Nelly

💼Learn how to grow revenue with B2B partnerships in the tech industry 📈 5,000+ subscribers ✍️ Writing featured in Forbes, Fortune, Inc

[Nelly @NelsonsThoughts]

@JJEnglert Guide

[Nelly @NelsonsThoughts]

@businessbarista Claude

[Nelly @NelsonsThoughts]

@dsiroker Congrats Dan and team!

[Nelly @NelsonsThoughts]

@RetentionAdam Inspiring! Thanks for sharing

[Grant Lee @thisisgrantlee]

Airbnb was burning millions every year on marketing, with miserable results.

Then Chesky went hands-on:
- Cut performance marketing to ~0
- Became "Chief Storyteller" himself

It worked. Most profitable year ever.

Thread on Founder-Led Marketing and why it works:

[Nelly @NelsonsThoughts]

@gaganbiyani Also proud (albeit small) investor of Maven. Go team!

[Grant Lee @thisisgrantlee]

Excited to introduce: Gamma 3.0

A generational leap for the world's most popular AI presentation tool.

Two major changes:

1. Gamma Agent - with one prompt, you can make sweeping edits across the presentation.

a. Say 'make it more visual' and it will scan each slide for data that could be visualized better.

b. Upload a screenshot of rough notes you want to turn into a slide and it will synthesize the info, search the web to fill gaps, and make a table for you to match your brand or theme.

2. Gamma API

Say you have a sales deck you want to reuse as a template. You could build a Zapier workflow to convert all of your meeting transcripts into personalized decks, automatically sent after every customer meeting.

Bonus:

We’re also launching Team & Business plans, bringing visual storytelling to organizations of all sizes, and a new Ultra plan for our power users looking to push the boundaries even further.

PowerPoint has over a billion users, but the vast majority struggle to use it effectively. Why is that?

Because making PPTs is still slow and tedious.

We want Gamma to feel different.

Our goal is to both lower the floor and raise the ceiling, so that anyone can get their ideas out there.

Can’t wait to see what you make with 3.0.

[Grant Lee @thisisgrantlee]

we grew from zero to $50M ARR in <2 years, profitably
i've never publicly shared our tactics before
it's cost us over $5M to learn what I'm about to share

800-word long post on every growth hack that printed money for us

I'll cover:
1. Influencer Marketing
2. Performance Marketing vs Brand
3. User Testing
4. Dogfooding

0-10M was nearly 100% word of mouth and organic content

10-50M was still >50% word of mouth but influencer, affiliate, and referral made up the other half

But the foundation we set from 0-$10M is what allowed us to blaze past $50M

1. Influencer Marketing 101:

90% of your reach comes from <10% of content that goes viral. Your job: go broad with influencers and spend enough to find that 10% of content and formats that work. Virality is no accident - test and discover hooks, visuals, formats for each platform, understand why they work, and replicate 100x across your influencer roster.

Most startups get three things wrong:
1 - Too small budget
2 - Overly selective on creators and messaging
3 - Give up too early
Start with $10-20k/month, commit to 6 months minimum. This lets you experiment with many micro influencers and lets you test many concepts.

- List creator personas with audiences that care about your product. Be exhaustive. Influencer outreach is time-consuming. Work with a freelancer or agency if you don't have a team. DM me for recommendations.

- Offer base + viral bonus. For TikTok, have them start new accounts. New accounts can get as many views as established ones. But on new accounts creators are unburdened by their brand and can try any format.

- Test across all platforms (TikTok, IG, X, LinkedIn work for most B2B/prosumer apps).

- Track specific creators and hooks that outperform, not just channels.

- Add 'How did you hear about us' to onboarding. Calculate which channels drive leads vs just views.

- Compile every asset, video or hook that works into a guide. Once you have 20-30 winning formats, hire your top creators as consultants to train all other influencers on what angles go viral for you and why.

- Never write scripts - it becomes an ad no one watches.
Creators know their audience best.

2. Invest in brand before performance marketing

Most startups are not prepared to scale their spend because their brand and creative sucks. We had to go through an extremely expensive rebrand (both in terms of time and dollars spent) to land on something we loved. But it would have been much more expensive to skip this step.

