Gamma

“We created a mini renewal agent. So let me scroll down. I'll show you guys this. So we've got this mini renewal agent now going where, you know, we had our AI day, I think last month or something. And previously it'd be a manual thing where we have a digital e…”

“This is all Gamma does at a hundred fifty million revenue.”

“We're going to talk about how we achieved a hundred million in AR profitably over the past couple of years with a team of 50.”

“I would advise you to probably compress that by an order of 10 or more and really try to get to market much faster.”

“We launched our product time. We ended up winning product of the day, product of the week, product of the month.”

“We got Paul Graham to respond, throwing a little shade at us and the tweet ended up going viral.”

“So in the very beginning, we had, you know, 5000 signups a day, then 10,000 signups a day, and 20,000 signups a day, then 50,000 signups a day, and it kept on going up. And this was a moment in time where we're doing zero marketing, zero sales.”

“Before you spend any money on marketing, build a product that has strong word of mouth. Because word of mouth is the only form of distribution that can help amplify everything else you're doing. Until you have it, I would not worry about anything else.”

“We traded it as something where every single creator, we would manually onboard. I would sit down with them.”

“And we actually even ended up open sourcing this so that at brand.gamma.app, a creator can pull all the assets they need. And even more importantly, they can actually create their own gamma branded assets so that they can further amplify our message out there.”

“In September, we ran a program called Gamma Lab, which is we invited users from around the world to work out of our office in San Francisco. We flew them into San Francisco. They could work alongside our team.”

“A lot of our biggest customers do have both end users using gamma as well as a ton of automation leveraging our API.”

“When you look broadly, one, the market's super fragmented. There is no, you know, not one person, one, you know, team or one product is dominating everywhere. And two, The sort of, the adoption curve, like, most people are still stuck at just getting the basic…”

“Growing sales team, actually, some of our folks here, yeah. Growing sales team, you know, our first part of our journey was really just this prosumer motion, which is still our core growth engine, but we recognize, like, our ambition is to build a product that…”

“Just fulfilling inbound, we haven't even really begun the process of, you know, all of our self-serve customers, like actually going and engaging them. Of course, that was probably going to be sort of next phase. And then eventually, you know, you're going to …”

“It's a split right now. We have both humans, but then, you know, agents, AI can help us also prioritize the right conversations and ensure that they're getting some touch.”

“We have different versions of basically Either like a, what we call a forward deploy designer, someone that can actually help them with some of the design translations, as well as, yeah, more technical folks that can help set up different things like our API, …”

“We launched and we didn't even have monetization figured out. There's no way to pay for the product. And so we had this credit based system and all of a sudden, you know, chat was blowing up saying, how do I buy more credits? And we had no way of actually char…”

“The conversion rate of someone signing up for our product from a landing page And actually getting to a point of seeing value was like appallingly low. It was like, we're talking five or 10% or something.”

“We're talking servers going down every other week, at one point for even days at a time, a support volume we couldn't keep up with, we weren't even monetizing, and people were emailing us begging to pay for the product.”

“Well, everyone needs just a chat tool for sure. The engineers all need a tool like a cursor or cloud code or whatever. And it turns out the third use case that's bubbling up over and over is presentations. People are wasting all this time just like formatting …”

“We thought we were solving an onboarding problem, which was overcome the blank page, but it turns out we were discovering product market fit because the real job to be done for the customer is also solve the blank page. And so when we solved what we thought wa…”

“What we did was we just eliminated maybe eight or nine of those 10 hours right off the board, and when you can give that concrete a time savings, the value is just so immediate concrete, and people left on it.”

“We bet early on and pretty consistently on building a horizontal product rather than a vertical one that was focused on a specific persona, and it was actually a source of constant tension in fundraising and a lot of our early debates because I think there's s…”

“Our original team, we had product market fit was 12 people, of which zero were in any kind of GTM role, so we had no sales or marketing. Four out of those 12 were UX designers.”

“A lot of the quotes we heard, probably the single most common quote we heard from all these people, no matter what their job was, I spend 90% of my time on formatting and 10% of my time on content.”

“We have more than a hundred million users who've signed up for our product”

“Now what we're finding, actually, is that all those guardrails we put in place are holding these much more intelligent AIs back. And so we're now in a mode not of even adding functionality, but trying to throw things out, loosen the requirements, and let AI do…”

“You have to bridge that familiarity gap, and only once you've bridged it and started to bring people into your new system can you now start to layer on what you really thought was magical about the vision.”

“And so we did build a PowerPoint export, but probably a year too late. I think we should have listened to the signals earlier on of people just telling us this is what they wanted.”

