"我听过的最蠢的想法"到 1 亿美元 ARR:揭秘 Gamma 的崛起 | Grant Lee(联合创始人)
“Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (co-founder)
Opener: “The Dumbest Idea”
Grant Lee: 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.”
Methods for Rapid Experimentation
Lenny Rachitsky: You guys are at over 100 million ARR now, worth over $2 billion. One of the most interesting ways you guys grew early on was influencer marketing.
Grant Lee: All the initial influencers, I onboarded manually myself. 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 you 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 a million 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.
The Story of Gamma
Lenny Rachitsky: Something you talk about it, there is actually a lot of ways to think experimentally, even in the early stages.
Grant Lee: We 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 fast so people can start playing with it. In the afternoon, we’re already running pretty full scale experiment. You start actually hearing other people describe their usage of the product. We 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 not usable and we’ve done that for everything.
The JPMorgan Chase Ad Face
Lenny Rachitsky: Today my guest is Grant Lee, CEO and co-founder of Gamma. This is a really unique and inspiring, and very tactically useful conversation because Grant is building something that is essentially the dream for most founders. A massive AI startup that’s profitable, and has been for a long time, that didn’t raise a lot of money for a long time. And as a small team, it’s just around 30 people, all who can fit in a small restaurant serving over 50 million users globally.
If you’re not familiar with Gamma, they’re an AI powered presentation and website design tool. They just hit 100 million ARR in just over two years. They’re valued at over $2 billion. And unlike a lot of the fast growing AI startups that you hear about, they’re growing profitably and sustainably, and in a category that most people did not believe had a huge business opportunity. As you’ll hear in the conversation, one investor told Grant, this is the dumbest idea that he has ever heard.
In this conversation, Grant shares the very counter-intuitive lessons that he’s learned, finding product market fit, how he knew they had product market fit, the specific tactics that helped them grow, including a deep dive into influencer marketing, which blew my mind. Also how they figured out their price, his thoughts on building a GPT wrapper company that is durable, a ton of hiring advice, and so much more. This could honestly have been another two hours of conversation. I suspect we’ll do another follow-up conversation next year.
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Grant Lee: Lenny, it’s so great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Why This Conversation Matters
Lenny Rachitsky: I see your face all the time in my LinkedIn feed. I don’t know if you know this is a thing. On these JPMorgan Chase ads. I’m so curious if other people see this or if it’s just me. Did you know this was a thing?
Grant Lee: I think it’s maybe once a day now I get a text message and just no message. It’s just a screenshot or 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.
Finding Product-Market Fit
Lenny Rachitsky: Oh my God, I hope you love them. Because it’s always you. There’s no one else. It’s like Grant.
Grant Lee: I know. Can I talk to you [inaudible 00:05:56] swap somebody out. I mean that’d be great. I’m totally fine with that.
The Word-of-Mouth Machine
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, so to get serious, the reason I’m really excited to have you here is, unlike a lot of super fast growing AI startups, you are both growing like crazy, you are growing very profitably. We’re going to talk about this. You did not raise a ton of money when you started. You waited a long time to raise a bunch of money. You also built a business in a category that I think most people never imagined there was this big of an opportunity. And you’re basically, you’ve achieved the dream of a lot of founders these days, especially people building AI startups.
So my goal with this conversation is essentially do an anthropological study of a really successful AI startup. Talk about how you found product market fit, how you grew, all the lessons you’ve learned along the journey. And I’m going to break this conversation up kind of along the different milestones of the journey. Before we get into the first piece, is there anything that you think is important for people to hear broadly about the story of Gamma?
Grant Lee: Yeah. Maybe I’ll just start with a quick story if that’s okay. And it’s really just the founding story. So we started the company back in 2020. This is peak pandemic. And 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 era. And so for us, we’re first time founders. I was actually living in London at the time, and so different time zone. I had to do all of my pitches at night. And I have two little kids, so wait for them to go to bed. 8:00 PM. We had a pretty modest flat, so nothing big. I would basically find this little corner between the kitchenette and the laundry room to kind of set up shot, far enough from the kids so they wouldn’t be woken up.
In between 8:00 PM and like 2:00 AM, I’m just pitching. Trying my best. I had the fake Zoom background so people didn’t know where I was, and just pitching. And so really the first day, 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 I get to the very end of the pitch feeling pretty good about myself. And 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.”
And so in my head, I’m already kind of shell shocked and thinking what’s my rebuttal? And before I could even respond, he hangs up. 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 just internalize this feeling that 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 promise to ourselves, that as we continue to build, growth was going to be critically important. And so my thing to your audience is that 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.
Natural Product Shareability
Lenny Rachitsky: That is such a fun story. Oh my god. How bad must this investor feel at this point. We won’t name names. Just to share some stats, I know this is going to be by the time this launches, this will be out, but you guys are at over 100 million ARR now, worth over $2 billion. A business that, again, most people did not think was going to work in this category.
Grant Lee: 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’ll help others kind of on their journey as well.
Vanity Metrics vs. Core Growth
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. So let’s dive into it. Let’s talk about product market fit. Tell us the story of just how you found product market fit, and how you knew you found product market fit.
Grant Lee: 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 kind of 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. We had what we felt like was a great launch, ended up winning product of the day, product of the week, product of the month. And it 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 flatten out. We were 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, we knew that the product wasn’t going to grow on its own. 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 asked ourselves, okay, what do we need to change? And the answer is we need to fundamentally change everything. It for us almost became this 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, and 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 doing something in this space. And so we spent three, four months actually after the product launch, we 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. 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 this sort of magic in the first 30 seconds. And so we relaunched, this is end of March 2023. And all of a sudden, we’d go from a few hundred signups a day to now first day it 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. We didn’t have to do anything. Product was just growing. And it was just such a distinct difference between that feeling and coming out of the Product Hunt launch where we could have fooled ourselves into thinking we have product market fit. I think the temptation would’ve been, hey, let’s just spend more on ads or spend more on marketing. Because we’ll just fuel the top of the funnel and everything else will work itself out.
I think that would’ve been a trap. I think that would’ve 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. We 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.
Onboarding and the First 30 Seconds
Lenny Rachitsky: Grant, this is exactly what I wanted this conversation to be. I’m so excited. I have so many questions I have to follow up on the stuff you shared before we even get to the rest of the journey. So one is essentially what you’re describing is product market fit to you was when organic growth started to really take off, and it was just growing through word of mouth. You weren’t doing much because it was so awesome, people were telling their friends about it. Is there anything more there that might be helpful for people to share just to hear about just like, okay, here’s what it actually looks like?
Gamma’s Founding Inspiration
Grant Lee: Yeah, I mean my 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. If you can get that part right, everything else becomes significantly easier. And if you have any, and I think this applies to both prosumer, B2C, as well as even B2B products, if you have a B2B product, even if you’re not telling 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 that should even be magical.
And then you should see that in all the leads that are coming through or people coming through 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 the massive tailwind you need where every single thing you do on top of that, all the marketing, all the sales, all the advertising, you’re just going to have it becomes way, way easier.
Lenny Rachitsky: How much of this was, you described it as a word of mouth machine, how much of this was word of mouth loops and virality features versus just the product itself? One was awesome and two is kind of innately shareable because it’s presentations people share with each other.
Zero to $100M: The Growth Journey
Grant Lee: 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 virality 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 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 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, when you look at your own product, you think about, okay, what is it about my product and how it gets used? Can you remove friction such that it can actually spread, and even if it’s locally within an organization or within a workspace, just be able to enable that as much as you possibly can.
Lenny Rachitsky: The other really profound point you’re making here is the story of you won product of the day on Product Hunt, which alone is so hard. So many people try to win and don’t. Most people don’t. I’ve tried to help companies win, and it’s a really hard thing to achieve. And then you won product of the week and product of the month, and still you’re like, no, this isn’t working. Most people that achieve that are like, no, we got this, and they would not have to bet the company. There wouldn’t be a feeling that we have to rethink everything. What is it there that you’re just like, no, this isn’t going to work, as much as exciting as this is, this isn’t it?
The Story of a Bait Tweet
Grant Lee: 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? If this number goes up, does it mean the product is working? And I think that’s where we looked at, okay, it 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.
Founder-Led Marketing
Lenny Rachitsky: So essentially it kind of started to just plateau and slow. It wasn’t like this rocket ship that took off from that point.
Grant Lee: Yeah, it was still like we were still getting signups. They were coming through. But you could just tell there wasn’t this building momentum. And I think that’s where it’s always hard to tell. You have to, me and my co-founders, we sat down, we’re trying to be honest with ourselves. Okay, is this going to be enough? And it just really felt like it wasn’t going to be good.
How to Start Sharing Content
Lenny Rachitsky: The other point here is the power of onboarding, which comes up a bunch on this podcast when you talk about driving retention. So you launched Product Hunt, did great and then started kind of petering out. How much did the product change after things started to work versus onboarding? Just like how important was onboarding? And then just tell us why the first 30 seconds, where’d you come up with that number?
Grant Lee: Yeah. So for us, the onboarding and the product experience, for us that’s intertwined. 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 into the door, you get seated, the waitress, waiter comes by, greets you, you can order. And of course the food has to taste good. And then you finally get the bill and you leave. 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 on the table, and just left and never came with a bill, I’m 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, dropping into the product, 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 that first mile, the first 15 minutes. And I think that’s totally right. And I think one approach is you think about new users as you almost have 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, 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 keep 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 revamp the entire product. We knew that we had to least put all of our energy into one spot, and so we made that coming into the door, come through the door, make that moment feel magical so that we can do a little bit more over time.
Social Media Content Strategy
Lenny Rachitsky: I love your point about how you could think of it as like, okay, it’s onboarding versus the product. The lens of how do we make this incredibly valuable and aha-ish for the first 30 seconds almost informs what the product should be.
Grant Lee: Yeah. It really helps you pull forward what is the most magical thing about your product. Sometimes founders will think about the five, 10 features. Well, maybe there’s only 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 what can I do to help a new user just understand. There’s this thing from consumer advertising, which is you throw 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 oftentimes founders want to talk about the four or five features they have, maybe 10 features. And then the consumer is totally confused, like why do I need this thing? We try to just give them that one egg, that one first experience. We’re like, okay, 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 a real problem for them, and then you can continue building on that over time. You’ve given them enough so that they’ll sit around and keep playing with your product.
Time Management for Content Creation
Lenny Rachitsky: That is a hilarious metaphor I’ve never heard for onboarding time to value, just focus on one egg at a time. Just going even further back, what was the original insight that you had that led to Gamma and what Gamma is today?
Value Exchange in Founder-Led Marketing
Grant Lee: After the last startup I was at 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% of the time on the content, 10% maybe on the design and formatting.
And so the question just was 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 nine slide, what could we offer to users? And so that was really the starting point of all this.
Lenny Rachitsky: Hearing this, I could see why investors would be like, I guess so. But slides has been around, PowerPoint has been around 40 years. I get it. I get why people would be… And specifically AI, was that a part of the vision initially, or did AI start to come up, and then wow, great timing,
Gamma’s Growth: 100M ARR
Grant Lee: Great timing. It wasn’t part of the original vision, although the spirit was there, which is we wanted to make it incredibly fast and effortless for people to create content. So it just so happened that AI was a magical gift 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 all the building blocks we were already building well before AI was part of the picture.
Lenny Rachitsky: It’s such a cool other example. There’s just so many examples of ideas that were not possible before are now very possible with AI. And it’s a great opportunity for people to come after as these places, categories, people think is an impossible place to build a big business. AI now allows it. Awesome.
Speaking of that, let’s talk about the growth journey, and how you actually grew from nothing to 100 million ARR in just over two years. I’m thinking we break it up. I know these milestones aren’t that clear, but kind of like zero to 100 million ARR, one to 10, 10 to 100, something like that. And let’s just see how it goes. How did you get your first set of users? How’d you get your, say, first 100 users? How’d you get to 100 million ARR from zero?
Influencer Marketing as a Growth Lever
Grant Lee: Our first 100 looks very different, I’d say. So this was even pre this sort of AI launch we had. The first 100 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. And I think early on, 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 100 was sort of gradually hard-earned post the product 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 do think the moment post the AI launch is where all of a sudden 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 hundred, it was like probably the first 10,000 users all came within a pretty short time period after that initial launch.
How to Find the Right Influencers
Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. We’re going to talk about monetization pricing later, which is obviously an important part of actual getting to million ARR and 10 million AAR. So what I’m hearing essentially is the Product Hunt launch was a big part of just the first 10,000-ish users. I know there was also a tweet when you relaunched that helped in a big way. Talk about that.
Grant Lee: Yeah. So when we did our AI launch, we didn’t do our AI launch on Product Hunt. We basically said, hey, let’s just put it out on Twitter, see if we can get some virality. And honestly, we kind came up with kind of a clickbaity sort of tweet. It was like the most valuable skill in business is about to become obsolete. And so it was intentional in that we wanted to create a little bit of engagement. We knew that having sort of a more provocative in a tweet would allow people to engage with it.
And so after a couple of 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.” And obviously 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 to be able to have that level of engagement so that people, it would have some level of reach.
And so for me, it was almost like my first learning moment, going back to what does founder led marketing even mean? It means how do you actually break through the noise? How do you get a chance to have people even engage with a post like that? Part of that is copywriting, part of that is storytelling. Part of that is just having even the right visuals to share. And so it was for me kind of a moment just understanding, hey, to 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.
Impact of Influencer Marketing on Growth
Lenny Rachitsky: Such a fun story. So you intentionally set that announcement up to be controversial is what I’m hearing?
Grant Lee: Totally. Yeah. I’d say provocative. A little spicy.
Quality First and Micro-Influencer Advantage
Lenny Rachitsky: That is so cool. So essentially you got to 10,000 users through Product Hunt, and then essentially one controversial tweet that ended up baiting Paul Graham to comment.
Cast a Wide Net for the 10%
Grant Lee: Totally.
”Reality Isn’t Random”: Double Down on What Works
Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. And it was just a comment. It wasn’t even him retweeting it.
Grant Lee: No, just a comment. And then others would pile on.
The Most Effective Platform: LinkedIn
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah. It’s interesting how much a comment can increase the distribution of a tweet versus them retweeting it or quote tweeting it.
Grant Lee: Totally. And of course the algorithm change all the time. So part of it was just luck based on when it happened, how it happened, who posted.
Build Brand Before Scaling Ads
Lenny Rachitsky: And you use this term founder led marketing, which I love, and I’m already seeing it in action here. This is you thinking about, it’s not delegating to someone in marketing, it’s not hiring an agency, it’s like how do I tell a story that I think will break through the noise based on you building this company, having the insight to build this product. And I guess is there anything more there you think is important for people to hear about the importance of the founder thinking through this stuff?
Grant Lee: 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 wasn’t 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 prosumer. 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 you have a chance to be a creator yourself these 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 postings like, oh, this doesn’t 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 for us, working with influencers. If you’re working with influencers and creators, and you can totally empathize with how they approach that work, and you know what a good hook looks like or you know how to structure a good post, you can only do that if you’ve gone through it a little bit yourself and you know how hard it is. And I think too many founders will then just say, they’ll write something that just feels so much like an ad, and then they’ll give it to a creator to help amplify. And then that just never works. And so I do think part of founder-led marketing is going through this yourself.
And so I do think part of founder-led marketing is going through this yourself, using your own platform. In the beginning it’s probably going to be super small. But as you get bigger, you have a platform to … 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. It’s like practice, you got to practice over and over.
When to Rebrand
Lenny Rachitsky: I definitely want to pull on this thread more because you tweeting the lessons you learned building Gamma is what led to this conversation. I was reading, I’m like, ” Okay, he’s sharing a bunch of stuff, but there’s so much more I want to hear.” And we’re going to talk through this and go in a lot more depth than what you’ve shared on Twitter. But I love that that’s example of that working, having this conversation.
So let me ask a couple of questions here. One is just how do you find time as a founder or CEO of a very fast growing crazy startup? We have so much to do. How do you just allocate the time to do this? And then any just key lessons you’ve learned about doing this well, beyond what you’ve already shared for people that want to try to start sharing things on LinkedIn and Twitter?
Grant Lee: My 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 a 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’d take a lot of those bullet points and try to say, “Is there enough here to turn this into maybe a post or something that can be shared broadly?” And in the beginning I didn’t have enough. It was all sort of scattered thoughts. But over time you start accumulating some interesting themes. And then I would start stress testing some of that.
So I would tell my teammates like, “Hey, this is something interesting. Do you find this interesting?” And if there were enough like, “Oh yeah, I would not have expected that”, or, “That’s not something I’ve ever heard before,” then I’d actually start crafting the initial post. And then you actually just put it out there. I think what I’ve learned is, even for LinkedIn versus Twitter, the audiences want different things. And so you almost have to then have different tones of voices or even nuggets or sharing. For me, I invested much more in LinkedIn early on just because it felt a little bit more natural for me. And then over time I said, “Okay, well I’m going to start packaging certain content for Twitter that’s actually different than what I would post on LinkedIn.” Sometimes on Twitter you get even more tactical or even more into the weeds. And so I found that to be helpful.
But honestly, I’m still learning. And so every time you post, you go back, after a couple of weeks you go and say, “Okay, what things are actually being engaged with? Are things actually creating …” Ideally you’re creating enough value where people are either bookmarking it, sharing it, retweeting it, these things that are signals for there’s something valuable there. And then you just go back and you start collecting your own sort of, these are my all-star posts, these are the ones that I’ve actually broken through. And then you go back and try to understand, okay, what about that post do I think was actually useful? Was it the actual content? Was it the structure of the content? Was it some sort of contrarian advice? And you start thematically bunching that together such that as you’re brainstorming every week, you just have a good sort of body of work to work off.
Gamma’s Growth Structure
Lenny Rachitsky: This is so interesting and valuable. So let me mirror back a few of the lessons that I heard here that I think is easy for people to miss. So one is just what to share. What I heard here, and I completely agree with this, and this is what I try to do, is pay attention to things you’ve learned, things that you find interesting, things that are unintuitive to you. Just have a doc and just put these there. And every time you learn something, find something interesting, just add it to the doc. Or yeah, I haven’t heard before is a good one too.
So it’s essentially just like if you find it interesting, people on social media will also find it interesting. And one approach is just share it as it’s happening, which is what I try to do. Just like, “Oh hey, just learned this thing with with clock code. Check it out.” Or save it up for a big long post. The other interesting, I’ve never heard this before, of post different things to LinkedIn and Twitter. I just copy and paste the same thing. I love that you do something different for the two platforms.
Grant Lee: I think we all kind of have intuition that there’s just 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 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. You almost need to be in the right mindset of, 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 test a bunch, see what actually works. Go back and iterate a little bit.
Intro to Performance Marketing
Lenny Rachitsky: So if you had one bullet point tip for what works on Twitter versus LinkedIn, you shared maybe more tactical on Twitter, is there anything more there you can share?
Huge Value of Pre-Launch Prototype Testing
Grant Lee: Yeah, that’s what I’ve found is tactical, oftentimes more contrarian on Twitter. And also I would say technical too. People really like to know, again, going back to getting into the weeds, is this something I feel like I could replicate? And I’m not going to give you … There’s no credibility if you just give a blanket statement or something that feels generic. I really need to know, if you could show me the metrics, even better. I feel like that …
Versus LinkedIn, it’s oftentimes more even just either more aspirational or aspirational or a topic or a theme that just feels 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, is 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 spell it completely out. Part of it’s also that on LinkedIn you can’t really do threads. And so doing a super long form post isn’t as practical. Maybe that changes in the future, where maybe the tactical pieces, that element might actually change.
How to Scale User Testing
Lenny Rachitsky: And last piece is you said you just block off time. Is there a specific time of the week you do this? How do you actually … Because everyone’s like, “Oh sure, I’ll block off time. And then, I don’t know, okay, but I actually got to do all this other stuff so I’m not going to use it this time or maybe next week.”
Grant Lee: For me, it’s usually two times of the day, very first thing in the morning and last thing at night. And partly it’s because of kids. It’s almost like I need time where there’s just zero distraction and there’s no noise in the house, and so I can actually think. And then I think in the mornings it’s about where are you finding inspiration, what are topics you’re energized by? And then I think at night it’s about reflection. What are the things you actually went through that day? You can 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 write some of those things. It’s more of a recap of actually what happened.
Rapid Feedback Loops
Lenny Rachitsky: And what helps me to not feel like this is some cringey self-promo egotistical stuff is just it’s useful stuff that I’ve learned that ends up being helpful to people. And people in the comments are always just like, “Oh, that is really cool and useful. Thank you.” It’s not like self-promotion-
Grant Lee: Totally.
Iterative Testing Philosophy
Lenny Rachitsky: … it’s not just like, “Look how amazing I am. Check out my amazing products.” Like, “Here’s a thing I learned. You might find it useful.”
Grant Lee: That’s exactly right. I think one way of thinking about it, with founder-led sales, it’s always about exchange of value, right? You want to be able to give 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 founder-led marketing, it’s almost this mindset of you want to give people a ton of content, maybe it’s a value in the content, so you’re sharing something, maybe some secret tactic or you’re giving them something where inherently there’s value in it, and 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 your post, 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 announcing it and they’re going to help amplify the news. And I think that’s magic, where you 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.
Experimentation Mindset and Early Validation
Lenny Rachitsky: The book I always point people to when they’re struggling with this sort of thing and like, “Okay, I did this and no one cared, didn’t do any good,” is there’s a book by Scott Pressfield, I think is his name, called Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit, which is exactly what is right. Nobody wants to read it. The bar for people to care is very high. There’s so much stuff to read and process. And so this book gives you a really good lens of just like, okay, the bar is very high and nobody wants to read your shit, so you have to try really hard to make it really good.
Gamma’s Origins: Testing Two Paths
Grant Lee: Great reminder.
Lenny Rachitsky: We’ll link to that in the show notes. Okay, let’s come back to the growth of Gamma. So we’ve talked about how you got your first tens of thousands of users, essentially product hunts, rethinking, onboarding, making it really magical, and then this very controversial tweet that Paul Graham commented, created some buzz. Let’s talk about the next phase and maybe, I don’t know, tell us kind of the ARR at that point through 100 million. Just broadly, what should we know?
Key Levers to Hit $100M ARR
Grant Lee: So when we got to about 10 million in ARR, I think there was 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 did feel like it was time to start amplifying some of this. And I think the main blocker of my mind that I started feeling was that our initial brand was holding us back. And I think a lot of people will discount whether or not a rebrand is valuable. And I think sometimes it is, 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 incorporated the company, which was again 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. And so it was pretty limited in sort of what I call the DNA of the brand. There wasn’t that many … The art direction was very limited in scope. There wasn’t much when it came to voice and tone.
