YouSaid · the spoken record

Grant Lee

lines on the record: 116
first: 2025-11-13
most recent: 2025-11-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Export, sharing, every single piece of that such that we can actually see where things are working or not. And then every time we'll learn something that's kind of painful, but obvious that we need to fix and we go back and fix it.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, oh, create a piece of content. And when you watch them do that and also hear what they're saying, you just immediately feel the pain. Like all the places they're struggling and all the places are so confused by like what they're seeing and you sort of then can internalize that pain and say, okay, we're going back and we have to fix this. This is like not usable. Like we, you know, we oftentimes are dog fooding everything. And so you can get to the point where you're so familiar with your own product. Everything kind of feels kind of easy and you know where things are. But when you start actually hearing other people describe their usage of the product, that's like a gift. Like you're all of a sudden you're like, okay, now I know where to actually spend the time. People aren't even getting to the third screen. They're stuck on the first screen because they can't even find the button that we think is like so dead obvious. And so let's go back and actually re-engineer, re-architect that piece of it. And we've done that for everything, landing pages, onboarding experience, new feature launch.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, this for us was a huge unlock. You know, going back to early days when you're just trying to get your product into anybody's hands, you're getting to your friends trying to use it. And again, they're going to lie to you, tell you how great it is, and then never come back to using the product. I think what you want to be able to do, the ideal situation is you recruit a bunch of people that are legitimately good prospective users or customers of your product, but have zero skin in the game. They do not care at all whether or not your product succeeds. They're just in it to test it. And for us, it was like people to have made slide decks or make slide decks regularly. Let's drop them into Gamma. Give them very little context. We just tell you, hey, this is an alternative to PowerPoint. Go ahead and try it. And then as you're going through the onboarding flow and testing the product, just tell us everything that's going on in your head. Like describe what you're seeing. Tell us what you're trying to do. We'll give you maybe a few different tasks.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think this comes back to maybe just how maybe aggressive you want to be. I think just rough heuristic is the more the better. If it's over 50%, I think that's great. If it's approaching that good and just going back to like, don't fool yourself into thinking just ads is going to be the way you grow because you can do that, but everything else becomes harder and harder. If you rely on paid acquisition to be the main growth engine, you should be prepared for things like CAC, like customer acquisition costs to keep going up. And the more you're trying to reach a new audience, it gets more and more expensive. So don't assume it's going to be flat. And then all of a sudden, you're running on this treadmill that's actually running faster and faster. And so that's where it's easy to get hooked on that early on when you're just investing a small amount of money. And then it's almost impossible to get off that treadmill when you're too far into it. So anticipate that and give yourself a better chance at actually be able to sustain that growth long term.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep. Yeah. And for us, even at scale, again, going back to more than 50% of new sign-ups still come through word of mouth. That for us is a sign like, okay, if something is still working, people are using the product, telling other people, and you want that feeling before you really start dialing anything else.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would just have two recommendations. Like one, going back to my initial piece of advice, which is don't invest until you have word of mouth. Don't fool yourself into thinking that you'll solve other problems by just starting to ramp up a performance marketing program. Just get the word of mouthpiece first so that you're coming into this program with some tailwinds and then start ramping it up. The second piece is like set some constraints. You don't want your product to be at a point where more than 50% of your acquisitions are coming through paid acquisition. I think if that is happening, your core growth engine is broken and feeds right back to point number one, which is if your core growth engine is broken, you just have this leaky bucket. You're trying to spend so much money building top of the funnel. People are not making it all the way through. Something else should be fixed before you really try to dial it up. And it doesn't mean like you don't spend a little bit of money, but just don't.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I do think it's probably more geared toward anything that's a little bit more prosumer or consumer because so much of your product you're trying to create this feeling for a user. Like what are they experiencing? And the experience happens way before they even drop into a product. It might be they see an ad or they see a billboard or they see something. It's like, okay, that piqued my interest a little bit. And then you need some sort of like symmetric messaging in that they see that there's some symmetry in that they see the ad, then they drop into the product, they land on your website, it feels cohesive. And it feels like, okay, this is interesting. I'm going to go all the way through to sign up and then maybe actually start using the product. That's a little bit different when it's like a B2B product or, you know, where there'sn't as much reliance on that initial moment. They might just hear about it through colleague and then sign up for it and then go through huge procurement process. And then it's like, okay, maybe.