The Worst Pitch That Built a $2 Billion Company
How Gamma Built a $100M ARR Presentation Platform Through Product-Led Growth
Written by: Taylor Cromwell Original photography by: Irina Logra
Summary
- From worst pitch to $2B company: Grant Lee built Gamma to $100M ARR with 50 employees after an investor rejected his presentation tool idea, targeting individual creators instead of competing for enterprise deals.
- AI rebuild sparked explosive growth: After a flat Product Hunt launch, Gamma rebuilt onboarding around AI-generated presentations, jumping from hundreds to 20,000+ daily signups with zero paid marketing.
- Users demanded to pay: A credit system meant to control costs accidentally created a monetization model when users flooded support asking to buy more, leading to profitability before Series A.
- Micro-influencers over celebrities: Gamma spent budgets on dozens of small creators in tight communities like teachers and consultants rather than expensive big-name endorsements, driving authentic word-of-mouth growth.
- Extreme efficiency as advantage: The team reached $50M ARR with just 30 employees by hiring slowly and making every leader a hands-on "player coach" instead of traditional managers.
Introduction
On a dark London evening, Grant Lee took yet another investor call from the only quiet corner of his flat: a narrow strip of floor squeezed between the kitchenette and the washer-dryer. A fake Zoom background hid the reality. It was his third pitch of the evening.
He walked through the vision he couldn’t stop thinking about: a new way to build and share presentations. A tool that started with writing and ideas, not endless formatting. A product that could give non-designers the same storytelling superpowers as a full creative team.
He finished his pitch and waited.
“That has to be the worst pitch, worst idea I have ever heard,” the investor finally said. “Not only are you trying to go against incumbents, you’re going against incumbents that have massive distribution. You are never going to succeed.”
Click.
Four years later, Gamma has passed $100M in ARR, raised a Series B at a $2B+ valuation, and serves tens of millions of users with a team of about 50 people. They hit their first $50M in ARR with roughly 30 employees and no sales team. At one point, they saw more than 20,000 new signups every day. Half of that growth was coming from pure word-of-mouth.
This is the story of how they turned that rejection into the blueprint and became one of the hottest AI startups this year.
The Rejection That Became a Strategy
Lee could have shrugged off the investor's reaction as an outlier. Instead, he sat with it.
"Maybe he's right," he remembers thinking. Not about the idea being bad but about the competitive reality. If distribution is the incumbents' weapon, he realized, then playing their game is a losing strategy.
Microsoft, Google, and Canva already owned the distribution channels that most presentation tools dream about. Bundled into productivity suites. Pre-installed across enterprises. The software was already deeply embedded into workflows.
If Gamma followed the standard SaaS playbook (hire a sales team, chase enterprise deals, try to displace PowerPoint department by department), they'd spend years fighting uphill.
So they did the opposite.
"We wanted to serve what we believe to be an underserved part of the market," Lee told me. "The vast majority of us are visual learners. Very few of us are designers by background. How do we give people visual storytelling superpowers so they can articulate their ideas to the rest of the world?"
While Microsoft chased IT departments and enterprise contracts, Gamma spotted a different audience entirely: the individual creators. The teachers making lectures every night. The consultants tweaking decks at midnight. The managers and founders who care more about their story than their slide layouts.
These were the users that the giants had ignored — not "enterprise" enough to matter.
Lee's own consulting background played a major role in understanding these pain points. "I spent more time wrestling with formatting and figuring out the right layout than I did on the content itself," he says. "It felt completely backwards. I should be spending 90% of my time on content, 10% on design. Not the other way around."
The issue wasn't that existing tools lacked features. The issue was they were design-first in a world where most people are idea-first.
At the same time, Gamma's early team had no classic growth or sales pedigree. They were product people, builders. Instead of treating that as a disadvantage, they leaned in.
"I don't come from a growth background," Lee says. "If I can learn growth, anybody can learn growth."
That mindset became core to the company's DNA: every decision would double as a growth decision. There would be no separate engine to "fix" later. If they couldn't build a product that grew on its own, they didn't deserve distribution.
Building the Un-PowerPoint
When Gamma first incorporated, the world was deep in pandemic-era remote work. Like a lot of teams at the time, Lee and his co-founders were wrestling with two different visions for the future — and for their company.
For six months, they built two products in parallel.
The first was a virtual office for distributed teams. A way to make remote work feel more like being together in person. The second was a complete reimagining of presentations — starting from writing and storytelling instead of blank slides.
"We were trying to build conviction for both paths," Lee says. "Both felt like they could have big impact."
They even dogfooded both products simultaneously. "We'd be in the virtual office presenting the presentation tool," he laughs.
The decision that followed was less about spreadsheets and more about honesty.
A virtual office would always be compared to the gold standard of actually working together in real life. No matter how polished the product you could make, it would always be the second-best option. They'd be "capped by that inherent reality."
Presentations were different.
