George Bonaci
Appearances
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I think the way that you find alpha is either by doing things that no one else knows about. I think another aspect is probably doing things that everyone is convinced will not work. I think a good leader needs to know how to do everyone on their team's job, but poorly. And I think the poorly part is important. eschew more junior.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Yeah. So I think the person that was ultimately like the DRI for an experiment, the person that also hopefully scoped the experiment, they should write the post-mortem. They really need to be clear on number one, did we run the experiment well? Or did it fail for some reason that we could have avoided? I think like outside of did we scope the experiment well?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
It's did we learn something that could be generalized to other aspects of the business? I think that's an important aspect to have. And then I think like the third most important component is just making sure that the right cross-functional stakeholders are there. So the folks that can learn from it, the folks that can prevent the failure in the future.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I think that's maybe like the third most important aspect of a postmortem. But beyond that, like the structure, I don't think actually matters that much. It's going to be very company dependent.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Yeah, I'm a Google Doc person. I think the DRI should write it up. They should send it out in advance, at least like 24 hours in advance. People have time to like think about it. But ideally, like I'm more in favor of a live conversation rather than add some comments, have a conversation in the comments in the doc and then like have a maybe more boring live conversation. So I'm big on live.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Yeah, a really tactical example was we were doing some very basic A-B testing on our homepage and we saw that a red button by far outperformed anything else. Now, red is like as a button is generally like a bad idea. It has a negative connotation. It's like something is wrong and don't hit the red button.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
But we couldn't ever find anything that outperformed on a pure A-B testing basis like that red button. Now, it turned out when you actually went and looked at the data by segment, although it outperformed in general, it's severely underperformed for like the enterprise segment. It's like a great example of like Simpson's paradox.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
When we took that information and like removed that from the web team and applied it to the content team and apply it to everyone else that was using the red button as a best practice, that was like incredibly valuable because most of the content we were generating was for enterprise. Most of the webinars we were generating were for enterprise.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Like most of the direct mailers we were sending were for enterprise. So what we were actually doing by saying, hey, red is the best button or sorry, the best practice was actually like decreasing the performance of all of these things we were doing that were specific for the enterprise segment.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
That's a good question. I think my personal opinion is I think growth should be independent. I think like the growth team's mandate should be to figure out how to grow the business. And that should be more than just marketing. It should be more than just product. It should mean that like you have the mandate to do whatever is the highest leverage. To me, that means you probably should report to
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Honestly, that's one of the reasons why I love Ramp is the growth team reports to one of the co-founders. I think some companies have chief growth officers. I think other folks have growth organizations that are more like SWAT teams and kind of roam between different parts of the business. Ultimately, it does depend on the business, but I think they should be as independent as possible.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Yeah, I was stealing alpha from investing terminology. What's your unfair advantage is maybe a better way to put it. That is the key to being a good growth team. You've got to figure out something that is not saturated and that other people ideally are not doing. I think the way that you find alpha... is either by doing things that no one else knows about, either most likely because it's so new.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Like think about when TikTok first came out. I don't think any B2B brands were thinking about advertising on TikTok. I don't think there even was advertising on TikTok when it first came out. But the folks that were really ahead of the game, they're like, eventually there'll be advertising on TikTok and it's going to be totally saturated with consumer brands to begin with.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
But eventually there'll be a B2B opportunity. And when they were the first ones to run those experiments, they probably had huge returns. So anyway, doing things that I think folks don't know about is like one aspect. I think another aspect is probably doing things that everyone is convinced will not work. I remember first suggesting we try direct mail like years and years ago.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And it was like, why would direct mail work? Like junk mail to people's homes? Like that absolutely won't work. And it became like one of our most successful, like biggest channels after like a few iterations. So I'm happy to chat about where you find these things, but you've got to find them.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Yeah. I think this actually is a good segue into like, how do you just learn in general as a member of the growth team or someone in in a company in general, I would say that there's three areas. Like you can learn academically. You can go read a book and learn what's worked for other companies or other growth folks or companies in the past even are great aspects of being able to learn.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
So learning academically is one aspect. I think you can also learn from your peers. So you can go and learn from folks at other companies, growth people at other companies, I think that's a great area of finding alpha. Granted, probably not the best unfair advantage since someone else knows about it. But I actually think the most interesting is to go and learn from other niches.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
So other verticals, other geographies, especially if they're tangential to what you're doing. A great example is WhatsApp. WhatsApp as a marketing channel is not huge for most brands or most companies in the United States, but it's massive in a lot of international regions. And I think like, great, could we go try like WhatsApp instead of sending emails? It'll probably fail.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
