“Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (co-founder)
发布时间 2025-11-13 13:30:04 来源
摘要
Grant Lee is the co-founder of Gamma, the AI-powered presentation tool that's one of the hottest and most interesting AI startups in ...
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中英文字稿 
I mean, my third pitch in, I get to the very end of the pitch feeling pretty good about myself. The investor pauses a little bit and then just says, That has to be the worst pitch. Worst idea I have ever heard. Not only are you trying to go against incumbents, you're going against incumbents have massive distribution. You are never going to succeed. You guys are over 100 million AR now, worth over $2 billion.
在我的第三次提案中，我最终讲完时自我感觉不错。投资者稍微停顿了一下，然后就说：“这可能是我听过的最糟糕的提案，最糟糕的主意。不仅仅是你们要挑战现有的大公司，这些公司还拥有庞大的分销网络。你们不可能成功。”然而，现在你们的年收入已经超过了一亿，公司的估值超过了二十亿。
One of the most interesting ways you guys grew early on was influencer marketing. All the initial influencers I onboarded manually myself. I always 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 your story, but in their voice. 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 and immediately feels like an ad. That product is not connected to them in any way.
你们在初期发展中最有趣的方法之一就是利用网红营销来推广。我亲自逐个联系了每一个初期的网红，每次都要和他们进行通话，以便他们理解Gamma代表什么以及如何使用这个产品。你希望他们能够用自己的语言来讲述你的故事。我认为很多人一提到网红营销就会想到那些拥有百万粉丝的大网红，这其实是错误的做法。因为这样你基本上就是给他们一份脚本来读，这样马上就让人感觉像是在打广告。这个产品和他们之间并没有任何联系。
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. Something you talk about, there is actually a lot of ways to think experimentally, even in the early stages. We would have an idea in the morning, come up with some sort of functional prototype. We recruit a bunch of people that are legitimately good prospective users, but have zero skin in the game.
你最好去做那些虽难以扩展但更有成效的事情，比如找寻成千上万的微型网红，这些网红的受众可能真正需要你的产品。人们非常信任他们所说的话，这就像是可以迅速蔓延的野火。你提到的这一点，在发展初期确实有很多实验性的思维方式可供考虑。我们可能早上有了一个想法，就开发出某种功能原型，然后招募一群真正潜在的好用户，但他们对这个项目没有任何个人利益。
Ship that so people can start playing. 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, OK, we're going back and we have to fix this. This is like not usable. And we've done that for everything.
让产品上线，这样大家就可以开始使用了。到了下午，我们就已经在进行大规模的实验。你会开始真正听到其他人描述他们使用产品的情况。到晚上或第二天，我们可以看到他们遇到的困难。我们可以一起查看这些问题，然后说，好吧，我们得回去修复这个。这样下去是无法使用的。我们对所有问题都是这样处理的。
Today, my guest is Grant Lee, C-owned co-founder of Gamma. This is a really unique and inspiring and very tactically useful conversation because Grant is building something that is essentially the dream for most founders. A massive AI startup that's profitable and has been for a long time that didn't raise a lot of money for a long time. And as a small team, it's just around 30 people, all who can fit in a small restaurant, serving over 50 million users globally.
今天，我的嘉宾是Gamma的创始人之一Grant Lee。这次谈话非常特别，充满启发性，并且在策略上非常实用，因为Grant正在打造的项目本质上是大多数创业者的梦想。他们创办了一家大型的AI初创公司，这家公司一直以来都很赚钱，并且在很长一段时间里没有筹集大量资金。公司的团队规模很小，只有大约30人，可以同时坐在一个小餐馆里吃饭，但服务的用户却超过了全球五千万人。
If you're not familiar with Gamma, they're an AI-powered presentation and website design tool. They just hit 100 million AR in just over two years. They're valued at over $2 billion. And unlike a lot of the fast growing AI startups they hear about, they're growing profitably and sustainably. And in a category that most people did not believe had a huge business opportunity. As you'll hear in the conversation, one investor told Grant, this is the dumbest idea that he has ever heard.
如果你不熟悉 Gamma，这是一款由人工智能驱动的演示和网站设计工具。他们在短短两年内就实现了1亿美元的年收入，并且估值超过20亿美元。不同于很多你听说过的快速成长的AI初创公司，Gamma 的增长不仅盈利而且可持续。而且是在一个大多数人并不认为有巨大商业机会的领域中。如你将在对话中听到的，一位投资者曾对 Grant 说，这是他听过的最愚蠢的想法。
In this conversation, Grant shares the very counterintuitive lessons that he's learned, finding product market fit, how he knew that product market fit, the specific tactics that helped them grow, including a deep dive into influencer marketing, which blew my mind. Also, how they figured out their price, his thoughts on building a GPT wrapper company that is durable, a ton of hiring advice, and so much more. This could honestly have been another two hours of conversation.
在这次对话中，Grant 分享了他所学到的一些非常反直觉的经验，包括如何找到产品市场契合点，他是如何确认产品市场契合的，帮助他们增长的具体策略，深入探讨了让我大开眼界的影响者营销。此外，还有他们如何确定定价、他对打造一家具有持久性的 GPT 包装公司的看法、大量招聘建议等等。坦白说，这场对话完全可以再继续两个小时。
I suspect we'll do another follow-up conversation next year. If you love this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of 16 incredible products, including Devon, Lovable, Reflit, Bull, and they then linear superhuman D-Script, Whisper Flow, Gamma, Proplexity, War of Granola Magic Patterns, Raycast, Jeff here, DnMovyn, head on over to Lenny's newsletter.com and click product pass.
我猜我们明年还会再做一次后续谈话。如果你喜欢这个播客，别忘了在你喜欢的播客应用或 YouTube 上订阅关注，这对我们帮助很大。而且，如果你成为我新闻通讯的年度订阅者，你将免费获得一年的 16 款超棒产品，包括 Devon、Lovable、Reflit、Bull 等线性超人 D-Script、Whisper Flow、Gamma、Proplexity、War of Granola Magic Patterns、Raycast、Jeff here、DnMovyn。请访问 Lenny 的 newsletter.com 点击 product pass 获取详情。
With that, I bring you Grant Lee after a short word from our sponsors. My podcast guests tonight love talking about craft and taste and agency and product market fit. You know what we don't love talking about? Sock too. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta helps companies of all sizes get compliant fast and stay that way with industry leading AI, automation, and continuous monitoring.
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无论您是正在应对首次 Sock 2 或 ISO 27001 的初创企业，还是在管理供应商风险的大型企业，Vanta 的信任管理平台都能让这些过程变得更快捷、更简单、更具可扩展性。Vanta 还可以帮助您更快地完成安全问卷，让您能够更快赢得大订单。根据最近的一项 IDC 研究显示，Vanta 的客户每年减少了超过 50 万美元的开支，生产力提高了三倍。
Establishing trust isn't optional. Vanta makes it automatic. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com slash Lenny. Did you know that I have a whole team that helps me with my podcast and with my newsletter? I want everyone on my team to be super happy and thrive in the roles. Just work snows that your employees are more than just your employees. They're your people. My team is spread out across Colorado, Australia, Nepal, West Africa, and San Francisco. My life would be so incredibly complicated to hire people internationally to pay people on time and in their local currencies and to answer their HR questions 24-7. But with just works, it's super easy. Whether you're setting up your own automated payroll, offering premium benefits, or hiring internationally, just works to offer simple software and 24-7 human support from small business experts for you and your people. They do your human resources right so that you can do right by your people. Just works for your people.
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Grant, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Lenny's so great to be here. Thank you for having me. I see your face all the time in my LinkedIn feed. I don't know if you know this thing on these JP Morgan Chase heads. I'm so curious if other people see this or if it's just me. Did you know this was a thing? I think it's maybe once a day. Now I get a text message and just no message. It's just a screenshot or an image of me doing something in San Francisco on one of these ads that we're saying. And so yeah, kind of embarrassing, but also we're happy customers of JP Morgan Chase so trying to represent. Oh my God. I hope you love them because it's always you. There's no one else that's like Grant. I know. Can I tag you guys? Stop somebody out? I mean, that would be great. I'm totally fine with that.
Grant，非常感谢你来到这里，欢迎参加我们的播客。Lenny，很高兴能在这里。谢谢邀请。我在LinkedIn主页上经常看到你的脸，不知道你知不知道这件事。在这些摩根大通的广告里总是看到你的面孔。我很想知道其他人是否也有这样的感觉，还是只有我这样。你知道这是怎么回事吗？几乎每天我都会收到这样的短信，没有文字内容，只是一张我在旧金山这些广告中的截图或者照片。有点尴尬，但我们是摩根大通的忠实客户，所以希望能代表他们。天哪，希望你对他们感觉很好，因为广告里总是你，没有别人像你一样。我可以标记你们吗？或者换个人？我完全没问题。
Okay. So to get serious, the reason I'm really excited to have you here is unlike a lot of super fast growing AI startups, you are both growing like crazy. You are growing very profitably. We're going to talk about this. You did not raise a ton of money when you started. You waited a long time to raise a bunch of money. You also built a business and a category that I think most people never imagine there was this big of an opportunity. And you're basically, if achieved the dream of a lot of founders these days, especially people building AI startups. So my goal with this conversation is essentially do an anthropological study of a really successful AI startup. Talk about how you found product market fit, how you grew, all the lessons you've learned along the journey. And I'm going to break this conversation up kind of along the different milestones of the journey.
好的，那么认真来说，我非常高兴能邀请到你，原因是，你们和其他许多快速增长的AI初创公司不同，不仅增长迅猛，而且非常有利可图。我们会讨论这一点。你们在创业之初并没有募集大量资金，而是等了很久才筹集了一大笔资金。你们还建立了一个商业模式和一个大多数人未曾想象过有如此大机会的领域。你们基本上实现了许多当下创业者，特别是AI初创公司创始人的梦想。因此，我希望通过这次交流，本质上能对一个非常成功的AI初创公司进行深度研究。谈论你们如何找到了产品市场契合点，如何实现增长，以及在这一过程中学到的所有经验。我会根据这段旅程中的不同里程碑来展开这次对话。
Before we get into the first piece, is there anything that you think is important for people to hear kind of broadly about the story of Gamma? Yeah, maybe I'll just start with the quick story of that. It's really just a founding story. So we started the company back in 2020. This is peak pandemic. Fund raising, even fundraising was just so different. So all of the fundraising was done over Zoom. You were kind of sitting in these Zoom meetings trying to pitch. Many investors never met in person. So just a different error. And so for us, we're first time founders. I was actually living in London at the time. And so, you know, a different time zone. I had to do all of my pitches at night. And, you know, I have two little kids. So wait for them to go to bed, APM. We had a pretty modest flat. So nothing big.
在我们开始讨论第一个话题之前，是否有任何广泛的内容是关于Gamma的故事是人们认为应该了解的？好的，我可以先简单介绍一下这个故事。这其实就是一个创立的故事。我们在2020年成立了公司，那是疫情的高峰期。筹集资金是非常不同的，所有的融资都是通过Zoom进行的。你会坐在Zoom会议中试图推销，很多投资者从未亲自见过面。这是一个完全不同的时代。
对于我们来说，我们是第一次创业。当时我住在伦敦，所以还涉及到时区不同的问题。我所有的推介都要在晚上进行。我有两个孩子，所以我通常在晚上八点孩子们上床睡觉后开始。我住的房子也不大，只是一个比较普通的公寓。
I would basically find this little corner between the kitchen net and the laundry room. They're kind of set up shot far enough from the kids. So they wouldn't, you know, be woken up. And between APM, like 2am, I'm just pitching. You know, trying my best, I'm like the fake Zoom background. So people didn't know where I was. And just pitching. And so, you know, really the first day, kind of, I mean, my third pitch in, trying to tell the story of Gamma obviously just starting to get the hang of the pitch. And, you know, I get to the very end of the pitch feeling pretty good about myself. And the investor pauses a little bit. And then just says, that has to be the worst pitch. Worst idea I have ever heard. Not only are you trying to go against incumbents, you're going against incumbents have massive distribution. You are never going to succeed.
我基本上会找到厨房网和洗衣房之间的一个小角落。它们布置得离孩子们比较远，这样就不会吵醒他们。从晚上8点到凌晨2点，我就在那里努力推销。我会用虚拟的Zoom背景，这样别人就不知道我在哪里。就是努力推销。记得第一天，算是第三次尝试时，我正在展开Gamma的故事，渐渐掌握了推销的技巧。到推销结束时，我觉得自己表现不错。但投资者稍微停顿了一下，然后说，那是他听过的最糟糕的推销，也是最糟糕的想法。不仅要和现有巨头竞争，而且这些巨头还有庞大的分销网络。你绝对不会成功。
And so like in my head, I'm already kind of shell shocked and thinking, you know, what am I going to, what's my rebuttal? And before I could even have, you know, respond, he hangs up. And so I'm there sitting, you know, they're thinking about it. And, you know, before I could really get down on myself because I had to prepare for the next pitch, I kind of just internalize this feeling that, you know, maybe he's right. You know, maybe something about what he's saying is actually correct. And so for me, I started thinking about if we're going to succeed in this category, we're going to really have to think about growth from the very beginning. category is going to be really, really hard to break into. And so we really kind of made this sort of kind of promise to ourselves that as we continue to build growth is going to be critically important.
在我脑海中，我已经有点震惊，想着我要怎么反驳。但在我还没来得及回应之前，他就挂断了电话。所以我坐在那里，思考这件事情。在我还没来得及对自己感到失望时，因为我得准备下一个推销，我就在心里明白，也许他说的有点道理，也许他的话确实有正确的地方。因此，我开始思考，如果我们想要在这个领域取得成功，就必须从一开始就认真考虑增长的问题。这个领域会很难进入。因此，我们给自己定下了一个承诺，在继续发展的过程中，增长将是至关重要的。
And so my thing to kind of, you know, your audience is that, you know, I don't come from a growth background. So if I can learn growth, anybody can learn growth. And I think especially in this sort of market, hyper competitive, oftentimes very crowded, it's going to be essential. That is such a fun story. Oh my God. How bad the most does investor feel at this point? We're going to name names. Just to share some stats, I know this is going to be, by the time this launches, this will be out. But you guys are over 100 million AR now. We're there were $2 billion. A business that, again, most people did not think was going to work in this category.
所以我想对你的听众说的是，我并不是来自增长领域的专业背景。如果我能学会如何实现增长，那么任何人都可以学会。在这种高度竞争、往往非常拥挤的市场中，这将是至关重要的。这个故事真的很有趣，天哪，投资者现在会有多后悔？我们会点名。分享一些数据，我知道在这个消息发布时这些内容已经公开了。你们的年经常性收入已经超过1亿美元，公司市值达到20亿美元。而这个业务最初大多数人都不认为在这个分类中会成功。
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, we feel super proud to have accomplished that. And again, yeah, I'm excited to share some of the, you know, the growth tactics and things that worked for us. I think, you know, hopefully it'll help others kind of on their journey as well. Okay. So let's dive into it. Let's talk about product market fit. Tell us the story of just how you found product market fit and how you knew you found product market fit.
好的，谢谢你。是的，我们感到非常自豪能够完成这项任务。我也很高兴能分享一些成功的增长策略和经验，希望这些对其他人的旅程也有所帮助。好，接下来我们深入探讨一下产品与市场的契合度。请讲述一下你们是如何找到并确定产品市场契合度的故事。
Yeah, I'll start by telling kind of the moment where we thought we maybe had product market fit. And I think a lot of founders, you know, ask themselves, do we have it or not? And I think there's a, there's often a sort of temptation to go almost full yourself into thinking you have it. And so we sort of did our first public beta launch. This is back in August of 2022. We launched on product time and, you know, felt really good. We had it, you know, what we felt like was a great launch. Ended up winning product of the day, product of the week, product of the month. And it's like, wow, we, you know, I think we have something here.
好的，我会先讲述一下我们感觉可能找到了产品市场契合点的那个时刻。我想很多创始人都会问自己，我们有没有达到这个契合点。我认为有时候人们很容易自我欺骗，以为自己已经找到了。所以我们在2022年8月进行了首次公开测试版发布。我们在Product Hunt上发布，感觉非常棒，像是一次伟大的发布。最后，我们赢得了当天产品、每周产品以及每月产品奖。这让我们感觉很震惊，我们可能真的有了一些突破。
And then we'd look at signups and you'd get that initial spike in signups. And then they sort of like flatten out. You're still getting new users every day. But it is clear we didn't have strong word of mouth. There wasn't strong organic virology. And so if we just kind of played things out, you know, we knew that the product wasn't going to grow on its own. Like something was missing there. We didn't have that strong word of mouth so that the product could just continue growing. And so we really kind of asked ourselves like, okay, what do we need to change?
然后，我们会查看注册情况，你会看到注册量最初会有一个激增。接着，注册量会趋于平稳。每天依然有新用户加入，但显然我们没有强大的口碑效应，也没有明显的自然传播。因此，如果我们只是按部就班地推进，我们很清楚这个产品不会自发增长，就像缺少了什么。我们没有足够的口碑来让产品能够持续增长。因此，我们认真地问自己，好吧，我们需要改变什么？
And the answer is like, we need to fundamentally change everything. It for us almost became the sort of bet the company sort of moment. Because at that point, we were running low on runway. You know, we knew we needed to make progress. And we didn't really know, you know, what could be done. And so we got everyone together at this point. The keen was just over 12 people. And we said, okay, we're it's going to be all hands on deck. We are going to do everything we possibly can to make the first 30 seconds of the product feel magical.
答案是这样的：我们需要从根本上改变一切。这对我们来说几乎成为一种"赌上公司命运"的时刻。因为当时，我们的资金快要用完了。我们知道必须取得进展，但并不确定能做些什么。所以我们召集了所有的人。团队成员刚好超过12个人。我们说，好吧，现在是全力以赴的时候了。我们要尽一切可能让产品的前30秒体验充满魔力。
The moment you land into the product, it has to be great. And it has to be so great that someone that goes through that onboarding is going to tell all their friends. And if we can get that right, then maybe we have a chance at actually, you know, doing something in this space. And so we spent three, four months actually, you know, after the product launch, we felt great, but we knew we had to go back to the drawing board. We spent the next like three, four months actually revamping the entire onboarding experience.
一进入产品的那一刻，它就必须是出色的。而且它必须出色到让经历过这个引导流程的人迫不及待地告诉他们的朋友。如果我们能做到这一点，那么就有可能在这个领域真正有所作为。因此，在产品发布后，我们花了三到四个月的时间，不仅感到满意，而且知道必须重新设计。接下来的三到四个月里，我们全面改进了整个用户引导体验。
And of course, this is also where, you know, AI for us kind of played a big role. We actually rebuilt it so that AI was part of the actual onboarding. So every single new user would experience the sort of magic in the first 30 seconds. And so we re-launched this is end of March 2023. In all of a sudden, you know, we'd go from a few hundred signups a day to now, first day, it was like a couple thousand. And then the next day would be like five thousand signups and then 10,000 signups a day. And then 20,000 signups a day. And then it just kept going up.
当然，这也是人工智能对我们来说发挥了重要作用的地方。我们实际上重新构建了系统，使人工智能成为用户注册流程的一部分。这样，每一个新用户在最初的30秒内都会体验到一种“魔力”。于是，我们在2023年3月底重新发布了这个系统。突然之间，我们每天的注册人数从几百个增加到第一天的几千个，接着第二天达到了五千个，然后是一万个，再到每天两万个，注册人数不断上升。
And we were doing any sort of marketing, no advertising. It was all sort of organic word of mouth. Virality of the product, people using the product and sharing with others, where we for the first time really felt this pull. Like we didn't have to do anything. Product was just growing. And it was just such a distinct difference between that feeling and like coming out of the product, I want to where we could have pulled ourselves in the thinking we had a product market fit. I think the temptation would have been, hey, let's just spend more on ads or spend more on marketing. Because like, you know, we'll just fuel, you know, fuel the top of the funnel and everything else will work itself out. I think that would have been a trap. I think that would have let us down to like this path of trying to brute force our way into product market fit. And it would just always be sort of a fleeting sort of destination. We never actually arrive.
我们在没有做任何广告的情况下进行市场推广，一切都是有机的口口相传。产品本身的传播力强，人们使用产品后会与他人分享，这让我们第一次真正感受到市场的拉力。就像我们不需要做任何额外的事情，产品就能自然增长。这种感觉与我们之前推出产品时的感觉截然不同，我们可能会误以为已经达到了产品与市场的完美契合。我们可能会忍不住想，多投入一些广告费用或增加市场推广开支，只需加大渠道顶部的流量，然后其他一切都会顺其自然。然而，这其实是一个陷阱，会导致我们误入歧途，试图通过强行手段来实现产品市场契合感。结果可能只是一个虚无缥缈的目标，始终无法真正达到。
And so I think we made the tough call, the right call. It was a sort of bet the company moment. And I think on the other side, it just felt so different. Grant, this is exactly what I want to discover. So to be I'm so so excited. I have so many questions to follow up on the stuff you shared before we even get to the rest of the journey. So one is essentially what you're describing as product market fit to you was when organic growth started to really take off. And it was just growing through word of mouth. You weren't doing much because it was so awesome. People are telling their friends about it. Is there anything more there that might be helpful for people to share just to hear about just like, OK, here's what it actually looks like?
我认为我们做出了艰难但正确的决定。这是一个关乎公司命运的重要时刻。在这之后，感受真的很不同。Grant，这正是我想要发现的东西，我非常激动。在我们继续探讨整个旅程之前，我还有很多关于您之前分享内容的问题。首先，您所描述的产品市场契合点，实际上是当自然增长开始真正起飞的时候。因为产品本身太棒了，人们通过口口相传来推荐它，而不需要我们做太多事情。对于其他人来讲，是否还有其他有用的信息可以分享，让大家了解这种情况到底是什么样的？
Yeah, I mean, one piece of advice is that when you're early on, your mindset should almost be like you're trying to create a word of mouth machine. Right? Like if you can get that part right, everything else becomes significantly easier. And if you have any, and I think this applies to both like prosum or B2C as well as even B2B products. Like if you have a B2B product, even if you're not telling all of your friends, you should be telling colleagues where like that product is relevant. You should probably be telling, you know, former co-workers where, hey, you've discovered something like, oh, I wish we had this, you know, in our prior lives. And like that should even be magical. And then you should see that in all the leads that are coming through, like, or people coming through through your prospects and your existing customers.
