Grant Lee

We would have an idea in the morning, come up with some sort of functional prototype, recruit a bunch of people that are legitimately good prospective users, but have zero skin in the game, ship fast so people can start playing with it. In the afternoon, we're already running pretty full scale experiment. You start actually hearing other people describe their usage of the product. We can also watch them struggle. By the evening or by the next day. We can actually go through all of it together and say, okay, we're going back and we have to fix this. This is not usable and we've done that for everything.

You have to think about them being selfish, vain, and lazy, right? They're coming in, they have no desire to learn a new tool. And so what can you give them in that first 30 seconds that earns you the next 30 seconds and then the next 30 seconds?

All of our people leaders are player coaches in that they still do the end work themselves and they can mentor and coach those around them. This analogy came from, or this mindset came from, it's something I borrowed from just the sports world in general because there's a lot of sports that just move incredibly fast.

I think a lot of people think influencer marketing and they'll think these big trendy creators, people that have a million followers. This is the wrong approach. You basically give them a script to read, immediately feels like an ad. That product is not connected really to them in any way. You're much better doing the hard thing, which is hard to scale, finding the thousands of micro influencers that have an audience where your product maybe is actually useful. People really trust what they say. That ends up becoming this wildfire that can spread really, really fast.

All the initial influencers, I onboarded manually myself. I would jump on a call with each one of them so that they understood what Gamma represented, how to use the product. You want to be able to have them tell you story but in their voice.

Before we even talk about the technology, so we're skipping to the part where you're trying to apply the most interesting models or technology to solve some problem. Start with solving the problem you actually care about.

There's this thing from consumer advertising, which is you throw a consumer one egg, they can probably catch it. You throw them four or five eggs, they're probably going to drop all of them. And oftentimes founders want to talk about the four or five features they have, maybe 10 features.

Your mindset should almost be like you're trying to create a word of mouth machine. If you can get that part right, everything else becomes significantly easier. And if you have any, and I think this applies to both prosumer, B2C, as well as even B2B products, if you have a B2B product, even if you're not telling all of your friends, you should be telling colleagues where that product is relevant.

Don't invest until you have word of mouth. Don't fool yourself into thinking that you'll solve other problems by just starting to ramp up a performance marketing program. Just get the word of mouth piece first, so that you're coming into this program with some tailwinds and then start ramping it up.

You don't want your product to be at a point where more than 50% of your acquisitions are coming through paid acquisition. I think if that is happening, your core growth engine is broken.

You want to recruit a bunch of people that are legitimately good prospective users or customers of your product, but have zero skin in the game. They do not care at all whether or not your product succeeds. They're just in it to test it.