of of different creators. So like for instance educators being one. And then they'll go out and actually, you know.

46:41 based on that profile, find all the right creators for you. So they've been amazing, really great to work with. Um and then we've also found um small agencies to also help kind of augment that. Like I look for, you know, agencies that are super young and hungry. These are people that, you know, are are uh social they're native to social media. And so, you know, they really understand it and they can really be able to bring in uh creators that, you know,

47:05 And I think part of it is like if you find creators are gr great to work with, every everything else becomes easy. So we've had a few. One is A K G Media out in out actually out in the the UK, and they've been fantastic to work with as well. So you kind of find a few different things, either agencies or platforms that can help you actually scale this thing up. And these when they post they they're not. Generally transparent about this is a paid promotion, right? They're not just pretending I found this tool and I love it.

47:31 Yeah, exactly right. Okay, and so How but how much impact did this lever of influencer marketing have on your growth, say from ten to hundred. Like is this the biggest lever of growth other than just word of mouth? People continue to share it. Yeah, so uh word of mouth has definitely been the biggest. So we look at kind of all kind of new

47:49 subscriber growth. Over fifty percent of this is is word of mouth. It's either people searching, you know, direct, coming direct, uh entering gamma.op. Or going through search and a 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.

48:09 So every time we invest in influencer marketing, we actually see word of mouth Increase even more. And it's always like you can just you can just see it. Like basically anytime you spend, you know, a little bit of money, you start seeing people come through influencer. The word of mouth factor is actually one point it will get another one point five additional users on top of that.

48:27 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 it why it's so effective, you know, we we all know, you know, Dunbar's number, which is you know, have this number of like 150 people that you call kind of your network. And your network you trust more than the average stranger down the street. Like if they tell you something, you know, the recommend something, there there is a sort of halo effect, right? You learn to trust them. There the a lot of these influencers

48:54 The reason why they share so much about their lives is because they want to be in your network. They want you to feel super close. And once you feel super close you trust them to actually, you know, share things are going to be useful. And so when they recommend a tool, there is a sort of halo effect where It doesn't feel like it's coming from a stranger, it feels like it's coming from a friend. And that's where every time we've spent money there, you actually see this amplification. It's like okay, that's kind of interesting. You wouldn't necessarily expect that, but um for us it's been this sort of amplifier from from yeah, the big

49:23 Very beginning. This is so fun to hear about. I've not heard this level of detail on how influencer marketing works and how to make it work. A few more questions here. How so you said there's maybe a few thousand people you ended up working with? Roughly. Influencers. Oh over the course of yeah, like a year. It wasn't all in the same time. It was like, you know, if you find basically in the beginning, you do in the very, very beginning, we had a small budget, it was like

49:43 You know, twenty creators a month. And then it you start increasing that to like fifty, then a hundred. And then you know, we're we're still not I don't I 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 Yeah, again content hooks. Ways to talk about the product value props.

50:03 Amazing. And you said the key here is you spend time with uh every one of these creators, influencers early on. To help make sure they understand. what you're doing. I get excited about it.

50:14 Isn't just like a thing you outsource. I think there's a lot of value there. It's hard to again hard to quantify. And and most creators feel like they're probably or most founders probably feel like they're too busy. To allocate that time. But I think is a good investment'cause uh going back to you want them to feel like an extension of your team.

50:31 they're not gonna feel like an extension of your team if if one, they've never met you and two, you've never even told them really how the product works. So just they're forced to kinda go to your website to figure it all out. Those are gonna be, you know. uh not a whole lot of uh love that they're feeling from from from the outside. So what I'm hearing is uh quality over quantity, especially when you're getting started. And then there's this other piece of niche, which I think is very counterintuitive instead of going to large

50:56 large influencers or the huge audience, it's good at folks that are small. What's like a audience size roughly that you think is ideal for this sort and what niche just means Honestly, I don't think there's a minimum because even with you know platforms like TikTok, they oftentimes are giving you credit for a brand new account. They want to help amplify that new account because, you know, obviously, you know, if they're thinking from a creator perspective, you know, if that new creator feels like, oh Coming to TikTok is like a massive win for me. they're gonna be more invested in it. And so there there really isn't a minimum. A lot of these platforms are trying to shift to to kind of the same thing where they really

51:31 reward new creators on the platform. And so you could have a small audience, it doesn't really matter. You can have 10,000 followers. That's also good. I think as long as the content feels, you know, again, engaging, authentic to that. to the to the people you're talking to. I think it has a really good chance of actually taking off. That's such a good point with TikTok where it's not follower related. It's it's if it's useful and People find it

51:52 uh clickable or whatever likeable, uh viewable, uh it'll it'll the algorithm will spread it. Yeah. Such a good point. Okay, there's a couple more points you made in the tweet that I wanna make sure we highlight. So one is you made this point that ninety percent of your reach in influencer marketing comes from less than ten percent. Of people, 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 know it's hard to know where that ten percent is gonna come from. So you kinda just have to cast a super wide net. Right. You can sort of I 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. Well, the reality is like even for me, I I could never guess. Like I kinda had some idea, but I just had to make sure that I was meeting enough creators broadly.

52:35 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. I was not smart enough to actually know which one to take off. I just knew that we had to play the sort of numbers game to make it work. So one of your tips here is is people fail often in this because they start too small or their budget's a little too small. You recommend ten to twenty thousand a month.

52:58 over six months and just trying this, it sounds like you're doing like twenty to thirty Creators of one. Is that the right framework for how to just start this thing and explore? Yeah, totally. And and I'd say it's not just that the budget's too small, it would be that they put all their eggs in one basket. So you can also easily blow that twenty K on just one, you know, bigger influencer.

53:17 And then be like, Oh, that didn't work, so I'm gonna try it again. That didn't work, okay, I give up. And and I think rather than doing that, you should be like okay, that twenty K I could actually probably work with, you know, forty different influencers and see what actually works. And across the forty, I'm gonna 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. Like if educators are working.

53:44 go with educators. If consultants are working, go with consultant, find more consultants, because there's gonna be more there. I think that's where the uh putting all your eggs in one basket is just probably the surest way to fail because like you're gonna s miss a ton and it's gonna take you way too long to learn and you're gonna come to the conclusion that it's a waste of time. I feel like this whole podcast conversation could be just about this one lever of so much I wanna keep talking about, but there's more questions here because this is so useful and interesting. You had this line in your tweet about how virality is not an accident. And that this approach is how you figure out what actually works. And then once you do that, then you start leaning into that messaging. Talk about that.