是的，我的意思是，有一个建议，在你刚开始的时候，你的思维方式应该像是试图创造一个口碑传播的机器。对吧？如果你能把这一点做好，其他一切都会变得容易得多。我认为这适用于专业消费品、面向消费者的产品以及B2B产品。即使你有一个B2B产品，即使你不告诉你所有的朋友，也应该告诉那些对这个产品相关的同事。你也可以告诉以前的同事，比如你发现了某个产品，然后感叹道“哎呀，我们以前有这个就好了。”这应该是一种神奇的体验。你应该在所有的潜在客户和现有客户中看到这种影响。
If you're not seeing a healthy chunk of those leads come through that way, I would go back and I'm like, why? Why is that not happening? Because again, that's like the massive tailwind you need where everything, every single thing you do on top of that, all the marketing, all the sales, all the advertising, you're just going to have like, it becomes way, way easier. How much of this was, you just grab it as a word about the machine. How much of this was like word amount loops and verality features versus just the product itself? One was awesome and two is kind of nately shareable because it's, you know, presentations people share with each other.
如果你没有看到很多潜在客户通过那种方式产生，我就会回头想，为什么？为什么没有发生？因为这就像你需要的强大推动力，在此基础上你所做的每一件事情——所有的营销、销售、广告——都会变得更加容易。其中有多少是因为你抓住了一个关于系统的词？有多少是因为口碑效应和传播特性，而不是仅仅靠产品本身？首先产品很棒，其次它本身就容易被分享，因为这是人们会互相分享的演示文稿。
Yeah, totally. I think for us, we do benefit from being in a category where, you know, by nature of it, if you like Yamaha, you're sharing it, presenting it to the others. So I think it for us, it's a combination of both. And ideally, you have other ways where, you know, word of mouth or organic verality can happen in your product. So by nature of usage, like it's being shared, you know, we basically had an internal mantra that we go back to like the first 30 seconds. We wanted to be dead simple for someone to create content. We want to be dead simple for them to share it. And everything we did, kind of for that first 30 seconds or, you know, called the first few minutes is remove friction so that they can do both of those things create and share.
是的，完全没错。我认为对我们来说，确实受益于我们所处的这个类别。因为从本质上讲，如果你喜欢雅马哈，你就会分享给其他人。所以，我认为对我们来讲，这是两者的结合。理想情况下，你的产品还能通过其他方式，比如口碑传播或自然的病毒式传播。通过使用产品，像这样被分享。我们有一个内部的信条，就是回到最初的30秒。我们希望在一开始的30秒内就能让用户轻松创建内容，也能轻松分享。为此，我们把最初的30秒或几分钟视为关键，把阻碍用户创建和分享的障碍都去除掉。
And I think other people, you know, when you look at your own product, you think about, okay, what is it, you know, what is it about my product and how it gets used? Can you remove friction such that it can actually spread? And even if it's locally within an organization or like, you know, within a workspace, like just be able to enable that as much as you possibly can. The other really profound point you're making here is the story of, you want product of the day on product kind, which alone is so hard. So many people try to win and don't, most people don't, like I've tried to help companies win and it's like a really hard thing to achieve.
我认为，人们在审视自己的产品时，都会思考它的特点以及如何使用它。能否减少使用过程中的障碍，使其能够更广泛地传播？即便是在组织内部或某个工作空间内，也尽可能地去实现这一点。你提到的另一个非常重要的观点是，你们在 "产品之友" 上赢得当日最佳产品，这本身就是一件很难做到的事情。很多人在努力争取这个荣誉时未能如愿，我曾帮助一些公司争取这个奖项，但这确实是一个非常艰难的目标。
And then you want product of the week and product of the month. And still you're like, no, this isn't working. Most people that achieve that are like, no, we got this and they would not have to bet the company. There was no feeling there wouldn't be a feeling if we have to rethink everything. What is it? Just what is it there that you just like, no, we need this isn't going to work as much as exciting as this is. This isn't it? Yeah, I mean, part of being a founder is being a self-aware as you can and be your own, your own worst critic, right? And so oftentimes you want to have these vanity metrics. I feel good to celebrate and you should celebrate, but you should know when it's a vanity metric versus is this core to our growth engine? Like if this number goes up, does it mean the product is working? And I think that's where we looked at like, okay, you know, felt good to win those things. We kind of put ourselves at least on the map, but it wasn't good enough to actually have this sort of feeling that we had a core growth engine.
然后，你想要每周产品奖和每月产品奖。即便如此，你还是觉得不对劲。大多数达到这个目标的人会觉得，“我们做到了”，他们甚至不用冒险去押上公司。没有那种感觉，如果我们需要重新思考一切，也不会有任何感觉。到底是什么让你觉得：“不，我们需要这个，但这并不能解决问题，尽管这很激动人心，这不是答案。” 是的，我的意思是，作为创始人，你需要尽可能地有自知之明，并成为自己的最严厉批评者。所以很多时候，你希望拥有这些华而不实的指标，它们让你感觉良好，你也应该庆祝一下。但你需要明白，它们是华而不实的指标，还是我们增长引擎的核心：如果这个数字上升，是否意味着产品正在发挥作用？我认为我们关注这些指标，虽然赢得这些奖项让人感觉不错，并且让我们至少在行业中崭露头角，但这远不足以让我们觉得拥有一个核心增长引擎。
We could just invest in and get better and better. That wasn't there yet. So essentially, it kind of started to just plateau and slow. It wasn't like this rocket ship that took off from that. Yeah, it was still like, we're still getting signups, like they're coming through, but you could just tell there wasn't like, there wasn't like, there wasn't this like building momentum, you know? And I think that's, that's where it's always hard to tell you. You kind of have to, you know, me and my co-founder would be sat down or just we're trying to be honest with ourselves like, okay, is this going to be enough? And it just really felt like it wasn't going to be good. The other point here is the power of onboarding, which comes up a bunch on this podcast when you talk about driving retention. So you launch product and did great and then started kind of petering out. How much did the product change after it things started to work versus onboarding, just like how important was onboarding? And then just tell us why the first 30 seconds, where did you come up with that number?
我们本来可以持续投资并不断提升，但当时还没有达到那个程度。所以基本上，它开始进入一个平台期并放缓。它并不像一开始那样迅猛增长。是的，我们仍然在获得注册用户，他们不断地加入，但显然没有形成一种加速增长的势头。我认为这就是为什么很难判断未来。我和我的联合创始人总是会坐下来试着诚实地面对自己：这是否足够？真的感觉像是不够好。这里的另一个关键点是用户引导的重要性，这在谈到如何提高用户留存时，经常会在这个播客中提到。产品上线时表现非常好，但后来逐渐疲软。在产品开始奏效后，发生了多大的变化，以及用户引导的重要性如何？那么关于前30秒，你是如何得出这个数字的呢？
Yeah, so for us, you know, the onboarding and the product experience for us, that's intertwined, right? The analogy I always think about is, you know, if you go into, you know, a restaurant and, you know, maybe the food is good, but when you really think about the user experience, it's like the moment you walk into the door, you get seated, the waitress waiter comes by, creates you, you get order, and of course the food has to taste good. But if that entire, like, and then you finally get the bill and you leave, like is that entire experience something that feels delightful? Is it good enough for you to tell your friends about? If someone just came by and dropped the food on your plate, you know, on the table, and was like, just left and never came with the bill, I'm like, okay, man, I'm not going to recommend this to somebody else.
好的，对我们来说，客户的入职体验和产品体验是密不可分的。我常用的一个比喻是，想像你走进一家餐馆，可能食物很好吃，但当你真正考虑用户体验时，从你走进门那一刻起，到你被安排座位，服务员过来为你点单，当然食物必须好吃，最后你拿到账单并离开。整个过程是否让你感到愉悦？是否好到你愿意告诉你的朋友？如果只是有人过来把食物放到你桌上，然后就离开了，甚至都不给你账单，那我肯定不会向别人推荐这家餐馆。
And so for us, like, we thought about, okay, the first moment someone walks through our door, where, you know, drop it into the product, what is, what is something we can give them? Can we shorten that time to value as much as possible? A lot of this is inspired by, you know, like Scott Belsky, he talks about kind of that first mile, the first 15 minutes. And I think that's totally right. And I think one approach is, you think about new users as you almost have like a cynical view of them. You have to think about them being selfish, vain, and lazy, right? Like 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. And so for us, we knew that if we can't, you know, people's attention span is even shorter than today than maybe 10 years ago.
对于我们来说，我们考虑的是，当有人第一次走进我们的门店，接触到我们的产品时，我们可以提供什么给他们？如何尽量缩短他们得到价值的时间？很多灵感来源于Scott Belsky，他谈到的“第一公里”或前15分钟。我认为这很有道理。一个方法就是，把新用户看作是有点自私、爱慕虚荣、懒惰的人——他们没有学习新工具的欲望。所以，我们需要在前30秒给他们带来一些东西，以赢得接下来的30秒，然后又是下一个30秒。毕竟，如今人们的注意力比十年前还要短。
And so what is it in that first 30 seconds? We actually show you something and earn the right to kind of, you know, keep kind of building that relationship with you. We really thought a lot about that. And certainly that's, that's, now that's all we could really afford at that time. We only had 12 people building. And so like, we couldn't make entirely, you know, revamp entire product. We knew that we had to at least put all of our energy into one spot. And so we made that coming into the door, come through the door, make that feel, not more of a magical so that we can do a little bit more over time. I love your point about how, you know, you could think of it as like, okay, it's onboarding versus the product. The lens of how do we make this incredibly valuable and a hawish for the first 30 seconds, almost informs what the product should be.
在那最初的30秒里有什么呢？我们其实是向你展示了一些东西，并借此赢得继续与你建立关系的权利。我们对此进行了很多思考。当然，当时这也是我们唯一能够承担的。我们只有12个人来开发，所以不可能完全对产品进行彻底革新。我们知道必须将所有精力集中在一个重点上。因此，我们在迎接用户的那一刻，用心设计，让它感觉更有魔力，这样才能随着时间的推移做得更多。我很喜欢你提到的观点：可以把它看作是引导用户入门与产品之间的对比。这个视角下，我们努力让前30秒变得非常有价值，让它几乎决定了产品应该是什么样子。
Yeah, it really helps you, you know, pull for what is the most magical thing about your product, right? Sometimes founders will think about like the 5, 10 features. Well, maybe there's only like one thing that kind of differentiates you. You know, I try to learn a lot from, you know, we'll get into some of the marketing pieces of this. But even just having this sort of founder-led marketing lens of like, what can I do to help a new user just understand? You know, there's this thing from like consumer advertising, which is, you through 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 like oftentimes founders want to talk about the four or five features they have, maybe 10 features. And then the consumer is totally confused. Like, why do I need this thing? We try to just give them that one egg, that one, you know, like first experience, we're like, okay, you know, create a slide in seconds. That's, that's the egg. I'm going to throw you this egg. Is that compelling to you?
这段话表达的意思是：重点是帮助你发现和推广产品中最神奇的那一点。有时候，创始人可能会考虑五到十个功能，但其实可能只有一个功能真正让你的产品与众不同。我努力从中学习，尤其在营销方面，比如从创始人视角出发思考：我可以怎么帮助新用户理解产品？在消费者广告中，有一种说法：如果你抛给消费者一个鸡蛋，他们可能接住它；但如果抛给他们四五个鸡蛋，他们可能一个都接不住。创始人常常想同时展示四五个、甚至十个功能，导致消费者感到困惑，不知道为什么需要这个产品。我们尝试只给他们一个“鸡蛋”，一种初体验，比如“几秒钟内创建幻灯片”，这是我们抛出的那个鸡蛋，这样的体验能打动你吗？
Some people are still going to out-down, but for the people that catch that, you're solving like a real problem for them. And then you can continue kind of building on that over time. Like, you've given them enough so that they'll sit around and like keep playing with your product. But as a hilarious metaphor, I've never heard of it for onboarding time to value. Just focus on one egg at a time. Just going even further back, what was the original insight that you had that led to gamma and what YAMAs today? After the last start, I was acquired. I went back into kind of my roots, which is consulting. I was advising early stage startups. And the sort of medium I was using was Google slides. So I just remember this, you know, late night trying to prepare for next day's meeting, trying to format and figure out the right layout and spending hours just trying to get the sort of look and feel right rather than the content itself. And for me, that just felt completely backwards.
有些人可能仍会挑毛病，但对于那些理解你的人来说，你是真的在为他们解决一个实际问题。然后你可以在此基础上继续发展。就像是，你已经给了他们足够的东西，让他们愿意去试用并持续使用你的产品。不过，这个诙谐的比喻让我想到了一个笑话——就好像在说，产品引导的时候要专注于一个鸡蛋。再往前追溯，你当初是如何得到那个灵感，进而发展出Gamma和如今的YAMA的？在我最后一个创业项目被收购后，我回到了我的初衷——咨询。我在为早期创业公司提供咨询，而我用的媒介是谷歌幻灯片。我记得那时，深夜里为了第二天的会议准备，努力排版和布局，花了几个小时试图调整外观和风格，而不是专注于内容本身。对我来说，这样的做法完全是本末倒置的。
I should be spending 90% all the time on the content, 10% maybe on the design formatting. And so the question just was, what if there's a better way? What if we could reimagine this format from the ground up? Slides have been around for almost 40 years as the default medium of choice for a lot of this. And so we thought about, okay, if we had different building blocks, different primitives, so you're not locked into the fix 16 by 9 slide, what could we offer to new users? And so that was really the start of one of all this. Like hearing this, I could see why investors would be like, you know, like I guess so, but slides has been around PowerPoint has been around 40 years. Like I get it, you know, I get why people would be. And specifically AI, was that a part of the vision initially or did AI start to come up and then wow, great timing. Great timing. It wasn't part of the original vision, although the spirit was there, which is we want to make it incredibly fast and effortless for people to create content.
我应该花90%的时间在内容上，可能只花10%的时间在设计格式上。于是问题来了，是否有更好的方法？如果我们能从头开始重新构想这种格式呢？幻灯片作为一种默认的选择媒介，已经存在了将近40年。所以我们考虑到，如果我们有不同的构建模块和基础要素，不再局限于固定的16:9幻灯片，我们能为新用户提供什么？这其实就是这一切的起始点。听到这里，我能理解为什么投资者会说：“好吧，我明白了。” 毕竟PowerPoint已经存在40年了。因此，我理解人们对此的看法。至于人工智能，最初的愿景中是否包括它，还是说之后才出现，恰好赶上了好时机？其实它并不在最初的愿景中，尽管我们有这样的精神，即希望让人们能够极其快速和轻松地创建内容。
So it just so happened that AI was a magical gift that allowed us to do all those things along the same sort of ambition or vision that we had. And so we integrated it core to kind of all the building blocks we're already building while before AI was part of the picture. It's such a cool other example. There's so many examples of ideas that were not possible before now very possible with AI. And it's a great opportunity for people to come after as you like places, categories, people think is an impossible place to build a big business AI now allows it. Awesome. Speaking of that, let's talk about the growth journey and how you actually grew from nothing to 100 million ARR in just over two years. I'm thinking we break it up. I know these milestones aren't that clear, but kind of like zero to 100 million ARR, one to 10 to 100, something like that. And let's just kind of see how it goes. How did you get your first set of users? How did you get your say 100 first 100 users? How did you get to 100 million ARR from zero?
所以碰巧 AI 就像一个神奇的礼物，让我们能够按照此前的愿景和目标去实现所有这些事情。因此，我们将 AI 集成到了我们已经构建的基本模块的核心部分，而这些模块在 AI 出现之前就已经在建了。这也说明了 AI 的巨大潜力，很多在以前看来不可能实现的想法现在都可以通过 AI 实现。而且，这为人们提供了很好的机会，让他们在那些被认为无法建立大企业的领域里去尝试，因为 AI 现在使得这些成为可能，这真是太棒了。
谈到这一点，让我们来讨论一下从无到有，再从零增长到年收入 1 亿美元的成长历程。我想我们可以拆分一下，我知道这些里程碑并不是非常明确，比如说从零到 1000 万，再到 1 亿这样的阶段，然后我们看看会如何。首先，你是如何获得最初的一批用户的呢？你是如何获得前 100 个用户的？又是如何在短短两年多的时间内从零增长到年收入 1 亿美元的呢？
Our first 100 looks very different, I'd say. So this was even pre this sort of AI laundry had. The first 100 users for a product like ours, you're trying to convince all your friends. He used the product. Anybody that's ever made a slide that you're trying to talk to. And I think early on, your friends wanted to do your favor so they could try the product. They're also going to lie to you. They're going to tell you how great it is. And then you look at the usage and nobody's coming back. And so I think our first 100 was sort of like gradually hard-earned posts sort of the product launch. People learning like, okay, this is kind of becoming a little bit more useful. Usage was still pretty episodic. So they weren't coming back every week. And then I think, do think, the moment post sort of the AI launch is where all of a sudden we saw that sort of organic growth happening. People coming back to the product regularly.
我们的最初100位用户是非常不同的，我想说。这是在某种AI工具面世之前的事情。对于像我们这样的产品，最初的100位用户，你会努力说服所有的朋友来使用这款产品。任何制作过幻灯片的人都是你的目标用户。我认为在早期，你的朋友们为了帮你，也会愿意尝试产品。他们可能还会对你说多么好用。但当你查看使用情况时，却发现没人再次回来。所以我觉得我们的最初100位用户是在产品发布后的逐步努力中得到的。人们开始意识到这个产品逐渐变得有用。使用仍然是偶发的，他们并没有每周都回来。而我认为，在AI推出后那一刻，我们突然看到了有机增长。人们开始定期回到产品中使用。
And so that's where it wasn't even the first 100's like the first 10,000 users all came within a pretty short time period after that initial launch. Awesome. We're going to talk about monetization pricing later, which is obviously an important part of actual getting to a million ARR and 10 million ARR. So what I'm hearing essentially is the product cut launch was a big part of just the first 10,000-ish users. I know there was also a tweet when you first, when you relaunched that helped in a big way. Talk about that. Yeah, so when we did our AI launch, we didn't do our AI launch on product tongue. We just basically said, hey, let's just put it out on Twitter, safely and get some virality.
所以，最初的10,000个用户都在首次发布后的相对短时间内涌入，而不仅仅是前100个用户。我们稍后会讨论货币化定价问题，这显然是实现百万年收入和千万年收入的重要部分。所以我听到的是，产品发布在获取最初的约10,000名用户上起到了很大作用。我也知道在你们重新上线时发了一条推文，这很有帮助。谈谈这件事吧。对，当我们进行AI发布时，并没有在Product Hunt上进行。我们只是说，让我们在推特上发布，使其安全并争取一些病毒式的传播。
And honestly, we kind of came up with kind of a clickbaity sort of tweet. It was like, you know, the most valuable skill in business is about to become obsolete. And so, you know, it was intentional in that we wanted to create a little bit of engagement. We knew that having sort of a more provocative tweet would allow people to engage with it. And so after a couple days, all of a sudden it started getting a little bit more viral and a lot more engagement. And we looked, and it was basically because Paul Graham had commented and saying something like, surely the thing that the slide deck is describing is more valuable than the slide itself, right? And obviously, it was fun just to see that comment.
老实说，我们当时想出了一条有点标题党的推文。内容大概是这样的：“商业中最有价值的技能即将被淘汰。”我们有意这样做是为了吸引一些关注，因为我们知道这种更具挑衅性的推文会让更多人参与讨论。几天后，突然之间，这条推文开始变得有点小热门，并获得了更多的互动。我们发现，原因是Paul Graham评论了我们的推文，他说：“显然，幻灯片所描述的内容比幻灯片本身更有价值，对吧？”看到他的评论，确实挺有趣的。
I think once that comment came through, even more engagement on the post. And that was really the whole intent of that post was just to be able to have that level of engagement so that people, you know, we have some level of reach. And so for me, it was almost like my first sort of learning morning going back to, you know, what does founder let marketing even mean? It means like, how do you actually break through the noise? How do you get a chance to have people even engage with like a post like that? Part of that is copywriting, part of that is like storytelling, part of that is just having like even like the right visuals to share.
我认为一旦那个评论出现，帖子上的互动就更多了。这其实就是发帖的目的：促进互动，以便扩大影响力。对我来说，这几乎像是第一次上课，学习什么是创始人主导的营销。这意味着要突破噪音，让人们有机会与这样的帖子互动。部分原因在于文案写作，部分原因在于讲故事，还有一部分是拥有合适的视觉效果。
And so for me, kind of a moment, just understanding, hey, they kind of do this, right? You kind of have to do things that maybe you're not super comfortable with, but it makes a difference. Such a fun story. So you intentionally set that announcement up to be controversial is what I'm hearing. Totally. Yeah. It's a provocative little spicy. That is so cool. So essentially, you got to 10,000 users through product hunt and then essentially one controversial tweet that ended up baiting Paul Graham to comment. Amazing. And was it a comment? It was just a comment. It wasn't even him retweeting it. Not just a comment.
对我来说，这是一个领悟的时刻。理解到，有些事情虽然可能让人不太舒服，但确实能带来影响。这真是个有趣的故事。所以你故意把那个公告设置得很有争议性，对吗？完全正确。是的，这是个有些挑衅性的方式，真的很酷。实际上，你们通过 Product Hunt 和一条有争议的推文达到了1万用户，这条推文成功引起了 Paul Graham 的评论，真了不起。而那只是一条评论，他甚至没有转发它。也不仅仅是一条评论。
Yeah. And then others would, you know, pile on. Yeah, it's interesting. I want to comment can increase the distribution of a tweet versus them retweeting it or quote, tweeting it. Totally. And of course, the algorithm change all the time. So part of which is long based on when it happened, how it happened, who posted? And you let use this term founder led marketing, which I love. And I'm already seeing it in action here. This is you thinking about it's not like delegating to someone in marketing. It's not hiring an agency. It's like, how do I tell a story that I think will break through the noise based on you building this company, having me insight to build this product.
是的，然后其他人就会加入讨论。是的，这很有趣。我想要评论一下，点赞有时比转发或引用推文更能扩大推文的传播。当然，算法一直在变化，所以传播效果部分取决于事件发生的时间、方式以及发布者。你提到的"创始人主导营销"这个概念我非常喜欢，而且我已经看到它在实际运作中。这个理念是指你在思考由你来讲述一个能够突破噪音的故事，而不是把任务委派给营销人员，也不是雇佣一个机构。你的想法是基于你自己构建这家公司和产品的洞察力来进行营销。
And I guess is there anything more there? You think is important for people to hear about the importance of the founder thinking through this stuff. Yeah. I mean, I think very, you know, most people today are probably familiar with founder led sales, which is still very, very important. I think before you hire your first, you know, sales person or sale, you know, it's great for the founder to understand like what it takes. And, you know, they're going to craft the right narrative, the right story. At my previous role, I was the COO at a startup where I was doing a lot of, I was unfounder, but I was early. And so I was helping the founders go through this and really helping go into meetings with a client or prospect. and saying, hey, this is why, you know, our product is interesting.
