YouSaid · the spoken record

Grant Lee

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2025-11-13
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2025-11-13
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  1. “That took off from that. Yeah, it was still like we were still getting signups. Like, they're coming through, but you could just tell there wasn't like, there wasn't this building momentum, you know? And I think that's where it's always hard to tell. You kind of have to, you know, me and my co-founders, we sat down. We're just, we're trying to be honest with ourselves. Like, okay, is this going to be enough? And it just really felt like it wasn't going to be good.”

    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

  2. “Yeah, I mean, part of being a founder is being as self aware as you can and be your own worst critic. And so oftentimes you want to have these vanity metrics that feel good to celebrate and you should celebrate, but you should know when it's a vanity metric versus is this core to our growth engine? Like if this number goes up, does it mean the product is working? And I think that's where we looked at like, okay, felt good to win those things. We kind of put ourselves at least on the map, but it wasn't good enough to actually have this sort of feeling that we had a core growth engine we could just invest in and get better and better. That wasn't there yet.”

    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

  3. “Yeah, totally. I think for us, we do benefit from being in a category where by nature of it, if you like Gamma, you're sharing it, presenting it to others. So I think for us, it's a combination of both. And ideally, you have other ways where word of mouth or organic plurality can happen in your product. So by nature of usage, like it's being shared, we basically had an internal mantra that we go back to like the first 30 seconds. We want it to be dead simple for someone to create content. We want to be dead simple for them to share it. And everything we did kind of for that first 30 seconds or call it the first few minutes is remove friction so that they can do both of those things, create and share. And I think other people, you know, when you look at your own product, you think about, okay.”

    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

  4. “Yeah, I mean, one piece of advice is when you're early on, your mindset should almost be like you're trying to create a word of mouth machine, right? Like if you can get that part right, everything else becomes significantly easier. And if you have any, and I think this applies to both like ProSumer, B2C, as well as even B2B products. Like if you have a B2B product, even if you're not telling all of your, you know, all of your friends, you should be telling colleagues where that product is relevant. You should probably be telling former coworkers where, hey, you've discovered something like, oh, I wish we had this in our prior lives. And like that should even be magical. And then you should see that in all the leads that are coming through, like are people coming through your prospects and your existing customers. If you're not seeing a healthy chunk of those leads come through that way, I would go back. I'm like, why? Why is that not happening? Because again, that's like the massive tailwind you need where everything, every single thing you do on top of that, all the marketing, all the sales, all the average.”

    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

  5. “On marketing because, like, you know, we'll just fuel the top of the funnel and everything else will work at self-out. I think that would have been a trap. I think that would have led us down to this path of trying to brute force our way into product market fit. And it would just always be sort of a fleeting sort of destination would never actually arrive. And so I think we made the tough call, the right call. It was a sort of bet the company moment. And I think on the other side, it just felt so different.”

    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

  6. “And of course, this is also where AI for us kind of played a big role. We actually rebuilt it so that AI was part of the actual onboarding. So every single new user would experience the sort of magic in the first 30 seconds. And so we relaunched, this is end of March 2023. And all of a sudden, you know, we'd go from a few hundred signups a day to now first day was like a couple thousand. And then the next day would be like 5,000 signups. And then 10,000 signups a day. And then 20,000 signups a day. And then it just kept going up. And we weren't doing any sort of marketing, no advertising. It was all sort of organic word of mouth virality of the product people using the product and sharing it with others where we for the first time really felt this pull. Like we didn't have to do anything. Product was just growing. And it was just such a distinct difference between that feeling and like coming out of the product hub launch where we could have fooled ourselves into thinking we had product market fit. I think the temptation would have been, hey, let's just spend more on ads or spend.”