54:20 uh this goes back to obviously if you're you're testing a bunch, you you'll finally find that sort of, you know Post or set of posts actually go viral. Going back to yeah, just the the fundamentals, like make it easy for your influencers to be able to tell your story in their voice. One thing we did, you know, we open sourced our basically our entire brand. We have brand.gamma.app, which is Everything about our brand, our voice and tone, our art direction, what we use in mid-journey to create the sort of art direction that we have. So that a creator can can do the same, right? And they can actually just copy

54:51 all of that so that they don't have to reinvent the wheel every time they're trying to post about gamma. They they have all of that. And I think that going back to like this notion of like Just make it dead simple for them. Remove friction. They already have enough to like on their plate to have to figure out. Don't make it any harder than it is. And if you remove friction, then it's like okay, you get into this rhythm of Adding creators is easy, having them post is cre easy. reviewing what's working, what's not as easy. And if you're able to do that relentlessly over many, many months, then all of a sudden like hitting those sort of viral posts is is easy because you're gonna have enough at bats there.

55:23 where some are gonna, you know, some are actually gonna pop off, but you kinda only can get there after you've like done all the half work before that. to make you know, you know kind of remove friction from the process and uh feeling like it's almost like a Yeah, well oiled the machine at that point. Is there a platform you find most helpful for the stuff you guys are doing? Is it like TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, something else.

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 subn substantially higher. They're they're four X, maybe five X higher than other platforms. And I I I think a lot of people are probably still sleeping on LinkedIn, frankly. And so it's one where, you know, the some of the some of the influencers there or creators there can be a little bit more costly, but if you can be highly high you know, eventually be more targeted knowing that hey, this type of creator is is pretty impactful for For you know, our product.

56:15 then working with them, it's just like, oh, that's that's great. Like the conversion rates are just so strong. And it really feels like we're we're like just getting started there. So you know, if you're in the beginning you're not sure, it's always helpful to cast a pretty wide net and then, you know, similar to sort of just the influencer strategy, like test and iterate, you'll figure out many of these things will fall follow the power a power law. So it's like you know, one or two channels are gonna be the most important for you. Uh for instance, Twitter for us hasn't been that impactful, and I think for tools like Notion, they've been really, really impactful. You're not going to really know. And so just test and then double down on the ones that really move the needle for your product. I think that many people listening now are like, Wait, LinkedIn posts are sponsored sometimes? I didn't know that. Uh what's like how do you know if it's a sponsored post? Is it like a hashtag sponsored or something like that? How do they communicate this? Usually they'll say, you know, they're a partner or yeah, basically they it is sponsored in some form, or you know, they'll the hashtag you know add or

57:06 No, uh something along those lines. So Um that's probably the the way you'll you'll see it the most. Cool. By the way, I don't do this sort of stuff. If you ever see me on LinkedIn I'm not doing any paid stuff. Just so people know. And I don't plan to do that. This episode is brought to you by Miro. Every day new headlines are scaring us about all the ways that AI is coming for our jobs, creating a lot of anxiety and fear. But a recent survey for Miro tells a different story. Seventy six percent of people believe that AI can benefit their role.

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58:21 Help your teams get great work done with Miro. Check it out at Miro.com slash Lenny. That's M I R O slash Lenny. Let's come back to this brand point. So one of your

58:33 big lessons is invest in brand before you go heavy into paid ads and performance marketing. I imagine you do some ads at this point on Facebook and Google and things like that. Yeah, we run ads, 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. I I very much follow kind of the the sort of the thought that brand marketing is performance market. Like everything is some form of performance marketing. It just not might have not be as attributable. So like the ability to actually map back to every single dollar spent.

59:08 That's a little bit harder. But it doesn't mean that it's not impactful. And I think um as a company scales, you have to invest in both. And ideally they work really, really well together. Like the more you invest in brand marketing, it strengthens your performance marketing. This goes back to like having enough creative to even test. If you're too limited in scope and you don't have a brand, you feel like you can actually amplify. you're handicapping your ability to actually have a good performance marketing programme. I love that heuristic of how do you know if you are under invested in brand is if you're

59:37 w limited in the number of ideas you can try in Performance marketing. Like is or your totally is your dying design system just like is everyone having to redesign things from scratch and come up with all these frameworks uh every time they run an ad. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's like bas basically you kinda have a feeling for You know, if I were to scale this up to a thousand pieces of creative.

59:58 Would it still feel cohesive or is it kind of all over the place? And if it feels like it's all over the place, then you kinda have to go back to the drawing board. You said when you talked about the rebrand that it took a lot longer than you expected, that it was more expensive than you expected. That's like the fear I think everyone has when they hear this, like oh I don't have to have a rebrand. Well Yeah. I also imagine because your product is so visual that it makes more sense. to invest there and to Spend the time and money.

1:00:23 For the typical founder, do you have any just I don't know, thoughts of just like here's when it makes sense, here's a sign you really need to invest here. Heavily versus like nah'll probably be all right. Yeah, I mean I I do think it's probably more geared toward anything that's a little bit more uh prosumer or consumer. 'Cause so much of your product you're trying to create

1:00:41 you know, the this feeling for a user, like what are they experiencing? And the experience it happens way before they even drop into your product. It might be they see an ad Or they see a billboard or they see something, it's like, okay, that piqued my interest a little bit. And then you need some sort of like symmetric messaging in that. They see that there's a some symmetry in that they see that they moment then they drop into the project with land on your website. they it feels cohesive and it feels like okay, this is this is interesting. I'm gonna go all the way through to sign up and then maybe actually start using the product. That's a little bit different when it's like a B to B product or, you know, where

1:01:15 There's a there there isn't as much reliance on you know, that that initial moment. They they might just hear about it through, you know, colleague and and then sign up for it and then go through a huge procurement process. And then it's like okay, maybe maybe it matters, but probably not so much as as like for a a product where the brand can have so many different touch points. I wanna talk about some uh kind of broader things that have worked to help you grow, but before we do that I just want to visualize the pie chart of how Gammer grows.

1:01:41 say post ten million AR. If I have it correctly in my head, it's Over fifty percent, just word of mouth, organic people sharing it, doing presentations for each other. Oh, it's gamma. Just go check it out. Sign up. Then it feels like the second Biggest bucket is

1:01:56 Influencer marketing. Kind of social stuff. And then is the third performance slash paid marketing? Yeah. That's right. Yeah.

1:02:04 Cool. So on that last piece, is there anything else there for people that are starting to explore performance marketing? Essentially Facebook ads, Google Ads, all these other platforms. Is there anything else that you think might be helpful for people to hear or learn just to get started down this road.

1:02:18 I w I would just have two recommendations. Like One going back to my initial piece of advice, which is Don't invest until you have word of mouth. Don't fool yourself into thinking that you'll solve other problems by just starting to ramp up a performance marketing program, but just get the word of mouth piece first. So that you have you're coming into this program with some tailwinds.

