SaaStr 871: $0 to $100M ARR Fast. How Gamma's CEO and Co-Founder Scaled Quickly without a Sales Team

0:00Grant Lee:Get into my third pitch and 20 minutes in, you know, I finished my pitch and I'm waiting for the investor to start asking me some questions. Long pause. And eventually the investor says, this has got to be the worst idea I've ever heard. Not only are you going up against massive incumbents, they have ultimate distribution. There is no way you will ever succeed. And so of course, I'm a little shell shocked in the moment. I'm trying to think about, okay, what is a really smart rebuttal I can give this investor? And before I can do that, he hangs up, leaves the Zoom call. And so in that moment, you know, I tried to internalize what he said, because I think there is some truth to it, which is being in this category is incredibly hard.

0:50Grant Lee:You can't just build a great product. You have to think about distribution from day one. Wow, wow. What an honor to be here. Very glad to be here with you all. Excited to share a little bit of our story. We're going to talk about how we achieved 100 million in AR profitably over the past couple years with a team of 50. For those that don't know about Gamma, you can think of us as the anti-PowerPoint. A quick glance at Gamma, we passed 100 million in AR, are, again, a team of 50. And today I'm here to share a little bit about our story. I have four lessons, just four lessons, hopefully lessons that you can take, bring back to your organizations to help you feel your growth as well.

1:36Grant Lee:We're going to talk a little bit about product market fit. We're going to talk about creator marketing. We're going to talk about community-led growth. And we're going to talk about dogfooding the future. now every early stage startup has this question of how do we know if we've reached product market fit and it's an incredibly important question to answer now unfortunately this could be one where it's super easy to trick yourself or to fool yourself into thinking you might have it and so i want to share kind of our story to talk about how we actually approach this ourselves When we first started Gamma, we were setting out to try to solve the blank page problem.

2:18Grant Lee:Part of this was informed by my own experience. I was basically at a different startup. We got acquired. I started advising early-stage startups. And one late night when I was preparing for a meeting the next day, I was pulling up Google Slides, trying to get my ideas onto this canvas, and just frustrated by the amount of time it took to sort of format and design rather than on the content itself. And that for me just felt backwards. What if we could reimagine this format from the ground up and really allow people to shape and share their ideas way more seamlessly? So we got to work. I ended up meeting up with two of my former colleagues from Optimizely and we started building Gamma.

2:59You're listening to the official Sastra AI podcast brought to you by... Hey everybody, starting a business can get expensive fast. Website here, email somewhere else, business phone with another provider. Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete business identity in one place with free tools, resources, and built-in privacy from day one. Get more at northwestregisteredagent.com slash sasterfree. That's northwestregisteredagent.com slash sasterfree. S-A-A-S-T-R-F-R-E-E. Hey, everyone. If you're listening to the agents, then you need to be at Saster AI Annual. We'll be back next May in 2027, the world's largest B2B and AI event, May 11th and 12th in the San Francisco Bay Area.

3:45Look, most conferences and content these days are about what's possible. As you know from the agents, we're all about what's happening now. The latest and greatest, and that's what we do even more so at Sastre Annual. See the actual work where we bring together 10 ,000 founders, revenue leaders, and VCs, plus 200 of the very best speakers showing you the playbooks of what's already running in production, behind the scenes, deep dive demos, and so much more. Plus over 5 ,000 scheduled one-on-one meetings so you can actually meet the people doing all this, not just hear from them. If you're a founder, a revenue leader, or you're the one who has to make this all work with agents, this is where you want to be.

4:26You already know this from listening to the agents. That's Saster AI annual 2027. Go to sasterannual.com and use our code the agents for a special discount on your tickets. See you there.

4:38Grant Lee:Now, our very early version of Gamma was this prototype we're seeing, which is sort of a hybrid document slash deck. And we really want to make it kind of dead simple for you to sort of flip between these different formats. And we spent a lot of time just trying to get this right, where we got to the point where this prototype was our pre-seed pitch deck. We used it instead of using Google Slides for the first time, rather than using slides, I was able to present with a different medium. Now, I was living in London at the time, so this is me trying to practice our pitch during the daytime. We didn't have a lot of furniture, and so I had to borrow my kids' little desk during the daytime to do all of my practicing.

5:21Grant Lee:and because we were in London, I had to do all the pitching in the middle of the night. So come 8 p.m., I would tuck my kids into bed. I would pick up this little table, move it to the far corner of the flat, which was tucked in between our kitchenette and our laundry room. And I would sit down, put up a fake Zoom background so nobody knew exactly where I was, and I'd start pitching. And, you know, first-time founder, so I'm getting into pitch mode, you know, get through my first two pitches. They go pretty well. I'm like, okay, how hard can this thing be? Get into my third pitch and 20 minutes in, you know, I finished my pitch and I'm waiting for the investor to start asking me some questions.