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's like basically you kind of have a feeling for, you know, if I were to scale this up to a thousand pieces of creative, would it still feel cohesive or is it kind of all over the place? And it feels like it's all over the place and you kind of have to go back to the drawing board.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We run ads, performance marketing. I think there's this stigma that brand marketing and performance marketing are sort of at odds with each other. I very much follow kind of the thought that brand marketing is performance marketing. Like everything is some form of performance marketing. So like the ability to actually map back to every single dollar spent is a little bit harder. But it doesn't mean that it's not impactful. And I think as a company scales, you have to invest in both. And ideally, they work really, really well together. Like the more you invest in brand marketing, it strengthens your performance marketing. This goes back to like having enough creative to even test if you're too limited in scope and you don't have a brand you feel like you can actually amplify your handicapping your ability to actually have a good performance marketing program.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Usually they'll say, you know, they're a partner, or basically it is sponsored in some form, or the hashtag ad or something along those lines. So that's probably the way you'll see it the most.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tools like Notion, they've been really, really impactful. You're not going to really know. And so just test and then double down on the ones that really move the needle for your product”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, this is one where for us, we cast a pretty wide net too, but it's very clear LinkedIn, the conversion rates are just substantially higher. They're 4x, maybe 5x higher than other platforms. And I think a lot of people are probably still sleeping on LinkedIn, frankly. And so it's one where some of the influencers there or creators there can be a little bit more costly. But if you can be highly, you know, eventually be more targeted knowing that, hey, this type of creator is pretty impactful for, you know, our product, then working with them, it's just like, oh, that's great. Like the conversion rates are just so strong. And it really feels like just getting started there. So, you know, if you're in the beginning, you're not sure. It's always helpful to cast a pretty wide net and then, you know, similar to sort of just the influencer strategy, like test and iterate, you'll figure out many of these things will follow the power law. So it's like, you know, one or two channels are going to be the most important for you. For instance, Twitter for us hasn't been that impactful. And I think for.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you're able to do that relentlessly over many, many months, then all of a sudden, like hitting those sort of viral posts is easy because you're going to have enough at bats there where some are going to pop off. But you kind of only can get there after you've done all the hard work before that to make the kind of remove friction from the process and feeling like it's almost like well-oiled machine at that point.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This goes back to obviously, if you're testing a bunch, you'll finally find that sort of post or set of posts actually go viral. Going back to just the fundamentals, like make it easy for your influencers to be able to tell your story in their voice. One thing we did, we open sourced our basically our entire brand. We have brand.gamma.app, which is everything about our brand, our voice and tone, our art direction, what we use in midjourney to create this sort of art direction that we have so that a creator can do the same, right? And they can actually just copy all that so that they don't have to reinvent the wheel every time they're trying to post about Gamma. They have all of that. And I think that going back to like this notion of like just make it dead simple for them. Remove friction. They already have enough to like on their plate to have to figure out. Don't make it any harder than it is. And if you remove friction, then it's like, oh, you get into this rhythm of adding creators is easy, having them post as easy, reviewing what's working, what's not as easy.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, totally. And I'd say it's not just that the budget's too small, it would be that they put all their eggs in one basket. So you can also easily blow that 20K on just one bigger influencer and then be like, oh, that didn't work. So I'm going to try it again. That didn't work. Okay, I give up. And I think rather than doing that, you should be like, okay, that 20K, I could actually probably work with 40 different influencers and see what actually works. And we'll across the 40, I'm going to try to find a variety of personas, a variety of use cases, spend a lot of time with them, and then actually see what's working, what's not. And then next month, take those learnings and, you know, double down. Like if educators are working, go with educators. If consultants are working, go with consultant, find more consultants because there's going to be more there. I think that's where, yeah, putting all your eggs in one basket is just probably the surest way to fail because like you're going to miss a ton and it's going to take you way too long to learn and you're going to come to the conclusion that it's a waste of time.