1:02:38 And then start ramping it up. The second piece is like Set some constraints. You don't want your product to happen to be at a point where More than fifty percent of your your acquisitions are coming through paid acquisition. I think if that

1:02:51 Is happening. your core growth engine is broken and g uh you know feeds right back to point number one, which is a If you if your core growth engine is broken you just have this leaky bucket. You're trying to p 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. And it doesn't mean like you don't spend a little bit of money, but just don't dial it up until you feel like your core core growth engine is actually working. 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.

1:03:29 Yeah, and and for us even at scale, again, going back to more than fifty percent of you know new signups still come through word of mouth. Like we That that for us is a sign like okay. Yeah, something is still working. People are using the product, telling other people. And you want that feeling before you really start dialing anything else up. Is there like a percentage that you think is helpful for people to think about just like is it like twenty five percent or more, something like that, of just word of mouth be f for you to feel like okay, we actually have organic growth as a major growth engine.

1:03:55 Yeah, I mean I think this comes back to maybe just how maybe aggressive you want to be. You know, I think that just rough, you know, heuristics the more the better. If it's over fifty percent, I think that's great. If it's like approaching that, Good. And just going back to like don't fool yourself into thinking just ads is gonna be the way you grow,'cause you can do that. But everything else becomes harder and harder. If you r rely on paid acquisition to be the main growth engine.

1:04:20 you should be prepared for things like CAC, like customer acquisition costs to keep going up. And the the the more you're trying to reach like a new audience, it gets more and more expensive. So don't assume it's gonna be flat. And then all of a sudden you're running on this treadmill that's actually running faster and faster. And so that's where it's it's uh easy to get hooked on that early on when you're just investing a small amount of money. And then it's almost impossible to get off that treadmill when you're too far into it. So Anticipate that. And give yourself a better chance at actually being able to sustain that growth long term. Mm-hmm.

1:04:50 Important advice. Okay. There's a couple more. elements you've shared that were key to gamma's growth. One is

1:04:58 Sharing prototypes with users before you ship. What does that look like? What does that mean? Why is that so Powerful. Yeah, I mean this for us was a huge unlock. You know, going back to like early days when you're just trying to get your product into anybody's hands.

1:05:12 You're getting to your you know, friends trying to use it and again they're gonna lie to you, tell you how great it is and then never come back to using the product. I think what you want to be able to do you know, the the ideal situation is you recruit a bunch of people that could, you know, that are legitimately good prospective users or customers of your product. Um but have zero skin in the game.

1:05:32 They do not care at all whether or not your product succeeds. They're just in it to test it. And You you know, for us it was like people that have made slide decks or make slide decks regularly. Let's drop them into gamma, give them very little context. We just tell you, hey, this is an alternative to PowerPoint. Go ahead and try it.

1:05:48 And then as you're going through the onboarding flow and testing the product. Just tell us everything that's going on in your head. Like Describe what you're seeing. Tell us what you're trying to do. We'll give you maybe a few different tasks, like oh create, you know, create a piece of content.

1:06:02 And When you watch them do that and also hear what they're saying You just immediately feel the pain. Like all the places they're struggling. Yeah.

1:06:13 All the places are so confused by like what they're seeing. And you sort of then can internalize that pain and say, Okay, we're going back and we have to fix this. This is like not usable. Like we, you know, we oftentimes are dog fooding everything. And so you can get to the point where you're so familiar with your own product, everything kind of feels kind of easy and you you know where things are. Well when you start actually hearing other people describe their usage of the product That's like a gift. Like you're all of a sudden like okay.

1:06:37 Now I know where to actually spend the time. People aren't even getting to the third screen. They're stuck on the first screen because they can't even find the button that we think is like so dead obvious. And so let's go back and actually re-engineer, re-architect that piece of it. And we've done that for for everything. 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 or not. And then every time we'll learn something that's kind of painful. But obvious that we need to fix and we go back and fix it.

1:07:08 How do you scale this sort of thing? How do you run every f new big idea, new feature change by people. Do you have like a closed beta group, uh do you some platform? How do you actually do this? There's a couple of great platforms. So um VoicePanel, which is also a Y C company, full disclosure, uh Angel Investor. And then there's also um, you know, platforms like user testing that really help you um

1:07:31 source and you know find find these people that fit again that persona or profile you're looking for. So in our case, like people that are in a specific job function or you know create decks regularly. And so you can use those platforms to really scale up these programs pretty fast. And then once your team knows how to use those platforms, 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 uh r a research study. And and by the evening or by the next day, we can actually go through all of it together. So it's pretty fast once you have it set up. It's more about like how do you get the program uh you know onboarded the right way. I think the other sort of mechanism we did early on was once we had some repeat users. We created a uh sort of a program for our power users. We called it the

1:08:15 Ambassador 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 wireframe f wireframes, sometimes there are functional prototypes, and get them to get some get some initial feedback as well. This h definitely helps with more sort of, you know, later stage or like you know, uh features or things that aren't gonna be necessarily important was part of onboarding. But like once you understand gamma, like oh how do you share it, for instance, like this was a great way to start testing some of that because they already understand gamma, but now you're adding net new functionality and then we can also watch them struggle and hear how they're struggling with the product. And so that was been a great way just to Have a separate Slack work space.

1:08:54 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've shared of you have an idea in the morning. You Built the prototype. Do you build it with like like AI prototypey tools, like cursor, lovable something like that? Yeah.

1:09:11 Yep, that or it could be, yeah, I mean, uh we're lucky a lot of our, you know, designers also know how to code. So even before the recent tools, like you know, kinda come up with some sort of functional prototype and then and then be able to ship that so people can start playing with it. Yeah, so you you have an idea in the morning. You build a prototype using Various tools. You By the end of the day, you are getting feedback from real people using one of these platforms, voice panel or user testing.

1:09:37 And Just like that loop saves you, I imagine, potentially months of just building the thing nobody wants and shipping it, launching it, and then just failing totally. Yeah, I mean I think this is even more probably helpful for Yeah, 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 amount of time to get something out there. Now prove that it's useful to like some set of users.

1:10:01 And this should be again like every day, every week, you should be able to go through a ton of these and and then build on the things that seem to be working. I I feel like that's like that's almost like a a a way to speed run a lot of that early sort of you're in the idea maze. Do you think you have something that could kind of work? How do you actually break through so that, you know people are actually finding value in what you're building. Yeah, I love it'cause so many people hear this idea of just like run your stuff by Users before you ship you know, do you the user research, it sounds so

1:10:29 Hard and heavy lift. Yeah. And in the way you're describing it is like very automated. Very very quick to do. You don't have to go think about finding random people to coffee shop. It's just like these platforms exist where you could go plug in your thing.