But again, if you're doing enough of these experiments, you'll find something that works that no one else is doing.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I think it does, but it depends how you look at it. So, yes, there are playbooks that you can just take and copy and paste. There are also playbooks that you can look at and think critically and adapt. And then there are playbooks kind of come up with from scratch. I think a lot of academic learning is taking a past playbook and adapting it.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And like the example that always comes to mind for me is in the world of attribution and marketing. So like media mix marketing. Oh, sorry. Media mix modeling or marketing mix modeling, depending on who you talk to. MMM. Everyone's talking about it now is the best way to do attribution, blah, blah, blah. That's a really old concept.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
That's like from the old like Mad Men style advertising days in like the 1950s and 60s. So I think that's a good example where, hey, you could actually go and look at how did they measure the impact of ads in literal newspapers before anything was digital back in like the 1950s or 60s?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And how do you actually adapt that playbook or that methodology to modern day like digital advertising or modern day digital marketing as a whole? There's probably a million examples like that. Actually, direct mail is probably another example of that. There are so many.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
So what did you see that no one else saw? No one else was doing it and it was incredibly scalable. Like that was pretty much it. The fact that no one else was doing it, it's like, okay, that's interesting. We should try it. But the fact that if it works, it'd be incredibly scalable.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And the fact that you can run it with very large sample sizes meant that we could run a lot of experiments in parallel and learn really, really quickly. Like there's very few channels where you can go like, hey, tomorrow, let's go reach like 200,000 people. Direct mail, email, those are like kind of some of the only channels that would allow you to do something at that scale.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And that's run a lot of experiments. What is no one trying today that you think is interesting? I don't know if I can give away my secrets, but I think the honest answer is like on the B2B side. And I don't think this is super cutting edge, but influencer marketing, maybe like a year or two ago, this would have been a little bit more cutting edge.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
But everyone's always thought of influencers and user generated content, maybe to get more specific as more of a B2C tactic that worked really well. I would argue that works just as well and maybe even better in the B2B world, like especially if you're moving up market, moving to enterprise. Yeah, there's definitely unfair advantage there, but it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Yeah, it goes back to the portfolio. I think that you have to be okay with the fact that most brand marketing is a long-term bet. It's high risk, it's high reward. At least that's how a growth person probably thinks about it.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I think if you're seeing all of your core direct response channels start to saturate, then it's something that you have to start doing. And the assumption is that investing in brand is going to do one of a few things. It's either going to make folks that have a problem and are aware they have a problem aware of you. And I think that's how probably most companies start thinking about it.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
But the more interesting aspect is like true demand generation. It's like, hey, there are people out there that don't realize they have a problem. And brand marketing, like instead of being like, hey, try XYZ product or try XYZ company. It's like this problem exists. Like there's actually a better way. And of course, like we're the better way.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
But that I think is like a much more interesting type of brand marketing to open up like demand for a new part of the market that you aren't able to reach with traditional channels.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Yeah, I think if you're doing things right, the concentration will change. It's almost like when you find something that works, if you do a really good job of saturating it as quickly as possible, you will be by almost definition, like really concentrated there, at least for a period of time.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I think hiring for potential, especially early on in the business, is far, far more important.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
It's really how quickly you can diversify and stack different bets and different wins so that you're not concentrated for too long of a period of time. But I think concentration in and of itself is not a bad thing. It means that you're doing a good job maximizing an area.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I think communicating the way growth thinks about things is probably like more important than like what specifically they're doing. As long as everyone's aligned that like the growth team's job is actually aligned with everyone else's in the company, which is like we need to be successful. Like growth team's job is not to make anyone happy. It's to make the business successful.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And that might mean like for a period of time working really closely with product or really working really close with product marketing or some other element of the business.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
But really, they should recognize and growth should be able to communicate that we're bringing a unique skill set and unique point of view that hopefully is complementary to their skill set and their point of view, but ultimately the same goal of making the business successful.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Yeah, I would always skew more junior. I think hiring for potential, especially early on in the business, is far, far more important.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I actually think it would be a mistake to hire someone more senior, like if you're series A. Hiring a really smart generalist that can think in terms of first principles and that can think logically in terms of solving problems is probably more important than anything. What background do you find is best? Yeah.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Unless you're trying to solve a very specific problem and you have a really high confidence that this is the right problem to solve, I would not hire a specialist or someone with a traditional marketing background. I think hiring someone that has demonstrated they can think logically and they can do math is really, really important in the early days.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
