How This AI Startup Grew to $50M ARR in 2 Years (Marketing Playbook)

Summary

Marketing Against The Grain

Episode: How This AI Startup Grew to $50M ARR in 2 Years (Marketing Playbook)

Date: September 18, 2025
Hosts: Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan, HubSpot Media

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OVERVIEW

In this episode, Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan dissect the meteoric rise of Gamma, an AI-powered presentation tool that hit $50M in ARR and amassed 50 million users within two years—all with only 30 employees. The heart of the episode is Gamma founder Grant Lee’s viral Twitter/X thread outlining the company’s four key marketing tactics. Kipp and Kieran break down each step of the Gamma playbook, examining how strategic marketing (not just “the magic of AI”) was instrumental, and how listeners can adapt these tactics for their own rapid growth, especially in the AI SaaS world.

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KEY DISCUSSION POINTS & INSIGHTS

1. The Myth of AI-Only Growth (00:01–02:39)

• Kieran and Kipp emphasize that Gamma’s explosive growth isn’t just about having a great AI product—smart and non-traditional marketing strategies played a central role.
• Gamma reached $50M ARR by spending only $5M, a capital efficiency that would have required $100-200M pre-AI, highlighting a major shift in growth economics.

“A lot of people think these companies are just growing because they’re AI... But this is a good example of a company that has done marketing from day one. Marketing is a big component of why they were able to grow so fast.” — Kieran (01:53)

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2. Influencer Marketing as the New Virality (03:26–13:26)

The Evolution:

• Old Approach: Product-led growth and in-product virality (e.g., Dropbox).
• New Approach: Influencer marketing is now the main driver, especially via creators with engaged B2B audiences (YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn).

Why It Works:

• Demo Magic: Influencer-generated content showcasing product “magic” (auto-building slides, etc.) drives mass adoption.
• Leverage Platform Virality: Instead of building in-product viral loops, Gamma piggybacks on the virality mechanisms of platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

“Influencer marketing is about outsourcing product virality... You’re leveraging their viral loops instead of trying to build your own.” — Kip (05:16)

Key Tactics and Lessons:

• Go Broad, Not Niche: Start with a wide range of creator types and content, then double down on the top performers.
  • “90% of all the reach comes from 10% of the content.” — Kieran (07:55)
• Avoid Minimal Viable Effort: Don’t just dabble—allocate real budget ($10-20k/month initially) and optimize continuously.
• Influencer as Content Team: Appoint a creator-led manager to orchestrate platforms, creators, and content formats for scale (09:54).
• TikTok Hack: On TikTok, brands work with influencers to launch new branded channels, benefit from the algorithm’s favor toward new accounts, and “hand over” success stories to the brand (10:01–11:59).

“The reason [TikTok works] goes back to hits... to have a big hit, you need as many attempts as possible.” — Kip (11:27)

Creator-Driven Pyramid:

• Top-performing creators are promoted to train others, creating a scalable, tiered influencer program.

“They created that playbook and had their top creators act as consultants to teach other creators how to promote Gamma... That is an amazingly powerful pyramid scheme.” — Kieran (13:26)

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3. Invest in Brand Before Performance Marketing (14:35–16:34)

• Contrary to common founder instincts, Gamma invested in brand marketing before paid “performance” campaigns.
• Rationale: Strong brand increases the effectiveness of all performance marketing (“brand lifts ad performance”).

“He believes you should invest in brand before performance marketing... The better your brand visibility, the better your ad performance, which is actually correct.” — Kieran (14:35)

“All he’s doing is buying low and selling high. He’s telling you to invest in areas that are less certain, less predictable—and subsequently less expensive—than the tried and true ways.” — Kip (15:15)

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4. Relentless User Testing and “Dogfooding” (16:34–17:57)

• Constant Prototyping: Gamma regularly put features in front of users for testing and refined through A/B (up to A/F!) iterations.
• Dogfood Obsessively: The team used the product themselves, always asking: is it “100x better” than alternatives?
  • If you’re not using your own product, why would anyone else?