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, this just goes back to it's hard to know where that 10% is going to come from, so you kind of just have to cast a super wide net, right? You can sort of, I think, try to, again, trick yourself into thinking you're great at picking creators or you're great at telling them how to like post about your stuff. But the reality is even for me, I could never guess. I kind of had some idea, but I just had to make sure that I was meeting enough creators broadly such that when you meet enough, they're all posting. There's some pocket that end up just taking off. I was not a good predictor of that. I was not smart enough to actually know which one to take off. I just knew that we had to play the sort of numbers game to make it work.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, I don't think there's a minimum because even with platforms like TikTok, they oftentimes are giving you credit for a brand new account. They want to help amplify that new account because, you know, obviously, you know, if they're thinking from a creator perspective, if that new creator feels like, oh, coming to TikTok is like a massive win for me, they're going to be more invested in it. And so there really isn't a minimum. A lot of these platforms are trying to shift to kind of the same thing where they really reward new creators on the platform. And so you could have a small audience. It doesn't really matter. You could have 10,000 followers. That's also good. I think as long as the content feels, you know, again, engaging, authentic to the people you're talking to, I think has a really good chance of actually taking off.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's a lot of value there. It's hard to, again, hard to quantify. And most creators feel like most founders probably feel like they're too busy to allocate that time. But I think it was a good investment because going back to you want them to feel like an extension of your team, they're not going to feel like an extension of your team if one, they've never met you. And two, you've never even told them really how the product works. They just, they're forced to kind of go to your website to figure it all out. Those are going to be not a whole lot of love that they're feeling from the outset.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over the course of yeah, like a year, it wasn't all in the same time. It was like, you know, you find basically in the beginning, you do, in the very, very beginning, we had a small budget. It was like, you know, 20 creators a month. And then you start increasing that to like 50, then 100. And then, you know, we're still not, we're not definitely not fully scaled at this point, but I could easily see a point where, you know, you're working with many, many creators every single month, and that gives you a chance to actually test a variety of, again, content hooks, ways to talk about the product, value props.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number, which is, you know, have this number of like 150 people that you call kind of your network. And your network, you trust more than the average stranger down the street. Like if they tell you something, you know, recommend something, there is a sort of halo effect, right? You learn to trust them. A lot of these influencers, the reason why they share so much about their lives is because they want to be in your network. They want you to feel super close. And once you feel super close, you trust them to actually share things are going to be useful. And so when they recommend a tool, there is a sort of payload effect where it doesn't feel like it's coming from a stranger. It feels like it's coming from a friend. And that's where every time we've spent money there, you actually see this amplification. It's like, okay, that's kind of interesting. You wouldn't necessarily expect that. But for us, it's been this sort of amplifier from the very beginning.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so word of mouth has definitely been the biggest. So we look at kind of all kind of new subscriber growth. Over 50% of this is word of mouth. It's either people searching direct, coming direct, entering gamma.app, or going through search and typing in gamma, like a branded keyword search, where they're looking for gamma. They've heard about gamma. But I think for us, social media and influencer specifically has always been an amplifier. So every time we invest in influencer marketing, we actually see word of mouth increase even more. And it's always like you can just see it. Basically, anytime you spend, you know, a little bit of money, you start seeing people come through influencer, the word of mouth factor is actually one point. We'll get another 1.5 additional users on top of that, which has been really interesting to see. And I think part of this is recognizing that, and I think we kind of understand it, but like with influencer marketing, because why it's so effective, we all know, dumb bars.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, out in the UK, and they've been fantastic to work with as well. So you kind of find a few different things, either agencies or platforms that can help you actually scale this thing up.