Running GTM at Gamma: Choosing Customers, Setting Prices

Questions I Get Asked a Lot as a GTM Consultant

I’ve been running GTM strategy at Gamma since February 2024. My job has been connecting product to market, and coordinating the work across product, sales, marketing, and customer success teams. Today I want to talk about the customer selection and pricing design decisions I’ve worked through in that process, along with what I think matters most when I’m consulting. I’ve also included a seminar video below where I shared this experience directly.

When I searched LinkedIn for GTM-related job postings in March 2026, I found listings across a wide range of industries in the US. In Seoul, postings with the exact same title were much harder to find. That said, search results vary by region, search terms, and timing. Korean companies may well be doing the same work under different job titles, so you can’t conclude the role doesn’t exist just from the number of postings.

What actually concerns me isn’t the missing title — it’s the gap in accountability. Product sits with the product team, customer acquisition with marketing, contracts with sales — but it’s often unclear who’s checking whether the whole process actually leads to real purchases and repeat purchases. This is exactly the gap I want to use to explain why GTM matters.

Looking at the fragment, I compared it carefully against the Korean source. The translation is accurate, no Hangul remains, no numbers to check, and structure (headings, image) matches exactly. Only minor smoothing needed.

GTM Means Setting Market, Price, and Sales Motion Together

GTM stands for Go-To-Market. It refers to deciding and executing which customers get which product, under what terms, and through what channels. It combines marketing, sales, and product strategy, and the team and title responsible for it vary by company.

I break this work down into four questions.

• Which customers, with which problem, do we approach first?
• What do we offer them, and at what price?
• What path does a customer take from learning about the product to buying it?
• What do we measure to check whether our assumptions were right?

A single deal has its own value. But you only get grounds to scale the business once you confirm you can sell the same way to similar customers again. For a subscription service, you’d look at renewals and cancellations; for a one-time product, at repeat purchases or uptake among other customers.

Along the way, the goals of the product, marketing, and sales teams need to line up. For instance, if marketing has driven up sign-ups but the customers sales is meeting don’t have budget to buy, the first thing to review together is who marketing targeted in the first place.

Elsewhere, some companies use titles like GTM Engineer, who apply technology to automate customer discovery and the sales process, or set up roles like RevOps, who organize the data and operations across sales, marketing, and customer management. These scopes can overlap, but they’re not all just new names for the same job.

In my experience, for a GTM lead to coordinate across teams well, it helps to sit directly under the CEO or under a Chief Strategy Officer. If you only handle requests from a single department—sales or marketing—your job can end up being reduced to pulling data rather than setting overall strategy. What this means is you need the authority to weigh in on pricing, target customers, and product improvement priorities.

Customer Selection and Pricing Design I Experienced Firsthand at Gamma

When I ran GTM strategy at Gamma, what mattered most to me was identifying customers who had a real reason to pay a premium for presentations. The customers I’m describing here as the focus of this strategy were strategy consulting firms and government and public institutions — a different scope from the story of the company’s entire user base.

These customers cared about document formatting, information structure, and the ability to download files and share them internally. Whether the product could accurately populate a fixed template, and whether it could be used immediately in existing workflows, shaped their purchase decisions. A competitor showing off flashier output didn’t automatically solve these requirements.

Among the customers I dealt with, some kept using the product even as prices rose. The choice of the team plan and the Ultra plan, priced around $90/month, can be understood in the same light. If it cut down the time spent creating and revising materials, customers judged that the cost was worth paying. You can only explain pricing once you know exactly what work a customer does and how often they do it.

At the time, I ran this work centered on GTM, without a dedicated marketer. We’d first define the customer, then align the features, pricing, and sales motion needed for that customer. This experience is precisely why I emphasize GTM in this piece.

The company’s overall performance can also be seen in its official announcement from November 2025. Gamma announced $100 million in ARR, profitable operations, roughly 50 employees, and 70 million users. It also disclosed a $68 million Series B round and a $2.1 billion valuation. According to the company, its early-stage funding before reaching $100 million in ARR totaled $23 million.

ARR is a figure that converts recurring revenue — such as subscriptions — into an annualized rate. It should be distinguished from revenue already recognized on the books for a given year, or from revenue that is guaranteed going forward.

To me, Gamma’s case stands as proof that you can only translate a product’s value into pricing once you understand your customer’s work. That’s why, whenever I look at another product’s GTM, I first check who actually uses the output, what friction it removes, and who ends up paying for that benefit.

Three Things Meeting Rooms Alone Can’t Tell You

I call it “conference room syndrome” — staying stuck in internal discussions without ever testing things out in the market. This tends to cause trouble in three areas specifically: customers, pricing, and early reactions.