“Use your product and keep asking yourself—Is it 100 times better than the alternatives? If you’re not using your own product, then... would any other users find it actually valuable?” — Kieran (16:34)

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5. Differentiation is Survival (17:21–17:58)

• In the AI tools arms race, differentiation is the ultimate moat—being “10x better” is essential because mediocrity leads to fast commoditization.

“If you are not achieving the results... it’s because you have no differentiation. Differentiation is now at a premium in this post-AI era.” — Kip (17:57)

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NOTABLE QUOTES & MOMENTS

• On Viral Tactics:
  “Today you need big hits... maximize the number of big hits that you can create from a viral perspective, especially on these short-form video platforms.” — Kip (08:38)

• On Scaling Influencer Content:
  “The manager is going to have to figure out the mix of creators with the right mix of channels and right content formats, and condense it to a small subset that really works.” — Kieran (09:54)

• On Performance vs Brand:
  “This post is a litmus test—are you a great founder? You’re investing in less-certain, less-predictable—less expensive—areas and making them work.” — Kip (15:15)

• On Competitive Landscape:
  “We’re in the most competitive era of software. To stand out, you have to be much, much, much better.” — Kieran (18:02)

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TIMESTAMPS FOR KEY SEGMENTS

• 00:01–02:39 — Gamma’s growth context: 50M ARR in 2 years, 50M users, 30 employees.
• 03:26–07:55 — Influencer marketing as replacement for product virality; how and why it works in AI SaaS.
• 08:38–09:54 — Shift from incremental content to “big hit” viral content; importance of finding the top 10% performers among influencers.
• 09:54–11:59 — Influencer “content team” philosophy; unique scaling hacks on TikTok.
• 13:26–13:51 — Training top creators to multiply reach; creator-led pyramid structure.
• 14:35–16:34 — Brand before paid ads: why counterintuitive brand investment boosts performance.
• 16:34–17:58 — Relentless user testing and dogfooding; constant product differentiation.
• 18:02–18:43 — Final takeaways and summary: influencer-centric growth, brand focus, and relentless differentiation.

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CORE TAKEAWAYS

• Influencer marketing is the growth engine for today’s fastest growing AI startups—it's the new virality.
• Invest big, go broad, iterate, and optimize: Don’t “MVP” influencer marketing—aim for high volume and maximize for hits.
• Prioritize brand: Brand before performance marketing leads to better overall paid results.
• Incessant testing and differentiation: Test with real users often, use your product obsessively, and ensure you're truly different in a sea of sameness.
• Modern founders thrive in uncertainty: The best founders can make low-certainty, low-cost tactics work through iteration and hustle.

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Listeners are challenged to think beyond traditional marketing—replicating Gamma’s playbook requires embracing experimentation, creator-driven growth, and bold brand moves. The message: “Don’t just ride the AI wave—market with intent, scale with influencers, perfect your product, and relentlessly differentiate.”

Transcript

[Kieran]

This is Grant Lee and the story of Gamma. Gamma is an incredible AI presentation tool. They have grown to over $50 million in ARR in under two years. 50 million users, and there's only 30 employees. Now, grant just did a tweet that went viral. It's gone everywhere. Because he has broken down their four exact marketing steps to supercharge their growth and reach these phenomenal numbers in record amount of time. And Kip and I about to break down every single step and tell you how you can replicate this for your business. All of that and more on this episode of Marketing against the Grain. All right, Kip, we're going to cover one of the best breakdowns on a marketing playbook that AI startups are using to really supercharge their growth. Now, we've had some of these companies on. We had Anton on from Lovable. These companies are growing faster than anything we've ever seen before. And I think the breakdown we're going to give you is from one of these companies and it's the best playbook that has kind of been distilled into real tactics to show you how these AI startups are growing so fast.