So that might be engineers, that might be ex-finance folks. It might be an ex consultant that hated consulting and like really wanted to stick with something long term and get their hands dirty. I think those make generally the best first first growth hires. But really, you should just be trying to assess for potential, which I think is a combination of like, can they have vision?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Can they kind of see areas where they can go? Like, can they acquire new skills really, really rapidly? And are they like internally motivated?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Yeah. If you've been at a company, especially a company that's an order of magnitude or larger or bigger, for more than a few years, it's just really hard to then change your mindset and go to a smaller startup and think about how much you have to get your hands dirty and how differently you need to think about things.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I think if you've been at a much, much larger company, you're going to tend to think more in terms of playbooks and rely more on your past experience than on what you can learn from others or what you can learn from maybe like other geographies, other companies or other peers. So going from playbook to first principle thinking is generally difficult to do.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I personally like stayed away from that type of profile.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I think if you're able to do some sort of back channel and some sort of test in that first interview, that is going to be like the most valuable, highest signal thing you can do.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I, both, so exactly both. If you're like a series A startup, it's probably like finding the best talent and hiring, convincing the best talent to join your company is generally gonna be really hard. I assume most people have probably never heard of most series A startups.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And in that case, yeah, the best folks you're gonna be able to hire are going to be like referrals, warm intros, that sort of thing. So getting some sort of back channel information from the person that is hopefully connecting you is I think like actually the first step of the interview process. I would argue the second should be some sort of case study or some sort of take home test.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
You can do the case study live in the conversation with them just to see how they think about things. But I don't think it would be a bad idea to go from warm conversation, get to know you, kind of selling you on the opportunity in the business straight to a take-home test. So the first call should probably be about selling.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And hopefully you're selling based on the referral that you just got, the very strong referral you just got. And then the second stage would be, okay, let's assess.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Yes, make it as real as possible and make it quantitative. And actually, maybe the third thing I'd say is understand what good looks like before you send the test out. So a great example is I like to just take a Salesforce dump or a dump of data and be like, hey, what's the best campaign? What worked best here? What were the best leads? Whatever it might be.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And if it's real world data, it's going to be really messy. Like there's going to be a bunch of tricks they have to catch. There's going to be a bunch of mistakes they have to figure out. Duplicate leads or the dates don't align or missing data or whatever it might be. So I think like that itself is like, can they work with real world data is I think a really interesting question to answer.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And then the other is like, how much of this did they think through? What was their thought process? How quickly were they able to adapt? How quickly were they able even to do the tests? Did they ask questions about it? All of those, I think, are signals before you even see the output to understand, are they at least thinking about things in the right way? But the real world is messy.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
They should work with real world data.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
They should at least meet some other members of the team. Like ideally, you want this to be a mutual fit, like both culturally, but also they want to work with the people on the team. The team wants to work with them. So I think there's still value in doing a panel, but it's almost more culture fit and more team fit more than anything.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
But ideally, you are scoping that test that you send them so you know if they can do the job.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
It's generally been hiring a generalist that, hey, this isn't for me. I don't want to do this after all. I've never done this problem or I've never done this job before. Now that I'm doing it, I really don't enjoy it. I want to go and get back into investing or I want to do like X, Y, Z. Honestly, I think it's difficult to assess for that.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And you just have to acknowledge that like no one, even the best person hiring is still going to make a lot of mistakes. And that's that's OK. Probably what's most important is just being as transparent as possible, both in terms of the opportunity and then in terms of how you're being going to be assessed and also just being transparent. Like if this doesn't work, that's fine.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Like we've all had jobs before. We're all going to have jobs again. Like that's OK.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I wouldn't say they were destined, but I think you can be suited for it. Like if you spend the last five jobs and 15 years in a certain stage of company, I think it's going to be difficult to adapt your way of operating, way of thinking to a different stage of company. Having said that, I mean, I don't think anyone in particular is like destined for a certain stage.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I think like if you're very, very hungry and you're a self-starter and you love just doing a little bit of everything, it's like, OK, you're probably going to do better at like a seed or series A stage company than like a hundred thousand person well-established business. But that might change over time and that might change as they gain more experience or do different things.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
