Gamma

“AI really could make the great thing in an hour. In fact, it could make something pretty good in like five or 10 minutes.”

“We were only trying to raise, like, a million, million and a half. We ended up raising more. I think we raised around two and a half million”

“And so we started to get excited about AI and the reason we got excited about it was honestly, not even because we necessarily believed in it on its own sake, but because we thought it would impress investors and we knew we were hitting a desperation point whe…”

“We were so focused on core product and making it good that there had been no time to like build a Stripe integration because we didn't know anybody would want to buy it.”

“We actually spent like three months trying to build a zoom competitor. We had this whole idea of like, what if the presentation was the like video platform and it was all kind of like one little, like Hub that you have the meeting in.”

“My feeling was nobody had tried rethinking the format itself of a presentation. They tried to make better PowerPoint editors, but it was still just making the same. 16 by nine slide format that you click through with like clip art and text.”

“And honestly, those first few months, we would send out 20 invites. Maybe like five would actually sign up and try it. Maybe, like, two would give us feedback, and probably zero would actually stick as, like, recurring users, but even that feedback we got was …”

“I think it was 80% hype. I think there was people out there that wanted to see cool AI stuff and wanted to know how AI could be useful for them.”

“And we had this wait list of 2000. We thought about, should we just like flood all 2000 and, you know, like have them try it and see who sticks. But I'm really glad that we didn't because what we chose to do instead was basically 20 a week. So we're like, we'r…”

“I think we raised three million at that time on top of maybe like two and change we'd raised before that. So we're at around five or six total at this point.”

“It was very quickly after we did that AI launch, maybe like three or four weeks after. And it was the moment that our support broke and we were just dealing with a flood of users. We didn't even understand what they were trying to use the product for. We had n…”

“But honestly, the product still wasn't delivering that much value, and I think the best sign of that was we still had terrible churn. I mean, most people who signed up didn't actually stick with the product. Most people who bought didn't stick with the product…”

“Our designer who has no video production background, Melissa ended up making the whole thing in Figma, which is not a video production tool, but it was just a desperation thing.”

“The day we came back was a Thursday. Not only was a Thursday, it was the fourth of July. When like nobody's working and we had this record sales date, we had this insane record sales date where suddenly we were making like. 50,000 dollars.”

“First of all, we win like number one product of the day on Product Hunt. To be honest, mainly by just getting everybody we know to upvote us. [1823] Host: That's how everybody does it, I think. [1825] Jon Noronha: Genuine it was, but it still felt good. [1827]…”

“I realized the acquisition was this amazing moment where there's gonna be all these great people who are suddenly looking for a new gig. And if there was a place I could gather them up, like it would just be this incredible shortcut to hiring. You could speed …”

“These horizontal products that are very product-led and serve a lot of different personas, it's actually harder to get that early stage validation, and you have to build a ton just to get to parity with the old tools before they become useful”

“It's funny because when we started the product, we never had any idea. People would actually use the final output as output. It was always supposed to be just the rough draft, the illustration.”

“Keep in mind, before this point, we've been onboarding between 20 and a hundred people a week. Suddenly we were getting, I think we got like thousands of signups that first day. You know, maybe like 5000 signups.”

“I actually remember Paul Graham replied to the tweet and said, making slides is not the most valuable tool in business. Like, anybody who thinks this is not making a good business. Like, the way to make a good business is to make a good product.”

“They have massive funds. They have tons of customers. They're like, you tell us when you need us, but they were not, like, checking in regularly. And think of anything, they were cheerleaders. Like, They're like, wow, the product's getting so much better so fa…”

“What we had early on was bells and whistles and I think the bells and whistles did work at impressing investors, but they didn't matter. They didn't matter in what the actual user said. And it turns out now that we've actually built a business around it, they …”

“So we raised a proper seed round from Excel. I actually think that was only possible because it was an incredibly frothy time. But it turned out to be crucial because we didn't really have traction yet.”

“We don't exist in an island. So people would say, yeah, I made something kind of cool in your product, but if I can't turn it into a PDF at the end of the day to send it to the client, then it's useless to me. In fact, it's worse than useless because I wasted …”

“Really, it was like a 1.5 X that I was telling myself was a 10 X. It really was genuinely better, and like 50% better is still a lot, but 50% better and 10 X better are just different universes.”

“And that's still, I would say our biggest source of strength is anybody who has something high stakes to present, especially anybody who is selling themselves as a service. So like a consultant, freelancer, a sales team, an agency when there's some kind of lik…”

“We have been cash flow positive pretty much continuously for two years now.”

“I think back to if we'd even raised, I don't know, like 10% less, we wouldn't have actually survived long enough to get to that point where we made it.”

“If the undo button doesn't work in a text editor, you're out. You're just out. If you ever lose anybody's data, if they ever, like, push a button and, like, a paragraph of stuff they spend time in is done, they're gone, and they're never coming back.”

“You have to do all this feature parity work, but if you just do feature parity, no one's going to use your product. You also have to do innovation different work so that it is like unique and differentiated. But you kind of don't know if your differentiation s…”

“So we fully roll out monetization by early July. I believe if I have the numbers right, that by August or maybe it was early September, we crossed a million ARR. And became cash flow positive.”

“So we ended up raising twelve million Series A from Excel, and that was, yeah, roughly December, twenty-twenty-three. And that's the last time we fundraised.”

“The stat that I heard when we started the company was that PowerPoint and Google slides each have Something like five hundred million monthly active users. So there's like a billion people making presentations every month.”

“It's actually on day two or three, that this thing starts picking up and we actually start to have more signups on day three than we had on day one.”

“And so actually for that first year or so, our compass was using it ourselves. We forced ourselves to do all our work inside this editor environment. So we would write all our own docs and we even created fake reasons to give presentations.”

“Month one, we're talking like two or 3000 signups a day and maybe it, I don't know, like a couple thousand MAU. Month two, now we're at like 10,000 signups a day and maybe like, I don't know, 15,000 MAU. Month three, it starts to get insane. There's like 50 or…”

“And our activation rate of people actually making things was like atrociously that it was like a, Maybe, like, five percent would actually succeed in, like, making something good, because people dropped in a blank page, don't know where to start, they have to …”