1:10:42 Get feedback by the end of the day. Totally. Yeah. And that yeah, helps you just move way faster. Is there a feature that you were super excited about that you built and you ran through this and just like, Okay, that was a huge failure? I mean, I don't I don't think any of the ones where we you know, we always try to kind of chunk it down. So like none of the things we're testing earlier on are like these massive features. They're always like

1:11:03 an inception or like a starting point of like this could be something interesting. And then we take that initial learning and actually then build the the the product around it. It's never like, oh we spent like four months working on this thing. Let's see if anybody actually wants it. It's almost like we always start super early and then a bunch of ideas die right away. But they're still pretty small ideas. And then the ones that kinda pass the initial test, you start building towards something that could be Yeah, hopefully more game changing or much more value add. And by the time you're actually shipping, like if you've gone through, you know ten different lay of actually testing and iteration before it actually sees the light of day.

1:11:34 What's really interesting about you and the way your company operates, you guys are ex optimizely people. So you're very uh versed in experimentation. A lot of people talk about A B testing experimentation is 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. Is there something more there you think is important for people to hear? Yeah, I mean I I really think it's more of You know, the the mindset you go into to almost any problem or opportunity is

1:12:08 You know, the the saying of, you know, strong opinions, weakly held. I think it's totally fine to have like some of these assumptions or like hypotheses going into a lot of these things, but you should always know that there's a way to start trying to validate some of this. You know, as a founder You're always trying to build conviction. And so you build conviction by, you know, not

1:12:25 you know, having it all live in your head, but getting it out there and start testing this with users. Prospect customers. And starting to see like what are the things that actually feel right. And sometimes you have enough data to be statistically significant. Sometimes it's more of a hey, we at least were able to gut check this a little bit and get some qualitative feedback. I think that's still valuable. It shouldn't be this sort of like all or nothing, like oh, it has to be stats save for it to be useful. I don't think that's true.

1:12:49 In fact, I'll just share kind of the very early story of You know, when we first started gamma, we knew we wanted to help change the way people communicate. And We actually had two different ideas we were uh parallel pathing uh kind of at the same time. So of course we had, you know, presentations, reimagining how people were creating presentations, and we also had actually had the separate idea, which we called The lobby, which is a virtual office.

1:13:13 Ah, 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, and feel pretty magical. And we worked on both for six months. We worked on both the virtual office and the presentation. product for for six months. We would dog food both. So like oftentimes we would be in the virtual office presenting the the uh the presentation tool and kind of use both. And after six months we came to this conclusion that

1:13:44 We wanted to go all in on the presentation tool. And the reason was When we looked at the virtual office tool We were sort of always competing against what we thought was something we'd never be able to surpass. which is in real life experience. Like actually being able to work shoulder to shoulder with her colleagues and having this environment where, you know, you really feel like you're building together. Like virtual office could get pretty good.

1:14:07 But we would never beat that. And so we were almost like limited in our own imagination about how good Can this product be versus The vr the the presentation product We ended that with like a million more ideas we thought we could actually introduce that could be better than how you work in PowerPoint today. And we were just so like so energized by it. And so for us, that was like a you know this sort of A B test of like testing these two things that we invested equal amount of time into and coming out at the other end, realizing that one. was gonna be the product we were pour sort of, you know, all of our blood, sweat and tears into making it

1:14:40 Great because we saw the potential in it. There's I didn't know that about you guys that you explore that other idea that there's so many startups that did that during Covid times. I'm like, Okay, this is the future. We're all gonna be remote and let's work remotely and virtual offices. There's a startup and I'm a tiny investor in Lindy. that is now a big AI agent company and they did the same thing, I imagine, you know, that was their whole first Concept.

1:15:02 There's just like these little avatars, it was like a little game where you walk around and go to little virtual meeting rooms. We had some yeah, it was it was a fun product of to work on, so Uh but yeah. Yeah, it's interesting how we just reverted to the base back to like the mean of just like okay, people are in offices again. That was a fun fun experience. Although things have changed all So just to uh highlight this point you made that I think is really powerful. I haven't heard it described this way before

1:15:27 Just the power of Testing prototypes. Very, very, very early. Using these platforms that make it super easy. We always hear. Okay. Yeah.

1:15:36 You have a Mark, you have a prototype. Yeah, test of users always feels like this heavy thing. You gotta 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.

1:15:50 Have an idea, build the prototype. Test it with I don't know, is it like dozens of people? How many people actually run through a prototype on average? Uh twenty. Twenty people. So twenty people look at this thing, give you a bunch of feedback, you realize this was

1:16:03 Very dumb, or here's the nugget that we want to lean into. And instead of building a thing, instead of doing all these research sessions, things like that. Super cool. Okay. Is there any other big lesson or lever that has helped you grow?

1:16:19 to today's a hundred million. Air two billion dollar company. We talked about influencer marketing. We talked about testing prototypes. uh investing in brand and the little bit of paid Growth. Anything else?

1:16:32 Certainly for us, the ability to sort of adapt and move fast in this environment, you know. I attribute a lot of you know, what we've been able to accomplish to a few things. One is We do have a small team. And a lean team, one that's able to move. Really fast.

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. So we're gonna talk one, you know, obviously about my W how do you construct like a team like ours and and what I think has worked. And then two, uh going back to experimentation being this sort of thing where For us has been a huge unlock, right? Because

1:17:07 It allows you to not only You know, test things and like, you know, iterate a ton. Allows you to build much more efficiently. And so we've been in a start up where we've had great Unit economics from the very beginning.

1:17:19 We run profitably, we have hot really strong margins. I don't think that would be possible if 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 gonna work. And the reality is that never is the case. And so for us to be able to actually test across, you know, twenty 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. 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 Optimizy, you know, probably not surprising. But do you think that's been part of our sort of ability to actually execute at this level? I love the the product.

1:18:05 It's so beautiful and such a good experience. It's such a good example of experimentation. And being really obsessed with running experiments, A B test like the data. Can you Create really beautiful products and experiences that aren't just feeling like some kind of micro optimized Yeah.

1:18:19 Totally, yeah. And and just going back to like one part of the team part of the 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. May are are they emote? I'm not gonna kind of uh kind of uh throw in whether or not yes or no, but I do think it makes a difference. And for us at some point, you know, more than a quarter of our team or about a quarter of our team was product designers. And I think that's like a 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.

1:18:52 you know, we're we're we're quarter of the team's product designers. And I think that was an important investment for us because when you think about You know With AI companies, so many companies are trying to invent new surface areas or you know new user experiences. And that's not possible if you're not really getting the foundation right, right, really thinking deeply about you know, user problems and how can you solve them in a novel way.