我觉得还有什么需要补充的吗？在想到创始人需要认真考虑这些事情的重要性时，我认为这个问题非常重要。大多数人现在可能都很熟悉由创始人主导的销售方式，这仍然是非常重要的。我认为在你雇佣第一个销售人员之前，让创始人自己了解销售所需要的过程是非常有益的。创始人会构建合适的叙述和故事。在我之前的工作中，我是一家初创公司的首席运营官，尽管我不是创始人，但我加入得很早。所以我帮助创始人们经历了这个过程，和他们一起参加客户或潜在客户的会议，并解释为什么我们的产品对他们有吸引力。
And I think, you know, today there's so many AI startups that are much more either B2C or PerSumer. And so you're not necessarily talking to individual prospects, but the idea that you can be, you know, really in control of the narrative on the marketing side is really, really important. And I think, describe a few things where over time, I think that skill set just really, really helps you. One is, you know, you have a chance to kind of be a creator yourself these days. I think a lot of founders are trying to be more active on social media. And I think, you know, if you can kind of overcome the initial cringe factor of like seeing yourself and posting, like, oh, this isn't, you know, feel authentic. If you can overcome that initial feeling, you start investing into like, okay, how do I become a better copywriter?
我认为，如今有很多AI初创企业更注重B2C或个人消费的市场。因此，你可能不一定直接与单个客户交流，但能在市场营销方面掌控叙述是非常重要的。我觉得有几个技能在长远来看非常有帮助。首先，现在你有机会成为一个创作者。很多创业者都在努力更多地活跃于社交媒体上。我认为，如果你能克服最初的尴尬感，比如看到自己发布的内容觉得不够真实的这种感觉，那么你就可以开始投入到如何成为更好的文案撰写者的努力中了。
You know, how do I articulate something that is clear, not just clever? You know, I think there's that saying where, obviously, if you can have that clarity, that's super important. And most people will try to get super like creative with their with their copywriting, but that's not usually the right way to break through and communicate something. So how do you improve your own copywriting? And then that allows you to actually have a higher bar when you start working with other marketers or in this case, like for us, like working with influencers, right? If you're working with influencers and creators and you can totally empathize with like how they approach that work and you know what a good hook looks like or you know how like a just structure a good post, like you can only do that if you've kind of gone through it a little bit yourself and you know how hard it is.
你知道，我该如何清晰地表达，而不仅仅是聪明地表达呢？我认为有句话是这样说的，如果你能保持清晰，这非常重要。大多数人写文案时都想变得非常有创意，但通常这不是有效沟通的正确方式。那么，如何提高自己的文案写作能力呢？这样，当你开始与其他营销人员合作时，或者像我们这种情况，与网红合作时，你的标准就会更高。如果你在与网红和创作者合作时，能够完全理解他们的工作方法，知道一个好的吸引点是什么样的，以及如何构建一个好的帖子，这只有在你自己经历过一些相关过程并且知道其中的难度时才能做到。
And I think too many founders will then just say, you know, they'll write something that just feels so much like an ad and then they'll give it to a creator to help amplify and then that just never works, right? And so I do think part of founder led marketing is like going through this yourself, using your own platform in the beginning, it's probably going to be super small. But as you get bigger, like you have a platform to need to have a voice and people listen and you're going to get better and better in your own storytelling. I think these are all skills you should invest in as early as possible because you know you're going to have to get better and better. It's like practice. You got to practice over and over. I definitely want to pull on this thread more because you tweeting the lessons you learn building gamma is what led to this conversation.
我认为很多创业者会写一些内容，感觉就像广告一样，然后交给创作者去扩大影响，但这样的方法常常失效。我认为创业者主导的营销的一部分是亲自经历这个过程，一开始可能使用自己非常小的平台。但随着变得更有影响力，你的平台也会扩大，你需要有自己的声音，让别人倾听，同时你也会在讲故事方面越来越出色。我认为这些都是你应该尽早投入的技能，因为你需要不断提升自己。这就像练习，需要反复操练。我确实想深入探讨这个话题，因为你分享关于创建Gamma的经验在推特上的过程促成了这次对话。
I was reading and I'm like, okay, he's sharing a bunch of stuff but there's so much more I want to hear. And we're going to talk through this and go a lot in a lot more depth than what you've shared on Twitter. But I love that that's example of that working, getting, having this conversation. So let me ask a couple of questions here. One is just how do you find time as a founder, CEO of a very fast growing, tactic, crazy startup? We have so much to do. How do you just like allocate the time to do this? And then any just key lessons you've learned about doing this well beyond which you've already shared for people that are not wanting to try to start sharing things on LinkedIn and Twitter?
我在阅读时想，他分享了很多东西，但我还有更多想了解的内容。我们会深入讨论，比你在推特上分享的更加深入。我很喜欢这种对话方式。那么，我想问几个问题。首先，作为一个快速发展的创业公司创始人兼CEO，你是如何找到时间的？事情那么多，你如何合理分配时间做这些事情？此外，除了你在推特上已经分享的内容，对于那些想在领英和推特上开始分享的人，有哪些重要的建议和经验教训可以借鉴？
My advice is definitely just to try to start small. Don't let it become so intimidating that you just don't get started. For me, it was like just having a no pad or Google Doc around in the beginning where I would just constantly jot down, okay, this is something I learned or something I observed or something that worked well or something that was unintuitive but worked and just start creating a log of that. And then once I had enough of those and I would spend basically every week I'd block off a few hours to go a little bit deeper. I take a lot of those bullet points and try to say, is there enough here to turn this into maybe a post or something that can be shared broadly? And in the beginning, I didn't have enough. It was all sort of scattered thoughts. But over time, you started accumulating some interesting themes.
我的建议绝对是从小处开始。不要因为感到过于吓人而不敢开始。对我来说，一开始就是在身边放一个记事本或者在Google文档里，把我学到的东西、观察到的东西、表现好的东西，或者是不太直观但却有效的东西随时记录下来，并开始建立这样的日志。然后，当我积累了足够多的记录，每周我都会留出几个小时来深入研究。我会从那些要点中挑选出来，看看是否有足够的内容可以变成一个帖子，或者是可以广泛分享的东西。一开始，我没有足够的内容，都是些零散的想法。但随着时间的推移，我开始积累出一些有趣的主题。
And then I would start stress testing that some of that. So I would tell my teammates, okay, this is something interesting. Like, did you find this interesting? And if there were enough, like, oh, yeah, that's I would not have expected that or that's not something I've never heard before, then I then I'd actually start crafting the initial post. And then you actually just put it out there.
然后，我会开始对其中一些进行压力测试。我会告诉我的队友：“好，这个很有趣。你觉得这有趣吗？”如果他们有足够多的人表示：“哦，没想到会是这样”或“这是我从未听说过的”，那么我就会开始撰写初始帖子。然后，你就可以真正发布它了。
I think what I've learned is, you know, even for LinkedIn versus Twitter, the audiences want different things. And so you almost have to then have different tones of voices or like, you know, even nuggets are sharing. For me, I invested much more in LinkedIn early on just because it felt a little bit more natural for me. And then over time, I said, okay, well, I'm going to start packaging certain content for Twitter. That's actually different than what I would post on LinkedIn.
我认为我学到的东西是，你知道的，对于 LinkedIn 和 Twitter，受众想要的东西确实不一样。因此，你几乎需要使用不同的语气，甚至是分享不同的内容。对我来说，最开始我更多地投入在 LinkedIn 上，因为那个平台对我来说更自然。随着时间的推移，我决定开始为 Twitter 打包某些特定内容，这些内容实际上与我在 LinkedIn 上发布的不同。
Sometimes on Twitter, you get even more tactical or even more into the weeds. And so I found that that to be helpful. But honestly, I'm still learning. So like, every time you post, you go back, you know, I have a couple of weeks, you go and say, okay, what things are actually being engaged with? Like, are things actually creating? Like, ideally, you're creating enough value where people are either bookmarking it, sharing it, retweeting it, you know, these things that are signals for there's something valuable there.
有时候在推特上，你可能会深入探讨一些战术性的话题。我发现这样做很有帮助。不过，说实话，我仍在学习中。每次发帖后，隔几周我会回过头看看，哪些内容真正引发了互动。理想情况下，你希望创造出足够的价值，让人们去收藏、分享或转发这些内容，这些行为表明你的内容具有一定的价值。
And then you just go back and you start collecting your own sort of, you know, these are my all-star posts. Like, these are the ones that I've actually, you know, broken through. And then you go back and try to understand, okay, what about that post? I think was actually useful. Is it the actual content? Was it the structure of the content? Was it some sort of contrarian advice? And you start, you know, thematically bunching that together, such that as your brainstorming every week, you just have a good sort of body, you know, body of work to work off.
然后，你回头开始收集自己的那些“明星帖子”。这些帖子是你认为真正突出的作品。接着，你回顾并试图理解，这个帖子到底有什么特别之处？是内容本身？还是结构？或者是一种与众不同的观点？然后，你开始将这些要素分类整理，以便在每周头脑风暴时，拥有一个扎实的“作品库”可以参考。
This is so interesting and valuable. So let me mirror back a few of the lessons that I heard here that I think is easy for people to miss. So one is just what to share. What I heard here, and I completely agree with this, and this is what I try to do is pay attention to things you've learned, things that you find interesting, things that are unintuitive to you. Just like, have a doc and just put these there.
这真是太有趣和有价值了。让我来回顾一下我听到的几个很容易被忽视的教训。首先是要分享什么。我在这里听到的是，这也是我完全赞同的做法，就是关注你所学到的、你觉得有趣的以及那些对你来说不太直观的东西。就像创建一个文档，把这些东西记录下来。
At any time you learn something, find something interesting, just add it to the doc. Or, yeah, I haven't heard before. Is a good one too. So it's essentially just like, if you find it interesting, people on social media will also find it interesting. And one approach is to share it as it's happening, which is what I try to do. Just like, oh, I just learned this thing with Clockcode, with Clockcode, check it out, or save it up for a big long post.
每当你学到新东西或发现有趣的事情时，就把它添加到文档中。或者，如果你听到“哦，这个我以前没听过”，这也是个好主意。基本上就是，如果你觉得有趣，社交媒体上的人也会觉得有趣。一个方法是随时分享这些发现，就像我常做的那样。比如“哦，我刚刚学到了Clockcode这个东西，快来看看”，或者积累起来写一篇长文分享。
The other interesting, I've never heard this before, is like post different things to LinkedIn and Twitter. I just copy and paste the same thing. I love that you do something different for the two platforms. I think we all kind of have intuition that there's different audiences, right? And so if you know that kind of fundamentally, then the question is, how do you package up the story the right way so that the audience is ready to receive it?
这段话表达的意思是：另外一件有趣的事，我以前从来没听说过，就是在 LinkedIn 和 Twitter 上发布不同的内容。我通常只是简单复制粘贴同样的东西。我很欣赏你在这两个平台上做出不同的内容。我想我们都本能地知道这两者有不同的受众，对吧？既然从根本上知道了这一点，那么问题就是，如何以合适的方式包装故事，以便受众能够更容易地接收它。
And I think it's getting differed by the type of creator or the founder, whoever's posting it. And of course, the actual content itself. And so for me, I'm still tweaking, but I do find that just copying and pasting from one to the other doesn't usually work. It really, like you almost need to be in the right mindset of like, what do I think will be more engaging on Twitter? And then what do I think will be more engaging on LinkedIn?
我认为这取决于发布内容的创作者或创始人的类型，当然，也与实际的内容本身有关。因此，对我来说，我还在不断调整，因为我发现简单地从一个平台复制粘贴到另一个平台通常效果不佳。实际上，你几乎需要进入合适的思维模式，思考：什么内容在Twitter上会更有吸引力？而什么内容在LinkedIn上会更引人注目？
And then kind of test the bunch, see what actually works, go back and iterate a little bit. So if you had like one bullet point tip for what works on Twitter versus LinkedIn, you shared maybe more tactical on Twitter, is there anything more there you can share? Yeah, that's what I found is tactical, oftentimes more contrarian on Twitter. And also, I would say technical too.
然后测试一下这一组，看看哪些真正有效，再返回去进行一些迭代。所以，如果你有一个关于Twitter和LinkedIn上什么有效的简要建议，你可能会在Twitter上分享更多策略性的东西，你能再分享一些吗？是的，我发现策略性内容通常在Twitter上更有争议性。我还会说，技术性内容也比较多。
People really like to know, again, going back to getting into the weeds, is this something I feel like I could replicate? And I'm not going to give you credit, there's no credibility if you just give a blanket statement or something that feels generic. Like I really need to know, because show me the metrics even better. I feel like that. Versus LinkedIn, it's more, oftentimes more even just, you know, either more aspirational or aspirational or like a topic or a theme that just feels like relevant at that point in time.
人们非常想知道，回到细节问题上，这是不是一个我觉得可以复制的东西？如果你只是给一个笼统的说法或看起来很普通的东西，我是不会相信你的。我真的需要知道具体信息，最好能给我看一些数据。我就是这样感觉的。而在LinkedIn上，人们通常更关注一些理想化的内容，或者是当下看起来很相关的话题或主题。
And you can just kind of make more of a broader statement. It doesn't need to be as tactical. It's more like inspirational. It's like, oh, okay, now I need to go and learn a little bit more about pricing and packaging, for instance. And that could be the sort of spark that somebody needs. And you don't need to spell it completely out. Part of it is also that on LinkedIn, you can't really do threads. And so, you know, doing like a super long form post isn't as practical. Maybe that changes in the future where maybe the tactical pieces, you know, that element might actually change.
你可以发表一个更广泛的声明，不需要太具体，更多是一种激励。例如，它就像一个启发：嗯，好的，现在我需要去多了解一些关于定价和包装的知识。这可能就是某人所需要的灵感之火。此外，你并不需要把一切完全解释清楚。还有一点是在 LinkedIn 上，你不能真正地编写连载帖子，所以发特别长的内容并不太实际。将来可能会改变，也许具体的内容形式会有所不同。
And the last piece is you said you just block off time. Is there like a specific time of the week you do this? How do you actually, because everyone's like, oh sure, I'll block off time. And then, I don't know, okay, but I actually got to do all this other stuff. So I'm not going to use it this time. Maybe next week. For me, it's usually two times of the day, very first thing in the morning and lasting at night. And partly is because of kids. It's almost like I need time, but there's just zero distraction. And there's no noise in the house. And so I can actually think.
最后一点，你说你会特别留出时间。那具体来说，你会在一周中的特定时间这样做吗？因为大家都说要留时间，但总是有其他事情要处理，比方说这次不能用这段时间了，也许下周可以。对我来说，通常是在一天中的两个时间段：早晨一醒来或晚上临睡前。一部分原因是因为孩子，我需要的是没有干扰的时间。这时家里很安静，我可以真正地思考。
And then, you know, I think in the mornings, it's about where are you finding inspiration? Like, where are you? Like, what are topics you're energized by? And then I think at night, it's about reflection. Like, what are the things you actually went through that day? You can almost pull up your calendar and be like, okay, I talked to X, Y and Z people. And was there anything from those conversations that might be relevant? That's where I write some of those things. It's more of a recap of, of actually what happened.
然后，你知道，我觉得早上的时候，关键在于你从哪里找到灵感？你在哪里？你对哪些话题感到有动力？然后我觉得晚上就是反思的时候了。你需要思考当天经历了哪些事情。你几乎可以打开你的日历，看看和哪些人交流过：X、Y 和 Z。这些对话中有没有什么对你有启发的？我会在这个时候写下一些内容，更多的是对实际发生的事情的回顾。
And what I, what helps me to not feel like this is some cringy self-promote, egotistical stuff is just it's useful stuff that I've learned that ends up being helpful to people and people in the comments. Or is just like, oh, that is really cool and useful. Thank you. It's not like self-promotions, not just like, look how amazing I am. Look, check out my amazing products. Like, here's the thing I learned. You might find it useful.
让我不感到这是一些令人尴尬的自我宣传、自我膨胀的事情的原因是，因为这些是我学到的有用东西，最终对人们有帮助，并且评论中有人说：“哦，这真是很酷，很有用，谢谢。” 这并不是那种自我推销，也不是那种“看看我多厉害，看看我多棒的产品”的感觉。相反，它是“这是我学到的一件事，你可能会觉得有用。”
That's exactly right. I think, you know, one way of thinking about it, you know, with like founder-led sales, it's always about like exchange of value, right? You want to be able to give, you know, them, the customer, this feeling that they're getting an amazing product and exchange they're going to pay you money for it. I think with like founder-led marketing, it's almost this mindset of you want to give people a ton of content. Maybe it's like, you know, a value in the contents. They're just sharing something, maybe some, you know, some secretactic or, you know, giving them something where they, you know, they're inherently there's value in it.
没错。我的意思是，创始人主导的销售往往强调价值交换。你希望能让客户感受到他们得到了一个非常棒的产品，而作为回报，他们愿意为此付钱。对于创始人主导的营销，它的理念几乎是，你要给人们大量的内容。这些内容可能本身就有价值，比如分享一些技巧或诀窍。通过这样的分享，内在就包含了价值。
And in exchange, you sort of get goodwill back. You're not necessarily getting money back. You get goodwill. They're going to follow you. They're going to engage with their posts. They're going to tell others about it. And then over time, you can exchange maybe some of that goodwill for like actually talking about my product and like announcing it and they're going to help amplify the news. And I think that's magic where you kind of kind of bank the goodwill for a long period of time by providing just a ton of value with no expectation of anything immediately in return.
作为交换，你会得到善意的回报。这并不一定是金钱上的回报，而是一种善意回馈。他们会关注你，参与到你的帖子中，并向他人推荐。随着时间的推移，你可能可以将一些这种善意转化为他们主动宣传你的产品，帮助扩大传播。我认为这是一种很奇妙的效果，你通过长期提供大量的价值而不期望立刻得到回报，积累了善意。
The book I always point people to when they're wanting, when they're struggling with this sort of thing and like, okay, I did this and no one like no one cared didn’t do any good is there's a book by Scott Pressfield, I think is his name called nobody wants to read your shit. Yeah, which is exactly what is right. Nobody wants to read it. The bar for people to care is very high. There's so much stuff to read in process. And so this book gives you a really good lens of just like, okay, the bar is very high and nobody wants to read your shit. So you have to try really hard to make it really good. Great reminder.
我经常推荐给那些在这种情况下感到困惑或沮丧的人一本书，就是由Scott Pressfield（我想他的名字是这样）写的《没人想读你的东西》。书名直接点出了问题的实质：没有人想读你的东西。人们在乎的标准非常高，因为要阅读和处理的东西太多了。这本书让你很好地理解到这个现实：人们对内容的要求很高，因此你必须非常努力地去创作优质的内容。是个很好的提醒。
We'll look to that in the show notes. Okay, let's get into 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 a hundred million, just like broadly, what should we know?
我们会在节目备注中关注这一点。 好的，让我们回到Gamma的成长话题。 我们已经谈到你们如何通过产品发布、重新考虑用户引导流程并使其变得非常出色来获得了最初的几万名用户。接着，一条引发争议的推文，保罗·格雷厄姆的评论更是激起了热议。现在让我们谈谈下一阶段，也许你可以告诉我们此时的年度经常性收入（ARR）大约到了一个亿，这期间有哪些我们应该了解的事情？
So when we got to about 10 million in ARR, I think there's this feeling for me, which is 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 viral, the viral day was there. And so we do, 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 sort of holding us back. And I think a lot of people discount, you know, whether or not a rebrand is valuable. And I think sometimes it is sometimes it isn't for us. You know, there's a few different things we looked at.
当我们的年经常性收入（ARR）达到大约1000万美元的时候，我感觉到我们需要一些方法来继续扩大和传播Gamma的影响力。实际上，在此之前，我们的产品已经通过自然的病毒效应取得了一定的成功。因此，我们确实感到是时候开始加大这种推广力度了。但我开始意识到，我们最初的品牌形象有些拖后腿了。很多人低估了重新品牌塑造是否有价值。我认为，这种价值取决于具体情况，对于我们而言，我们考虑了几个不同的方面。
So one, our initial brand was was almost more of a placeholder brand because we created it the moment we sort of incorporated the company, which is again like 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 kind of the DNA of the brand. There wasn't that many, like the art direction was very limited in scope. There wasn't much when it came to like voice and tone.
我们的初始品牌可以说是一个临时的品牌，因为我们在公司成立时就创建了它，那是在2020年底到2021年初。当时我们需要一个名字，以便在我们建设过程中至少可以与他人分享。我们能够建立一个登录页面，只是为了觉得有一些东西在那里。但我们并没有在这方面投入太多，因此品牌的“DNA”非常有限。艺术风格的方向范围很小，语言和语调方面也没有太多内容。
And so, you know, it was, 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. Like you're kind of, you know, this DNA is something where you can, you can imagine creating tons of content around and all feeling pretty cohesive. And I know, I think that needs to be done by design. Like you're really think 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, you know, thousands of pieces of copy, it all feels pretty cohesive.
所以，你知道，我们当时觉得这个东西已经足够好，可以开始，但还不能大规模扩展。当我想到可以扩展的东西时，感觉就像你可以拿一个品牌的元素并大量复制它。就像这个 DNA，你可以想象围绕它创作大量内容，而这些内容能很好地统一一致。我觉得这需要有意识地去设计。你需要对每一个元素都进行深思熟虑。比如，你想要走什么样的艺术风格？声音和语调应该是什么样，以便当你在创作成千上万的文案时，它们都能显得非常一致。
And so we kind of went back to the drawing board and we spent many months kind of rethinking what would be the, you know, the brand. What is, what is this vision that we have longer term? Our creative doctor internally partnered with Smith Indiction and Amazing Agency that has helped, you know, what folks like Probelexity also do their rebrand or their initial brand. And we work, we are so many months just like really trying to craft kind of what we think is like the core DNA of the brand. And doing so in a way that we could replicate it as much as possible.
于是，我们可以说是回到了起点，花了好几个月的时间重新思考品牌的定位和我们长远的愿景。我们的创意总监与Smith Indiction以及Amazing Agency合作，他们曾帮助像Probelexity这样的公司进行品牌重塑或初步品牌策划。我们也花了许多个月的时间认真打造我们认为是品牌核心DNA的东西，并努力找到一种可以尽量复制的方式。
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, you know, for performance marketing assets for influencers to be able to use and showcase in their content. And so you're going from like, you know, 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, like you have that sort of cohesive feel. So for us that we realize it was going to be necessary and why we invested so much and end up being I mean way more expensive, way more time consuming that I would have imagined, but I think coming, you know, on the other side of it being the right investment feeling that that was the right time to do.
当你开始扩大规模时，复制部分就变得重要了，因为你需要创建大量的内容。你需要为社交媒体广告制作自己的内容，也需要为绩效营销和让网红展示的素材提供支持。因此，你从制作小量内容突然变成每周测试数千个创意作品。如果没有信心在复制过程中保持统一的风格和感觉，就无法做到这一点。对我们来说，我们意识到这是必要的，因此在这方面进行了大量投资，这比我想象的要昂贵和耗时得多。但最终我们感到这笔投资是正确的，并且是在合适的时间做出这个决定。
I love how many things you did that feel like this wouldn't this would will not work out. Building a startup within the presentation space doing a whole rebrand in the middle of scaling also just reworking the entire product after you launched and just like rethinking the whole thing like all these things and everyone's always like no this is not how we went and interestingly worked out for you guys. I want to come back to the brand stuff, but one of the most interesting ways you guys grew early on was influencer marketing, which a lot of people hear about and talk about I haven't heard a much of like had actually do this and what actually works.