The goal of growth is to figure out how to grow the business. And usually early on, that's very top of funnel focused. How do you figure out how to get more leads? How do you figure out a channel that works and is repeatable and has predictable outputs given some inputs? And the honest answer is no one really knows. Every business is different.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
By most companies, no, I don't. I think that like philosophically, they're like, yes, we want to invest in people's learning and development. I think they even believe that that's true. But like actually doing it is really difficult. Like it takes time. It takes resources. You have to be intentional. It has to be top down.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I think Samsara actually had like a great model for this. The CEO and founder, like he was very big on learning and very big on reading. And I remember like one time he was hanging out in like the cafeteria and like, what do you like to do in your free time? Like, I like to read books. And so as a result, you saw how that permeated throughout the culture.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
So I remember they launched something when I was there called Leadership Principles. And everyone that was a leader within the company got a big box shipped to their home. And it had literally like 15 books in it. And they're all business books. And the expectation was that you read one of these books every single month and then rejoin a conversation with other peers.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And this is all organized to discuss like one of the principles in these books that Samsara wanted you to embody. And then there was like an element where you actually then have to go put it into practice and demonstrate you're putting into practice. Like to me, that is a great example of being very intentional about, hey, we value learning and development here.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And we're going to add a structure and we're going to add accountability to it to make sure that you are not just learning things, but putting it into practice. That took time. That took a lot of investment. That took really it coming from the founders.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And I think like a lot of companies maybe sometimes get caught up in the day to day and they say, hey, we value learning, but go figure it out on your own rather than coming up with like a holistic program or holistic mechanism like that.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I don't think business has actually changed that much. Tactically, sure, maybe it has. The channels, TikTok didn't exist 30 years ago. But I don't actually think business and being a good manager in particular has changed that much or the skills necessary to be a good manager have changed that much. A great example is like the book, The Goal. Like I'm a big fan of that book.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I have some recency bias because we reread it recently. But one of the key concepts in that is like the theory of constraints. And now this doesn't have anything to do with management. But the concept of the theory of constraints existed 40 years ago and it still exists today. Like every team is operating with some bottleneck in their process.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And being able to identify that bottleneck and remove it is a very valuable skill for anyone, but it's especially valuable for a manager. That's how you get the most out of people. That's one of the core jobs of being a manager. So that's just one example.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
So even if you understand from past experience something that's worked... Usually just taking that one playbook or that one tactic and copy and pasting it to a new company generally doesn't work. And I think that's the tendency of a lot of marketers.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Like I would argue that most business books, as long as you're vetting them well, and as long as like you are being intentional on what is the principle you want to pull out of this and have your team put into practice, there's probably something that can be learned from from almost any book, regardless of how old it is.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
The biggest bottleneck is probably the velocity of experimentation. Like there are so many opportunities. We don't have enough time. We don't have enough resources. That's probably like if you zoom out far enough, that's probably the constraint for most businesses.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
There are a lot of things I would just like to get off the ground faster. When you're reliant on external parties, either like external vendors or external lead sources or other legal teams to review your terms and services, things just go much more slowly. I wish that there was a way to speed all of that up.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I think that Ramp actually does a really good job of saying like, let's optimize for speed. Just accept those legal terms. Maybe not necessarily, but let's figure out a way to move as quickly as possible and just like launch it and test it. And then we can figure out the details if we're going to actually scale it up.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
It's a great question. A good leader. I won't even say just manager. I think a good leader needs to know how to do everyone on their team's job, but poorly. And I think the poorly part is important. They should know how to do the job so they can step in if they need to or so that they're dangerous enough to ask the right questions.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
But if they know how to do the job better than the people they've hired, then they didn't hire the right people. And it's going to lead to micromanagement. It's going to lead to, to your point, filling in gaps that are not the most effective use of their time.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
So when I say that growth is mostly just science, I mean that you kind of have to come in with a blank slate, form a hypothesis, and then run a bunch of experiments. And you'll be surprised about what works. You'll be surprised at what doesn't work. But ultimately, if you run enough of those experiments, you'll find something.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
So being able to, number one, either learn enough of what your team does so that you can do it poorly, or number two, hire people that can do what you need them to do better than you know, I think is kind of the key.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
First 30 days, it's learn the business. It's learn the team. It's learn like your area of domain. I would expect in the first 30 days, you know how to do your job. And that's pretty much it. And you understand how the company operates and how the company makes money. Like I think a strong foundation is actually understanding how the business works.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I think this again goes back to the investing and learning. I think the leader needs to be incredibly detailed in what those first 30, 60, 90 day plans look like. who you're meeting, what you're doing with your time. Actually, this is something I learned from Samsara as well. I remember my first 30 days were written out in excruciating detail.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I think the first two weeks were completely scheduled out to the minute for me. And as a result, it was also very clear to understand if someone was learning and picking things up. And it was very easy to compare folks if they were given the same structured onboarding. So I firmly believe like the first 30 days is like you learn the business and you learn the job.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Now, beyond those 30 days, like you should be able to start showing like some sort of step change impact, start having some ideas, start making things your own. And then by 90 days, you should be starting to actually show the fruits of those new ideas and the fruits of like that new experience that you're bringing, a new perspective that you're bringing.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Should you always go for early wins just to get points on the board? If you see the opportunity, yes. And there should be the opportunity. You were ideally hired because you have some skill set or some unique perspective or there's some gap in the business that you're filling. So there should be some early points on the board you can put up.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Having said that, if someone is not able to put up points on the board, you should understand why and if they were set up for success. And if they were not, you should move that as quickly as possible. But there are some roles and there are some problems that do just take time to solve. And that's where the, okay, how can we scope this down and run an experiment to validate?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Are we at least on the right track is important. But there are some aspects or sometimes where it is difficult to put early points on the board. George, how fast do you know if someone you hired...
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
isn't good enough oh yeah i think you generally have inklings in the first couple weeks but you should give some people the benefit of the doubt like you should run some sort of str and i guess this is why structured onboarding is so important um and this is why making sure people ship things in their first week is so important you actually can assess them based on facts versus just vibes or feelings but you generally have some sort of vibe or feeling in the first week or two
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
That's usually lost on a lot of marketers because they don't think in terms of experiments. They think in terms of like, what do I know and how can I apply it here? Is that because of the profile of person that they are that they don't think in that way? It's probably partly the profile, but it's also partly just like how you think.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Do you know what I find really hard?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I think the number one reason is it was on the manager. It was a mishire. They didn't scope the role effectively or the role changed. The needs of the business changed and they hired the wrong person, the wrong profile. I think generally managers try to come up with like a laundry list of skills that they want to hire for and they try to find someone that checks most of those boxes.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
But that's almost the easy way to do things. I think the much harder way is to get really, really crystal clear on what is the one thing that we need? Like what is the one skill or trait or piece of experience, one problem we need to solve? And hiring someone that you have high confidence can do that or fill that gap versus check a bunch of boxes.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
So not getting clear on that, I think, is the number one reason why you would miss hire. And that's mostly on the manager, if I'm being honest.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
In that example, I think it's hard to find alpha if you're just having AI go find the opportunities for you. Having said that, I think AI is tremendously changing the role of growth.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
It could be personalized, but almost by definition, that's just going to give you incremental gains on things you're already doing and things that has data on. I think like to get real advantage, like maybe we'll get to this point at some point soon, but I think it's hard.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Have the AI go talk to like 50 people in the industry and like synthesize what they're doing and apply what they think is going to be relevant to your business model and your ICP and like go apply that. That sounds really difficult to do, at least at the state of AI today, but maybe not in a year. Who knows? Tooling wise, does it change much? Yes, 100%.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I remember a few years ago, I was such a strong advocate that everyone on the growth team needs to be technical. They need to learn SQL. They need to learn Python. They need to learn how to work with a growth engineering team very, very closely. I think AI has upended that. You don't need to be nearly as technical as you used to. AI can help you write the code.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Like I think the type of person that would go and become a chemist like me or an engineer is probably very different than someone that's like, hey, I want to become a writer or a
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
It can tell you other ways of doing things. Even just in that element of who I used to have a bias for hiring, it's totally changed.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
It's a good co-pilot, for lack of a better term, for both of those roles. I think that on the creative side, it can help you think about new ideas and help you brainstorm. On the performance side, it can help you analyze the data and maybe be more efficient or move more quickly. You've got to choose which one helps more. Here's my bias. I am not super creative at the end of the day.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I'm not a creative minded person. So I think it helps me a lot more.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Or maybe it helps uncreative people more is maybe what I'd say. The number of times that I've had chat GPT just be like, how do I make this better? How do I add a joke in here? What are some other like visuals I can do? What's a good analogy for XYZ? I wouldn't have been able to do that on my own. I would have had to go to someone on product marketing or content and be like, hey, I need some help.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I want to get into comms or PR, like very valuable skills, but very, very different from the way in thinking or way of thinking that would make someone successful, like scoping an experiment and thinking about like what my hypothesis is and how I'm going to measure results. It's just like a different part of your brain. Like I would be a terrible writer, for example.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Yeah. I think it's like most things, you just have to have a better product and you have to have some plan for distribution. I think that having a better product probably solves like 80, 90% of the battle. But you also need to think about how you're going to distribute that product and like what your unfair advantages in distribution.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And hopefully that's where the growth team comes in and where they can provide value. But I do think it's mostly on the product.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Absolutely not. No. I'm a marketer at the end of the day and I'm a growth person. That is antithetical to everything we stand for. There are some products, sure, where like, yes, it is so amazing and the word of mouth was so strong that they did build it and people did come. I think that is so out of the ordinary and leaves your fate so much to chance that that's not a good approach.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Hiring for experience because they don't know any better. Like, we don't know how to do this. We'll hire someone that does. And it should be we should hire someone who doesn't? It should be like, we should actually assess for, hey, how do we determine what good looks like? And how do we test them for it? And like, could someone figure this out?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Could someone on the team figure this out rather than hiring experts?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
They got to figure it out. Like, I think that's where the learning comes in. Like go talk to other, go determine, let's, I'm going to make this up. Like you're trying to figure out how to do cold calling. Maybe this will work for us. Maybe it won't. Go identify 10 companies that do cold calling really well.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Go talk to the people that built that infrastructure and built that system, et cetera, et cetera.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I think that's why I'm such a fan.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
It is probably honestly something on the influencer side of things. I don't think most people think of it as a growth channel, but influencers absolutely is, at least on the B2B side. Can you do influencer at scale? That's the hard thing. That is the fun problem to solve. I think you can. I think you treat it almost as a outbound funnel.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
It's like, go make a list of the 10,000 micro influencers or folks that could become micro influencers and go do some skilled outbound to them, figure out a process that works. Like you can solve almost any problem in that way. But short answer is yes. What's the most polluted channel today or overrated? Paid search. I think everyone goes to paid search because they have to.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
But I think like in the very, very early days, you have nothing that works. Sure. It's like table stakes, but it saturates quickly. You're paying a tax to Google. I think paid search is like relatively uninspiring of a growth channel that will scale long term.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Oh, man. I think like very, very early on, it was event sponsor. Like at very small companies, it's event sponsorships. Like go exhibit at Dreamforce or something like that. Like it feels like something you have to do because everyone else doesn't. It's like just a waste of money. You're in a sea of other companies and no one's paying attention to you.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Like that money would be better spent figuring out some guerrilla tactic to stand out. Or honestly, probably be better spent on paid outs. We do a lot on events. I think we're at a very different scale though. And we do things a little bit differently. It's not just like go exhibit at an event. It's also like get a speaker slot, do some out of home advertising around it.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Make sure we do like outbound emails immediately after. It's more than just like, let's get a booth in a corner of the conference hall because it was all we could afford. And let's hope people come to us.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Exactly.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Exactly. And that's why I think it changes depending on size. Like when you're a series A company, like most events, depending upon your go-to-market motion, most events are not going to be high ROI.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
It's a good question. I think like direct mailing gifting was one that we could have actually even attempted even earlier when we were at Samsara. I think that there's probably unfair advantages to be gained in like display advertising. Like display advertising is so inexpensive right now, but it's not measured well. And most people think of it in terms of like direct response.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Like if someone, no one clicks these ads. So like the response and the ROI is not very good. But the reality is like figuring out how to serve the right number of impressions with the right message into an account or into a contact actually does have a halo effect. So there's definitely an advantage there. But solving and solving for that advantage is probably dependent on how you measure it.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
So I would say display advertising is an opportunity. What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months? It's a good question. I would say it's very much brand advertising. This is something or brand investment in general.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
That is a good question. The short answer is it has to be both. If you're doing a good job, and it depends on the stage of the company, but in general, if you're doing a good job, you're thinking in terms of different time horizons. So you have to have some like bucket of bets or experiments that are going to be those like big swing, huge step changes and impact.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