6:05Grant Lee:Long pause. And eventually the investor says, this has got to be the worst idea I've ever heard. Not only are you going up against massive incumbents, they have ultimate distribution. There is no way you will ever succeed. And so, of course, I'm a little shell-shocked in the moment. I'm trying to think about, okay, what is a really smart rebuttal I can give this investor? And before I can do that, he hangs up, leaves the Zoom call. And so in that moment, you know, I tried to internalize what he said because I think there is some truth to it, which is being in this category is incredibly hard. You can't just build a great product.

6:48Grant Lee:You have to think about distribution from day one. So fortunately, we were able to raise a little bit of money and actually get to work and really think about how do you intertwine distribution and product at the same time. Two years later, we launched our public beta. For anyone that's building today, that feels like a lifetime. I would advise you to probably compress that by an order of 10 or more and really try to get to market much faster. It took us a couple of years. We launched our product on. We ended up winning product of the day, product of the week, product of the month. And we felt really great about ourselves.

7:21Grant Lee:We're like, hey, maybe we actually did it. But unfortunately, sign of spikes and then they plateaued. And so what we realized is that we did not have strong organic growth. We did not have a product people were telling their friends about. We did not have strong word of mouth. And so we were basically at a fork in the road. What should we do? Should we invest more in marketing or should we invest more in product? There's a saying of, hey, you should do things that don't scale. And I think a lot of founders, they hear this and they say, okay, well, maybe that means I can brute force my way into sales and marketing and really just fill the top of the funnel.

8:03Grant Lee:The alternative maybe is, what if you went back to the drawing board and really thought about the product and really broke the product all the way back down and thought about what would it take to build a product that had much more organic growth? And so the question is, what would you do? For us, we decided to invest in the product. We went back and said, we have to make the first 30 seconds of this product feel magical. It has to be so magical that people tell all their friends about. It cannot just be good enough. And so we got the team together, 12 of us at the time, and we really treated this as a sort of all hands on deck.

8:41Grant Lee:We were crammed in a converted two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, and we got to work. We gave ourselves three months to re-architect the entire onboarding experience of the product so that we can deliver that magic, that first 30 seconds, so that people would tell all their friends about it. The version of the product was pretty simple in the beginning. you entered a prompt, and you get a first draft of your presentation. From there, you can continue to edit with AI to get you further along on the journey of creating content. Like most startups today, we basically try to basically launch by announcing this via a tweet.

9:22Grant Lee:And we sat down, you know, this is again three months in, heads down, building this product. We thought about, okay, what would we say if we wanted to announce this to the world? And in the very beginning, we had a pretty sort of conservative, safe sort of message. But then we realized as founders, like, okay, sitting down, we needed something a little bit more provocative, right? You need to be able to have something that actually created engagement. And so in many ways, you know, you're trying to lean into, you know, this feeling that maybe you're going to be a little bit clickbaity, but that's okay.

9:53Grant Lee:You need that initial engagement. So we ended up coming up with this, which is the most valuable skill in business is about to become obsolete. And yes, a little bit of flip bait, but it worked. We got Paul Graham to respond, throwing a little shade at us, and the tweet ended up going viral. And so it was for us a moment of realization, like, okay, let's get that engagement. Let's get that virality. And more importantly, the product went viral. So in the very beginning, we had, you know, 5 ,000 signups a day, then 10 ,000 signups a day then 20 ,000 signups a day then 50 ,000 signups a day and it kept on going up.

10:30Grant Lee:And this was a moment in time where we're doing zero marketing zero sales. It was people telling each other people using the product that sort of organic growth that we were kind of seeking from the very beginning and we felt that pull. So really quickly before I move on to the next topic this is the reminder that I'd have for anybody that's building today. Before you spend any money on marketing building, 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.

11:06Word of mouth is super hard earned.

11:10Grant Lee:It cannot be bought. And so go back to building the product that actually has this before you actually worry about the rest of marketing. We'll talk a little bit now about creator marketing, because for me, that tweet I mentioned, that was my sort of first foray into trying to become a creator. I realized that being a creator, I had a chance to help amplify everything we were doing at Gamma. So I wanted to say, okay, if we know creator marketing can be a channel for us, how do we tap other creators? And I'm a finance person. I had zero idea how to become a creator. How does creator marketing work?