我喜欢你们做的许多事情，这些事情看起来似乎是行不通的。比如在扩展业务过程中，你们在演示领域建立了一家初创公司，同时还进行了整体品牌重塑，更是在产品上线后对产品进行全面的重新设计和思考。大家通常会认为这样做不会成功，但有趣的是，你们却获得了成功。虽然我还想回到品牌的讨论上，但其中一个你们早期发展的最有趣的方法是通过网红营销。很多人都听说过和谈论过网红营销，但真正实践中该如何进行，以及哪些方法有效，其实了解不多。
Talk about that as a broad growth lever free guys and then I want to get into just like what tools did you use who actually was really helpful there. So yeah, just give us the big picture. Yeah, I think a lot of founders assume that with influencer marketing it's almost like turnkey. You set aside a budget, you find some creators, you figure out the right campaign or the right moment of time to do it and it's all done. You're ready to go. And I think the reality is like going back to like this founder led marketing mindset is like well you're going to set yourself up for success if you actually are super involved in that entire process.
谈论一下作为广泛增长杠杆的内容，然后我想深入了解你们用了哪些工具，谁在这方面真正提供了帮助。所以请给我们一个整体概况。我认为很多创始人认为网红营销就像是一个一劳永逸的解决方案。你预留一笔预算，找到一些创作者，想出一个合适的活动或时机，一切就都搞定了，准备好上线了。但实际上，如果你希望取得成功，就需要像创始人主导的营销那样，深度参与整个过程。
So for us what this meant was like all the initial influencers I onboarded manually myself. We would find I would spend time 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 your story but in their voice right and they can't do that if you're not willing to put in that investment. And so we would spend a lot of time like going through it wasn't my job to tell them how to pitch gamma but it was my job to make sure that they understood what gamma was as a product. And so we would spend a lot of time like me just walking through the product then asking questions us like just kind of brainstorming what could the hooks be and me just giving them some initial feedback and like saying oh yeah this one I love that I think it's going to work great for your audience but not trying to be super prescriptive.
对我们来说，这意味着我最初手动招募的所有网红都是由我亲自负责的。我们会找到合适的人选，我会花时间与每一位网红进行通话，确保他们理解Gamma的意义以及如何使用这款产品。你希望他们能用自己的方式讲述你的故事，如果你不愿意投入时间和精力，这是无法实现的。因此，我们会花很多时间来讨论，虽然我的工作不是教他们如何推销Gamma，但确保他们理解Gamma作为产品的特性是我的责任。于是，我们会花很多时间共同研究产品，回答问题，进行头脑风暴，思考什么样的切入点更好，同时我会给他们一些初步的反馈，比如说：“哦，我喜欢这个点子，我觉得它很适合你的观众。”但不会给出过于具体的指导。
And working with a ton of micro influencers people that don't have massive followings but are committed to giving going back to giving value to your audience like they're committed to giving value to their audiences. They want to be able to showcase tools that actually they would use or they are using. And how do you do that in an authentic way like you can't really fake that you really need to spend the time doing that. And just like you would onboard a customer you onboard and influence are the same way you want them to be an extension of your team. And I think they can feel whether or not you're willing to put in the work. And if you're not then they're just going to treat it like any other project ship it and be done with it. If you invest in that relationship you know guess what they'll they'll be back to actually post about you again.
与众多微型网红合作，他们可能没有庞大的粉丝群，但他们致力于为自己的观众提供价值。他们希望展示一些他们确实会使用或者正在使用的工具。如何以真实的方式做到这一点呢？这并不是能够随便伪装的事，你真的需要投入时间。就像你培养一个客户一样，你也应该以同样的方式去培养一个意见领袖，让他们成为你团队的延伸。我认为，他们能够感受到你是否愿意花时间和精力去建立这种关系。如果你不愿意投入，他们就会把这当作普通的项目来对待，结束之后就不再关心。但如果你投资于这段关系，他们可能会愿意再次为你发声，甚至主动回来支持你。
And like you're all of a sudden having this sort of you know this relationship that actually can build over time. I think that's really where the magic is like too many people discount that initial piece. This is awesome. To be clear influencer marketing essentially a person with a following answer I ticked out Instagram Twitter LinkedIn whatever gets paid in some way to promote your product. That's how you describe that's the simple way to understand influencer marketing.
突然之间，你开始有了一种可以随着时间发展起来的关系。我觉得这就是其中的魔力所在，太多人低估了这种初始阶段。这真的很棒。需要澄清的是，网红营销本质上是某个拥有粉丝的人通过抖音、Instagram、Twitter、LinkedIn等平台以某种方式获得报酬来推广你的产品。这就是对网红营销的简单理解方式。
Yeah. Yeah so it's definitely the simple way and I'd say you know there's definitely a different you know levels. I think a lot of people think influencer marketing and they'll think you know these big trendy creators people that have like a million followers for instance. And they're the ideas that okay we're going to carve out a really big budget. We're going to you know choose like five or six that we feel like a really thick that taste makers in the space and put all of our money into like just help you know having them talk about our product.
是的，是的，所以这确实是比较简单的一种方式。我想说的是，影响者营销有不同的层次。很多人一提到影响者营销，就会想到那些拥有一百万粉丝的大网红。这种想法是好的，意思是我们需要投入一笔很大的预算，然后挑选五六个我们认为在这个领域非常有影响力的关键人物，把所有的钱用于让他们来推广我们的产品。
And I think usually this is this is kind of the wrong approach because many of them you know they do have massive audiences. And for you you're basically like you basically give them a script to read and it immediately feels like an ad right like they don't feel like that product is not connected really to them in any way it's just something that they're you know for this week they happen to be working with you and then they move on with their life and it never feels organic or authentic and you wasted a ton of money doing so.
我认为通常这种做法是错误的，因为他们中的很多人确实拥有庞大的受众。对于你来说，你基本上是给他们一个剧本来读，这样立刻就让人感觉像是在打广告。不像是这个产品和他们有什么实际的联系，仅仅是因为在这一周他们恰好在和你合作，然后就继续过自己的生活了，毫无自然感或真实性可言。这样做你只是浪费了大量金钱。
I think you're much better doing the hard thing which is hard to scale but it's like finding the thousands of micro influencers that have an audience where your product maybe is actually useful. And for instance you know for us like early on it would be you know educators. People that for them part of their job is creating slides every day because they need to engage their students. And so like for them you know having a tool that actually save them a ton of time was something they love talking about.
我觉得你更应该去做那些虽然难以扩展但很有价值的事情，比如找到成千上万的小众网红，他们的受众群体可能正好对你的产品有用。举个例子，对我们来说，早期的目标群体可能是教育工作者。这些人每天的一部分工作就是制作幻灯片，以便更好地吸引学生。因此，对他们来说，如果有一款工具能够节省大量时间，他们会很愿意分享这个工具。
And if you can find some of these pockets we call them echo chambers where if you find a pocket like educators teachers love telling other teachers about products they love using. During summer break they all come together and talk about okay what are the things that we're going to actually improve you know my job next next school season. And you know obviously during this AI wave a lot of those have been okay what are the AI tools I just saved me a ton of time.
如果你能找到我们称之为“回声室”的这些小圈子，比如教育工作者，就是教师们喜欢向其他教师分享他们喜欢使用的产品的小圈子。暑假期间，他们都会聚在一起讨论，好吧，我们来看看哪些东西能在下一学年真正改善我的工作。显然，在这次人工智能浪潮中，他们很多讨论都是关于有哪些人工智能工具能帮我节省大量时间。
And so if you can start actually tapping into these pockets of like echo chambers that's even better. Like that it doesn't have to be this flashy you know like well known influencer it's actually just this person that has an audience of where people like really trust what they say. And and that's amazing that ends up becoming this sort of you know wildfire that can spread really really fast. And what's like the dollar amount these folks get it's like a few hundred bucks few thousand bucks some like that.
因此，如果你能开始真正利用这些类似回音室的小圈子，那就更好了。这不一定非得是那种闪亮登场、众人皆知的网红，而是那些拥有观众、观众真正信任其言论的人。而这就很厉害，因为它最终就像一场可以迅速蔓延的野火。至于这些人得到的费用，大约是几百或几千美元这样。
Yeah a few hundred to low thousands. Single digit thousands. What are how do you find these folks are their tools that use is it just like a bunch of manual searching and looking. Yeah in the very beginning it was all manual a lot of cold outreach. And then we ended up finding a couple different things. One is a platform a YC company called first collab that has been amazing they basically do all the automated outbound for you. Plus you can help them you know actually create profiles or personas of different creators. So like for instance educators being one and then they'll go out and actually you know based on that profile find all the right creators for you. So they've been amazing really great to work with.
是的，大约有几百到一两千人，具体来说就是一千多。这些人是怎么找到的呢？有没有什么工具帮助寻找，还是全靠人工搜索和查找？一开始确实都是人工的，进行了大量冷启动的接触。后来我们找到了一些不同的方法。其中之一是一个名叫 First Collab 的 YC 公司平台，它非常棒，几乎可以为你完成所有的自动化外联工作。此外，你还可以帮助他们创建不同创作者的档案或人物角色。比如说，把教育工作者作为一个类型，然后他们会根据这个档案帮你找到所有合适的创作者。这个平台真的很好用，非常愉快的合作。
And then we've also found small agencies to also help kind of augment that. Like I look for you know agencies that are super young and hungry. These are people that you know are social they're native to social media. And so you know they really understand it and they can really be able to bring in creators that you know are great to work with. And I think part of it is like if you find creators are great to work with everything everything else becomes easy. So we've had a few one is AKG media actually the UK and they've been fantastic to work with as well. So you kind of find a few different things either agencies or platforms that can help you actually scale the signal.
然后，我们也寻找了一些小型代理机构来帮助我们加强这一点。我通常会寻找那些非常年轻、充满干劲的代理机构。这些人很活跃，天生熟悉社交媒体。他们非常理解社交媒体，并且能够找到优秀的创作者。这些创作者合作起来非常愉快。我认为，如果找到好的创作者合作，其他事情就会变得简单得多。我们已经合作了一些代理机构，其中之一是英国的AKG媒体，他们一直是出色的合作伙伴。因此，你可以找到一些不同的方法，比如代理机构或平台，来帮助你扩大影响力。
And these when they post they're generally transparent about this as a paid promotion right they're not just pretending I found this tool and I love it. Yeah exactly right. Okay and so how much impacted this lever of influencer marketing have on your growth say from 10 to 100 like is this the biggest lever of growth other than just word of mouth people continue to share it. Yeah so word of mouth has definitely been the biggest. So we look at kind of all kind of new subscriber growth over 50% of this is word of mouth. It's either people searching you know direct coming direct entering gamma dot op or going through search and typing in gamma like a branded keyword search where they're looking for gamma they've heard about gamma.
这些人在发帖时通常很透明地标明是付费推广，他们不会假装只是偶然发现这个工具并喜欢上它。没错。那么，从10到100，你觉得网红营销这一个手段对你们的增长有多大影响呢？它是不是除了口耳相传外，最大的增长动力？是的，口耳相传绝对是最大的。我们观察所有的新用户增长，有超过50%是通过口耳相传实现的。要么是有人直接输入gamma.op来访问，要么是通过搜索引擎输入“gamma”这样的品牌关键词，因为他们听说过gamma。
But I think for us social media and influencers specifically has always been an amplifier. So every time we invest in influencer marketing we actually see word of mouth increase even more. And it's always like you can just you can just see it like basically anytime you spend you know a little bit of money you start seeing people come through influencer the word of mouth factors actually one point we'll get another 1.5 additional users on top of that which has been really interesting to see. And I think part of this is just recognizing that and I think we kind of understand it but like with influencer marketing because it why it's so effective you know we all know you know dumb bars number which is you know have this number like 150 people you call kind of your network.
我认为，对于我们来说，社交媒体和网红一直是一个扩音器。因此，每次我们在网红营销上投入的时候，实际发现口碑传播也显著增加。几乎每次你花一点钱，就能看到通过网红营销带来的效果，口碑传播的用户数量可以增加1.5倍，这点非常有趣。我觉得部分原因是我们认识到了这一点，并且理解到网红营销的有效性。我们都知道邓巴数字理论，即你的人际网络大约有150人，你把他们视作自己的社交圈。
And your network you trust more than the average stranger down the street. Like if they tell you something you know they recommend something there is a sort of halo effect right you learn to trust them there a lot of these influencers the reason why they share so much about their lives is because they want to be in your network they want you to feel super close and once you feel super close you trust them to actually you know share things are going to be useful. And so when they recommend a tool there is this sort of halo effect where it doesn't feel like it's coming from a stranger it feels like it's coming from a friend.
你会信任你的社交网络比信任街上的陌生人更多。如果他们告诉你什么，或者推荐了某样东西，这就像是一种“光环效应”，你会学着去信任他们。许多网络红人分享他们生活的原因之一，就是为了让自己融入你的社交圈，让你感到非常亲近。一旦你觉得和他们很亲近，你就会信任他们分享的信息是真正有用的。所以，当他们推荐一款工具时，这种“光环效应”使得这些建议不像是来自陌生人，而更像是来自一个朋友。
And that's where every time we've spent money there you actually see this amplification like okay that's kind of interesting you wouldn't necessarily expect that but for us it's been this sort of amplifier from from yeah the very beginning. This is so fun to hear about I've not heard this level of detail on how influencer marketing works and how to make it work. A few more questions here. So you said there's maybe a few thousand people you ended up working with roughly influencers. Over the course of yeah like a year it wasn't all in the same time it was like you know you find basically in the beginning you do in the very very beginning we had a small budget it was like you know 20 creators a month and then you start increasing that to like 50 then 100 and then you know we're still not we're not definitely not fully scaled at this point but I could easily see a point where you know you're working with many many creators every single month and that gives you a chance to actually test a variety of you know again content hooks ways to talk about the product value props.
这是我们每次花钱的地方，你会看到这种放大效应，这有点有趣，因为你不一定会预料到这一点，但对我们来说，从一开始，这就像是一个放大器。听到这些信息很有趣，我以前从未听过这种详细程度的内容，关于网红营销的运作方式以及如何使其有效运作。这里还有几个问题。你提到我们可能与几千个人合作过，大致都是网红。大约在一年的时间里，并不是一次性全部合作，而是从一开始，我们的预算很小，每月大约与20位创作者合作，然后逐步增加到50位，然后100位。即使如此，我们现在还没有完全扩大规模，但我可以很容易地看到一个场景，那就是我们每个月和许多创作者合作，这样可以让我们测试各种内容挂钩和产品宣传方式。
Amazing and you said the key here is you spend time with every one of these creators influencers early on to help make sure they understand what you're doing get excited about it isn't just like a thing you outsource. I think there's a lot of value there it's hard to again hard to quantify and in most creators feel like the most founders probably feel like they're too busy to allocate that time but I think it was a good investment because going back to you want them to feel like an extension of your team they're not going to feel like an extension of your team if if one they've never met you and two you've never even told them really how the product works they're just forced to kind of go to your website to figure it all out those are going to be you know not a whole lot of love that they're feeling from from from the outset.
这真是太棒了，你所说的关键在于你会在初期就花时间与每位创作者和影响者沟通，确保他们理解并对你正在做的事情感到兴奋，而不是简单地把这件事外包。我认为这一做法很有价值，虽然很难量化，但大多数创作者可能觉得大多数创始人都忙得不可开交，没有时间来投入这一点。不过，我认为这是一个好的投资，因为你是希望他们感觉自己是你团队的延伸。如果他们从未见过你，或者你从未真正向他们解释过产品的运作方式，那他们是不会有这种归属感的，只是被迫去你的网站上了解这些信息。这样一来，他们从一开始就不会感受到太多关注和关爱。
So I'm hearing is quality over quantity especially when you're getting started and then there's this other piece of niche which I think is very counterintuitive instead of going to large large influencers or the huge audience it's good if folks that are small what's like an audience size roughly that you think is ideal for this sort of what niche just means. Honestly I don't think there's a minimum because even with platforms like TikTok they oftentimes are giving you credit for a brand new account they want to help amplify that new account because you know obviously you know if they're thinking from a creator perspective you know if that new creator feels like oh coming to TikTok is like a massive win for me they're going to be more invested in it and so there there really isn't a minimum a lot of these platforms are trying to shift to to kind of the same thing where they really reward new creators on the platform and so you could have a small audience it doesn't really matter you could have 10,000 followers that's also good I think as long as the content feels you know again engaging authentic to that to the to the people you're talking to I think has a really good chance of actually taking off.
所以我听到的是，在刚开始的时候，质量胜于数量。还有一个重要的方面是找到自己的细分领域，这一点其实是非常反直觉的。与其去找那些拥有巨大粉丝的影响者，还不如选择一些较小的粉丝群体。你觉得在这个情况下，适合的受众规模大概是多少呢？实际上，我觉得没有一个最小值。即使是在像TikTok这样的平台上，通常也会给予新账号更多的曝光，因为他们希望帮助推广这些新账号。从创作者的角度来看，如果新创作者觉得在TikTok上获得成功是一个巨大的胜利，他们就会更加投入。因此，很多平台都在努力朝这个方向转变，奖励新创作者。所以，你的受众规模可以很小，甚至只有一万个粉丝，这也是不错的。只要你的内容对你的受众群体来说足够引人入胜和真实，就有很大的可能性取得成功。
That's such a good point when we take talk where it's not follow related it's it's if it's useful and people find it clickable whatever likeable viewable yeah it'll it'll it'll algorithm will spread it to a lot of people such a good point. Totally. Okay there's a couple more points you made in the tweet that I want to make sure we highlight so one is you made this point that 90% of your reach in influencer marketing comes from less than 10% of people is there anything there that you think is important for people to hear.
这真是一个好观点，当我们发布内容时，如果它虽然与原话题不相关，但有用且吸引人点击、点赞或观看，算法就会把它传播给更多的人。完全同意。你在推文中提到的还有几个要点我想强调一下，其中之一就是你指出在网红营销中，90%的影响力是由不到10%的人实现的。你觉得这其中有什么重要信息是大家需要知道的吗？
Yeah I mean this just goes back to it's it's hard to know where that 10% is going to come from so you kind of just have to cast the super wide net right you can sort of I think try to again trick yourself into thinking you're you're great at picking creators or you're great at telling them how to like post about your stuff whether reality is like even for me I could never guess like I kind of had some idea but I just had to make sure that I was meeting enough creators broadly such that when you meet enough they're all posting there's some pocket that end up just taking off and I was not a good predictor of that I was not smart enough to actually know which ones to take off I just knew that we had to play this sort of numbers game to make it work.
这段话的大意是：是的，我的意思是，这个问题回到了很难知道那10%的成功来源，因此你必须撒网捞鱼。你可能会一再欺骗自己，认为你非常擅长挑选创作者或指导他们如何发布你的内容，但现实情况是，就算是我自己，也无法准确预测。我虽然有一些想法，但还是需要确保我能够接触到足够多的创作者，当你接触到足够多的人时，总会有一些会突然走红。我并不擅长预测哪些会成功，我也没有聪明到能知道哪一个会有突破。我只知道，我们必须通过这种数字游戏来让事情奏效。
So when your tips here is is people fail often in this because they start too small or they're budget a little too small you recommend 10 to 20,000 a month over six months and just trying this it sounds like you're doing like 20 to 30 creators a month is that the right framework for how to just start this thing and explore.
所以，你的建议是，人们在这方面常常失败，因为他们的起步太小，或预算过于紧张。你建议每月投入1万到2万美元，持续六个月来进行尝试。这样看来，你的计划是每月与20到30位创作者合作。这是一个合理的框架来开始并探索这个项目吗？
Yeah totally and I'd say it's not just that the budget's too small it would be that they put all their eggs in one basket so you can also easily blow that 20k on just one you know bigger influencer and then be like oh that didn't work so I'm gonna try it again that didn't work okay I give up and I think rather than doing that you should be like okay that 20k I could actually probably work with you know 40 different influencers and see what actually works and we'll cross the 40 I'm gonna try to find a variety of personas a variety of use cases spend a lot of time with them and then actually see you know what's working what's not and then next month take those learnings and you know double down like if educators are working go with educators if consultants are working go with consultant find work consultants there's going to be more there I think that's where the outputting all your eggs in one basket is just are the surest way to fail because like you're gonna miss a ton and it's gonna take you way too long to learn and you're gonna come to the conclusion as a waste of time.
是的，完全同意。我认为问题不仅仅在于预算太少，还在于他们把所有的希望寄托在一个地方。比如说，你可能很容易把这2万花在一个网红身上，如果效果不好，再试一次，没效果就放弃了。我觉得与其这样，不如考虑用这2万去和40个不同的网红合作，看看哪个真正有效。在这过程中，你可以寻找各种不同的用户群体和使用场景，花时间了解他们，然后找出哪些有效、哪些无效。下一个月可以根据这些经验，加大投入，比如说如果教育工作者有效，就专注在他们身上；如果顾问有效，就去找更多的顾问合作。我认为把所有的希望寄托在一个地方是最容易失败的方法，因为这样你会错过很多机会，学习的过程也会太漫长，最后可能得出结论说这是浪费时间。
I feel like this whole podcast conversation could be just about this one lever so much I want to be talking about but there's more questions here because this is so useful and interesting you have this line in your tweet about how virality is not an accident and that this approach is how you figure out what actually works and then once you do that then you start leading into that messaging talk about that.
我觉得整个播客对话可能都可以围绕这一点展开，我有太多想说的内容，不过还有更多问题要讨论，因为这个主题真的很有用也很有趣。你在推文中提到，病毒式传播不是偶然的，这种方法可以帮助你找出真正有效的东西。一旦找到有效的策略，就开始深入这个方向进行信息传递。请谈谈这个吧。
This goes back to obviously if you're you're testing a bunch you'll finally find that sort of you know post or set a post actually go viral going back to yeah just the fundamentals like make it easy for your influencers to be able to tell your story in their voice but one thing we did you know we open sourced our basic entire brand we have brand.gamma.app which is everything about our brand our voice and tone our art direction what we use in mid-journey to create this sort of art direction that we have so that a creator can can do the same right and they can actually just copy all of that so that they don't have to reinvent the wheel every time they're trying to post about gamma.
这显然回到了这样一个基本点：如果您进行大量测试，最终会发现某条帖子或一组帖子会变得受欢迎。重要的是要让您的影响者能够用他们自己的语言讲述您的故事。我们做了一件事，就是将我们的基本品牌信息开源。我们的网站 brand.gamma.app 包含了关于我们品牌的一切：我们的声音和语调、艺术方向以及我们在 mid-journey 中使用的创作方式等等。这样，创作者就可以直接复制这些，而不必每次试图发布有关 gamma 的信息时都从头再来。
The have all of that and I think that going back to like this notion of like just make a dead simple for them remove friction they already have enough to like on their plate that to figure out don't make it any harder than it is and if you remove friction then it's like oh you get into this rhythm of adding creators is easy having them post as crazy easy reviewing what's working what's not as easy.