think this is something that gong did really really well uh they were willing to invest in things that elevated the brand even if it was completely unmeasurable even if it was something that like we would never be able to measure but you saw that in the fact that like you saw that in the inbound numbers and how big of like a channel like inbound was for gong because they invested in their brand so much and
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And I think that it doesn't make sense when you're a very early startup and you don't have that type of resource. But once you reach a certain size or scale, if you're not investing in brand as part of your long-term horizon or long-term bucket of bets, then you're going to screw yourself over in the future.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
But which company were you like, that was smart? It's usually the non-traditional stuff. So like cold calling, I think a lot of people thought cold calling is dead. And like cold calling is like a tremendous channel for a lot of companies because it is hard to do. Door to door, I think is something that's really interesting. And I've been thinking about this for a while now.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
The medical devices space is interesting because a lot of their sales and a lot of their marketing or sales is door to door. And I think there's actually now that folks are moving more back into the office and working from offices again, I think there's probably an unfair advantage to having a true field sales team that goes door to door and brings like a cake with them or whatever it might be.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
So that's something I've been thinking about.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
No, thank you. Honestly, great questions. I love the conversation. Hopefully I wasn't too concise, but no, it's been a fun time.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
But those are generally high risk, high rewards. You can't just do that. Otherwise, you're going to fail and miss your number this quarter. At the same time, you need to have some bets where you have high confidence, but probably not going to move the needle a ton. But it'll help you get the 2%, 3%, 4%, 5% improvement this quarter. And then you have everything in between.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
So ideally, you're being intentional with how you're allocating your resources across everything from the very long term to the very short term. And how you make those bets and how you allocate those resources is actually a conversation you should probably have with finance or with leadership and align it to the goals of the company. But that's my way of thinking about it.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Oh, yes. So it's absolutely a portfolio. But I think like an investment portfolio, it depends what you're optimizing for. And it depends on the stage of the company. So your risk tolerance is going to depend on the stage of the company. It's going to depend on if you're optimizing for growth or profitability or whatever it might be. So it is a portfolio.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I think that you should assume if you're doing things right, you should assume the majority of your bets are going to fail. Which is why I always believe that velocity is probably more important than getting things perfect. But it is a spectrum. You could do some really well-controlled, rigorous experiments, and it's going to be incredibly academic.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And you're going to learn something, but it might take you a year to say something conclusive. Or you can just run a bunch of experiments at an incredibly high velocity and it's kind of sloppy. And similarly, you might not learn anything because you made a bunch of mistakes or didn't fully think through how you'd measure something. So you kind of have to balance it.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
But in general, I'd probably be biased to run more things faster than run something perfectly.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Yeah, I think if you had to choose, velocity is more important. But there's the other side of that coin, which is if you're just doing a bunch of sloppy things, it doesn't matter how many things you run, you're not going to actually learn anything. What did you do that was sloppy that you wish wasn't sloppy? Um, it's a good question.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
So I'm reminded of this one time, I won't say which company, but we had a webpage and the webpage is conversion. It was trending down and it was trending down for a long time. It was our number one channel. And it was like, Hey, what are we, what are we going to do to solve this? And there were kind of two paths.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
There was one where we could run a bunch of individual, well-controlled experiments and understand, hey, changing this button or changing this H1 is like what's going to improve the page and it worked or it didn't. Or we could just run everything at once, kind of use our gut, kind of use our past experience and like hope that it worked.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And we ended up going that latter route, which was definitely the sloppier route, the less rigorous experiment. It did end up working. It did end up working. Uh, so we did end up like three X-ing the webpage conversion rate, like over the course of a couple of weeks and helped us hit our number that quarter. I say that that was like a mistake because we never actually knew what did or didn't work.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And we had to go back and undo a lot of the changes that we made once we did end up AB testing them. But I think that goes back to like the portfolio of bets. Like we were operating on a very short time horizon. So we had to like optimize for velocity versus like rigor.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And then once we were no longer under the gun, we went back and optimized for rigor to understand what worked and what actually didn't.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Having said that, it would be great if you could figure out what some leading indicators are or scope down the experiment so you could get some signal that like, hey, we have confidence this will or won't work. In general, I've always tried to prioritize experiments based on impact and effort. I think those obvious ones, but also confidence in time to results.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Like if you're really confident something's going to work, you should just do it. If you're really unconfident that something's going to work, but the time to results is really fast, you should do that as well. And I think usually those two dimensions are lost when people are prioritizing. They tend to just go for impact and effort and not think about confidence or time to results.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
