The Moment That Changed Everything

To build a unicorn in a category already ruled by giants, you need more than a good idea — you need the kind of conviction that survives public humiliation.

Grant Lee, co-founder and CEO of Gamma, walked into a fundraising pitch in late 2020 with a vision to reinvent the slide deck — a format that had barely changed in almost 40 years.

The investor listened, sat back, and said words that would have sent most first-time founders packing.

“This has got to be the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”

Then the investor closed the call and disappeared — without even giving a chance to respond.

That moment could have killed Gamma before it ever had a chance to breathe.

Instead, it became the foundation of something extraordinary, a company that now generates over $100 million a year in revenue, serves tens of millions of users, and stands as one of the clearest AI breakouts of this era.

If you want to understand how to build a unicorn the right way — not with unlimited capital, not with a lucky break, but with brutal capital efficiency, deep conviction, and systems that compound over time — this is the blueprint worth studying.

And if you are a creator, founder, or builder looking to grow faster, tools like flipitai exist precisely to help you turn insight into action at speed.

Why Energy Is the Most Underrated Signal for Founders Who Want to Build a Unicorn

Before Gamma became what it is today, there were two ideas on the table.

One was a virtual office product called The Lobby — a digital space designed to replicate the feeling of being shoulder to shoulder with a colleague in a post-pandemic world where remote work had become the norm.

The other was a reimagined presentation tool, a fresh take on the slide deck format that had been the so-called language of business for nearly four decades.

Both ideas had merit on paper, and the team gave themselves six months to run both in parallel — not as a statistically significant A/B test, but as a genuine gut-level experiment in which idea actually deserved their time and energy.

The virtual office idea kept running into a ceiling — a nagging sense that no digital space could ever fully replicate the real thing, that the product had a natural cap on its potential, and that the excitement was always measured rather than magnetic.

The presentation tool was different — every morning brought ten, twenty, even thirty new features they wanted to build, and even in off hours, the mind kept pulling back to it without any effort.

That pull — that invisible gravitational force that keeps dragging your mind toward one idea even when you try to rest — is one of the most reliable signals a founder can trust when deciding where to place their bet.

When you are trying to build a unicorn, you will face fundraising rejection, customers who say no, team members who move on, and market conditions that shift without warning — and the only thing that will carry you through all of that is a genuine and renewable source of energy rooted in what you are building.

Metrics can mislead in early stages, but energy rarely lies, and Grant Lee’s decision to follow that energy rather than any spreadsheet turned out to be one of the most consequential choices in the company’s history.

For founders documenting and sharing their own journeys through this process, flipitai is a powerful platform to help capture and amplify those moments in a way that builds real community.

How Conviction Compounds and Why You Must Start Building It Before Anyone Believes in You

One of the most important mental frameworks for anyone trying to build a unicorn is understanding that conviction is not something you receive — it is something you construct, brick by brick, long before the market or investors catch up to your vision.

Before Gamma was officially a company, the co-founders were tinkering on nights and weekends — nobody was paying them, nobody was asking them to, and there was no formal team or structure around what they were doing.

They built a prototype not because a roadmap told them to, but because the act of building itself helped them develop a point of view — a shared belief that they actually had something differentiated, something that could genuinely solve a real problem in a way no one else had quite figured out yet.

Then they made a bold and deliberate choice — they decided to use that unfinished prototype to raise their seed round, abandoning Google Slides and PowerPoint entirely, betting that if their own tool could not help them raise money, it probably was not worth going all in on.

The first two conversations went well, the third ended in public dismissal, but the round ultimately closed — and each small win added another rung to the conviction ladder.

This is exactly how you build a unicorn without losing your mind in the process — not by waiting for external validation, but by engineering your own internal evidence base so that when the inevitable doubt comes, you already have something solid to stand on.

Conviction compounds in the same way interest compounds — it builds slowly at first, then accelerates, and by the time you need it most, it has become a structural part of how your team thinks and operates together.

The Truth About Early User Feedback and Why What People Say Means Almost Nothing

Early users will almost always tell you your product is great.

Friends will say it looks slick, feels smooth, and has potential — and then you will go back and look at the data and see that most of them touched the product once for five minutes and never came back.

The word “slick” is one of those tells — when someone uses a vague compliment that has no specificity attached to it, there is a reasonable chance they have not actually used the product in any meaningful way, and their feedback should be weighted accordingly.

What actually reveals the truth is usage — do people come back? Do they use the product for real work? Do they like it enough to tell someone else without being asked?