1:19:13 And uh and so for us, like we made that investment in the very beginning, even if it was counter to what other startups would do, because we actually felt like it was the right thing. Okay. I definitely want to spend more time on hiring before we get to that. You've touched on this. Kind of uh Concept that you guys are

1:19:28 What many describe uh A GPT wrapper company. You essentially sit on top of Other models. Do some cool stuff.

1:19:36 Uh charge for that. There's historically And there's been a big shift here. Historically there's a sense that okay Uh

1:19:43 You're just this thin layer on top of the model. How is there any sort of motor leverage or long term business model here when it's just the model that is doing the thing and uh charging you guys to do all this AI work. 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

1:20:04 a place you can build a business anymore. 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. You know, when you think about maybe just um literally only being a wrapar on like you know one model or you know one provider Yeah, maybe there's only a limited amount of utility or or value add.

1:20:26 But then when you start thinking about okay, I'm gonna go really deep into this one workflow. And it's not just one model, it's maybe twenty plus models powering all different parts of the product. And then you think 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 been around that are cheaper.

1:20:47 Like you're doing a lot to really You know, your your job is to 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 that. And so for us, you know, we've always been passionate about Being very close to our

1:21:05 our customers, our users, who for them their job to be done is you know, visual communication, visual storytelling. And the default tool today is going into like a PowerPoint or Google Slides where the amount of effort to create something, you know, we've all been there late at night trying to format a deck, trying to find the right layout, all this manual and tedious work. Well, what if you uh could abstract all that away and give them something that feels a little bit more delightful, a little bit easier, much more effortless. What would that earn you in terms of a customer that wants to come back to your product? And so that's everything that we focus on. It's like you need to go deep into the workflow.

1:21:40 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. And I think if you can be laser focused on it, it doesn't matter if you're a rapper or not, like What is the technology you're doing in applying that um makes a real difference? 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. I I don't know if it's truck, it's true or not. But just like, you know, some ideas don't work'cause you these model companies are launching their own Products here and there. So what I love about what you're describing here is kind of like the almost like a heuristic that'll tell you if there's If there's an opportunity slash how to be successful as a GPT rapper company, I'm putting in air quotes.

1:22:28 It sounded like maybe there's three here, but talk about just like if you think about the bullet points of what you need to do to build a successful business on top of existing models. I mien I think the most important thing is you know, before we even talk about the technology, 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.

1:22:49 Start with solving the problem you actually care about. You know, I think it's very tempting right now to chase shiny objects like a founder might be able to gain some initial traction by literally being that GPT rapper and like solving any sort of problem and like you start to see some traction. And then you just go with that. But before you do that, you should think about is this a problem I can invest five to ten years into actually solving? Do I care deeply enough about it?

1:23:12 Uh because if you can, you're never gonna go sort of actually think about like overcoming the variety of different hurdles, whether it's other startups or other you know incumbent tools that are trying to start doing the same thing. And so for us like we we go back to like, you know We've started this company because we really care about helping change the way people communicate their ideas. Um we really feel like this idea of like visual communication, visual storytelling matters. It helps elevate everybody and it gives people much more opportunity to do the things that, you know, in the past, if you weren't great at making slides, your ideas might have died.

1:23:45 And someone else that was able to actually articulate their ideas better ended up winning, you know, the deal or winning the, 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 doesn't feel right. And and so well, could we help democratize visual storytelling, visual communication? That was sort of our North Star. And then you go back into thinking, okay. every step of the way, what are the tools and technology I can apply to help solve that and actually move the average person closer to that long term vision of ours. And of course AI's been, again, like this gift where Yes, you can apply that to solving this job. You can also apply that you know AI to many different jobs. Figure out what is the problem you care deeply enough to go deep, because going back to this sort of idea, like you need to own the sort of end to 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

1:24:35 when they think about, hey I have to create a presentation, they come to you as the default tool. And and the moment they start creating it to the moment they ship it and send it to you know their boss, That end to end experience needs to feel magical, needs to feel great. And I don't think you can really do that unless it's actually a workflow. You either know deeply yourself or you care deeply to actually help solve for somebody else. So some of the elements I'm hearing here is one is just like Uh.

1:25:00 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 ten, twenty years. Um two is understand the problem really, really deeply and have real empathy for the people trying to solve this problem. You had this problem that you uh creating presentations at your previous job, so you understood it.

1:25:23 And I imagine you're Janet. understand even more deeply now that you work on this. So essentially like care really deeply. Uh go really deep on the problem, have real empathy for the people facing this problem.

1:25:33 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 twenty different models to do what you do. Talk more about that, just'cause you know, people may think, Oh Okay. Like I could just go to open to Jet G P T or Cloud and it'll create an awesome presentation for me. Why does it take twenty different models? Why is that such a big part of the success here?

1:25:55 Yeah, so going back to the workflow, you know, you're trying to go and break down every step of you know the creation process for 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. What do we, you know, show you there too. I didn't eat the content like okay I have a first draft, but It's only sixty percent of the way there. How do I get it to a hundred percent of the way there? Those are all things that might require different models. Like the initial outline might be better served by something that's purpose built for actually creating, you know, the best outline, the best narrative, the best story arc.

1:26:30 versus one where you're actually going back and saying, you know gamma or agent can actually go and review your entire deck and say, actually if I were to add suggestions, I would say, you know You may well 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 cars to match, you know, everything else. Uh, these are things that again, like every model might be better served for different things. And so knowing how that actually breaks down into

1:26:56 the end user sitting down working on the product, working on working on, you know, their presentation. How do you help them? I think you can only do that by understanding that workflow and then breaking that down into finding the right tool for the right job. That is super interesting. Essentially there's like here's the things that AI has to do for us. Uh I don't know, imagining some kind of uh storyboard and then it's

1:27:15 Figure out the model. And level of model and prompt. for that model to achieve each of these steps uh as best as possible. Totally, yeah. And it applies to, you know, even on the visual side, finding the right image. I think certain models of great uh photo realistic output versus others, you know, want more of the artistic vibe or like uh you know something that feels more abstract.

1:27:36 And so again, you can choose the right model for the right job. It doesn't mean that you'll never use other models. It's just like as as you're going through that workflow. Cert the the content might dictate you know, what's the best use case of 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's 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.

1:28:14 We're just getting to the point where there's gonna be more personalization too. He's going back to like, you know A consultant's gonna have different needs than an educator. If an educator is trying to engage their students, they may want to have, you know, language or visuals are more animated and that that makes sense. Consultant can't get away with that. They might need something that, you know, is much more structured or information dense. And so again, like how do we actually be the same tool? That can serve both of those needs. I think that's where it becomes interesting and it's almost like there is isn't that necessary even a quote unquote best model. It's like what's the right model for that right for that particular user. That's actually a much harder problem to solve. And we're just starting to, you know, we're trying to embrace some of that now.

