Why one founder personally onboarded every influencer in the early days to build his $2.1 billion AI startup

• 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’s early days.

• The key was working with “micro influencers” who are “committed to giving value,” Lee said.

After one investor called his startup idea the “worst,” a cofounder leaned hard on influencers to grow his AI-powered presentation business.

Now, Gamma is a $2.1 billion company — and a growth engine fueled by thousands of “micro-influencers.”

Gamma cofounder Grant Lee said on an episode of “Lenny’s Podcast” published Thursday that in the company’s early days, he personally onboarded every influencer. He saw it as valuable time spent because they would understand Gamma’s product and help the brand grow authentically.

“You want to be able to have them tell your story, but in their voice,” he said. “They can’t do that if you’re not willing to put in that investment,” he added.

Lee said the key to influencer marketing wasn’t about finding influencers with a few million followers. It was about working with “micro influencers,” people without massive followings but who are “committed to giving value to their audiences.”

“People really trust what they say,” Lee said. “That ends up becoming this wildfire that can spread really, really fast.”

Lee said he would onboard these influencers by walking them through the product, brainstorming content angles, and giving feedback without being “super prescriptive.”

“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,” he said.

“They want to be able to showcase tools that actually they would use or they are using,” he added.

Lee said investing in those relationships has reaped benefits, such as influencers coming back to post about the company. “That’s really where the magic is,” he said.

Word-of-mouth — which accounts for over 50% of Gamma’s subscriber growth — remains the company’s biggest growth driver. Influencers helped to boost word-of-mouth, Lee said.

On Monday, Gamma announced a $68 million Series B round at a $2.1 billion valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz.

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.

Gamma last raised $12 million in Series A led by Accel in 2024.

Some AI startups are also leveraging influencers to accelerate their growth.

The cofounder of AI “cheating” app Cluely, Chungin “Roy” Lee, said in an episode of the “Sourcery” podcast published in June that he is betting big on influencers to drive product growth.

“You’re either building the product or you’re making the product go viral,” Lee said on the podcast, describing job scopes at Cluely.

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.

Lee told Business Insider earlier this year that his main goal for Cluely is to reach 1 billion views across all platforms.

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.

Brands are “shifting from one-time, short-term partnerships to long-term, recurring partnerships,” Olivia McNaughten, senior director of product marketing and partnerships at the influencer firm Grin, told Business Insider.

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.

Read the original article on Business Insider