And so 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, 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. 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 went back to the drawing board and we spent many months rethinking what would be the brand, what is this vision that we have longer term? Our creative director internally partner with Smith & Diction, an amazing agency that has helped folks like Perplexity also do their rebrand or their initial brand. And we [inaudible 00:40:05] many months just really trying to craft what we think is 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 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, you have that sort of cohesive feel. So for us that we realized it was going to be necessary and it’s why we invested so much. It ended up being way more expensive, way more time consuming than I would’ve imagined. But I think coming on the other side of it being the right investment, feeling that that was the right time to do it.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love how many things you did that feel like this will not work out. Building a startup within the presentation space, doing a whole rebrand in the middle of scaling, also just reworking the entire product after you launched and just rethinking the whole thing. All these things and everyone’s always like, “No, this is not how we win.” And interestingly, worked out for you guys.
I want to come back to the brand stuff, but one of the most interesting ways you guys grew early on was influencer marketing, which a lot of people hear about and talk about. I haven’t heard much of how to actually do this and what actually works. Talk about that as a broad growth lever for you guys. And then I want to get into just what tools did you use, who actually was really helpful there, thing like that. So yeah, just give us the big picture.
Importance of the Design Team
Grant Lee: 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, 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 all the initial influencers I onboarded manually myself. 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 as a product. And so we’d spend a lot of time, like me just walking through the product, them asking questions, us just kind of brainstorming what could the hooks be, and me just giving them some initial feedback and 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 … Going back to giving value to your audience. 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? 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? They’ll be back to actually post about you again. And you’re all of a sudden having this sort of this relationship that actually you can build over time. I think that’s really where the magic is. Too many people discount that initial piece.
On the GPT Wrapper Business Model
Lenny Rachitsky: This is awesome. To be clear, influencer marketing, essentially a person with a following on say TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever, gets paid in some way to promote your product. That’s the simple way to understand influencer marketing, yeah?
Grant Lee: 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 a million followers for instance. And the idea is that, okay, we’re going to carve out a really big budget, we’re going to choose five or six that we feel like are really the tastemakers in the space and put all of our money into just having them talk about our product. And I think usually this is kind of the wrong approach. Because many of them, they do have massive audiences. And for you, you basically give them a script to read and it immediately feels like an ad. That product is not connected really to them in any way. It’s just something that they’re … 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.
I think you’re much better doing the hard thing, which is hard to scale, but it’s finding the thousands of micro influencers that have an audience where your product maybe is actually useful. And for instance, for us 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 saved 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. During summer break, they all come together and talk about, “Okay, what are the things that are going to actually improve my job next school season?” And obviously during this AI wave, a lot of those have been, “Okay, what are the AI tools that just save me a ton of time?”
And so if you can start actually tapping into these pockets of echo chambers, that’s even better. It doesn’t have to be this flashy, well-known influencer. It’s actually just this person that has an audience where people really trust what they say. And that’s amazing. That ends up becoming this sort of wildfire that can spread really, really fast.
Framework for a Successful GPT Wrapper
Lenny Rachitsky: And what’s the dollar amount these folks get? It’s like a few hundred bucks, a few thousand bucks, something like that?
On Pricing Strategy
Grant Lee: Yeah, few hundred to low thousands, low single digit thousands.
Pricing and Hiring
Lenny Rachitsky: How do you find these folks? Is there tools that you use? Is it just like a bunch of manual searching and looking?
Grant Lee: Yeah, in the very beginning it was all manual, a lot of cold outreach. And then we ended up finding a couple of different things. One is a platform, a YC company called 1stCollab. 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 for instance educators being one, and then they’ll go out and actually, 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 that are super young and hungry. These are people that they’re native to social media and so they really understand it. And they can really be able to bring in creators that are great to work with. And I think part of it is if you find creators that are great to work with, everything else becomes easy. So we’ve had a few, one is AKG Media, 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.
Revisiting Pricing Decisions
Lenny Rachitsky: And when they post, they’re generally transparent about this is a paid promotion, right?
Our Hiring Philosophy
Grant Lee: Yes.
Lenny Rachitsky: They’re not just pretending, “I found this tool and I love it”? Cool.
Team Continuity and Cultural DNA
Grant Lee: Yeah, exactly right.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. And so how much impact did this lever of influencer marketing have on your growth, say from 10 to 100? Is this the biggest lever of growth other than just word-of-mouth, people continue to share it?
The Generalist Era and Player-Coach Model
Grant Lee: Yeah, so word-of-mouth has definitely been the biggest. So we look at all new subscriber growth, over 50% of this is word-of-mouth. It’s either people searching direct, coming direct, entering Gamma.op, 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 influencers 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 a little bit of money, you start seeing people come through influencer, the word-of-mouth factor actually will get another 1.5 additional users on top of that, which has been really interesting to see.
And I think part of this is just recognizing that … And I think we kind of understand it, but with influencer marketing, why it’s so effective, we all know Dunbar’s number, which is have this number of 150 people that you call kind of your network. And your network you trust more than the average stranger down the street. If they tell you something, they recommend something, there is a sort of halo effect, 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 that are going to be useful.
And so when they recommend a tool, there is a sort of halo 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 amplifications, 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: This is so fun to hear about. I’ve not heard this level of detail on how influencer marketing works and how to make it work. A few more questions here. So you said there’s maybe a few thousand people you ended up working with, roughly, influencers?
Betting Big on Exceptional People
Grant Lee: Over the course of a year. It wasn’t all in the same time. Basically in the beginning you do … In the very, very beginning we had a small budget. It was like 20 creators a month. And then you start increasing that to like 50, then 100. We’re definitely not fully scaled at this point, but I could easily see a point where 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. And you said the key here is you spend time with every one of these creators, influencers early on to help make sure they understand what you’re doing and get excited about it. It isn’t just like a thing you outsource.
Increasing the Surface Area of Luck
Grant Lee: I think there’s a lot of value there. It’s again hard to quantify. And 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’re forced to 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.
Rapid Fire Q&A
Lenny Rachitsky: So what I’m hearing is quality over quantity, especially when you’re getting started. And then there’s this other piece of niche which I think is very counterintuitive. Instead of going to large influencers with a huge audience, it’s good with folks that are small. What’s like a audience size roughly that you think is ideal for this, or what niche just means?
Grant Lee: 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 obviously if they’re thinking from a creator perspective, if that new creator feels like, “Oh, coming to TikTok is 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, again, engaging, authentic to the people you’re talking to I think it has a really good chance of actually taking off.
Follow and Contact Info
Lenny Rachitsky: That’s such a good point with TikTok, where it’s not follower related, if it’s useful and people find it clickable or whatever, likable, viewable, the algorithm will spread it to a lot of people. Such a good point.
Grant Lee: Totally.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, there’s a couple more points you made in the tweet that I want to make sure we highlight. So one is you made this point that 90% of your reach in influencer marketing comes from less than 10% of people. Is there anything there that you think is important for people to hear?
Grant Lee: Yeah, 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. 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 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. And I was not a good predictor of that. I was not smart enough to actually know which ones would take off. I just knew that we had to play the sort of numbers game to make it work.
Lenny Rachitsky: So one of your tips here is people fail often in this because they start too small or their budget’s a little too small. You recommend 10,000 to 20,000 a month over six months and just trying this. It sounds like you’re doing like 20 to 30 creators a month. Is that the right framework for how to just start this thing and explore?
Grant Lee: 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 20 K 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 20 K, I could actually probably work with 40 different influencers and see what actually works.” And 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 double down. If educators are working, go with educators. If consultants are working, go with consultants, find more consultants, there’s going to be more there. I think that’s where the putting all your eggs in one basket is just probably the surest way to fail, because 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: I feel like this whole podcast conversation could be just about this one lever. So much I want to keep talking about, but there’s more questions here because this is so useful and interesting. You had this line in your tweet about how reality is not an accident and that this approach is how you figure out what actually works. And then once you do that, then you start leading into that messaging. Talk about that.
Grant Lee: This goes back to obviously if you’re testing a bunch, you’ll finally find that sort of post or set of posts that 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 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 mid-journey to create the sort of art direction that we have so that a creator can do the same, right? And they can actually just copy all of 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 going back to this notion of just make it dead simple for them, remove friction. They already have enough 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 is easy, reviewing what’s working, what’s not is easy. And if you’re able to do that relentlessly over many, many months, then all of a sudden hitting the sort of viral post is easy because you’re going to have enough bats there where some are actually going to pop off. But you only can get there after you’ve done all the hard work before that to remove friction from the process. And feeling like it’s almost like a well-oiled machine at that point.
Lenny Rachitsky: Is there a platform you find most helpful for the stuff you guys are doing? Is it like TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, something else?
Grant Lee: 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 eventually be more targeted knowing that, hey, this type of creator is pretty impactful for our product, then working with them, it’s just like, “Oh, that’s great.” The conversion rates are just so strong and it really feels like we’re just getting started there.
So if in the beginning you’re not sure, it’s always helpful to cast a pretty wide net. And then similar to just the influencer strategy, like test and iterate, you’ll figure out … Many of these things will follow a power law. So it’s like 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 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: I think that many people listening now are like, “Wait, LinkedIn posts are sponsored sometimes? I didn’t know that.” How do you know if it’s a sponsored post? Is it like a #sponsored or something like that? How do they communicate this?
Grant Lee: Usually they’ll say they’re a partner or yeah, basically it is sponsored in some form, or they’ll #ad or something along those lines. So that’s probably the way you’ll see it the most.
Lenny Rachitsky: Cool. By the way, I don’t do this sort of stuff. Have you ever seen me on LinkedIn? I’m not doing any paid stuff. It’s just so people know. And I don’t plan to do that.
… Often share Miro templates. I use it all the time to brainstorm ideas with my team. Teams especially can work with Miro AI to turn unstructured data, like sticky notes or screenshots, into usable diagrams, product briefs, data tables, and prototypes in minutes. You don’t have to be an AI master or to toggle yet another tool. The work you’re already doing in Miro’s Canvas is the prompt. Help your teams get great work done with Miro. Check it out at miro.com/Lenny. That’s M-I-R-O .com/Lenny. Let’s come back to this brand point. So, one of your big lessons is invest in brand before you go heavy into hit paid ads and performance marketing. I imagine you do some ads at this point on Facebook and Google and things like that.
Grant Lee: Yeah, 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 the sort of thought that brand marketing is performance marketing. Everything is some form of performance marketing. It just might not be as attributable, so 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. The more you invest in brand marketing, it strengthens your performance marketing. This goes back to 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love that heuristic of how do you know if you are under invested in brand is if you’re limited in the number of ideas you can try in performance marketing.
Grant Lee: Totally.
Lenny Rachitsky: Is your design system just… Is everyone having to redesign things from scratch and come up with all these frameworks every time they run an ad?
Grant Lee: Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Basically you kind of have a feeling for, “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 if it feels like it’s all over the place, then you kind of have to go back to the drawing board.
Lenny Rachitsky: You said when you talked about the rebrand, that it took a lot longer than you expected, that it was more expensive than you expected. That’s the fear, I think, everyone has when they hear this like, “Oh, I don’t have time for a rebrand.” I also imagine, because your product is so visual, that it makes more sense to invest there and to spend the time and money.
For the typical founder, do you have any just, I don’t know, thoughts of just like, “Here’s when it makes sense. Here’s a sign you really need to invest here heavily.” Versus, “It’ll probably be all right.”
Grant Lee: 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, what are they experiencing. And the experience happens way before they even drop into your 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 symmetric messaging in that they see there’s some symmetry in that, they see the ad, then they drop into the product or 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 a B2B product or where there isn’t as much reliance on that initial moment. They might just hear about it through a colleague and then sign up for it and then go through a huge procurement process and then it’s like, “Okay, maybe it matters, but probably not so much as for a product where the brand can have so many different touch points.”
Lenny Rachitsky: I want to talk about some broader things that have worked to help you grow, but before we do that, I just want to visualize the pie chart of how Gamma grows. Say, post-10 million ARR. If I have it correctly in my head, it’s over 50% just word of mouth, organic, people are sharing it, doing presentations for each other, “Oh, it’s Gamma. Just go check it out, sign up.” Then it feels like the second-biggest bucket is influencer marketing, social stuff. And then is the third performance/paid marketing?
Grant Lee: Yep, that’s right. Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: Cool. On that last piece, is there anything else there for people that are starting to explore performance marketing, essentially Facebook Ads, Google Ads, all these other platforms, is there anything else that you think might be helpful for people to hear or learn just to get started down this road?
Grant Lee: I would just have two recommendations. 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: 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 it 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 you don’t spend a little bit of money, but just don’t dial it up until you feel like your core growth engine is actually working.
Lenny Rachitsky: When you said the first point about wait until you have word of mouth before investing in performance marketing, is that essentially a large chunk of your growth should be coming from word of mouth, direct, organic?
Grant Lee: Yeah, yeah. And for us, even at scale, again going back to more than 50% of new signups 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, then you want that feeling before you really start dialing anything else up.”
Lenny Rachitsky: Is there a percentage that you think is helpful for people to think about just… Is it 25% or more something like that or just word of mouth for you to feel like, “Okay, we actually have organic growth as a major growth engine”?
Grant Lee: Yeah, 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, 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. 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 being able to sustain that growth long-term.
Lenny Rachitsky: Important advice. Okay. There’s a couple more elements you’ve shared that were key to Gamma’s growth. One is sharing prototypes with users before you ship. What does that look like? What does that mean? Why is that so powerful?
Grant Lee: Yeah. I mean, this for us was a huge unlock. 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 people that 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, describe what you’re seeing, tell us what you’re trying to do. We’ll give you maybe a few different tasks 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.
All the places they’re struggling and all the places are so confused by 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 not usable.” We, oftentimes, are dog-fooding everything. And so you can get to the point where you’re so familiar with your own product, everything 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 a gift.
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 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 launches, 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: How do you scale this sort of thing? How do you run every new big idea, new feature change by people? Do you have a closed beta group, a decent platform? How do you actually do this?
Grant Lee: There’s a couple of great platforms. Voicepanel, which is also YC company, full disclosure, angel investor, and then there’s also platforms like UserTesting, that really help you source and find these people that fit again, that persona or profile you’re looking for. So, in our case, people that are in a specific job function or create decks regularly, and so you can use those platforms to really scale up these programs pretty fast.
And then once your team knows how to use those platforms… We would have an idea in the morning and in the afternoon, we’re already running a pretty full scale experiment or a research study, and by the evening or by the next day, we can actually go through all of it together. So, it’s pretty fast once you have it set up. It’s more about how do you get the program onboarded the right way.
I think the other sort of mechanism we did early on was once we had some repeat users, we created sort of a program for our power users. We called it the Gammaster Program, which is we put them into a separate Slack workspace, and that was a place for us to share very, very early prototypes like wireframes, sometimes they were functional prototypes, and get them to get some initial feedback as well. This definitely helps with more later stage or features or things that aren’t going to be necessarily important as part of onboarding, but once you understand Gamma, like, “Oh, how do you share it?”
For instance, this was a great way to start testing some of that because they already understand Gamma, but now you’re adding that new functionality. And then we can also watch them struggle and hear how they’re struggling with the product. And so that has been a great way just to have a separate Slack workspace. Anytime we’re thinking about something, they’re the first to hear about it. Give us some early indication if we’re on the right track or not.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love this workflow that you shared of you have an idea in the morning, you built a prototype. Do you built it with AI prototyping tools like Cursor, Lovable, something like that?
Grant Lee: Yep. That or it could be… Yeah, I mean we’re lucky a lot of our designers also know how to code, so even before the recent tools, come up with some sort of functional prototype and then be able to ship that so people can start playing with it.
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah. So, you have an idea in the morning, you build a prototype using various tools. By the end of the day, you are getting feedback from real people using one of these platforms, Voicepanel or UserTesting, and just that loop saves you, I imagine, potentially months of just building the thing nobody wants and shipping it, launching it, and then just failing.
Grant Lee: Totally. Yeah. I think this is even more probably helpful for certainly a lot of folks that are starting to do much with vibe-coded apps. Yeah, that’s great. You’ve lowered the amount of time to get something out there. Now, prove that it’s useful to some set of users, and this should be again, every day, every week, you should be able to go through a ton of these, and then build on the things that seem to be working.
I feel like that’s almost like a way to speed run a lot of that early… you’re in the idea maze, you think you have something that could kind of work. How do you actually break through so that people are actually finding value in what you’re building?
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, I love it because so many people hear this idea of just run your stuff by users before you do the user research. It sounds so hard and heavy lift-y, and the way you’re describing it is very automated, very quick to do. You don’t have to go think about finding random people in a coffee shop. It’s just like these platforms exist where you could go plug in your thing, get feedback by the end of the day.
Grant Lee: Totally. Yeah, and that helps you just move way faster.
Lenny Rachitsky: Is there a feature that you were super excited about that you built and ran through this and just like, “Okay, that was a huge failure”?
Grant Lee: I don’t think any of the ones where we… We always try to chunk it down. So, none of the things we’re testing earlier on are these massive features. They’re always an inception or a starting point of, “This could be something interesting.”
And then we take that initial learning and actually then build the product around it. It’s never like, “Oh, we spent four months working on this thing. Let’s see if anybody actually wants it.” It’s almost like we always start super early. And then a bunch of ideas die right away, but they’re still pretty small ideas.
And then the ones that kind of pass the initial test, you start building towards something that could be, hopefully, more game-changing or much more value-add. And by the time you’re actually shipping, you’ve gone through 10 different layers of actually testing and iteration before it actually sees the light of day.
Lenny Rachitsky: What’s really interesting about you and the way your company operates, you guys are ex-Optimizely people, so you’re very versed in experimentation. A lot of people talk about A/B testing experimentation as something that doesn’t make sense for a startup because the scale is so low. What I’m hearing here, and I know this is something you talk about, is just there is actually a lot of ways to think experimentally, even in the early stages. Is there something more there you think is important for people to hear?
Grant Lee: Yeah. I really think it’s more of… The mindset you go into to almost any problem or opportunity is the saying of, “Strong opinions weakly held.” I think it’s totally fine to have some of these assumptions or hypotheses going into a lot of these things, but you should always know that there’s a way to start trying to validate some of this.
As a founder, you’re always trying to build conviction, and so you build conviction by not having it all live in your head, but getting it out there and start testing this with users, prospect customers, and starting to see what are the things that actually feel right. And sometimes you have enough data to be statistically significant. Sometimes it’s more of a, “Hey, we at least were able to gut check this a little bit and get some qualitative feedback.” I think that’s still valuable. It shouldn’t be this sort of all or nothing like, “It has to be static for it to be useful.” I don’t think that’s true.
In fact, I’ll just share the very early story of when we first started Gamma, we knew we wanted to help change the way people communicate, and we actually had two different ideas we were parallel pathing kind of at the same time. Of course we had presentations, reimagining how people were creating presentations, and we also actually had this separate idea, which we called The Lobby, which is a virtual office. This is a place where this is, again, peak pandemic, much more hybrid work, much more virtual work. And so this was a place where everybody on the team, whether you’re in the same office or not, could gather, collaborate to feel pretty magical.
And we worked on both for six months. We worked on both the virtual office and the presentation product for six months. We would dog-food both. So, oftentimes we’d be in the virtual office, presenting the presentation tool and kind of use both. And after six months, we came to this conclusion that we wanted to go all in on the presentation tool. And the reason was, when we looked at the virtual office tool, we were sort of always competing against what we thought was something we’d never be able to surpass, which is in real life experience, actually being able to work shoulder to shoulder with your colleagues and having this environment where you really feel like you’re building together.
Virtual office could get pretty good, but we would never beat that. And so we were almost limited in our own imagination about how good could this product be versus the presentation product. We ended up with a million more ideas we thought we could actually introduce that could be better than how you work in PowerPoint today. We were just so energized by it.
And so for us, that was this sort of A/B test of testing these two things that we invested equal amount of time into, and coming out at the other end realizing that, one, was going to be the product we were pour all of our blood, sweat and tears into making it great because we saw the potential in it.
Lenny Rachitsky: I didn’t know that about you guys, that you explored that other idea. There’s so many startups that did that during COVID times, and like, “Okay, this is the future. We’re all going to be remote, and let’s work remotely in virtual offices.” There’s a startup and I’m a tiny investor in, Lindy, that is now a big AI agent company, and they did the same thing. I imagine that was their whole first concept. It was just these little avatars. It was like a little game where you walk around, go to little virtual meeting rooms.
Grant Lee: Yeah, it was a fun product to work on, but yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, it’s interesting how we just reverted back to the mean of just like, “Yeah, people are in offices again. That was a fun experience.” Although things have changed. Just to highlight this point you made that I think is really powerful, I haven’t heard it described this way before, just the power of testing prototypes very, very, very early, using these platforms that make it super easy.
We always hear, “Okay, you have a mock, you have a prototype. Yeah, testing with users always feels like this heavy thing. You got to have a user research team, go do interviews, do one-on-ones.” What you’re describing is something… I don’t know why everyone’s not doing this. With AI tools, it’s so easy now. Have an idea, build the prototype, test it with, I don’t know, is it like dozens of people? How many people actually run through a prototype on average?
Grant Lee: 20.
Lenny Rachitsky: 20 people. So, 20 people look at this thing, give you a bunch of feedback, you realize this was very dumb, or, “Here’s the nugget that we want to lean into.” And instead of building a thing, instead of doing all these user research sessions, things like that. Super cool.
Okay. Is there any other big lesson or lever that has helped you grow to today’s 100 million ARR, and $2 billion company? We talked about influencer marketing, we talked about testing prototypes, investing in brand and a little bit of paid growth. Anything else?
Grant Lee: Certainly for us, the ability to adapt and move fast in this environment. I attribute a lot of what we’ve been able to accomplish to a few things. One is we do have a small team and a lean team, one that’s able to move really fast. I think that means, by default, we have to look for a lot of levers where a small team can do a lot of different things.
So, we can talk, one, obviously about how do you construct a team like ours and what I think has worked. And then two, going back to experimentation being this sort of thing where for us it’s been a huge unlock because it allows you to not only test things and iterate a ton, it allows you to build much more efficiently. And so we’ve been in a startup where we’ve had great unit economics from the very beginning. We run profitably, we have really strong margins.
I don’t think that would be possible if experimentation wasn’t core infrastructure to us because the temptation would be you just throw the most expensive model at every job and assume that’s going to work. And the reality is that never is the case. And so for us to be able to actually test across 20 different models in production today, always trying to align the kind of value we’re delivering to our customers with our ability to actually scale this operation, that’s been in the background.
And not always things that are easily quantifiable or things that you’re sharing broadly, but it is core to our DNA. And again, going back to a team that came from Optimizely, probably not surprising, but I do think that’s been part of our ability to actually execute at this level.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love that the product is so beautiful and such a good experience. It’s such a good example of experimentation and being really obsessed with running experiments, A/B tests. Data can create really beautiful products and experiences that aren’t just feeling like some kind of micro-optimized flow.
Grant Lee: Totally. Yeah. And just going back to one part of the team, part of that plays a huge role, which is you want to build a product where people talk about taste and brand and all these things, what they emote. I’m not going to throw in whether or not, yes or no, but I do think it makes a difference. And for us, at some point, more than a quarter of a team or about a quarter of our team was product designers. I think that’s an unintuitive level of investment, or at least that’s not common. You don’t see many startups at our stage or early stage where a quarter of the team’s product designers.