“This also, I think, came from perhaps trying to build for durability and moat before building for adoption. And I think you actually have to go in the opposite order. You have to first win adoption, which is a kind of a grueling fight with someone who is chang…”

“For a while we were at over two million ARR per employee, which actually felt like too much. It was like almost comically outsized in terms of the amount of work we had to do versus the size of our team.”

“I think probably the biggest difference between the Excel workflow and the PowerPoint workflow is creativity and taste. There's less objective definition of what good looks like and there's much more room for the user and also the brand to express themselves. …”

“We're also able to combine different models from different providers in a way that some of our competitors structurally aren't. They're kind of tied into their own House models, and so we get to directly test, you know, particularly in the world of image model…”

“The classic design mindset is make a quick prototype and throw it away. The classic engineering mindset is build durable systems that can last for 10 years. We find ourselves in this in-between, where we have to build systems that last for six to 12 months. At…”

“Presentations are a naturally episodic use case, which means we can't expect on our prosumer base to have more than a hundred percent net revenue retention.”

“We have at the low end, a 10 dollar a month plan, which is relatively episodic. It's our entry level floor. It's also more popular internationally in developing countries who don't have the money for very expensive AI products. It's not actually a loss leader …”

“The inflection point came when we truly solved virality in the product by introducing AI. And at that point, we started getting distribution for free because people would make something great. They would share it with someone else. Those people would try it ou…”

“Before we launched our sort of AI product, and it was more kind of esoteric and hard to use, we were in the hundreds of signups a day. As soon as we launched this AI product, it jumped into the low thousands. We're talking one or 2000 a day. But the reason we …”

“And we were still doing no paid marketing at this time. So the only explanation for this was word of mouth growth, basically, you know, different kinds of word of mouth. But that 10,000 kept climbing upwards, 10,020 1030 thousand, to the point where in our fir…”

“Going international has been huge for us. The AI app layer opportunity is so much broader than just a narrow segment of people, like, say, in the United States and the people right next to you. I think especially for a horizontal prosumer product like ours, it…”

“You have to take your one value prop and show it in the 1:02 minutes of when someone signs up. If you can't do that, you're toast. And probably like the single biggest lesson that you could take from Gamma was focusing on onboarding actually unlocked the real …”

“Companies like Gamma, they haven't raised much money in the life of the company. In fact, they have what they call negative lifetime burn as a term I had never heard before, but it's a new term I've learned, which is they have more money in the bank today than…”

“They will need to have a second product. I'm so sure of that. They will need to have a second product.”

“Gamma is a California-based AI platform used by seventy million people to create presentations. When they joined the first cohort of Stripe users to accept UPI payments in India, their Indian revenue jumped 22% in that very same month.”

“In this product cycle, what's actually interesting is a bunch of the early leaders from 23 and 24 have maintained their lead. You know, we talked about Harvey. That's a really impressive company. You know, Gamma is a really impressive company. You know, Cursor…”

“Now Gamma just said, I'm not going to gamble, but I just noticed in the last, you know, two billion valuation, a hundred million ARR, 50 employees.”

“Gamma was interesting to see, like one of the biggest things that they said in their launch that I think is a very good trend is they said they got to a hundred million dollars in ARR with only 50 employees.”

“We read about gamma and we love gamma for AI presentations, one to eighty million that we'll do this year, but it was founded in 20, 20. So it was five years to one and then one to 80 this year.”

“Claude figured that out. Cursor didn't figure this out. Replit and Lovable and Bolt didn't figure it out. I can tell you the story. Claude figured it out. Anthropic, the guys, you know, once they quit OpenAI, they figured it out and everyone grafted on this, i…”

“They just said they crossed a hundred million AR this year and raised around at two billion.”

“Gamma raising a hundred million dollars at a 2.1 billion dollar valuation, having hit a hundred million in revenue with 50 people.”

“Canva actually has a Gamma clone now that's not bad.”

“You guys are at over a hundred million ARR now, worth over two billion dollars.”

“This is end of March, 20, 23. And all of a sudden, you know, we'd go from a few hundred signups a day to now first day was like a couple thousand. And then the next day would be like 5000 signups. And then 10,000 signups a day and then 20,000 signups a day. An…”

“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? Like they're coming in, they have no desire to learn a new tool. And so what can you give them …”

“There's this thing from like consumer advertising, which is you threw 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 want to talk about the four or five f…”

“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. Along the…”

“Your friends want to do you a favor, so they're going to try the product. They're also going to lie to you. They're going to tell you how great it is. And then you look at the usage and nobody's coming back.”

“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 …”