Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Great reminder. We'll link to that in the show notes. Okay, let's come back to the growth of Gamma. So we've talked about how you got your first tens of thousands of users, essentially product hunts, rethinking, onboarding, making it really magical, and then this very controversial tweet that Paul Graham commented, created some buzz. Let's talk about the next phase and maybe, I don't know, tell us kind of the ARR at that point through 100 million. Just broadly, what should we know? So when we got to about 10 million in ARR, I think there was this feeling for me, which was we knew we needed ways to help just continue to amplify and spread the word about Gamma. I think it was already working in terms of the organic virality was there, and so we did feel like it was time to start amplifying some of this. And I think the main blocker of my mind that I started feeling was that our initial brand was holding us back. And I think a lot of people will discount whether or not a rebrand is valuable. And I think sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. For us, there's a few different things we looked at. So one, our initial brand was almost more of a placeholder brand because we created it the moment we incorporated the company, which was again late 2020, beginning of 2021, where we needed something so that as we built, we could at least share it with people. We could put up a landing page and just feel like, okay, there's something here. But we didn't invest a whole lot into it. And so it was pretty limited in sort of what I call the DNA of the brand. There wasn't that many ... The art direction was very limited in scope. There wasn't much when it came to voice and tone. And so it was something that we knew was good enough to start, but it wasn't scalable. And when I think about something that could be scalable, it's almost like you can take the ingredients of a brand and replicate it a ton, this DNA is something where you can imagine creating tons of content around and all feeling pretty cohesive. And I think that needs to be done by design. You're really being thoughtful about every single element. Like what is the art direction you want to go with? What is the voice and tone? Such that as you're creating thousands of pieces of copy, it all feels pretty cohesive. And so we went back to the drawing board and we spent many months rethinking what would be the brand, what is this vision that we have longer term? Our creative director internally partner with Smith & Diction, an amazing agency that has helped folks like Perplexity also do their rebrand or their initial brand. And we [inaudible 00:40:05] many months just really trying to craft what we think is the core DNA of the brand, and doing so in a way that we could replicate it as much as possible. Replication piece of it comes into play, because as you start scaling you're going to have to create a ton of content, your own content on social media, ads for performance marketing, assets for influencers to be able to use and showcase in their content. And so you're going from tiny pieces of content to all of a sudden every week we're testing thousands of pieces of creative. And you cannot do that if you don't feel confident that as you're replicating, you have that sort of cohesive feel. So for us that we realized it was going to be necessary and it's why we invested so much. It ended up being way more expensive, way more time consuming than I would've imagined.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.