    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

  7. “Okay, what do we need to change? And the answer is we need to fundamentally change everything. It for us almost became the sort of bet the company sort of moment because at that point we were running low on runway. We knew we needed to make progress and we didn't really know what could be done. And so we got everyone together. At this point, the team was just over 12 people. And we said, okay, it's going to be all hands on deck. We are going to do everything we possibly can to make the first 30 seconds of the product feel magical. The moment you land into the product, it has to be great. It has to be so great that someone that goes through that onboarding is going to tell all their friends. And if we can get that right, then maybe we have a chance at actually, you know, doing something in this space. And so we spent three, four months actually, you know, after the product launch, we're like, felt great, but we knew we had to go back to the drawing board. We spent the next three, four months actually revamping the entire onboarding experience.”

    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

  8. “Yeah, I'll start by telling kind of the moment where we thought we maybe had product market fit. And I think a lot of founders ask themselves do we have it or are we not? And I think there's often a sort of temptation to almost fool yourself into thinking you have it. And so we sort of did our first public beta launch. This is back in August of 2022. We launched on product hunt and felt really good. What we felt like was a great launch ended up winning product of the day, product of the week, product of the month. And I was like, wow, I think we have something here. And then we'd look at signups and you'd get that initial spike in signups. And then they sort of like flatten out. You're still getting new users every day, but it was clear we didn't have strong word of mouth. There wasn't strong organic virality. And so if we just kind of played things out, you know, we knew that the product wasn't going to grow on its own. Like something was missing there. We didn't have that strong word of mouth so that the product could just continue growing. And so we really kind of asked ourselves like,”

    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

  9. “Yeah, thank you. Yeah, we feel super proud to have accomplished that. And again, yeah, I'm excited to share some of the growth tactics and things that worked for us because I think hopefully it will help others kind of on their journey as well.”

    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

  10. “And so I'm there sitting there thinking about it. And before I could really get down on myself because I had to prepare for the next pitch, I kind of just internalize this feeling that, you know, maybe he's right. Maybe something about what he's saying is actually correct. And so for me, I started thinking about if we're going to succeed in this category, we're going to really have to think about growth from the very beginning. This category is going to be really, really hard to break into. And so we really kind of made this sort of kind of promise to ourselves that as we continue to build, growth is going to be critically important. And so my thing to kind of, you know, your audience is that, you know, I don't come from a growth background. So if I can learn growth, anybody can learn growth. And I think especially in this sort of market, hyper competitive, oftentimes very crowded, it's going to be essential.”

    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

  11. “Corner between the kitchen net and the laundry room to kind of set up shot far enough from the kids so they wouldn't be woken up. In between 8 p.m. like 2 a.m. I'm just pitching, you know, trying my best out of the fake Zoom background so people didn't know where I was and just pitching. And so really the first day, kind of I'm in my third pitch in trying to tell the story of Gamma. Obviously just starting to get the hang of the pitch. And then just says that 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. And so like in my head, I'm already kind of shell shocked and thinking, you know, what am I going to, what's my rebuttal? And before I could even respond, he hangs 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

  12. “Yeah, maybe I'll just start with a quick story if that's okay. And it's really just a founding story. So we started the company back in 2020. This is peak pandemic. And, you know, fundraising, even fundraising was just so different. So all of the fundraising was done over Zoom. You were kind of sitting in these Zoom meetings trying to pitch many investors you never met in person. So just a different error, right? And so for us, we're first-time founders. I was actually living in London at the time. And so, you know, different time zone, I had to do all of my pitches at night. And, you know, I have two little kids. So wait for them to go to bed 8 p.m. We had a pretty modest flat. So nothing big. I would basically find this little”

    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

  13. “Maybe once a day now I get a text message. There's no message, it's just a screenshot, an image of me doing something in San Francisco on one of these ads that we're seeing. And so, yeah, kind of embarrassing, but also we're happy customers of JPMorgan Chase. So trying to represent.”

    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

  14. “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. In the afternoon, we're already running pretty full-scale experiments. You start actually hearing other people describe their usage of the product. 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.”

    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

  15. “All the initial influencers, I onboarded manually myself. I always 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 chameleon followers, this is the wrong approach. You basically give them 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”

    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

  16. “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 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”

    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