1:28:50 Is there one that's just like, oh, that's actually really cool for some that we didn't expect? Early on, things like creating the outline perplexity was actually great. You know, not one that people talk about as often, but creating the outline and doing web search and you know actually integrating some of those elements together for for us was was pretty powerful. Okay, there's two more things I want to talk about. One is pricing, how you guys figure it out. your approach to pricing, you guys started monetizing really early. And that feels like such an important piece to AI startups because you're spending real money on And inference. And other things.

1:29:21 And then I'm gonna talk about hiring. So in terms of pricing. When did you decide it was time to really start charging? And then how did you pick your approach to pricing the actual price. Yeah, so uh we kinda stumbled into having to do pricing and packaging. Um I mentioned our big AI launch in in March twenty twenty three. This was pre revenue, so

1:29:41 We wanted just to get the you know, we focused All of our effort on the first thirty seconds. Literally all hands on duck just trying to get that right. And we spent zero time on actually monetization. So we, you know, we had a credit system, all new users get four hundred credits. Once they burn through those credits, there's actually nothing more you could do with AI. It kinda just got cut off.

1:30:02 And so intercom for us was just blowing up with people saying How do I purchase More credits. Like I I wanna keep using this thing. And a very fair question. So basically all of April we ended up having to do a quick, you know, sort of pricing and packaging exercise. Uh we did a couple of different things. We we we did run a form of Van Wessendorp, which is just understanding what is the overall willingness to play.

1:30:25 and uh w willingness to pay. And we so we did we did use that. We did kind of integrate some f forms of like conjoint analysis, which is just like trying to understand, you know, what are the features or things that people actually value in your product. And so we'd survey a lot of our early users and 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 twenty bucks a month. Part of this was 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 are coming out, and you almost uh end up becoming anchored by What does chat GPT charge? Because everyone becomes familiar with that price point. And so we asked ourselves like how complicated do we want to make it? We always default to remove friction, make it as easy as possible for a user to understand. And so we end up coming up with like a similar price point and kind of ship that as the the V one basically end of May twenty twenty three.

1:31:17 And for us we wanted to see a couple of 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? And we'd 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.

1:31:45 And so we've always had that like, you know Pricing and packaging is is not only it doesn't not only need to be easy to understand for a user. You know, obviously you have to have like strong conversion rates, but it should be something where you feel like you could build an enduring, durable business off of. And if it's not right, then you can always go back and try to tweak things, but it's something you should be monitoring, you know, as early as possible. What's interesting, we have the head of Chat GPT on the podcast and he shared the way they picked Chat GPT's price is the Van Westendorp survey that they ran in Google Forms. Totally, yeah, yeah. I listened to that one. Yeah, it was a great one.

1:32:16 Oh what a that survey, man. What a and it 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. 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. Twenty bucks a month, of course. That's what everyone's doing. Totally. Who knows what would happen if they chose a different number, but everyone would be so much more rich if it's just like twenty five bucks on Imagine that The GDP. Of growth. Yeah. Yeah.

1:32:54 From that. Oh man. Okay. And then the way so is Ben Westendorp helped you pick a price point. And then you said this uh conjoint analysis. We actually have a guest post. that I think describes how to do this well and if not we'll find pulling people to actually approach this. And you started charging so it was post product cut launch you launch with no

1:33:13 paid features. People are just like, I wanna pay, I wanna keep using this. You're like, Okay, I guess we gotta start charging. That's right. Yep. 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 I should have thought about this. Yeah, I mean that's one that one's hard. I think, you know, you you never wanna obviously just throw something together without giving it much thought, but for us

1:33:36 You know, we 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. Yeah, I think there's there's maybe like two checkpoints of thinking about whether or not you feel like you have product market fit. I think one checkpoint is organic growth. The second is are people willing to pay for the product? And I think if you pass both those, you feel like you've you've you've at least within some pocket of the market, you have some PMF.

1:34:01 Um, so I I think you know, those are both important questions to ask. depending on your resources, ideally you can do kind of both and experiment a little bit. along you know, um uh at the same time and then by the time you actually have paying users you've You sort of check some of those boxes for yourself. By the way, I love that you like you launch pricing, you're like, Okay, let's figure out if we're actually making money or not.

1:34:20 It's not obvious with AI companies. Mm. Totally. Well, we also didn't have a choice because at that point runway was also low, you know. So it's like if we weren't making money, well, you know, we would have to be in a tough spot. That's such a good point that you did not have a huge amount of money sitting around and to spend on like the way a lot of companies in AI do just we'll deal with it and we'll figure out how to make money later. Totally. Yeah. Within a couple months we had hit uh a million in ARR and became profitable.

1:34:45 And so those are both two exciting milestones for a company that months prior were, you know, heads down figuring out how we how we even survive. What a story. I'm so excited to be telling the story. Uh Okay, final. uh topic. I wanna talk about is hiring. You have some really hot takes on hiring. Clearly it's worked out. For you guys.

1:35:03 What are some things you've learned about hiring well, what is your approach to hiring? Yeah, so we had this mantra internally, I mean, even before you know the the sort of AI launch for us, which was Higher, painfully, slowly. And I think, you know, the temptation is once start you know, things start working, you just start

1:35:22 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 w wanted to build the team very thoughtfully. Be lean, but also be a team that Every individual feels like they have high a you know amount of impact that they can that they have on a daily basis and

1:35:39 And so for us, yeah, that was from sort of the very beginning. And so even, you know, as we've scaled up, I think we've been super efficient. By nature of just being a very lean team. So I think a lot of people hear this advice of stay lean, be efficient. You have some even more concrete pieces of advice here of just like what that looks like. You have a huge Uh I don't know, philosophy of just like huge leverage per person. You focus a lot on it.

1:36:00 Revenue per employee. Talk about that. So we actually I mean we we we obviously we look at things like revenue employee boom, we never let that be the sort of North Star. It's not something that dictates our strategy per se. Same thing with like profitability. I think by being efficient, like that ends up becoming like a side effect of Yeah, we we are profitable and and growing. But I think for us more of it's like we care a ton about

1:36:22 You know, adding the right team members. So You know, it's it's easy you can almost sort of shoot yourself in the foot as a founder by just setting the wrong goals. If your goal is to double and headcount and like add a hundred people to the company And that becomes the goal, right? The goal is no longer to add the best people, it's no longer to maintain a high quality bar.

1:36:40 The goal is to hit a hundred people and that's that's everything everyone's focused on. So then guess what? If that's the goal, then the thing that ends up dropping is okay, maybe we'll settle for employees that are good enough. And we're gonna make sure we get to that hundred because hundreds gonna help us get to the next phase of growth and then the next phase of growth. And I think we've tried to resist that temptation, which is We want everybody that comes through the door and joins our team to to really be You know This the type of person that represents gamma.

