The Marketing Secrets Behind Ramp’s Ultra Fast Growth

Ramp's growth story is often told as a fintech rocket ship, but the more useful interpretation is an operating model: be meaningfully better, then distribute with intent. George Bonaci, Ramp's VP of Growth, frames the product side as roughly 80-90% of the battle in competitive markets. That is a strong claim, but it is also a practical one: if you win on product, every downstream motion gets easier, sales cycles shorten, referrals happen with less bribery, and paid efficiency does not fall off a cliff the second CPMs rise. The second half of the thesis is where most teams fall down. Better product does not automatically produce demand, especially in markets where incumbents already own mindshare and procurement habits. Ramp's stance is explicit: distribution is a strategy, not an afterthought. You need a real plan for reaching the market, and ideally some kind of unfair advantage in how you do it, whether that is being earlier than peers in a channel, operationally better at executing it, or willing to do the unglamorous work others avoid. If you want to apply this, start by writing your own version of the Ramp premise as a two-part sentence: we win because our product is better in these three ways, and we will distribute through these two or three channels where we can become structurally advantaged. Keep it concrete. Better is not a brand adjective. Better is a measurable workflow improvement, a cost saving, a reduction in manual steps, or a capability that only your data or integration layer can offer. This is why Ramp's growth marketing is best understood as amplification rather than invention. The goal is not to compensate for parity with clever ads. The goal is to take a real product edge and route it through the highest leverage distribution paths available at the time.

The most concrete proof point behind the product-first stance is spend. Ramp has cited putting 54% of payroll into R&D and engineering, versus roughly 15% as a typical software benchmark. Regardless of the exact accounting definitions, that ratio signals a posture: build aggressively, ship improvements that users feel quickly, and treat product velocity as a growth input rather than an output. From a growth marketing angle, this matters because it changes the kind of promises you can make. If your product is genuinely improving faster than competitors, your messaging can be sharper and more specific without creating churn downstream. You can take bigger creative swings because the experience catches up. Your landing pages can talk about outcomes rather than vague features. And your sales team can follow up on marketing leads with confidence that the demo will land. A useful mechanism here is to formalise a loop between growth and product where marketing does not just ask for new features, but contributes evidence about which product edges actually create demand. For example, growth can run messaging tests that isolate which value proposition pulls hardest in each segment, then feed that into product prioritisation. If a particular workflow improvement drives both higher conversion and higher retention, that is a compounding bet. Conversely, if a feature is loved by existing customers but does not move acquisition, it should be positioned as retention and expansion, not front-door marketing. Ramp's scale metrics underline why this loop matters. With 50,000+ customers by November 2025, and 2,200+ enterprise accounts generating $100K+ ARR, small improvements in activation, onboarding, or spend controls can have large dollar impact. When you operate at that level, product work is not just UX polish, it is distribution efficiency. If you are not able to spend like Ramp, you can still copy the discipline: pick a small number of product advantages you are willing to fund, and make marketing accountable for expressing them in plain language customers understand.

A lot of companies try to copy tactics without copying the organisational preconditions that make those tactics work. One of the most telling details in Ramp's approach is structural: the growth team reports to a co-founder. That is not a vanity line on an org chart. It usually means faster decisions, fewer turf wars between product and marketing, and the ability to shift resources when a channel is working. In practice, empowered growth is about owning an end-to-end system rather than a set of campaigns. You need leverage over product, data, sales, and finance to do the job properly. If growth can only change ad copy and subject lines, you get local optimisation. If growth can change onboarding flows, pricing pages, sales routing, and lifecycle messaging, you get compounding improvements. A concrete way to build this, even without a co-founder reporting line, is to define a single cross-functional metric and a single cross-functional cadence. For example, pick one metric that matters across teams such as activated accounts, approved cardholders, or qualified spend volume. Then run a weekly review where growth, product, data, and sales look at that one metric, decide on two or three experiments, and assign owners with clear timelines. The point is not to copy Ramp's speed for its own sake. The point is to remove the organisational drag that kills good ideas. Ramp's growth also appears to be supported by operational maturity: onboarding around 1,000 users per day implies serious investment in support tooling, product education, fraud and compliance workflows, and a sales and success motion that can keep up. Growth authority is not just permission to spend, it is the ability to coordinate all the moving parts that turn demand into durable revenue. If your growth team is constantly blocked waiting for engineering time or sales alignment, you do not have a channel problem. You have an operating model problem.

Ramp's distribution philosophy is not about chasing the newest platform. It is about channel alpha, finding channels others are not exploiting yet, or doing familiar channels in a way others will not because it is operationally difficult. Cold calling is the cleanest example because it is unfashionable, hard to do well, and therefore under-competitive. Bonaci calls it a tremendous channel for many companies, precisely because the difficulty creates opportunity. There is a deeper lesson for B2B teams: channel choice is often less about the abstract channel and more about whether you can build a repeatable machine in it. Cold calling, for example, is rarely limited by list size. It is limited by coaching, talk tracks, follow-up discipline, and the integration between outbound and the rest of the funnel. If you can do those well, you can create an advantage even in a saturated category. A practical tactic is to treat hard channels as systems, not heroics. Build a playbook that defines who you call, what the first 20 seconds sounds like, what you send immediately after the call, and how you route responses into meetings and product education. Then invest in quality control. Record calls, review them weekly, and make the team better through repetition. The same thinking applies to partnerships, events, and community, all of which are typically dismissed because they are messy. Ramp's scale suggests they have not relied on a single channel. When you see a business reach $700M annualised revenue by January 2025 and then $1B+ annualised revenue by August to October 2025, you are looking at an organisation that can stack multiple motions without collapsing operationally. The growth lesson is not that cold calling is magic. It is that boring, labour-intensive channels can be a durable edge if you are willing to operationalise them. If your competitors are all fighting over the same paid keywords, the highest ROI move may be to win in places they find inconvenient.

Ramp's view on brand is refreshingly honest. In direct response, you can usually see what is happening in the numbers. In brand, you often have no clear idea what it does to revenue in the short term, attribution is imperfect, and the work is a long-term bet that can feel high risk and high reward. The trigger Ramp points to is saturation: when core direct response channels get crowded and marginal efficiency declines, brand becomes strategically important. The important nuance is that Ramp is not talking about brand as vague awareness. The stated goal is true demand generation, educating people who do not realise they have a problem, teaching that the problem exists, and showing there is a better way. In B2B, that is often category creation at a smaller scale. You are not just trying to be remembered. You are trying to shift what buyers think is normal. A mechanism that works well here is to pick one or two beliefs you want the market to adopt and then repeat them through multiple formats. For Ramp, it might be that finance teams should treat spend controls as a product surface, or that modern bill pay and card programmes can be software-first rather than bank-first. You then express those beliefs through founder-led content, customer stories, creator collaborations, and distribution buys that are hard to attribute but widen the top of funnel. Bonaci mentions display as inexpensive right now but not measured well, with a halo effect that traditional attribution misses. That is a sensible place to test if you have confidence in your product and sales motion. You can run geo tests, holdouts, or brand lift studies to get directional signal, but the bigger discipline is budget hygiene: decide in advance what you are willing to spend for a given learning period and do not pretend it is a last-click channel. The companies that win long term usually do brand before they are forced to. Waiting until performance collapses is a common, expensive mistake.

One of the more actionable parts of Ramp's approach is treating influencer and UGC mechanics as a scalable B2B distribution channel, including into enterprise. The common objection is that creators are for consumer products or SMB at best. Ramp's counterpoint is that it can work just as well, and potentially better, in B2B if you execute it with process rather than one-off sponsorships. The key operational idea is to run creator distribution like an outbound funnel. Bonaci talks about building a list of 10,000 micro-influencers, or people who could become micro-influencers, then running scaled outbound to them and systematising what works. That framing is useful because it forces you to design for throughput. You need sourcing, outreach, qualification, content briefs, review cycles, and performance feedback loops. Without that, creator work stays artisanal and dies the moment a champion leaves. A concrete way to apply this is to define micro-influencer not by follower count alone but by credibility in a niche. In finance and operations, a person with a few thousand relevant followers who posts consistently about procurement, accounting workflows, or CFO decision-making may outperform a general business creator with ten times the audience. The goal is not fame. It is trust in a specific buying committee. On measurement, do not overfit to last click. Track a blend of signals: increases in branded search, direct traffic, conversion rate on high-intent pages, and sales team reports of prospects referencing content. If you already have strong product-market fit, the creator layer can improve conversion in channels you are already running, because prospects arrive warmer. The enterprise angle matters. If you are trying to reach 2,200+ accounts doing $100K+ ARR, you are selling to teams, not individuals. Creator content that gets shared inside a company can have an outsized impact, even if the original viewer is not the buyer. Most B2B teams underinvest here because it feels unfamiliar. That is exactly why it can become an advantage.

