FounderFront

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“So then we started working on this, and that's like, okay, that's great. So we did that for a bit. But then you're like, you start building this thing, and you get some early users. Many of them are your friends telling, hey, this is an interesting thing. And then you go look at the data. They don't come back to using the product. You're like, okay, well, not good enough. Let's keep iterating. We keep iterating all the way until August of 2022. So again, this is a couple of years in now. We were like, okay, we're going to do our first launch. We're going to launch on product time. We're going to launch our public beta, right? So no longer will it be like a wait list or private. We're going to launch a public beta. And we launched our own product time, and it actually did really well. We got product of the day, product of the week, product of the month. See the surge in usage and signups, and you feel kind of good about yourself. And then the new signups start plateauing, or they start going down. It's like, okay, you're still getting new signups, but you have not earned word of mouth. People are not telling other people. You do not have organic virality. So you can keep on getting new startups. You're never going to have sort of exponential growth, right? And so at that point, we knew, okay, there's some interesting building blocks here that we've done, but is this standalone? We are not going to succeed as a business if this continues to be the case. There is no amount of like incremental improvements we're going to do to turn us into a company that has product market fit. That's the moment where we went, let's go back to the drawing board, three months sprint of engineering AI into the entire creation flow, relaunching our AI launch in March of 2023. And that's where things, that was the inflection point. All of a sudden, it took us like eight months to get to 60,000 signups. And then the day we launched, we got like 5,000 signups, then like 10,000 signups a day, then like 20,000 signups a day, and like 50,000 signups a day. And none of that was marketing. It was all word of mouth, people using the product. And that's the moment you know, okay, we have something here that can just continue to grow organically without us even touching anything else.” Learn how to sell for your business with the RepReady: AI Sales Training app on the App Store 🤫 #gamma #scale #ideamaze #grit #ai

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If your product doesn’t have strong word-of-mouth, don’t move on to scaling. Be patient and brutally honest with yourself: Does this product have the potential to grow organically? That organic pull is the tailwind behind everything else. When you have it, everything becomes easier. Without it, nothing works. No amount of marketing, distribution, or incremental improvement will save you. Don’t fool yourself into thinking, “We’ll fix churn later,” or “We just need more distribution.” If people aren’t naturally talking about your product, stop and fix that first. If I could tell founders just one thing, it would be this: build something people truly want. That’s the foundation. Once you have it, then strategy matters, because strategy is how you build a business around something people love. But if you skip that first step, or trick yourself into thinking you’ve hit it, everything else is just a waste of time and money. Check out RepReady: AI Sales Training app on the AppStore to learn sales and get better at selling your product 🤫 #gamma #scale #startup #founder #vc

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You can’t lower the bar in hiring. Our mantra was always to hire painfully slowly. Even when we felt like we’d hit product–market fit, I didn’t rush to open 50 new headcount. We stuck with the roles we already had open and added only where we truly felt pain. We’d ask the team: Where are we feeling the most pressure? Sometimes, that pain wasn’t even on the engineering side, it was marketing, or something I was still figuring out myself. Before I built a marketing team, I wanted to understand the work firsthand. I’d never done growth marketing at scale, so I decided to do the job myself. I wanted to know how hard it was, to see what “great” actually looked like before hiring for it. So I did it for 6 to 12 months. Was it easy? No. Was it painful? Absolutely. But I learned an enormous amount. I went from zero to one in that area by doing it myself, talking to creators, working with agencies, figuring out the right way to tell Gamma’s story. Could I have delegated it sooner? Sure. People told me to stop and just hire someone. But I don’t think that would’ve been right. Nobody else would’ve cared as deeply about how we build the brand and connect with our customers as I did. Sometimes, doing it yourself, before you hire, is what sets the bar high enough for everyone who comes next. Check out the RepReady: AI sales training app on the AppStore to learn how to sell your solution better and what it takes to close more deals 😎 #gamma #hiring #10outof10 #scale #startups