Be relentless about testing a wide range of creatives. Whatever number of creatives you're thinking of testing, 10x it. Be bold. See what moves the needle (CAC payback, conversion rates, LTV and retention).

Once you see a particular use case resonating, build a whole funnel around it with symmetric messaging. You don’t want to confuse visitors by showing them an ad with one value prop and then drop them on to a landing page with a completely different message.

3. Get users to test prototypes before you ship.

This seems trivial, but saves you from the worst startup mistake - misdirected product development.

Most startups think experimentation is for mature companies improving their funnel by 1% through a/b testing. But Gamma's founding team is early Optimizely folks. Experimentation is in our DNA.

We ran extensive user testing on platforms like voicepanel and usertesting

a. Recruited random people who make slide decks for work. They have no skin in the game and won't lie to be nice.

b. Showed them prototypes with minimal instructions and let them spend a few minutes trying things out.

c. Asked them to think out loud. The words they use to navigate, their expectations, where they get confused is gold. Combining their voice + screen actions amplifies things 10x. You really feel the pain of poor UX and overcomplicated copy.

Did this for everything - landing pages, onboarding, new features, moonshot concepts.

Always test your biggest assumptions about what people will get or like. Identify major blind spots in your prototype stage, not at the end.

Ship once you have hours of testing proof that ordinary people find it easy and useful.

4. Dogfood the hell out of your product

Either you build something that's 100x better than alternatives, or you build something else. Dogfooding makes it painfully obvious if your product isn't a 100x better.

Storytime: When we started Gamma, we had two competing ideas -
Idea 1: a virtual office to capture in-person magic
Idea 2: reimagining PowerPoint from the ground up (This became Gamma)

After 6 months of building and dogfooding both of them in parallel, we had a clear winner.

It wasn't about metrics or hard data.

With a virtual office, we were always competing against IRL and could never replace the magic of being together in person.

With the reimagined PowerPoint, we could imagine a product 100x better than the alternative.

Any startup can learn from our playbook.
I really hope they do.

[Nelly @NelsonsThoughts]

@m_franceschetti @eightsleep Congrats!!! Awesome to see - and a happy customer after many years here!

[Nelly @NelsonsThoughts]

@Jason Would suggest building this with Airtable AI! Built a similar use case before

[Grant Lee @thisisgrantlee]

Gamma's first AI launch was exactly 2 years ago. We were pre-revenue - just a small team crammed in a 2-bedroom apartment, hoping for some signups.

Today, 50 million users later, the next chapter at Gamma begins ... and we're pumped.

We're dropping powerful updates and an entirely new look & feel that transforms how you'll work with AI.

Our vision: To build tools for imagination.

You have ideas.

Gamma helps you explore them, shape them, and bring them to life.

Try it out now:
https://t.co/NGP5rnlMDP

(We'd love to hear what you think)

[Nelly @NelsonsThoughts]

@kevinwu_hi Incredible! Congrats Kevin

[Nelly @NelsonsThoughts]

@eglyman @tryramp @googlecalendar This is awesome

[Nelly @NelsonsThoughts]

@mnaficy Such a cool idea! Congrats

[Nelly @NelsonsThoughts]

@FitFounder Eight sleep!

[Grant Lee @thisisgrantlee]

Every great visual storyteller understands gestalt principles.

A well-designed slide deck or video uses these principles:

1/ proximity
2/ similarity
3/ continuity

to guide the viewer's eye naturally, creating a cohesive narrative. Each element becomes a stepping stone, leading to the story's ultimate message effortlessly.

Here's a great example of these visual principles in practice:
https://t.co/aRJ1hJjgAf

[Nelly @NelsonsThoughts]

@kathrynwu1 @ycombinator @gjain @anamitra @AforeVC @salil @gustaf @garrytan Congrats!!

[Chris Bakke @ChrisJBakke]

https://t.co/9OIzr6HGsO is wild.

Just cloned a 16 page website with a single-line prompt.

[Eric Glyman @eglyman]

See this everywhere. Talent helps, sure, but truly it's grit and consistency that make great football players, great engineers, great designers, great builders, great artists, great investors -- great anything really.

[Grant Lee @thisisgrantlee]

The most successful startups are master storytellers.

But how exactly do they use stories to drive growth, unite teams, and create lasting impact?

4 ideas I've been noodling on: