Head of Growth at Gamma ($100M ARR) Talks AEO

Intro What is the one leading principle that you would say gamma has around your GTM? Speaker 2 Identify things with the world hasn't identified. We grew 8X from ChatGPT. Referred traffic across all our channels at Gamma. AI mode is actually killing all the standard SEO practices. Speaker 3 When it comes to AO, how do you rank the platforms? Speaker 2 Reddit is by far the most influential. Speaker 3 And is Reddit by far the most influential only for GPT? Speaker 2 Reddit only works for ChatGPT and the playbook for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini are all completely different. My bigger thesis is that Lord will look more like Play Store and ChatGPT would look more like Google search. Speaker 1 The funny thing is, it feels like we're using ChatGPT to guess like ChatGPT. Speaker 2 This is the part that I hate is like people say, you know, let's put out spam content first. We are assuming that if AI is writing a content, it's going to be spam. If we are moving towards AGI and you know if these models can do coding, build an app, of course they can write an article and of course they can write a great article. Speaker 3 What does the future look like when it comes to growth? Speaker 2 I am more bullish about. What Is Gamma's GTM North Star? Welcome to the Distribution Podcast. We're with Ravish Agarwal from Gamma, and Gamma's been one of the fastest growing companies. So we're really excited to chat. We go really, really, really deep into AEO because that's been one of the channels that's been the fastest growing for them. Speaker 1 If you want to find out a bit more on how they got 100 million users are at 100 million in ARR profitably going to distribution where we talk everything distribution. So you lead the growth team at Gamma and Gamma is killing PowerPoint right now, right? You're using AI and solving the blank page problem, helping teams and individuals build like amazing presentations, right. I would say that in terms of the GTM world, gamma is probably one of the leaders in in tech, right? And you're playing in an even more difficult industry because you're going after the pros humor, not the enterprise deals, right? So there's a lot more creative involved. My, my first question around this would be, what is the one leading principle that you would say gamma has around your GTM? What is the the North Star that you're always searching for when you are, you know, going to market, getting users on board on the system? Speaker 2 You know 2 answers to this. I think one of the things that we discuss day in day out or in weekend is also one of our company values is don't be boring, right? So as you go out there, you know, put, put a content piece, you know, put anything out there, you know, try to be, you know, try to be not be boring, right? Because your PowerPoint as a tool can be really boring. Representations are generally associated with the boring stuff. So I think that that comes that comes a lot in our day-to-day discussions, you know, don't be boring. How can we go out and do this in the most exciting and the fun way of doing things when it comes to doing growth or, you know, bringing new, more new users, I think my personal approach has been to identify things with the world hasn't identified. So, you know, what are the channels that currently is something that you know, hasn't taken over or there is a lot of things that you can do. We were very ugly when it, you know, doing a or doing Reddit. We have just started doing chat GPD ads. So our like our principles around there is can we, you know, can we explore a couple of things which the world is also exploring and understand, you know, if this suits us, if, if, if it does, you know, what's the alpha, as you say, or, you know, what's the method to go about this? And I think that that's one thing that we keep going after. Speaker 3 Not being boring is easier said than done. Speaker 2 Of course, yeah. Speaker 3 It's like it's one of the most difficult challenges ever and you have to be so creative and do crazy stuff to like not be boring oftentimes. With that said, when it comes to Reddit and EO, you mentioned you guys were very early on. What did you guys do and how did you catch on that AEO and Reddit specifically is, you know, where nobody is really doing it. And now it's become common knowledge. Everyone's looking into that ad and it's selling so easily as like an agency service, right? What made you guys look into that? And then what's the next paradigm of that? Is that chat, GPD ads or what? How Gamma Caught on to AEO & Reddit Before Everyone Else I will start with the next paradigm. I think next paradigm is or is something that we all are figuring out together. I still feel that there is a lot of depth in in AO stuff as well. I think it's it's also about how platforms decide, I think today be a ChatGPT or cloud or perplexity. Like every one of them is giving a good organic discover. Like they're giving chance for organic discovery. If you put up a new website out there, you know, it gets really quickly crawled by any of these like, you know, ChatGPT cloud or perplexity. Like that's also the order, you know, the way they crawl and you know, you know, quickly index or site and do something. So it's also, I think it's it's what Facebook maybe was ugly back in 2012. You know, before, before they before they decided to pull back on organic reach and, you know, ads, ads became a thing. So that that's one thing like we don't know how these platforms, because these platforms are also fast. Really like when when you were ugly in Facebook days, you were still get three years time to, you know, build your organic approach and continue to do it like today, because things keep changing every three months. You know, tomorrow this platform leaders decide that hey, now you want to pull back on organic and you know, push something else. That would be a completely different conversation. But for now, I do believe that it's really deep and you know, all of these AI, you know, AI answer engines have also prompted Google to, you know, go more on AI mode and AI, AI mode is actually killing all the standard SEO practices, like all, all the growth peers that I talked to, everybody seeing click through rates on their websites falling and so on. So everything is in a flux and I and that's it. I believe that it's it will continue to be in a flux and that's where it will also be very deep. As you know, one of the biggest search engine goes into it. What led us to a was I was, I think just one fine day, I was just looking at Google Analytics to understand, you know, where the traffic is coming from. I saw that you know our traffic and this was click through traffic because Google Analytics cannot discover any other traffic. So our traffic from ChatGPT kind of increase, increase, increase and then it decreased somewhere in the middle of last year. So it was very surprising to me that in that period of like the traffic increasing, we grew 8X from traffic across all our channels at Gamma, you know we have never seen that growth. So that kind of caught my eye. It was very small part still like it was less than I would even say 1% of our part. So do not really felt like you know it's going to change something. But then we did two things. We started, you know we started tracking it in a different way. We like we are a SAS plat consumer company. So one of the methods that we rely on is Heidi Howard, how