他们已经拥有了所有这些东西，我认为回到这个理念，就是要尽可能简单地为他们提供服务，减少阻力。他们已经有很多事情需要处理，不要让事情变得更复杂。 如果你能减少阻力，那就会变得简单，比如，添加创作者变得轻而易举，让他们发布内容非常简单，审核哪些有效哪些无效也变得简单。
And if you're able to do that relentlessly over many many months then all of a sudden like hitting the sort of viral post is easy because you're going to have enough at bats there where some are going to you know some are actually going to pop off but you kind of only can get there after you've like done all the hard work before that to make you know you know kind of remove friction from the process and feeling like it's almost like a you know well oiled the machine at that point.
如果你能在很多个月里不懈地做到这一点，那么突然之间，像创建一个病毒式的帖子就会变得容易，因为你会有足够多的尝试，其中一些会真正爆发。但是你只有在之前完成了所有艰苦的工作之后，才能达到这个状态，从而让整个过程更顺畅，感觉就像是一个运行良好的机器。
Is there a platform you find most helpful for the stuff you guys are doing is it like TikTok and Instagram linked in something else yeah I mean this is one where you know for us we cast a pretty wide net too but it's very clear you know linked in the conversion rates are just substantially higher there the 4x maybe 5x higher than other platforms and I think a lot of people are probably still sleeping on LinkedIn frankly and so it's one where you know the some of the some of the influencers there are creators there can be a little bit more costly but if you can be highly highly you know eventually be more targeted knowing that hey this type of creator is pretty impactful for for you know our product then working with them it's just like oh that's that's great like the conversion rates are just so strong and it really feels like we're like just getting started there.
有没有哪个平台对你们的工作特别有帮助？是像 TikTok 和 Instagram 这样的，还是 LinkedIn 或其他平台？
对我们来说，我们确实在多个平台上都投入了资源，但很明显，LinkedIn 的转化率要高得多，可能是其他平台的 4 倍甚至 5 倍。我觉得很多人可能还没有充分认识到 LinkedIn 的潜力。虽然在 LinkedIn 上与一些影响力大的人或内容创作者合作可能花费更高，但是如果能精准地锁定那些对我们产品有影响力的创作者，合作效果会非常好。LinkedIn 的转化率确实很强，我们感觉这才刚刚开始挖掘它的潜力。
So you know if you're in the beginning you're not sure it's always helpful to cast a pretty wide net and then you know similar to sort of just the influencer strategy like test and iterate you'll figure out many of these things will fall the power a power loss was like you know one or two channels are going to be the most important for you for instance Twitter for us hasn't been that impactful and I think for tools like notion they've been really really impactful you're not going to really know and so just test and then double down on the ones that really move the needle for your product.
如果你刚开始不太确定方向，广泛尝试是很有帮助的。就像影响者策略一样，要进行测试和迭代，你会发现很多渠道可能并不重要，但会有一两个渠道对你非常关键。比如，Twitter 对我们没有很大影响，但对像 Notion 这样的工具影响非常大。你一开始可能并不知道这些，所以要进行测试，然后在对你的产品真正起作用的渠道上加大投入。
I think that many people are sitting now are like wait LinkedIn post are sponsored sometimes I didn't know that what's like how do you know if it's a sponsored post is like a hashtag sponsored or something like that how do they communicate that usually they'll say you know they're a partner or yeah basically it is sponsored in some form or you know they'll the hashtag you know add or you know something along those lines so that's probably the the way you'll you'll see it the most cool by the way I don't do this sort of stuff if you ever see me on LinkedIn I'm not doing any paid stuff just so people know and I don't plan to do that.
我想很多人现在才意识到，原来LinkedIn上的帖子有时是赞助的。我以前不知道这件事。那么，你是怎么判断一个帖子是否是赞助的呢？一般来说，他们会注明是一个“合作伙伴”或标注为“赞助”的形式，或者使用类似“#赞助”的标签。因此，你最常见到的就是这样的标识。另外，顺便说一下，我自己是不做这种事情的，如果你看到我在LinkedIn上发帖，那不是付费的帖子，只是让大家知道这一点，我也没有计划去做。
This episode is brought to you by Miro every day new headlines are scaring us about all the ways that AI is coming for our jobs creating a lot of anxiety and fear but a recent survey for Miro tells a different story 76% of people believe that AI can benefit their role but over 50% of people struggle to know when to use it enter Miro's innovation workspace an intelligent platform that brings people and AI together in a shared space to get great work done.
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Let's come back to this brand point so one of your big lessons is invest in brand before you go heavy into hit ads and performance marketing I imagine you do some ads at this point Facebook and Google and things like that yeah we run ads performance marketing you know I think there's this this like the stigma that you know brand marketing and performance marketing or sort of at odds with each other I very much follow kind of the the sort of the thought that brand marketing is performance marketing like everything is some form of performance marketing it just not might not be as attributable.
让我们回到品牌这一点上，你的一个重要经验是要先投资于品牌建设，然后再大举进行广告投放和效果营销。我可以想象你在这个阶段会在 Facebook、Google 等平台上做一些广告，是的，我们确实进行广告投放和效果营销。很多人认为品牌营销和效果营销是相互对立的，我非常认同这样一种观点：品牌营销本身就是效果营销的一种形式。所有营销实际上都是某种形式的效果营销，只是可能不会那么容易被直接关联到具体效果。
So like the ability to actually map back to every single dollar spent is a little bit harder but it doesn't mean that it's not impactful and I think as a company scales you have to invest in both. and ideally they work really really well together like the more you invest in brand marketing it strengthens your performance marketing this goes back to like having enough creative to even test if you're too limited in scope and you don't have a brand you feel like you can actually amplify your handicapping your ability to actually have a good performance marketing program.
要把每一分钱的支出都精确地追溯回去确实有点难度，但这并不意味着这些支出没有影响力。我认为，随着公司的发展，你必须同时在两个方面进行投资。而且理想情况下，这两个方面可以相辅相成。比如，你在品牌营销上投入越多，就会增强你的效果营销。这就涉及到是否有足够的创意进行测试。如果你的范围过于局限，而且你没有一个可以推广的品牌，那么你实际上是在限制自己开展有效的效果营销计划的能力。
I love that he risk to go how do you know if you are under invested in brand is if you're limited in the number of ideas you can try in performance marketing like is or your design design system just like is everyone having to redesign things from scratch and come up with all these frameworks every time they run an ad exactly yeah yeah it's like basically you kind of have a feeling for you know if I were to scale this up to a thousand pieces of creative would it still feel cohesive or is it kind of all over the place and it feels like it's all over the place and you kind of have to go back to the drawing board.
我喜欢他敢于冒险。你如何知道自己在品牌投资上是否不足呢？一种方法是看你在效果营销中的想法数量是否有限，比如说在设计系统上，是不是每次想要做广告时都得从头开始设计，还要想出一大堆框架。如果你有这种感觉，那么基本上可以判断出来。如果你放大到一千个创意作品，看看它们是否还能保持一致性，还是说显得杂乱无章？如果还是杂乱无章，那你可能就需要重新开始设计。
You said when you talked about the rebrand that it took a lot longer than you expected that it was more expensive than you expected that's like the fear I think everyone has when they hear this like oh I don't think we're rebrand well yeah I also imagine because your product is so visual that it makes more sense to invest there and to spend the time and money for the typical founder do you mean you just said I don't know thoughts of just like here's when it makes sense here's a sign you really needs to invest here have believe versus like an ad will probably be all right.
你在谈到品牌重塑时说，整个过程比你预期的要久，也比你预期的要贵。这是大家在听到品牌重塑时常常担心的：“哦，我觉得我们不需要重新打造品牌。” 我可以理解，因为你的产品非常注重视觉效果，所以在这里投资时间和金钱更加合理。对于普通创始人来说，你的意思是，在什么情况下才真的需要进行这样的投入？有什么标志表明你需要相信这个投资，而不是仅仅依靠广告就能解决？
Yeah, I mean I do think it's probably more geared to anything that's a little bit more prosumer consumer because so much of your product you're trying to create you know that this feeling for a user like what are they experiencing and the experience it happens way before they even drop into your product it might be they see an ad or they see a billboard or they see something is like okay that piqued my interest a little bit and then you need some sort of like symmetric messaging and that they see there's some symmetry and that they see that they will then they drop into the product with land on your website they it feels cohesive and it feels like okay this is this is interesting I'm going to go all the way through to sign up and then maybe actually start using the product.
是的，我的意思是，我确实认为这更适合那些定位在介于专业用户和普通消费者之间的产品。因为在你创造产品的过程中，你需要为用户创造一种体验，而这种体验远在他们接触到你的产品之前就已经开始了。可能他们先是看到一个广告，一个广告牌，或者其他什么，引起了他们的兴趣。接下来，你需要确保传达的信息一致性，当用户看到这种一致性后，他们会进一步访问你的产品，比如登陆你的网站。这样一来，整个体验显得统一、有吸引力，用户会觉得有趣，愿意一路走到底，注册账号，甚至开始真正使用这个产品。
That's a little bit different when it's like a B2B product or you know where there's a there there isn't as much for lions on you know that that initial moment they they might just hear about it through you know colleague and and then sign up for it and then go through a huge procurement process and then it's like okay maybe it matters but probably not so much as like for a product where the brand can have so many different touch points.
当涉及到B2B产品时，这情况有些不同。因为在这种情况下，开头的那个瞬间并没有那么重要。他们可能只是通过同事听说这个产品，然后注册使用，接着经历一个庞大的采购流程。在这种情况下，品牌的影响可能没有那么大，至少不如那些有很多不同接触点的产品那么重要。
I want to talk about some kind of broader things that have worked to help you grow but before we do that I just want to visualize the pie chart of how GAMARK rose say post 10 million ARR if I have it correctly in my head it's over 50% just word of mouth organic people sharing it doing presentations for each other oh it's yeah my just go check it out sign up then it feels like the second biggest bucket is influencer marketing kind of social stuff and then is the third performance slash paid marketing yeah that's right yeah cool.
我想讨论一些更广泛的成功因素，帮助你们实现了成长。不过在此之前，我想先来形象化一下关于GAMARK在年经常性收入（ARR）超过一千万后增长的构成比例。如果我没记错的话，其中超过50%是通过口碑传播实现的，也就是人们自发地分享、相互展示产品，或者简单地说“去看看，注册一下。” 然后，第二区块最大的因素似乎是网红营销和社交媒体相关的活动。第三大因素则是表现型和付费营销。对的，就是这样。很棒。
So on the last piece is there anything else there for people that are starting to explore performance marketing essentially Facebook ads Google ads all these other platforms is there anything else that you think might be helpful for people to hear or learn just to get started down this road I would just have two recommendations like one going back to my initial piece of advice which is 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 but just get the word of mouthpiece first so that you have you're coming into this program with some tailwinds and then start ramping it up.
对于刚开始探索效果营销，尤其是使用Facebook广告、Google广告等平台的人来说，还有什么其他建议呢？我这里有两个建议：首先，不要在没有口碑传播的情况下进行投资。不要误以为仅仅通过启动效果营销就能解决其他问题。应该先建立良好的口碑传播，这样你在进入这个计划时会有一些助力，然后再逐步扩大推广。
The second piece is like set some constraints 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 and you know feeds right back to point number one which is that if you if your core growth engine is broken you just have this leaky bucket you're trying to spend so much money building top the funnel people are not making it all the way through something else should be fixed before you really try to dial it up and it doesn't mean like you don't spend a little bit of money but just don't dial it up until you feel like your core growth engine is actually working.
第二点是设定一些限制：你不希望你的产品在一个阶段有超过50%的用户是通过付费获取来的。如果发生这种情况，说明你的核心增长引擎出问题了。这与第一点密切相关：如果你的核心增长引擎失灵，你就像在往一个漏水的桶里注水，花费大量资金吸引潜在用户，但他们没有转化。所以在你真正加大力度之前，应该先解决其他问题。这并不是说完全不花钱，而是说在你的核心增长引擎真正运作良好之前，不要大幅增加投入。
When you said the first point about wait until you have word of mouth before investing in performance marketing is that essentially like a large chunk of your growth should be coming from word of mouth direct organic yep yeah and for us even at scale again going back to more than 50% of you know new sign ups still come through word of mouth like we that that for us is a sign that okay you know something is still working people are using the product telling other people and you want that feeling before you really start dialing anything else.
当你提到第一个要点，关于在进行效果营销投资前等待口碑传播，这基本上意味着你很大一部分的增长应该来自口碑直接的自然增长。对我们来说，即使在规模扩大时，超过50%的新用户依然是通过口碑引荐来的。这对我们来说是一个信号，表明产品仍然在发挥作用，人们在使用产品并向他人推荐。在你真正开始对其他事情进行投入之前，你想要看到这种情况。
Is there like a percentage that you think is helpful for people to think about just like is like 25% or more something like that of just word of mouth before you to feel like okay we actually have organic growth as a major growth engine yeah I mean I think this comes back to maybe just how maybe aggressive you want to be you know I think just rough you know erasik is the more the better if it's over 50% I think that's great if it's like approaching that good and just going back to like don't fool yourself into thinking just ads is going to be the way grow because you can do that but everything else becomes harder and harder.
你认为有没有一个百分比可以帮助人们判断，比如说是25%或者更多，只通过口碑传播来觉得我们确实是有机增长作为主要增长引擎？是这样的，我认为这可能取决于你想要多么积极。大概来说，口碑传播越多越好，如果超过50%，那就很棒。如果接近50%，也很好。但不要自欺欺人地认为仅靠广告就能实现增长，因为虽然这么做是可能的，但这样一来其他方面就会越来越难展开。
If you rely on paid acquisition to be the main growth engine you should be prepared for things like tack like customer acquisition cost to keep going up and the more you're trying to reach like a new audience it gets more and more expensive so don't assume it's going to be flat and then all of a sudden you're running on this treadmill that's actually running faster and faster and so that's where it's it's easy to get hooked on that early on when you're just investing a small amount of money and then it's almost impossible to get off that treadmill when you're too far into it so anticipate that and give yourself a better chance that actually be able to sustain that growth long term important advice.
如果您将付费获客作为主要增长引擎，就要做好准备面对一些情况，比如客户获取成本不断上升。当您尝试吸引新的受众时，成本会越来越高，因此不要以为费用会保持不变。突然之间，您可能会发现自己在一台越来越快的跑步机上，而在初期只投入少量资金时，很容易对这种模式产生依赖。但当深入其中太久后，想要摆脱这种依赖几乎是不可能的。因此，要提前预见这个问题，这样才能有更好的机会实现长期可持续增长。这是一个重要的建议。
Okay there's a couple more elements you've shared that were key to Gamma's growth one is sharing prototypes with users before you ship what does that look like what does that mean why is that so powerful yeah I mean this for us was a huge unlock you know going back to like early days when you're just trying to get your product into anybody's hands you're good into your you know friends trying to use it and again they're going to lie to you tell you how great it is and then never come back to using the product.
好的，你提到了一些对Gamma增长至关重要的因素，其中之一就是在发布前与用户分享原型。这个过程是什么样的？意味着什么？为什么这么有力？对我们来说，这真的是一个巨大的突破。回想早期的日子，当时你只是想把产品交到任何能用它的人手上。你让朋友们尝试使用，但他们往往会说好听的话，告诉你产品有多棒，然后就再也不会使用了。
I think what you want to be able to do you know the ideal situation is you recruit a bunch of people that could you know they're 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 and you you know for us it was like people to have made slide decks or make slide decks regularly let's drop them into Gamma give them very little context we just tell you hey this is an alternative to PowerPoint go ahead and try it and then as you're going through the onboarding flow and testing the product just tell us everything that's going on in your head.
我认为理想情况下，你应该招募一群真正有潜力成为你产品用户或客户的人，他们对产品的成功与否毫不关心，他们参与只是为了测试产品。对我们来说，就好比找一些经常制作幻灯片的人，让他们使用Gamma。我们不给他们太多背景信息，只告诉他们这是一个PowerPoint的替代品，然后请他们在体验产品的过程中，把心里的想法都告诉我们。
Like describe what you're seeing tell us what you're trying to do we'll give you maybe a few different tasks like oh create you know create a piece of content and when you watch them do that and also hear what they're saying. you just immediately feel the pain like all the places they're struggling and all the places are so confused by like what they're seeing and you sort of then can internalize that pain and say okay we're going back and we have to fix this this is like not usable like we you know we oftentimes are dog fooding everything and so you can get to the point where you're so familiar with your own product everything kind of feels kind of easy you you know where things are but when you start actually hearing other people describe their usage of the product that's like a gift like you're all of a sudden you're like okay now I know we're to actually spend the time people aren't even getting to the third screen they're stuck on the first screen because they can't even find the button that we think is like so dead obvious is let's go back and actually re-engineer re-architect that piece of it and we've done that for everything landing pages onboarding experience new feature launches you know export sharing every single piece of that such that you know we can actually see where things are working or not and then every time we'll learn something that's kind of painful but obvious that we need to fix and we go back and fix it.
翻译如下：
描述你所看到的，告诉我们你的目标，接着我们可能会给你几个不同的任务，比如说“创建一项内容”。当你观察他们完成这个任务并听他们的反馈时，你会立刻感受到他们的痛苦，看到他们在哪些地方遇到了困难，在哪些地方被界面搞得一头雾水。通过这种方法，你能亲身体会到用户的难题，从而决定回去改善产品，因为现在的产品根本不够好用。
我们经常会自己试用产品，因此有时候对产品太过熟悉，一切都觉得简单，知道东西都在哪里。但当你真正听到别人描述他们如何使用产品时，这是一种“礼物”。因为突然之间，你意识到该花时间在哪里：用户甚至都无法到达第三个界面，他们被卡在第一个界面，因为他们找不到看似显而易见的按钮。这时，我们需要回去重新设计和架构那个部分。
对于产品的各个方面，我们都进行了这样的优化，例如登陆页面、用户引导体验、新功能发布、导出和共享等。通过这样做，我们可以清楚地看到哪些部分工作正常，哪些部分需要改进。每次都会学到一些虽然显而易见但需要改进的地方，而我们会回头去修复它。
How do you scale this or the thing how do you run every new big idea and you feature change by people do you have like closed beta group do you some platform how do you actually do this there's a couple great platforms so voice panel which is also YC company full disclosure angel investor and then there's also you know platforms like user testing that really help you source and you know find find these people that fit again that persona or profiler looking for so in our case like people that are in a specific job function or you know create decks regularly and so you can use those platforms to really scale up these programs pretty fast and then once your team knows how to use those platforms like we would we would have an idea in the morning and then that afternoon we're already running you know a pretty full-scale experiment or like you know a research study and and by the evening or by the next day we can actually go through all of it together so it's pretty fast once you have it set up it's more about like how do you get the program you know onboarded the right way.
如何扩展这一过程，或者说如何在人们之间推广每一个新的大创意和功能更新？你是否有一个封闭测试小组，或者使用某个平台来实现？其实有一些很棒的平台，比如 Voice Panel（也是 YC 的公司，顺便说一下，我是天使投资人）以及 User Testing 等平台，这些平台能够帮助你找到符合你目标用户特征的人。在我们的情况下，比如那些在特定工作岗位的人，或者那些经常创建演示文稿的人。你可以利用这些平台快速扩大项目规模。一旦你的团队学会了如何使用这些平台，我们可能早上有一个创意，下午就能开展一个全面的实验或研究项目，到晚上或者次日就可以一起分析结果。设置好流程后速度就很快，关键在于怎样正确地实施这个计划。
I think the other sort of mechanism we did early on was once we had some repeat users we created a sort of a program for our power users we called it the Gambaster program which is we put for them to a separate slack workspace and that was a place for us to kind of share very very early prototypes like wireframe for rire frames sometimes they're functional prototypes and get them to get some get some initial feedback as well this definitely helps with more sort of you know later stage or like you know a features or things that aren't going to be necessarily important was part of onboarding but like once you understand gamma like oh how do you share it for instance like this was a great way to start testing some of that because they already understand gamma but now you're adding net new functionality and then we can also watch them struggle and hear how they're struggling with the product and so that has been a great way just to have a separate slack workspace anytime we're thinking about something they're the first to hear about it give us some early indication if we're on the right track or not.
我认为我们早期采取的另一种机制是，一旦我们有一些重复用户，我们就为我们的核心用户创建了一个项目，我们称之为“Gambaster 计划”。我们将这些用户加入一个独立的 Slack 工作空间，这个空间是用来分享非常早期的原型，比如线框图，有时甚至是功能原型，并从他们那里获得一些初步反馈。这对之后阶段的开发尤其有帮助，虽然这些功能或者特性可能不在初次体验中显得重要，但一旦用户理解了 Gamma，比如他们如何分享内容，这就是一个很好的测试开始，因为他们已经理解了 Gamma，但我们正在为他们添加全新的功能。同时，我们还可以观察他们在使用产品时的困难，并听取他们的反馈。这是一个很好的方法，可以在我们考虑任何新想法时，首先让他们知道，并从他们那里得到一些初步的指引，以确认我们是否走在正确的道路上。
I love this workflow that you shared of you have an idea in the morning you build the prototype do you build it with like like AI prototype tools like cursor lovable something like that yeah yeah that or it could be yeah I mean we're lucky a lot of our you know designers also know how to code so even before the recent tools like you know kind of come up with some sort of functional prototype and then and then be able to ship that so people can start playing with it.
我喜欢你分享的这个工作流程：早上有了一个想法，然后开始制作原型。你会用像Cursor或Lovable这样的AI原型工具来做吗？是的，会用这些工具，或者也可能用其他方法。我们很幸运，我们很多设计师也懂得编程，所以即使在最近这些工具出现之前，他们已经能做出一些功能性原型，然后可以发布让大家开始使用和测试。
Yeah so you you have an idea in the morning you build a prototype using various tools you by the end of the day you are getting feedback from real people using one of these platforms voice panel or user testing and just like that loop saves you I imagine potentially months of just building the thing nobody wants and shipping it launching it and then just failing totally yeah I mean I think this is even more probably helpful for you know certainly a lot of folks that are starting to do much with vibe coded apps like yeah that's great like you've lowered the you know amount of time to get something out there now prove that it's useful to like some set of users and this should be again like every day every week you should be able to go through a ton of these and and then build on the things that seem to be working I feel like that's like it's almost like a a way to speedrun a lot of that early sort of your idea maze you think you have something that could kind of work how do you actually break through so that you know people are actually finding value in what you're building.