And I think that was an important investment for us because when you think about with AI companies, so many companies are trying to invent new surface areas or new user experiences, and that’s not possible if you’re not really getting the foundation right, really thinking deeply about user problems and how can you solve them in a novel way. And so for us, we made that investment in the very beginning, even if it was counter to what other startups would do, because we actually felt like it was the right thing.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. I definitely want to spend more time on hiring. Before we get to that, you’ve touched on this kind of concept that you guys are, what many described, a GPT wrapper company. You essentially sit on top of other models, do some cool stuff, charge for that. There’s historically, and there’s been a big shift here, historically, there’s this sense that, “Okay, you’re just this thin layer on top of the model. How is there any sort of motor leverage or long-term business model here when it’s just the model that is doing the thing and charging you guys to do all this AI work?”
It feels like people have started to realize maybe that is the only place money will be made because the models are just so hard to compete with, and that’s not a place you can build a business anymore. Talk about just what you’ve learned about this concept of being a GPT wrapper, and what people may not be understanding about the business opportunity there.
Grant Lee: When you think about maybe just literally only being a wrapper on one model or one provider, yeah, maybe there’s only limited amount of utility or value add. But then when you start thinking about, “Okay, I’m going to go really deep into this one workflow, and it’s not just one model.” It’s maybe 20 plus models powering all different parts of the product, and then you’re thinking about the orchestration that’s required and you’re thinking about, obviously if you’re experimenting constantly being able to test across the newest models versus models that have been around that are cheaper, you’re doing a lot to really… Your job is to, again, align value, maximize the value you’re delivering to the end user in a way that’s sustainable for you as a business. And so there’s a lot more to that.
And so for us, we’ve always been passionate about being very close to our customers, our users. Who, for them, their job to be done is visual communication, visual storytelling. And the default tool today is going into a PowerPoint or Google Slides where the amount of effort to create something… We’ve all been there late at night trying to format a deck, trying to find the right layout, all this manual and tedious work.
Well, what if you could abstract all that away and give them something that feels a little bit more delightful, a little bit easier, much more effortless? What would that earn you in terms of a customer that wants to come back to your product? And so that’s everything that we focus on is you need to go deep into the workflow, be empathetic to the user and their job that you’re trying to solve, and of course, apply the best technology possible so that you’re delivering on that promise of a product experience that’s way better than the status quo.
And I think if you can be laser-focused on, it doesn’t matter if you’re a wrapper or not, what is the technology you’re doing and applying, that makes a real difference? So, that’s the ultimate goal.
Lenny Rachitsky: This is a really cool framework for how to think about what it takes to build a successful wrapper company that is… I don’t know, I’ll keep using that term. I don’t know if it’s [inaudible 01:22:09], but just some ideas don’t work. These model companies are launching their own products here and there.
So, what I love about what you’re describing here is almost like a heuristic that’ll tell you if there’s an opportunity/how to be successful as a GPT “wrapper company.” I’m putting in air quotes. It sounded like maybe there’s three here. But talk about just if you think about the bullet points of what you need to do to build a successful business on top of existing models.
Grant Lee: I mean, I think the most important thing is before we even talk about the technology, so we’re skipping to the part where you’re trying to apply the most interesting models or technology to solve some problem. Start with solving the problem you actually care about.
I think it’s very tempting right now to chase shiny objects, like a founder might be able to gain some initial traction by literally being that GPT wrapper and solving any sort of problem. And you start to see some traction and then you just go with that. But before you do that, you should think about, “Is this a problem I can invest five to 10 years into actually solving? Do I care deeply enough about it?”
Because if you can’t, you’re never going to go… actually think about overcoming the variety of different hurdles, whether it’s other startups or other incumbent tools that are trying to start doing the same thing.
And so for us, we go back to… We’ve started this company because we really care about helping change the way people communicate their ideas. We really feel like this idea of visual communication, visual storytelling matters. It helps elevate everybody and it gives people much more opportunity to do the things that in the past if you weren’t great at making slides, your ideas might’ve died, and someone else that was able to actually articulate their ideas better ended up winning the deal or winning the favor of their manager or their boss.
And so we felt like that was the wrong, that didn’t feel right, and so could we help democratize visual storytelling, visual communication? That was sort of our north star. And then you go back into thinking, “Okay, every step of the way, what are the tools and technology I can apply to help solve that and actually move the average person closer to that long-term vision of ours?”
And of course, AI has been, again, this gift where yes, you can apply that to solving this job. You can also apply that AI to many different jobs. Figure out what is the problem you care deeply enough to go deep, because going back to this sort of idea, you need to own the sort of end-to-end workflow. A customer needs to have… You want your product to live in their brain somewhere where when they think about, “Hey, I have to create a presentation.” They come to you as the default tool.
And the moment they start creating it to the moment they ship it and send it to their boss, that end-to-end experience needs to feel magical, needs to feel great. And I don’t think you can really do that unless it’s actually a workflow you either know deeply yourself or you care deeply to actually help solve for somebody else.
Lenny Rachitsky: So, some of the elements I’m hearing here is, one, is just like actually really care about solving this problem, not come from, “Oh wow, this cool thing happened and it worked. Wow, maybe I could sell this thing to people.” Because you may end up having to work on this thing for 10, 20 years.
Grant Lee: Totally.
Lenny Rachitsky: Two is: understand the problem really, really deeply and have real empathy for the people trying to solve this problem. You have this problem creating presentations at your previous job, so you understood it, and I imagine you understand even more deeply now that you worked on this. Essentially, care really deeply, go really deep on the problem, have real empathy for the people facing this problem, and then there’s this actually be able to solve this problem using the technology out there.
And you made this point about how you guys use 20 different models to do what you do. Talk a little bit more about that just because people may think, “Oh, okay, I could just go to ChatGPT or Claude and it’ll create an awesome presentation for me.” Why does it take 20 different models? Why is that such a big part of the success here?
Grant Lee: Yeah, so going back to the workflow, you’re trying to go and break down every step of the creation process for a user. So, the moment of the initial idea to maybe creating an outline of what you want to present or articulate to creating the first draft. What do we show you there to editing the content?
Like, “Okay, I have a first draft, but it’s only 60% of the way there. How do I get to 100% of the way there?” Those are all things that might require different models. The initial outline might be better served by something that’s purposed-built for actually creating the best outline, the best narrative, the best story arc, versus one where you’re actually going back and saying… Gamma, our agent can actually go and review your entire deck and say, “Actually, if I were to add suggestions, I would say, ‘You may want to change the visual layout on these set of cards, and you may want to actually change the imagery or the visuals for these cards to match everything else.’”
These are things that, again, every model might be better served for different things. And so knowing how that actually breaks down into the end user, sitting down, working on the product, working on their presentation, how do you help them? I think you can only do that by understanding-
Their presentation, how do you help them? I think you can only do that by understanding that workflow and then breaking that down into finding the right tool for the right job.
Lenny Rachitsky: That is super interesting. Essentially there’s like, here’s the things that AI has to do for us. I don’t know, imagining some kind of a storyboard and then it’s figure out the model and level of model and prompt for that model to achieve each of these steps as best as possible.
Grant Lee: Totally. Yeah, and it applies to even on the visual side, finding the right image. I think certain models are great at photorealistic output versus others want more of the artistic vibe or something that feels more abstract. And so again, you can choose the right model for the right job. It doesn’t mean that you’ll never use other models, it’s just like as you’re going through that workflow, the content might dictate what’s the best use case. So in that particular use case and so you’re always trying to map to that, what is the end user trying to accomplish in that certain moment?
Lenny Rachitsky: Which models are you finding most useful in the work? I don’t know, is there anything surprising about, “Oh wow, this model’s actually really good at this and this is really bad at that.”
Grant Lee: Yeah, I think surprising or not surprising, the leaderboard is constantly changing and so this is where you almost, you have to have the mindset that you can be adaptable. We’re just getting to the point where there’s going to be more personalization too, is going back to a consultant’s going to have different needs than an educator. Educator’s trying to engage their students. They may want to have language or visuals are more animated and that makes sense. Consultant can’t get away with that. They may need something that is much more structured or information dense. And so again, how do we actually be the same tool that can serve both of those needs? I think that’s where it becomes interesting and it’s almost like there isn’t necessarily even a “best model”. It’s like what’s the right model for that particular user? That’s actually a much harder problem to solve and we’re just starting to try to embrace some of that now.
Lenny Rachitsky: Is there one that’s just like, “Oh, that’s actually really cool.” For something that we didn’t expect?
Grant Lee: Early on, things like creating the outline, Perplexity was actually great. Not one that people talk about as often, but creating the outline and doing web search and actually integrating some of those elements together for us was pretty powerful.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, there’s two more things I want to talk about. One is pricing. How you guys figured out your approach to pricing. You guys started monetizing really early and that feels like such an important piece to AI startups because you’re spending real money on an inference and other things. And then I want to talk about hiring. So in terms of pricing, when did you decide it was time to really start charging and then how did you pick your approach to pricing your actual price?
Grant Lee: So we kind of stumbled into having to do pricing and packaging. I mentioned our big AI launch in March 2023. This was pre-revenue, so we wanted just to get, we focused all of our effort on the first 30 seconds, literally all hands on deck, just trying to get that right. And we spent zero time on actually monetization. So we had a credit system. All new users get 400 credits. Once they burn through those credits, there was actually nothing more you could do with AI. It kind of just got cut off. And so Intercom for us was just blowing up with people saying, “How do I purchase more credits? I want to keep using this thing.” In a very fair question. So basically all of April we ended up having to do a quick sort of pricing and packaging exercise. We did a couple of different things.
We did run a form of Van Westendorp, which is just understanding-
Lenny Rachitsky: Classic.
Grant Lee: …what is the overall willingness to pay. And so we did use that. We did kind of integrate some forms of conjoint analysis, which is just trying to understand what are the features or things that people actually value in your product. And so we’d survey a lot of our early users and ended up coming to a price point that was, in the beginning we only had one plan type. It was roughly like 20 bucks a month. Part of this was also just realizing we almost didn’t need to overthink it too much because this is when the initial wave of AI companies and startups were coming out and products are coming out and you almost end up becoming anchored by, what does ChatGPT charge? Because everyone becomes familiar with that price point. And so we ask ourselves how complicated do we want to make it?
We always default to remove friction, make it as easy as possible for a user to understand. And so we end up coming up with a similar price point and ship that as the V1, basically end of May 2023. And for us, we wanted to see a couple of things like, okay, we have the initial price point. Is it economical for us at that price point? Are we actually making money? And we’d monitor there for that for many, many months realizing that yes, actually at that price point we could still generate pretty good margins and that would allow us to reinvest that profit back into growing the business.
Continue to add obviously head count, but then also investing even more into inference costs, whatever we wanted to do to experiment broadly with AI. And so we’ve always had that pricing and packaging. Does it not only need to be easy to understand for a user, obviously you have to have strong conversion rates, but it should be something where you feel like you could build an enduring durable business off of. And if it’s not right, then you can always go back and try to tweak things, but it’s something you should be monitoring as early as possible.
Lenny Rachitsky: What’s interesting, we have the head of ChatGPT on the podcast and he shared the way they picked ChatGPT’s prices is the Van Westendorp survey that they ran in Google Forms.
Grant Lee: Totally. Yeah, I listened to that one. Yeah, it was a great one.
Lenny Rachitsky: Oh, what a, that survey man, what a, and not only just that survey being the slick, I’m imagining that XKCD comic with the open source little, I don’t know, block holding up the entire world, like this one little piece of code. That’s like the survey, just behind everything. But it’s interesting how that one decision just created this ripple effect on all AI startups, 20 bucks a month. Of course that’s what everyone’s doing.
Grant Lee: Totally. Who knows what would happen if they chose a different number, but here we are.
Lenny Rachitsky: Everyone would be so much more rich if it’s just like 25 bucks. Someone. Imagine the GDP of growth-
Grant Lee: Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: …from that. Oh man. Okay. And then the way, so was Van Westendorp helped you pick a price point and then you said this conjoint analysis, we actually have a guest post that I think describes how to do this well and if not we’ll find, appoint people to how to actually approach this. You started charging, so was post product [inaudible 01:33:11] launch, you launch with no paid features. People were just like, “I want to pay, I want to keep using this.” You’re like, “Okay, I guess we’ve got to start charging.”
Grant Lee: That’s right. Yep.
Lenny Rachitsky: Is there anything, looking back, I guess just you wish you’d known when you were approaching pricing for folks that are doing this now like, “Oh, we should have done this differently or should have thought about this.”
Grant Lee: Yeah, I mean that one’s hard. I think you never want to obviously just throw something together without giving it much thought, but for us with limited resources, we focused on the only thing we thought mattered, which was getting some initial users and having that organic growth. And I think there’s maybe two checkpoints of thinking about whether or not you feel like you have product market fit. I think one checkpoint is organic growth. The second is are people willing to pay for the product? And I think if you pass both those, you feel like you’ve, at least within some pocket of the market you have some PMF. So I think those are both important questions to ask depending on your resources. Ideally you can do kind of both and experiment a little bit along at the same time. And then by the time you actually have paying users, you sort of check some of those boxes for yourself.
Lenny Rachitsky: By the way, I love that your launch pricing. You’re like, “Okay, let’s figure out if we’re actually making money or not.” It’s not obvious with AI companies. [inaudible 01:34:24]
Grant Lee: Well, we also didn’t have a choice because at that point runway was also low. So if we weren’t making money, well we would actually be in a tough spot.
Lenny Rachitsky: That’s such a good point that you did not have a huge amount of money sitting around to spend on the way a lot of companies in AI do, just, “We’ll deal with it and we’ll figure out how to make money later.”
Grant Lee: Totally. Within a couple of months we had hit a million in ARR and became profitable. And so those were both two exciting milestones for a company that months prior were heads down figuring out how we even survive.
Lenny Rachitsky: What a story. I’m so excited to be telling this story. Okay, final topic I want to talk about is hiring. You have some really hot takes on hiring, clearly it’s worked out for you guys. What are some things you’ve learned about hiring well, what is your approach to hiring?
Grant Lee: So we had this mantra internally, I mean even before the sort of AI launch for us, which was “Hire painfully slowly.” And I think the temptation is once things start working, you just start, [inaudible 01:35:23] scaling this thing and start adding more and more headcount. And for us that always, I don’t know, that didn’t feel right. We wanted to build the team very thoughtfully, be lean, but also be a team that every individual feels like they have high amount of impact that they have on a daily basis. And so for us that was from sort of the very beginning. And so even as we’ve scaled up, I think we’ve been super efficient by nature of just being a very lean team.
Lenny Rachitsky: So I think a lot of people hear this advice of “Stay lean, be efficient.” You have some even more concrete pieces of advice here of just what that looks like. You have a huge, I don’t know, philosophy of just huge leverage per person. You focus a lot on revenue per employee. Talk about that.
Grant Lee: So obviously we look at things like revenue per employee, but we never let that be the sort of North Star. It’s not something that dictates our strategy per se. Same thing with profitability. I think by being efficient, that ends up becoming a side effect of yeah, we are profitable and growing. But I think for us more is like we care a ton about adding the right team members. So it’s easy. You can almost sort of shoot yourself in the foot as a founder by just setting the wrong goals. If your goal is to double in headcount and add a hundred people to the company, then that becomes the goal. The goal is no longer to add the best people. It’s no longer to maintain a high quality bar. The goal is to hit a hundred people and that’s everything everyone’s focused on. So then guess what?
If that’s the goal, then the thing that ends up dropping is, okay, maybe we will settle for employees that are good enough and we’re going to make sure we get to that hundred because a hundred is going to help us get to the next phase of growth. And then the next phase of growth. And I think we’ve tried to resist that temptation, which is we want everybody that comes through the door and joins our team to really be the type of person that represents Gamma. Our first 10 to 12 employees, we spent so much time really getting the DNA right. I think Brian Chesky talks about this. Your goal is you get that first 10 and you want to be able to then replicate the next 10 and then replicate the next 10, but that 10 needs to be all super cohesive. You need to have the same shared values, same principles, same ambition, same vision, and if you don’t, then what are you even replicating?
Right? At that point you’re just adding headcount and you can easily just be adding headcount because we’re chasing the next shiny startup to join. And so for us, we really focused on that first 10. That allows us to really have this sort of community of teammates that basically want to stick around. A lot of founders think about not wanting to have a leaky bucket on the product side, but the same thing applies on the team side. If you have a leaky bucket, people are just constantly leaving, revolving door. That’s a huge amount of cost. The continuity cost is massive and it’s really hard to quantify.
And I mentioned our first 10 employees, all 10 of them are still here today, five years later. And so that sort of continuity, it means that you have this tribal knowledge that sticks with you. It means that people can continue building and having that sort of cohesive feeling. So I think that’s one piece that’s just like, it’s hard to quantify, but I do think, new startups I would advise just to really be thoughtful about that, get that to a point where you really feel confident that as you’re adding the next 10 and next hundred, you’re actually replicating the same DNA and not actually just adding a bunch of random people to the company.
Lenny Rachitsky: One of your very specific piece of advice is hire generalists versus someone that’s just really deep in one thing, why is that so important? What does that look like?
Grant Lee: This very much feels like the age of the generalist or the rise of the generalist right now. When we think about of a team that can be really flat, you still want people that can be very spiky in certain areas. So for instance, obviously a product designer that knows how to code, that’s great. It allows you to actually span across many different domains. And again, an organization that’s super flat, when you’re wearing a lot of different hats, that means every individual, if you’re a generalist, you can wear by default a lot of different hats. And that’s helped us just maintain this idea that the work, the opportunity in front of us can easily expand. Each person plays a huge role. They don’t need to wait and ask for permission. They can go after and pick up a piece of work because it’s there and they can at least get it started even if they’re not the one that always sees it through.
And so for us, I do think this rise of the generalist is going to be important. You can always augment that by working with contractors or agencies that are hyper-specialized in certain areas. And this is where, for instance, going back to influencer marketing, you might work with an agency rather than kind of scale up your own influencer marketing team. You work with a hyper-specialized team there. But my marketing team is all generalists. Our head of marketing more recently launched this cool drone show in San Francisco. We have 4,000 people in San Francisco. The mayor came by, she created that entire project and managed that entire project end to end herself while also managing the entire marketing team. And so it’s like this idea that a generalist is able to play all these different roles, can still be super high impact. For us, it also goes hand in hand with, I mentioned sort of this other role, which is the player coach. Traditional management layer is like a manager manages a ton of people and that’s kind of their core focus.
All of our people leaders are player coaches in that they still do the end work themselves and they can mentor and coach those around them. This analogy came from, or this mindset came from, it’s something I borrowed from just the sports world in general because there’s a lot of sports that just move incredibly fast. Like football for instance, it moves really, really fast. And so you might have a coach that’s calling into play, but the quarterback can actually make a last-minute adjustment based on what he’s seeing the defense do. And so you want a player that is on the field that can adapt as needed and that way the coach doesn’t have to call every single thing in. He’s just kind of giving you the general intent of what you want to run as the play and then the quarterback can still make the adjustments.
And so all of our people leaders, our management layer is all folks that actually can make those adjustments. If they’re seeing something that doesn’t feel right on a daily or weekly basis, they’re adjusting priorities for that team and they’re still doing the work themselves too. They’re so close to it that they understand what is the relative prioritization at all times. So both of those I think have been, when I think about founders, they oftentimes think about innovation in the sense, we’re going to innovate on products or innovate on technology. I think every founder today has a chance to innovate on org design, and that starts by just thinking about what is the type of company we want to build today? What does it mean? And when it comes to the management later, what type of sort of leaders do we hire? What does it mean when it comes to hiring specific roles and specific functions? All of that is a chance for you to be very thoughtful and build a company that you’re excited to be at for hopefully many, many years to come.
Lenny Rachitsky: So what I’m hearing here is manager, there’s no pure managers at Gamma and your plan is to not have people that are just managing the ideas. Everyone, even a manager is doing their own IC work.
Grant Lee: Yes.
Lenny Rachitsky: And then the other piece of advice here is just generalists. People that can do a lot of stuff, and I hear this a lot on this podcast just like everyone is, there’s no more just like you’re a designer, that’s all you’re going to do. Designers need to build stuff, market stuff, write some PRDs probably.
Grant Lee: Just one thing to add is that’s where we are at today. I think being adaptable means that certain things may evolve and change and how the player coach model evolves and maybe in certain functions or as the team scales, that’s not going to be practical everywhere. I think the reality is you just have to know and be willing to adopt different frameworks over time and being honest with yourself with what’s working, what’s not. I think we’re constantly trying to learn and evolve ourselves. I think we’re doing it in a way that we don’t believe it really has been done before, and so we have to kind of pave our own path over time.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love that. Giving yourself an out when the time comes when you need to just hire managers.
Grant Lee: A year later when you invite me back, I’ll say, “Yeah, this is what we learned.”
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, that makes sense. That’s probably going to happen. It’s like people are like, “We don’t need product managers.” [inaudible 01:43:22] “I see. Maybe we do.” Yeah, that makes sense. One last piece I want to talk about is you have this really cool quote that you shared on Twitter. ” When you find someone exceptional, bet big on them.” This is a big part of your philosophy is just bet big on the people that are doing super well. Just talk about what that looks like and why that’s so important.
Grant Lee: Yeah, I mean this starts top of the funnel, which is you meet candidates, you decide who you actually hire. And so if you don’t start with a high bar there, going back to what is the goal? The goal is to hit a hiring target versus maintaining a super high quality hiring bar. Those are different goals and I don’t think we’ve ever kind of dropped our bar. And so then you bring somebody in that you think is exceptional, that brings something unique to the table, that can be a good teammate. When they’re thriving, you just give them more and more resources. I think what you realize, another sports analogy is when you’re on an A team for instance, or a team that you feel like is exceptional, A players want actually more playing time. You never see a star player that says “I actually want less playing time.”
They want more time on the field, they want to actually go after the hardest problems. They want to be able to feel like they’re making a huge impact. And so if you have fewer exceptional teammates where you can just throw almost anything at them and they’ll figure it out, that feels for you as a team, just feels great because then they get what they find rewarding, which is the ability to go after hard hairy problems and to be able to come out through the other end feeling like they’ve accomplished something. And I think that for us has always been something that goes beyond just almost everything else. We give people a chance to really thrive in this environment and we try to nurture that as much as humanly possible every step of the way.
Lenny Rachitsky: Is there anything else around hiring that you think is really important or a big lesson you’ve learned or lesson you share that we haven’t talked about yet?
Grant Lee: I mean, there’s some of these intangibles, which is for the founding team, does this feel like this could be your life’s work? When you’re pitching a potential candidate, does this feel like something where you’re actually committed? The unfortunate side of a lot of what’s happening in the AI world broadly is I think you’re coming to learn which founders are sort of missionaries versus mercenaries. And many that were just chasing maybe just a big outcome, or something shiny, or something to feel good about themselves, they’ll go off and then the company, I guess doesn’t live on or maybe has to find a different way, a different path.