did you hear about us? And previously people were feeling that there was an other option and people would say, Hey, I discovered you from but you are perplexity. But we brought that in, add the face and a lot more people started answering. So we realized that, you know, while the click through traffic is less or it's decreasing, people who are self reporting continues to increase. And I tell this to, you know, to every people around it, like as a channel, it behaves like Google, but as measurement, it behaves like Facebook, like, you know, the whole a your stuff. If you want to go ahead, you would execute all the playbooks that it is required for you to come up in Google search. But if you're measuring, you should measure it the way you're measuring Facebook attribution, which is a lot of you through at that time. The common knowledge was, you know, LLM sort of picking picking up from Reddit. So we started doing Reddit and now, now Reddit is of course one part, but LLM have started to pick from LinkedIn, from YouTube. So you can do a lot of stuff on the existing channels and you might not get a lot of traffic from those channels, but you would be building, you would be building the core AU engine and you would be laying the foundation. So a couple of channels that now we invest on, we primarily invest more from an AU perspective than that particular channel perspective. The 80/20 rule: writing Content for Crawlers vs Humans That's what I was going to ask, right. So when you're building out for AEO, right, let's say we're placing a piece of content on YouTube, LinkedIn, what percentage of the thinking is I'm making this for a human treat versus I'm making this for a crawler treat? And then does it feel like sometimes maybe we're gaming the engines? Speaker 2 It does feel that we are gaming the engine and to be honest it it also don't feel good because you know, like if it's gaming then you know you're going to lose that advantage at some point of time. Speaker 3 They'll notice that you're gaming it and then they'll ungame. But. Speaker 1 Everyone's gaming it. So it's like game theory, right? You, you gotta game it or you're gonna fall, fall behind. Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. So yes, it's a kind of gaming I think for a couple of channels like we have initiatives where we say that this initiative is primarily for AU and then like we would see that initiative as 80% from a very agent for sort of crawler first angle. So we would want to have like let's take YouTube as an example, right? Whatever our headings would be is will Will from Proms or phrases that are being used rather than, you know, clickbait headline, you know, which will make humans click. So, so generally it's like I like all the AO stuff. When we do for a certain generally take an 8020 approach where is 80% is it's for the agents, for the crawlers, 20% is it for humans. Like if a human discovered they should not just feel like what the hell this is right? Like it should still be digestible. Speaker 1 Makes sense. And I guess a question on that one is right. Like if we look at the market, Google, I would say is probably the most sophisticated about picking up signals, right? That's why they built the the whole way SEO works is based on backlinks, right? Because they show authority, right? Are you feeling that GPT clawed they are looking at authority other than the platform you posted on. So for example, are they more heavily indexing things? If it has more views, more uploads, more comments, is it looking at those kinds of signals? Or is it just really looking at the content itself in almost a vacuum? Do LLMs Look at Authority the Way Google Does? In terms of websites, I don't think they're really looking at authority. So websites as as old as Forbes and maybe you know, your friends startup, I think from an EO perspective it's the same. It's more about content. And I think your friends startup would have more AI first content than what Forbes would have. Of course Forbes, you know, would come because they have authority and so on. But so I think in terms of website, I think authority is a very, very level playing field right now. I think everybody is starting from the same authority on other platforms. To be honest, I haven't seen a pattern like I've also tried to understand this, right? Like I've looked at our YouTube citations, right? They're getting cited for, you know, for a video that has four 100K views and also a video that has 18K views. So like there, there's no pattern as such. I think the closest pattern that I've been able to figure out is that are you being togged by someone else? And then are you being togged in comparison to something other? Like if it's going to be like it's just a whole listicle playbook, but yeah, exactly. It's the whole listicle playbook, you know, going on video. But are you getting togged in comparison with someone or like the video or the content should not be just about you. I think that's the that's the broader direction that I've been able to pick up so far. Speaker 1 OK. And just around that one again, one more question is how long do you think this is going to last, right? Because what is the playbook now? Does that mean just like spam content basically, or at least you know, put out as much content as you can and then do you think the the engines are going to start to count like fight that basically and start looking at views and likes and so on and so forth? And how much time do we have basically? Speaker 2 To be honest, I don't know how much time we have. I do feel that that's going to change. I think Google's update that came on May 21st, the search update, it did penalize a lot of website that was, you know, just posting content out there. So I think Google is definitely taking action. ChatGPT pulls most of its, I think, queries from Bing. So, you know, Bing Bing ends up acting differently on the content piece. I won't like you know, and this is this is the part that I hate is like people say, you know, let's put our spam content out there. I think there are two two wrong assumptions there. First, we are assuming that if AI is writing our content, it's going to be spam, right? I don't think so. I think models have become better today and with Fable 5 or even OS 4.8 and you can actually write content which is much, much better than human and you can actually, you know, do a much more research content. So I think that's the that's the first piece that I really hate about like whenever you know, like I also talk about AEO, people roll their eyes in the like, oh, spam content. So it's not spam, right. You have the, you know, if we are moving towards AGI and you know, if these models can do coding, build an app, of course they can write an article and of course they can write a great article. And I think the second one is, or do you include in that article, right? You can on one side, you can say that, hey, this is a glass of water and you know, this is this, this is that and so on. Or you can go deeper on, you know, why is this steel glass better than a plastic glass, right? And that is, that is upon you to decide like how deep you want that content to be, how meaningful, you know, content of you can always write, you know, five health benefits of using a steel glass as compared to, you know, just saying that, hey, this is grey, this is grey over again and again. So I, I think that's the second, that's the second idea that the content doesn't have to be thin. And all people assume that if AI is writing content, you know, let's just give it 5 keywords and stuff it and let it repeat. The content can actually be very and you know, and that's what I think LLMS would appreciate. I'm sure that, you know, as this scraped the websites like as LLMS are training scraping website, I'm sure there is someone who is looking at all of this index of content. And you know, just like Google, at some point in time we will have, you know, authority and relevancy and so on. But till then, it's an open field and you know, we we all get to take our shot. Speaker 3 It will all be. It's gonna be ever evolving in that sense. Speaker 2 Exactly, yes. Speaker 3 When it comes to. Speaker 1 The funny thing is, it feels like we're using ChatGPT to gaslight ChatGPT. Speaker 3 Exactly which model does it better? Speaker 1 It's like, yes, please write a content that is going to help fool you thinking that my product is more, you know, important. You know, the best part is if, you know, you're not fooling and you're actually serious. But yeah. Speaker 2 In a market years defence the labs are also using their own models to train next models. So I don't think exactly it's. Speaker 3 All it's all like that when it comes to like AEO, right? And what's been working for you guys? How do you rank the platforms? Like there's been Reddit has been YouTube. YouTube I know is like heavily picked up on when it comes to their transcripts, right? And then there's of course LinkedIn content and then other blogs slash articles, whatever. If you had to rank them in order of how you guys have built out your AU strategy, what would you say has been most influential? Ranking the Platforms: Reddit, Website, YouTube, LinkedIn & Claude I think Reddit is by far the most. Speaker 3 Influential And is Reddit by far the most influential only for GPT or for other? Speaker 2 Just for GPT. Just for GPT, yeah. And and that's a very good topic. I will come back to. They have a data deal. Yeah, they have a data deal. But I think people also keep selling good AEO, good SEO is, you know, good AEO. We will touch that. But I think what ChatGPT Reddit is really great. The second one I realized is your own website, right? The kind of content that you can do on your website, I think that gets picked up faster, that gets cited more. And you also, of course, have you know, control over how do you want your product to talk about, how do you want to talk about competitors? The code that I have seen is generally as a category is other people's website. So is it blog, is it PR, is it review? I think that's the third most important cluster. And to be honest, I'm always, always switching between 2nd and 3rd, right? Second could also be, you know, how other people are talking about you on, you know, the complete text or or Internet. I think that it did always between your website and all the other websites that are talking to you. It always switches between 2nd and 3rd. After that, I think is YouTube. After that, I think it's LinkedIn. LinkedIn is also very thin right now, Like you don't get a lot of citations. And to be honest, I haven't been able to see, you know, what's gets cited. It's more bizarre than what YouTube is. I think Reddit is much more predictable. I think people have spent six months across the world of, you know, important time of their life to understand, you know, what's what gets cited on Reddit. And I think as we continue to go ahead, I think we'll start seeing more patterns on what's happening on YouTube, what's happening on LinkedIn, what's happening on other platform. Coming back to what you pointed out, like Reddit and ChatGPT, I think Reddit only works for ChatGPT and the playbook for ChatGPT. Cloud Perplexity, Gemini or Google AI overviews are all completely different. They of course have some overlap. In my heuristic observations I have seen that there is generally 30 to 40% of overlap across all four, you know, LLM engines. But 60% is something that you have to do it different. And I think if you want to make sure that you are coming top in Google AI overview, then you have to play by SEO rules. And that is where you know good, you know, good SEO is good. AEO makes sense just in the whole Google context. In the ChatGPT context, as I said, 4020 to 40% of the playbook remains same. But then there are new things that you can try. Speaker 3 Like for GPT it's Reddit for perplexity it gives more authority to third party. Speaker 2 Exactly. Speaker 3 Sources, right? What about Clot? Do you? Speaker 2 Know clot doesn't cite I think the best way so clots like and then there have been a lot of studies it's all out there on Internet. I think that's the number of citations that cloud does is I think 5X lesser than ChatGPT and so on. The best way to be, I think to crack cloud is being clouds ecosystem, right? So create an MCP server, list your app there and so on. So yeah, and again, that's that's slow, right? Of course, you know, like cloud Anthropic needs to approve it. At least the MCP servers have evolved like like three months before you would have to download a zip file, do a local installation Today you can just paste a link in a remote installation through Oauth. Can, you know, quickly set up. It's just like, you know, connecting Facebook in olden days with any of your third party website. And I think it will it will evolve more. My my bigger thesis is that cloud will look more like Play Store and chargeability would look more like Google search. Speaker 3 I think it's a very good analogy, yeah. Speaker 1 I think we should for example just make an MCP. Speaker 3 For like. Speaker 1 Some kind of product we do just for the sake of having Claude pick us up as well. Can you rate and review MCP? They're gonna reduce it 100%. Speaker 2 Exactly. I think a lot of this, a lot of this will evolve, but I think the biggest constraint with MCPS today is that you still need to acquire user on your own, right? Like like if you have an MCP hosted on your website, Claude will not pick you like it, it won't pick you saying, oh, this has MCP, why don't you try this? You still have to do that heavy lifting where you have to tell your user, hey, we have an MCP connected with cloud, you can continue using it and so on, which I think gets solid. That's why I'm saying it will evolve as Play Store where earlier in the app, you know, the discovery happening through a Play Store or App Store wasn't, you know, the biggest, right, you would have to ask people to download the app. And then as mobile took over, right, people started natively searching on these places, right? You would go to Play Store and search for, you know, maybe a weather app or travel app. And you know, some mobile native companies came in, right? We, we know Robin Hood. Robin Hood is one of those examples, you know, very mobile native that that got picked up. So I think and that's where I think these new category of products will come in. When will they come in? How will they get adopted? Is is what we all have to see. Speaker 3 I've got another question. Yeah, For Gamma, when it comes to acquiring customers, how much of it is AU right now? Speaker 2 It's one of our top channels, right? So it is a channel which gets talked about and it's a channel that we can't ignore. Speaker 3 It is top of mind. Speaker 2 Top of mind, of course. Top of. Speaker 1 Mind, what is the directional growth of that Channel, right? Speaker 2 Faster than any of this. Speaker 1 OK. Speaker 3 