早上有了一个想法，然后用各种工具搭建一个原型，到一天结束时就可以通过语音面板或用户测试等平台从真实用户那里获取反馈。这样一个循环可以帮你节省几个月的时间，避免建造出没人想要的产品并推出后以失败告终。我认为这对那些刚开始用低代码应用程序开发的人特别有帮助。是的，这很棒，你减少了产品推向市场所需要的时间，现在要证明它对一些用户群体是有用的。每天或每周都应该能经历很多这样的循环，然后在那些似乎有效的东西上继续构建。我觉得这就像加速了早期的想法探索过程，让你觉得好像有一个大致可行的方案，实际过程中如何突破，让人们真正发现你的产品价值。
Yeah I love it because so many people hear this idea of just like run your stuff by users before you ship you know do the user research it sounds so hard and heavy lift and in the way you're describing this like very automated very very quick to do you don't have to go think about finding random people to in a coffee shop it's just like these platforms exist where you can go plug in your thing get feedback by the end of the day totally yeah and that helps you just move way faster is there a feature that you were super excited about that you built and ran through this and just like okay that was a huge failure I mean I don't think any of the ones where we you know we always try to kind of chunk it down so like none of the things we're testing earlier on or like these massive features they're always like an inception or like a starting point of like this could be something interesting and then we take that initial learning and actually then build the product around it it's never like oh we spent like four months work on this thing let's see if anybody actually wants it.
是的，我很喜欢这一点，因为很多人一听到 "在发布之前找用户反馈" 或者 "做用户研究" 这些想法，就觉得好像很难，也很费力。而你描述的这种方法非常自动化、非常迅速，你不需要去咖啡馆寻找随机的人。这些平台已经存在，你可以在那里输入你的内容，最快在一天结束时就能获得反馈。这确实帮助我们加快了速度。你有没有过对某个功能特别兴奋，然后用这种方法测试后发现其实是个大失败的情况？我想我们在早期测试时总是把问题分解成小块，所以没有哪个测试过的功能是一个庞大的模块。一切都是一个想法或起点，可能会有趣，然后我们根据最初的反馈再构建产品。我们从来不会在一个项目上花费四个月的时间才去看看是否有人愿意使用它。
It's almost like we always start super early and a bunch of ideas die right away but there's still pretty small ideas and then the ones that kind of past initial test you start building towards something that could be hopefully more game changing or much more value add and by the time you're actually shipping like you've gone through you know 10 different layers of actually testing and iteration before it actually sees the light of day. It's really interesting about you and the way you company operates your guys are ex optimizally people say you're very reversed in experimentation a lot of people talk about a be testing experimentation as something that doesn't make sense for a startup because the scale is so low what I'm hearing here and I know this is something you talk about is just there is actually a lot of way to a lot of ways to think experimentally even in the early stages there's something more there you think is important for people to hear.
这段话的大意是：我们通常都会很早开始工作，许多想法一开始就被淘汰，但仍有一些小想法留下来。那些通过初步测试的想法，你可以开始打造，希望它们能带来更大的改变或更多的价值。在这些想法真正落地之前，你已经经过了大约十个阶段的测试和迭代。你和你的公司以实验著称，这一点真的很有趣。很多人认为，初创公司进行A/B测试和实验是不实际的，因为规模太小。但我了解到，你们认为即使在早期阶段，实验性的思考方法也是很有益的。这一点很值得分享。
Yeah I mean I really think it's more you know the mindset you go into to almost any problem or opportunities you know the saying of you know strong opinions weekly held I think it's totally fine to have like some of these assumptions or like hypotheses going into a lot of these things but you should always know that there's a way to start trying to validate some of this you know as a founder you're always trying to build conviction and so you build conviction by you know not you know having it all live in your head but getting it out there and start testing this with users prospect customers and starting to see like what are the things that actually feel right and sometimes you have enough data to be statistically significant sometimes it's more of a hey we at least were able to gut check this a little bit and get some qualitative feedback I think that's still valuable it shouldn't be this sort of like all or nothing like it has to be static for it to be useful.
是啊，我的意思是，我真的觉得无论面对什么问题或机会，心态非常重要。你知道那句“强烈的观点，轻松持有”的说法吗？我觉得在很多事情上，带着一些假设或假说去开始是完全可以的。但是，你也要始终明白，可以通过某种方式来验证这些假设。作为一名创业者，你一直在努力增强自信，而增强自信的方法不是把想法都藏在脑子里，而是把它们付诸实践，去测试用户和潜在客户的反馈，看看哪些感觉是正确的。有时候，你能收集到足够的数据来证明其统计意义，而有时候至少可以进行初步的验证并获得一些定性的反馈。我认为这依然有价值。验证不必是非黑即白的，不必只有静态的数据才有用。
I don't think that's true in fact I'll just share kind of the very early story of you know when we first started gamma we knew we wanted to help change the way people communicate and we actually had two different ideas we were parallel pathing kind of at the same time so of course we had you know presentations reimagining how people were creating presentations and we also actually had the separate idea which we called the lobby which is a virtual office this is a place where you know this is again peak pandemic much more hybrid work much for a virtual work and so this was a place where everybody on a team whether you're in the same office or not could gather collaborate it would feel pretty magical and we worked on both for six months we worked on both the virtual office and the presentation product for for six months we would dog food both so like oftentimes we'd be in the virtual office presenting the the presentation tool and kind of use both.
我不认为那是真的，实际上，我想分享一下我们刚开始做 Gamma 时的早期故事。我们当时知道自己想要改变人们交流的方式，并且有两个不同的想法在同步进行。一方面，我们重新构想了如何制作演示文稿；另一方面，我们还有一个名为 "Lobby" 的虚拟办公想法。那时正值疫情高峰期，混合办公和虚拟办公变得更加普遍。这个虚拟办公是一个团队成员可以聚集和协作的地方，无论是否在同一办公室，感觉就像一种魔法。我们花了六个月的时间同时开发这两个项目——虚拟办公室和演示工具。我们也在自己使用这两个产品，比如常常在虚拟办公室里展示我们的演示工具，从而同时使用它们。
After six months we came to this conclusion that we wanted to go all in on the presentation tool and the reason was when we looked at the virtual office tool we were sort of always competing against what we thought was something we'd never be able to surpass which is in real life experience like actually being able to work shoulders shoulder with her colleagues and having this environment where you know you really feel like you're building together like virtual office could get pretty good but we would never beat that and so we were almost like limited in our own imagination about how good could this product be versus the the presentation product we ended that with like a million more ideas we thought we could actually introduce that could be better than how you work in PowerPoint today we were just so like so energized by it.
经过六个月的时间，我们得出了结论，决定全力投入到演示工具的开发中。原因是，当我们审视虚拟办公室工具时，总觉得它永远无法超越现实生活中的体验，比如实际和同事肩并肩工作，以及拥有一种真正能一起建设的环境。虽然虚拟办公室可以做到相当不错，但我们始终无法超越这种现实体验，因此对产品的想象力几乎受到了限制。相反，对于演示工具，我们产生了许多想法，认为可以引入一些改进，使其超越目前使用 PowerPoint 的方式，这让我们感到非常振奋。
And so for us that was like a you know this sort of AP test of like testing these two things that we invested equally amount of equal amount of time into and coming out at the other end realizing that one was going to be the product we were poor sort of you know all of our blood sweat and tears into making it great because we saw the potential in it there's I didn't know that about you guys that you explore that other idea that there's so many startups that did that during COVID times I'm like okay this is the future we're all going to be remote and let's work remotely and virtual offices there's a startup and I'm a tiny investor in Lindy that is now a big AI agent company and they did the same thing I imagine you know that was their whole first concept there was just like these little avatars is like a little game where you walk around go to little virtual yeah it was a fun project to work on so but yeah it's interesting how we just reverted to the base back to like the mean of just lay people are in offices again that was a fun fun experience although things have changed.
对我们来说，这就像是一个"AP测试"，我们花了同样的时间去投入两个项目，最后发现其中一个项目将成为我们倾注所有心血去打造的产品，因为我们看到了它的潜力。我不知道你们也探索过其他想法，这让我想起了很多在疫情期间进行了类似尝试的创业公司。当时大家都觉得未来是远程办公，虚拟办公室很有前途。我是一个叫Lindy的创业公司的小投资者，现在他们已经成为了一家大型AI代理公司，他们也经历了类似的过程。之前他们的概念就是用一个小的虚拟化身，就像一个小游戏，可以走动去虚拟办公室。那是一个有趣的项目。不过有趣的是，我们最后又回到传统的模式，大家又回到了办公室中。虽然经历很有趣，但事情已经有所变化。
So just to highlight this point you made that I think is really powerful I haven't heard it describe this way before just the power of testing prototypes very very very early using these platforms that make it super easy we always here okay you have you have a mock you have a prototype yeah it's always feels like this heavy thing you gotta have a user research team go do interviews do one on ones like what you're describing is something I don't know why everyone's not doing this and with AI tools it's so easy now have an idea build the prototype tested with I don't know is it like dozens of people how many people actually run through a prototype on average 20 20 people so 20 people look at this thing give you a bunch of feedback you realize this was very down or here's the nugget that we want to lean into and instead of building the thing instead of doing all these user research sessions things like that super cool.
那么，只是想强调一下你提到的这一点，我觉得非常有力，我以前从未听过这样的描述，就是非常非常早地利用这些超级简单的平台来测试原型的威力。我们总是听到说，你有一个模型或原型，听起来总是像一个很繁重的任务，需要有用户研究团队去做访谈，一对一采访。而你所描述的方法，我不明白为什么不是每个人都在使用这个方法，特别是在现在有了AI工具后，事情变得如此简单：有了一个想法，构建原型，然后用它进行测试。我不知道平均有多少人实际测试一个原型？大概是20个。他们会看这个东西，给你一堆反馈，你就能意识到某些方面做得很糟糕，或者发现我们想要深入挖掘的关键点，而不是去构建一个完整的东西或进行一系列用户研究会话。这样的做法，真是太酷了。
Okay is there any other big lesson or lever that has helped you grow to today is a hundred million there are two billion dollar company we talked about influencer marketing we talked about testing prototypes investing in brand and a little bit of paid growth anything else certainly for us the ability to sort of adapt and move fast in this environment you know I attribute a lot of you know what we've been able to accomplish a few things one is we do have a small team and a lean team one that's able to move really fast I think that is that means by default like we have to look for a lot of levers where a small team can do a lot of different things we're going to talk one you know obviously about like how do you construct like a team like ours and what I think has worked and then to going back to experimentation being this sort of thing where for us it's been a huge unlock right because it allows you to not only you know test things and like you know iterate a ton it allows you to build much more efficiently and so we've been a startup where we've had great unit economics from the very beginning we run profitably we have really strong margins I don't think that would be possible if experimentation was in kind of core infrastructure to us because the temptation would be you just throw the most expensive model at you know every job and assume that's going to work and the reality is that never is the case and so for us to build actually test across you know 20 different models in production today always trying to align kind of value we're delivering to our customers with you know our ability to do actually scale this operation that's been at the sort of in the background and not always things that are easily you know quantifiable or things that you know you're sharing broadly but it is kind of core to our DNA and again going back to the team that came from Optimize you know probably not surprising but I do think that's been part of our sort of ability to actually execute at this level.
好的，还有其他重要的经验或杠杆能帮助你们从一个亿万企业成长为一个两亿美元的公司吗？我们谈到了影响者营销、测试原型、品牌投资和一些付费增长，还有其他的吗？当然对我们来说，在这个环境中适应和快速行动的能力是非常重要的。我觉得我们能够取得今天的成就有几个原因。首先是我们有一个小而精干的团队，这让我们能够快速行动。这也意味着我们必须寻找很多杠杆，让小团队能够完成多种任务。我们会谈到如何组建像我们这样的团队，以及我们认为有效的方法。
其次，回到实验，对于我们来说，这是一个巨大的突破。它不仅允许我们测试和迭代，还让我们能够更高效地发展。因此，我们作为一家创业公司，从一开始就拥有优秀的单位经济效益，我们是盈利运营的，拥有非常强的利润率。如果没有把实验作为核心基础设施，这一切可能就难以实现。因为有时会被诱惑容易地选择最昂贵的模式，而假设它肯定有效，但实际上往往不是这样。
因此，为了构建和测试今天生产中使用的20多种不同模式，我们始终努力对齐向客户提供的价值与我们的规模扩展能力。在背后，这些并不总是易于量化或广泛分享的东西，却是我们DNA的一部分。回到来自Optimize的团队，可能这并不令人惊讶，但我确实认为这是我们能够在这种水平上执行的部分原因。
I love that the product is so beautiful and such a great experience it's such a good example of experimentation and being really obsessed with running experiments a BTS like your data can create really beautiful products and experiences that aren't just feeling like some kind of micro optimized flow totally yeah and just going back to like one part of the team part of the place a huge role which is you know you want to build a product you know people talk about taste and you know brand and all these things are they a mode I'm not going to kind of throw in whether or not yes or no but I do think it makes a difference and for us at some point you know more than a quarter of a team or about a quarter of our team was product designers and I think that's like a un sort of unintuitive level of investment or at least that's not common like you don't see many startups like on our stage or early stage you know where we're a quarter of the team's product designers and I think that was an important investment for us because when you think about you know with AI companies so many companies are trying to invent new surface areas or you know new user experiences and that's not possible if you're not really getting the foundation right really thinking deeply about you know user problems and how can you solve them in a novel way and so for us like we made that investment in the very beginning even if it was counter to what other startups would do because we actually felt like it was the right thing.
我非常喜欢这个产品，它不仅美观，而且带来了极佳的使用体验。这一切都很好地体现了通过不断实验来实现突破的理念，以及对实验的极度专注。一如大家常说，将数据转化为产品和体验，本身就是一种艺术，而不仅仅是进行微优化的流程。是的，回到团队的构成问题上，团队的一部分在其中发挥了重要作用。打造产品时，人们常提到品味、品牌等等，这些是否构成护城河我不做定论，但我确实认为它们影响深远。我们的团队中有多于四分之一的人是产品设计师，这是一种非同寻常的投入，尤其是在我们的阶段，很多初创企业不会这样做。对于AI公司来说，许多公司都尝试开发新的用户体验，这需要打下坚实的基础，深入思考用户问题以及如何以创新方式解决这些问题。因此，我们在一开始就进行了这样的投入，即使与其他初创企业的做法不同，因为我们相信这才是正确的选择。
Okay I definitely want to spend more time on hiring before we get to that you've touched on this kind of concept that you guys are with many describe a GPT wrapper company you essentially sit on top of other models do some cool stuff charge for that there's historically and there's been a big shift here historically there's a sense that okay you're just this thin layer on top of the model how is there any sort of motor leverage or long-term business model here when it's just the model that is doing the thing and charging you guys to do all this AI work feels like people have started to realize maybe that is where the all that is the only place money will be made because the models are just so hard to compete with and that's not a place you can build a business anymore talk about just what you've learned about this concept of being a GPT wrapper and how maybe what people may not be understanding about the business opportunity there.
好的，我确实想在我们深入这个话题之前先花更多时间在招聘上。你提到了一个概念，就是你们公司被很多人描述为“GPT包装公司”，本质上是在其他模型之上运行，做一些很酷的事情并收取费用。一直以来，人们普遍认为你们只是模型之上的一层薄薄的外壳，如果核心工作是模型完成的，那这样的商业模式是否有任何护城河或长期价值呢？大家觉得AI工作是模型在完成的，而你们只是为此收费。
然而，人们似乎开始意识到，也许这正是唯一能赚到钱的地方，因为很难与这些模型竞争，再也无法在这个领域建立新业务。谈一谈你对成为GPT包装公司的理解，以及在这个商业机会中可能被忽视的地方。
You know when you think about maybe just literally only being a wrapper on like you know one model or you know one provider yeah maybe there's only you know limited amount of utility or value add but then when you start thinking about okay I'm going to go really deep into this one workflow and it's not just one model it's maybe 20 plus models powering all different parts of the product and then you think about the orchestration that's required and you're thinking about obviously if you're experimenting like constantly being able to test across the newest models versus you know models that have been around that are cheaper like you're doing a lot to really you know your your job is to again like align value you know maximize the value you're delivering to to the end user in a way that's sustainable for you as a business and so there's a lot more to that.
当你想到仅仅只是作为一个单一模型或单一提供商的外壳时，可能在效用或附加价值上是有限的。但是，当你深入思考一个特定的工作流程时，就不仅仅是一个模型了，可能是由20多个模型驱动产品的不同部分。然后你要考虑协调的复杂性，显然如果你在不断尝试，就需要时刻测试最新的模型与那些成本较低的老旧模型之间的性能差异。你的职责是，以一种对你的业务可持续的方式，最大化地为终端用户提供价值。里面涉及的内容远不止这些。
And so for us you know we've always been passionate about being very close to our our customers our users who for them their job to be done is you know visual communication visual storytelling and the default tool today is going into like a power point or Google Slides where the amount of effort to create something you know we've all been there later now trying to form out a deck trying to find the right layout all this manual and tedious work well what if you could abstract all that away and give them something that feels a little bit more delightful a little bit easier much more effortless what would that earn you in terms of a customer that wants to come back to your product.
对于我们来说，一直以来都非常热衷于与客户和用户保持紧密联系。对于他们来说，他们的工作就是进行视觉交流和视觉故事讲述。而现在常用的工具是像PowerPoint或Google Slides这样的产品，大家都知道，要在这些平台上创建内容需要花费大量的时间和精力，比如要精心排版或寻找合适的布局，这些都是繁琐的手动工作。那么，如果我们能够消除这些麻烦，为用户提供一种更愉悦、更容易使用的工具，会大大简化他们的工作。那么，这样一来，对于那些希望持续使用你产品的客户，你又将获得怎样的忠诚度呢？
And so that's everything that we focus on is like you need to go deep into the workflow the empathetic to the user and their job that you're trying to solve and of course apply the best technology possible so that you're you're delivering on that promise about product experiences way better than the status quo and I think if you can be laser focused on it doesn't matter if you're a rapper or not like what is the technology you're doing in applying that makes a real difference so that's that that's the ultimate goal.
所以，我们关注的一切都是要深入了解工作流程，对用户及其工作表现出同理心，同时应用最好的技术，以超越现状的方式实现产品体验的承诺。我认为，只要能对此保持专注，无论你是否是一个快速适应者，关键是你所应用的技术是否真的带来了显著的改变。这就是我们的最终目标。
This is a really cool framework for how to think about what it takes to build a successful rapper company that is I don't know let's just I'll keep using that term I don't know if it's truckers or not but just like you know some ideas don't work because these model companies are launching their own products here and there so what I love about your describing here is kind of like the almost like a heuristic that'll tell you if there's if there's an opportunity slash how to be successful as a GPT rapper company.
这是一个非常有趣的框架，帮助理解如何打造一个成功的说唱艺人公司。我不太确定是否适合用“说唱艺人公司”这个词，也许不是这样，但总之，某些想法之所以行不通，是因为这些模型公司正在不断推出自己的产品。在你描述的内容中，我最喜欢的是它有点像一个启发式方法，能够告诉你是否有机会成为一个成功的GPT说唱艺人公司/如何成功成为GPT说唱艺人公司。
I'm putting in air quotes it sounded like maybe there's three here but talk about just like if you think about the bullet points of what you need to do to build the successful business on top of existing models I mean I think the most important thing is you know before we even talk about the technology so we're we're skipping to the part where you're trying to you know apply the most interesting models or technology to solve some problem start with solving the problem you actually care about you know I think it's very tempting right now to chase shiny objects like a founder might be able to gain some initial traction by literally being that GPT rapper and like solving any sort of problem and like you start and see some traction and then you just go with that.
这段话的大意是：
我想用“引号”来强调一下，这里听起来可能有三个要点，但实际上是在讨论如何基于现有模型创建成功的业务。最重要的是，在我们讨论技术之前，要明确你真正关心的问题。现在，很容易被新奇的事物吸引，比如一个创始人可能通过简单地应用一些有趣的模型或技术来解决任何问题，从而初步获得一些成功，然后继续顺势发展。因此，应该从解决你真正关心的问题开始，而不是被各种“闪光点”所迷惑。
But before you do that you should think about is this a problem I can invest five to ten years it's actually solving do I care deeply enough about it because if you can you're never going to go sort of actually think about overcoming the variety of different hurdles whether it's other startups or other you know incumbent tools that are trying to start doing the same thing and so for us like we we go back to like you know we've started this company because we really care about helping change the way people communicate their ideas we really feel like this idea of like visual communication visual storytelling matters it helps elevate everybody and it gives people much more opportunity.
在你决定投入时间和精力之前，你应该先思考这个问题是不是值得你花五到十年来解决的。你是否足够关心它？因为只有在你真正关心并投入的时候，你才会认真去克服各种障碍，无论是来自其他初创公司还是现有的工具，这些都在尝试做同样的事情。对我们来说，我们创办这家公司的初衷是因为我们非常在意改变人们表达想法的方式。我们真心觉得视觉交流和视觉讲故事很重要，它提升了每一个人，并为人们提供了更多的机会。
to do the things that you know in the past if you weren't great at making slides your ideas might have died and someone else that was able to actually articulate their ideas better and the dub winning you know the deal or winning the you know the favor of their manager or their boss and so we felt like that was the wrong you know that that didn't feel right and and so could we help democratize visual storytelling visual communication that was sort of our north star and then you go back into thinking okay every step of the way what are the tools and technology I can apply to help solve that and actually move the average person closer to that long term vision of ours and of course AI has been again like this gift where yes you can apply that to solving this job you can also apply that you know AI to many different jobs figure out what is the problem you care deeply enough to go deep because going back to this sort of idea like you need to own the sort of end-to-end workflow a customer needs to have you like you want you to live you want your product to live in their brain somewhere where when they think about a after creative presentation they come to you as the default tool.
翻译成中文，表达意思，尽量易读：
如果你过去在做幻灯片方面不擅长，你的想法可能就会被埋没，而那些能够更好表达他们想法的人可能就会赢得合同或者获得上司的青睐。我们觉得这样发展是不对的，所以我们想看看能否帮助大众实现视觉故事传播，也就是视觉沟通，这就是我们的指导原则。因此，我们要考虑每一步该采用哪些工具和技术来帮助解决这些问题，并真正使普通人更接近我们的长期愿景。当然，人工智能在这方面是一个礼物，你可以用它来解决这项任务，也可以用它来解决许多不同的工作。关键是要找出哪个问题让你感兴趣到愿意深入研究，因为就像我们之前谈到的，了解从头到尾的工作流程是很重要的。我们希望当客户想到富有创意的演示时，我们的产品可以成为他们大脑中的默认工具。
and the moment they start creating it to the moment they ship it and send it to you know their boss that end-to-end experience needs to feel magical needs to feel great and I don't think you can really do that unless it's actually a workflow you either know deeply yourself or you care deeply to actually help solve for somebody else so some of the elements I'm hearing here is one is just like care actually really care about solving this problem not come from oh wow this cool thing happened in a work wow maybe I could sell this thing to people because you may end up having to work on this thing for 10 20 years totally um two is understand the problem really really deeply and have real empathy for the people trying to solve this problem you have this problem that you uh creating presentations of your previous jobs you understood it and I imagine you understand it understand even more deeply now that you work on this so essentially like care really deeply uh go really deep on the problem have real empathy for the people facing this problem and then there's this like actually be able to solve this problem using the technology out there and you made this point about how you guys use 20 different models to do what you do talk a little bit more about that just because you know people may think oh okay like I could just go to open a jet jet to ptr cloud and it'll create an awesome presentation for me why does it take 20 different models why is that such a big part of this success here.