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, in the very beginning, it was all manual. A lot of cold outreach. And then we ended up finding a couple different things. One is a platform, a YC company called First Collab. That has been amazing. They basically do all of the automated outbound for you. Plus, you can help them actually create profiles or personas of different creators. So like, for instance, educators being one, and then they'll go out and actually, you know, based on that profile, find all the right creators for you. So they've been amazing, really great to work with. And then we've also found small agencies to also help kind of augment that. I look for agencies at her super young and hungry. These are people that are social, they're native to social media. And so, you know, they really understand it. And they can really be able to bring in creators that, you know, are great to work with. And I think part of it is like, if you find creators are great to work with, everything else becomes easy. So we've had a few. One is AK.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you're much better doing the hard thing, which is hard to scale, but it's like finding the thousands of micro influencers that have an audience where your product maybe is actually useful. And for instance, for us, like early on, it'd be educators, people that for them, part of their job is creating slides every day because they need to engage their students. And so for them, having a tool that actually saves them a ton of time was something they love talking about. And if you can find some of these pockets, we call them echo chambers where if you find a pocket like educators, teachers love telling other teachers about products they love using.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's definitely the simple way. And I'd say there's definitely different levels. I think a lot of people think influencer marketing and they'll think these big, trendy creators, people that have like a million followers, for instance. And they're the idea is that, okay, we're going to carve out a really big budget. We're going to choose like five or six that we feel like are really like the tastemakers in the space and put all of our money into just help, you know, having them talk about our product. And I think usually this is kind of the wrong approach because many of them, you know, they do have massive audiences. And for you, you're basically like, you basically give them a script to read and it immediately feels like an ad, right? Like they don't feel like that product is not connected really to them in any way. It's just something that they're, you know, for this week, they happen to be working with you and then they move on with their life. And it never feels organic or authentic. And you wasted a ton of money doing so.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They'll be back to actually post about you again. And like you're all of a sudden having this sort of, you know, this relationship backstreet can build over time. I think that's really where the magic is. Like too many people discount that initial piece.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a product. And so we would spend a lot of time like me just walking through the product, them asking questions, us like just kind of brainstorming, what could the hooks be and me just giving them some initial feedback and like saying, oh, yeah, this one, I love that. I figure it's going to work great for your audience, but not trying to be super prescriptive. And working with a ton of micro influencers, people that don't have massive followings, but are committed to giving, going back to giving value to your audience, like they're committed to giving value to their audiences. They want to be able to showcase tools that actually they would use or they are using. And how do you do that in an authentic way? Like you can't really fake that. You really need to spend the time doing that. And just like you would onboard a customer, you onboard an influencer the same way. You want them to be an extension of your team. And I think they can feel whether or not you're willing to put in the work. And if you're not, then they're just going to treat it like any other project, ship it and be done with it. If you invest in that relationship, guess what?”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think a lot of founders assume that with influencer marketing, it's almost like turnkey. You set aside a budget, you find some creators, you figure out the right campaign or the right moment of time to do it, and it's all done. You're ready to go. And I think the reality is, like, going back to this founder-led marketing mindset is like, well, you're going to set yourself up for success if you actually are super involved in that entire process. So for us, what this meant was like all the initial influencers I onboarded manually myself, we would find, I would spend time, 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, right? And they can't do that if you're not willing to put in that investment. And so we would spend a lot of time going through, it wasn't my job to tell them how to pitch gamma, but it was my job to make sure that they understood what Gamma was.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An amazing agency that has helped folks like perplexity also do their rebrand or their initial brand. And we spent many months just like really trying to craft kind of what we think is like the core DNA of the brand and doing so in a way that we could replicate it as much as possible. Replication piece of it comes into play because as you start scaling, you're going to have to create a ton of content. Your own content on social media ads for performance marketing. assets for influencers to be able to use and showcase in their content and so you're going from like you know tiny pieces of content to all of a sudden every week we're testing thousands of pieces of creative and you cannot do that if you don't feel confident that as you're replicating like you have that sort of cohesive feel so for us that we realized it was going to be necessary is why we invested so much and end up becoming way more expensive way more time consuming than i would have imagined but i think coming you know on the other side”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was pretty limited in sort of what I