[Kip]

Right. What everybody's saying is like, oh, these AI startups are just great because they have these cool AI products. That's not the full story. They're actually doing new tactics that is unlocking this growth. The company that we're talking about, Kieran, is called Gamma, which is an AI slide company. And the founder of Gamma, I think you're going to pull up his tweet, right? And his tweet went viral. If you are a nerd like us, you care about marketing and AI. I think you probably saw it everywhere over the Internet. Is that right?

[Kieran]

Yeah, because he really did break it down. It's obviously they have done this sometimes you see a lot of these tweets and they're not true. Right. It's just people trying to put best in class to get engagement or things out there to get engagement. But you can see that they've actually distilled this playbook, really figured it out and helped to scale their growth. They're at like $50 million in ARR. Annual recurring revenue. There are over 50 million users and there are 30 employees. Like, it's kind of bananas how large these companies are growing with such a small amount of people. And what was really cool is a lot of people think these companies are just growing because they're AI, right? Oh, wow. It's the magic of AI. They're a new tool. They can do new things and they don't really need marketing. But like this is a good example of a company that have done marketing from day one, like Markland is a big component of why they were able to grow so very, very fast.

[Kip]

And if you break down the math real quick, just for context to everyone, he's basically saying they spent $5 million to get to $50 million of annual reoccurring revenue. In the pre AI era, a company would have spent what, Karen? 100, 150, $200 million to get to 50 million in annual reoccurring revenue. So the math and the economics are what's breaking out these growth rates into such kind of exponential curves. And we want to break down for you what the heck they're actually doing and what you can go and do. So given that, Kieran, the number one thing he put at the top of his list, and I don't think it's an accident, is influencer marketing. It's something you and I have been doing for a long time. But I'd love for you to break it down. I know, because you are, I think, an expert in this topic.

[Kieran]

Influencer marketing really is native companies, AI startups, new form of virality. So like pre AI, we had this thing called product led growth. Product led growth allow users to use products prior to them ever having to talk to a human. And there was these mechanics in that product that allow you to get what we call virality, which is people sharing the product with other people. A good example of this is Dropbox. Dropbox is one of the most famous examples where I store some files. I share that link with you. You're like, wow, like I can access these files and there's this app called Dropbox. I should also get that app, right? That's a form of virality. Yeah, that has kind of been done to death now. Those mechanics don't work as well. And I think the way these companies are growing, what's fascinating about Gamma, there was no mention of like product virality. It's really influencer marketing, as you said, was number one. And the reason influencer marketing I think is the new form of virality for these companies is a couple of reasons. Number one, a couple years ago, like 2021, we bought the hostile, right? You and I were like, hey, we think creators, we think content, we think personality. Led growth is a big thing. We see that now. Today it's happening. Creators in B2B have a ton and ton of audience, right? So a lot of the audience is owned by These individual creators and that's who people want to get their content from. And the second thing is because you pair creators with cool product demos, because these product demos look magical. Gamma is an app that allows you to build slides automatically. I will say I'm a big genspark user. I actually got back into Gamma last month. It's so much better than I had even thought.

[Kip]

Oh, nice. I need to retry it then.

[Kieran]

They've really built an incredible tool. I didn't realize they had come on in such a short amount of time. So it's a magical tool. I, you know, I'm building world class looking decks really easily. So the product demo is kind of magical. Those two things set up a pretty great foundation to start to distribute your product through these creators who have all of that audience.

[Kip]