And so something I admire is you look at some of the founders, obviously before this sort of AI era, folks like Dylan or Melanie, Figma, Canva, Ivan at Notion, they’ve been doing this for over a decade now. They had many chances to just leave and sunset off into doing whatever they wanted to do, but they care so much about the mission, they’ve stuck it through. And I think when you’re talking to candidates, candidates can kind of tell, is this something the founders even care about? And I think you’re going to have a better chance of attracting true missionaries, people that want to build with you for the long haul, if it’s authentic and it’s something you actually care about.
Lenny Rachitsky: Oh man, I keep saying this. I feel like we could have at least five more hours of stuff to talk about. That’ll be good content for when you come back and you’re making a billion dollars a year. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, Grant, is there anything else that you think is important for people to hear? Any last, I don’t know, lesson you want to double down on? Anything you want to leave listeners with?
Grant Lee: Yeah, I mean, just going back to the original story of that was probably the ultimate low point. Having an investor that spent 20 minutes listening to my pitch, telling me that it was the worst thing, worst idea in the world. I think throughout the journey there’s going to be those low moments. And when I think about being a founder and working a startup, you’re honestly just trying to increase your luck surface area as much as possible. And for me, luck surface area has two dimensions. The first dimension is people. Who are you surrounding yourself with that share your same ambition, share the same values, same principles, and find those people and then give yourself enough time to prove that you guys can accomplish great things. I’m lucky to have two amazing co-founders. We’ve been working on this thing for five years. There’s 0% chance we’d be where we are if I didn’t have them. And we’ve had to overcome a lot. But I guess for us it’s like creating that own luck over a long time horizon has been the only way that it’s been possible.
Lenny Rachitsky: Well, it’s clearly showing in the success you guys are having. Grant, with that, we’ve reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?
Grant Lee: Yep. Yes.
Lenny Rachitsky: All right. I’ve got five questions for you. First question, what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?
Grant Lee: Yeah, so I’ll give one that’s for pre-product market fit folks and the one post-product market fits.
Lenny Rachitsky: Perfect.
Grant Lee: Pre-product market fit I would say is Shoe Dog, which is written by Phil Knight, founder of Nike. And he talks about two things. One, you should chase your sort of crazy ideas, but these should be ideas you’re passionate about. He was an athlete, and so not surprisingly, he focused a lot about creating tools or shoes in this case for other athletes and was passionate about that. And the second thing he taught me was going back to the team thing, he surrounded himself with other people that were super passionate about athletics and shoes as well. And so the folks that he had as his initial startup crew were all that.
And I think that gives you a chance of overcoming a ton, where you’re focused on problems you actually care about solving, and you’re dealing with a team that shares the same ambition as you. Post-product market fit, there’s a book called 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer, where I think when you think about how to build a durable business, there’s so much in there. I think there’s a lot that you can kind of read and reread as you kind of evolve and hit new milestones yourself. And so much of that can be both tactical but also zooming out and thinking about what are the big picture strategic questions you as a founding team you need to be thinking about. So both are great.
Lenny Rachitsky: Hamilton was on the podcast, we’ll link to that episode. I also love that book. Many people mention it. Next question, do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you’ve really enjoyed?
Grant Lee: Yeah, The Lazarus Project is one, I’m a huge sucker for time travel and sci-fi, so this is one I just started watching. And for me, it has all the right ingredients for a fun show.
Lenny Rachitsky: Is there a product you recently discovered that you really love?
Grant Lee: Yeah, I mentioned this already, Voicepanel. So again, a full disclosure angel investor, but we’ve been using it and going back to kind of being a cheat code for folks that are starting to experiment a ton with different ideas, vibe coding, maybe some of these might get this into the hands of users, hear what they think about it. I think, and honestly can help speed up a lot of things and save you time from wasting time on the wrong ideas or ideas where there’s no market.
Lenny Rachitsky: Is there a life motto that you often find yourself coming back to in work or in life?
Grant Lee: Yeah, so there’s this Chinese idiom that my mom used to say, it’s a [foreign language 01:50:24] which the translation is “A frog at the bottom of a well”. And the story is like there’s a frog at the bottom of the well. He looks up every night and he sees the world and he imagines he knows everything about the world. And then one day a bird comes along and describes all the things that he sees, the ocean, the mountains, and the frog realizes that what he sees is just such a limited part of the world and the bird asks, “Do you want to come join me?” And kind of see the rest of it. And so frog goes along.
And so for me, I came from a pretty modest childhood. My parents, we didn’t have a whole lot and I think it would’ve been very easy to kind of have a very narrow lens on the world and be like, “Oh, this is what it is.” But my mom never allowed me to do that. She always pulled me to dream much bigger to say, “Hey, the world is vast. It’s your opportunity to seize it. You have to go out there, don’t have a narrow view of what’s possible. Always dream bigger.” And so for me, that’s always carried through and every time I feel like I’m thinking too little or too small, I try to zoom out and remind myself that there’s much more out there to go after.
Lenny Rachitsky: That is so good and so important and so valuable in today’s world where so much more is possible. Just like, most of what limits people it feels like now is just, I don’t know what idea I have. I don’t know what to do. Now you could get things done so much quicker and so much more is possible. So that’s such valuable thinking. Okay, final question. You help people present better. Your tools basically help people become better presenters. What’s one tip you’ve learned or one tip you teach people to become better presenters that might be helpful to listeners?
Grant Lee: Yeah, I mean, I’ll go back to the consumer advertising concept, which is one idea at a time, this notion of you give them one egg, someone can catch it, give them too many eggs, they’re going to drop it. So don’t try to throw too many concepts all at once. Keep it simple. People will appreciate it. And so with every sort of presentation, break it down into the core concepts, try to make sure you’re covering one at a time. And I think once you sort of see a through line there, then it becomes easy for it to package up into something that feels more cohesive.
Lenny Rachitsky: Less is more, as they say.
Grant Lee: Totally.
Lenny Rachitsky: Grant, two final questions. Where can folks find you online? Where can they find Gamma? What should they know? Just plug anything you want and then how can listeners be useful to you?
Grant Lee: Yeah, so you can find me on both Twitter and LinkedIn, DM’s open. I honestly hear just knowing how hard the journey is in general, whether just thinking about a startup idea or you’re deep into startup land, I want to be hopefully helpful. I’m going to be hopefully your biggest cheerleader, so let me know how I can help. And then for us, we’re always looking for feedback. So if you’re trying Gamma, it’s falling short of your expectations, let us know. We’d love to help in terms of just trying to make it better. And yeah, really appreciate all the feedback and support along the way.
Lenny Rachitsky: Grant, this was awesome. I really appreciate you making time. I know you’re trying to build a crazy fast-growing startup with a lot going on, so I really appreciate you making time for this.
Grant Lee: Thanks, Lenny. It’s been a blast.
Lenny Rachitsky: It’s been a blast for me too. Bye everyone.
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Glossary
| English | 中文 |
|---|---|
| 1stCollab | 1stCollab |
| 7 Powers | 7 Powers(Hamilton Helmer 著) |
| AE (Account Executive) | 客户经理(Account Executive) |
| AKG Media | AKG Media |
| ARR | 年度经常性收入(Annual Recurring Revenue) |
| Brian Chesky | Brian Chesky(Airbnb 联合创始人,此处保留原文) |
| CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) | 客户获取成本(Customer Acquisition Cost) |
| cold outreach | 冷启动外联(cold outreach) |
| conjoint analysis | 联合分析(conjoint analysis) |
| creative | 创意素材 |
| dog-fooding | dogfooding(内部试用自家产品) |
| Dunbar’s number | 邓巴数(Dunbar’s number) |
| founder-led marketing | 创始人主导的营销 |
| functional prototype | 功能原型(functional prototype) |
| Gammaster Program | Gammaster Program |
| GPT wrapper | GPT wrapper(基于 GPT API 封装的产品) |
| halo effect | 光环效应(halo effect) |
| Hamilton Helmer | Hamilton Helmer |
| hook | 钩子(hook) |
| IC (Individual Contributor) | 独立贡献者(Individual Contributor) |
| idea maze | 想法迷宫(idea maze) |
| incumbents | 在位企业(incumbents) |
| influencer marketing | 网红营销(influencer marketing) |
| Intercom | Intercom |
| job to be done | 待完成的任务(job to be done) |
| luck surface area | 运气表面积(luck surface area) |
| margin | 利润率 |
| missionaries vs mercenaries | 传教士与雇佣兵 |
| orchestration | 编排(orchestration) |
| org design | 组织设计(org design) |
| Perplexity | Perplexity |
| Phil Knight | Phil Knight(Nike 创始人,此处保留原文) |
| player coach | 球员兼教练(player coach) |
| PRD (Product Requirements Document) | PRD(产品需求文档) |
| product-market fit | product-market fit(产品市场匹配) |
| prosumer | prosumer(专业消费者) |
| rebrand | 品牌重塑 |
| Shoe Dog | Shoe Dog(Phil Knight 著) |
| The Lazarus Project | The Lazarus Project |
| tribal knowledge | 组织记忆(tribal knowledge) |
| UserTesting | UserTesting |
| Van Westendorp | Van Westendorp 价格敏感度测试 |
| vibe-coded apps | 凭感觉写的应用(vibe-coded apps) |
| Voicepanel | Voicepanel |
| word of mouth | 口碑 |
Reformatted by reformat_english.py
“我听过的最蠢的想法”到 1 亿美元 ARR:揭秘 Gamma 的崛起 | Grant Lee(联合创始人)
开场:“我听过最烂的想法”
Grant Lee: 那是我第三次路演,讲到了最后,自我感觉还不错。投资人停顿了一下,然后直接说:“这是我听过最烂的路演、最烂的想法。你不仅在与 incumbents(在位企业)竞争,而且你在跟拥有巨大分发渠道的 incumbents 竞争。你永远不会成功。”
Lenny Rachitsky: 你们现在的年度经常性收入(ARR)已经超过 1 亿美元,估值超过 20 亿美元。你们早期增长中最有意思的方式之一就是网红营销(influencer marketing)。
Grant Lee: 所有最初的网红,都是我亲自手动 onboard 的。我会和每个人单独打电话,让他们理解 Gamma 代表什么,怎么用这个产品。你希望他们能用自己的声音来讲你的故事。很多人一想到网红营销,就会想到那些大网红、拥有百万粉丝的创作者。这是错误的方向。你基本上给他们一个稿子念,立刻就像广告了,那个产品和他们的真实体验没有任何联系。你更应该做那个难的事——虽然难以规模化——找到成千上万的小网红,他们的受众可能真的需要你的产品。人们真的信任他们说的话,最终这会变成一场能非常快速蔓延的野火。
快速实验的方法
Lenny Rachitsky: 你提到的另一点是,即使在早期阶段,也有很多方式可以进行实验性思考。
Grant Lee: 我们早上有了一个想法,就做一个可用的原型,招募一批真正有潜力的目标用户——但他们对产品没有任何投入——快速发布让人们开始上手。到了下午,我们已经在跑一个相当完整的实验了。你开始听到别人描述他们如何使用产品,我们也可以观察他们在哪里卡住。到了晚上或者第二天,我们可以一起回顾所有反馈,说好,我们要回去改,这个没法用。我们对所有事情都是这么做的。
Gamma 的故事
Lenny Rachitsky: 今天的嘉宾是 Grant Lee,Gamma 的 CEO 兼联合创始人。这是一次非常独特、令人振奋,同时在战术层面也非常实用的对话。因为 Grant 正在打造的东西,基本上是大多数创始人梦寐以求的——一家大规模的 AI 创业公司,而且一直很赚钱,很长一段时间里并没有融很多钱。团队只有大约 30 人,一辆小巴都坐得下,却服务着全球超过 5000 万用户。
如果你还不太了解 Gamma,它是一个 AI 驱动的演示文稿和网站设计工具。他们在两年多的时间里年度经常性收入(ARR)就达到了 1 亿美元,估值超过 20 亿美元。而且与很多你听到的快速增长型 AI 创业公司不同,他们是在盈利且可持续地增长,所在的品类也是大多数人并不认为存在巨大商业机会的领域。正如你将在对话中听到的,一位投资人曾告诉 Grant,这是他听过最蠢的想法。
在这次对话中,Grant 分享了他学到的那些非常反直觉的经验——如何找到 product-market fit,他怎么知道他们找到了 product-market fit,帮助他们增长的具体策略,包括对网红营销的深入探讨(这部分让我大开眼界),还有他们如何定价、他对打造一个持久的 GPT wrapper 公司的看法、大量的招聘建议等等。说实话,这次对话再聊两个小时都没问题,我猜明年我们会再做一次后续对话。
JPMorgan Chase 广告上的脸
Lenny Rachitsky: Grant,非常感谢你来参加播客。
Grant Lee: Lenny,很高兴来到这里。谢谢你的邀请。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我在 LinkedIn 动态里经常看到你的脸。不知道你知不知道这回事——就是那些 JPMorgan Chase 的广告。我很好奇其他人是不是也看到了,还是只有我一个人看到。你知道这件事吗?
Grant Lee: 大概每天我都能收到一条短信,什么都没写,就是一张截图或照片——我在旧金山某个广告牌上的画面。所以确实有点尴尬,但我们也是 JPMorgan Chase 的忠实客户,尽量好好代言吧。
Lenny Rachitsky: 天哪,希望你真的喜欢他们。因为永远都是你,没有别人,就是 Grant。
Grant Lee: 我知道。能不能跟他们说说换个人上去?那就太好了,我完全没问题。
为什么这次对话值得期待
Lenny Rachitsky: 好,说正事。我非常高兴邀请你来这里的真正原因是,与很多超高速增长的 AI 创业公司不同,你们既在疯狂增长,又在非常盈利地增长。这一点我们会聊到。你们起步时没有融很多钱,等了很久才融了一大笔。你们还在一个大多数人从未想到有如此巨大机会的品类中建立了业务。基本上,你们实现了如今很多创始人——尤其是做 AI 创业的人——梦寐以求的目标。
Lenny Rachitsky: 所以这次对话的目标,基本上就是对一家非常成功的 AI 创业公司做一次”人类学研究”。聊聊你们如何找到 product-market fit,如何增长,一路上所有的心得教训。我会按照这段旅程的不同里程碑来组织这次对话。在我们进入第一个话题之前,你觉得有没有什么是大家了解 Gamma 故事时应该知道的?
Grant Lee: 好的。如果可以的话,我先讲一个小故事吧,就讲讲创始的故事。我们是在 2020 年创办这家公司的,那正是疫情最严重的时候。连融资的方式都完全不同——所有融资都是通过 Zoom 完成的,你就坐在这些 Zoom 会议里做路演,很多投资人你从来没有见过面。那是一个完全不同的时代。对我们来说,我们是第一次创业。我当时其实住在伦敦,时区也不一样,所有的路演都得在晚上做。我有两个小孩,得等他们上床睡觉,晚上八点才开始。我们住的是一间很普通的公寓,不大。我基本上就是在小厨房和洗衣房之间的一个小角落里架好镜头,离孩子足够远,不致于把他们吵醒。
晚上八点到凌晨两点之间,我就是在不停地路演,竭尽全力。我用了 Zoom 的虚拟背景,这样别人不知道我在哪里。就这样一直讲。第一天,我正在进行第三场路演,努力讲述 Gamma 的故事,显然才刚开始摸到路演的节奏。讲到最后,我自己感觉还不错。那位投资人停顿了一下,然后直接说:“这可能是我听过的最烂的路演、最烂的想法。你不仅要去跟在位企业(incumbents)竞争,而且你要对抗的是拥有巨大分发渠道的在位企业。你永远不会成功。”
我当时脑子里一下子就懵了,在想怎么反驳。还没来得及回应,他就挂了。我就坐在那里想这件事。还没来得及沮丧——因为还得准备下一场路演——我就把一种感觉内化了:也许他说的是对的,也许他说的话里确实有正确的成分。于是我开始想,如果我们想在这个品类里成功,就必须从最初就把增长考虑进来。这个品类真的非常、非常难突破。
所以我们就给自己做了一个承诺:随着持续打造产品,增长将是至关重要的。我想对你们的听众说,我本身并不是做增长出身的。如果我都能学会增长,那任何人都可以。特别是在这样的市场里——竞争极度激烈,往往也非常拥挤——增长能力将是不可或缺的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这个故事太有意思了,天哪。那位投资人现在得多后悔啊。我们就不点名了。跟大家分享一些数据吧——等这期节目上线的时候这些数字应该是公开的——你们现在 ARR 已经超过一亿美元,估值超过二十亿美元。而这个业务,再强调一次,是大多数人认为在这个品类里不可能做成的。
Grant Lee: 是的,谢谢。我们确实为取得的成就感到非常自豪。我也很期待分享一些增长策略和对我们有效的方法,希望它能帮助其他正在路上的创业者。
寻找 Product-Market Fit
Lenny Rachitsky: 好,我们正式开始吧。来聊聊 product-market fit。讲讲你们是怎么找到 product-market fit 的,以及你们怎么知道自己找到了。
Grant Lee: 好的。我先讲讲我们意识到自己可能找到了 product-market fit 的那个时刻。很多创始人都会问自己,我们到底有没有找到?我觉得常常会有一种诱惑,让你几乎可以骗自己说已经找到了。我们在 2022 年 8 月做了第一次公开 beta 版发布,在 Product Hunt 上线,感觉非常好。我们的发布很成功,最终拿下了当日最佳产品、当周最佳产品、当月最佳产品。当时就想,哇,也许我们真的做出了点东西。
但然后我们去看注册数据,会有一个初始的注册飙升,然后就趋于平缓了。我们每天依然有新用户,但很明显我们没有强劲的口碑传播,没有强劲的自然传播力。所以如果就这么继续下去,我们知道产品不会自己增长。缺了点什么——我们没有那种强有力的口碑传播能让产品持续增长。
于是我们认真问自己:需要改变什么?答案是,我们需要从根本上改变一切。对我们来说,这几乎变成了一个押上整个公司的时刻。因为那时候我们的资金已经快见底了,我们知道必须取得进展,但又不太确定该怎么办。于是我们把所有人召集起来——那时团队刚过十二个人——然后说,全员上阵。
我们要尽一切可能让产品的前三十秒体验变得令人惊叹。用户进入产品的那一刻,体验必须是出色的——出色到每一个完成注册流程的人都会告诉他们所有的朋友。如果我们能做到这一点,也许我们才真正有机会在这个领域做出点名堂。所以在产品发布之后,我们又花了三四个月的时间——虽然发布时感觉很好,但我们知道必须回到原点重新来过。
接下来的三四个月,我们彻底重新设计了整个注册引导体验。当然,这也是 AI 对我们发挥重大作用的地方——我们实际上进行了重构,让 AI 成为注册流程的一部分。这样每一个新用户都能在前三十秒体验到那种”神奇”的感觉。然后我们重新发布了,那是在 2023 年三月底。突然之间,我们从每天几百个注册飙升到——第一天就有几千个,第二天五千个,然后每天一万个,再然后每天两万个。
然后数字就一直在涨。我们没有做任何营销,没有打广告,完全是产品的有机口碑传播——用户使用产品后分享给他人。我们第一次真正感受到了那种”拉力”。我们什么都不用做,产品就在增长。这种感觉和 Product Hunt 发布之后的那段时间截然不同——那时候我们本可以骗自己说已经找到了 product-market fit。当时的诱惑很可能是:嘿,我们多投点广告、多花点营销费用就行了,往漏斗顶端灌流量,其他的一切自然会好起来。
我觉得那会是一个陷阱。那会让我们走上一条用蛮力去追求 product-market fit 的路。它会一直是一个始终无法真正到达的目标。所以我觉得我们做出了艰难但正确的决定。那是一个押上公司的时刻,而在另一边,感受完全不同。
口碑传播机器
Lenny Rachitsky: Grant,这正是我希望这次对话能达到的效果,我太兴奋了。你前面分享的内容让我有太多问题想追问,甚至还没走到这段旅程的后面部分。首先,你刚才描述的本质上是——对你来说,product-market fit 就是当有机增长真正开始起飞的时候,纯粹靠口碑传播在增长。你几乎没做什么,因为产品太好了,人们自发告诉朋友。关于这一点,还有什么可以分享的吗?让大家了解,好吧,那到底长什么样?
Grant Lee: 是的,我的一条建议是:在早期阶段,你的心态应该几乎是你试图打造一台口碑传播机器。如果你能把这一步做对,其他一切都会变得容易得多。而且我认为这既适用于 prosumer 和 B2C 产品,也同样适用于 B2B 产品。如果你有一款 B2B 产品,即使你不会告诉所有的朋友,你也应该告诉同事——在那个产品相关的场景下。你应该告诉前同事,说你发现了一个好东西,“哦,要是我们以前也有这个就好了”,它甚至应该让人觉得神奇。
然后你应该在所有进来的线索中,在你的潜在客户和现有客户中看到这种迹象。如果你没有看到相当大比例的线索是通过这种方式来的,我会回去反思:为什么?为什么没有出现这种情况?因为说到底,这就是你需要的那股巨大顺风——有了它,你在上面做的每一件事——营销、销售、广告——都会变得轻松得多。
产品天然的可分享性
Lenny Rachitsky: 你把它形容为一台”口碑传播机器”——其中有多少是口碑传播循环和病毒式传播功能在起作用,又有多少纯粹是产品本身的力量?一方面产品很棒,另一方面它天然就有可分享性,因为演示文稿本身就是人们互相分享的东西。
Grant Lee: 完全同意。我觉得对我们来说,我们确实受益于所处的品类——它的本质决定了,如果你喜欢 Gamma,你就会把它分享出去、演示给别人看。所以对我们来说,这两者是结合在一起的。理想情况下,你的产品中应该还有其他方式可以让口碑传播或有机的病毒式传播发生,即在使用过程中自然而然地被分享出去。
我们内部基本上有一句信条——回到那前 30 秒——我们希望让用户创建内容变得极其简单,也希望让他们分享出去变得极其简单。我们在那前 30 秒,或者说是前几分钟内做的所有事情,就是消除摩擦,让他们能完成这两件事:创建和分享。我觉得其他人在审视自己的产品时,也可以思考一下:我的产品有什么特性?它被使用的方式是什么?你能否消除摩擦让它真正传播开——即使只是在一个组织内部或者一个工作空间内——尽可能让这种传播发生。
虚荣指标与核心增长引擎
Lenny Rachitsky: 你这里提到的另一点也非常深刻——你在 Product Hunt 上赢得了当日最佳产品,这本身就已经极其困难了。那么多人想赢却赢不了,大多数人都做不到。我曾经帮一些公司去冲击过,这真的是一件很难达成的事情。然后你又赢得了当周最佳、当月最佳,可你依然说:不对,这不行。大多数取得这个成绩的人会说:我们搞定了,不需要拿公司去赌。他们不会有那种”必须重新思考一切”的感觉。到底是什么让你确信:不对,这行不通——尽管很令人兴奋,但这不是我们要的?
