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

(instrumental music plays) 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 have, 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 100 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 would 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 'em 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 maybe 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, recruit a bunch of people that are legitimately good prospective users but have zero skin in the game. Ship that so people can start playing with it. In the afternoon, we're already running pretty full-scale experiment. You start actually hearing other people describe their usage of the product, or you 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 Li, 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, a massive AI startup that's profitable and has been for a long time, that didn't raise a lot of money for a long time, and is a small team. It's just around 30 people, all who can fit in a small restaurant, serving over 50 million users globally. If you're not familiar with Gamma, they're an AI-powered presentation and website design tool. 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 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 and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of 16 incredible products, including Devon, Lovable, Replit, Bolt, n8n, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, ChatPRD, and Maven. Head on over to lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Grant Li after a short word from our sponsors. My podcast guests and I love talking about craft and taste and agency and product-market fit. You know what we don't love talking about? SOC 2. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta helps companies of all sizes get complying fast, and stay that way, with industry-leading AI, automation, and continuous monitoring. Whether you're a startup tackling your first SOC 2 or ISO 27001, or an enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta's Trust Management Platform makes it quicker, easier, and more scalable. Vanta also helps you complete security questionnaires up to five times faster so that you could win bigger deals sooner. The result? According to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers slashed over $500,000 a year and are three times more productive. Establishing trust isn't optional. Vanta makes it automatic. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com/lenny. Did you know that I have a whole team that helps me with my podcast and with my newsletter? I want everyone on that team to be super happy and thrive in their roles. Justworks knows that your employees are more than just your employees. They're your people. My team is spread out across Colorado, Australia, Nepal, West Africa, and San Francisco. My life would be so incredibly complicated to hire people internationally, to pay people on time and in their local currencies, and to answer their HR questions 24/7. But with Justworks, it's super easy. Whether you're setting up your own automated payroll, offering premium benefits, or hiring internationally, Justworks offers simple software and 24/7 human support from small business experts for you and your people. They do your human resources right so that you can do right by your people. Justworks, for your people. Grant, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.