One of the things I want to break down on influencer marketing, Kieran, I got a couple takes here that nobody ever talks about. One take is influencer marketing is about outsourcing product virality. So instead of you being obsessed with product virality for your own product, you're saying, hey, you know, who's forgotten more than I'll ever learn about virality? Fricking meta, for example. And like the Instagram viral loops are crazy and the TikTok viral loops are crazy. So I'm going to go play there and leverage their viral loops instead of trying to build my own. Right, right. Like that's one reason it works, because you are getting the scaled viral loops of these amazing growth teams and you're taking advantage of them where they have figured out the dynamics of like, oh, we're gonna ask somebody to follow you if they share your story and all these things. Right. The second thing, Kieran, that I think is very, very important is that like the math and discovery of realness changed in the old world of companies. It was like, oh, I've got this Roas model and I'm looking for these direct response metrics and we're all kind of competing using the same math and the costs kind of go up and you need a lot of money now. It's like you can be much more creative with your math. And what I mean like that you work out these partnerships with these influencers that are more bespoke. But you can be like, hey, you know, I'm going to pay to get you more followers so that you get more followers, I get more signups. You can do very creative things that you could not do with like these very traditional programmatic ad platforms. And there's a two Aspects of this influencer marketing playbook that I don't think people talk about at all.

[Kieran]

Yeah. And I think these AI startups also are leading into the fact that, you know, the personality part, if you actually look at some of these founders, they're not afraid to get into it and mix it on LinkedIn and goes back and forth.

[Kip]

They get zero cares, man.

[Kieran]

Yeah, they don't care. They're on X posting some good content as well, posting strong points of view. Some of the learnings here I think were really good for listeners are how do I do this? Right? How do I do influencer marketing? I'm a smaller company, is this for me? Well, there's some like good learnings here. You cannot minimal viable version creator or influence market. And I think that's like a really important thing because the problem is the people who have influence cost money and it actually is a channel that you have to optimize, right. It's not just give the influencers your money, you have to really optimize it and perfect it. And so you can't really do a minimal viable version where you're like, I'll pay for some like third tier, fourth tier influencers and do it for a month and see if it works. And so one of their learnings was most startups get a bunch of things wrong. They too small a budget, right? So they started with 10 to 20k a month, which isn't a lot for a fast growth company. And they're probably spending this on influencer versus traditionally paid ads. They're overly selective on creators and messaging. We get back to one of the learnings which is go broad to begin with and they give up too early. This is a, it's a paid channel, but it works much more like an organic channel because these creators are posting through organic channels. So I think there are three good learnings. One of the things he talked about here is you really want to go broad, right? So he said, list of creative Personas with audiences that care about your product, right? So you want to actually find an exhaustive list of people in that space who are going to be actually passionate about your product because you want to try a lot of influencers until you find your core. What he says is like 90% of all of the reach comes from 10% of the content, which means it's going to be a small subset of your creators.

[Kip]

I think this is a very important point, Kieran, because this is a shift in everybody's thinking. It used to be like, cool, I'm going to Write blog articles or I'm going to do social media posts. And it's about like consistently doing that and getting them a little bit better. Every time that game has changed to where it's like I need big hits, right? And it's like I'm going to have big hits or I'm going to have misses and there's not going to be a lot in between. And these companies that are getting really sharp trajectories are all about maximizing the number of big hits that they can create from like a viral perspective, especially on these like short form video platforms. Right?

[Narrator]

Here's the thing. Traditional marketing is broken. The smartest companies have figured out a completely different approach. Influencer led growth. Instead of hoping for organic shares, they're systematically recruiting hundreds of creators to manufacture word of mouth at scale. We're talking 10 to 20 times better capital efficiency than traditional marketing. Well, we've put together the complete playbook, 10 prompts that show you exactly how to discover creators at scale, build viral loops through influencers, and turn top performers into trainers who actually scale your entire program. Get it right. Now scan the QR code or click the link in the description below. Now let's get back to the show.

