00:06:49 · Grant Lee, Jonathan Brebner
[00:06:49] S1: It was one of the core ideas from the beginning, but I would say it wasn't necessarily the core idea that led to the initial inflection point in terms of growth and usage. Mhmm. We did have the... You know, this notion of if we can make it, you know, more malleable, mobile friendly, all those things. We thought that was going to be important, but what really mattered to our early users was the fact that you could create stuff effortlessly. It was really really fast. You don't have design skills, you don't have design background, design resources, but you can still go in and create something that looked professional and worthy of sharing. And, you know, for us, it was a good learning moment that, you know, sometimes, you know, you have a list of things that you think are value props, you just show it to the world and let the world tell you what's actually useful. [00:07:30] S0: Yeah. They they look at, 90% of it, they're like, I really don't... I just see the one thing, they're like, oh, what about that? [00:07:35] S1: Totally. And you will never know really until you kinda get it out there. [00:07:38] S0: Yeah. So if I recall correctly, early on, there was another pretty well funded competitor in the space. Great. Right? And in fact, they sort of, like, raced out to just kind of a a crazy funding lead. Right? They had a bunch of, like, top tier investors on their cap table. [00:07:51] S1: Right.
00:07:51 · Grant Lee, Jonathan Brebner
[00:07:51] S1: Right. [00:07:52] S0: And they either don't exist anymore or pivot away, to something else completely. I'm not so interested in, like, the the sort of specific details of, like, oh, what what were the things that you did different, than that company? But I am interested in, like, the psychology of it. Right? Because you you have remained... I mean, even up until now, but but especially in those early years, you were very lean. Right. Right? And to be kind of a lean team in a world where there's this, like, you know... So, like, investors were trying to king make. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Were there specific ways that you kind of thought about that, or were you actually just trying to, like, tune it out?
00:08:27 · Grant Lee
[00:08:27] S1: So internally, you know, one thing that we really value is transparency. So obviously, you don't ignore things that happen in the fundraising market and if other companies are getting invested in, you know, it's not... We we... It's not that we don't talk about it, but we're also very transparent in that we always believe that none of those competitors matter. None of those other startups were a true competition. Our competition is behavior change. We have to get people that are used to using slides because it was invented almost forty years ago, that is the default to get them to give another format a try. And we were always more worried about how do we even earn the right to be in the conversation. Somebody will pick us up, use it, and we can truly be integrated in how they wanna create presentations. So we were never worried about that. You can always draw inspiration from what other tools or startups are doing and that's great. I think that's healthy for just the ecosystem in general because there's so many talented teams out there. They're doing cool work. And in many ways, you can always ask yourself like, what are they doing great at that maybe you wanna fold into the mix? And so I thought they always had, you know, interesting approach to just the overall problem space. But honestly, were never worried about that because we knew had a bigger challenge ahead of us, which is the behavior change portion.
00:09:38 · Jonathan Brebner, Grant Lee
[00:09:38] S0: Okay. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, I guess it it doesn't matter if there's a big incumbent when the bigger incumbent... Or not incumbent, a big challenger when the bigger incumbent is like, again, you know, big fan companies. Right? [00:09:50] S1: Probably. Like, [00:09:51] S0: There's another, story that we were chatting about earlier, that has to do with kind of a a crisis moment. Like, an important moment in the company's history, which was the the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, which obviously, like, affected a ton of people. It was it was, like, just incredibly dramatic and kinda hair on fire moment. I remember that from our side at SPC and and just, you know, everyone on the team was just, like, on the phone constantly trying to help owners figure out [00:10:19] S1: Yep. [00:10:19] S0: Yep. Like, what did you do when when suddenly your bank isn't there? Yeah. You had a particularly acute, like, unfortunately timed, moment with your company. Can you talk about that a little bit?
00:10:31 · Grant Lee
[00:10:31] S1: Yeah. So, I guess, you know, maybe to rewind maybe a few months before that moment, we had gotten to the point where we had just come out of, a product hunt launch, which ended up going pretty well. We ended up winning product of the day, product of the week, product of the month, felt great, sign up spiked, and then they sort of plateaued. And we had this moment of realizing that what we had created had created some initial interest but not enough to drive organic growth. If we were to continue growing, we'd have to find other mechanisms of actually, you know, filling the top of the funnel and trying to get more and more users. And we felt like that meant that the fundamental part of the sort of product and the growth engine was broken. We didn't have something that could be self sustaining. So for us, that was a moment of, okay, well, we need to really go back and kind of redo the entire creation flow within Gamma. The product needs to be dead simple. We need to be able to actually win over users and have them come back and use the product. And it needs to be good enough so that people tell all their friends about so that we actually have some sort of organic virality. So this was basically end of December, coming in on, you know, January and we basically gave ourselves, just over three months to try to, address this problem. And for us, it really much was about the company moment because, you know, coming up on, you know, March, we were about a year of runway left, no meaningful traction, definitely not enough organic growth to sort of make it to the next, you know, round of funding. And so this bet the company moment was, okay, heads down. Everybody in the company focused on just the first thirty seconds of the product experience, made that feel magical, earned the right to have people tell their friends about it. And two weeks before our launch date is when the Silicon Valley Bank collapses. And of course, you know, that is a moment of crisis because, we don't know if we're gonna be able to make payroll and certainly working with a lot of our early investors to try to figure this out in the background. And of course, you know, we know employees are reading about this in the news as well. So, as a company, again, we've always been super transparent. So, we ended up calling the entire company together.
00:12:38 · Grant Lee, Jonathan Brebner
We had our own all hands and, at this stage of the company, we were in a converted two bedroom apartment. So calling an all hens meant... Calling everybody into one of the bedrooms and, setting everybody down and saying, you know, we don't know how we're going to make payroll, but you have a word that we're doing everything we possibly can to, you know, to figure this out and we can't move the launch date. We owe it to ourselves to see it through. We're gonna ship this thing one way or another. Even if the company shut shuts down, we've worked way too hard not to ship this thing. And so we ended up sticking to the launch date. Fortunately, the SVB stuff worked itself out. But I think for us, we sort of earned some resiliency going through that, coming through it on the other side, just knowing that, you know, we would do whatever it takes. We launched successfully. The launch was... Is, you know, immediate spike in sort of growth. We did start seeing that organic virality. [00:13:32] S0: Was that the the kinda like first moment in the company where we really had that sustainable... [00:13:36] S1: Yeah. Sustainable growth, you know, thousands of sign ups growing, growing, growing every single day. And so for better or worse, going through that moment, I think did make us a tougher, more resilient team and also formed kind of this sort of closeness knowing that we were never going to shy away from challenges or like these hard moments and, we're gonna, you know, get through it together.