call kind of the DNA of the brand. There wasn't that many, like the art direction was very limited in scope. There wasn't much when it came to voice and tone. And so, you know, it was something that we knew was good enough to start, but it wasn't scalable. And when I think about something that could be scalable, it's almost like you can take the ingredients of a brand and replicate it a ton. Like you're kind of, you know, this DNA is something where you can imagine creating tons of content around and all feeling pretty cohesive. And I think that needs to be done by design. Like you're really being thoughtful about every single element. Like what is the art direction you want to go with? What is the voice and tone such that as you're creating thousands of pieces of copy, it all feels pretty cohesive. And so we kind of went back to the drawing board and we spent many months kind of rethinking what would be the, you know, the brand. What is this vision that we have longer term? Our creative doctor internally partner with Smith and Diction.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when we got to about 10 million in ARR, I think there's this feeling for me, which was we knew we needed ways to help just continue to amplify and spread the word about gamma. I think it was already working in terms of the organic virality was there. And so we do feel like it was time to start amplifying some of this. And I think the main blocker in my mind that I started feeling was that our initial brand was sort of holding us back. And I think a lot of people discount, you know, whether or not a rebrand is valuable. And I think sometimes it isn't. For us, there's a few different things we looked at. So one, our initial brand was almost more of a placeholder brand because we created it the moment we sort of incorporated the company, which was again like late 2020, beginning of 2021, where we needed something so that as we built, we could at least share it with people. We could put up a landing page and just feel like, okay, there's something here, but we didn't invest a whole lot into it.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Self That's exactly right. I think one way of thinking about it, you know, with like founder-led sales, it's always about exchange of value, right? You want to be able to give them the customer this feeling that they're getting an amazing product in exchange, they're going to pay you money for it. 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 a value in the content, so you're just sharing something, maybe some secret tactic, or you're giving them something where inherently there's value in it. In exchange, you sort of get goodwill back. You're not necessarily getting money back. You get goodwill. They're going to follow you. They're going to engage with their posts. They're going to tell others about it. And then over time, you can exchange maybe some of that goodwill for actually talking about my product and like announcing it and they're going to help amplify the news. And I think that's magic where you kind of kind of bank the goodwill for a long period of time by providing just a ton of value with no expectation of anything immediately in return.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, it's usually two times of the day. Very first thing in the morning and lasting at night, and partly is because of kids. It's almost like I need time when there's just zero distraction and there's no noise in the house. And so I can actually think. And then, you know, I think in the mornings, it's about where are you finding inspiration, like where are you like, what are topics you're energized by? And then I think at night it's about reflection. Like, what are the things you actually went through that day? You could almost pull up your calendar and be like, okay, I talked to X, Y, and Z people. And was there anything from those conversations that might be relevant? That's where I, you know, write some of those things. It's more of a recap of actually what happened.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't really do threads. And so doing like a super long form post isn't as practical. Maybe that changes in the future where maybe the tactical pieces, you know, that element might actually change.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's what I found is like tactical, oftentimes more contrarian on Twitter. And also, I would say technical too. People really like to know, again, going into like getting into the weeds, like, is this something I feel like I can replicate? And I'm not going to give you like there's no credibility if you just give like a blanket statement or something that feels generic. Like I really need to know. If you can show me the metrics even better, I feel like that versus like LinkedIn, it's more oftentimes more even just, you know, either more aspirational or aspirational or like a topic or theme that just feels like relevant at that point in time. And you can just kind of make more of a broader statement. It doesn't need to be as tactical. It's more like inspirational. It's like, oh, okay, now I need to go and learn a little bit more about pricing and packaging, for instance. And that could be the sort of spark that somebody needs. And you don't need to, you know, spell it completely out. Part of it is also that on LinkedIn.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we all kind of have intuition that there's different audiences, right? And so if you know that kind of fundamentally, then the question is, how do you package up the story the right way so that there is, you know, the audience is ready to receive it? And I think this can differ by the type of creator or the founder, whoever's posting it. And of course, the actual content itself. And so for me, I'm still tweaking, but I do find that just copy and pasting from one to the other doesn't usually work. It really like you almost need to be in the right mindset of like, okay, what do I think will be more engaging on Twitter? And then what do I think will be more engaging on LinkedIn? And then kind of test a bunch, see what actually works, go back and iterate a little bit.