[Kieran]

And I think the big thing here is to kind of COVID off the rest of the influencer marketing learning. So one of the roles I said that's going to be really important in the Future recently on LinkedIn was creator led manager. And so what I mean by that is this team is really your content team. So when you think about it, that manager is going to have to figure out the mix of creators with the right mix of channels and the right mix of content formats that work for those channels and then condense it all into the small subset of creators, platforms and content mix that really works. And one of the things I want to kind of get your take here is one of the interesting things about TikTok, and I know this because I know some people who are TikTok influencers and have kind of talked me through how this works is TikTok is kind of unique in terms of how people approach that as an influencer channel. So in all these other channels I want access to your audience. So you post through your channel. And TikTok because the algorithm rewards new channels just as much as it rewards existing channels. What people do there is they actually get the influencers to create brand new channels and they create brand new channels, create content because then they don't have to adhere to their brand guidelines or whatever. They're trying to do in their core channel, they, they can start fresh just for you and your content. And they do this at scale, right? They might take on hundreds of creators and they all launch new channels and then they see after 30 days what's working and whatever channels are really working, they hand over the ownership to the brand. And we know some companies are doing that. I think Roy and Chloe is doing something like that. But that's pretty fascinating like, because today I don't know if this will change but you can really scale TikTok influencer marketing much, much quicker than you can any other platform.

[Kip]

The reason for this, my take on this goes back to the hits you and I know. To have a big hit, what do you need? As many attempts as possible. And so what you can do on TikTok that you can't do anywhere else is just have way more attempts. If you have a hundred creators and you've got like this kind of pay per performance viral bonus structure for them where you pay them a little bit. But if the post really takes off then they get a lot, then it's like cool. Well, my only barrier to distribution growth is how many creators I have and how good those people are.

[Kieran]

Exactly right.

[Kip]

There's no platform friction.

[Kieran]

Not every throw is going to be a touchdown kit because you're into American football.

[Kip]

I love it.

[Kieran]

So just to let our listeners know something amazing has happened. I've always watched documentaries in American football but I would never watch four hours of American football. I did not know the NFL have created the perfect sport, the perfect sport, the 13 minute game. And so what I do now is I don't know any of the results and I go watch the 30 minute highlights and that has all you need to see because it has all the stuff that actually happens. Everything else is just commercials and Americans being wowed by things going on around them at the game, not actually watching the game. And so now I can watch a 30 minute American football game and it's like the best thing I'm watching right now. I just love this sport.

[Kip]

13 minute summer and you're missing all the fun on Sunday afternoons. And sometime we're going to get you in America and have you have a proper football weekend in the fall.

[Kieran]

I don't think I could do four hours.

[Kip]

But look, that 13 minute summary is a pretty good cheat code and I'm just happy that you follow American football now and we can use it as references.

[Kieran]

But I'm just trying to find my team.

[Kip]

Every throw is not going to be a touchdown Kieran, you're right. Yeah.

[Kieran]

It's a lot of field goaling.

[Kip]

Feel, kicking, field, go. Oh my gosh, I can't wait for that little guy.

[Kieran]

He's a little guy and he has to come on and that's like, okay. Like this is all I get to do and if I get it wrong, everyone hates me. And that's like your life. That's a tough.

[Kip]

That's basically kind of how it works. Yeah.

[Kieran]

All right, so let's just kind of like end the kind of influencer learnings because there's one other thing here. So if you think about it, you have the mixture of creators, platforms and content formats. What Gamma did really well is they figured out what really worked and created a playbook. And the thing I love then is they created that playbook and had their top creators act as consultants to teach other creators how to promote Gamma. Now that is a amazingly powerful pyramid scheme. Right?

[Kip]

Like completely is a marketing pyramid scheme.

[Kieran]

It's awesome. And so what you should really learn from this is people just think, here's like my money influencer, go promote that thing and I'll see what happens. Whereas Gamma said, no, like this is a core channel and we believe we can be world class in this channel.

[Kip]

Well, this is I think a really important part to understand about marketing. The more confident you are in something is going to work, the higher the expenses to do that thing. And the arbitrage that they found is, hey, I've got all these creators. Not many of them are making much money. They'd like to make money. A lot of them might not work, but I've got so many of them that some of them will work and I'll be successful. Right. And so I can get that distribution at a much lower cost. Okay, Brand performance marketing.

