Part 3: Gamma for visual communication
A product review for a tool that I've come to love
Tl;dr
Gamma is revolutionizing presentation creation with AI-powered tools that streamline research, design, and synthesis. Key highlights:
Gamma automates outline creation and slide generation from simple prompts
They offer smart pricing with credits for occasional users and subscriptions for regulars
They aim to go beyond traditional decks, blending webpages and presentations
It’s worth trying out if you frequently create visual presentations for work or fun!
Series:
Part 1: The job of a product manager is to convince others
Part 2: Being a visual versus written communicator
Part 3: Product review of Gamma
Reading time: 16 minutes
Topic: Communication
PowerPoint was the de facto presentation tool for decades. It was first launched in 1987, after the acquisition of Forethought by Microsoft. I started my career in investment banking in 2014. I was a major PowerPoint user.
My time was spent moving text boxes within millimeters, making sure the font was the accurate exact royal blue that matched the bank’s Royal Bank of Canada colors, carefully aligning my bullet points. However, that was all low impact work. In fact, editing slides takes hours and is meaningless work most times. It’s work that requires accuracy but not critical thinking.
With the move toward the cloud, many companies started using Google Slides as a web application. Google Slides was made available in 2006, within the Google Docs suite.
However, both tools haven’t changed since they were released. They might have additional functionality added over time (new formatting, inserting tables, embedded content), but no step function improvements to improve the content creation or viewing experience for visual creators.
AI has been a catalyst towards the multiplier improvements to visually create work: Midjourney has 19.26M registered users, Dall-E is available to all ChatGPT customers which is estimated to be ~180 million users. With that, there was clearly a big opportunity to disrupt business communication, as presentations are a mix of copy writing and visual creations.
In the last few years, we’ve seen quite a few players enter the space to disrupt presentations: Tome, Canva, Beautiful.ai and Gamma.
One product I’d like to talk about that I’ve really enjoyed using to create decks is Gamma.
Gamma
I first saw Gamma being used when I joined the SPC x OpenAI hackathon 4 months ago.
Finn Meeks was sharing how the weekend was going to be organized. He used a tool that made going through the different pages feel seamless as he was going through the agenda, final demo and prizes. I was intrigued. I wanted to find out more what this software was since you could easily flip through pages immediately in a webpage.
After having created a few decks with Gamma, I’m a huge advocate.
There are a few things I want to focus on that make their product interesting:
Gamma’s focus on increasing productivity
Gamma’s smart pricing and packaging
Gamma’s visionary appeal of going beyond decks, leveraging AI for the cold start problem
Gamma’s focus to increase productivity
Product managers, founders, investors, etc. Everyone makes a presentation to convince an audience to do something. That’s it. I want to influence you to think in a certain way and for you to make a conclusion to make a specific decision.
These are the different scenarios where I’ve made slide decks:
Product reviews for a key decision
Product launch results to deem whether a product was a success
Product strategy & roadmap for the beginning of the quarter
Pitch deck for investors to raise money
Customer proposal for founder-led sales and close a sale
Case presentation for a PM interview to get a job
Industry overview to convince general partners to invest in a new space
We’ve talked about how company’s either rely on written or visual persuasion.
For visual narratives, speakers use presentations and slides. A presentation is a visual support for a speaker to make a compelling point for an audience and convince them of their perspective.
However, the process is a long and windy road.
As a deck creator, the process to build the deck has been painful, and most of the time, this is how I go about it:
Phase 1: Research
Build an outline in words: consider the audience, my goals, and what competencies I want to highlight
Collect data and research, quotes: consider what I believe is persuasive for the audience
Create an outline: understand the key points you want to come across
Phase 2: Create a visual aid
Create the slides: ensure it’s cohesive, that it’s sequenced in a narrative and would make sense to an audience and figure out the visual evidence you want to share with the audience to convince them
Phase 3: Synthesize and practice
Synthesize: Cut out all the potential data and arguments that don’t hold up and ruthlessly focus on what’s most meaningful to an audience. A lot of the time, I’m cutting out up to 30% of what I’ve added into the deck after having created the deck. This is where I spent most of my banking days editing here and there, constantly
Practice out loud: Practicing out loud is nowhere the same as creating speaker notes. When I practice, I think about where to pause, what word to emphasize when I practice out loud. Presenting a deck mostly also means being a great orator and stand-up comedian that can take audience cues.
The process of slide creation and practice might take me 10-20 hours. Once I’ve mastered a specific type of review, it might take me a 1/4 of the time after the first 3 times.
Let’s say I start doing product reviews at a company I’ve just joined. The first time, it might take me 20 hours to prepare, but once I’ve been doing them 3-4 times, I might be able to cut it down to 5 hours of prep time.
The impact of the presentation going well is critical.
With Gamma, all steps can be short circuited and automated with AI. It’s crazy how simple of an experience it can become. Gamma simplifies the three core phases of presentation preparation.
Phase 1 Research
I love how Gamma solves the cold start problem for their users when starting the presentation creation.
