How Gamma Hit $50M ARR By Ignoring Silicon Valley’s Growth Playbook
Gamma hit $50M ARR without ads. Their secret? A "100x better" product rule. Discover the 3-step playbook to stop buying users and start earning them.
Let’s play a game. You just raised a fat seed round. Your product is live. What’s the first thing your investors and advisors tell you to do?
“Scale paid acquisition. Find your channels. Optimize CAC to LTV. Let’s go, go, go”
It’s the Silicon Valley gospel. Growth is a math problem you solve by force-feeding cash into the Facebook and Google algorithms.
It’s a trap that burns cash, masks a mediocre product, and leads to a bloated, unprofitable mess.
I just read through the growth tactics from Grant Lee, whose company (Gamma) rocketed from $0 to a profitable $50M ARR in under two years. And the playbook is so brilliantly backward, so fundamentally contrarian, that I have to break it down for you.
Their secret wasn’t a bigger ad budget. It was building a product so damn good that word-of-mouth did the heavy lifting.
They proved that brand isn’t a fluffy nice-to-have; it’s the most powerful performance marketing channel you’ll ever find.
The Great Lie: You Can’t Buy Love
Here’s the data that should make every growth marketer sweat:
$0 to $10M ARR: Almost entirely word-of-mouth and organic content.
$10M to $50M ARR: Still over 50% from word-of-mouth.
Think about that.
They built a $10M business before they even seriously considered the tactics most startups lead with. They didn’t buy users; they earned evangelists.
How?
By flipping the traditional model on its head.
Instead of building a product and then figuring out how to market it, they focused on two pre-marketing steps that created an unstoppable growth engine.
Step 1: The “100x Better” Dogfooding Test
You hear “dogfooding” and probably think of your team using your own buggy software. That’s not what this is. This is a strategic filter for killing bad ideas.