And then when it comes to this AU, right, how is that AEO broken down? So it's one of the fastest channels for Gamma. You guys are one of the fastest growing consumer companies. So then which LLMS are chat GPD? What percentage? Speaker 2 I think it's north of 90% I would say. Speaker 3 GPD because every normal user just types on chat. GPD they don't even know cloud. Speaker 2 Yeah. So I think. Speaker 1 Consumers, right? Yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah. We have an MCP connector and people use our MCP connector. We have also launched it. So we have seen that once MCP connector gets built into cloud like we have seen good amount of usage, right? Because you say to cloud like you have thought about something with cloud and then like create a BPD and suddenly a gamma BPD is created, right? Because you are there in that ecosystem now. But I think a lot of new user acquisition is still happening from ChatGPT Perplexity is, is there Google, I think we haven't been very, I would say like top class when it comes to cracking the Google AI overviews. I, I also feel that I haven't paid a lot of attention because I wasn't expecting that, you know, it would move so fast. Like, as you know, the whole AI mode has come in now. Now I would want to invest more but HR GPT is way ahead. Speaker 1 So, so for prosumer brands, right? How would you rank the importance of the different LLMS, right? Number one is GPT. What would be #2? Speaker 2 I would say #2 I would still bet on Google AI overviews rather than perplexity, I think because if you do that correctly, you also have a, you know, secondary SEO factor playing in. And again, it's Google, right? So you still get a lot of distribution out out there. So it's then I would say Google AI overviews, then, then maybe I would say perplexity. And then I would say cloud because as I said, cloud will not help you acquired new customers. It can help you really retain customers or. Speaker 1 What if you're playing in the enterprise space, right? How would you think of the prior prioritizing? I, I know we're, we're guessing here, right? Because. Speaker 2 Very interesting. I think enterprise space, I would flip it and maybe I will say the first should be cloud because that's what I use. Yeah, because I keep talking everyday and if I'm searching for a tool, I'm searching for a tool there. So that's one. And I have no idea how to, you know, how to make sure that cloud is recommending you. The second I would say is copilot, right? Copilot Bing. I think that's also a very interesting piece. I, I haven't, I haven't gone much deeper into that space, but I have seen a lot of, you know, traffic coming to us from Copilot or, you know, under the whole Bing umbrella. So that that is big and. Speaker 3 Those are like massive companies, probably. Speaker 2 Exactly. So I think you get you get that distribution advantage and then I think everything else is the same. I would say maybe ChatGPT, Google AI overviews and then perplexity maybe would be last in that ranking. Speaker 3 Because you guys are getting so much phenomenal growth from ChatGPT particularly, and GPT is one of the most important sources is Reddit, what exactly have you guys been doing? Like what is the Reddit playbook then? The Reddit Playbook: Subreddits, Comparisons & Negative Sentiment I think 1:00 we, we have been doing different things on Reddit. We have our own community where, you know, people talk about, they ask questions and we have seen that in our own community also get cited. Like for example, how to export a presentation from Gamma, right? A lot of people are asking questions and you can export it to PowerPoint, you can export it to PDF as images. So that that's one good play. And as I said, like if you're participating in other communities, make sure that you are are talking in besides your other competitors or other players. So never talk the best way. Don't talk about, hey, gamma is great, right? How is gamma better than PowerPoint or how is gamma better than Google Slides is what gets you right with AU from a Reddit perspective. If you're just doing Reddit, then you know there are different approaches. I think we take a mixed approach to Reddit where our overall idea is to be on Reddit so that we can be up on search results. Speaker 1 How would you say is the like waiting of picking up things which are in your own subreddit versus on other subreddits? Speaker 3 Same question. Speaker 2 Yes, I still feel it depends upon the scale we are. We are still in the phase of building our own subreddit so our like content from our subreddit gets picked later. What I have seen is that generally it takes anywhere between 30 to 45 days for a new content to get picked up as citation from jet GPT. I think perplexity can pick up as quick as the next day if you are specifically, you know, searching that phrase. For example, turn your notion dock into gamma if you if you're there, I think perplexity will quickly pick that up. If you're starting up, I would say it's more important to be on other subreddits as compared to your longer. I think the longer term potential is building your own subreddit as compared to participating on that. Speaker 3 I've seen a Google AI overview also site in one day from Reddit. Speaker 2 OK, very interesting. I haven't seen that yet. Speaker 3 It was very niche query, but then I was shocked that Google picked something up in a day. Speaker 2 Got it. I think with niche query it's also that because it ends up showing on the search results at the top and that's why that's why it gets picked up. Speaker 3 I think so too. Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. Like the longer you go on the query, the you know. Speaker 3 It was a specific one, but I'm like, OK, it's getting faster and faster, right? The cycles. Speaker 1 What would you say or like let's go like really tactical with Reddit, right? I'm going I'm going to ask some questions you might not want to answer. So the first one there is how do we actually post on other subreddits without getting taken down? Because Reddit is a bit of. Speaker 2 A yeah, it's a tough spot. Yeah. I think think it from a very, very value oriented perspective. I think what we have seen is as Gamma, you can import a lot of things to Gamma and you can export a lot of things from Gamma, right? So we are not a walled garden and that helps us talk in compare like we can talk on a lot of other subreddits, right? Like, hey, I created a PowerPoint, but I actually created in Gamma and then exported it to PowerPoint. That's one kind of content that you're, you're not promoting Gamma, but you're seeing that, hey, you know, Gamma is a good and a faster way to make a PowerPoint quickly. And then, you know, this content can get picked up because if you go into a PowerPoint separated, people are trying to understand it. What's the quickest way to make PowerPoint? What's the quickest way to, you know, align three boxes, right? And that's, that's one way to you know, that that's a wedge for us as a tool to be a part of that community. So I would say that, you know, make sure that your tool is open like 11 good thing about us is our tool is open ecosystem. But can your tool support an open ecosystem? And then can you plug onto those conversations that is happening around those those ecosystems like for I think sales force or sales force could be good, right? If yours if you are building ACRM company and you can import from sales force, then it's