Scalebrity Spotlight: How Gamma Grew to $100M+ in ARR as a Microteam

Insights from Grant Lee's Interview with Lenny Rachitsky on Lenny's Podcast

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Before we dive in, a confession. The insights and lessons in this newsletter come from Grant Lee’s conversation with Lenny Rachitsky on Lenny’s Podcast and from additional publicly available sources. Please do listen to the interview in full at the link above, and be sure to subscribe to Lenny’s newsletter and podcast.

And yes, I have reached out to Grant to get him onto the Exponential Scale podcast. Have I succeeded? Not yet. Am I giving up? Absolutely not. You know I don’t quit that easy. So stay tuned for some first-party responses for our Exponential Scale community hopefully in the near future.

Now buckle up. Because Grant’s story is a masterclass in Microteam building, Scalemaxxing, high leverage execution, and momentum over manpower. And he did it while keeping his team tiny and his growth explosive.

That is what Microteam Megascale looks like in the wild. This isn’t a fairy tale. It’s a blueprint.

And today, we’re tearing open the blueprint. Gamma’s story is just too good to not tell.

The Gamma Story

Grant Lee is the CEO and cofounder of Gamma. Gamma is the AI powered presentation and website tool you’ve probably seen everywhere because everyone and their cat seems to be using it right now. The company still has just a few dozen people, and yet they are serving over fifty million users and hit $100 million annual revenue run rate (ARR) in just over two years.

Gamma started in late 2020 when Grant Lee and team began building an AI-powered way to create presentations and web pages.

Why did he create Gamma? Because creating slides and fiddling with design sucks. In his words:

“I just remember this late night trying to prepare for the next day’s meeting. Trying to format and figure out the right layout and spending hours just trying to get the look and feel right rather than the content itself. And for me that just felt completely backwards.”

He spent years living in slide decks in consulting and banking. Later as a CFO he was still stuck in Google Slides. He felt the pain of late edits, rigid formats, and tools that hadn’t evolved. That personal frustration over “a couple of decades” is what pushed him to reimagine presentations.

So his goal was to make content creation effortless for people who hate PowerPoint or lack design skills.

Originally his plan didn’t involve AI at all, but the timing of AI’s entry into the market was good for Gamma. Very good.

The team iterated for over a year and launched the product in 2022. They kept the team tiny while obsessing over a same-day build, test, fix loop that let them out-iterate bigger rivals.

Early fundraising did not look glamorous. Grant pitched from a small flat at night while his kids slept. An investor famously called the concept the worst idea he had ever heard. That sting became his fuel. The team focused on shipping, learning from users, and ignoring gatekeepers.

First Lesson: Rope in Influencers (Others) To Help

The key to getting out of the trap was to tap into influencers. A lot of them. Instead of paying a handful of celebrity creators. Grant personally onboarded thousands of micro-influencers who actually used Gamma and could tell the story in their own voice. That founder-led program created an authentic word-of-mouth loop that still drives the majority of subscriber growth.

This was a lesson. The investor who told him that the product sucked? Ok, that’s a data point, not an end of the road.

Microteam founders don’t need universal validation. They need momentum. They need one customer who cares. One angle the incumbents missed. One unfair advantage they can lean into with ferocity.

Gamma had that. They just had to ignore the noise long enough to prove it.

Gamma’s Team Size Growth

When the company started in 2020, there were just three people. Through the first year before launch the team remained very small. For the next few years they stayed small as they iterated on the product and worked on getting both traction and product-market fit.

Tracxn lists 18 employees as of Dec 2023, which is roughly double what they had the year before. This lines up with their pre-explosion phase just after the March 2023 AI integration.

But things really took off in late 2023 and early 2024. Momentum compounded. By 2024 Gamma had raised a modest Series A. Multiple reports through 2024–mid 2025 describe Gamma running at about 28–30 people while crossing $50M ARR and staying profitable. That suggests the 2024 team size sat in the high twenties to roughly 30 plus.

On November 10, 2025 Gamma announced a $68 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz. At that point, the company confirmed a $2.1 billion valuation with over $100 million ARR and more than 70 million users. At this time, Gamma publicly confirmed roughly 50 employees. Independent trackers list 50 to 52 employees.

Let that sink in. They’re doing over $2M a year per employee… and that was at the time they closed the round, not after. This is how you do it folks, you don’t need big investments and big teams to make big bucks.

So this was not an overnight miracle. It was five years of tight focus, ruthless iteration, and distribution that scales without hiring.

But it also wasn’t a blow-out “let’s raise a bajillion dollars, hire a zillion people and grow through brute force” approach. There’s a lot to unpack for Microteams here.

Learn Fast. Use Tight Iteration Loops.

Small teams beat big teams with velocity. They don’t win by hiring armies. They win by collapsing the distance between thought and execution.