11:45Grant Lee:So I wanted to learn and I'd wanted to have deeper empathy by actually going through the journey of becoming a creator myself. So this meant doing the basics, posting regularly, trying to understand the fundamentals of being a creator, learn what it takes. And in doing so, I was able to finally gain a little bit of traction. I tell founders today or anybody in startups, if you want to do this, you have to go through Cringe Valley for a bit. You're going to put stuff out there that feels just terrible. But that's the whole point. You learn. You put yourself out there, you build the audience. And today I have a little bit of a bigger audience where anytime I announce stuff for Gamma, it gets a little bit more of pickup and you kind of keep on building that over time.

12:27Grant Lee:And these are things where I can now take that, what I've learned, and helping us actually build a much more effective creator marketing program. I can go in and say, when we sit down with a creator, really help them understand how can they tell Gamma's story and their voice to their audience because I understand the process myself. And I think a lot of people treat creator marketing or influencer marketing as very transactional. They put a budget, they signed up a big creator and they said, okay, that's it, we're done. We traded it as something where every single creator, we would manually onboard.

12:59Grant Lee:I would sit down with them and guess what? Many of them struggled to create presentations on their own in the past because this wasn't something they learned on the job. And so how could they actually leverage our tool? they ended up falling in love with using Gamma. And so when they go out and tell their audience how to use Gamma, it was much more authentic. It was something they were actually using. You don't earn the right to do that until you've actually invested in building that community of creators that can actually sing your praises. For us, what we found is that there's just massive benefit.

13:30Grant Lee:Anytime creators would amplify what we were building, there was this halo effect. There was even more word of mouth. So not only were they able to tap their audiences, there was this multiplicative effect of going out, creating content, and it's really creating this flywheel for us. When we think about basically what got us to 50 million users, the real big question is, for us, it was like, okay, we got to 50 million users. Do we have everything we need to reach the next 500 million users? And when we're asking that question, we really felt like one key ingredient was sort of missing. We didn't feel like we had a brand that could actually reach the next 500 million users.

14:12Grant Lee:And the reason was because our first brand was more of a placeholder. The DNA was very limited. So the number of assets we could create was very limited. And if you want creators or even your own content team to really start amplifying content, you need a much richer set of ingredients, is what I call it, like the DNA of a brand. So at 50 million users, it's pretty risky to say, hey, we're going to do a complete rebrand because you can cause a lot of confusion in the market. People see, you know, one version of your logo or, you know, your color palette and like, oh, you're trying to do something different.

14:42Grant Lee:We felt like that was the right long-term bet. Because again, we needed that universe, that DNA that people can then tap into so that they can help amplify our message. And so we did a complete rebrand. We chose a very different art direction, different vibe, something that felt like it really matched our values and what we wanted to be and represent. 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.

15:16Grant Lee:And so this was a huge investment, but we felt like, again, at 50 million users, the bigger risk was not to do this because if we wanted to reach the next 500 million users, we had to get this fundamentally right. I'll talk a little bit about community-led growth, which is community, I know, is a term that gets thrown out there all the time, right? And so what does this actually mean? For us, it meant many different things. One was, you know, we talk about learning from the voice of the customer. We took this pretty literally, which is we actually wanted to hear our users going through the product and struggling along their journey.

15:53Grant Lee:So what we do is use tools like voice panel and user testing and actually have users walk through the product and describe everything they're seeing on the screen. And this is where you can really start feeling like, where is there true confusion in using the product? Or where is there true delight? And you can start leaning into that much more. We felt like this was fundamental in really understanding how our customers perceived our product. As we started getting more and more power users, we developed a program called the Gambassador program. which is we have this separate Slackware space. We pull them in.

16:26Grant Lee:They get early access to new features. They give us feedback. They're oftentimes the first people to report bugs. And we have this ongoing dialogue. In the very beginning when we're just setting this up is like every single day, I'm the first one to log in to check people responding or asking questions there and treating that community as one where they can really help us shape the future direction of Gamma. We felt that was super important. the bigger you get, the easier it is to treat your user base as a sort of faceless entity, right? And I think as a startup grows and has traction, you have to do everything you can to resist that.

17:03Grant Lee:They are not a faceless entity. They are real users with real problems. And so we've always tried to lean much more into this. 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. We could show them what exactly we were working on. And as we were developing our own education program, we could get their immediate feedback so that we can make sure that future users learning Gamma could learn it the right way. And so this was, of course, a big investment.

17:36Grant Lee:A huge time suck because you're like, you're really trying to carve out time in your day. But again, for us, a no-brainer, worthwhile investment. More recently, we had a program called Gamma Everywhere where we visited our users in Seoul, in London, in Sao Paulo. And again, this was so critical because what you can take for granted is that each of these users, these user bases, may need something different out of what your tool offers, right? And so how do you build a product that feels truly native to the users in those regions? You can't do that unless you're not actually spending time with them, running workshops, working alongside them.