it's really a good place to, you know, be in that subreddit. Speaker 1 Are you seeing things like literalistical type comparisons working on Reddit or are they? Speaker 2 Exactly the. Speaker 1 Top top five tools I've tested and then you put top five tools I've tested and then you list out all the different tools, you know, painting one of them as being, you know, favorable. And then you also kind of put that in the discussion and you want people to discuss that as well in the comments. Are comments picked up as well? Speaker 2 I haven't seen comments having meaningful impact in changing the direction of your discovery. So let's say if you're already getting discovered via Reddit or you're in ChatGPT. I think comments are more for sentiment I would say. But if you're, if you're thinking that, hey, I would just keep commenting and I would, you know, end up being on the top or, you know, my chargeability citations would increase. I don't think that would work. I think like my mental model has been the comments of the good sentiment sentiment way of, you know, looking looking at that chargeability answer. And to your question, yes, I think that is like a if you are play vanilla playbook, everybody knows it, right? People raise eyebrows when you say that here you are doing it. But for the good or for the bad, it works and you know it gets you there. Speaker 3 You know, it's funny, I've seen another presumer company I can't name, but they were also doing like a lot of Reddit marketing and one negative sentiment style comment just kept getting indexed and they could not get rid of that for several months. They did everything. So when it comes to Reddit, one learning is that like look, good sentiment is of course the goal, but bad sentiment you have to avoid at all costs because if there's a bad sentiment, LLM's have bias towards picking that up. You think so and showing them? I think so, no. Speaker 2 That's interesting. Like I always knew that, you know, comments are playing some role in sentiments, but I've never gone gone so deeply, you know, thinking that, you know, negative sentiment would pick up more or. Speaker 3 I that's a theory I, don't I. Speaker 2 Can't do it, but we're all. Speaker 1 Theorizing. Theorizing. Speaker 2 Theorizing here. Speaker 1 Taking the black. Speaker 2 Exactly, yes. Speaker 3 And then they did so much to get that comment removed and then eventually. Speaker 1 Guys new business idea it's Black Hat. Go and comment on any black prosumer reddit's post negative comments and then reach out index. Reach out to the company and charge like $3000 to remove your comment. Speaker 2 Oh God you are getting cancelled now. Speaker 1 Good, we're here to get cancelled and an interesting 1 is that you know, I guess let's Reddit getting indexed, you know, from stuff you post on Reddit is it is almost a 0 sum game because there's only you know, four or five references right in an LLM query. So you are effectively competing always against your competitors, right on Reddit, it's similar to, you know, SEO because there's only top three results, right and you're being always compared on backlinks basically. So, So what is the thing that the AI, the AI, you know the LLM will look at when choosing which one of the queries to to include in their citation from Reddit, right? What is ChatGPT looking at it? Are they looking at how extensive the article is? What's your thesis on this right? How do you stand out from the competitors? Speaker 2 I don't have a thesis on it like I I did think about it but I couldn't see any patterns. I think the only, the only thing that I could deduce from it is that like choose the competitors that you would want to talk about. And I think that's the best way to still be there. But at the same time, you know, not really get bogged down by. So for for example, you can like you can always talk about that, Hey, our tool is open, right? You can use MCP when connected to SAP and you can export and so on. But hey, this XYZ presentation tool doesn't let you do all of that. So like you can just choose, you know who, who do you want to place yourself against and then then, then accordingly, you can play that game. Speaker 3 To translate that a bit, I think what's been happening on Reddit is that for a lot of companies, you don't want to do AO for them, right? So by mentioning competitors, you don't want it to act in their favour. I agree. So it's very, it's like a game. Speaker 1 But my perspective on this one is more around the fact that, you know, let's say, let's take another like companies example. Let's take like CRM companies, right? Let's say, you know, add to your hubspots, Salesforce, Sugar, right? They're all doing Reddit marketing, right? And they're all putting out a lot of content there. How does, and then, you know, there's a general query right, on ChatGPT. What's the best CRM system out there? How is ChatGPT going to decide which one of the Reddit posts is going to pull? Right? Because Google decides based on backlinks, right? Maybe also not not anymore. Really concentration of keywords on the page, more like the length of the page, you know, the kind of the depth of the content. What are these, these like LLMS, tragedy PT looking at when they're deciding what to index and site on Reddit? Because The thing is, no one is going to be doing this in a vacuum, right? Like I'm sure you're going to have your competitors, you know, competing with you in this domain as well, right? So how do we compete with them? How do we beat them? Speaker 2 As I said, I, I really don't have a very strong thesis on it, but I would say is that what you can do is instead of saying what is the best CRM, what is the best CRM for SMB? What is the best CRM for fintech? What is the best CRM for health tech? I think can you go there? And that is where you reduce competition. It's, it's also like the SCO playbook, right? You cannot come at the top in best CRM. So can you start by going, you know, going slightly, I would say niche, like, you know, best CRM for healthcare. And then you might end up ranking you, you will get some topical authority and relevance from there. And then you can try to take another shot at, you know, like being up on best CRM results. I think it I would think it is the same way like I would maybe like if if I'm doing CRM and you know, it's a competitive space, right, How much can I niche down and can then I do like best CRM for salespeople in health tech. Speaker 1 OK. What happens then when your competitor starts niching down and just following? Speaker 2 You keep moving, that's what growth is, right? That's. Speaker 1 What growth is you gotta look for the output and and actually on that one is how similar is it to SEO where you have to consistently be putting out content right? Is it a one time and done thing? No. The Half-Life of a Citation Or you just gotta be always. Speaker 2 It is ever on running engine. You have to keep keep doing it. I still don't have a formula on. You know what is the lifetime of a citation right? Like I've been like, I've been thinking a lot about, you know, what is the lifetime of a citation? We have also, we are also tracking a couple of citations. We know that when we get cited, but we don't know when we get removed from citations or when does that citation, you know, loses importance. Like it's like, I don't know if you have, if you remember, you know, early in college or in science school, you, you would have read about carbon