Grant explains that in the early days, they ran experiments at a speed I can only describe as deranged in the best way.

Here’s the loop:

Idea in the morning.
Functional prototype built immediately.
Users recruited that same afternoon.
Full scale usage observed by evening.
Iteration shipped by next morning.

That isn’t a workflow. That is a Microteam martial art.

This workflow is “Momentum is multiplicative” Scalemaxxing Law 4 in the wild. Every microstep compounds fast.

This is the biggest advantage Microteams have over incumbents stuck in Jira hell and cross-functional alignment meetings that require twelve signatures and a seance.

Gamma didn’t have those constraints. They had clarity. They had speed. They had urgency powered by tiny-team energy.

Pushing a String Versus Getting Attention

Likewise, Microteams can learn from how Gamma acquired their customers.

For their first 100 customers, they had to do hand-to-hand founder work. Grant asked friends and anyone who made decks to try Gamma. Early usage was “episodic”. People tried it to be supportive but did not return consistently to continue using the product.

Their first public beta went live on Product Hunt in August 2022. That launch seeded the early user base and awareness before the AI relaunch. But they were still finding their usage to be “episodic” in nature.

The inflection hit right after the company relaunched their product with AI capabilities. Retention and organic pull jumped. Grant says the first ten thousand users all arrived in a short window following that release.

They intentionally did not launch the AI update on Product Hunt. They posted a provocative tweet instead. A few days later YCombinator founder and notable Silicon Valley investor (and influencer) Paul Graham replied, which spiked engagement and reach. That comment alone helped propel the announcement and downstream signups.

Here’s the tweet:

So 10,000 users via word-of-mouth and Product Hunt plus one spicy relaunch tweet that got a Paul Graham comment.

The “Learning Log” every Microteam lead should keep

Grant’s founder-marketing mindset is simple. Share what you learn. When he was working on his “Founder-led Marketing” approach of using his position as founder to get attention, Grant would collect little bits of knowledge and things he learned as he was going along into a doc, and then use those to create posts that others could learn from.

This is a powerful idea.

Don’t Just Learn In Private… Learn and Share in Public

Turn hard-won lessons into useful posts, templates, and receipts others can reuse. He frames it as exchanging value with your audience. Give away something genuinely helpful now. Earn goodwill that compounds later. That’s the spirit behind keeping a running doc of “things I didn’t know last week”. ship notes. experiments. pricing tests. creator briefs. postmortems. Then publish the bits that help others.

They even open-sourced their brand system so creators wouldn’t reinvent the wheel. That shows the habit in action. Codify what works in a place others can grab fast, and you remove friction for growth partners and new teammates. Your “Learning Log” becomes a living asset, not a private diary.

This is a quick starter template for the log:

The Date. What you or the team tried. What surprised you. What you’d repeat. What you’d change. Artifacts to share. Keep entries short. Publish something useful weekly.

For his founder-led marketing approach, Grant also shared that LinkedIn and X / Twitter audiences behave differently. LinkedIn is good for the high level connection for an aspirational message on a broader theme, while X is better for in-the-weed technical, contrarian (edgy), and tactical stuff. X threads are good for diving into a very technical post.

But Grant also shared that LinkedIn audience converts at a much higher ratio and value than X users.

The Scalemaxxing Philosophy Embedded in Grant’s Story

Grant’s tactics match almost perfectly with the 5 Laws of Scalemaxxing.

Law 1. Leverage Over Labor

Gamma didn’t grow in the stereotypical Silicon Valley blitz-scale style. They built tools. Automations. Systems. And a product that did the work of a small internal design agency for millions of users.

Grant scaled output, not payroll. Exactly what Microteams must do to win.

Law 2. Repeatable Processes

The experimentation loop was systematized. Every idea followed the same pattern. Prototype. Test. Observe. Iterate. Repeat.

Microteams without process drown. Gamma used process to sprint.

Law 3. Master Time

Doing pitches at night. Iterating daily. Prioritizing what mattered. Protecting creative cycles. Cutting everything else.

Time is the rarest resource for small teams. Gamma treated it like currency.

Law 4. Momentum Beats Motivation

Gamma acted relentlessly. Every day had forward motion. Even micro wins were stacked to create macro momentum.

Influencer loops. Referral loops. Word of mouth loops. These are Microteam-friendly growth engines that scale infinitely while your team stays the same size.

Law 5. Harness the Energy of Others

Gamma’s growth engine was not ads, enterprise sales, or content. It was people. Specifically, influencers.

But not the big shiny influencers you see on Instagram. Grant went the opposite direction.

Not big creators. Not million follower celebrities. But Micro influencers. (Umm hello Grant, we’re one of those, drop me a DM anytime!)

He recruited them manually. One by one. Jumped on calls. Helped them understand the product. Gave them the story. Taught them how to express Gamma in their voice.