This is the signal that matters when you are trying to build a unicorn, because organic sharing is the proof of concept that no survey or user interview can manufacture.

The smarter approach to qualitative research is to ask users to talk through what they are seeing and experiencing in real time — not to ask them if they like it, but to listen for the language they use, the frustrations they name repeatedly, and the themes that start to cluster across multiple conversations.

In Gamma’s early days, users kept saying versions of the same thing: they struggled with formatting, they felt embarrassed by how their slides looked, and they had no design skills and no access to a designer — meaning their ideas always looked worse than they actually were.

That repeated language became a north star for the team, pointing directly toward the problem worth solving, and understanding it deeply became one of the core reasons Gamma was able to build a unicorn in a space where incumbents had grown complacent.

The 30-Second Bet That Changed Everything and Helped Gamma Build a Unicorn at Speed

With twelve people on the team, money running low, and growth plateauing after an initial spike, the team made a decision that looked reckless from the outside but turned out to be one of the clearest examples of how to build a unicorn through ruthless prioritization.

They gave themselves four months — and pointed every single person at one problem: what happens in the first thirty seconds of a new user’s experience?

Not the first week. Not the onboarding flow. Not retention. The first thirty seconds.

The logic was clean and unforgiving — if those thirty seconds do not wow the user, the next thirty seconds will never happen, and the chance that the user goes on to tell someone else about the product drops close to zero.

Every brain in the company went toward compressing the time-to-value into those thirty seconds, finding the fastest possible path from “I just signed up” to “I have to show this to someone.”

When SVB collapsed two weeks before the planned launch — with all of the company’s money sitting in a bank that might not exist by the following Monday — the team gathered in a single bedroom of the converted two-bedroom apartment that served as their office and made a decision.

They had worked too hard to pause.

They were proud of what they had built.

The world needed to see it.

And if the company did shut down afterward, then so be it — they were going to ship on the date they had set, and nothing that was outside their control was going to take that away from them.

That launch became the most impactful moment in the company’s history — a true inflection point that defined Gamma’s identity as a team, proved the resilience of the culture they had built, and set the company on the path to building a unicorn that now serves tens of millions of people worldwide.

This kind of decisive, outcome-focused momentum is exactly what flipitai helps creators and builders maintain — providing tools and community that turn energy into execution without the noise.

The Micro-Influencer Strategy That Fueled Viral Growth Without a Big Marketing Budget

When organic social content started performing well for Gamma without any paid promotion behind it, the team paid close attention.

Short-form content creators were posting about the tool on their own, their audiences were responding, and the numbers were moving — all without a single dollar of spend attached to any of it.

That observation became a strategic insight: when distribution channels follow a power law, the smart move is to double down on the channel that is already working rather than spreading budget across everything equally.

The decision was made to engage directly with micro-influencers — not through transactional campaign briefs or scripted ad reads, but through genuine one-to-one relationships where the creator was treated as a collaborator rather than a vendor.

In most cases, brands treat creator partnerships as purely transactional — a marketing team sends a script, the creator reads it, and everyone involved knows it is an ad.

The Gamma approach was fundamentally different — building real relationships with creators, onboarding them as actual users of the product, spending real time understanding their workflow, their audience, and what kind of content actually resonated — then co-creating something that felt authentic rather than manufactured.

To do this well, it was necessary to actually become a creator — to go through the experience firsthand, to understand what it takes to write a good hook, craft compelling copy, and earn an audience’s trust — and that firsthand empathy made every single creator conversation more productive and more human.

The lesson for anyone trying to build a unicorn in a crowded space is this: distribution channels that feel authentic outperform channels that feel expensive, and the fastest way to unlock authentic distribution is to stop treating your audience like a target and start treating them like a community.

Creators and flippers who want to build their own presence and grow their audience around their expertise should explore flipitai — a platform built specifically to help you monetize your knowledge and reach.

How Hiring Slow and Building Culture Is the Foundation of Every Unicorn That Lasts

At a stage when most companies at similar growth trajectories had hundreds of employees, Gamma was operating with sixty people.

That was not an accident — it was a deliberate and ongoing choice rooted in the belief that overhiring creates more problems than it solves, and that the quality of each person on the team compounds over time in the same way that conviction and launch muscles do.

When you hire too fast without clearly knowing what you want a person to work on, you end up creating work rather than executing on it — and the shiny object syndrome that follows tends to scatter energy across dozens of initiatives rather than concentrating it on the handful of things that will actually move the business forward.