Grant Lee: 我觉得做创始人的一部分,就是要尽可能自我诚实,做自己最严厉的批评者。很多时候你会有一些看起来不错的虚荣指标,感觉值得庆祝——你也确实应该庆祝。但你要分清什么是虚荣指标,什么才是你增长引擎的核心。这个数字上涨了,是否意味着产品真正在运转?我觉得这就是我们审视的角度——赢得那些东西确实感觉很好,我们至少让自己在行业地图上有了存在感。但它还不够好到让我们觉得拥有了一个可以持续投入、越做越好的核心增长引擎。那种感觉当时还没有出现。
Lenny Rachitsky: 所以本质上是增长开始趋于平缓和放缓了,它并不是从那个点开始一飞冲天的火箭。
Grant Lee: 对,当时我们仍然在获得注册用户,他们还在持续进来。但你能感觉到没有那种不断累积的势能。我觉得这就是最难判断的地方——我和联合创始人坐下来,试图对自己坦诚:这够不够?我们真的觉得还不够好。
注册引导与”前 30 秒”哲学
Lenny Rachitsky: 这里的另一个要点是注册引导(onboarding)的力量——在播客里讨论提高留存的时候,这个话题经常出现。你在 Product Hunt 发布后表现很好,然后开始逐渐减弱。产品在起效之后变化有多大?注册引导又有多重要?然后告诉我们,“前 30 秒”这个概念是怎么来的?
Grant Lee: 对我们来说,注册引导和产品体验是交织在一起的。我常想的一个类比是——你去一家餐厅,也许菜品不错,但当你真正思考用户体验的时候,它是从你走进门那一刻开始的:入座、服务员过来招呼你、你点菜,当然菜品味道要好,最后你结账离开。这整个体验是否让人觉得愉悦?是否好到你想推荐给朋友?如果有人只是把食物扔到桌上就走了,连账单都不给,我会想:好吧,我大概不会把这家店推荐给别人。
所以我们思考的是:用户走进我们的门、进入产品的第一刻,我们能给他们什么?能否尽可能缩短到达价值的时间?这其中很大一部分灵感来自 Scott Belsky,他谈过”第一英里”、前 15 分钟的理念。我觉得他说得完全对。一种思路是,你可以用一种近乎愤世嫉俗的视角来看待新用户——你得假设他们自私、虚荣、懒惰。他们进来的时候,没有任何学习新工具的欲望。
那么在那前 30 秒里,你能给他们什么,来赢得下一个 30 秒,再下一个 30 秒?对我们来说,我们知道如果做不到——人们的注意力比十年前更短了——那前 30 秒里,我们能否真的展示给你一些东西,来赢得继续建立这段关系的权利?我们在这上面想了很多,当然,这也是当时我们唯一能负担得起的。我们当时只有 12 个人在开发,不可能彻底翻新整个产品。我们知道自己必须把所有精力集中在一个点上——所以我们选择了用户进门的那一刻:让走进门的那一刻感觉神奇,然后随着时间推移再逐步做更多。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我很喜欢你关于这一点的说法——你可以说这是注册引导还是产品本身的问题,但用”如何让前 30 秒极其有价值、充满 aha 时刻”这个视角来看待,它反过来几乎在告诉你产品应该是什么样的。
Grant Lee: 对,它真的能帮你把产品中最神奇的那个点提前拉出来。创始人有时会想谈论自己产品的五到十个功能,但也许只有一个东西真正让你与众不同。我试着从中学到很多——我们后面会聊到营销的部分——但即使只是带着”创始人主导营销”的视角,我也会想:我能做什么来帮助一个新用户理解产品?消费广告领域有这样一个说法:你扔给消费者一个鸡蛋,他可能接得住;你扔四五个鸡蛋过去,他大概率全都会掉在地上。
创始人往往想展示自己的四五个功能,甚至十个功能。结果消费者完全懵了——我到底为什么需要这个东西?我们只想给他们那一个鸡蛋,那一次首次体验。就是:几秒钟内创建一张幻灯片。这就是那个鸡蛋。我把这个鸡蛋扔给你,你觉得有没有吸引力?有些人还是会走开,但对于那些接住它的人来说,你确实在解决他们的真实问题,然后你可以在此基础上持续构建。你给他们的足够多,他们会留下来继续玩你的产品。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这个比喻太逗了,我从来没听人用它来形容新用户引导和价值交付——每次只专注一个鸡蛋。让我们再往回追溯一下,最初让你创立 Gamma、让它成为今天这个样子的那个洞察是什么?
Gamma 的创始灵感
Grant Lee: 上一家创业公司被收购之后,我回到了自己的老本行——咨询。我当时在给早期创业公司做顾问,用的工具就是 Google Slides。我记得很清楚,有一次深夜我在准备第二天的会议,一直在调格式、找合适的布局,花了几个小时就为了做出想要的外观和感觉,而不是在打磨内容本身。对我来说这完全是本末倒置的——我应该花 90% 的时间在内容上,可能 10% 在设计和排版上。
所以问题就是:有没有更好的方式?我们能不能从零开始重新构想这种格式?幻灯片作为很多场景下的默认媒介,已经存在了将近四十年。我们开始思考,如果我们提供不同的构建模块、不同的基础原语,让用户不再被固定的 16:9 幻灯片所束缚,我们能为用户提供什么?这一切就是从这里开始的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 听到这里我能理解为什么投资人会说”嗯,有道理”——但毕竟幻灯片、PowerPoint 已经存在四十年了。我懂,我懂为什么人们会……那具体来说,AI 是最初愿景的一部分吗?还是 AI 后来开始兴起,然后你们发现时机刚刚好?
Grant Lee: 确实是时机好。AI 不是最初的愿景,但精神内核一直在——我们一直想让人极其快速、毫不费力地创建内容。所以 AI 恰好是一份神奇的礼物,让我们沿着原有抱负和愿景的方向实现了所有这些目标。在 AI 出现之前,我们就已经在构建各种基础模块了,然后我们把 AI 深度集成到了所有这些模块的核心中。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这又是一个很酷的例子。类似的例子太多了——以前不可能实现的想法,现在靠 AI 变得完全可行。对于那些被认为不可能做出大生意的品类,这对创业者来说是绝佳的机会。AI 现在让它成为可能了。太棒了。
从零到一亿:增长历程
说到这个,我们来聊聊增长历程——你们是怎么在短短两年多时间里从零做到一亿美元 ARR 的。我想我们可以分阶段来聊。我知道这些里程碑没那么泾渭分明,但大致是零到一亿 ARR,其中可能一千万、一千万到一亿这样的节奏。我们顺其自然地聊。你们是怎么获得第一批用户的?怎么获得前一百个用户的?怎么从零走到一亿 ARR?
Grant Lee: 我们的前一百个用户,和后来的情况完全不同。那甚至还在我们的 AI 版本发布之前。对于像我们这样的产品,前一百个用户就是你想尽办法说服朋友们来试用。凡是做过幻灯片的人,你都会去聊。早期的时候,朋友们想帮你的忙,所以他们会试一下,还会跟你说产品有多好——但也是善意的谎言。然后你看使用数据,根本没人回来。
所以我觉得我们的前一百个用户,是在产品上线后一点一点辛苦积累的。人们开始觉得”好吧,这东西变得有点有用了”,但使用频率仍然很低,他们不会每周都回来。而 AI 版本发布之后的那一刻,我们突然看到了有机增长——人们开始定期回到产品中。所以其实不是前一百个用户的问题,更像是前一万名用户都是在 AI 版本上线后的很短一段时间内涌入的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 很好。后面我们会聊变现和定价,这显然是真正到达一百万 ARR、一千万 ARR 的重要组成部分。所以我听到的是,Product Hunt 的发布是获得前一万左右用户的重要推动力。我知道你们重新发布的时候还有一条推文也起了很大作用。讲讲这个。
一条”钓鱼”推文的故事
Grant Lee: 对。我们做 AI 发布的时候,没有选择在 Product Hunt 上发。我们基本就是说,直接发到 Twitter 上,看看能不能获得一些病毒式传播。说实话,我们构思了一条有点标题党性质的推文——“商业中最有价值的技能即将被淘汰”。这是刻意的,我们想制造一些讨论度。我们知道在推文中带一点挑衅性的内容,会让更多人参与互动。
几天之后,它突然开始变得更病毒式,互动量大幅增长。我们一看,原来是 Paul Graham 评论了,大意是说”幻灯片所描述的内容,肯定比幻灯片本身更有价值”。当然,看到这条评论本身就很有趣。而这条评论出现之后,帖子的互动量进一步飙升。其实那整条帖子的目的就是达到那个级别的互动,让人们看到它、让它获得一定的触达。
对我来说,这几乎是我的第一个学习时刻——回到”创始人主导营销”到底意味着什么这个问题上。它意味着你如何真正突破噪音?如何让人们有机会和这样的帖子产生互动?这其中有文案写作的因素,有讲故事的因素,也有选择合适视觉素材分享的因素。那一刻让我理解了:想把这件事做好,有时候你得做一些自己不太舒服的事情,但确实会有差别。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太好玩了。所以你是故意把那条公告做得有争议性,我是这么理解的?
Grant Lee: 完全是。我会说是”挑衅性”。带点辣味。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太酷了。所以基本上你通过 Product Hunt 获得了一万用户,然后又通过一条故意制造争议的推文——最终成功钓到了 Paul Graham 来评论。
Grant Lee: 完全是。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太厉害了。而且他只是评论了,甚至都没有转发。
Grant Lee: 对,只是评论。然后其他人就会跟帖 pile on。
Lenny Rachitsky: 有意思,一条评论带来的推文传播量居然比转发或引用转发还要多。
Grant Lee: 完全是。当然算法一直在变,所以某种程度上也是运气,取决于什么时候发生、怎么发生的、谁发的。
创始人主导的营销
Lenny Rachitsky: 你用了”创始人主导的营销”这个说法,我很喜欢,而且在这里已经看到它在实践了。你的思路是——不是委托给市场部的人,不是雇代理公司,而是:我怎么讲一个能穿透噪音的故事,基于你亲自创建这家公司、拥有打造这个产品的洞察力。你觉得关于创始人自己思考这些事情的重要性,还有什么想让人知道的吗?
Grant Lee: 嗯,我觉得现在大多数人可能已经熟悉”创始人主导的销售”了,这依然非常重要。我认为在雇佣第一个销售人员或客户经理之前,创始人自己先搞清楚需要怎么做是非常好的。他们会打磨出正确的叙事、正确的故事。在我上一份工作中,我是一家创业公司的 COO,虽然我不是创始人,但我是早期成员。所以我帮助创始人们经历这个过程,真正帮助走进客户或潜在客户的会议,说:“嘿,这就是为什么我们的产品很有意思。”
我认为现在有大量的 AI 创业公司,更多面向 B2C 或 prosumer(专业消费者)。所以你不一定是在跟个别潜在客户对话,但能够在营销侧真正掌控自己的叙事,这一点非常、非常重要。我想举几个例子,随着时间推移,这项技能真的会对你非常有帮助。
第一点是,现在你有机会自己成为一个创作者。我认为很多创始人正在尝试更活跃地在社交媒体上发声。如果你能克服最初的那个不适感——看到自己的帖子觉得”哎呀,这感觉不够真实”——如果你能克服最初的这种感觉,开始投入:好,我怎么成为一个更好的文案写手?我怎么把事情表达得清晰而不只是巧妙?有句话说得对,如果你能做到清晰,那就超级重要。大多数人写文案时会试图非常有创意,但这通常不是突破和传播信息的正确方式。所以你怎么提升自己的文案能力?
然后这让你在与其它营销人员合作时,或者在我们的情况下与网红合作时,能有一个更高的标准。如果你与网红和创作者合作,你能完全共情他们做这项工作的方式,你知道什么是一个好的钩子(hook),或者你知道怎么结构化一篇好帖子——只有当你自己亲身经历过、知道这有多难的时候,你才能做到。我觉得太多创始人写的东西太像广告了,然后交给一个创作者去放大,这样根本行不通。所以我确实认为,创始人主导的营销的一部分就是你自己亲自去做。
所以我确实认为,创始人主导的营销的一部分就是你自己亲自去做,利用你自己的平台。一开始可能规模很小。但随着你做大,你有了一个平台……你有自己的声音,人们会倾听。你的故事讲述会越来越好。我认为这些都是你应该尽早投入的技能,因为你知道自己必须不断提升。就像练习一样,你必须反复练习。
如何开始分享内容
Lenny Rachitsky: 我确实想沿着这个话题再深入聊聊,因为你在推特上分享的打造 Gamma 过程中的经验教训,正是促成这次对话的原因。我当时在读,心想:“好的,他分享了不少东西,但我想听的远不止这些。“我们会详细聊这些,比你在推特上分享的深入得多。但我就喜欢这个例子——它说明了这种方式是有效的,促成了这次对话。
那我先问几个问题。第一个就是,作为一家高速增长的创业公司的创始人兼 CEO,你怎么找时间做这件事?要做的事情太多了。你怎么分配时间来做这些?另外,对于想在 LinkedIn 和推特上开始分享内容的人,除了你已经分享的,还有什么关键经验?
Grant Lee: 我的建议是,一定要从小处着手。不要让它变得那么令人生畏以至于你根本不开始。对我来说,就是在身边放一个记事本或 Google 文档,不断记下:好,这是我学到的东西,或者我观察到的,或者某个行之有效的方法,某个不直觉但有效的东西,就开始建立一个日志。等积累了足够多之后,我基本上每周会留出几个小时,深入研究一下。我会把很多要点拿出来,试着判断:“这里面的内容够不够组成一篇帖子或可以广泛分享的内容?“一开始内容还不够,都是零散的想法。但随着时间推移,你开始积累出一些有趣的主题。然后我就开始检验这些内容。
我会告诉团队成员:“嘿,这个挺有意思的。你们觉得有意思吗?“如果有足够多的人说”哦对,我没想到会是这样”,或者”这是我以前从没听过的”,那我就真正开始构思初始帖子。然后就直接发出去。我学到的是,即便在 LinkedIn 和推特之间,受众想要的东西也是不一样的。所以你几乎得有不同的语气,甚至不同的内容碎片或分享方式。对我来说,我早期在 LinkedIn 上投入更多,因为感觉对我来说更自然一些。然后随着时间推移,我说:“好吧,我要开始为推特专门打包一些内容,跟 LinkedIn 上发的不同。“有时候在推特上你会更加战术化,更加深入细节。我发现这样很有帮助。
但说实话,我还在学习。每次发完帖子,过几周你回去看:“好,哪些内容实际被互动了?哪些内容真正在创造……”理想情况下你创造了足够的价值,人们会收藏、分享、转发,这些都是有价值的信号。然后你就回去,开始收集自己的——这些是我的最佳帖子,这些是我真正突破了的。然后再回去分析:那篇帖子到底哪里有用?是内容本身?是内容结构?是某种反直觉的建议?然后你按主题把它们归类,这样每周头脑风暴的时候,你就有了一个很好的素材库可以依托。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这太有意思、太有价值了。让我把你说的几点经验镜像总结一下,这些很容易被忽略。第一点是分享什么。我从你这里听到的——我也完全同意,这也是我自己试图做的——就是关注你学到的东西、你觉得有趣的东西、对你来说不直觉的东西。弄一个文档,把这些东西放进去。每次学到什么、发现什么有趣的,就加到文档里。或者对,“我以前没听过”也是一个很好的标准。
社交媒体平台的内容策略
Lenny Rachitsky: 所以本质上就是,如果你觉得有意思,社交媒体上的人也会觉得有意思。一种做法是随时分享——我就是这样尝试的——就是”嘿,刚学了个关于 clock code 的东西,看看这个。“或者攒起来发一篇长帖子。另一个我觉得很新鲜的说法是,在 LinkedIn 和推特上发不同的内容。我就是直接复制粘贴同样的东西。我很喜欢你为两个平台做不同的内容。
Grant Lee: 我想大家都有一种直觉,就是受众是不一样的,对吧?所以如果你从根本上认识到这一点,接下来的问题就是,你怎么把故事用正确的方式打包,让受众愿意接收?我觉得这会因创作者的类型、发帖的创始人、以及具体内容本身而有所不同。对我来说,我还在不断调整,但我确实发现,从一个平台直接复制粘贴到另一个平台通常不太管用。你几乎需要进入正确的心态:好,我觉得什么在推特上更有吸引力?然后什么在 LinkedIn 上更有吸引力?然后大量测试,看看什么真正有效。再回去迭代调整。
Lenny Rachitsky: 如果让你给一个建议,关于推特和 LinkedIn 分别什么内容更有效——你刚才提到推特上更偏战术化——还有什么更多可以分享的吗?
Grant Lee: 我发现的就是战术化的内容,在推特上往往也更反直觉。而且我觉得也更偏技术。人们真的很想知道——回到”深入细节”这一点——这东西我感觉能复制吗?如果你只是给一个笼统的结论或者感觉很泛泛的东西,那是没有说服力的。我真的需要知道——如果你能给我看具体的数据指标,那就更好了。我觉得……
而 LinkedIn 上的内容,往往更多是偏愿景性的,或者是一个当下感觉比较相关的话题或主题。你可以说得更宽泛一些,不需要那么战术化。更多的是一种启发性,就是”哦,好的,我现在得去多了解一下定价和打包策略”之类的。这可能就是某人需要的那种火花。你不需要把所有东西都讲透。部分原因也是在 LinkedIn 上你没法真正做长串推文。所以做一篇超长的深度帖子不太现实。也许未来会有变化,战术性内容的呈现方式可能也会随之改变。
内容创作的时间管理
Lenny Rachitsky: 最后一点,你说你会专门留出时间。是一周中某个特定时间吗?具体怎么操作的?因为每个人都说”好的,我留出时间。“然后,“我不知道,但我还有一堆别的事要做,所以这次就不写了,或者下周再说吧。”
Grant Lee: 对我来说,通常是一天中的两个时段——最早一大早,和最晚深夜。部分原因是因为孩子。我几乎需要那种完全零干扰、家里没有噪音的时间,这样我才能真正思考。早上主要是寻找灵感,你对哪些话题有热情?然后晚上主要是反思。你当天经历了什么?你几乎可以翻开日历看:“好,我今天跟谁谁谁聊了。那些对话中有没有什么可能值得分享的?“我就是在这个时候写下一些东西。更多是对当天实际发生事情的回顾。
Lenny Rachitsky: 帮我消除”这是在自我推销、很尴尬”这种感觉的一个方法是——我分享的就是我学到的有用的东西,最终也确实帮到了别人。评论里的人总是说”哦,这真的很酷、很有用,谢谢。“这不是自我推销——
Grant Lee: 完全同意。
Lenny Rachitsky: 不是那种”看看我多厉害,来看看我多棒的产品。“而是”这是我学到的一个东西,你可能也会觉得有用。“
创始人主导营销的价值交换
Grant Lee: 说得完全对。我觉得可以这样理解:在创始人主导的销售中,核心始终是价值交换,对吧?你想让客户感受到他们得到了一个很棒的产品,作为交换,他们会付钱给你。而创始人主导的营销,我觉得几乎也是这种心态——你想给人们大量的内容,也许是内容本身的价值,你分享某个秘密战术,或者你给了他们一些本身就带有价值的东西,作为交换,你获得了好感。你不一定是直接换回钱,而是换回好感。他们会关注你,会跟你的帖子互动,会告诉其他人。然后随着时间推移,你可以用一部分好感来——比如实际聊聊我的产品、发布公告——他们会帮你放大传播。我觉得这就是神奇之处,你通过持续提供大量价值、不期望任何即时回报,长期地积累好感。
Lenny Rachitsky: 当人们在这个事情上遇到困难——“好吧,我发了,但没人在乎,没有任何效果”——我总是推荐一本书,是 Scott Pressfield 写的,叫《Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit》,书名说的就是事实:没人在乎你写的东西。让人们真正关注你的门槛非常高。有太多东西要读、要处理。这本书给了你一个很好的视角:好的,门槛非常高,没人在乎你写的东西,所以你必须非常努力,把它做得非常好。
Grant Lee: 很好的提醒。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我们会在节目笔记里放链接。
Gamma 的增长:从千万到亿级 ARR
好了,让我们回到 Gamma 的增长话题。我们之前聊了你如何获得最初几万用户——基本上是通过 Product Hunt、重新思考 onboarding、让它变得非常神奇,然后 Paul Graham 评论了那条很有争议的推文,引发了一些讨论。我们来聊聊下一个阶段——大概讲讲,从那个时间点到 ARR 达到一亿的过程。总体来说,有什么我们应该知道的?
Grant Lee: 当我们 ARR 达到大约一千万的时候,我有一种感觉——我们知道需要一些方法来继续放大和传播 Gamma。我觉得当时的自然病毒式增长已经在起作用了,所以我们确实觉得是时候开始进一步放大了。而我心中主要的障碍是,我们的初始品牌在拖后腿。我觉得很多人会低估品牌重塑是否有价值。有时候确实有价值,有时候没有。
对我们来说,我们审视了几个不同的方面。第一,我们的初始品牌几乎就是一个占位品牌,因为我们在公司注册的那一刻就创建了这个品牌——也就是 2020 年底、2021 年初——我们需要一个品牌,这样在开发过程中至少可以跟人分享。我们可以挂一个落地页,感觉像是”好的,这里有个东西。“但我们没有在品牌上投入太多。所以它在我称之为品牌 DNA 的层面非常有限。没有太多——艺术方向的范围非常窄。在语调和风格方面也没什么内容。
所以,这个品牌我们知道用来起步足够好了,但它不具备可扩展性。当我思考什么是可扩展的品牌时,它几乎就像——你可以把品牌的要素提取出来,然后大量复制,这种品牌 DNA 是你可以想象围绕它创建大量内容,而且所有内容都能保持相当一致的感觉。我认为这需要从一开始就精心设计。你要深思熟虑每一个元素。比如你想要什么样的艺术方向?什么样的语调和风格?这样当你在创建成千上万条文案时,它们都能保持相当一致的感觉。
Grant Lee: 于是我们回到原点,花了好几个月重新思考品牌应该是什么样的,我们长期的愿景是什么。我们的内部创意总监与 Smith & Diction 合作,这是一家很棒的代理商,也曾帮助 Perplexity 等公司完成品牌重塑或初始品牌建设。我们花了好几个月,真正试图打造我们认为的品牌核心 DNA,并且以一种可以尽可能复制的方式来完成。
这种可复制性之所以重要,是因为随着你开始规模化,你需要创建大量的内容——社交媒体上的自有内容、效果营销用的广告素材、给网红用来展示的产品素材等等。你要从零星的小内容,一下子变成每周测试成千上万条创意素材。如果你没有信心在复制的过程中保持那种统一感,你是做不到这些的。对我们来说,我们意识到这是必要的,这也是为什么我们投入了这么多。最终这比我预想的要昂贵得多、耗时得多。但我觉得走过来之后,这是正确的投资,时机也是对的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我很喜欢你们做的很多在别人看来”这行不通”的事情。在演示文稿领域创业,在规模化过程中做一次完整的品牌重塑,上线后又重新打造整个产品、重新思考整个产品。所有这些事情,每个人都说”不,这不是我们的取胜之道。“但有趣的是,对你们来说都奏效了。
网红营销作为增长杠杆
品牌的事我们之后再聊,你们早期增长中最有趣的方式之一是网红营销(influencer marketing),很多人听说过也讨论过,但我没怎么听到过具体怎么做、什么才真正有效。聊聊这个作为你们整体增长杠杆的情况。然后我想深入聊聊你们用了什么工具、哪些人真正帮到了你们,之类的事情。所以,先给我们讲讲大局。
Grant Lee: 好的。我觉得很多创始人以为网红营销几乎是即插即用的——你拨出一笔预算,找一些创作者,想好一个活动或选择一个合适的时机,然后就万事俱备、准备上线了。但现实是,回到创始人主导的营销(founder-led marketing)这种思维方式——如果你真正深度参与整个过程,你才能为自己铺好成功之路。对我们来说,这意味着所有最初的网红都是我亲自手动引入的。我会和每一位单独打电话,让他们了解 Gamma 代表什么、如何使用这个产品。你希望他们能用他们自己的声音来讲你的故事,对吧?而如果你不愿意投入这种精力,他们做不到这一点。
所以我们会花很多时间一起讨论……告诉他们如何推销 Gamma 不是我的工作,但确保他们理解 Gamma 作为一款产品是什么,这是我的工作。所以我们会花很多时间,比如我演示产品、他们提问、我们一起头脑风暴可能的钩子(hook)是什么,我给他们一些初步反馈,说”哦对,这个我喜欢,我觉得对你的受众来说效果会很棒。“但不会过度规定他们该怎么做。而且我们会和大量的微型网红合作,这些人没有庞大的粉丝群,但致力于——回到为受众提供价值这一点——他们致力于为自己的受众提供价值。他们希望能够展示那些他们自己真正在使用或会使用的工具。你如何以一种真实可信的方式做到这一点?你没法造假。你真的需要花时间去做这件事。
就像你引导(onboard)一个客户一样,你用同样的方式引导一个网红。你希望他们成为你团队的延伸。我觉得他们能感受到你是否愿意付出这份努力。如果你不愿意,他们就会把它当作又一个普通项目,交付完就结束了。如果你在这段关系中投入了精力,你猜怎么着?他们会回来再次发布关于你的内容。你突然之间就拥有了这种可以随着时间不断构建的关系。我觉得这才是真正的魔力所在。太多人低估了最初那个投入环节。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这太棒了。明确一下,网红营销本质上就是一个在某些平台——比如 TikTok、Instagram、Twitter、LinkedIn 等等——拥有粉丝的人,以某种方式获得报酬来推广你的产品。这是理解网红营销最简单的方式,对吧?
