Gamma

Grant Lee started Gamma during the pandemic in 2020 while living in London with two kids. After his previous startup was acquired, he returned to consulting and found himself spending hours formatting Google Slides presentations instead of focusing on content. This friction sparked a realization: slides have been the default presentation medium for 40 years, but what if you could reimagine the format from scratch with different building blocks, not locked into a fixed 16:9 aspect ratio? That question became Gamma.

When the team (then just 12 people) launched publicly on Product Hunt in August 2022, they won Product of the Day, Product of the Week, and Product of the Month. By any standard, this should have been a massive success. But Grant and his co-founders were brutally honest with themselves: signups spiked then plateaued. There was no strong word-of-mouth, no organic virality. The Product Hunt launch was a vanity metric, not a growth engine.

This became a "bet the company" moment. The team was running low on runway and facing a choice: spend more money on ads to fuel growth, or go back to the drawing board. They chose the latter. Grant recalls: "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."

For three to four months, the entire team focused on one thing: the onboarding experience. They rebuilt it so that every new user would experience AI magic in the first 30 seconds—not as a separate feature, but as part of the core experience. When they relaunched in March 2023, the results were undeniable. First day: a few thousand signups. By day two: 5,000. Day three: 10,000. Then 20,000 per day. And it kept climbing. No ads. No marketing spend. Pure organic word-of-mouth and virality.

This felt completely different from the Product Hunt launch. Grant describes the distinction: "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 Hunt launch."

The key insight: the first 30 seconds had to earn the next 30 seconds. Grant thought about new users as "selfish, vain, and lazy"—they have zero desire to learn a new tool. So Gamma's job was to show them something valuable immediately. The mantra became: "create a slide in seconds." One egg to throw them. Simple.

As growth accelerated, Grant realized that to scale, he needed to take control of the narrative himself. Rather than hire a marketing agency, he became the voice of Gamma. When they announced the AI integration, he crafted an intentionally provocative tweet: "The most valuable skill in business is about to become obsolete." This was tactical—he knew a spicy angle would drive engagement.

Paul Graham responded with a comment, which triggered a wave of additional engagement. This single comment from a legendary investor amplified the reach massively and brought thousands of users.

Grant learned what "founder-led marketing" truly meant: breaking through noise with authentic storytelling. He invested in becoming a better copywriter, learning what hooks worked on Twitter (tactical, contrarian, replicable) versus LinkedIn (aspirational, thematic, inspirational). He blocked off time—early mornings and late nights after his kids went to bed—to keep a running doc of interesting observations and learnings, then converted these into weekly posts.

When Gamma hit 10 million ARR, Grant felt the product's organic virality was strong enough to amplify. But he noticed their original brand—created in late 2020 as a placeholder—wasn't scalable. They partnered with Smith Indiction (the agency behind Complexity's rebrand) to rebuild the brand DNA from scratch. This wasn't just cosmetic; it was foundational. They needed a brand where every piece of creative, every asset, every social post would feel cohesive even as they eventually created thousands of pieces monthly.

Simultaneously, Grant tackled influencer marketing in a deeply unconventional way. Rather than buying bulk influencer placements, he manually onboarded every early influencer himself. He'd jump on personal calls with each creator to ensure they understood what Gamma actually was and could tell the story in their own voice. This was hard to scale, but it worked because the influencers became authentic advocates, not script-readers.

Grant rejected the playbook of chasing mega-creators with millions of followers. Instead, he focused on thousands of micro-influencers whose audiences genuinely needed presentation tools. "People really trust what they say," he explains. "That ends up becoming this wildfire that can spread really, really fast."

Two years after the March 2023 relaunch, Gamma reached 100 million ARR. The company remained profitable, never raised massive venture funding (a rarity for AI startups), and operated with just 30 people. They now serve over 50 million users globally.

When that early investor told Grant, "This is the worst idea I have ever heard," he could have given up. Instead, he internalized the challenge: if we're going to win in a crowded category against massive incumbents, growth has to be core to everything. The path required brutal honesty about what was working (organic virality, not vanity metrics), the discipline to rebuild when early signals were false, and the founder hustle to personally shape the narrative and relationships that drove exponential growth.