How Gamma grew to millions of users by solving a problem first

Executive overview

Most people hate making slides. Gamma's founders started with that problem, not with AI. They spent over a year iterating in private before a public launch, using their own product daily to drive continuous improvement.

AI collapsed the activation barrier: what once took an hour to see now takes one minute. That single shift transformed onboarding and ignited growth to millions of users.

Start with the problem, then find the technology — not the other way around.

Finding the problem and building in private

• Grant and Jon met at Optimizely, where meetings meant six to eight hours of presentations daily
• That experience made the problem visceral: too much time spent on formatting, constant context-switching between document and slide tools
• First product was a minimal text editor broken into sections with a present mode — deliberately stripped back
• Early users were friends and colleagues; qualitative feedback was unreliable, so they watched usage patterns instead
• They forced themselves to use their own MVP for all internal work — notes, meetings, presentations — to surface what was broken
• Product improved ~10% each week over roughly 18 months before they felt it was genuinely good

Launching and iterating toward product-market fit

• Private beta launched with just a landing page; first 1,000–2,000 sign-ups came from that alone
• Product Hunt launch (August) hit number one and produced a clear sign-up spike — then plateaued
• Jon emailed every single sign-up personally to ask how they heard about Gamma and what feedback they had
• Iterated for six months on that feedback: missing features, unclear value proposition, poor expectation-setting
• At public beta, there were no AI capabilities yet; the AI rebuild came after

How AI changed everything

• Pre-AI, the blank page problem was the biggest obstacle: users had to invest an hour before seeing Gamma's value
• AI compressed that to one minute — activation energy dropped, onboarding transformed
• Existing users who got AI access worked faster and unlocked a new level of creativity
• AI has high marginal cost, so unlimited free usage was not viable; a credit system was built in the week before launch
• Users burned through 400 credits quickly, then asked how to get more — a clear willingness-to-pay signal
• First monetization was entirely manual: support team sent Stripe payment links individually, no buy button in product
• First paying customer converted within an hour of receiving that link

Growth and international expansion

• After the AI launch, sign-ups and engagement surged to millions of users
• On 4 July (a US public holiday), over 50,000 people signed up in a single day — driven almost entirely by international users
• Korea and Japan among the fastest-growing markets; users there eager to embrace new creative tools

Lessons on building with AI

• Temptation with any technology shift is to find a technology and then search for a problem — resist this
• Start with a problem you are personally passionate about; you will live with it for years
• Teams that win are customer-obsessed first, then ask whether AI is the right tool for the identified problem
• AI moves humans from creator to curator — Gamma is an example of this shift in practice
• AI as a design partner: unlimited creativity, unlimited patience, no fatigue