Grant Lee: 是的,这确实是最简单的理解方式。我要说网红营销有不同的层次。很多人一想到网红营销,就会想到那些大型潮流创作者,比如拥有一百万粉丝的人。他们的想法是,好吧,我们要拨出一大笔预算,选择五六个我们认为是该领域意见领袖的人,把钱全部砸在让他们谈论我们的产品上。我觉得这通常是错误的方式。因为他们中的很多人确实拥有庞大的受众。对你来说,你基本上给他们一个脚本让他们念,这立刻就感觉像是一条广告。那个产品与他们之间没有任何真正的联系。这只是他们——这周碰巧在跟你合作,然后他们就继续自己的生活了。它永远不会让人感觉有机或真实,而你在这个过程中浪费了大量资金。
我认为你更好的选择是做那件困难的事——虽然难以规模化——那就是找到成千上万的微型网红,他们的受众可能真正需要你的产品。比如对我们来说,早期就是教育工作者,他们日常工作的一部分就是每天制作幻灯片,因为他们需要吸引学生的注意力。对他们来说,有一个真正能节省大量时间的工具是他们乐于谈论的。如果你能找到一些这样的群体——我们称之为回音壁(echo chambers)——比如教育工作者这个群体,老师们喜欢把自己喜欢的产品推荐给其他老师。暑假期间,他们会聚在一起讨论”好吧,下个学期有什么东西能真正改善我的工作?“显然在这波 AI 浪潮中,很多讨论就是”哪些 AI 工具能帮我省下大量时间?”
所以如果你能开始触及这些回音壁群体,那就更好了。它不一定是那种光鲜亮丽的知名网红。其实就是这样的一个人——他们有一个受众群体,而人们真正信任他们说的话。这非常棒。它最终会变成一种野火般的效果,可以传播得非常非常快。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这些人拿到多少钱?大概几百美元、几千美元,差不多是那个范围?
Grant Lee: 对,几百到几千,低个位数的千美元级别。
如何找到合适的网红
Lenny Rachitsky: 你是怎么找到这些人的?有没有用到什么工具?还是主要靠手动搜索和查找?
Grant Lee: 一开始完全是手动的,做了大量的冷启动外联。后来我们陆续找到了几种方法。一个是 1stCollab,一个 YC 學生的平台。它非常棒,基本上帮你完成所有自动化的对外触达。而且你可以帮他们创建不同创作者的用户画像或人设,比如教育工作者就是其中一类,然后他们会根据这个画像帮你找到所有合适的创作者。所以他们非常出色,合作起来真的很愉快。
我们同时还找到了一些小型机构来辅助这件事。我会找那种非常年轻、充满冲劲的机构。这些人本身就是社交媒体的原住民,所以他们真的理解这个生态。他们能真正找到那些合作起来很棒的创作者。我觉得关键在于,如果你找到的合作创作者本身就很好配合,其他一切都会变得简单。我们合作过几个,其中一个是 AKG Media,总部在英国,合作也非常好。所以你基本上可以找到几种不同的资源——机构也好,平台也好——来帮你把这件事规模化。
Lenny Rachitsky: 他们发帖的时候,一般都会标明这是付费推广,对吗?
Grant Lee: 对。
Lenny Rachitsky: 他们不会假装”我发现了这个工具,超喜欢”?好。
Grant Lee: 对,正是这样。
网红营销对增长的影响
Lenny Rachitsky: 那么从 10 到 100 这个阶段,网红营销这个杠杆对你们的增长有多大影响?除了口口相传、用户持续分享之外,这是最大的增长杠杆吗?
Grant Lee: 口口相传确实是最大的。我们看所有新增订阅用户的增长,超过 50% 来自口口相传。要么是用户直接搜索、直接访问,输入 Gamma.op,要么是通过搜索引擎输入 Gamma 这种品牌关键词搜索——他们听说过 Gamma,正在寻找 Gamma。但对我们来说,社交媒体,尤其是网红营销,一直是一个放大器。每次我们投入网红营销,实际上都会看到口口相传进一步增长。而且你能直观地看到:基本上每花一点钱,通过网红引来的用户开始出现的同时,口口相传的效应还会额外带来 1.5 倍的用户增量,这一点非常有意思。
我觉得部分原因在于要认识到这一点……我们也大概理解为什么网红营销这么有效。大家都知道邓巴数(Dunbar’s number),也就是你的社交网络大约有 150 个人。你对这个网络中的人的信任程度,远超过街上随便一个陌生人。如果他们告诉你什么、推荐什么,会产生一种光环效应,你会逐渐信任他们。很多网红之所以会分享那么多自己的日常生活,就是因为他们想进入你的网络,想让你觉得跟他们很亲近。一旦你感觉很亲近,你就会信任他们,愿意接受他们分享的有用的东西。
所以当他们推荐一个工具的时候,会产生一种光环效应——你不会觉得这是来自一个陌生人,而会觉得是来自一个朋友。这就是为什么每次我们在那上面花钱,都能看到这种放大效果。你可能不一定预期到这一点。但对我们来说,网红营销从一开始就是这样一个放大器。
Lenny Rachitsky: 听这些真的很过瘾。我之前没有听过这么细致地讲网红营销怎么运作、怎么做好的。再问几个问题。你说你大概跟几千个网红合作过,是吗?
Grant Lee: 这是一年期间的总量。不是同时在进行的。一开始我们的预算很小,大概每个月 20 个创作者。然后逐步增加到 50 个、100 个。我们现在还没有完全规模化,但我完全能想象到一个阶段,每个月跟非常非常多的创作者合作。这样你就有机会测试各种不同的内容钩子(hook)、讲述产品的方式、价值主张。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太棒了。而且你说这里的关键是,你早期会跟每一个创作者、每一个网红花时间,确保他们理解你们在做什么,并且对此感到兴奋。这不是一个你可以直接外包的事情。
Grant Lee: 我觉得这其中有很大的价值,虽然很难量化。大多数创始人可能觉得自己太忙了,抽不出这个时间。但我认为这是一笔好的投资。因为回到那个目标——你希望他们感觉自己是你们团队的延伸。如果他们从来没见过你,你也没真正告诉他们产品怎么运作,他们只能自己去你的网站上摸索,那他们不可能觉得自己是团队的延伸,从一开始就不会有太多热情。
质量优先与小型网红的优势
Lenny Rachitsky: 所以我听到的是,尤其是刚开始的时候,质量优先于数量。然后还有一个我觉得非常反直觉的点:与其去找拥有大量受众的大网红,不如找那些小的人。你认为理想的受众规模大概是多少?或者你说的”小”具体是什么意思?
Grant Lee: 说实话,我觉得没有下限。因为像 TikTok 这样的平台,很多时候会给予新账号流量扶持。他们希望帮新账号获得曝光,因为从创作者的角度来想,如果那个新创作者觉得”来 TikTok 对我来说是一个巨大的收获”,他们就会更投入。所以真的没有下限。很多平台都在往这个方向转变,它们会大力奖励新创作者。所以你可以受众很小,这并不重要。你有一万粉丝,也挺好的。我觉得只要内容对目标受众来说是引人入胜的、真实自然的,它就很有机会真正传播开来。
Lenny Rachitsky: 关于 TikTok 这一点说得太好了——它不是基于粉丝数的,只要内容有用、让人觉得值得点击、值得看,算法就会把它推给很多人。说得太好了。
Grant Lee: 完全同意。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好,你在那条推文里还提到了几个点,我想确保我们都聊到。一个是你说 90% 的网红营销触达量来自不到 10% 的人。这里有没有什么你觉得大家需要知道的?
广撒网,找到那 10%
Grant Lee: 我的意思是,这归根结底还是在于——你很难知道那 10% 会从哪里来。所以你基本上必须撒一张非常大的网。你或许可以,我觉得,试着让自己相信——“我很擅长挑选创作者”,或者”我很擅长指导他们怎么发我的产品”。但现实是,即使是我,也没法猜准。我大概有一些直觉,但我必须确保自己足够广泛地去接触足够多的创作者,这样当数量够多、他们都在发帖的时候,总会有一些内容突然爆起来。而我并不是一个擅长预测的人,我也不够聪明到能判断哪条内容会爆。我只是知道,我们必须用这种概率游戏的方式,才能让它奏效。
Lenny Rachitsky: 所以你的一个建议是,很多人在这件事上失败,是因为他们起步规模太小,或者预算太少。你建议每月投入 1 万到 2 万美元,持续六个月,去尝试这件事。听起来你大概每月会合作 20 到 30 位创作者。这个框架对吗——就用这种方式来启动和探索?
Grant Lee: 对,完全正确。而且我想说的是,问题不仅仅在于预算太小,而是他们把所有鸡蛋放在一个篮子里。你同样可以轻松地把那 2 万美元全砸在一个更大的网红身上,然后说,“哦,没效果,那我再试一次。又没效果,好吧,我放弃了。“而我认为与其这样做,不如说,“好,这 2 万美元,我其实可以跟 40 个不同的网红合作,看看什么才真正有效。“在这 40 个人里,我会尝试各种不同的人设、各种不同的使用场景,花大量时间跟他们沟通,然后真正搞清楚什么有效、什么无效。
然后下个月带着这些经验加倍投入。如果教育类创作者有效,就继续找教育类的;如果顾问类有效,就继续找顾问类,去找更多的顾问,那里面还会有更多机会。我觉得把所有鸡蛋放在一个篮子里几乎是最稳妥的失败方式,因为你会错过大量机会,学习周期会拉得太长,最后你会得出结论——“这纯属浪费时间。"
"现实不是偶然”——找到有效内容后加倍投入
Lenny Rachitsky: 我感觉这整期播客都可以只聊这一个杠杆。太多我想继续聊的了,但还有更多问题,因为这真的太有用、太有意思了。你在那条推文里还有一句话,说”现实不是偶然”(reality is not an accident),这种方法就是你搞清楚什么真正有效的方式。一旦找到了,你就开始围绕那个信息点去发力。聊聊这个。
Grant Lee: 这又回到那个问题——如果你大量测试,最终会找到那条或那组真正爆火的内容。回到基本原则:让网红能够轻松地用他们自己的语言来讲你的故事。我们做了一件事,我们基本上把整个品牌开源了。我们有 Brand.gamma.app,上面有关于我们品牌的一切——我们的品牌调性和语气、美术方向、我们在 Midjourney 里用什么提示词来创造我们的美术风格——这样创作者也可以照着做,对吧?他们可以直接照搬所有这些,这样就不需要每次发 Gamma 相关内容时都从零开始。所有东西都现成在那里。
我觉得回到这个核心理念——就是让事情对他们来说极度简单,消除摩擦。他们自己本身已经有足够多事情要忙了。别让事情变得更难。如果你消除了摩擦,那就会进入一种节奏——添加新创作者很简单,让他们发帖很简单,复盘什么有效什么无效也很简单。如果你能连续好几个月不停地这样做,那么突然之间,命中爆款内容就变得容易了,因为你已经有了足够多的挥棒次数,总有一些会爆发。但你只有在之前做了所有这些艰苦的工作、消除了流程中的摩擦之后,才能走到那一步。到那时,感觉就像一台运转良好的机器。
最有效的平台:LinkedIn
Lenny Rachitsky: 有没有一个你觉得对你们做的事情最有帮助的平台?比如 TikTok、Instagram、LinkedIn,还是其他的?
Grant Lee: 嗯,我们在平台选择上也撒了很广的网。但有一点非常明确——LinkedIn 的转化率远远高于其他平台。高出 4 倍,也许 5 倍。我觉得老实说,很多人可能还在忽视 LinkedIn。所以,那上面的一些网红或创作者可能成本会稍微高一点。但如果你最终能更精准地定位,知道”嘿,这类创作者对我们的产品很有影响力”,那跟他们合作就觉得——“太好了。“转化率就是那么强,而且感觉我们才刚刚起步。
所以如果一开始你不确定,广泛撒网总是有帮助的。然后就跟网红策略一样——测试、迭代,你会弄清楚……这些事情大多会遵循幂律分布。所以一两个渠道会成为对你最重要的。比如,Twitter 对我们来说影响力就没那么大。但我觉得对于像 Notion 这样的工具,Twitter 就非常、非常有效。你不会真正知道答案,所以就去测试,然后在对你产品真正有效的渠道上加倍投入。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我猜现在很多听众在想,“等等,LinkedIn 的帖子有时候是赞助的?我不知道。“你怎么判断一篇帖子是不是赞助的?是看 #sponsored 之类的标签吗?他们怎么传达这个信息的?
Grant Lee: 通常他们会说自己是一个合作伙伴,或者确实是某种形式的赞助,或者会加上 #ad 之类的标签。这大概是你最常看到的方式。
Lenny Rachitsky: 顺便说一下,我不做这类事情。你在 LinkedIn 上见过我吗?我不做任何付费推广。只是让大家知道。我也没有这个打算。
先投品牌,再砸广告
Lenny Rachitsky: 我们回到品牌这个话题。你一个很大的经验教训是——在你大力投入付费广告和效果营销之前,先投资品牌。我猜你现在应该在 Facebook、Google 这些平台上也有一些广告投放了。
Grant Lee: 对,我们有投放广告做效果营销。我觉得有一种偏见,认为品牌营销和效果营销是相互对立的。我非常认同这样一个理念:品牌营销就是效果营销。一切都是某种形式的效果营销,只不过可能不那么容易归因——也就是说,把每一块钱的花费都精确地追溯到具体效果上会更困难,但这并不意味着它没有影响力。
我认为随着公司规模扩大,两者都需要投入,理想状态下它们会配合得非常好。你在品牌营销上投入越多,效果营销也会越强。这又回到之前说的——你是否有足够的创意素材来进行测试。如果你的范围太窄、又没有品牌基础,你就会限制住自己,反而削弱了做好效果营销的能力。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我很喜欢这个经验法则——如何判断自己在品牌上投入不足?就是看你在效果营销中能尝试的创意想法是否非常有限。
Grant Lee: 完全正确。
Lenny Rachitsky: 你们的设计系统是怎样的?是每次投放广告时大家都得从头设计、重新搭建所有框架吗?
Grant Lee: 对,就是这样。基本上你会有一种感觉——“如果我把这个规模放大到一千条创意素材,它们看起来还是一个统一的整体吗,还是七零八落?“如果觉得七零八落,那就得回到原点重新来过。
什么时候该重做品牌
Lenny Rachitsky: 你之前谈到品牌重塑的时候说,它花的时间比你预期的长得多,费用也比你预期的高得多。我觉得这是所有人听到”品牌重塑”时的顾虑——“我没时间搞这个。“同时我也在想,因为你们的产品本身非常视觉化,所以在品牌上投入时间和金钱确实更有意义。对于一般创业者,你有没有什么建议?比如”这种情况下值得投”,“这个信号说明你真的需要在这方面大力投入”,或者”暂时不搞也问题不大”。
Grant Lee: 我确实觉得这更适用于偏 prosumer 或消费者的产品,因为你很大一部分产品体验是在为用户营造一种感受——他们的体验是什么。而这个体验远在他们进入产品之前就开始了。可能是看到了一则广告、一块广告牌或什么内容,“嗯,这引起了我的兴趣。”
然后你需要某种对称性的信息传达——他们看到广告,然后进入产品或着陆你的网站,感觉是一致的,觉得”好的,这挺有意思,我要一路注册下去,然后可能真的开始使用这个产品。”
如果是 B2B 产品,情况就不太一样了,因为不太依赖最初那一瞬间。他们可能只是通过同事推荐知道了产品,然后注册,再经历一个漫长的采购流程。这种情况下品牌可能也有点关系,但远不如品牌能触达很多接触点的产品那样重要。
Gamma 的增长结构
Lenny Rachitsky: 我想聊聊更广泛层面帮助你们增长的因素,但在此之前,我想先把 Gamma 的增长来源具象化。在年度经常性收入(Annual Recurring Revenue)突破 1000 万之后——如果我没记错的话,超过 50% 是口碑和自然增长,用户互相分享,做演示时互相推荐,“哦,这是 Gamma 做的,你去看看,注册一下。“然后第二大块应该是网红营销(influencer marketing)、社交媒体之类。第三才是效果/付费营销?
Grant Lee: 对,没错。
效果营销的入门建议
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的。关于最后这一块,对于那些刚开始探索效果营销的人——基本上就是 Facebook 广告、Google 广告这些平台——你还有什么觉得有帮助、值得大家了解的建议吗?
Grant Lee: 我只有两条建议。第一,回到我最初的建议——在拥有口碑之前不要投入效果营销。不要自欺欺人地认为通过启动效果营销就能解决其他问题。先把口碑做起来,这样你进入效果营销时就有一些顺风势能,然后再逐步加码。
第二,设定约束。你不希望自己的产品超过 50% 的用户获取都来自付费获客。如果出现这种情况,说明你的核心增长引擎出了问题。这又直接回到第一点——核心增长引擎出了问题,你就像一个漏水的桶,花大量钱往漏斗顶端灌人,但他们走不完全程。你需要先修复其他环节,再去加码付费投放。这不是说一点钱都不花,而是在核心增长引擎真正跑通之前不要大力加码。
Lenny Rachitsky: 你说的第一点——等到有口碑再投入效果营销——这本质上是不是说你的增长中应该有相当大比例来自口碑、直接访问和自然增长?
Grant Lee: 对,没错。对我们来说,即使在现在的规模下,仍然有超过 50% 的新注册来自口碑。这对我们来说是一个信号——“好的,口碑还在起作用,人们在使用产品,在推荐给别人。“你要先有这种感觉,然后再去加大其他渠道的投入。
Lenny Rachitsky: 有没有一个你觉得对大家有帮助的百分比参考?比如 25% 以上?还是说只要口碑增长让你觉得”我们有自然增长作为主要引擎”就行?
Grant Lee: 我觉得这取决于你想要多激进。一个粗略的经验法则是——越多越好。如果超过 50%,我觉得那很好;如果接近这个数字,也不错。还是回到那句话——不要自欺欺人地以为光靠广告就能实现增长。因为你可以这么做,但其他一切都会变得越来越难。
如果你依赖付费获客作为主要增长引擎,你得做好客户获取成本(Customer Acquisition Cost,CAC)持续上升的准备。你要触达的新受众越广,成本就越高。所以不要假设成本会保持不变,否则你会突然发现自己在一个越跑越快的跑步机上停不下来。早期只投入少量资金时很容易上钩,而一旦陷得太深就几乎不可能从那台跑步机上下来了。所以要提前预见到这一点,给自己一个真正能长期维持增长的机会。
Lenny Rachitsky: 非常重要的建议。好的,你还分享过几个对 Gamma 增长至关重要的要素。其中一个是在发布前就与用户分享原型。具体是怎么做的?这意味着什么?为什么这么有效?
发布前原型测试的巨大价值
Grant Lee: 对我们来说这是一个巨大的突破口。回想早期,当你只是想把产品交到任何人手上的时候,你会去找朋友试用,然后他们又会对你说谎,告诉你产品有多好,之后就再也不用了。
理想的做法是,你招募一批真正符合目标用户画像的潜在用户或客户,但他们对你产品的成败完全没有利益关系。他们根本不在乎你的产品是否成功,只是来测试的。对我们来说,就是那些经常制作幻灯片的人——让他们直接上手 Gamma,几乎不给什么背景说明,就告诉他们:“这是一个 PowerPoint 的替代品,试试看吧。”
然后在他们经历引导流程、测试产品的过程中,让他们把脑海里想到的一切都说出来——描述他们看到了什么,告诉我们在试图做什么。我们会给他们布置几个任务,比如”创建一份内容”。当你看着他们操作、同时听着他们的描述时,你会立刻感受到那种痛苦。
你会看到他们在所有那些挣扎的地方、所有那些对界面感到困惑的地方,然后你就能把这种痛苦内化,说:“好,我们回去必须修这个,这根本没法用。“我们团队经常自己 dogfooding(吃自己的狗粮,即内部试用),所以很容易走到一个极端——对自己的产品太熟悉了,一切都觉得很顺手,所有东西都知道在哪里。但当你真正听到别人描述他们使用产品的体验时,那是一份礼物。
你会突然意识到:“好,现在我知道该把时间花在哪了。“用户连第三个页面都到不了,他们卡在第一个页面,因为连那个我们觉得再明显不过的按钮都找不到。那就回去,重新设计、重新架构那部分。
我们对所有环节都这样做:落地页、引导体验、新功能发布、导出、分享——每一个环节都经过用户测试,亲眼看到哪些地方行得通、哪些不行。每一次我们都会发现一些令人痛苦但显而易见需要修复的问题,然后回去修好它。
如何规模化用户测试
Lenny Rachitsky: 这种做法怎么规模化?你怎么把每一个新想法、每一个新功能变更都拿去给用户测试?你们有一个封闭测试群组,还是用了某个平台?具体是怎么操作的?