18:11Grant Lee:Again, huge investment for us, a no-brainer. The last thing I'll talk about is dogfooding the future. For those that are not familiar with the term, dogfooding means you're oftentimes testing early versions of the product yourself before it ever goes into the hands of users. And for us, this has been a critical part of the learning journey from day one. I'll share a story, which is when we first started Gamma, our passion, our sort of mission was to help people change the way they communicate, communicate their ideas to be more effective at it. And we actually had two different ideas. The first idea was to reimagine presentations as a category, which is very much the product you see today.

18:54Grant Lee:The second was actually to create a virtual office. And like, what if, you know, virtual office allowed people to collaborate just as if they were in a real office. And that for us was also interesting, especially in the moment in time where we're coming out of the pandemic, hybrid virtual work was all sort of being, you know, reimagined from the ground up. And so we gave ourselves six months running these two products in parallel. And when I think about dogfooding, it is all about building conviction for your product. And so we wanted to say, okay, after six months, which product that we would do, we actually have more conviction.

19:28Grant Lee:And more importantly, which product were we more energized by? and it just became so clear with a virtual office. We were sort of almost like there was a ceiling in terms of what we imagined could be possible. We couldn't imagine actually being better than in real life work. And so we're like, okay, that seems limiting. We can't actually imagine what's needed. Whereas presentations, there was just so many things that we wanted to build and there was energy pulling us in into that category. So six months in, we ended up sunsetting the virtual office going all in on presentations as this category.

20:02Grant Lee:And we continue to do that today. So Gamma and Imagine is a more recent launch where people can design anything, one-pagers, infographics. And we oftentimes are dogfooding these sort of things internally a lot before we actually release it to the world. We've also recently released connectors to different platforms. And for us, dogfooding internally just allows us to see what if Gamma lives in other tools and other workflows where our customers are already using us? What would that look like? How would that feel? So these are just the four lessons, hopefully some that either resonate or can inspire something for you all to think about as you bring all the learnings from this conference back to your organizations.

20:45Grant Lee:I'll just lead by saying this, for anyone that's building a startup, I'm cheering you on. Honestly, I know there's going to be ups, there's going to be downs, but the journey is worth it. It can be daunting. I'm here for you. I would love to be helpful in any way possible. Connect with me on LinkedIn on X. I'm here to learn as well. So really appreciate the time here. And we're going to do a little bit of... Okay, I've got a lot of questions. And then for... Well, you've got a big crowd up here. I was just saying to you backstage how I used Gamma last night to create the Pokemon cards I made for our opener this morning.

21:17And there's... Not only are they so cute, it did it instantly. And when I gave it feedback, I didn't even say in the prompt, make me Pokemon cards. I was like, hey, I want to make our AI agent stack. And I want to just visualize it for everybody at Sastra because this whole week, Amelia, Jason, what's your stack? What's your stack? Show us the whole stack. And I was like, okay, I'll show you. I'll try and show you some of the stack. I don't even know if I could show you all the things because we have like 30 agents. And so I just went into Gamma and I said, hey, here's the list of my agents I want to show.

21:45Make me something to show people the stack. and it was Gamma Create and it asked me like that was literally the prompt just make me an image to show people the stack it's aster and it said do you want it like western style like wanted posters do you want um there was some like more like infographic style in the middle and then I was like or do you want Pokemon like no brainer no brainer I was like gotta catch them all so that was super fun but I just I've been using Gamma for a little bit now both myself but also are one of my agents also uses Gamma So one of the things I want to ask you was you've built such a product that is, you know, for humans being creative.

22:23But I know you were saying, though, like you have now more customers that are using the Gamma API. How are you how are you balancing that?

22:31Grant Lee:Right. I mean, I think this is applies to almost most categories, which is everyone building today needs to have kind of that to those two mindsets. Or how do you build for the human as well as prepare for a world where many of more of your users are agents? and I think that's a journey we're on today, which is we do want to serve both. We think they can be deeply intertwined because a lot of our biggest customers do have both end users using Gamma as well as a ton of automation leveraging our API and so it's part of the fun. It is sort of changing the mindset though and you almost have to go from like the fundamentals, like how do you make a product that could hopefully be great at both, but also maybe not alienate one or the other as you're trying to innovate along the way.

23:11Yeah, and then another thing I wanted to ask you, When you were talking about your gambassadors, right? So you have users around the world that you've brought in, you put them together. Like how much of that are they asking you for features they want and then features their agents want?