从他们开始创作这个作品，到他们发货并发送给老板，这整个过程都需要给人一种神奇和美好的感觉。我认为如果你不深入了解这个工作流程，或者你没有真正关心去为别人解决问题，是无法做到这点的。我所听到的一些要素包括：
首先，真正关心解决这个问题，而不是因为某个工作中的酷事而想着“哇，也许我可以把这个东西卖给别人”，因为你可能需要为此工作10到20年。
其次，要对问题有非常深入的理解，对试图解决这个问题的人要有真正的同理心。比如你在之前的工作中做演示的时候遇到了这个问题，你了解并理解它，现在你在这个领域工作后我想你会理解得更深。
核心是，真正关心这个问题，深入研究这个问题，对遇到问题的人要有真实的同理心。之后，要能够利用现有的技术去解决这个问题。你提到你们用了20种不同的模型来实现你们所做的事情，谈谈这个，因为可能有人觉得，他们只需去某个平台就能让它为你创建一个很棒的演示文稿，为什么需要20种不同的模型，为什么这是成功的关键部分。
yeah so go on back to the workflow you know you're trying to go and break down every step of you know the creation process for for a user so the moment of the initial idea to maybe creating an outline of of what you want to you know present articulate to creating the first draft like what do we you know show you there to editing the content like okay I have a first draft but it's only 60% of the way there how do I get to 100% of the way there those are all things that might require different models like the initial outline might be better served by something that's purpose built for actually creating you know the best outline the best narrative the best story arc versus one where you're actually going back and saying you know gamma our agent can actually go and review your entire deck and say actually if I were to add suggestions I would say you know you may want want to change the visual layout on these set of cards and you may want to actually change the imagery or the visuals for these cards to match you know everything else.
好的，让我们回到工作流程这一部分。你需要逐步拆解用户的创作过程。从最初的想法开始，可能先创建一个你想要展示的内容大纲，再到写出第一稿。比如我们可以在这里为你提供什么帮助来编辑内容。假设你已经写出第一稿，但只完成了60%，如何才能完成到100%呢？这每一步可能需要不同的方法来处理。例如，创建初步大纲时，可能需要专门的工具来帮助创建最佳大纲、叙述或故事结构。而在审阅整个文稿时，可以利用像“Gamma”这样的智能代理来提供建议，比如你可能想要修改某些页面的视觉布局，或者更改图片和视觉效果以匹配其他部分。
these are things out again like every model might be better served for different things and so knowing how that actually breaks down into the end user sitting down working on the product working on working on you know their presentation how do you help them I think you can only do that by understanding that workflow and then breaking that down into finding the right tool for the right job that is super interesting essentially there's like here's the things that AI has to do for us I don't know imagining some kind of storyboard and then it's figure out the model. and level of model and prompt for that model to achieve each of these steps as best as possible totally yeah and it applies to you know even on the visual side finding the right image I think certain models of great photo realistic output versus others you know want more of the artistic vibe where like you know something that feels more abstract and so again you can choose the right model for the right job it doesn't mean that you'll never use other models is just like as you're going through that workflow certain that the content might dictate you know what's the best use case so in that particular you know particular use case and so you're always trying to map to that what is the end user trying to accomplish in that certain moment which models are you finding most useful in in the work like I don't know is there anything surprising about oh wow this model is actually really good at this and this is really bad at that
这些事情再次出现，每个模型可能在不同的事情上会更有优势。因此，了解这些到底如何分解到最终用户坐下来使用产品、制作展示文档的流程是很重要的。你可以通过理解这个工作流程，然后找到合适的工具来做好这个工作。我觉得这是非常有趣的。基本上，AI需要为我们完成这些事情。可以想象某种故事板，然后为实现每个步骤找到合适的模型、模型等级和提示，这是至关重要的。
是的，它甚至适用于视觉方面，比如说找到合适的图像。有些模型擅长生成逼真的照片效果，而另一些则更加适合艺术风格，创造更抽象的感觉。因此，你可以为合适的任务选择合适的模型。这并不意味着你永远不会使用其他模型，只是在处理这些工作流程时，内容可能会决定最佳的使用案例。因此，在特定使用情况下，你始终试图匹配最终用户在特定时刻想要实现的目标。
在工作中，哪些模型最有用？有没有什么令你感到惊讶，比如“哇，这个模型在这方面真的很出色，而在那方面却不尽如人意”？
yeah I think surprising or not surprising the leaderboard is constantly changing and and so this is where you almost you have to have the mindset that you can be adaptable we're just going to the point where there's going to be more personalization to is going back to like you know a consultant's going to have different needs in an educator if an educator is trying to engage their students they may want to have you know language or visuals are more animated and that that makes sense consultant can't get away with that they may need something that you know is much more structured or information dense and so again like how do we actually be the same tool that can serve both of those needs I think that's where it becomes interesting and it's almost like there is isn't necessarily even a quote-unquote best model it's like what's the right model for that right and for that particular user that's not too much harder problem to solve and we're just starting to you know trying to embrace some of that now is there one that's just like oh that's actually really cool for some that we didn't expect early on things like creating the outline perplexity was actually great you know not one that people talk about is often but creating the outline and doing web search and you know actually integrating some of those elements together for us was was pretty powerful
是的，我认为无论令人惊讶与否，排行榜总是在不断变化，因此我们必须具备适应变化的心态。我们正处于一个越来越个性化的时代，比如说，顾问与教育者会有不同的需求。如果一个教育者想要吸引学生，他们可能需要采用更加生动的语言或视觉效果，而这对顾问来说行不通，因为他们可能需要的是更加结构化或信息密集的内容。因此，我们如何才能成为一个满足这两种需求的工具呢？我认为这正是有趣的地方。就像没有所谓的最佳模型，而是要看哪个模型最适合特定的用户。这并不是一个特别难解决的问题，我们正开始尝试去接受这一点。
有些东西，比如创建提纲，最初我们没有预想到它会这么有用，虽然人们不常提起，但创建提纲、进行网络搜索以及结合这些元素对我们来说非常有帮助。
they're okay there's two more things I want to talk about one is pricing how you guys figured out your approach to pricing you guys started monetizing really early and that feels like such an important piece to AI startups because you're spending real money on and inference and other things and then I want to talk about hiring so in terms of pricing when did you decide it was time to really start charging and then how did you pick your approach to pricing your actual price
好的，我想谈两件事情：首先是定价问题，你们是如何确定定价策略的？你们很早就开始盈利，这对于AI初创企业来说似乎非常重要，因为你们在推理和其他方面都在投入真金白银。然后，我想谈谈招聘方面的问题。
关于定价方面，你们是何时决定开始真正收费的？又是如何选择定价策略和具体收费金额的呢？
yeah so we kind of stumbled into having to do pricing and packaging I mentioned our big AI launch in March 2023 this is pre-revenue so we wanted just to get the you know we focused all of our effort on the first 30 seconds literally all hands on deck just trying to get that right and we spent zero time on actually monetization so we you know we had a credit system on the users get 400 credits once they burn through those credits there's actually nothing more you could do with AI it kind of just got cut off and so intercom for us was just blowing up with people saying how do I purchase more credits like I want to keep using this thing in a very fair question so basically all of April we ended up having to do a quick you know sort of pricing and packaging exercise we did a couple different things we did run a form of van western door which is just understanding what is the overall will miss the play and what will nest to pay and which are we did we did use that we did kind of integrate some forms of like conjoint analysis which is just like trying to understand you know what are the features or things that people actually value in your product and so we'd survey a lot of early users and and can it ended up coming to a price point that was in the beginning we only had one plan type was roughly like 20 bucks a month part of this was also just realizing we we almost didn't need to overthink it too much because this is one the the initial wave of like AI companies and startups are coming out and products are coming out and you're almost end up becoming anchored by what is chat you be to charge because everyone becomes familiar with that price point and so we asked ourselves like how complicated do we want to make it we always default to remove friction
翻译如下：
是这样的，我们有点意外地需要处理定价和包装的问题。我提到过我们在2023年3月的大型AI发布会，这个项目发布时尚未产生收入，所以我们集中所有的精力在前30秒的用户体验上，动员了所有人力来完善这部分，而没有在定价和盈利上花费任何时间。因此，我们设置了一个信用系统，用户可以获得400个信用点数，一旦这些点数用完，他们就不能再使用AI功能了。于是，我们收到大量用户反馈询问如何购买更多点数，他们想继续使用我们的产品，这个问题很合理。
所以整个四月，我们不得不快速进行定价和包装的研究。我们做了几件不同的事情，包括使用了一种叫做Van Westendorp的价格敏感度分析，了解用户愿意为产品支付的价格，以及用户希望支付的价格。我们也进行了联合分析，试图了解用户对产品中哪些功能或特性最看重。我们调研了很多早期用户，最终确定了一开始的定价方案，每月大约20美元。
同时，我们意识到不需要过度复杂化这个问题，因为这是AI公司和创业公司涌现的初期，因此我们几乎会受到ChatGPT等知名产品价格的影响，用户对这些价格已经很熟悉了。于是，我们自问希望将产品复杂化到何种程度，但我们的原则始终是尽量减少阻力。
make it as easy as possible for a user to understand and so we end up coming up with like a similar price point and kind of ship that as the the V1 basically end of May 2023 and for us we wanted to see a couple things like okay we we have the initial price point is it economical for us like at the price point we actually making money and we'd monitor there for that for many many months realizing that yes like actually at that price point we could still generate pretty good margins and that would allow us to reinvest that profit back into growing the business continue to add you know obviously headcount but then also you know investing even more into inference costs whatever we wanted to do to experiment broadly with AI and so we've always had that like you know pricing and packaging is not only it doesn't not only need to be easy to understand for a user you know obviously you have to have like strong conversion rates but it should be something where you feel like you could build an enduring durable business off of and if it's not right then you can always go back and try to tweak things but it's something you should be monitoring
我们尽量让用户容易理解，于是在2023年5月底，我们提出了一个类似的定价方案，并作为V1版本发布。对我们来说，我们希望看到几件事：例如，我们的初始价格是否对我们有经济效益？在这个价格下我们能否盈利？经过多个月的观察，我们意识到确实如此：在这个价格下，我们仍然可以获得不错的利润率，这使我们能够将盈利重新投资于业务的增长，不仅增加员工数量，还能更多地投资于我们想要广泛实验的人工智能领域。因此，我们一直认为定价和服务组合不仅需要易于用户理解，显然还需要有较高的转化率，还应是您觉得可以建立一个持久稳固企业的基础。如果不合适的话，您总可以回过头来进行调整，但这个过程需要持续监测。
you know as early as possible what's interesting we have the head of chat GPT on the podcast and he shared the way they picked chat GPT's prices the Vaden West Endorp survey that they ran in Google forums oh yeah yeah I listened to that one yeah I was great one oh what a that survey man what a and not only just that survey being the like I'm imagining that xkcd comic with like the open source little I don't know block holding up the entire world like this one little piece of code that's like the survey just like behind everything but it's interesting how that one decision just created this ripple effect on all AI startups 20 bucks a month of course that's what everyone's doing. It's all right who knows what what happened if they chose a different number but right everyone be so much more rich it's just like 25 bucks someone imagine the the GDP growth yeah from that oh man okay and then the way so is Ben West Endorp helped you pick a price point and then you said this conjoined analysis we actually have a guest post that I think describes how to do this well and if not we'll find pulling people to add actually approach this and you started charging so it was post product cut launch you launch with no paid features people are just like I want to pay I want to keep using this you're like okay I guess we got to start charging.
尽早了解有趣内容，我们请到了ChatGPT的负责人做播客，他分享了他们是如何决定ChatGPT定价的。他们在Google表单上做了Vaden Westendorp调查。我听过那一集，确实很精彩。那个调查真是太有趣了。我脑海中浮现出一个xkcd漫画，里面有一个开源的小方块支撑着整个世界，仿佛这个调查就是背后支撑一切的关键代码。这个决定对所有人工智能创业公司产生了连锁反应——每月20美元，这成为了大家的标准。谁知道如果他们选择了不同的数字会发生什么，但如果是25美元，所有人可能会更加富裕，想象一下因此带动的GDP增长哦。
然后Ben Westendorp帮助他们确定了价格，他们进行了一项联合分析。我们实际上有一篇描述怎样有效进行这项操作的客座文章，如果找不到，我们可以找人来补充说明。而你们开始收费是在产品发布后，开始时没有任何收费功能。用户纷纷表示愿意付费以继续使用，于是你们开始决定收费。
That's right yeah. Is there anything looking back I guess just like you wish you've known when you were approaching pricing for folks that are doing this now like oh we should have done this differently or should have thought about this. Yeah I mean that's well no one's hard I think you know you never want to obviously just throw something together without giving a much thought but for us you know we we limited resources we focused on the only thing we thought mattered which was like getting some initial users and having that organic growth and I think there's there's maybe like two checkpoints of thinking about whether or not you feel like you have product market fit.
是的，没错。回过头来看，你有没有在定价时希望自己当时知道的事情，特别是对于现在正在这样做的人，比如“我们本该这样做得不同”或者“我们当时应该考虑到这一点”？嗯，我的意思是，没有人真的掌握定价的难题。我觉得你永远不想在没有经过深思熟虑就草率制定定价方案。但对我们来说，由于资源有限，我们专注于我们认为唯一重要的事情，那就是吸引一些初始用户并实现自然增长。我认为，也许在判断是否达到了产品市场契合度时，可以有两个检查点来考虑。
I think one checkpoint is organic growth the second is our people willing to pay for the product and I think if you pass both those you feel like you you've you've you've at least within some pocket of the market you have some PMF so I think you know those are both important questions to ask depending on your resources ideally you can do kind of both an experiment a little bit along you know at the same time and then by the time you actually have paying users you you sort of checks them those boxes for yourself.
我认为一个重要的考察点是有机增长，另一个是用户愿意为产品付费。我觉得如果你在这两个方面都通过了，那么至少在市场的某个部分，你已经有了一定的产品市场契合度。因此，这两个问题都是需要根据你的资源来考虑的。理想情况下，你可以同时进行一些实验，并在拥有付费用户时，确认这两个方面都达到了要求。
Well I love the Jews like you launch pricing you're like okay let's figure out if I actually make you money or not it's not obvious with AI companies. Well we also didn't have a choice because at that point runway was also low you know so it's like if we weren't making money well you know we would actually be in a tough spot. That's such a good point that you did not have a huge amount of money sitting around to spend on like the way a lot of companies in AI do just we'll deal with it and we'll figure out how to make money later.
嗯，我很喜欢这种做事方式，就像你们推出定价时的做法一样：你会想“好吧，让我们来看看我是否真的能为你赚到钱”，对于一些AI公司来说，这并不是显而易见的。而且，我们当时也没有选择，因为我们的资金也不多，所以如果我们不赚钱的话，就会遇到麻烦。你提到的这个问题非常重要：我们没有很多钱可以像许多AI公司那样，先花钱然后再想办法赚钱。
Totally yeah within a couple months we had hit a million in ARR and became profitable and so those were both two exciting milestones for a company that months prior were you know heads down figuring out how we how we even survive. What a story I'm so excited to be telling the story okay final topic I want to talk about is hiring you have some really hot takes on hiring clearly it's worked out for you guys what are some things you've learned about hiring well what is your approach to hiring.
好的，当然，几个月内，我们的年经常性收入（ARR）就达到了100万美元，并且实现了盈利。这对一个几个月前还在全力以赴地摸索如何生存的公司来说，是两个令人振奋的重要里程碑。多么精彩的故事，我很高兴能够分享这个故事。好了，最后一个话题我想谈谈招聘。你们在招聘方面有些非常独到的见解，显然这对你们来说非常奏效。你们从招聘中学到了什么？你们的招聘方法是什么？
Yeah so we had this mantra internally I mean even before you know the sort of AI launch for us which was higher painfully slowly and I think you know the temptation is once start you know things start working you to start let's scaling this thing and start adding more and more headcount and for us that always I don't know they didn't feel right we wanted to build the team very thoughtfully be lean but also be a team that every individual feels like they have high you know amount of impact that they can have on a daily basis and and so for us yeah that was from sort of the very beginning and so even you know as we've scaled up I think we've been super efficient by nature of just being a very lean team.
我们有一个内部的格言，这在我们推出AI之前就已经存在了，那就是“招聘要非常谨慎和缓慢”。通常的诱惑是，一旦事情开始顺利运行，人们就想马上开始扩大规模，增加更多的人员。但对我们来说，这样做始终感觉不太对。我们希望能够非常周到地组建团队，保持精简，同时让每个成员都觉得自己可以在日常工作中产生很大的影响。所以，从一开始我们就是这样做的。即便在我们扩张的时候，由于团队的精简，我们依然非常高效。
So I think a lot of people here this advice of Staleen be efficient you have some even more concrete pieces of advice here just like what that looks like you have a huge I don't know philosophy of just like huge leverage per person you focus a lot on it revenue per employee talk about so we actually I mean we we we obviously we look at things like revenue employee but we never let that be the sort of nor star it's not something that dictates our strategy per say same thing with like profitability I think by being efficient like that ends up becoming like a side effect those yeah we are profitable and growing but I think for us more it's like we care a ton about you know adding the right team members so you know it's easy you can almost sort of shoot yourself in the foot as a founder by just setting the wrong goals.
我认为很多人听过Staleen的建议，就是要高效。你还提供了一些更具体的建议，比如说关注个人的高杠杆作用和每位员工的收入。我们确实会关注诸如每位员工的收入等指标，但我们不会让这些指标成为我们的指导原则，它们不会决定我们的战略。同样地，盈利能力也是如此。我认为，通过高效工作，盈利就成为一种附带的结果。我们的确是盈利且在增长，但对我们来说，更重要的是加入合适的团队成员。作为创始人，如果设定了错误的目标，很容易就会事与愿违。
If your goal is to double and headcount and like add a hundred people to the company then that becomes the goal right the goal is no longer to add the best people it's no longer to maintain a high quality bar the goal is to hit a hundred people and that's that's everything everyone's focused on so then guess what if that's the goal then the thing that ends up dropping is okay maybe we'll settle for employees that are good enough and we're gonna make sure we get to that hundred because hundreds gonna help us get to the next phase of growth and the next phase of growth and I think we've tried to resist that temptation.
如果你的目标是将员工人数翻倍，比如说增加到100人，那么这就变成了唯一的目标。这个时候，目标不再是招聘最好的人才，也不再是保持高标准的人员质量，而是要达到100人的规模。这就成了大家关注的焦点。那么，结果是什么呢？如果这个是目标，那么我们可能就会妥协，接受那些"还不错"的员工，只是为了确保总人数达到100，因为这会帮助我们进入下一阶段的成长。而我们一直在努力抵制这种诱惑。
Which is we want everybody that comes through the door and joins our team to really be you know the type of person that represents gamma our first 10 to 12 employees we spent so much time like really getting the DNA right I think Brian Chesky talks about this like your goal is like you get that first 10 and you want to be able to then replicate the next 10 and then replicate the next 10 but that 10 needs to be all super cohesive you need to have the shared same shared values same principles same ambitions same vision and if you don't then like what are you even replicating right at that point you're just adding headcount and you know you can easily just be adding headcount because they're chasing the next shiny startup to join and so for us we really focused on that first 10 that allows us to really have this you know this sort of community of of like a teammates that that basically you know want to stick around a lot of founders think about you know not wanting to have a leaky bucket on the product side but the same thing applies on the team size right if you have a leaky bucket people are just constantly leaving revolving door that's a huge amount of cost the continuity cost is massive and it's really hard to quantify.
我们希望每一个走进公司并加入我们团队的人，真正具备代表 Gamma 的品质。我们花了很多时间筛选前 10 到 12 位员工，确保他们的“基因”是正确的。正如 Brian Chesky 所说，你的目标是确保前 10 位员工的选择正确，这样你才能复制接下来的 10 位，再复制接下来的 10 位。但这前 10 个人必须具备极高的凝聚力，拥有相同的价值观、原则、抱负和愿景。如果没有，那么你复制的是什么呢？在那种情况下，你只是增加了员工数，而这些人可能只是追逐下一个热门创业公司。所以我们非常注重前 10 位员工的选择，这让我们能打造一个由志同道合的团队成员组成的社区，他们愿意长期留在这里。很多创业者关注产品上的“漏桶”问题，同样的道理也适用于团队。如果你的团队一直有人离开、流动性很大，这会带来巨大的成本，尤其是连续性成本，这种成本很难量化。
And that I mentioned our first 10 employees all 10 of them are still here today five years later right and so that sort of continuity and means that you have this tribal knowledge that sticks with you and means that people can continue building and having that sort of cohesive feeling so I think that's one piece just like it's hard to quantify by do you think you know startups I would advise just to really be thoughtful about that like get that to a point where you really feel confident that as you're adding the next 10 and next 100 you're actually replicating the same DNA and not actually just adding a bunch of random people to the company one of your very specific piece of advice is hired generalists versus someone that's just like really deep in one thing why why is that important what does that look like this very much feels like the age of the generalist or the rise of the generalist right now when we think about you know a team that can be really flat you want people that can you still want people that can be very spiky in certain areas.
我提到我们的前10名员工中所有10人在5年后仍然在公司。这种连续性意味着企业能够保留住自己的“部落知识”，让员工能够持续发展并维持团队的凝聚力。我认为这是一个很重要的方面。虽然难以量化，但我建议初创公司认真考虑这一点，确保在增加新的员工时，你真正有信心复制你公司最初的DNA，而不是随意招聘一堆人进入公司。
有一个具体的建议是：招聘通才，而不是只在某一领域非常精通的专才。为什么这是重要的呢？这现在非常像是一个通才崛起的时代。当我们考虑一个可以保持扁平化的团队时，你希望有能力在特定领域表现突出的员工加入进来。
So for instance the obviously you know a product designer that knows how to code that's great it allows you to actually span across many different domains and again a organization that's super flat when you're wearing a lot of different hats that means every individual if you're a generalist you can wear by default a lot of different hats and that's helped us like just maintain this idea that the work you know the opportunity in front of us it can easily expand each person plays a huge role they don't need to wait and ask for permission they can go after and pick up a piece of work because it's there and they can at least get it started even if they're not the one that owes season through and so for us I do think this rise of the generalist is going to be important you can always augment that by working with contractors or agencies that are hyper specialized in certain areas.
