1. It wasn’t actually an AI native company
Gamma was borne in COVID times, pre GPT madness. But due to meagre cash left in the bank, and noticing how dramatically AI image functionality had improved in the years they’d floundered finding product market fit, Gamma pivoted to go all in with AI.
To re-launch, they used a deliberately 🌶 spicy hot take 🌶. Their March 2023 tweet read:
“A launch so big, it deserves a spaceship. We built Gamma to tackle the biggest pain point in presentations: empty slides”.
The tweet exploded. Paul Graham even re-tweeted:
“If you think that making presentations is the most important skill in the workplace, you’re clueless”.
It was effective. All the re-tweets led to a tsunami of new sign ups; 2000/3000/5000 a day which the team then leveraged to optimise for conversion.
2. It’s gotten rid of the blank page problem
Regardless of whether you agree or disagree on presentations being the most important skill in the workplace, it really is important!
Presentations cut across all business functions from consulting, sales, partnerships, marketing, C-level Exec comms and both startups and enterprises alike.
When I was at Google, people joked that you could get promoted with a great project name and an excellent slide deck. A strong narrative that could be shared asynchronously separated the wheat from the chaff. Similarly in the startup world, decks make or break investment decisions.
All of this to say, Gamma helps accelerate the creation process from a tiny prompt.
And its magic is shown in their onboarding immediately: You sign up, type a short prompt (10-15 words) and in seconds you get a full deck/doc/web-page generated.
The “a-ha” moment blends speed (mere seconds), design (it looks great) and (in my personal opinion what makes it most powerful) also focuses on the presentation's narrative.
Because it's so quick and powerful, the user's genuine “wow” response triggers growth; users feel compelled to tell colleagues or their social networks about it.
(Full presentation here)
3. Gamma's output is as generalist as you can get (personas, use cases, output formats)
Everyone knows to go after big markets (Don Valentine, Sequoia Capital: "Target Big Markets") but the traditional startup playbook recommends a beach-head strategy of focus e.g. Qwilr was built for innovating sales presentations, it has 1 main business use case (Sales) with one main output (scrollable website).
Gamma went the opposite direction. Instead of focusing on one persona or output, it bet on going as broad as possible. Gamma spans design, writing, strategy, across innumerable business use cases and personas, and the output format competes from Microsoft's Office suite to Canva's branding and design to Squarespace.
From a single line of prompt, Gamma generates:
✅ A Presentation deck
✅ A Document
✅ A Microsite web-page
It’s a hybrid between presentation document and website. It’s visual like a presentation, but detailed like a document and interactive/responsive like a website on phone or laptop.
It reminds me of Rippling CEO’s “compound startup” idea:
“The secret to building better business software is building a system where you can build multiple parallel business software applications that are all natively built into the same system,”
A compound startup focuses on creating a broad range of products or services under a single company, leveraging shared resources, technologies, and market insights to drive growth across multiple areas simultaneously. This strategy allows the startup to diversify its offerings and tap into various revenue streams. (here)
Gamma fits this new startup philosophy.
4. It’s lean.
Despite seeing the pattern everywhere across AI companies, it’s still mind-boggling.
Gamma is a $100m ARR company with just 52 people.
Its efficiency would have been unheard of a couple of years ago.
5. It's biggest and most radical bet is on UX
Gamma believe that the biggest unlock in AI isn’t model quality, data, verticalisation or ecosystem, it’s UX design.
An extreme example to illustrate this is that when Gamma was only 12 people with a year of runway left, 4 out of those 12 were UX designers. One third of the company.
And it worked. It’s working.
If you’re interested in reading more I highly recommend:
