{"id":38554,"date":"2025-11-14T08:31:22","date_gmt":"2025-11-14T08:31:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/why-one-founder-personally-onboarded-every-influencer-in-the-early-days-to-build-his-2-1-billion-ai-startup\/"},"modified":"2025-11-14T08:31:22","modified_gmt":"2025-11-14T08:31:22","slug":"why-one-founder-personally-onboarded-every-influencer-in-the-early-days-to-build-his-2-1-billion-ai-startup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/why-one-founder-personally-onboarded-every-influencer-in-the-early-days-to-build-his-2-1-billion-ai-startup\/","title":{"rendered":"Why one founder personally onboarded every influencer in the early days to build his $2.1 billion AI startup"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/6916bc0fabd5e944effaba22?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Grant Lee\"\/><figcaption>Gamma&#039;s cofounder, Grant Lee, said he onboarded every early influencer, a hands-on strategy he says helped grow his $2.1 billion AI startup.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Broadway\/Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>Gamma leaned on influencers to grow its $2.1 billion AI-powered presentation business.<\/li>\n<li>Grant Lee said he would personally onboard every influencer in the company&#039;s early days.<\/li>\n<li>The key was working with &quot;micro influencers&quot; who are &quot;committed to giving value,&quot; Lee said.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>After one investor called his startup idea the &quot;worst,&quot; a cofounder leaned hard on influencers to grow his AI-powered presentation business.<\/p>\n<p>Now, Gamma is a $2.1 billion company \u2014 and a growth engine fueled by thousands of &quot;micro-influencers.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Gamma cofounder Grant Lee said on an episode of &quot;Lenny&#039;s Podcast&quot; published Thursday that in the company&#039;s early days, he personally onboarded every influencer. He saw it as valuable time spent because they would understand Gamma&#039;s product and help the brand grow authentically.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;You want to be able to have them tell your story, but in their voice,&quot; he said. &quot;They can&#039;t do that if you&#039;re not willing to put in that investment,&quot; he added.<\/p>\n<p>Lee said the key to influencer marketing wasn&#039;t about finding influencers with a few million followers. It was about working with &quot;micro influencers,&quot; people without massive followings but who are &quot;committed to giving value to their audiences.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;People really trust what they say,&quot; Lee said. &quot;That ends up becoming this wildfire that can spread really, really fast.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Lee said he would onboard these influencers by walking them through the product, brainstorming content angles, and giving feedback without being &quot;super prescriptive.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;You want them to be an extension of your team, and I think they can feel whether or not you&#039;re willing to put in the work,&quot; he said.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;They want to be able to showcase tools that actually they would use or they are using,&quot; he added.<\/p>\n<p>Lee said investing in those relationships has reaped benefits, such as influencers coming back to post about the company. &quot;That&#039;s really where the magic is,&quot; he said.<\/p>\n<p>Word-of-mouth \u2014 which accounts for over 50% of Gamma&#039;s subscriber growth \u2014 remains the company&#039;s biggest growth driver. Influencers helped to boost word-of-mouth, Lee said.<\/p>\n<p>On Monday, Gamma announced a $68 million Series B round at a $2.1 billion valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz.<\/p>\n<p>Lee said in an X post Monday that Gamma has reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue and 70 million users. The company was founded in 2020 and launched its first product in 2022.<\/p>\n<p>Gamma last raised $12 million in Series A led by Accel in 2024.<\/p>\n<h2>Influencer marketing for startups<\/h2>\n<p>Some AI startups are also leveraging influencers to accelerate their growth.<\/p>\n<p>The cofounder of AI &quot;cheating&quot; app Cluely, Chungin &quot;Roy&quot; Lee, said in an episode of the &quot;Sourcery&quot; podcast published in June that he is betting big on influencers to drive product growth.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;You&#039;re either building the product or you&#039;re making the product go viral,&quot; Lee said on the podcast, describing job scopes at Cluely.<\/p>\n<p>He told TechCrunch last month that startups need to scale up their distribution. Most startups fail because they are not visible, even if they have product-market fit, he said.<\/p>\n<p>Lee told Business Insider earlier this year that his main goal for Cluely is to reach 1 billion views across all platforms.<\/p>\n<p>The broader influencer-marketing industry has also benefited from collaborating with companies. Business Insider reported last year that influencer marketing remained strong in 2024, with firms seeing rising deal volume and spending.<\/p>\n<p>Brands are &quot;shifting from one-time, short-term partnerships to long-term, recurring partnerships,&quot; Olivia McNaughten, senior director of product marketing and partnerships at the influencer firm Grin, told Business Insider.<\/p>\n<p>Fohr, another influencer-marketing firm, told Business Insider it saw a 36% year-over-year jump in deal volume and a 47% increase in total dollars for those deals in the first quarter of 2024 compared to the same period a year earlier.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gamma&#039;s cofounder, Grant Lee, said he onboarded every early influencer, a hands-on strategy he says helped grow his $2.1 billion AI startup. Alex Broadway\/Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty Images Gamma leaned on influencers to grow its $2.1 billion AI-powered presentation business. Grant Lee said he would personally onboard every influencer in the company&#039;s early [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38555,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-38554","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38554\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}