When Paid Acquisition Should Kick In

Grant advises waiting for strong organic word-of-mouth before scaling paid channels and warns against overreliance on paid acquisition.

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Grant Lee is the co-founder of Gamma, the AI-powered presentation tool that’s one of the hottest and most interesting AI startups in the world right now. They’re valued at over $2 billion, and they hit $100 million ARR in just over two years, with a lean team of just around 30 people. Unlike many fast-growing AI startups, Gamma has been profitable for most of its history, has not raised significant funding, and they built a massive business in a category most investors dismissed. In fact, one investor told Grant his idea was “the dumbest idea he had ever heard.”

We discuss:

• How Gamma found product-market fit by rethinking their onboarding

• Their process for building a “word-of-mouth machine”

• How they leveraged more than 1,000 micro-influencers instead of big names

• Why focusing on the “first 30 seconds” transformed their business

• Their approach to pricing that led to profitability within months

• How Grant thinks about building a durable “GPT wrapper” business

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