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Advice is definitely just to try to start small. Don't let it become so intimidating that you just don't get started. For me, it was like just having a notepad or Google Doc around in the beginning where I would just constantly jot down, okay, this is something I learned or something I observed or something that worked well, something that was unintuitive but worked and just start creating a log of that. And then once I had enough of those and I'd spend basically every week, I'd block off a few hours to go a little bit deeper. I take a lot of those bullet points.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only do that if you've kind of gone through it a little bit yourself and you know how hard it is, and I think too many founders will then just say, you know, they'll write something that just feels so much like an adorator to help amplify. And that just never works, right? And so I do think part of founder-led marketing is like going through this yourself using your own platform in the beginning is probably going to be super small. But as you get bigger, you have a platform that you have a voice and people listen and you're going to get better and better at your own storytelling. I think these are all skills you should invest in as early as possible because you know you're going to have to get better and better is like practice. You got to practice over and over”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Days. I think a lot of founders are trying to be more active on social media. And I think if you can kind of overcome the initial cringe factor of seeing yourself and posting like, oh, feel authentic, if you can overcome that initial feeling, you start investing into like, okay, how do I become a better copywriter? How do I articulate something that is clear, not just clever? I think there's that saying where obviously if you can have that clarity, that's super important. And most people will try to get super creative with their copywriting, but that's not usually the right way to break through and communicate something. So how do you improve your own copywriting? And then that allows you to actually have a higher bar when you start working with other marketers or in this case, like for us, like working with influencers, right? If you're working with influencers and creators and you can totally empathize with like how they approach that work and you know what a good hook looks like or you know how like a structure, a good post, you can.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think most people today are probably familiar with founder-led sales, which is still very, very important. I think before you hire your first salesperson or AE, it's great for the founder to understand what it takes. And they're going to craft the right narrative, the right story. At my previous role, I was the COO at a startup where I was doing a lot of, I was in founder, but I was early. And so I was helping the founders go through this and really helping go into meetings with a client or a prospect and saying, hey, this is why our product is interesting. And I think today there's so many AI startups that are much more either B2C or pursumer. And so you're not necessarily talking to individual prospects, but the idea that you can be really in control of the narrative on the marketing side is really, really important. And I think I'll describe a few things where over time, I think that skill set just really, really helps you. One is like, you know, you have a chance to kind of be a creator yourself.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And of course, the algorithm change all the time, so part of it is just luck based on when it happened, how it happened, who posted.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Able to have that level of engagement so that people have some level of reach. And so for me, it was almost like my first sort of learning going back to, you know, what does founder-led marketing even mean? It means like, how do you actually break through the noise? How do you get a chance to have people even engage with like a post like that? Part of that is copywriting, part of that is like storytelling, part of that is just having like even the right visuals to share. And so it was for me kind of a moment just understanding, hey, they kind of do this right. You kind of have to do things that maybe you're not super comfortable with, but it makes a difference.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so when we did our AI launch, we didn't do our AI launch on Product Tongue. We basically said, hey, let's just put it out on Twitter, see if we can get some virality. And honestly, we kind of came up with kind of a clickbaity sort of tweet. It was like, you know, the most valuable skill in business is about to become obsolete. And so, you know, it was intentional in that we wanted to create a little bit of engagement. We knew that having sort of a more provocative tweet would allow people to engage with it. And so after a couple days, all of a sudden it started getting a little bit more viral and a lot more engagement. And we looked. And it was basically because Paul Graham had commented and saying something like, surely the thing that the slide deck is describing is more valuable than the slide itself, right? And obviously, you know, it was fun just to see that comment. I think once that comment came through even more engagement on the post. And then that was really the whole intent of that post was just.