1:37:09 Our first ten to twelve employees, we spent so much time like Really getting the DNA right. I think Brian Cheske talks about this. Like your goal is like you get that first ten. And you want to be able to then replicate the next ten. And then replicate the next ten. But that ten needs to be all super cohesive. You need to have the shared same shared values.

1:37:27 Same principles, same ambition, same vision. And if you don't, then like what are you even replicating, right? At that point you're just adding headcount and you know, you can easily just be adding headcount because they're chasing the next shiny startup to join. And so for us, we really focused on that first ten. That allows us to really have this, you know. This sort of community of of

1:37:47 of like a teammates that that basically, you know, want to stick around. 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? If you have a leaky bucket, people are just constantly leaving revolving door. That's a huge amount of cost. The the continuity cost is is massive and it's really hard to quantify. And that yeah, I mentioned our first ten employees, all ten of them are still here today, five years later. Right. And so that sort of continuity means that you have this tribal knowledge that sticks with you. It means that people can continue building and having that sort of cohesive feeling. And so I think that's one piece of just like

1:38:23 It's hard to quantify, but I do think and you know start ups I would advise just uh really be thoughtful about that, like get that to a point where you really feel confident that as you're editing the next ten and next hundred. You're actually replicating the same DNA and not actually just adding a bunch of random people to the company. One of your very specific piece of advice is hire generalists.

1:38:42 versus someone that's just like really deep in one thing. Why why is that so important? What does that look like? This very much feels like the age of the generalist or the rise of the generalist right now. When we think about, you know, uh a f 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. So for instance, obviously, you know, a product designer that knows how to code. That's great. It allows you to actually span

1:39:06 Across many different domains. And again, a co 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. And that's helped us like just maintain this idea that the work, you know, the opportunity in front of us, it can easily expand. Each person plays a huge role. They don't need to wait and ask for permission. they can go after and pick up a a 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. And so for us, I do think this rise of the generalists is going to be important. You can always augment that by working with contractors or agencies that are hyper specialized in certain areas. And this is where, like, for instance, going back to influencer marketing, you might work with an agency rather than kind of scale up your own influencer, you know, marketing team.

1:39:52 You work with like a hyper specialized team there. But my marketing team is all generalists. You know, we are head of marketing more recently launched this cool drone show. in San Francisco. We had like four thousand people in San Francisco come the mayor came by.

1:40:06 She created that entire project and manage that entire project en to henta herself. Right, 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 it also goes hand in hand with I I mentioned sort of this other um role which is the player coach.

1:40:27 traditional management layer is like a manager manages a ton of people, and that's kind of their core core focus. All of our people leaders are player coaches in that They still do the end work themselves. And they can like mentor and coach those around them. Um, this analogy came from or this mindset came from. I something I borrowed from just the sports world in general, because there's a lot of sports that just move incredibly fast, like football, for instance. It moves really, really fast. And so you might have a coach that has that's calling in a play.

1:40:55 But the quarterback can actually make a last minute adjustment based on what he's seeing the defense do. Right. And so you want a player that is on the field. that can adapt as needed. And that way the coach doesn't have to call every single thing in. He's just kind of giving you the general intent of what you want to run as the play. And then the quarter cac quarterback can still make the the adjustments. And so all of our people leaders, our management layer is all folks that actually can make those adjustments. If they're seeing something that doesn't feel right.

1:41:22 On a daily or weekly basis, they're kind of adjusting priorities for that team. And they're still doing the work themselves too. They're so close to it that they understand like what is the relative prioritization at all times. So those both of those I I think have been Yeah, when I think about founders, uh, they they oftentimes think about Innovation in the sense like we're gonna innovate on products or innovate on technology.

1:41:43 I think every founder today has a chance to innovate on org design. And that starts by just thinking about What is the type of company we want to build today? what does it mean and when it comes to like the management later, what s what sort of leaders do we hire?

1:41:56 What does it mean when it comes to hiring specific roles and specific functions? All that is a chance for you to be very thought. 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. There's no pure managers again, when your plan is to not have

1:42:12 People that are just managing The idea is everyone, even a manager is doing their own IC work. Yes. And then uh the other piece of advice here is just generalists, people that can do a lot of stuff. And I hear this a lot on this podcast, just like everyone is there's no more just like you're a designer.

1:42:28 That's all you're gonna do. Designers need to build stuff, market stuff. Write some BRDs probably. And I think I mean just one thing to add is like Yeah, th that's for where we are where where we are at today. I think being adaptable means that

1:42:41 You know, certain things may evolve and change and like how the player coach model evolves you know, in maybe in certain functions or as the team scales, like that's not gonna be practical everywhere. 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 yourself with what's working, what's not. I mean, we're constantly trying to you know, learn and and evolve ourselves'cause I think you know, we're doing it in a way that

1:43:05 We don't believe really has been done before. And so we have to kind of pave our own path over time. I love that. Giving yourself an out when the time comes when you need to just hire managers. A year later when you invite me back, I'll say yeah, this is what we learned. Yeah. It's like people are like, We don't need product managers and then okay. I see. Maybe we do. Uh yeah, it makes sense.

1:43:26 talk about is you have this really cool quote that you shared uh on Twitter. When you find someone exceptional, bed big on them. This is a big part of your philosophy is just like bet big on the people that are doing super well. Just talk about what that looks like and why that's so important. Yeah, I mean this starts top of the funnel, which is like you meet candidates, you you decide who, you know, you actually hire. And so if you don't start with a high bar there. you know, going back to what is the goal. The goal is to h hit a hiring target.

1:43:53 versus like you know maintaining super high quality you know hiring bar. Yeah, th those are different goals and I don't think we've ever Kind of dropped our bar. And so then you bring somebody in that you think is exceptional, that brings something unique to the table, that can be a good teammate. when they're when they're thriving, you just give them more and more resources.

1:44:11 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. No. A players want actually more playing time. Like you never see a star player that says, actually I want less playing time. They want more time on the field. They want to actually go after the hardest problems. They want to be able to feel like they're making a huge impact. And so if you have fewer, you know, exceptional teammates

1:44:36 um where you can just throw almost anything at them and they'll figure it out. That feels that 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. Yeah, I think that for us has always been something that um goes beyond just, you know, almost everything else. Like we give people a chance to really thrive in this environment. 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 sh learned or lesson you share that you that we haven't talked about yet. I mean there's some of these intangibles which is, you know For the founding team, does this feel like this could be your life's work? Right. Like when you're pitching a um

1:45:21 When you're pitching um a potential Canada, like does this feel like something where You you're actually committed. Uh the unfortunate side of a lot of the you know, what's happening in the AI world broadly is I think you're coming to learn Which founders are sort of missionaries versus mercenaries.