The design is consumer-friendly, fun, with pastel colors, and does feel engaging with a user. What I’ve been impressed by is also their speed of execution. This is a product I’ve continued to see evolve since their public launch.
There are three ways to create a presentation in Gamma:
Paste in text from a conversation, draft or blog post
Generate a slide deck from a single sentence
Import a file. I love “import a file” format, because many times you might already have content ready but you just needed to translate it to a deck. This is no longer a blank page problem but rather a migration and translation challenge
Let’s assume I want to create a slide about the benefits of adopting a puppy.
Gamma will suggest an outline for me. Already, this is a big burden lifted from my shoulders, not having to logically reason how I frame the presentation as I run through it out loud.
Phase 2: Create a visual aid
Normally, I spend hours editing, summarizing, switching the ordering of the slides depending on whether how I think something will land and how fluid I believe the narrative I’m building is.
Figuring out what to edit in a slide can take hours and yet feel like there hasn’t been much progress with each word added or picture that has been replaced. Gamma reduces the steps of feeling like I’m spending so much time creating the perfect slides.
Gamma can immediately create the full slides and content with a clear focus on readability, simplicity with just 8 slides suggested for the full outline.
Nit: One minor thing that is tough is that the images generated just have that AI-generated veneer that don’t feel personable. I wonder whether they can prompt in the background for pictures that are more photorealistic.
Phase 3: Synthesize and practice
Finally, Gamma announced some new functionality this month, including easily being able to edit with AI. The user experience feels extremely smooth: 1. finding the edit button on the top left corner of the slide, 2. entering a prompt and 3. seeing a loading state as it updates the slide.
One bigger missing part of this is around preparing to speak around a slide deck. Gamma has a recent feature to create speaker notes. I believe that being successful in convincing an audience on a certain decision is 70% good public presentation skills, and that’s a lot more than prepared speaking notes.
I wonder if there’s a future product that could help give a speaker feedback as they practice.
Gamma’s smart pricing and packaging
Gamma has two pricing models: they provide credits for those that want to build a deck occasionally and a subscription model for regular users.
As a free-tier user, I used credits to create the slide deck. If I find that I am consistently using the product, I can upgrade to a monthly subscription (I can see the banner showing me I can upgrade on the Credits page). This freemium version allows me to easily get access and try the product before buying.
Credits are a great way to increase pricing in the future without tripping up customers on a price increase, being able to increase the pricing per credit or the number of credits versus tying the price of creating a presentation to a dollar amount. Another company I’ve seen do that smoothly and increase pricing per credit is ClassPass.
Referrals are also incentivized for users by giving users free credits for every referral who signs up. This creates a flywheel for existing happy users to refer friends.
Lastly, they are leaning into becoming a multiplayer collaboration tool for companies, with the “Invite a teammate” call to action. It remains to be seen how the pricing evolves since it seems like it’s still per user pricing.
One super impressive thing about Gamma is their financial efficiency. With 16 employees and 18M+ users, they’re already profitable. I give credit to their founder, Grant, who by chance, was also CFO at Optimizely. ;)
Gamma’s visionary appeal of going beyond decks, leveraging AI for the cold start problem
The impressive thing about Gamma is how much of a horizontal product it is. Business communication is required for any company where visual communication is critical, however it can be used by any type of customers, from founders, to product managers, to investors, to sales folks.
From a GTM perspective, horizontal products do need to invest in telling the story for the use cases the company is targeting. Challenges with horizontal products is not understanding the specific problem you’re solving for the specific customer segment (e.g. product manager, designer, founder, marketing professional, business owner) to reduce blank page anxiety and leaving a customer in the lurch of figuring out what problem they should be solving first with the tool.
There’s an opportunity to build out blogs to these specific personas to explain how the targeted personas to use the product and get them to sign up and create their first deck. Though another interesting GTM approach would be to have creators set up onboarding templates and explain use cases, similarly to what happened with Notion. This would reduce the cost of customer acquisition while providing more sticky net new customers who come through with high trust in the product that was recommended to them.
They can start leaning into their growth loop getting more of the slide audience to create their own slides in Gamma. Eventbrite had a similar loop where event attendees used Eventbrite to create their own events or SurveyMonkey had a final page when filling out a survey encouraging them to create their own survey. They are still getting good brand recognition by branding the free version decks as “Made with Gamma”.
Their company is clearly focused on product-led growth and getting users through word of mouth, and hopefully from people who see the amazing presentations and webpages coworkers and friends have created.
One thing that I’m curious to see evolve is their go-to-market and whether as they continue to sell to tech companies, whether we see more sales-led strategies. I feel like there’s a constant siren’s pull for any SaaS company to go upmarket and sell to enterprise companies. Even Notion, a company they’ve compared themselves to in their fundraising announcement, did the same thing.
Summary
If you’re required to create visually appealing and engaging presentations for your job, I recommend trying out Gamma. Reducing the barrier to getting started on a presentation has made it more compelling for me to use slide decks to persuade my key stakeholders on important decisions.
This is my referral code if you’re interested in trying out the product. No pressure.
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