Lessons from scaling Ramp

Sri Batchu, head of growth at Ramp and previously at Instacart and Opendoor, discusses how Ramp grew so quickly, including its growth team structure, tech-driven channel efficiency, and metric frameworks. The conversation also covers velocity culture, north-star and payback-period metrics, experimentation design, and hiring.

01Key learnings

• Sequence B2B growth roughly as founder-led sales, first salespeople, low-cost targeted marketing like content and community, then PR, with paid, brand, and SEO efforts following.
• Use early investor and founder relationships as a growth channel: getting influential operators onto the cap table can drive word of mouth among customers.
• Make every growth channel driven by technology and data, such as dedicated growth engineers automating sales workflows and improving prospect targeting.
• Give growth engineers ownership of pipeline and payback-period goals rather than only product metrics, so they choose high-impact projects bottom-up.
• Pick one or two simple north-star metrics and translate each team's metric into that common currency to make cross-team prioritization easier.
• Measure success with payback period on contribution margin instead of CAC or LTV/CAC, since LTV is hard to predict early and CAC can reward lower-value customers.
• Design B2B experiments to fail conclusively by maximizing the treatment effect with many tactics at once, since small samples make clean tests hard.
• Hire slower and use network or data-driven sourcing from companies one or two stages ahead, and reward top operators with disproportionately higher pay.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.