Ramp's growth discussions include a referral and incentive design example that is worth stealing as a principle, even if the exact numbers come from a different product context. The core idea is simple: referrals work best when you tell the truth about the trade-off and then give a meaningful nudge that makes the deal feel fair. The example goes like this. A product keeps 25% of the savings it generates. A referral variant gives the referred user 5% more, reducing the take rate to 20%. The framing matters: instead of keeping 75%, you keep 80%. That is not just a discount. It is an objection handler built into the offer. It acknowledges the downside, the platform takes a cut, and then makes the new user feel like they are getting a better version because someone vouched for it. In B2B, incentive design often fails because teams copy consumer-style credits that do not match buyer motivation or procurement reality. A finance leader is rarely moved by a small gift card. They are moved by risk reduction, time savings, budget control, and clear ROI. A more aligned referral mechanic might be an upgraded implementation package, extended premium features for a period, or a donation to a charity chosen by the referring customer, so the incentive fits professional norms. The execution detail that matters is the narrative. Your referral prompt should make the implicit concerns explicit. If the concern is that switching spend platforms is painful, say so and offer implementation support for referred accounts. If the concern is that fees are hidden, make the pricing transparent and offer a clear improvement for referrals. The difference between a gimmick and a growth lever is whether the offer directly addresses the friction that would otherwise block adoption. If you do this well, referrals become more than a nice-to-have. They become a distribution flywheel that is cheaper than paid, higher intent than cold outreach, and often better retained because it arrives with social proof.

Ramp's public operating metrics are not just bragging rights. They hint at what has to be true internally for the growth model to work. By late 2025, Ramp is cited at $1B+ annualised revenue, up from $648M in 2024, and had previously hit $700M in January 2025 after being around $300M in August 2023. Those are not linear gains. They imply multiple distribution paths feeding a product that retains and expands. Customer scale reinforces the point. Ramp is cited at 50,000+ customers by November 2025, up from 45,000 in September 2025, and far above the 15,000 level in 2023 and 5,000 in 2022. Enterprise penetration is meaningful too, with 2,200+ enterprise accounts generating $100K+ ARR, reportedly doubled year on year. That combination, large customer count plus growing enterprise depth, is hard to achieve if you only optimise one part of the funnel. Transaction volume matters because it is a proxy for product stickiness. Ramp has been cited at $100B+ annual purchase volume in 2025, and $57B in total payment volume by end of 2024, up from $22.3B in 2023. Bill Pay is also described as reaching a $12B annual run rate by end of 2023, up 5x from $2.5B in 2022, and even hitting $1B annualised volume within six months of launch. Those numbers suggest that new products are not just shipped, they are distributed effectively and adopted quickly. Financially, there are signals of discipline: positive free cash flow in 2025, and cash-flow positive earlier in 2025, alongside major valuations such as $22.5B in July 2025 and $32B in October to November 2025 after large raises. You cannot sustainably buy growth at that scale unless your unit economics and retention support it. Ramp has cited net dollar retention above 200% as of March 2022, which, if maintained even partially, would make distribution investments compound. My opinion is that the market is moving towards this exact blend. The next generation of category winners will not be the best marketers or the best builders in isolation. They will be the companies willing to fund product advantage like it is their primary growth channel, and then run distribution with the operational seriousness of sales. Most teams still treat brand, creators, outbound, and product as separate departments. Ramp's edge is that it treats them as one system, and I think that will become the baseline for winning B2B over the next decade.