SaaStr 871: $0 to $100M ARR Fast. How Gamma's CEO and Co-Founder Scaled Quickly without a Sales Team

**Grant Lee** (0:00)
Get into my third pitch, and 20 minutes in, you know, I finish my pitch, and I'm waiting for the investor to start asking me some questions. Long pause, and eventually the investor says, this has got to be the worst idea I've ever heard. Not only are you going up against massive incumbents, they have ultimate distribution. There is no way you will ever succeed.
And so, of course, I'm a little shell shocked in the moment. I'm trying to think about, okay, we're just a really smart rebuttal I can give this investor. And before I can do that, he hangs up, leaves the Zoom call.
And so in that moment, you know, I tried to internalize what he said because I think there is some truth to it, which is being in this category is incredibly hard. You can't just build a great product. You have to think about distribution from day one.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:55)
Wow.

**Grant Lee** (0:55)
Wow. What an honor to be here. Very glad to be here with you all. Excited to share a little bit of our story.
We're going to talk about how we achieved 100 million in AR profitably over the past couple of years with a team of 50
For those that don't know about Gamma, you can think of us as the anti PowerPoint. A quick glance at Gamma. We passed 100 million in AR, again, with a team of 50
Today, I'm here to share a little bit about our story. I have four lessons, just four lessons. Hopefully, lessons that you can take, bring back to your organizations to help you feel your growth as well. We're going to talk a little bit about product market fit. We're going to talk about creator marketing. We're going to talk about community-led growth, and we're going to talk about dogfooding the future.
Now, every early stage startup has this question of, how do we know if we've reached product market fit? It's an incredibly important question to answer. Now, unfortunately, this could be one where it's super easy to trick yourself or to fool yourself into thinking you might have it. So I want to share our story to talk about how we actually approach this ourselves. When we first started Gamma, we were setting out to try to solve the blank page problem. Part of this was informed by my own experience. I was basically at a different startup. We got acquired. I started advising early stage startups, and one late night when I was preparing for a meeting the next day, I was pulling up Google Slides, trying to get my ideas onto this canvas, and just frustrated by the amount of time it took to format and design, rather than on the content itself. That for me just felt backwards. What if we could reimagine this format from the ground up, and really allow people to shape and share their ideas way more seamlessly? So we got to work, I ended up meeting up with two of my former colleagues from Optimize.ly, and we started building Gama.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:59)
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**Grant Lee** (4:38)
Now, our very early version of Gamma was this prototype you're seeing, which is sort of a hybrid document slash deck. We really want to make it kind of dead simple for you to sort of flip between these different formats. We spent a lot of time just trying to get this right, where we got to the point where this prototype was our pre-seed pitch deck. We used it instead of using Google Slides. For the first time, rather than using slides, I was able to present with a different medium. Now, I was living in London at the time, so this is me trying to practice our pitch during the daytime. We didn't have a lot of furniture, and so I had to borrow my kids' little desk during the daytime to do all of my practicing. Because we were in London, I had to do all the pitching in the middle of the night. So come 8 p.m., I would tuck my kids into bed, I would pick up this little table, move it to the far corner of the flat, which was tucked in between our kitchenette and our laundry room. And I would sit down, put up a fake zoom background so nobody knew exactly where I was, and I'd start pitching. And first time Founders, so I'm getting into pitch mode, get through my first two pitches. They go pretty well. I'm like, okay, how hard can this thing be? Get into my third pitch, and 20 minutes in, I finish my pitch, and I'm waiting for the Investor to start asking me some questions.