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our first hundred looks very different. I'd say this was even pretty AI laundry had, you know, the first hundred users for a product like ours, you're trying to convince all your friends to use the product. Anybody that's ever made a slide deck you're trying to talk to? I think early on, you know, 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. And so I think our first hundred was sort of like gradually hard earned post sort of the product hunt launch, people learning like, okay, this is kind of becoming a little bit more useful usage was still pretty episodic. So they weren't coming back every week. And then I think do think, you know, the moment post sort of the AI launch is where all of a sudden, you know, we saw that sort of organic growth happening. People coming back to the product regularly. And so that's where it wasn't even the first hundreds, like maybe the first 10,000 users all came within a pretty short time period after that initial launch.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Timing. 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 gif that allowed us to do all those things along the same sort of ambition or vision that we had. And so we integrated it core to kind of all the building blocks we were already building well before AI was part of the picture.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After the last startup by this app was acquired, I went back into kind of my roots, which is consulting. I was advising early stage startups and the sort of medium I was using was Google Slides. So I just remember this late night trying to prepare for next day's meeting, trying to format and figure out the right layout and spending hours just trying to get the sort of look and feel right rather than the content itself. And for me, that just felt completely backwards. I should be spending 90% all the time on the content, 10% may be on the design and formatting. And so the question just was, you know, what if there's a better way? What if we could reimagine this format from the ground up? Slides have been around for almost 40 years as the default medium of choice for a lot of this. And so we thought about, okay, if we had different building blocks, different primitives, so you're not locked into the fixed 16 by 9 slide, what could you, you know, what could we offer to you users? And so that was really the starting point of all this.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Problem for them. And then you can continue kind of building on that over time. Like you've given them enough so that they'll sit around and like keep playing with your product.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it really helps you pull forward what is the most magical thing about your product, right? Sometimes founders will think about the 510 features. Well, maybe there's only like one thing that kind of differentiates you. I try to learn a lot from we'll get into some of the marketing pieces of this, but even just having this sort of founder-led marketing lens of like, what can I do to help a new user just understand? You know, 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 going to drop all of them. And like oftentimes founders want to talk about the four or five features they have, maybe 10 features, and then the consumer is totally confused. Why do I need this thing? We try to just give them that 1 egg, that one first experience where like, okay, you know, create a slide in seconds. That's the egg. I'm going to throw you this egg. Is that compelling to you? Some people are still going to opt out, but for the people that catch that, you're solving like a real problem.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And 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? They're coming in. They have no desire to learn a new tool. And so what can you give them in that first 30 seconds that earns you the next 30 seconds and then the next 30 seconds? And so for us, we knew that if we can't, you know, people's attention span is even shorter to today than maybe 10 years ago. And so what is it in that first 30 seconds? Can we actually show you something and earn the right to kind of keep kind of building that relationship with you? We really thought a lot about that. And certainly that's all we could really afford at the time. We only had 12 people building. It's like we couldn't make an entirely revamped entire product. We knew that we had to at least put all of our energy into one spot. And so we made that coming into the door, come to the door, make that moment feel magical so that we can do a little bit more over time.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so for us, the onboarding and the product experience, for us, that's intertwined, right? The analogy I always think about is if you go into a restaurant and maybe the food is good, but when you really think about the user experience, it's like the moment you walk in the door, you get seated, the waitress waiter comes by, greets you, you get order. And of course, the food has to taste good. But if that entire, like, and then you finally get the bill and you leave, like, is that entire experience something that feels delightful? Is it good enough for you to tell your friends about? If someone just came by and dropped the food on your plate, you know, on the table and was like, just left and never came with a bill. We're like, okay, maybe I'm not going to recommend this to somebody else. And so for us, we thought about, okay, the first moment someone walks through our door, you know, dropping into the product, what is, what is something we can give them? Can we shorten that time to value as much as possible? A lot of this is inspired by Scott Belsky. He talks about kind of that first mile, the first trip team minutes. And I think that's totally right.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source