Kelsey Wu

@gammaapp | prev @harvard @slackHQ @salesforce

[Kelsey Wu @kelseyywu]

@thisisgrantlee so excited about his launch! our biggest update yet!!! gamma is truly everywhere, can't wait to get these features in the hands of our users

[Grant Lee @thisisgrantlee]

There's a hidden tax on every knowledge worker in the world, and nobody talks about it:

The design tax.

You're a strategist, a sales lead, a marketer. You were hired for what you know. But every meeting, every pitch, every proposal expects you to show up with something that looks like a designer made it.

I lived this. Before Gamma, I spent time in consulting and investment banking. I spent more hours formatting slides than the analysis that went into them.

When my cofounders and I started Gamma, we asked: what if you never had to be a designer in the first place?

Five years and nearly 100 million users later, we've refunded billions of hours of the design tax.

Today, we're eliminating it for good with our biggest launch ever.

Gamma Imagine — a powerful, AI-native visual creation tool directly in Gamma. Posters, logos, infographics, visuals from a single prompt. On brand, every time.

AI-Native Templates. Templates were supposed to save you from design work. Instead you spent the time filling them in. So we completely rebuilt the template experience. Modify a whole deck with a single prompt, with your brand and style intact every time.

Gamma Connectors. You're already thinking in ChatGPT and Claude. Now Gamma sits inside the most popular work apps in the world. No more context-switching.

You were hired for your ideas, not to resize text boxes. Let Gamma pay the design tax.

[Kelsey Wu @kelseyywu]

waiting for an uber at the airport feels like waiting for your mom to pick you up afterschool

[Grant Lee @thisisgrantlee]

Had a special friend visit the office today, but he might’ve gotten too comfortable 😅

[Kelsey Wu @kelseyywu]

@thisisgrantlee @thisisgrantlee we'll miss you, but it's astonishing what rainn has accomplished in his first few minutes

[Kelsey Wu @kelseyywu]

this thanksgiving i'm grateful for:
– people who care deeply
– dogs who lean their whole body weight into you
– double shot matcha lattes
– the resurgence of point-and-shoot cameras
– creative tools that don’t make me spend 10 minutes fighting a text box

[Kelsey Wu @kelseyywu]

@GammaApp HUUUUGE

[Kelsey Wu @kelseyywu]

@rohitpadmakumar this is toooo good

[Gamma @GammaApp]

The best way to try Nano Banana Pro? In Gamma.

Starting December 1st: Nano Banana Pro is available for ALL Gamma users, including users on our free tier!

Pro tip: Pair it with Studio Mode, Gamma's most visually rich storytelling engine, also unlocked for everyone.

Only in December.

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Gamma is wild:
- Just 50 people
- Generating $100M ARR
- Valued at over $2B
- Profitable for 15+ consecutive months
- With more cash in the bank than they raised
- In a category that most VCs dismissed

In fact, one investor told @thisisgrantlee his idea was “the dumbest idea he had ever heard.”

Today, @GammaApp is one of the hottest AI startups in the world, and unlike most fast-growing AI startups, they're a model for how to build a sustainable, profitable, and durable AI product and brand.

In my conversation with @thisisgrantlee, we discuss:
🔸 How Gamma discovered product-market fit
🔸 Their process for building a “word-of-mouth growth machine”
🔸 How they leveraged more than 1,000 micro-influencers (instead of a few big names)
🔸 Why focusing on the “first 30 seconds” transformed their business
🔸 Their pricing strategy that led to profitability within months
🔸 How Grant thinks about building a durable “GPT wrapper” business

Listen now 👇
• YouTube: https://t.co/TmTxxfr4uJ
• Spotify: https://t.co/09DC0AsJ8H
• Apple: https://t.co/p4INoqCKZV

Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast:
🏆 @TrustVanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security: https://t.co/JHcQhNsK42
🏆 @justworks—The all-in-one HR solution for managing your small business with confidence: https://t.co/ax9QeAVrWE
🏆 @MiroHQ—A collaborative visual platform where your best work comes to life: https://t.co/Im5Q57v78w

[Kelsey Wu @kelseyywu]

@dianaberlin so lucky to be building alongside you and to celebrate this milestone together 🤩 and can't wait for more amazing folks to join us!

[Kelsey Wu @kelseyywu]

@thisisgrantlee @sarahdingwang @a16z so honored to be building with this amazing, passionate, tiny team 💙 can't wait for what's next!

[Grant Lee @thisisgrantlee]

Today, as shared by The New York Times, we’re announcing two things:

>Our Series B at a $2.1B valuation led by @sarahdingwang at @a16z.
>Reaching $100M ARR, profitably, with a team of just 50 people. That's $2M ARR per employee.

PowerPoint was invented before the first website, before the Game Boy, before the Berlin Wall fell.

But Gamma, and our 70 million users, are proof that an AI-native company can disrupt a category everyone assumed was won.

30 million gammas are created every single month, as we fight hard to become a new standard for communication.

But we’re not stopping. We’re expanding our plans for businesses. We’re building out a full visual storytelling platform. And today, we’re releasing our API to the general public. So you can plug Gamma into wherever work happens.

And to celebrate, we’re also sharing our first ever prompt guide backed by research into how our most successful users use Gamma to automate presentations, websites, and content in minutes.

[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.

[Kelsey Wu @kelseyywu]

@jamisonfox can't wait for the world to try out everything the team has been working on - and for more amazing folks to join us!

[Gamma @GammaApp]

Gamma 3.0 is here.

We have a bunch of massive updates to share, including Gamma Agent, Gamma API, and Gamma for Teams.

Check it out below:

[Kelsey Wu @kelseyywu]

@gammaapp this is HUGE! so proud of the team for all these amazing launches!

[Kelsey Wu @kelseyywu]

@thisisgrantlee so excited for this!!!

[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.

[Gamma @GammaApp]

9.16.25.