Grant Lee: 有几个很好的平台。Voicepanel,也是一家 YC 公司——完全披露一下,我是他们的天使投资人。还有 UserTesting 这类平台,能帮你找到符合目标画像的用户。比如我们的情况,就是特定职能岗位上的人,或者经常做幻灯片的人,你可以用这些平台很快地把测试项目规模化起来。
一旦团队学会了使用这些平台——我们可能早上有个想法,下午就已经在跑一个相当完整的实验或用户研究了,到了晚上或第二天,团队就能一起看所有的反馈。所以搭建好之后速度非常快,关键是怎么把这个流程正确地建立起来。
我觉得我们早期还用了另一个机制——当我们有了一些反复使用的用户后,我们为核心用户创建了一个项目,叫 Gammaster Program。我们把他们放进一个独立的 Slack 工作区,在那里分享非常早期的原型——有时候是线框图,有时候是可运行的 functional prototype(功能原型),让他们给出初步反馈。这对于更后期的功能或那些不涉及引导流程的部分特别有帮助,因为用户已经理解了 Gamma,比如”你要怎么分享?“这类新功能。
比如说,这就是一个很好的方式来测试新功能,因为他们已经了解 Gamma,现在你加入了新的功能,我们又可以看到他们在哪里挣扎、听到他们遇到困难的地方。拥有一个独立的 Slack 工作区一直是个非常好的方式。任何时候我们在考虑什么东西,他们都是第一批知道的,给我们一个早期信号——方向对不对。
快速反馈循环
Lenny Rachitsky: 我很喜欢你分享的这个工作流——早上有了想法,下午就做出原型。你是用 AI 原型工具做的吗?比如 Cursor、Lovable 之类的?
Grant Lee: 对,或者也可能是……我们很幸运,很多设计师也会写代码,所以即使在最近这些工具出现之前,他们就能做出某种可运行的原型,然后把它上线让用户开始体验。
Lenny Rachitsky: 所以你的流程是:早上有想法,用各种工具做出原型,到当天结束时就已经从真实用户那里通过 Voicepanel 或 UserTesting 这些平台拿到了反馈。光是这个循环,我想就能帮你省下可能好几个月的时间——否则你会花几个月做一个没人想要的东西,发布上线,然后失败。
Grant Lee: 完全正确。我觉得这对现在大量使用 vibe-coded apps(凭感觉写的应用)的人来说可能更有帮助。没错,你缩短了把东西做出来的时间。现在去证明它对某些用户是有用的。而且这应该是每天、每周都在做的事,你应该能跑大量这样的测试循环,然后在那些看起来有效果的方向上继续深挖。
这几乎像是一种方式来加速跑通那个早期阶段——你处在 idea maze(想法迷宫)中,觉得某个东西可能行得通,但你如何真正突破,让用户真正在你构建的产品中找到价值?
Lenny Rachitsky: 我很喜欢这一点,因为很多人听到”在开发之前就把东西拿给用户测试”这个建议时,觉得听起来很难、很重。但你描述的方式非常自动化、非常快。你不需要去咖啡店随机找人。这些平台就在那里,你把东西放上去,到当天结束时就能拿到反馈。
Grant Lee: 完全同意,这能让你快得多。
小步快跑的测试哲学
Lenny Rachitsky: 有没有哪个功能你曾经特别兴奋,做好了拿去测试之后发现——“好吧,这是一个巨大的失败”?
Grant Lee: 我不觉得有哪个……我们总是把东西拆得很小。所以我们在早期测试的东西从来都不是什么大功能,永远只是一个起点——“这可能是一个有意思的方向。”
然后我们拿着最初的发现,再围绕它真正构建产品。从来不是那种”我们花了四个月做一个东西,然后看看有没有人真的想要它”。我们几乎总是从极早期就开始测试。然后一大批想法立刻就死掉了,但它们本身还只是很小的想法。
那些通过了初步测试的想法,你才开始往可能更具颠覆性或更高附加值的方向去建设。而等到真正发布的时候,你已经经过了十层不同级别的测试和迭代,产品才最终面世。
实验思维与早期验证
Lenny Rachitsky: 你和你们公司的运作方式有一个很有意思的地方——你们是 Optimizely 出身,所以对实验方法论非常熟悉。很多人认为 A/B 测试和实验对创业公司来说没意义,因为规模太小、数据量不够。但我从你这里听到的,而且我知道你也经常提到的是,即使在早期阶段,其实也有很多方式可以用实验思维来思考问题。关于这一点,你还有什么觉得大家需要听到的吗?
Grant Lee: 对。我真的觉得这更多是一种……你面对几乎所有问题或机会时的心态,就是那句话:“坚定的观点,松散的持有(Strong opinions weakly held)。“我觉得在面对很多事情时,带着一些假设或假说进去完全没问题,但你始终应该知道,有办法可以开始验证这些东西。
作为创始人,你一直在试图建立信念,而建立信念的方式不是把所有东西都留在脑子里,而是把它拿出来,开始跟用户、潜在客户测试,然后开始观察哪些东西确实感觉是对的。有时候你有足够的数据达到统计显著性,有时候更多的是一种”好吧,至少我们做了一个快速的直觉校验,获得了一些定性反馈”。我认为这依然是有价值的。不应该是那种非此即彼的——“必须达到统计显著性才有用。“我不认为是这样的。
Gamma 的起点:两条路径的并行测试
事实上,我可以分享一下 Gamma 最早期的故事。我们刚起步的时候,知道自己想帮助改变人们沟通的方式,当时我们实际上有两个不同的想法在同时并行推进。当然其中一个是演示文稿——重新构想人们创建演示文稿的方式;另外我们还有一个单独的想法,叫做 The Lobby,一个虚拟办公室。这又是在疫情高峰期,混合办公和远程办公要普遍得多。所以这是一个团队里所有人——不管你在不在同一个办公室——都可以聚集、协作的地方,感觉还挺奇妙的。
我们对这两个方向同时投入了六个月。虚拟办公室和演示文稿产品,两个都做了六个月。我们会同时对两者进行 dogfooding(内部试用自家产品)。所以经常出现的情况是,我们坐在虚拟办公室里,用演示文稿工具做展示,同时使用这两个产品。六个月之后,我们得出了结论:要全力押注演示文稿工具。原因是,当我们审视虚拟办公室的时候,我们始终觉得自己在跟一个永远无法超越的东西竞争——那就是真实生活中的体验,能够跟同事并肩工作,身处一个真正让你感觉大家在一起创造的环境中。
虚拟办公室可以做得相当好,但我们永远无法打败那个。所以我们在自己想象力的上限方面天然就受到了限制——这个产品到底能有多好。而演示文稿产品则不同,我们最终冒出了一百万个更多的想法,觉得可以引入的东西能够比你现在用 PowerPoint 的方式好得多。我们对此充满了能量。
所以对我们来说,这就是一次 A/B 测试——把两件投入了同等时间的东西放在一起测试,然后在另一端走出来的时候意识到,其中一个才是我们要倾注所有心血、汗水和泪水去打磨的产品,因为我们看到了它的潜力。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我不知道你们还探索过那个其他想法。疫情期间有太多创业公司做了同样的事,觉得”这就是未来,我们都会远程工作,那就来虚拟办公室里远程协作吧。“有一家我叫 Lindy 的创业公司,我现在是它的一个小股东,现在它已经是一家很大的 AI agent 公司了,他们当时也做了完全一样的事。我猜那也是他们最初的整体概念——就是那些小头像,像一个小游戏一样,你走来走去,走进各个虚拟会议室。
Grant Lee: 对,那个产品做起来挺有意思的,但确实如此。
Lenny Rachitsky: 嗯,有意思的是我们基本上又回归了均值——“好吧,人们又回到办公室了。那段经历挺有趣的。“虽然情况确实也发生了一些变化。我想强调你刚才提到的一个观点,我觉得非常有力量,我之前没听过有人这样描述——就是极早期测试原型的威力,利用那些让这件事变得超级简单的平台。
我们总是听到,“好吧,你有一个模型、一个原型。对,用户测试总感觉是一件很重的事情。你得有一个用户研究团队,去做访谈,做一对一的深度交流。“而你描述的是一种……我不知道为什么大家没有都这样做。有了 AI 工具,现在实在太简单了。有个想法,做一个原型,拿去测试——我不确定,大概是几十个人?平均来说一个原型会有多少人跑一遍?
Grant Lee: 20 个。
Lenny Rachitsky: 20 个人。所以 20 个人看看这个东西,给你一堆反馈,你发现这个想法很蠢,或者”这里有一个值得深入的金子。“而不用先去构建一整个产品,也不用做大量用户研究会议之类的。超级酷。
达到一亿年度经常性收入的关键杠杆
好的,还有没有其他重要经验或杠杆帮助你们增长到今天的一亿年度经常性收入(Annual Recurring Revenue)、二十亿美元的公司?我们聊了网红营销,聊了测试原型、投资品牌,还有一些付费增长。还有别的吗?
Grant Lee: 对我们来说,很重要的一点是在这个环境中适应和快速行动的能力。我们能够取得今天的成绩,我归功于几个方面。第一,我们的团队确实又小又精干,行动非常快。我认为这天然就意味着我们必须寻找很多能让小团队撬动大量不同事情的杠杆。
所以一方面,我们可以谈谈如何构建像我们这样的团队,以及哪些做法我认为是有效的。另一方面,回到实验这个话题——它对我们来说是一个巨大的解锁,因为它不仅让你能够测试东西、大量迭代,还能让你构建得更加高效。我们从一开始就有很好的单位经济模型,我们盈利运营,利润率很高。
如果实验不是我们的核心基础设施,我认为这不可能做到,因为诱惑会是你直接把最贵的模型砸到每个任务上,觉得这样就行了。但实际情况从来不是这样的。所以我们能够在生产环境中同时测试 20 个不同的模型,始终在试图把我们为用户交付的价值与我们规模化运营的能力对齐——这一直是幕后的支撑。
这些并不总是容易量化的东西,也不总是你会广泛分享的东西,但它确实是我们 DNA 的核心。再回到一个来自 Optimizely 的团队——这可能并不令人意外——但我确实认为这是我们能够在这一水平上执行的关键之一。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我很喜欢你们的产品如此美观、体验如此出色。这是一个非常好的例子,说明实验精神和真正痴迷于跑实验、做 A/B 测试——数据也可以创造出真正美丽的产品和体验,而不是那种感觉像是某种被微优化到极致的流程。
设计团队的重要性
Grant Lee: 完全同意。回到团队的一部分,有一支在其中发挥了巨大作用——你想打造一款人们会谈论品味、品牌和所有这些东西的产品,谈论它们所唤起的感受。我不打算去争论是或不是,但我确实认为这是有影响的。对我们来说,在某个阶段,超过四分之一——大约四分之一的团队成员是产品设计师。我觉得这是一个不太直观的投资比例,或者至少不太常见。你不会看到很多在我们这个阶段或更早期的初创公司,团队中有四分之一是产品设计师。
我认为这对我们来说是一项重要的投资,因为当你思考 AI 公司时,有那么多公司在尝试发明新的交互面或新的用户体验,如果你不真正把基础打牢,不真正深入思考用户问题以及如何以新颖的方式解决它们,这是不可能实现的。所以对我们来说,我们在最初就做了这项投资,即使这与其他初创公司的做法相悖,因为我们确实认为这是正确的事。
关于 GPT wrapper 的商业模式
Lenny Rachitsky: 好。我接下来肯定想花更多时间聊招聘。不过在聊那个之前,你提到了一个概念,就是你们被很多人描述为一家 GPT wrapper 公司。你们本质上是构建在其他模型之上的,做一些很酷的事情,然后为此收费。历史上——当然现在发生了很大的转变——一直有一种感觉,“好吧,你只是模型上面的一层薄壳。当模型本身在做这件事并向你们收费来做所有这些 AI 工作时,这里怎么会有什么护城河或杠杆效应,或者长期商业模式呢?”
现在感觉人们开始意识到,也许这才是唯一能赚到钱的地方,因为模型本身就极难与之竞争,那已经不再是一个可以建立业务的地方了。聊聊你对 GPT wrapper 这个概念的理解,以及人们可能没有理解到的商业机会。
Grant Lee: 如果你仅仅是在一个模型或一个提供商之上做一层封装,确实,可能只有有限的作用或增值。但当你开始思考,“好,我要深入这一个工作流,而且不仅仅是一个模型。“可能是 20 多个模型在驱动产品的各个不同部分,然后你思考所需的编排(orchestration),你思考——显然如果你在不断实验,能够跨最新模型和已经存在的更便宜的模型进行测试——你做了很多事情来真正……你的工作就是,再次强调,对齐价值,在对你作为企业可持续的方式下,最大化你交付给终端用户的价值。所以这其中的内容要丰富得多。
对我们来说,我们一直热衷于与客户、用户保持非常近的距离。对他们来说,他们待完成的任务(job to be done)是视觉沟通、视觉叙事。而今天的默认工具是打开 PowerPoint 或 Google Slides,创造某个东西所需的努力……我们都有过那种深夜还在格式化幻灯片、试图找到正确布局的经历,所有那些手动而繁琐的工作。
那么,如果你能把这些全部抽象掉,给他们一些更令人愉悦、更简单、轻松得多的东西呢?这在客户回头使用你的产品方面能为你赢得什么?所以这就是我们专注的一切——你需要深入工作流,对用户以及你试图解决的任务保持同理心,当然还要应用最好的技术,这样你才能兑现那个比现状好得多的产品体验的承诺。
我认为如果你能聚焦于——不管你是不是 wrapper 都不重要——你所使用和应用的技术是否真正产生了影响?这才是最终目标。
成功的 GPT wrapper 公司框架
Lenny Rachitsky: 这是一个非常棒的框架,用来思考如何构建一家成功的 wrapper 公司……我不知道,我会继续使用这个词。我不知道这是不是[听不清]的,但确实有些想法行不通。这些模型公司也在不时推出自己的产品。
所以我很喜欢你在这里描述的内容,它几乎像一个启发式法则,能告诉你是否存在机会、以及如何成为一家成功的 GPT “wrapper 公司”。我加了引号。听起来也许有三个要点。但聊聊看,如果你想一下要点清单,要在现有模型之上建立成功的业务需要做什么。
Grant Lee: 我认为最重要的事情是,在我们谈论技术之前——我们现在跳到了尝试应用最有趣的模型或技术来解决某个问题的部分——从解决你真正关心的问题开始。
我认为现在非常诱人的是追逐闪亮的东西,比如一个创始人可能通过做那个 GPT wrapper 来获得一些初步的增长势头,解决随便什么问题。然后你看到了一些起色,就顺势而为了。但在你这样做之前,你应该思考,“这是一个我能投入五到十年去真正解决的问题吗?我对它足够在乎吗?”
因为如果你做不到,你永远不会真正……去思考克服各种各样的障碍,无论是其他初创公司还是其他在位企业工具,它们都在试图做同样的事情。
所以对我们来说,我们回到……我们创办这家公司是因为我们真的在乎帮助改变人们沟通想法的方式。我们真的觉得视觉沟通、视觉叙事这件事很重要。它帮助每个人提升,给人们更多机会去做那些过去——如果你不擅长做幻灯片,你的想法可能就死了,而另一个能够更好地表达想法的人最终赢得了交易,或者赢得了他们的经理或老板的青睐。
所以我们觉得这是不对的,这感觉不对,那么我们能不能帮助实现视觉叙事、视觉沟通的普及化?那就是我们的北极星。然后你回去思考,“好的,每一步,我可以应用哪些工具和技术来帮助解决这个问题,真正让普通人更接近我们的长期愿景?”
当然,AI 一直以来,再次强调,是一份礼物——是的,你可以将其应用于解决这个任务。你也可以将 AI 应用于许多不同的任务。弄清楚什么是你足够在乎、愿意深入的问题。因为回到这个想法,你需要拥有端到端的工作流。客户需要……你希望你的产品存在于他们的脑海中某个地方,当他们想到,“嘿,我需要创建一个演示文稿。“他们会把你作为默认工具。
从他们开始创建的那一刻到他们完成并发送给老板的那一刻,这个端到端的体验需要感觉很神奇,需要感觉很棒。我认为除非这是一个你自己深刻了解的工作流,或者你深度关心并愿意为他人解决的工作流,否则你真的做不到这一点。
Lenny Rachitsky: 所以我从中听到的一些要素,第一,就是真正在乎解决这个问题,而不是来自于”哇,这个很酷的东西出现了而且有效,哇,也许我可以把这个东西卖给别人。“因为你最终可能需要在这个东西上工作十年、二十年。
关于定价策略
Grant Lee: 完全同意。
Lenny Rachitsky: 第二点:真正、真正深入地理解这个问题,对试图解决这个问题的人有真正的共情。你在之前的工作中就遇到过创建演示文稿的问题,所以你理解它,我猜自从你开始做这件事之后理解得更深了。本质上就是:真的非常在乎这个问题,在问题上扎得非常深,对面对这个问题的人有真正的共情,然后才是真正能够利用现有技术来解决这个问题的能力。
你还提到你们用了 20 个不同的模型来完成你们做的事情。稍微多谈谈这一点吧,因为人们可能会想,“哦,我可以直接去 ChatGPT 或 Claude,它就能帮我创建一个超棒的演示文稿。“为什么需要 20 个不同的模型?为什么这是你们成功中如此重要的一部分?
Grant Lee: 对,回到工作流这个话题,你要做的是把用户创建过程的每一步都拆解开来。从最初的想法萌芽,到创建一个你想呈现或表达的提纲,再到生成初稿——我们给你展示什么?然后到编辑内容,比如”好吧,我有一个初稿,但它只做到了 60%,我怎么才能到 100%?“这些都可能需要不同的模型。最初生成提纲可能更适合用专门为创建最佳提纲、最佳叙事、最佳故事线而优化的模型,而不是那种让你回头审视整个文档的模型。Gamma 的智能体可以审查你的整份文档,然后说,“如果让我提建议的话,你可能需要改变这些卡片的视觉布局,你可能需要更换这些卡片的图片或视觉元素,让它们与其他部分保持一致。”
这些都是每个模型在不同方面可能各有擅长的例子。所以关键在于理解这如何拆解到终端用户的体验——他们坐下来,使用产品,做他们的演示文稿,你如何帮助他们?我认为只有理解了那个工作流,然后把每个环节拆解开来,为每个环节找到最合适的工具,你才能做到这一点。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这太有意思了。本质上就是,这里是 AI 需要为我们做的事情——我不知道,想象某种故事板,然后为每一个步骤找出合适的模型、模型的级别,以及针对该模型的提示词,来尽可能好地完成每个步骤。
Grant Lee: 完全正确。而且这也适用于视觉层面,比如找到合适的图片。我认为某些模型在照片级逼真输出方面非常出色,而另一些模型则更适合艺术感更强的风格或更抽象的感觉。所以你同样可以为不同的任务选择最合适的模型。这并不意味着你永远不会用其他模型,而是在整个工作流中,内容本身会决定什么是最佳选择。在那个特定的使用场景下,你始终在映射:终端用户在那一时刻到底想完成什么?
Lenny Rachitsky: 在你们的工作中,哪些模型你觉得最有用?有没有什么让你意外的发现,比如”哇,这个模型在这件事上真的很好,而在那件事上真的不行”?
Grant Lee: 意不意外不好说,但排行榜一直在变,所以你几乎必须保持一种可适应的心态。我们现在正开始进入更多个性化的阶段——回到前面说的,咨询师的需求和教育工作者的需求是不同的。教育工作者想要吸引学生的注意力,他们可能希望语言和视觉更活泼生动,这很合理。咨询师可不能这样,他们需要更结构化、信息密度更高的东西。那么,同一个工具如何同时满足这两种需求?这正是有趣的地方,而且几乎可以说并不存在一个”最佳模型”——而是对那个特定用户来说什么是合适的模型?这其实是一个更难解决的问题,我们才刚刚开始尝试拥抱这些。
Lenny Rachitsky: 有没有哪个让你觉得”哦,这真的挺酷的”,用在出乎意料的地方?
Grant Lee: 早期的时候,像创建提纲这个环节,Perplexity 其实非常好用。这不是人们常提到的工具,但在创建提纲、进行网络搜索,以及将其中一些元素整合在一起方面,对我们来说相当强大。
定价与招聘
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的,还有两件事我想聊聊。一个是定价——你们是如何确定定价方式的。你们很早就开始商业化,这对 AI 创业公司来说感觉非常关键,因为你在推理和其他方面花的是真金白银。然后我想聊聊招聘。关于定价,你们什么时候决定是时候真正开始收费了?然后你们是怎么选择定价方式和具体价格的?
Grant Lee: 我们算是被迫才开始做定价和包装的。我提到过我们在 2023 年 3 月那次大规模 AI 发布。那时我们还没有收入,所以我们只想——我们把所有精力都集中在前 30 秒的体验上,真的是全员投入,只想着把这个做好。我们在商业化方面花的时间为零。所以我们有一个积分系统,所有新用户获得 400 个积分。一旦用完这些积分,AI 功能就基本被切断了。然后我们的 Intercom 客服就炸了,人们问”我怎么购买更多积分?我想继续用这个东西。“这是非常合理的问题。所以整个四月我们被迫快速做了一次定价和包装的方案。我们做了几件不同的事情。
我们做了 Van Westendorp 价格敏感度测试,就是了解——
Lenny Rachitsky: 经典方法。
Grant Lee: 整体的付费意愿。所以我们用了这个方法。我们还结合了一些联合分析(conjoint analysis),就是试图了解用户真正看重你产品中的哪些功能或特性。我们对大量早期用户做了调研,最终得出了一个价格点。一开始我们只有一种套餐类型,大概每月 20 美元。部分原因也是我们意识到不需要过度纠结,因为当时正是第一批 AI 公司和初创产品涌现的时期,你几乎会被锚定在 ChatGPT 的定价上,因为所有人都熟悉那个价格点。所以我们问自己,要把它搞得多复杂?
我们始终默认消除摩擦,让用户尽可能容易地理解。所以最终我们定了一个类似的价格点,在 2023 年 5 月底作为 V1 发布了。对我们来说,我们想看几件事:有了这个初始价格点,我们在那个价格点上是否经济可行?我们是否真的在赚钱?我们持续监测了很多个月,得出的结论是,是的,在那个价格点上我们仍然能产生相当不错的利润率,这让我们可以把利润再投入业务增长。
Grant Lee: 继续增加人手,同时把更多资金投入到推理成本中,以及我们想做的各种 AI 实验。所以我们一直以来的定价和套餐设计原则是——不仅要让用户容易理解,显然你也需要有很强的转化率——更重要的是,你要觉得这个价格能支撑起一个持久的、可持续的商业模式。如果定价不对,你随时可以回过头去调整,但这是你应该尽早开始监测的事情。
Lenny Rachitsky: 有意思的是,我们请过 ChatGPT 的负责人来播客,他分享了他们是如何确定 ChatGPT 定价的——就是用 Google Forms 做的 Van Westendorp 价格敏感度测试。
Grant Lee: 完全同意。对,我听过那一期,做得很棒。
Lenny Rachitsky: 哎呀,那个问卷真是绝了。而且不只是这个问卷本身有多简洁,我脑海里浮现出那幅 XKCD 漫画——一个开源的小模块撑起了整个世界的架构——这个问卷就像是那个小模块,藏在一切背后。但有意思的是,就这么一个决策,对整个 AI 创业生态产生了连锁反应——每月 20 美元。当然,所有人就都跟着这么做。
Grant Lee: 完全同意。谁知道如果他们选了不同的数字会怎样,但这就是现实。
Lenny Rachitsky: 要是定价 25 美元,所有人都会富裕那么多。想象一下由此带来的 GDP 增长……
Grant Lee: 哈哈,是啊。
重新审视定价决策
Lenny Rachitsky: 好了,回到刚才的话题。所以 Van Westendorp 价格敏感度测试帮你们确定了价格点,然后你又提到联合分析(conjoint analysis)——我们博客上好像有一篇客座文章专门讲怎么做这个,如果没有的话我们会找到合适的资源分享给大家。你们开始收费的时机——是在产品正式上线之后吗?上线时没有付费功能,用户主动说”我想付费,我想继续用”,你们才说”好吧,那我们得开始收费了”。
Grant Lee: 没错,是这样。
Lenny Rachitsky: 回头看的话,有没有什么你觉得”当时应该换种方式做”或”应该提前考虑的”,给现在正在做定价的人一些建议?
Grant Lee: 这个问题比较难回答。我觉得你显然不想毫不思考就随便定一个价格,但对我们来说,在资源有限的情况下,我们只专注于一件事——获取初始用户并实现有机增长。我觉得判断你是否拥有 product-market fit 大概有两个检验点:第一个是有机增长,第二个是用户是否愿意为产品付费。如果这两点都通过了,你至少在某个细分市场里有了一定的产品市场匹配。所以我觉得这两个问题都很重要,具体取决于你的资源情况。理想状态下,你可以同时在这两方面进行实验。等到你真正有了付费用户的时候,你就已经验证了这些关键指标。
Lenny Rachitsky: 顺便说一下,我很喜欢你们上线定价时的心态。你们说”好,我们来搞清楚到底能不能赚钱”。对 AI 公司来说,这并不是理所当然的事。
Grant Lee: 嗯,我们也没有别的选择,因为当时资金也快见底了。如果不赚钱的话,我们真的会陷入很困难的处境。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这点说得太好了。你们并没有像很多 AI 公司那样手里握着大把资金可以烧,那种”先花钱再说,以后再想怎么赚钱”的模式。
Grant Lee: 确实如此。在几个月内,我们的年度经常性收入(Annual Recurring Revenue)就达到了百万美元,并且实现了盈利。对于一个几个月前还在埋头想办法怎么活下去的公司来说,这是两个非常令人振奋的里程碑。
Lenny Rachitsky: 真是个精彩的故事。我太激动能讲述这个故事了。
招聘理念
好了,最后一个话题——招聘。你在招聘方面有一些非常犀利的观点,而且显然效果很好。关于招聘你学到了什么?你的招聘方法是什么?
Grant Lee: 我们内部有一句信条,甚至在 AI 产品上线之前就有了,就是”招聘要极其缓慢”。我觉得诱惑在于,一旦事情开始起效,你就想立刻开始扩张,不断增加人手。但对我们来说,这总觉得不太对。我们希望非常有策略地搭建团队,保持精简,同时确保每个团队成员都觉得自己在日常工作中能产生高度的影响力。这个原则从最初就是这样。所以即使规模扩大之后,我们凭借精简的团队一直保持着很高的效率。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我觉得很多人听到”保持精简、提高效率”这个建议时,可能会觉得比较抽象。但你有一些更具体的建议来说明这到底意味着什么。你非常强调每个人的杠杆效应,你很关注人均收入。能聊聊这个吗?
Grant Lee: 我们当然会看人均收入这类指标,但我们从来不让它成为指引方向的北极星。它并不决定我们的战略。盈利能力也是一样。我认为正是因为注重效率,盈利和增长反而成了自然的结果。但对我们来说,核心是我们非常在意招募到正确的团队成员。作为创始人,你很容易给自己设定错误的目标从而搬起石头砸自己的脚。如果你的目标是把团队人数翻倍、招满一百人,那这个目标本身就变了。目标不再是招到最优秀的人,不再是维持高标准的质量要求,目标变成了”凑够一百人”,所有人都围绕这个在努力。那接下来会怎样?
如果这就是目标,那被牺牲掉的就是——好吧,也许我们会接受”差不多就行”的员工,我们要确保招到一百人,因为一百人能帮我们进入下一个增长阶段。然后再下一个增长阶段。我们一直在努力抵制这种诱惑。我们希望每一个走进门加入团队的人,都是真正能代表 Gamma 的那种人。我们的前 10 到 12 名员工,我们花了大量时间来确保团队 DNA 的正确。Brian Chesky 谈过这个——你的目标是先把那前 10 个人搞对,然后才能复制出下一个 10 个人,再复制下一个 10 个人。但那最初的 10 个人必须高度凝聚——相同的价值观、相同的原则、相同的雄心、相同的愿景。如果不是这样,那你复制的是什么?
到那时你只是在增加人头数。而且很容易就变成只是在增加人头数,因为我们追逐的是下一个闪亮的新初创公司里的人。所以我们非常专注于那最初的 10 个人。这让我们拥有了一个真正有凝聚力的团队,大家愿意长期留下来。很多创始人会关注产品端不能有”漏水桶”,但团队端同样适用。如果你的团队是个漏水桶,人员不断流失,来来去去,那是巨大的成本。连续性的代价是极其庞大的,而且真的很难量化。
团队连续性与文化 DNA
Grant Lee: 我刚才提到我们最初的 10 名员工,10 个人到今天仍然全部在岗,已经五年了。这种连续性意味着你拥有那种沉淀下来的组织记忆。意味着人们可以持续地建设,并保持那种凝聚力。所以我觉得这一点很难量化,但我确实认为,对于新的初创公司,我的建议是务必要认真对待这件事,把它做到一个你真正有信心的程度——当你添加下一个 10 人、下一个 100 人的时候,你是在复制同样的 DNA,而不是在往公司里塞一堆随机的人。
Lenny Rachitsky: 你有一条非常具体的建议,就是招聘通才而非在某一领域极其专深的人,为什么这一点如此重要?实际操作中是什么样的?
通才时代与”球员兼教练”模式
Grant Lee: 现在这个时代非常像是通才的时代,或者说通才正在崛起。当我们考虑一个可以非常扁平的团队时,你仍然希望人们在某些领域有突出的尖刺。比如,一个会写代码的产品设计师,那太好了。这让你能够横跨很多不同的领域。而且在一个超级扁平的组织里,每个人都要身兼数职,这意味着如果你是通才,默认情况下你就能戴上很多不同的帽子。这帮助我们维持了这样一个理念:我们面前的工作和机会可以轻松扩展。每个人扮演着举足轻重的角色。他们不需要等待批准。他们可以主动去认领一项工作,因为工作就在那里,即使他们不是自始至终完成它的人,至少可以先把事情启动起来。
所以对我们来说,通才的崛起确实会越来越重要。你始终可以通过与在某些领域高度专业化的承包商或代理机构合作来补充这一点。比如回到网红营销的例子,你可能会与一家代理机构合作,而不是去扩大自己的网红营销团队。你和一支高度专业化的团队合作。但我的营销团队全部是通才。我们的营销负责人最近在旧金山策划了一场很酷的无人机表演,现场来了四千人,市长都来了,她从零到一策划了整个项目并端到端地管理了整个项目,同时还管理着整个营销团队。这就是通才的理念——能够扮演各种不同的角色,仍然可以产生巨大的影响力。对我们来说,这与我提到的另一个角色是相辅相成的,那就是”球员兼教练”(player coach)。传统的管理层是一个管理者管理一大群人,那就是他们的核心职责。
我们所有的人员负责人都是球员兼教练——他们自己仍然在亲手做执行层面的工作,同时也能指导和辅导身边的人。这个类比、这种思维方式,是我从体育界借鉴来的,因为很多体育运动节奏极其快。比如橄榄球,节奏非常非常快。你可能有一个教练在喊战术,但四分卫可以根据他看到的防守动作做出临场调整。所以你需要一个在场上能够随机应变的球员,这样教练就不必事无巨细地一一指示。他只是给你一个大致的意图,告诉你这次进攻想怎么打,然后四分卫仍然可以做出调整。
所以我们所有的人员负责人、我们的管理层,全部是能够做出这些调整的人。如果他们在每天或每周的工作中发现了什么不对劲的地方,他们会调整团队的优先级,同时自己也仍然在做具体的工作。他们离一线如此之近,以至于随时都能理解相对的优先级排序。所以这两点,当我去思考创始人群体的时候,他们通常从”我们要在产品上创新”或”在技术上创新”的意义上思考创新。我认为今天的每一个创始人都有机会在组织设计上进行创新,而这首先取决于思考我们今天想建立一家什么样的公司?这意味着什么?当涉及管理层时,我们要招聘什么样的领导者?当涉及招聘具体角色和具体职能时意味着什么?所有这些都是你深思熟虑的机会,去建立一家你愿意在其中待很多很多年、并且为之兴奋的公司。
Lenny Rachitsky: 所以我听到的是,Gamma 没有纯粹的管理者,你的计划是不设那种只管理想法的人。每个人,即使是管理者,也在做自己的独立贡献者(IC)工作。
Grant Lee: 是的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 另一条建议就是通才——能做很多事情的人。我在这个播客上经常听到类似的说法,大家都在说不再存在”你只是个设计师,这就是你唯一要做的事”这种情况了。设计师需要做产品、做营销,可能还要写一些 PRD。
Grant Lee: 需要补充一点,这是我们今天的状态。我认为保持适应性意味着某些事情可能会演变和改变,球员兼教练的模式如何演进,也许在某些职能中,或者随着团队规模的扩大,这不会在所有地方都可行。我认为现实是你必须知道并愿意随时间推移采用不同的框架,并对自己诚实——什么是有效的,什么是无效的。我们一直在不断学习和进化自己。我认为我们的做法是一种此前从未真正有人做过的方式,所以我们必须随着时间的推移自己开辟道路。
Lenny Rachitsky: 很好。给自己留了一条退路,等时机到了需要招聘纯管理者的时候可以用。
Grant Lee: 一年后你再邀请我回来,我会说,“对,这是我们学到的。”
Lenny Rachitsky: 嗯,说得通。这大概率会发生。就像有些人说”我们不需要产品经理”,然后……”嗯,也许还是需要的。“说得通。最后一点我想聊的是,你在 Twitter 上分享过一句很酷的话:“当你遇到一个卓越的人,就重仓押注他们。“这是你哲学中很重要的一部分——对那些做得非常好的人下重注。聊聊这在实际中是什么样的,以及为什么这么重要。
重仓押注卓越之人
Grant Lee: 这要从漏斗的最顶端说起,也就是你接触候选人、决定真正录用谁。如果你在最开始没有设立高标准,回到目标的问题——目标是达到招聘人数指标,还是维持一个超高的招聘质量标准?这是两个不同的目标。我认为我们从未降低过标准。然后你招进来一个你认为卓越的人,能带来独特价值的人,能成为好队友的人。当他们在蓬勃发展的时候,你就给他们越来越多的资源。你会发现——再来一个体育类比——当你在一支 A 级球队,或者一支你觉得真正卓越的球队时,A 级选手实际上想要的是更多的上场时间。你永远不会看到一个明星球员说”我想要更少的上场时间。”
他们想要更多的上场时间,想要去挑战最困难的问题,想要感受到自己在产生巨大的影响。所以,如果你身边是少数几位卓越的队友,几乎什么任务都可以交给他们,他们总能想办法搞定,这对整个团队来说感觉非常好——因为他们得到了自己觉得有回报的东西,也就是去攻克那些棘手的问题,并在最终走出来时感到自己确确实实成就了什么。我认为对我们来说,这件事的重要性几乎超越了一切。我们给人们一个真正能在这种环境中茁壮成长的机会,并在每一步都尽可能地去培养和呵护这一点。
Lenny Rachitsky: 关于招聘,还有什么你觉得非常重要的事情,或者你学到的大教训、经常分享的心得,是我们还没聊到的?
Grant Lee: 我想说的是一些无形的东西。对于创始团队来说,这件事是否感觉像是你毕生的事业?当你在向潜在候选人推介的时候,这件事是否让你觉得自己是真心投入的?在 AI 领域目前发生的大量变化中,不幸的一面是,你开始能分辨出哪些创始人是传教士(missionaries),哪些是雇佣兵(mercenaries)。很多人只是追逐一个巨大的回报,或者某个光鲜的东西,或者某种能让自己感觉良好的东西——他们会离开,而公司可能就此消亡,或者不得不寻找另一条路、另一个方向。
所以我非常敬佩的一件事是,你看看一些创始人——显然在这个 AI 时代之前的人——比如 Dylan、Melanie、Figma、Canva、Notion 的 Ivan,他们已经做了十多年了。他们有无数次机会可以直接离开,功成身退,去做任何他们想做的事,但他们太在乎这个使命了,一直坚持了下来。我觉得当你在和候选人交谈时,候选人是能感觉到的——这些创始人到底在不在乎这件事?我认为,如果这是真实的、是你真正在乎的东西,你就有更好的机会吸引到真正的传教士,那些愿意和你一起长期建设的人。
Lenny Rachitsky: 天哪,我一直在说这句话——我觉得我们至少还可以再聊五个小时。这些可以留到你下次来、年收入达到十亿美元的时候再聊。在我们进入非常精彩的快问快答环节之前,Grant,你觉得还有什么重要的话想让人们听到的?任何最后的教训想要强调的?有什么想留给听众的?
扩大运气的表面积
Grant Lee: 嗯,回到最初那个故事——那大概是我最低谷的时刻。一个投资人花了 20 分钟听我推介,然后告诉我那是世界上最糟糕的东西、最糟糕的想法。我觉得在整个旅程中,都会有这样的低谷时刻。当我想做创始人和做创业这件事的时候,你本质上就是在尽可能扩大自己的运气表面积(luck surface area)。对我来说,运气表面积有两个维度。第一个维度是人——你身边围绕着什么样的人,他们是否与你分享同样的抱负、同样的价值观和原则。找到这些人,然后给自己足够的时间来证明你们可以一起完成伟大的事情。我很幸运有两位出色的联合创始人。我们一起做这件事已经五年了。如果没有他们,我们绝不可能走到今天的位置。我们克服了很多困难。但我想对我们来说,在一个很长的时间维度上创造自己的运气,是让这一切成为可能的唯一方式。
Lenny Rachitsky: 显然,你们的成功已经很好地证明了这一点。Grant,话说到这里,我们已经到了非常精彩的快问快答环节。准备好了吗?
Grant Lee: 嗯,准备好了。
快问快答
Lenny Rachitsky: 好,我有五个问题。第一个问题:有两三本你会经常推荐给别人的书吗?
Grant Lee: 我会推荐一本给还没达到 product-market fit(产品市场匹配)的人,一本给已经达到的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 完美。
Grant Lee: 还没达到 product-market fit 的阶段,我推荐 Shoe Dog,由 Nike 创始人 Phil Knight 所写。他讲了两件事。第一,你应该去追逐你那些疯狂的想法,但这些想法应该让你有热情。他自己就是运动员,所以毫不意外地,他专注于为其他运动员创造工具——在这个例子中是鞋子——并且对此充满热情。第二件事又回到了团队的话题——他身边都是同样对运动和鞋子充满热情的人。所以他最初的创业团队全都是这样的人。
我觉得这给了你克服重重困难的机会——你专注于自己真正在乎的问题,你的团队和你有共同的抱负。达到 product-market fit 之后,有一本叫 7 Powers 的书,作者是 Hamilton Helmer。当你在思考如何建立一个持久的业务时,那本书里有很多内容。我觉得里面很多东西可以随着你的成长、每达到一个新的里程碑,反复阅读和重新理解。它既有战术层面的内容,也能帮你拉远视角,思考你们作为创始团队需要考虑的那些大局战略问题。两本都很棒。
Lenny Rachitsky: Hamilton 上过我们的播客,我们会附上那期节目的链接。我也很喜欢那本书,很多人都会提到它。下一个问题:你最近有特别喜欢的一部电影或电视剧吗?
Grant Lee: 有的,The Lazarus Project 是其中一部。我对时间旅行和科幻毫无抵抗力,所以这是我刚开开始看的一部。对我来说,它具备了一部有趣剧集的所有要素。
Lenny Rachitsky: 有没有你最近发现并非常喜欢的产品?
Grant Lee: 有的,我之前已经提到过了——Voicepanel。再次声明,我是它的天使投资人,全面披露。但我们一直在使用它。回到我说的——对于那些正在大量实验不同想法、凭感觉写代码(vibe coding)、可能想把一些东西交到用户手中、听听他们看法的人来说,它算是一个作弊码。我觉得它确实能帮你加速很多事情,让你不用在错误的想法、或者没有市场的想法上浪费时间。
Lenny Rachitsky: 在工作或生活中,有没有一句座右铭是你经常回想的?
Grant Lee: 有的。有一句中国成语是我妈妈常说的——“井底之蛙”。故事是这样的:有一只青蛙在井底,每天晚上他抬头看天,觉得自己看到了整个世界,以为自己什么都知道了。然后有一天,一只鸟飞过来,向他描述了大海、山川等他看到的一切。青蛙这才意识到,自己看到的不过是世界极其有限的一部分。鸟问他:“你想跟我一起出去看看吗?“于是青蛙就跟着去了。
Grant Lee: 对我来说,我从小家境比较普通。父母条件并不宽裕,我很容易就会用一个很窄的视角看待世界,觉得”哦,世界就是这个样子”。但我妈妈从不允许我这样。她总是拉着我去往更大的方向想,对我说:“世界是广阔的,这是你的机会去把握它。你要走出去,不要对可能性抱有狭隘的看法,永远要敢于想得更大。“这句话一直伴随着我,每当我觉得自己想得太局限、太渺小的时候,我就试着退后一步,提醒自己外面还有远更多的东西值得追求。
Lenny Rachitsky: 说得太好了,太重要了,在当今世界尤其有价值,因为现在有这么多事情是可能的。大多数限制人们的东西,感觉就是——我不知道自己有什么想法,不知道该做什么。而现在你可以把事情做得快得多,可能性也大得多。这种思维方式真的非常宝贵。好,最后一个问题。你帮助人们更好地做演示,你的工具基本上就是帮助人们成为更好的演示者。你学到的或教给别人的一条建议是什么,可以对听众有帮助的?
Grant Lee: 我会回到消费广告的理念——一次只传达一个想法。这个比喻就是:你给别人一个鸡蛋,他接得住;你给他太多鸡蛋,他就会掉。所以不要试图同时抛出太多概念,保持简单,人们会感激的。所以在每一次演示中,把它拆解成核心概念,确保一次只讲一个。我觉得一旦你看清了贯穿其中的主线,就很容易把它组合成一个更有整体感的东西。
Lenny Rachitsky: 正如人们所说,少即是多。
Grant Lee: 完全同意。
关注与联系方式
Lenny Rachitsky: Grant,最后两个问题。大家在网上哪里可以找到你?哪里可以找到 Gamma?有什么需要了解的?随便推广什么都行,然后听众怎样能帮到你?
Grant Lee: 你可以在 Twitter 和 LinkedIn 上找到我,私信都是开放的。说实话,我很清楚这段旅程有多艰难——不管你只是在考虑一个创业想法,还是已经深入创业的世界——我希望能帮上忙,希望能成为你最热情的支持者,所以告诉我我能怎么帮你。对我们来说,我们一直在寻求反馈。如果你在用 Gamma,觉得没达到你的期望,请告诉我们。我们很愿意帮忙改进。真的非常感谢一路走来所有的反馈和支持。
Lenny Rachitsky: Grant,这次太棒了。非常感谢你抽出时间。我知道你正在打造一家增长极快的创业公司,事情很多,所以真的很感谢你抽时间来做这次访谈。
Grant Lee: 谢谢,Lenny。很开心。
Lenny Rachitsky: 对我来说也很开心。大家再见。
感谢各位收听。如果你觉得这期节目有价值,可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或你喜欢的播客应用上订阅。也请考虑给我们评分或留下评价,这真的能帮助其他听众找到这档播客。你可以在 lennyspodcast.com 找到所有往期节目或了解更多关于节目的信息。下期见。
术语表
| 原文 | 中文 |
|---|---|
| 1stCollab | 1stCollab |
| 7 Powers | 7 Powers(Hamilton Helmer 著) |
| AE (Account Executive) | 客户经理(Account Executive) |
| AKG Media | AKG Media |
| ARR | 年度经常性收入(Annual Recurring Revenue) |
| Brian Chesky | Brian Chesky(Airbnb 联合创始人,此处保留原文) |
| CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) | 客户获取成本(Customer Acquisition Cost) |
| cold outreach | 冷启动外联(cold outreach) |
| conjoint analysis | 联合分析(conjoint analysis) |
| creative | 创意素材 |
| dog-fooding | dogfooding(内部试用自家产品) |
| Dunbar’s number | 邓巴数(Dunbar’s number) |
| founder-led marketing | 创始人主导的营销 |
| functional prototype | 功能原型(functional prototype) |
| Gammaster Program | Gammaster Program |
| GPT wrapper | GPT wrapper(基于 GPT API 封装的产品) |
| halo effect | 光环效应(halo effect) |
| Hamilton Helmer | Hamilton Helmer |
| hook | 钩子(hook) |
| IC (Individual Contributor) | 独立贡献者(Individual Contributor) |
| idea maze | 想法迷宫(idea maze) |
| incumbents | 在位企业(incumbents) |
| influencer marketing | 网红营销(influencer marketing) |
| Intercom | Intercom |
| job to be done | 待完成的任务(job to be done) |
| luck surface area | 运气表面积(luck surface area) |
| margin | 利润率 |
| missionaries vs mercenaries | 传教士与雇佣兵 |
| orchestration | 编排(orchestration) |
| org design | 组织设计(org design) |
| Perplexity | Perplexity |
| Phil Knight | Phil Knight(Nike 创始人,此处保留原文) |
| player coach | 球员兼教练(player coach) |
| PRD (Product Requirements Document) | PRD(产品需求文档) |
| product-market fit | product-market fit(产品市场匹配) |
| prosumer | prosumer(专业消费者) |
| rebrand | 品牌重塑 |
| Shoe Dog | Shoe Dog(Phil Knight 著) |
| The Lazarus Project | The Lazarus Project |
| tribal knowledge | 组织记忆(tribal knowledge) |
| UserTesting | UserTesting |
| Van Westendorp | Van Westendorp 价格敏感度测试 |
| vibe-coded apps | 凭感觉写的应用(vibe-coded apps) |
| Voicepanel | Voicepanel |
| word of mouth | 口碑 |
此文档由 AI 分片翻译(translate_long_document)