We grew from zero to $50 million in annual average revenue (ARR) and profitability in less than two years. I've never shared our strategy publicly before. We spent over $5 million to learn what I'm about to share. This 800-word article describes each growth hacking strategy that brought us results. I'll cover the following: 1. Influencer Marketing 2. Performance Marketing vs. Brand Marketing 3. User Testing 4. Internal Testing From $0 to $10 million, we relied almost 100% on word of mouth and organic content. From $10 million to $50 million, word of mouth still accounted for over 50%, but influencers, affiliate marketing, and referral marketing made up the remaining half. But the foundation we laid from $0 to $10 million was crucial to our success in reaching $50 million. 1. Introduction to Influencer Marketing: 90% of our reach came from less than 10% of viral content. Your mission: Reach out to influencers widely and invest enough money to find the 10% of content and marketing formats that work. Virality doesn't happen by accident—test and discover the selling points, visuals, and marketing formats on each platform, understand why they work, and replicate them 100x across your influencer roster. Most startups make three mistakes: 1 - Too little budget 2 - Being too picky about creators and messaging 3 - Giving up too early Start with $10,000-20,000 per month, with a minimum six-month commitment. This allows you to experiment with many micro-influencers and test many concepts. - Develop a list of creator personas who represent the audience that engages with your product. Be exhaustive. Influencer marketing is time-consuming. If you don't have a team, work with freelancers or an agency. Message me for advice. - Offer basic content with a bonus for virality. For TikTok, have them create new accounts. New accounts will get just as many views as existing ones. But new creators aren't burdened by brands and can experiment with any format. - Test across all platforms (TikTok, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn are suitable for most B2B/prosumer apps). - Track specific creators and hooks that perform well, not just channels. - Add a "How did you hear about us" section to your onboarding. Calculate which channels drive leads and which simply generate views. - Compile a guide for every effective creative, video, or hook. Once you have 20-30 winning formats, hire a top creator as a consultant and train all other influencers on which angles drive virality and why. - Don't write scripts—they'll go unnoticed. Creators know their audience best. 2. Invest in brand first, then performance marketing. Most startups don't scale because their brand and creative are terrible. We had to go through an incredibly expensive rebrand (in both time and money) before we finally found a product we loved. Skipping this step would have cost even more. Relentlessly test creatives. No matter how many creatives you plan to test, increase them tenfold. Experiment. Observe what drives results (CAC returns, conversion rates, LTV, and retention). Once you find a specific use case that resonates, build a complete funnel around it, with symmetrical messaging. You don't want to confuse visitors by showing an ad with one value proposition and then directly redirecting them to a landing page with a completely different message. 3. Test your prototype with users before launching. This may seem trivial, but it can help you avoid one of the biggest startup mistakes: developing your product in the wrong direction. Most startups think of experimentation as something established companies use A/B testing to improve their funnel by 1%. But the Gamma founding team were early members of Optimizely. Experimentation is in our DNA. We conducted extensive user testing on platforms like voicepanel and usertesting. a. Randomly recruit people who created work slides. They had no involvement in the project and wouldn't lie out of kindness. b. Show them a prototype with minimalist instructions and let them spend a few minutes trying it out. c. Have them think out loud. Understanding the words they use to navigate, their expectations, and where they get confused is crucial. Combining their voice and on-screen actions can amplify the impact tenfold. You'll truly feel the pain of poor user experience and overly complex copywriting. Do this across all aspects—landing pages, onboarding, feature moonshots. Always test your biggest assumptions about what people will get or like. Identify major blind spots during the prototype phase, not at the end. Once you've proven through hours of testing that the average person finds it easy to use, launch immediately. 4. Test your product rigorously Either you build something 100x better than the alternative, or you build something else. Testing will make it clear whether your product is 100x better than the competition. Story time: When we founded Gamma, we had two competing ideas: Idea 1: Create a virtual office that captures the magic of face-to-face communication Idea 2: Completely reinvent PowerPoint (this is how Gamma began) After six months of building and testing in parallel, we finally identified a clear winner. It wasn't about metrics or hard data. A virtual office always puts us in competition with real life; it can never replace the magic of face-to-face communication. With the redesigned PowerPoint