That's where I think the experimental design and the rigor of experiments comes in. You'll have a hypothesis. And I think most marketers tend to jump to, let's go do something. Let's go launch something. But the experimental design, like understanding what you're actually able to measure, what you will measure, how long it'll take to get that result, if it's statistically significant or not.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
All of that, honestly, like you either need to be able to do that math yourself or go find someone on a data team and go work with them or acknowledge the fact that, hey, we don't actually have a good way to think about this or measure this. And that's OK. We're going to go collect some qualitative data. And it means we might be wrong.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Folks need to be honest about that upfront and define that upfront is probably how I would think about it.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Yeah, absolutely. You should like triple down on that. I think that another mistake most startups make is they see something that works and they're like, okay, great. Let's increase our spend. Let's double it. Let's triple it. Ideally, if it's working, you take that channel to saturation as quickly as possible.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
Like if you graph out what the results are over a long period of time, you're probably going to see it approach an asymptote. You're going to see the incrementality of those results start to like decay.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
So, so yes, but it depends. So if you're able to graph that response curve going from 10K to 200K, obviously you're probably not going to be able to go to 10K to 200K overnight. If you were, that actually would probably be a good problem to have. But yes, if you're able to like graph that response curve and see when something goes from linear to start to decay in terms of response.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
That tells you it's like, OK, we're no longer getting an expected output given the input. And then we have a conversation if the returns are worth it. So figuring out the asymptote where things start to actually plateau is the most important thing. And I think most companies or most startups, at least, they get to that asymptote too slowly.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And they should really be scaling much, much faster if they find something that works. Having said that, I think like most things saturate probably more slowly than people expect. And so going from 10K to 200K might not be as insane as it sounds, but it depends. You've got to watch it.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
the only right answer is that yes, CACs become more expensive. As you get more and more market share, it makes sense that every incremental acquisition is going to cost more than previous. Having said that, I think the reality is that's usually not true. Usually you figure out new products to sell that actually make the LTVs improve. You figure out new geographies to break into.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
You figure out new channels that work. You figure out maybe that, hey, actually combining different channels has a halo effect and you're not fully capturing that and what the customer acquisition cost is. So the reality is that No, it takes a really long time to get to the point where the macro effect of saturation is hitting your CAC, but that's how I think about it.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I think it's a reasonable framework. I think you have to have some threshold that you agree on as a business. Like this is what we're willing to spend and this is what we think a customer is worth. But the reality is it's like false precision. Like you're not going to know what your LTV is if you've been in business for a year or six months or whatever it might be.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
So I wouldn't over index on that false precision. I would instead just acknowledge that there's some threshold we're going to be okay with in terms of spending to acquire a customer and what that customer is worth. And that should change over time as you learn things and run experiments.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
No one should be that attached to the experiment that they're running. I think that is a cultural problem. I think that they should acknowledge that the vast majority of what they work on is going to fail. And that if they're not failing, honestly, they're probably not doing their job well. You need to be running a bunch of stuff. It needs to be unique. It needs to be creative.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And that means that most is not going to work. If you're that attached to something that's working, you should be very, very high on the confidence aspect of how we prioritized it. And in that case, like maybe we were wrong, we should have that conversation, but you definitely, no one should be that attached to any experiment.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I would say like you should be doing premortems and postmortems. I think that's part of like good experimental design, like understanding what are the different failure modes for this and acknowledging like what the probability of those failure modes are.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
That's one way to do it. I would actually get more specific than that, when you're planning the experiments, like why would this fail? It's like, oh, we're not going to have a large enough sample size as we predicted. Or like there's a million things. You should probably write out those million things.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And then I think what's more interesting is when you do a postmortem, if the experiment failed for something that you didn't actually anticipate, something that you didn't like factor into your experimental design, that I think is an interesting conversation.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
But if it's something that you would kind of anticipated and maybe the probability was wrong or whatever it might be, that is less interesting. And I probably wouldn't even do a postmortem for that.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
I would say for the high probability, high confidence bets, the things that you're doing to hit a number this quarter or even this year, I think pretty high. It's probably like 90% plus. For the big swings, there's always like some black swan. There's always something that like you cannot anticipate. You had no idea. And that's where the postmortem actually, I think, is valuable.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
And trying to figure out what you learned and how it might apply to either other big swings or maybe even like higher confidence bets. Like that, I think, is actually the much more interesting and more valuable conversation. I think every growth team is going, well, I couldn't predict COVID.