This is high leverage community building. A small team connects deeply with a small group of trusted voices whose audiences actually care.

One line from Grant sums it up:

“People really trust what they say. It becomes a wildfire that can spread really fast.”

That is Law 5 in action. Harness the energy of others. Don’t hire ten marketers. Instead, mobilize a thousand believers.

Team Growth Advice from a Founder Who Kept His Team Tiny on Purpose

Grant’s hiring philosophy is a masterclass in Microteam discipline.

He hired slowly. He hired for curiosity. He hired for people who could wear multiple hats without complaining. And he avoided bloating the team even when revenue exploded.

He also carries a mindset that more Microteams should adopt.

“Less is more. Totally.”

Fewer people means more clarity. More alignment. More velocity.

Gamma chose the hard path. They didn’t hire ahead of revenue. They didn’t build departments. They built leverage.

And that’s why they Scalemaxxed as a Microteam.

Three Tools that Gamma Used to Scalemaxx

Here are the three most leverage-packed tools Gamma leaned on to Scalemaxx a tiny team into a huge business.

Perplexity. Used early to generate structured outlines and blend web search into Gamma’s creation workflow. This sped up concepting. Let them move from idea to draft fast. And kept the product anchored to real user tasks.

1stCollab. A YC platform that automated outbound to find and recruit the right creators. Grant started manually. Then scaled the “micro-influencer” engine with First Collab’s persona-based sourcing so they could hit educator and niche “echo chambers” with precision.

Intercom. Their user-feedback firehose. Post-launch, Intercom “blew up” with people asking how to buy more credits. That signal directly triggered their pricing. Packaging sprints. And faster monetization. Intercom functioned as a real-time demand barometer.

How you can adopt this list: Use an AI research/outlining copilot for speed. A targeted creator-outreach tool to scale distribution authentically. And a live customer-messaging system to convert noise into next actions.

Three Processes that Gamma Used to Scalemaxx

Here are the three strongest processes Gamma leaned on to Scalemaxx with a tiny team. Each one is a repeatable method you can copy.

Rapid daily user-test loop. Idea in the morning. Prototype fast. Put it in front of real target users the same day using panels like UserTesting or VoicePanel. Watch them struggle. Fix by evening. Repeat. They also ran a private “power users” Slack. They dropped rough wireframes and functional prototypes there to get early signal from people who already understood the product. This made iteration brutally fast and focused.

Founder-led micro-influencer engine. Grant personally onboarded creators. One by one. He taught them the product. Workshopped hooks with them. Then let them tell the story in their own voice. He avoided “big name” blasts that feel like ads. Instead he targeted many small creators inside authentic echo chambers. Educators were a prime pocket. Trust was high. Word spread fast at low cost.

Gamma first focused on “word of mouth” to drive sales. Grant said to do that before investing in any paid “performance” marketing. And still as of today, more than 50% of Gamma’s signups come from word of mouth versus paid advertisements.

Monetize through signal-driven pricing sprints. After a big AI launch, Intercom overflowed with “how do I buy more credits”. That was the trigger to ship pricing quickly. They ran a fast Van Westendorp survey, added light conjoint to rank what users valued, and shipped a simple plan around the familiar price anchor in the market. Then they monitored margins and adjusted. This kept the business profitable while small.

For Microteams, you can mirror this approach by defining the exact persona you want feedback from. Use a testing platform to source five to ten matches daily. Keep changes tiny. Ship the next rev in under 24 hours. Run a lightweight power-user space to test deeper or non-onboarding features.

Map two or three “echo chambers” where your product is genuinely useful. Do founder calls to engage with and educate creators. Treat them like an extension of your team. Aim for hundreds of creators who each reach the right thousand people. Keep budgets in the few-hundred to low-thousands range per partner.

Watch support and activation channels for “pull” signals. When you see willingness to pay, run a quick pricing study. Ship one clear plan first. Track unit economics in real time. Keep it simple until the data proves you need tiers.

The Mindset That Created a $2B Outcome

Grant tells a story from his childhood about his mom teaching him to dream bigger. To zoom out. To avoid narrow thinking. To not let early circumstances dictate future ambition.

This mindset is the secret weapon.

Most Microteams limit themselves not by capacity but by imagination. They build too small. They think too locally. They underestimate the scale they can reach with the right leverage stack.

Grant didn’t make that mistake.

He used small steps. Tiny cycles. Fast experiments. Compounding momentum. But always pointed at a big outcome.

This is the Microteam mindset. Not small business thinking. Big business energy. Small team execution.

When asked how listeners can help him, Grant said:

“Let me know how I can help. I want to be your biggest cheerleader.”

This is the Microteam ethos. We rise together. We scale together. We build the future with leverage, not labor.

Grant did it. And you can too.

Think big. Stay lean. Scale smarter.