"We ended that with a million more ideas we thought we could introduce that could be better than how you work in PowerPoint today," Lee says. "We were just so energized by it."
So Gamma went all-in on the "worse idea" according to conventional wisdom: competing head-on with Microsoft, Google, and Canva.
The False Victory
From the beginning, Gamma's 12-person team lived inside their own broken product.
"We've been heavy dogfooders from the very beginning," Lee says. "It's not always fun. Early on, the product is rough. But it's the only way to feel the friction your users feel."
There's a trap many early-stage founders fall into: friends will test your product as a favor and then tell you it's great. You can convince yourself you're closer to product-market fit than you really are.
"Your friends want to do you a favor, so they're going to try the product," Lee says. "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."
When Gamma launched on Product Hunt in August 2022, they were blown away by the response. It looked like instant validation: they won Product of the Day, Product of the Week, and Product of the Month.
Then the charts flattened.
"We saw this initial spike in users and felt good in that moment," Lee says. "But then new user growth kind of plateaued. We were still getting users, but we could tell there wasn't strong word of mouth."
Most teams would have poured more fuel on the fire: bigger marketing pushes, more launches, more PR.
"We could have fooled ourselves into thinking we had product market fit," Lee says. "The temptation would have been to spend more on ads or marketing because we'll just fuel the top of the funnel and everything else will work itself out. I think that would have been a trap."
Gamma did the opposite.
“I don't come from a growth background. If I can learn growth, anybody can learn growth.”
— Grant Lee, co-founder and CEO of Gamma
The Bet-the-Company Rebuild
In early 2023, with runway running low, the team made a hard call: pause all big new feature work and rebuild the entire new user experience from scratch.
"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," Lee says. "We're going to do everything we possibly can to make the first 30 seconds of the product feel magical."
They had a simple philosophy guiding them. Maybe a little harsh, but effective.
"You have to think about new users as selfish, vain, and lazy," Lee says with a laugh. "They're coming in, they have no desire to learn a new tool. So what can you give them in that first 30 seconds that earns you the next 30 seconds? And then the next 30 seconds?"
They redesigned onboarding around one central idea. Instead of dropping users onto a blank slide, Gamma would ask a simple question: What do you want to present on? Give Gamma a topic, and it would generate a first-draft presentation in seconds.
Behind the scenes, the team rebuilt their editor around modular building blocks rather than traditional slides. AI could pre-assemble those blocks into something coherent, but users could still tinker, rearrange, and refine without worrying about fonts, alignment, or layers.
In March 2023, they shipped the new experience.
"We really didn't know what to expect," Lee says. "We felt like we'd made a ton of progress, but we were coming off that quote-unquote successful Product Hunt launch and then things plateaued. So maybe the same thing would happen again."
It didn't.
The Explosion
The first day after the AI launch, signups doubled.
"We went from a few hundred signups a day to a couple thousand," Lee says.
Day two: 5,000 signups.
Day three: 10,000.
Within two weeks, Gamma was seeing 20,000+ new users signing up per day, with zero dollars spent on paid marketing.
"Word of mouth was super strong," Lee says. "The product was growing very, very fast organically, despite not doing any marketing."
The growth was visible through user behavior, too. People experienced that moment of going from a one-line prompt to a ready-to-edit deck in seconds, and immediately told their colleagues.
"Anyone they saw working on a presentation was like, 'Well, why are you doing it the old way? That just feels so manual and tedious. Try Gamma,'" Lee says. "That's where you get that word-of-mouth love that's really, really needed at the early stage."
That's when Lee realized what product-market fit actually felt like. It was the pull they felt when they couldn’t keep up with the organic demand. Like the time on July 4th, a major holiday in the U.S. when most aren’t working, more than 50,000 new people signed up for Gamma in a single day. Almost all of these users were from outside the United States, revealing international growth they hadn’t even planned for.
"It was such a distinct difference between that feeling and coming out of the Product Hunt launch where we could have fooled ourselves into thinking we had product market fit," Lee says.
The Accidental Monetization Model
The AI launch created a new problem.
Gamma had introduced a 400-credit system to control infrastructure costs. Users would get 400 credits when they signed up. When they burned through them, they couldn't use AI anymore.
It was more of a guardrail than a business model. They hadn't even built a way to charge yet.
"Our inbox from support and chat was blowing up," Lee says. "People were running out of credits and trying to figure out how to buy more. And we just didn't have a mechanism for anything. We hadn't even planned for that."
The message from users was clear: Why won't you take my money?
"Within an hour of sending our first payment link, the first person paid," Lee says.
For weeks, the team scrambled to stand up basic billing flows while still shipping product improvements. They ran pricing research, surveyed early users, and used tools like Van Westendorp analysis to understand willingness to pay.
They made two key decisions:
First, focus on individuals. Gamma needed to "win single-player before we could win multiplayer."
Second, keep pricing painfully simple. A straightforward per-seat price around $20/month that felt fair.
Within months, Gamma crossed $1M in ARR and became profitable.