dating, right? There's a half life of everything. So I think they don't like my bigger theory is there is a half life of citation. And I, I keep thinking about it. What is the half life of citation? Can I say that, Hey, my citation will only exist on Internet for three months. And that's like whatever value I can get in that three months is, is all that I can get and it won't matter. Which means then every three months I will have to come back and make sure that as I get removed from that particular phrase keywords prompt, right? How do I make sure that I'm ranking again? Speaker 3 Again, it's so it's an always on engine. I think also every LLM is different when it comes to half life. So it's like. Speaker 2 Up for the graphs, yes. Speaker 1 What tools are sorry? What tools are you using to track? Speaker 3 It's like you guys are profound customers, yes. Is that helping you track the half life? Speaker 2 No. So what we it, it isn't like what we are doing is we are just manually tracking on an Excel sheet, you know like this got cited here and then we are trying to look at its citation share and do we see a change in citation share somewhere down the line? Speaker 1 So product idea or feature idea for profound. Speaker 2 Is half life half life citation? Speaker 3 Exactly. Speaker 1 And I would also like the interesting thing about what we're discussing here is we're always discussing the front tier right, of marketing, GTM and all of these different channels. So if anyone has insights like please DM us, please write in the comments, right? Let's, let's talk about this because we're trying to learn as well, right? We're putting our thoughts. Speaker 3 On and you guys are hiding. Speaker 2 We are hiding. I am hiding. Like if you have a alpha on Reddit, you know, just just write to me. You can find me on Twitter. You can find on me. Like give me, give me, you know your hottest take. Tell me you know where I'm wrong. Where have you seen something else? And yes, you know, we would like to. Speaker 1 Have you on? We should make a group chat called Marketing Alphas or GTM alphas. Speaker 3 Another question is getting more tactical than Reddit. How do you guys decide which subreddits is worth investing in right? Like which subreddits do you guys see any content on? And then what's the good way to see that content? How do you talk about it? And how much do followers of a subreddit or like weekly active visitors of a subreddit matter? Speaker 2 Because gamma operated on a certain scale, the last question is very easy for us. Like we do not go at any subreddit like which has, for example, thousands or 10 thousands of active users or members, right? Because we know that that is not going to impact us at the scale that we are playing. So, but if you're starting up just now, I think you know, that's a fair game too. We have we have thought about subreddits from 2. Perspectives 1 is a very ICP perspective, right? Where is a sales leader, a marketing leader, a founder going and looking at the next content or content for themselves? And then the other is, I would say the problem universe. For example, there are decks being talked about or creative generation being talked about. And so for example, in first case the subreddit would be, you know, SAS right? In the second case, it could be PowerPoint or Canva. So these these are the two approaches that we have taken on discovering, you know which sub ready to go after. Speaker 1 Could I challenge something you said? However, you said that you're not going to be looking at the smaller subreddits, right? But if this is a primarily AEO action, right? We're thinking about AEO here. Isn't AEO going to still pick it up even if it's smaller subreddit? Speaker 2 I think it will and it might makes you know, it might make sense from a longer term, but then I would want to focus on our own brand subreddit on the longer term, so I won't disregard that idea. Yes, I think we should spend some time on doing smaller subreddits. In my view of all the citations that I have seen, I have never seen a citation from a subreddit which I would not know existed in this two universe. And I don't think Reddit communities also don't grow like Instagram channels, right? They don't go viral suddenly the next month or three months. So I think things would like they grow step by step, month by month. And you know, I think you will dis like if you're too deep into Reddit, if you're doing it day in day out, you will rediscover that, you know, one of these, one of these places is where the conversation will is happening and you will go there. So I would like my answer to that challenge would be I think there will be a certain threshold after which it will become important and. Speaker 1 There's not going to even pick it up if it's in a small. I haven't seen for everyone that applies. Actually, it's not just even bigger. Speaker 2 Companies, I think we are also very big categories. For example, presentation is a very big category. So you're any anything that we talk about also as a very big subreddit, and it's a very horizontal thing, right? We were talking about in our PowerPoint Canva, which again has millions of 1,000,010 millions of users. So these subreddits are already bigger, but I think it would be an interesting play to see how things in health tech are getting picked up. Are they getting picked up from smaller subreddits? Speaker 1 Maybe the way the AEO works and these LLMS do it is if it's a broad topic they're going to be able to find it in the bigger subreddit so they don't bother digging. Speaker 2 Maybe. Maybe if it's a? Speaker 1 More niche topic. Then they have to actually start digging. Could be maybe it's a question of compute efficiency basically for this. Speaker 2 Could be. Speaker 3 Have you guys seen any dirty plays by competitors? Speaker 2 We do have seen, you know, some like dirty plays, for example. We have seen a lot of copycats coming up, right? So sometimes people like, sometimes, you know, people really just spin up a website that exactly looks like gamma, you know, has a similar landing page like gamma. They would also user name and they might end up being on the top. And sometimes users, users would confuse, you know, OK, you know, this is gamma, this is gamma, Both are gamma. Which one is the right gamma? We have seen that happen. Speaker 3 And how did they get indexed? Speaker 2 They they do like let some of them also, you know, just build a website and run ads, right. So that is also happening if they're figuring out how to tackle that. They generally don't show up on organic, but they end up showing quicker on paid. Speaker 1 You know, when we're talking about the different places the content is getting picked up, you mentioned LinkedIn. Are we looking at LinkedIn post LinkedIn articles? And then the next question from that is how is X being indexed by the LMS? I guess like Grog is probably indexing X quite a bit, but not many people use Grog, right? Speaker 2 Let me go back and look how X is indexing. I have never noticed X getting indexed. Yeah. Speaker 3 I haven't seen X. Speaker 2 Yeah, but like, I think you're correct, right? Because if you search anything on Google, X do come at the top. So X ideally should get indexed, X content should get indexed. Speaker 3 I haven't seen it. That's the thing. Even if. Speaker 2 You search the news, you would see X coming up right? Speaker 3 But not LLMS. Speaker 2 Yeah, I haven't seen that, but I would, I would love to maybe go back