1:45:36 And many that were just chasing maybe just a big outcome where like something shiny Or like something to feel good about themselves. They'll go off and then the company, you know, I guess doesn't live on or maybe has to find a different way or different path. And so, you know, something I admire is like You look at some of the founders, obviously before the sort of AI era. No, folks like Dylan or Melanie, Figma, Canva.

1:45:57 You know, Ivan at Notion. They've 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.

1:46:10 And I think when you're talking to candidates, candidates can kinda tell like is this something like the founders even care about? And um I think you're gonna have a better chance of attracting, you know, true missionaries, people that want to build with you for the long haul. If it's authentic and it's something you actually care about. Oh man. I feel like I I keep saying this, I feel like we could have at least five more hours of stuff to talk about.

1:46:30 Uh that'll be good content for when you come back and you're making a billion dollars a a year. Before we get to our Very exciting lightning round. Grant, is there anything else that you think uh is important for people to hear any last I don't know.

1:46:45 Lesson you want to double down on anything you want to leave listeners with. Yeah, I mean, just going back to the original story of um that was probably the ultimate low point. You know, having an investor that's been twenty minutes listening to my pitch, telling me that it was the worst thing, worst idea in the world. You know, I think Throughout the journey there's gonna be those m low moments.

1:47:03 And when I think about you know, being a founder and uh working a startup You're honestly just trying to increase your luck surface area as much as possible. And for me, luck surface area has two dimensions. The first I mention is

1:47:17 People. 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. I'm lucky to have two amazing co-founders. We've been working on this thing for five years. There's zero percent chance we'd be where we are if I didn't have them. And we've had to overcome a lot, but I guess. For us, it's like creating that own luck over a long time horizon.

1:47:45 has been the only way that you know it's been possible. Well, it's clearly showing in the success you guys are having. Grant. With that. We've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

1:47:56 Yeah. Yes. All right, I've got five questions for you. First question. What are two or three books?

1:48:02 that you find yourself recommending most to other people. Yeah, so I'll give um one that's for pre product market fit. Folks. And the one post product market fit. Pre product market fit, I would say, is shoe dog. Which is written by Phil Knight.

1:48:17 Founder of Nike. And you know, he talks about two things, like one, you should tra chase your sort of crazy ideas. But these are the 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.

1:48:37 And the the second thing he taught me was going back to the team thing, he surrounded himself with other people that were super passionate about Athletics and shoes as well. And so the folks that he had as his has his initial start up crew. Or all that. 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.

1:48:55 You're doing with a team that shares the same ambition as you? Uh post product market fit, there's a book called Seven Powers by Hamilton Helmer. Where I think when you think about how to build a durable business There's so much in there. I think there's a lot that you can kinda read and reread as you kind of evolve and kind of hit new milestones yourself. And so much of that can be both tactical, but also like zooming out and thinking about what are the big picture strategic questions you as a founding team need to be thinking about. So both are great. Hamilton was on the podcast. We'll link to that episode.

1:49:24 Uh I also love that book. Many people mention it. Next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or T V show you've really enjoyed. Yeah, uh the Lazarus project is one. I I'm a I'm a huge sucker for uh time travel and sci fi.

1:49:38 So this is one I just started watching and for me it has like all the right ingredients for a fun show. Is there a product you recently discovered that you really love? Yeah, I mentioned this already, um, voice panel. So again, a full disclosure, Angel Investor, but we've been using it and Going back to kind of being a cheat code for folks that are, you know, starting to experiment a ton with different ideas, vibe coding maybe some of these. Like get this into the hands of users, hear what they think about it. I think analysis can help speed up a lot of things and save you time from

1:50:09 uh wasting time on on kind of the wrong ideas or ideas where there's no no market. Is there a life motto that you often find yourself coming back to in work or in life? Yeah, so there's this uh Chinese idiom that my mom used to say, it's uh Jin Deeds Hwa. Which the translation is a frog at the bottom of a well. And the story is like there, you know, there's a frog at the bottom of the well. He looks up every night and he sees the world and he imagines he you know he he knows everything about the world.

1:50:37 And then one day a bird comes along and describes all the things that He sees. The ocean, the mountains. And the frog realizes that What he sees is just such a limited

1:50:47 part of the world and You know the bird ask like do you wanna come join me and kinda see the rest of it and so Frog goes long and so For me, you know, I came from

1:50:56 you know, pretty modest childhood. You know, my parents we we didn't have a whole lot. And I think it would have been very easy to kinda have a very narrow kind of lens on the world and be like, Oh, this is this is what it is. But my mom never l allowed me to do that. She always pulled me to dream. Much bigger.

1:51:12 To say hey the world is vast. It's your opportunity to seize it. Like you have to go out there. Don't have a narrow, you know, view of of what's possible, always dream bigger. And so for me that's Always carried through?

1:51:24 And every time I feel like I'm thinking too little or too small. I try to zoom out and remind myself that there's much more out there to go after. That is so good. And so important. And so valuable in today's world where so much more is possible. Just like Most of the 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 as possible.

1:51:44 So that's such valuable thinking. Okay, final question. You help people present better. You know, your tools basically help people become better presenters. What's like one tip you've learned or one tip you teach people to become better presenters that might be helpful to listeners? Yeah, I mean we'll go back to the uh consumer advertising uh concept, which is

1:52:04 Yeah. one idea at a time. So you know this this notion of you give them one egg someone can catch it, you give'em too many eggs, they're gonna drop it. So don't try to Uh uh You throw too many concepts all at once, keep it simple.

1:52:17 People will appreciate it. And so with every sort of presentation, like break it down into the core concepts. Try to make sure you're covering one at a time. And uh I think once you s sort of see the through line there, then it becomes it easy for it to package up into something that feels more cohesive. Mm. Less is more, as they say. Totally.

1:52:35 Grand, two final questions. Where can folks find you online? Where can they find gamma? What should they know? Just like plug anything you want. And then how can listeners be useful to you? Yeah, so you can find me on both Twitter and LinkedIn, DMs open. Uh I uh honestly here just knowing how hard the the journey is in general, whether just thinking about a startup idea or you're deep into startup land. Uh I wanna be hopefully helpful.

1:52:58 I'm gonna be You're hopeful your biggest cheerleader, so let me know I can help. And then for us it You know, we're always looking for feedback. So if you're trying gamma, it's falling short of your expectations. Let us know. We'd love to help in terms of just trying to make it better.

1:53:12 And uh yeah, really appreciate, you know, all the feedback and support along the way. Grand, this was awesome. I really appreciate you making time. I know you're trying to build a Crazy fast growing startup with a lot going on. So I really appreciate you making time for this. Thanks, Lenny. It's been a blast.

1:53:25 It's been a blast for me too. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's Podcast dot com.

1:53:49 See you in the next episode.

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