"We were profitable and cash flow positive even before Series A," Lee says. "We didn't need to raise. We chose to."
That profitability became another critical constraint in their favor. From then on, they could choose when and why to raise capital, rather than raising out of necessity.
The Micro-Influencer Army
As the product took off, Lee found himself pulled into a new role: creator and chief evangelist.
One controversial tweet in particular took on a life of its own: "The most valuable skill in business is about to become obsolete."
It was intentionally provocative. "We knew that having a more provocative tweet would allow people to engage with it," Lee says. Paul Graham commented. Engagement exploded. The product went viral again.
But the bigger discovery Lee had around this point was the power of micro-influencers.
When most companies talk about influencer marketing, they picture big names and big budgets. Gamma went the opposite direction.
"A lot of people think influencer marketing and they'll think these big trendy creators with a million followers," Lee says. "This is usually the wrong approach. You basically give them a script to read and it immediately feels like an ad. That product is not connected to them in any way."
At the time, Gamma couldn't afford celebrities anyway. So instead of spending $20K on a single big-name creator, they invested that budget across dozens of micro-influencers inside specific communities — people like teachers, consultants, startup operators, creators whose audiences deeply trusted them.
Lee personally onboarded many of them via Zoom. Showing how Gamma worked. Brainstorming content ideas with them live.
"All the initial influencers I onboarded manually myself," he says. "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."
Lee calls this market "echo chambers,” essentially tight networks where people copy each other's workflows. Teachers influence other teachers. Consultants influence consultants. Startup operators swap tools inside Slack workspaces.
"If you find a pocket like educators, teachers love telling other teachers about products they use during summer break," Lee says. "If you can start tapping into these pockets, these echo chambers, that ends up becoming this wildfire that can spread really, really fast."
By empowering these micro-influencers with early access, templates, and support, Gamma turned its users into its sales team.
The results speak for themselves: roughly half of Gamma's growth has come from organic word-of-mouth and social proof.
Despite the traction, despite the success, we still believe that a small team can move incredibly fast.”
— Grant Lee, co-founder and CEO of Gamma
The Lean Team Philosophy
Traditional wisdom says that by the time a SaaS company hits $100M in ARR, it needs hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of employees.
Gamma reached $50M ARR with roughly 30 employees. At $100M ARR and a $2B+ valuation, they still employ only around 50 people.
"From the very beginning, our mantra has been to hire painfully slowly," Lee says. "Despite the traction, despite the success, we still believe that a small team can move incredibly fast."
Many of Gamma's early team members came from Optimizely, where they'd seen the opposite approach. At similar revenue milestones, that company had hundreds of employees.
"When I compare ourselves — when we were the same scale of traction, they were 10 times bigger," Lee says. "Hundreds of employees, rather than sub-50."
"Traditional management is like a manager manages a ton of people and that's their core focus," Lee says. "All of our people leaders are player coaches. They still do the end work themselves and they can mentor and coach those around them."
The small team enables speed that larger companies can't match. They can go from morning idea to afternoon prototype to evening user testing with 20 real people and ship changes the next day.
"A lot of founders think about innovating on product or technology," Lee says. "I think founders today actually have a chance to also innovate on org design."
That velocity extends to their AI infrastructure, too. While giants are locked into a single model provider, Gamma runs 20+ AI models in production, constantly testing which ones deliver the most value for different use cases.
"We weren't smart enough to know who was going to win that race," Lee says. "So we architected our entire system to be very experiment-minded. We can be model-agnostic, constantly testing with frontier models as well as open-source models, and let the data do the talking."
Conclusion: David's Playbook for Beating Goliath
On paper, Gamma shouldn't exist.
A San Francisco startup, led by a non-technical CEO, taking on Microsoft, Google, and Canva in one of the most entrenched software categories of all time. Starting without a traditional sales team, no built-in distribution, and no obvious wedge into the enterprise.
"There's a negative stigma around non-technical founders," Lee says. "People wonder if you're just the 'idea person.' But assembling the right technical team, approaching the market with structure, staying obsessed with the problem — that's real value."
That investor in 2020 was right about one thing: trying to out-distribute Microsoft and Google on their terms would have been a losing battle.
So Gamma refused to play it.
They built for overlooked users. They doubled down on a product that sells itself. They turned a tiny, high-leverage team into a growth engine that 30,000-person companies struggle to match.
The worst pitch ever? Maybe.
But it built a company worth over $2 billion with a team smaller than most Series A startups.
And in the age of AI, that might be the most interesting startup playbook of all.
Author: Taylor Cromwell
Taylor is a writer, interviewer, and founder of Creator Diaries, a newsletter digging into how real people turn ideas into income. Her editorial work spans HubSpot, beehiiv, Just Go Grind, Confluence VC, and more — covering founder strategy, content marketing, and the business side of the creator economy. When she’s not writing about building businesses, she’s probably wandering an antique market, walking with a podcast, or scheming her next countryside escape.