所以，比如说，一个懂编程的产品设计师是很棒的，这使得他可以跨越多个不同的领域。在一个非常扁平化的组织中，每个人都身兼多职，这意味着如果你是一个通才，就可以默认承担许多不同的角色，这帮助我们保持这样的理念：面对的工作和机会是灵活的，每个人都扮演着重要角色。他们不需要等待和请求许可，可以主动承担和开始处理某项工作，即使他们不是负责将其完成到底的人。因此，我认为通才的崛起将非常重要。当然，你也可以通过与在某些领域非常专业的合同工或机构合作来加强你的能力。
And this is where like for instance going back to influencer marketing you might work with an agency rather than kind of scale up your own influencer you know marketing team you work with like a hyper specialized team there but my marketing team is all generalist you know we are head of marketing more recently launched this cool drone show in San Francisco we have like 4,000 people in San Francisco calm the mayor came by she created that entire project a manager entire project end of henner herself right while also managing the entire marketing team and so it's like this idea that a generalist is able to play all these different roles can still you know be super high impact for us it also goes hand in hand with I mentioned sort of this other role which is the player coach traditional management layer is like a manager manages a ton of people and that's kind of their core focus.
这段话可以翻译成中文如下：
这就好比回到网红营销，如果你不想自己扩大网红营销团队，你可能会选择与代理公司合作，因为他们非常专业。而我的营销团队都是通才，比如，我们的营销负责人最近在旧金山策划了一场很酷的无人机表演，吸引了约4000人，连市长都来参加。我们的负责人亲自创办并管理了整个项目，同时还管理着整个营销团队。这说明通才可以胜任多个角色，并且依然能带来非常高的影响力。此外，我还提到了另一种角色，就是“既是选手也是教练”的角色。传统管理层的做法通常是经理只专注于管理大量员工。
All of our people leaders are player coaches in that they still do the end work themselves and they can like mentor and coach those around them this analogy came from where this mindset came from I was something about from just the sports world in general because there's a lot of sports that just move incredibly fast like football for instance it moves really really fast and so you might have a coach that has that's calling in a play but the quarterback can actually make a last minute adjustment based on what he's seeing the defense do right and so you want a player that is on the field that can adapt as needed and that way the coach doesn't have to call every single thing in he's just kind of giving you the general intent of what you want to run as the play and then the quarterback quarterback it still make the adjustments and so all of our people leaders our management layer is all folks that actually can make those adjustments if they're seeing something that doesn't feel right on a daily or weekly basis.
我们所有的领导者都是“球员教练”，意思是他们仍然自己亲身参与实际工作，并能够指导和培训他们周围的人。这种类比和思维方式源自体育界，因为许多体育项目，如橄榄球，节奏非常快。例如，比赛中教练可能会下达一个战术，但四分卫可以根据对方防守情况在最后一刻做出调整。我们希望在场上有这样的球员，他们可以根据需要灵活应对，这样教练就不需要指挥每一个细节，而是提供总体的战术意图，然后四分卫进行相应调整。因此，我们的管理层能够在日常或每周发现不对劲时，做出相应调整。
There are kind of adjusting priorities for that team and they're still doing the work themselves too they're so close to that they understand like what is the relative prioritization at all times so though both of those I think I've been you know when I think about founders they oftentimes think about innovation in the sense like we're going to innovate on products or innovate on technology I think every founder today has a chance to innovate on org design and that starts by just thinking about what is the type of company we want to build today what does it mean and when it comes to like the management later we're sort of leaders to rehire what does it mean when it comes to hiring specific roles and specific functions all that is a chance for you to be very thoughtful and build a company that you're excited to be out for hopefully many many years to come.
该团队正在调整优先事项，同时他们自己也在进行工作，因为他们非常了解情况，所以始终明白什么是相对优先的。考虑到这些，我认为，当我想到创业者时，他们通常会认为创新是产品或技术上的创新。而我认为今天的每位创业者都有机会在组织设计上进行创新。这首先需要思考我们今天想建立什么类型的公司，这意味着什么。当涉及到未来的管理时，我们需要重新招聘哪些领导，这在招聘特定角色和职能时又意味着什么。所有这些都是你认真思考，并建立一个让你充满激情的公司的机会，希望在未来的许多年里，你都为之感到自豪。
So what I'm hearing here is manager there's no pure managers again when your plan is to not have people that are just managing the ideas everyone even a manager is doing their own I see work yes and then the other piece of advice here is generalists people they can do a lot of stuff and I hear this a lot on this podcast just like everyone is there's no more just like you're a designer that's all you're going to do designers need to build stuff market stuff write some BRDs probably and I think I mean just one thing to add is like you know that's for where we are where we are at today I think being adaptable means that you know certain things may evolve and change and like how the player coach model evolves you know and maybe in certain functions or as the team scales like that's not going to be practical everywhere.
所以我听到的是，现在的管理者不再是纯粹的管理员，因为计划是让每个人，包括管理者，都要亲自参与工作。然后另一个建议是倾向于找通才，因为他们可以做很多事情。我在这个播客中听到很多这样的观点，就是已经不再是你只是一个设计师，你只做设计的工作了。设计师需要构建产品、进行市场营销，甚至可能要撰写一些商业需求文档（BRD）。我想补充一点，那就是适应性很重要，因为我们所处的环境在不断变化，教练员和选手兼具的模式也会不断演变。也许在某些职能或者随着团队的扩展，这种模式并不总是可行的。
I think the reality is like you just have to know and be willing to kind of adopt like different frameworks over time and like being honest with yourself with what's working what's not I think we're constantly trying to you know learn and evolve ourselves because I think you were doing it in a way that we don't believe it really has been done before and so we have to kind of pave our own path over time. I love that giving yourself an out when the time comes when you need to just hire managers a year later when you invite me back I'll say yeah this will be learning yeah well you know that makes sense that's probably going to happen it's like people are like we don't need product managers and then I see maybe we do yeah it makes sense.
我觉得现实情况是，你必须知道并愿意随着时间的推移去接受不同的框架，同时要对自己诚实，了解什么有效、什么无效。我们一直在努力学习和发展自己，因为我们在以一种我们认为以前没有被采用过的方式去做事情，所以我们必须逐步开辟自己的道路。我喜欢这种给自己留有余地的方式，比如说，等到需要的时候就可以雇用经理。一年后，当你再次邀请我时，我会表示这也是一种学习。这很合理，这可能会发生。就像人们说我们不需要产品经理，然后我看到可能确实需要，这也是有道理的。
One last piece I want to talk about is you have this really cool quote that you shared on Twitter when you find someone exceptional bed big on them this is a big part of your philosophy is just like bed big on the people that are doing super well just talk about what that looks like and why that's so important yeah I mean this starts top of the funnel which is like you meet candidates you decide who you know you actually hire and so if you don't start with a high bar there you know going back to what is the goal the goals the high hit a hiring target versus like you know maintaining super high quality you know hiring bar those are different goals and I don't think we've ever kind of dropped our bar and so then you bring somebody in that you think is exceptional that brings something unique to the table that can be a good teammate when they're when they're thriving you just give them more and more resources.
我想谈的最后一点是你在推特上分享过一句很酷的话：“当你找到特别优秀的人时，要重注于他们。”这其实是你哲学的一个重要部分，就是重视那些表现非常优秀的人。可以谈谈这看起来是怎样的，以及为什么如此重要吗？
是的，这一切都始于招聘过程的最初阶段，也就是你遇见候选人并决定雇用谁的时刻。如果在这一步你不设立高标准，目标就会仅仅是达到招聘数量，而不是维持超高质量的招聘标准。这两者是不同的目标。我认为我们从未降低过我们的标准。因此，当你引入一个你认为非常出色并且能带来独特价值的人，他们能成为一个优秀的团队成员时，当他们表现出色时，你就应该给他们更多的资源。
I think what you realize going you know another sports analogy is like you know when you're when you're on a you know in the 18 for instance or a team that you feel like is exceptional you know a player is one actually more playing time like you never see a star player that says actually one less playing time they want more time on the field they want to actually go after the hardest problems they want to be able to feel like they're making a huge impact and so if you have fewer you know exceptional teammates where you can just throw almost anything at them and they'll figure it out that feels that for you. as a team just feels great because then they they get what they find rewarding which is the ability to go after hard hairy problems and to be able to come out through that they're in feeling like they've accomplished something and I think that for us has always been something that goes beyond just you know almost everything else like we give people a chance to really thrive in this environment and we try to nurture that as much as humanly possible every step of the way.
我觉得，当你意识到这一点时，你会想到另一个体育类比。就像在一个你认为异常出色的球队中，比如一个极具才能的团队，球员们总是希望能够有更多的上场时间。你永远不会看到一个明星球员说他们希望减少上场时间。他们希望在场上拼尽全力，想要挑战最难的问题，希望能感受到自己在创造重大影响力。因此，如果你身边有更少但非常优秀的队友，无论你抛给他们什么挑战，他们都能解决，那种感觉真是太棒了。作为一个团队，这让人感到开心，因为这些队员能够得到他们觉得有意义的事情，就是去迎接艰难复杂的挑战，然后从中感受到成就感。我认为，对我们来说，这一直是超越其他一切的追求。我们为人们提供机会，让他们在这样的环境中真正成长，并尽可能在人生的每一个阶段培养他们的发展。
Is there anything else around hiring that you think is really important or big lesson you've learned or lesson you share that you that we haven't talked about yet? I mean there's some of these intangibles which is you know for the founding team does this feel like this could be your life's work right like when you're pitching when you're pitching a potential candidate like this is feel like something where you're actually committed. The unfortunate side of a lot of the you know what's happening in the AI world broadly is I think you're coming to learn which founders are sort of missionaries versus mercenaries and many that were just chasing maybe just a big outcome where like something shiny or like something to feel good about themselves they'll go off and then the company you know I guess doesn't live on or maybe has to find a different way a different path.
在招聘方面，还有什么你认为非常重要或者是你学到的重要教训、想要分享的经验是我们还没有讨论过的吗？我觉得有一些无形的因素，比如对于创始团队来说，这是否感觉可以成为你一生的事业。当你在向潜在候选人推销时，你是否真心投入其中。不幸的是，在人工智能领域的广泛发展中，你开始明白哪些创始人是真正有使命感，而哪些只是功利主义者。许多人可能只是追求一个大的结果、追求一些吸引眼球的东西或是为了让自己感觉良好。他们可能会离开，然后公司要么无法继续生存，要么得另辟蹊径。
And so you know something I admire is like you look at some of the founders obviously before the sort of AI era you know folks like Dylan or Melanie Figma Canva you know Ivan at Notion they've been doing this for over a decade now they had many chances to just you leave and you know sunset off into doing whatever they wanted to do but they care so much about the mission they've stuck it through. I think when you're talking to candidates can this can kind of tell like is this something like the founders even care about and I think you're gonna have a better chance of attracting you know true missionaries people that want to build with you for the long haul if it's authentic and it's something you actually care about.
有一件事我很佩服，那就是在人工智能时代到来之前，一些创始人，比如Figma的Dylan或Canva的Melanie，以及Notion的Ivan，他们已经做了十多年。这期间，他们有很多机会可以选择离开和放手去做其他事情，但由于对使命感的强烈热爱，他们始终坚持不懈。我认为，当你在和求职者谈话时，你可以看出创始人是否真正关心自己的事业。如果这是真诚的，并且是你真正关心的事情，那么你会更有机会吸引到那些真正怀抱使命感的人，他们愿意和你一起长期建设事业。
Oh man I feel like I keep saying this I feel like we could have at least five more hours of stuff to talk about uh that'll be good content for when you come back and you're making a billion dollars a year. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round grant is there anything else that you think uh is important for people to hear any last I don't know less than you want to double down on anything you want to leave listeners with? Yeah I mean just going back to the original story of um that was probably the ultimate low point you know having an investor that spent 20 minutes listening to my pitch telling me that it was the worst thing worst idea in the world you know I think throughout the journey there's gonna be those low moments and when I think about you know being a founder and uh we're gonna start up you're honestly just trying to increase your luck surface area as much as possible and for me luck surface area has two dimensions the first dimension is people who are you surrounding yourself with that share your same ambition share the same values same principles and find those people and then give yourself enough time to prove that you guys can you know accomplish great things.
哦，天哪，我感觉自己一直在重复这些话。我觉得我们至少还有五个小时的内容可以聊，这对你回来后一年赚十亿美元的那天会是不错的素材。在进入我们非常精彩的快问快答环节之前，Grant，你觉得还有什么重要的内容是大家应该知道的，或者有什么想强调的、想留给听众的？是的，其实回到最初的故事，那可能是我人生的最低谷。有位投资者听了我20分钟的演讲后告诉我那是世界上最糟糕的主意。在这段旅程中，会有这样的低谷时刻。当我想到作为一个创始人，或者说我们在创业时，其实就是在尽可能地增加自己的运气接触面。对我来说，运气接触面有两个维度：第一个是围绕在你身边的人，他们是否和你有相同的抱负、相同的价值观和原则。找到这样的人，然后给自己足够的时间去证明你们能够成就伟大的事情。
I'm lucky to have two amazing co-founders we've been working on this thing for five years there's zero percent chance we'd be where we are if I didn't have them and we've had to overcome a lot but I guess for us it's like creating that own luck over a long time horizon has been the only way that you know it's been possible. Well it's clearly showing the success you guys are having grant with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round are you ready? Yep yes all right I've got five questions for you first question what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?
我很幸运有两位了不起的联合创始人，我们一起为这个项目努力了五年。如果没有他们，我们绝不可能达到现在的成就。我们克服了很多困难，但我想对我们来说，似乎是在长时间跨度内创造属于自己的运气，这是成功的唯一方式。这明显展示了你们所取得的成功。好了，我们现在进入非常激动人心的快问快答环节，准备好了吗？准备好了。好的，我有五个问题问你，第一个问题是：你向别人推荐最多的两三本书是什么？
Yeah so I'll give one that's for pre-product market fit folks and the one post product fit pre-product market fit I would say is shoe dog which is written by Phil Knight founder of Nike and you know he talks about two things like one you should chase your sort of crazy ideas but these are these should be ideas you're your passion about or he was an athlete and so not surprisingly he focused a lot about you know creating tools or you know shoes in this case for other athletes and was passionate about that and the second thing he taught me was going back to the team thing he surrounded himself with other people that were super passionate about athletics and shoes as well and so the folks out he had as his his initial startup crew or all that and I think that gives you a chance of like overcoming a ton where you're focused on problems you actually care about solving you're doing with a team that shares the same ambition as you.
好，我来分别讲一下针对产品市场契合前和产品契合后的人该怎么做。对于那些尚未达到产品市场契合的人，我推荐《鞋狗》这本书，它是由耐克创始人菲尔·奈特撰写的。在书中，他提到了两点：首先，你应该追寻那些看似疯狂但让你充满激情的想法。他自己就是个运动员，所以他不出所料地专注于为其他运动员创造工具，比如鞋子，并对此充满热情。第二，他让我明白了团队的重要性。他把自己与其他对运动和鞋子同样充满热情的人聚在一起，他的初创团队成员都是这样的人。我认为，这种做法让你有机会克服许多困难，因为你专注于自己关心的问题，并和一个与你有相同抱负的团队一起努力。
Post product market fit there's a book called Seven Powers by Hamilton Helmer where I think when you think about how to build a durable business there's so much in there I think there's a lot that you can kind of read and reread as you kind of evolve and kind of hit new milestones yourself and so much of that can be both tactical but also like zooming out and thinking about what are the big picture strategic questions you as a founding team you'd be thinking about so both are great Hamilton was on the podcast willing to that episode I also love that book many people mentioned it.
在产品市场契合度之后，有一本书叫《七种力量》，作者是汉密尔顿·赫尔默。我认为当你思考如何建立一个持久的企业时，这本书里有很多内容可以帮助你。这本书中的内容不仅可以让你在过程中不断阅读和重新思考，还可以在你自己发展并达到新里程碑时提供指导。这些内容既有实际的策略指导，也帮助你从全局出发思考作为创始团队应该考虑的战略性问题。汉密尔顿曾在播客节目中分享过他的观点，我也非常喜欢这本书，很多人都提到过它。
Next question do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed yeah uh the Lazarus project is one I'm a I'm a huge sucker for time travel and sci-fi so this is one I just started watching and for me it has like all the right ingredients for a fun show is there a product you recently discovered that you really love yeah I mentioned this already voice panel so again a full disclosure angel investor but we've been using it and going back to kind of being a cheat code for folks that are you know starting to experiment a ton with different ideas vibe coding maybe some of these like get the sense of the hands of users hear what they think about it I think an honest it can help speed up a lot of things and save you time from wasting time on on kind of the wrong ideas or ideas where there's no market.
下一个问题：你最近有没有特别喜欢的电影或电视剧？有的，我最近喜欢《拉撒路计划》。我非常喜欢时间旅行和科幻题材的故事，所以这个剧对我来说非常合口味。
有没有最近发现你特别喜欢的产品？有，我已经提到过，就是Voice Panel。需要说明的是，我是这个项目的天使投资人，但我们一直在使用它。它对那些开始尝试各种创意的人来说，是一个妙招。通过与用户互动，可以更好地感受到用户对产品的看法。我认为它可以加快很多事情的进展，避免在没有市场需求的错误想法上浪费时间。
Is there a life motto that you often find yourself going back to and work or in life yeah so there is this Chinese idiom that my mom used to say it's a gene deez of wa which the translation is a frog at the bottom of a well and the story is like there you know there's a frog at the bottom of a well he looks up every night and he sees the world and he imagines he you know he knows everything about the world and then one day a bird comes along and describes all the things that he sees the ocean the mountains and the frog realizes that what he sees is just such a limited part of the world and you know the bird asks like do you want to come join me and kind of see the rest of it and so frog goes long and so for me you know I came from you know pretty modest childhood you know my parents we didn't have a whole lot and I think it would have been very easy to kind of have a very narrow kind of lens on the world and be like oh this is this is what it is but my mom never allowed me to do that she always pulled me to dream much bigger to say hey the world is vast it's your opportunity to seize it like you have to go out there don't have a narrow you know view of what's possible always dream bigger and so for me that's always carried through and every time I feel like I'm thinking too little or too small I try to zoom out and remind myself that there's much more out there to go after.
有没有一句人生格言是你常常在工作或生活中回顾的？是的，有一句我妈妈常说的中国成语：“井底之蛙”。这个故事讲述了一只井底的青蛙，它每晚抬头看见的世界，并自以为了解世界的一切。直到有一天，一只鸟来到井边，向青蛙描述了大海、山脉等许多风景，青蛙才意识到自己看到的世界是多么有限。鸟问青蛙：“你想和我一起去看看其他的地方吗？”于是青蛙决定跟随鸟去探索更广阔的世界。
我来自一个比较普通的家庭，小时候家里条件不算好。我可能很容易就会用狭隘的视角来看待世界，觉得世界就是这样。但我妈妈从不让我这样想。她总是鼓励我拥有更大的梦想，她说，世界广阔，充满机会，你必须主动去探索，不要局限于自己狭小的视野。每当我觉得自己想得太小或局限时，我都会提醒自己，外面的世界值得追寻和探索。
That is so good and so important and so valuable in today's world we're so much more as possible just like most of what limits people feels like now is just I don't know what the idea I have like I don't know what to do now you could get things done so much quicker and so much more as possible so that's such valuable thinking.
这非常好，非常重要，而且在当今世界非常有价值。我们能实现的可能性比以往多得多。阻碍人们的往往只是那种“不知道该做什么”的感觉。现在你可以更快地完成事情，能做到的事情也多得多。这种思维方式是非常有价值的。
Okay, final question you help people present better you know your tools basically help people become better presenters what's like one tip you've learned or one tip you teach people to become better presenters that might be helpful to listeners yeah I mean we'll go back to the consumer advertising concept which is you know one idea at a time so you know this this notion of you give them one egg someone can catch you given too many eggs are gonna drop it so don't try to throw too many concepts all at once keep it simple people will appreciate it and so with every sort of presentation like break it down into the core concepts try to make sure you're covering one at a time and I think once you sort of see the through line there then it becomes easy for a package up and some that feels more cohesive less is more as they say.
好的，最后一个问题，你帮助人们提升演讲水平，你的工具基本上帮助人们成为更好的演讲者。对于那些希望提升演讲技能的听众来说，有没有一个实用的小技巧或者建议？ 是的，我们可以回到消费者广告的概念上，就是一次只传达一个想法。就好比你给别人一个鸡蛋，别人容易接住，但如果给太多，他们就可能会掉。所以，不要一次抛出太多概念，要保持简单，大家会更容易理解。因此，在每一场演讲中，把内容分解成核心概念，一次只讲一个。我认为当你看到这样的逻辑线索后，就能够更轻松地把整个演讲组织得更具连贯性。正如人们常说的，“少即是多”。
Probably grand two final questions work in folks finding online working they find gamma what should they know that's just like plug anything you want and then how can listeners be useful to you yeah so you can find me on both Twitter and LinkedIn DMs open I honestly here just knowing how hard the the journey is in general whether just thinking about a startup idea or your deep into startup land I want to be hopefully helpful I'm going to be you're hopefully your biggest cheerleader so let me know I can help and then for us like you know we're always looking for feedback so if you're trying gamma it's falling shorter of your expectations let us know we'd love to help in terms of just trying to make it better and yeah really appreciate you know all the feedback and support along the way.
大概有两个最终问题：对于那些在网上寻找工作的人来说，他们可能会发现Gamma。那么他们应该知道些什么呢？这个部分就像是你可以插入任何你想说的内容。然后，听众可以如何对你有所帮助？
是的，你可以在Twitter和LinkedIn上找到我，私信开放。我真心了解创业道路的艰辛，无论你是仅仅在思考一个创业点子，还是已经深入创业领域，我希望能提供帮助。我会是你最大的支持者，所以让我知道我能如何帮助你。
至于我们团队，我们总是在寻找反馈。如果你在尝试使用Gamma时觉得不符合你的期望，请告知我们。我们希望能帮助你，并努力改进它。非常感谢一路以来的反馈和支持。
Grand this was awesome I really appreciate you making time I know you're trying to build a crazy fast growing startup with a lot going on so I really appreciate you making time for this thanks Lenny it's been a blast it's been a blast for me too bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast.com see you in the next episode.
这真是太棒了，我非常感谢你抽出时间。我知道你正在努力建立一家快速发展的初创公司，有很多事情需要处理，所以我非常感谢你抽出时间来做这件事。谢谢你，Lenny，这段时间过得很愉快，我也觉得很开心。再见，大家，感谢你们的收听。如果你觉得这有价值，可以在Apple播客、Spotify或你喜欢的播客应用程序上订阅我们的节目。另外，也请考虑给我们评分或留下评论，因为这对其他听众发现这个播客非常有帮助。你可以在Lenny's podcast.com找到所有的往期节目或了解更多关于这个节目的信息。我们下期再见。