Hiring slowly means constantly feeling behind, and that discomfort is real — but it also means that every person who does join has clear ownership, meaningful work, and the kind of context that allows them to make good decisions without needing to be managed at every step.

As the team grew from twelve to sixty, the hardest cultural norm to preserve was the fluid, frictionless communication that comes naturally when everyone can fit in one room — the kind of transparency that does not require systems because everyone is already in the room together.

The solution was not to try to recreate that informality at scale, but to build deliberate structures around it — weekly show-and-tell sessions, dedicated Slack channels, and a consistent bias toward over-communication across multiple formats so that the team always had the context they needed to do their best work.

The cultural value that runs through all of it is what the team calls creating your own luck — building the team, systems, and resilience needed to navigate the things that are completely outside your control, because those things will always come, and how you respond to them is ultimately what separates companies that build a unicorn from those that collapse under the weight of uncertainty.

Anyone building a team and trying to document those cultural principles in a compelling and shareable way can use flipitai to create content that reflects and reinforces the values that make their company worth joining.

Systems Over Goals and the Feedback Loops That Help Great Companies Build a Unicorn

One of the most common traps for early-stage startups is setting ambitious revenue goals for quarters that are still months away — creating a false sense of control over outcomes that are not yet within reach.

The alternative is to focus on the inputs and systems you can actually control — the feedback loops, customer relationships, and internal processes that reliably produce good outcomes over time even when the market is unpredictable.

For Gamma, that meant building a dedicated community of power users — called Ambassadors — inside a separate Slack workspace where the team could share new features before they shipped, gather real feedback in context, and maintain a living relationship with the people who cared most about the product.

It meant tightening the loop between idea, prototype, and user response — over and over again, in shorter and shorter cycles — so that every new feature shipped with some degree of user validation rather than purely internal assumption.

It meant asking not just whether users were completing onboarding, but whether they were sharing — whether the product was generating the kind of word-of-mouth that does not cost anything and cannot be faked.

These systems are not glamorous, and they do not generate the kind of headline-worthy announcements that go viral — but they are the infrastructure that allows a lean, capital-efficient team to build a unicorn without burning itself out chasing metrics that do not yet have solid foundations under them.

Every founder, creator, and builder who is serious about building something that lasts should be spending as much time designing their systems as they spend building their product — and flipitai is the kind of tool that helps you turn those systems into shareable content that attracts the right people into your orbit.

Launch Like You Mean It — How Repeated Practice Builds the Muscle to Break Through

The ability to launch well is not a talent — it is a skill, and like every skill, it compounds with practice.

The first Gamma landing page was full of clever language that nobody understood — terms like “the modern memo” that felt meaningful internally but communicated nothing to a person landing on the page for the first time.

Each subsequent launch refined the copy a little more, sharpened the positioning, and brought the message closer to what the user actually needed to hear — moving from abstract and clever to concrete and clear, until finally arriving at messaging that clicked.

A great product that cannot be communicated is a product that will never reach the people it was built for — and forcing yourself to go through the exercise of writing a landing page, crafting a hook, and distilling your vision into a single punchy sentence is one of the most valuable things a founder can do at every stage of building.

The launch muscle is built through repetition, not perfection, and every failed attempt teaches something that no amount of internal planning ever could.

Conclusion: What It Really Takes to Build a Unicorn in Today’s AI Era

Building a unicorn is not about having the best idea in the room — it is about having the conviction to keep moving when the investor drops the call, the resilience to ship when the bank collapses, and the discipline to hire slowly and build systems that compound quietly in the background.

Grant Lee and the Gamma team did not succeed because everything went right — they succeeded because they had built a team and a culture capable of navigating everything that went wrong.

The lessons here are not abstract: follow your energy when metrics are inconclusive, build conviction before you need it, listen for the language users repeat rather than the praise they offer, optimize the first thirty seconds before you touch anything else, and treat your creators and community like partners rather than targets.

If you are a founder, builder, or creator working to build your own version of something remarkable, start by surrounding yourself with the right people and the right tools.

Flipitai is built for exactly this kind of journey — helping creators and entrepreneurs turn their expertise, stories, and insights into content that grows audiences, builds trust, and creates leverage at scale.

And if you are a flipper ready to take your hustle to the next level, head to flipitai and start building the momentum that compounds into something worth talking about.

The world needs more people who believe in their ideas enough to ship them anyway — even when the bank is collapsing, even when the investor has already closed the call.

That is how you build a unicorn.

We strongly recommend that you check out our guide on how to take advantage of AI in today’s passive income economy.