and check because I have never thought about it. It's a very good thing to go back and see in my console, but I've I've never seen X or I've never heard about XI think on LinkedIn. It is still difficult to say. I've seen both getting indexed articles as well as posts. I have also seen them indexed like I've seen these pieces of contents either being an article or a post, you know, not coming from an influencer or you're not having them one of the most engagement like you would you would feel that, you know, something that is getting indexed might have, you know, 500,000 likes people are commenting on it, but I even haven't seen that button. I don't think it's too early for, you know, like they're in the earlier phase of LinkedIn content getting generated. So there is there's yet something to get evolved there. And I would love to understand from the audience if they have seen anything particularly interesting with LinkedIn content. Speaker 3 What do you think of Discord? Will Discord ever be picked up? I feel like it's one of those again, what companies might get into in the future. Because credit is what? Discussions, Online community discussions. Discord is one of the other hubs for these discussions. So as LLMS try to get more data, deals, etcetera, do you think Discord can ever be indexed? Speaker 2 I think before Discord Instagram will get indexed and it's already getting indexed. Yeah, right. Like Instagram is started coming on search results and I think it will end up getting indexed before like my biggest bet would be on LinkedIn and Instagram, you know, influencing search results over the next 6 to 12 months because that's also very like I see it from a very user generated content perspective. Like, you know, where is, you know, new user generated content coming up, you know, get getting some reputation in some way. Like I'm like a discord content doesn't get reputation. Like, you know, you don't have AI know you have a word, you have a comment, you have reactions, but still, it's not a very structured content to pull from. But I do feel that Instagram is that like, you know, you can explain, you can explain a new concept and suddenly it gets to indicate like, so both LinkedIn and Instagram has those classic user generated content plus a reputation of that content. And I think that will get picked up. And that's what has happened with Reddit, right? Reddit is a place where you get the most unfiltered content, most true content. So as this universe gets expanded, I think we would look for more content which is not available out there. And where is that content coming from? Speaker 1 What about Cora? Speaker 2 Quora is getting. Quora is still getting indexed. Speaker 1 Yeah, I. Speaker 3 Think that. Speaker 1 Was the big one in the start before even right it wasn't it. Speaker 2 Yeah, it I think it Quora got left behind, but it's still important. Like if you have exhausted Reddit, you should move to Quora. Medium is another like Medium as well. Yeah, Medium is also getting indexed a lot. Speaker 1 What about sub stack? Speaker 2 Sub stack. Sub stack is getting is also getting indexed, but I think with sub stack it's also that it is a run by journalist or you know, people who are in the media. So they they generally prefer it gated then not gated. So I think has more gated content that that is why it's not picking up. But medium is picking up. So so is Quora. Like I haven't seen Quora influencing till now. But yes, it definitely gets sighted. Speaker 1 OK, interesting. And I mean, if we think about like, you know, this PLG motion, right, this word of mouth motion, I think the tool out there which was the most influenced by it was probably a calendly. Do you remember when that just grew insanely? I think they went to like $300 million in revenue. Speaker 3 Powered by Calendly. Speaker 1 Yeah, powered by Calendly. Or you know. Speaker 3 And you guys do powered by Gamma of course, like in the. Speaker 2 Yeah, made with gamma. Made with. Speaker 1 Gamma made with gamma. But yeah, like Calendly was one of those products that, you know, every time you send your Calendly to someone now it's become a verge. Do you have a Calendly even though you're using cal.com? Yes, yes. So it's really interesting if you can get that PLG in a product. Speaker 3 The other thing is since most of your growth has been a year related in the last few months especially or you know more bottom up portions, what was the campaign where you guys flew 4000 drones over San Francisco? Like how do you guys choose to do stunts like that versus, you know, the company that you guys are going bottom up? Speaker 2 I think one thing that I really like about Gabba, and if you look at both of these things, that underlying factor is you let ideas breathe. You let people you let people do things that they are most passionate about, and then you trust that the best works get done. So I think when the idea came in first, I think it sounded very bizarre. But, you know, I think, you know, the founders, the leadership has done really a great job in, you know, letting some of these ideas breathe and, you know, some, some of them see the light of the day and, you know, gets talked about. We we also have so, so many more crazy ideas coming. But yeah, at the center of it is that, you know, can you let ideas breathe? Can you let ideas improve? And then can you trust the team to throw something out and then see what happens? Speaker 3 How do you differentiate go to market versus distribution, those two keywords? Speaker 1 Do you differentiate them? Speaker 3 Because we often get confused, like we need different definitions of these. People have different opinions of these. What are your perceptions about them? Speaker 2 I think for like go to go to market for me always sounds like AB to B side and distribution always sounds like AB to C like and that could be just me, but like I've always associated GTM with, you know, business to business distributions, distribution with, you know, with primarily consumer. I also feel that I think distribution comes from supply chain, maybe comes from, you know, all the seven CG companies which are also maybe, you know, different consumer companies that that's how I differentiate. Of course you know both. Both could be the same, both could be different. Speaker 3 Makes sense. I'm curious, what do you think about that? Speaker 1 I I try not to get lost in definitions. I try to just drive sign up. Speaker 2 That's a very safe answer you. Speaker 1 Can call it the pink pony as long as you're driving sign ups, right? I think. I think at the end of the day right number one thing is like correct sign ups from the correct. Speaker 3 People yeah, reading from my research, there seem to be two different games when it comes to AEO is retrieval mode answers right? Which is like browsing AIO views where fresh content is better and better and then there's LLM's actually memorizing content right? And this can bring us back to the half life discussion of content. When it comes to this memorization mode, the model resides from its training data. So that data is the same data until a lab retains a new model. Do you have different playbooks for these both things in AEO and have you thought about this? Retrieval vs Memorization: Two Different AEO Games I have definitely thought about this. I think Reddit content is more about training data. So if you're like any Reddit intervention is about training data, I don't think it's it's