[Kieran]

Yeah, let's kind of go through the last couple here because I think influencer marketing really is the big one to perfect. But the second one is like a really interesting one because it's probably anti what most founders do, which is he believes you should invest in brand before performance marketing. Right. That is not the traditional want of most founders. And the reason he believes that is because the better your brand visibility, the better your ad performance, which is actually correct. So maybe give your take on that.

[Kip]

We have found this to be true.

[Kieran]

But for a founder, that's really hard to make that decision because you again are doing something that has some amount of time to like get traction, to build foundation, whereas paid is like pretty immediate.

[Kip]

I have a really hot take here. I would pause it to you that the stuff in this post that he covers is honestly just a litmus test of whether you're a great founder or not.

[Kieran]

Then you understand marketing.

[Kip]

Well, no, it's not even understand marketing. All he's doing is buying low and selling high. What he is telling everybody to do in this post. And if you're reading this post, he is basically telling you to invest in areas of marketing that are less certain, less easy to predict their outcomes, and subsequently less expensive than the tried and true, highly predictable ways. And he's saying, hey, I as a founder can make these less expensive, less predictable things work and become predictable because, like, I have the skills to like, iterate, learn, and figure that out. And that's essentially the litmus test of a great founder. Right, Right. And it's like you can show me anybody who's doing a playbook like this or something similar, and I'd be like, okay, your company's gonna be successful. Like, you've figured out you have the backbone to be a really good founder.

[Kieran]

And I should say so. He definitely approaches brand very similar to how you would approach performance marketing. Lots of testing, lots of figuring out the right creative messaging and then building funnels would align messaging and creative. And I think the big thing to say here is this team's background is optimizedly.

[Kip]

Yes.

[Kieran]

And you can actually see it through the way they approach.

[Kip]

Definitely see it all forms.

[Kieran]

Yeah, they kind of like iterate and test. Maybe we'll just kind of round out the four he list really quickly because these two are like, much more akin to building great products. So he says get users to test prototypes before you ship, which basically is you can never do enough user testing. They A, B, C, D, E, F, G. All of the user testing you could do to figure out like, where were the weak points within the product and really started to figure out how to like bring that to life and make sure they kind of nailed the most important things to users. And the last one, like, makes a ton of sense, which is I really love this, which is like dog food the hell out of your own product. Which means use your product and keep asking yourself, is it 100 times better than the alternatives? And if you're not using your own product, then like, question mark, would any other users find it actually valuable? So those two are like how you build good product.

[Kip]

My hot take on number four here is that it's all about differentiation, that you have to obsess about being different. And in this AI world, you could make a new product that is just so much better in their case than all the other slide builders and have high differentiation for a little while. And if you're not highly differentiated, the average thing will get commoditized super quickly. You either are far and away like 10 times different or you're in a mass of hundreds of other companies the same. And if you are not achieving the results that you're trying to achieve for your company, it's because you have no differentiation.

[Kieran]

Exactly.

[Kip]

Differentiation is now at a premium in this post AI era.

[Kieran]

Yeah, we're in the most competitive era of software and to stand out you have to be much, much, much better. So just to recap the influencer marketing which really is driving a lot of success of these AI native startups and I think it's something that most companies, whether you're AI native or not, can actually replicate and I think it's a trend that's going to continue to happen because search is, is declining, paid is getting more expensive, creators own more of the audience. You have to perfect that as a channel. Performance marketing versus brand, pretty counterintuitive. Go with brand, your performance marketing will be better because of that. And then build great product user tests, dog food. And kudos to Grant and the Gamma team for building a great, great product and building a great great marketing playbook.

[Kip]

This is an awesome playbook. The core lesson takeaway for me is like figure out your influencer marketing playbook and understand. You know, this goes back to the old book Blue Ocean strategy. You want to go where there's not a high competition. He's playing in channels where there's less competition to do great marketing than there is in kind of traditional B2B avenues. And that is really what's let them get a lot more successful. So go check that out, let us know what you think. Let us know if you're getting these playbooks to work in your business. Leave us a comment, hit subscribe and we'll see you real soon. On marketing against the grain. It.