First, you need to define specifically who your customer is. Take an AI meeting recording and summarization service as an example — not everyone who attends a lot of meetings is the same kind of customer. The product and sales approach will differ depending on whether recording and external transmission are even permitted in a given environment, who approves the purchase, and how much accuracy the record-keeping requires. Institutions with legal recording obligations are also worth considering as customers, but you’ll need to check security and procurement requirements separately for them.

Pricing also needs to be part of early validation. Saying you like a product is different from deciding to buy it at a given price. Rather than settling on a price at the very end, I think it’s better to propose a price for a reasonably complete set of features and see how people react. This process lets you examine PMF (Product-Market Fit) — whether the product actually fits what the market needs — in much more concrete terms.

That doesn’t mean you can never change the price once you’ve set it. As you learn what problem customers are actually trying to solve, what alternatives they currently use, and what their internal budgets look like, you should adjust the product and its price together.

Early reactions from people you know also need to be read with some care. It helps when friends, family, and followers use your product. But whether they signed up to support you personally or keep using it to solve their own problem are two very different things. Don’t judge based on sign-up counts and compliments alone — check return visits, actual usage, and whether they pay. Even feedback from acquaintances is useful if it concretely reveals a problem your target customers actually have.

How Coupang, Slack, and Zoom Sell

Coupang made delivery a core part of the buying experience. According to the company’s own account, Rocket Delivery launched in 2014 with direct, next-day delivery, and later expanded into same-day and dawn delivery. Promising customers a specific arrival time requires fulfillment centers, inventory, and delivery operations to work in concert. I see this as a case where marketing the product and actually delivering the value were designed together.

Slack’s 2019 S-1 filing describes a model that combines free usage with direct sales. A small team tries the product first, and as usage spreads within the organization, the sales team steps in to support broader adoption and paid contracts. It’s an approach that addresses both the experience of everyday users and the requirements of the people who ultimately make purchasing decisions.

Zoom’s 2019 S-1 filing shows a similar connection. Someone invited to join a meeting becomes a user who then hosts their own meetings, and if they need additional features, they choose a paid plan. Depending on customer size, the company blends online sales, direct sales, and partners.

What I want to highlight in these cases is how value gets delivered to the customer. You have to concretely design the points where product and revenue connect — operations that guarantee delivery, usage experience that spreads within a team, participants who become paying users. I consider this one of GTM’s most important roles.

Oswarld’s Lens

As a data specialist, I try to keep signup, usage, and payment metrics separate. Monthly active users or download counts show interest and engagement. Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), ARR, and churn rate in a subscription business show the flow of people paying and choosing to stay. No single one of these tells you the whole state of the business.

If recurring revenue is growing but the cost of acquiring each customer is growing faster, or if losses widen the more the service is delivered, that’s a problem. So you need to look at revenue alongside the cost of acquiring and retaining customers.

As a GTM consultant, I want founders to make full use of the chance to meet and validate customers domestically first. When working with Korean customers, it’s easier for me to check reactions in a language and work environment I’m familiar with. That lets me correct assumptions about the product and the sales approach.

So for any product that can be validated with domestic customers, I recommend a strategy of first building experience generating recurring revenue in Korea. If you go overseas without being able to explain why customers buy and why they keep using the product, it becomes much harder to trace the causes once the language and distribution structure have also changed. Whether the reasons for purchase you’ve confirmed domestically also hold up abroad is something you validate afterward.

What I find disappointing about Korean startups is how consistently they push market validation down the road. There’s plenty of talk about vision and product, but actual customer purchase decisions often go unchecked. Whoever owns GTM needs to turn that conversation into execution around customers, pricing, and sales channels.

If the product isn’t selling well right now, start by revisiting why the most recent prospect you met hesitated to buy. What you do next will differ depending on whether they didn’t feel the need, the price didn’t fit, or they got stuck somewhere in the onboarding process.

References & Further Reading

• Gamma founder’s account of how the company grew, November 10, 2025.
• a16z, Investing in Gamma, November 10, 2025.
• Lenny Rachitsky’s GTM interview with Vercel COO Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, November 30, 2025. Note that the public preview and the paid content cover different scope.
• Peter Thiel, Zero to One, 2014.

Below are seminar recordings drawn from my own experience. You can watch the cases and Q&A discussed in today’s issue alongside them.

• Seminar video 1
• Seminar video 2

The author is Oswarld (Kwangseob Ahn). Current roles: Adjunct Professor at Sejong University, Strategy Consultant at INLEVEL9. Career, research, books, and recent work are kept current on the About page. Latest · July 2026: HEMA-2: A Consolidation-Aware Tri-Memory Architecture with Multi-Channel Scheduling for Lifelong Conversational AI.