going to get sighted. And even if it gets sighted you, you know the click through would go to Reddit, not to your place. So I see Reddit intervention as a training data. Third party blogs or R blogs is something I see more like sighted data or you know, people who would, you know, LMS would bring this into our ecosystem like our product ecosystem. I also feel that one of the very important things that have started playing a role is also memory. How a lot of these engines today are in a tools like Profound actually run prompts without logging in. But an average user is always logged into LGBT or cloud or Google. So it matters you know what has been referenced before and if you are playing in the same landscape, then you know what gets referenced again. So I think that I think training data is important for that memory and referencing. I think there there is some study where it says that chargeability queries web for 60% of the queries and you know gives answer for from its own knowledge from 40%. So this 40% is where training is coming from and you know you're doing, 60% is getting picked up from web where you have a chance to influence. Speaker 1 There is a first mover advantage here because if you moved quickly on AEO, right, you would show up in people's queries and then those queries would be loaded in memory and then you'd re show up again basically. So would you say that? Yes. Speaker 2 I do yeah, I do think that and I think that's going to and that also brings that back to, you know, what would relevancy an authority look like in a LLM domain. And like we we have seen like when GPT 5.5 got rolled out to free users, we we saw a jump in, you know, people coming through click through from ChatGPT. And our biggest this is there was that I think GPT 5.5 had more memory component to it as compared to previous models. And when, when it got rolled out to, you know, free people, we saw a lot of traffic coming from developing countries because it was like the farthest it was roll out was to developing countries. So I think memory would play far more important role there. I, I don't know how it will like, it could be that, hey, I have already recommended this, you know, this brand or this article or this citation to this person. So I should do that again. Google AC also works in a similar way like that link that you have clicked shows up slightly at a better ranking as compared to what you have seen it before. I would see something would happen here. Again, all of this is a black box. We don't know where it will head, but I'm very promised, like I'm very hopeful about it and I have seen promising results with the gamma when it comes to memory influencing discovery. Speaker 1 I think it'd be really interesting to have this conversation again, maybe in like a year. Speaker 2 And. Speaker 1 See how like your channel's velocity and channel distribution changes and then also how does the black box evolve maybe by the next time we're having this competition. Speaker 3 You know, completely different ChatGPT. Speaker 1 Will you know Sam Altman will have watched this podcast and stopped us from gaming the system? Speaker 3 Yeah, who knows? Speaker 2 I feel that when, when we were like, if, if we are going to have this conversation next year, it would happen in either of the extremes, right? Either this channel would be dead or, you know, like it would be skyrocketing and we would still be talking more about depth. I don't think it will be somewhere in the middle. Speaker 3 What happens is anytime there's an asymmetry, anytime something is working, all the tech companies will abuse it once it's done all right, Maybe some companies will definitely have first move advantage where you know they're getting to abuse it for way longer. But then once everyone catches on, the models have to evolve and adapt so that their model quality of their actual responses are off quality and not game. Thus starts the new paradigm, of course, that that that is what it is. What is, while on this topic, what is the future look like when it comes to, you know, growth? What are you, what is something that you're taking like a bold bet on, right? Anything experimental you're looking out like one year from now? Or are you just adapting as things move on? Speaker 2 Both sides but I I'm more bullish about agent using your product and you know, maybe creating account on their own or maybe doing a checkout. Checkout is still far fetched, but is your product agent first, I think it completely makes sense in developer tools. You can see it today, right? Can cloud code auto install your, you know, your package and you know, get it out there and use like I, I do code coding using cloud code and it it uses five other tools that even I don't know and I don't care about like I simply trusted to, you know, install the important libraries that are out there and get the work done. I think that would, that would become more mainstream in other knowledge work as we, we are seeing cloud and it would become more and more important is, is your product being used by agents? And, and like I want to move towards that direction where I don't have a very good mental model of, you know, how it will evolve. I have a couple of my growth friends who have actually tried experimenting where they have said that we would give for example 10% extra reward to the model if model ends up signing right away like there like. Speaker 1 You're negotiating with the model. Speaker 2 Exactly. Speaker 1 Where are you putting that text? Speaker 2 I think it I think you're putting, you're putting it in your Jason schema and you're also putting it I think in your install package or something like that, that if you do it right now, you're going to get this as compared to this. Speaker 3 That's next level gaming, I love it. Speaker 2 Yes. So I think there are a lot of this work really being done by a lot of good teams out there. I haven't done, in all honesty, I haven't done a lot of work on that, but I am particularly excited. Speaker 3 That's very insightful to be honest. Speaker 1 Actually a quick question. I've got 2 questions here. 1 is is the growth on a genetic usage faster? Is there a bigger gradient than it is on human usage or not yet? Speaker 2 I don't think so, I think. Speaker 1 For gamma specific. Speaker 3 Gamma no way I because. Speaker 2 Yeah, this actually is a presentation to people, present to other people. Speaker 3 And plus, when GPT, for example, I feel like this is the conversation that they will have when Clod is dominating over GPD because that represents a more sophisticated user base in my opinion, right? So that's when these sort of agents, because right now think about the population of the world which is even using agents. Speaker 1 Yeah, so. Speaker 3 Very tiny. Speaker 1 And the question is how do you market to agents? Speaker 3 That's the next I'm guessing though. Speaker 2 Yeah, I think that that is going to be I think the part will go through AU because fundamentally what you're doing is marketing to agents. I did looks like a very level 0 or MVP version of marketing to agents. If you, you know, if you're doing all your interventions in AU, it will, it will evolve again. I haven't spent much time on it's very interesting topic for me as well. And I would love to spend some more time. Speaker 3 That could be like a dedicated hire whose ROI will come years later, but you're seeding all of that in like information for LLMS now. That's very interesting.