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First Round CapitalHow Gamma pulled off their AI pivot | Jon Noronha (Co-founder and CPO of Gamma)
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Gamma’s AI pivot: solving the blank page unlocked hypergrowth
- Jon Noronha describes Gamma’s evolution from early remote-work-driven prototypes with weak product-market fit to a March 2023 AI-driven breakthrough centered on solving the “blank page” problem.
- He argues that what looked like an onboarding optimization was actually the core job-to-be-done, creating immediate value by removing most of the time spent structuring and formatting presentations.
- He explains why Gamma chose a horizontal product strategy despite investor pressure to verticalize, aiming for virality and broad applicability across presentation makers.
- He details the practical product-building tension of AI apps: temporary scaffolding and guardrails are needed to ship reliably at scale, but must be removed as models improve to unlock higher ceilings.
- He shares lessons on monetization and growth, including high willingness to pay for time savings, churn driven by “AI tourism,” tiered pricing, and a fast, unplanned sprint from prosumer adoption into enterprise requirements.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasGamma’s path to product-market fit came in distinct eras, with AI creating the true inflection point.
He described a pre-2023 period of prototypes and weak traction, then a March 2023 “Hail Mary” launch using generative AI to overcome the blank page, followed by a more recent phase of catching up operationally and then rapidly building an enterprise motion once B2B demand appeared.
Fixing onboarding worked because it revealed the real product value: eliminating the blank page.
He said their activation rate was “appallingly low” (around 5–10%) and the blank page was “staring us in the face”; solving it in onboarding turned out to solve the customer’s core job-to-be-done, not just a funnel problem.
Time savings—especially removing formatting work—was the sharpest wedge for adoption.
He framed the customer pain as the dread and workload of making a high-stakes deck—design, structure, layout, clip art, formatting—and said Gamma “eliminated maybe eight or nine of those 10 hours,” making the value immediate and concrete.
Gamma bet against the classic ‘start vertical’ playbook and leaned into a horizontal, prosumer-driven product.
He said Gamma repeatedly chose to be horizontal rather than picking a narrow persona, even though this created “constant tension” in fundraising; they focused broadly on “external presenting” roles where there’s virality and willingness to pay.
Adoption beats ‘new-format purity’: meet users where their team already works.
He said they built PowerPoint export “probably a year too late” because they assumed people would stay in Gamma’s new format; in hindsight, they should have prioritized adoption and workflow interoperability before worrying about moat/durability.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesThe best definition I've heard of product-market fit is you stop pushing the rock up the hill, and you start chasing the rock down the hill.
— Jon Noronha
We weren't even monetizing, and people were emailing us begging to pay for the product.
— Jon Noronha
We just eliminated maybe eight or nine of those 10 hours right off the board.
— Jon Noronha
You have to first win adoption, which is a kind of a grueling fight with someone who is changing their workflow, and only then build some of that stickiness around it.
— Jon Noronha
If you do nothing else, nail onboarding, because if you can nail the first five minutes, you've nailed the value prop of the rest of the product.
— Jon Noronha
SPEAKERS
Jon Noronha
guestCo-founder and Chief Product Officer of Gamma, an AI presentation platform.
Brett Berson
hostHost at First Round Capital who interviews startup founders and operators.
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
