Is it just me or does everyone else see Ramp sponsoring everything under the sun?
Over the past few years it’s like I’ve been brainwashed to think more and more about Ramp. They sponsor my dreams. Rumour has it if you say ‘Ramp’ three times in a mirror, an accountant appears.
To be honest, I don’t even fully know what Ramp is or does - receipts? a bank? developer tool? or a marketing stunt company?
So I did some research to see how they infiltrated my brain.
I turned it into a very visual, interactive page that I encourage you to look at. It’s just not the same in the email :(
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Just look at that chart above. It’s crazy (1) how accurately it’s drawn and (2) how the closely related the trend of revenue, valuation, and how much they’re in my eyes and ears over time is.
But their product isn’t ‘sexy’.
If we look at the next super accurate chart of how hard companies have to try vs how boring their product is, we can see how Ramp and others move from the expected baseline.
They get it. They have the illustrious ‘taste’ factor. They have fun with it.
For example, who’s the world’s most famous accountant?
Kevin from The Office (US) of course. So they did the only reasonable thing they could. Stick him in a glass box in New York and have him process 600k expense reports.
200+ Million people saw this stunt. A couple even got married in the box...wtf!?
They also recognise that the ‘exhaust’ from these efforts turn into great content too. In these receipts sections (on the live post) you can click to see the real videos and images.
Then they doubled down on Kevin (Brian), or more accurately 10x’d him by sending 9 lookalikes with him to the Super Bowl. Plus also hosted a Brian-themed party in SF where people came dressed as him with a lookalike competition where the winners got Super Bowl tickets. They sold bald caps called ‘Brian Hair’ too - reminds me of the Pitbull bald-cap mania.
Oh and of course he was in the ad itself.
A year before the Brians, they made their first Super Bowl ad in a week.
I’ve been diving into Colossus magazine recently, they do awesome in-depth profiles of people and companies. Well worth reading. But outside of the awesome profiles I actually saw awesome display ads.
I’ve never said ‘awesome display ads’ in my life, and doubt anyone else has either. But these ads were made (assuming with the help of AI) to be super personalised and unique to the content of the post itself.
These were my favourite:
They came in like a wrecking ball 🎶 to launch Ramp Treasury.
To launch bill pay, they put on a Broadway musical.
Last month, they got Tony Hawk on a ramp outside the NYSE.
These stunts make noise for a wide audience but they understand their customers deeply. Not just CFOs/Controllers but founders and developers.
They sponsor a lot of podcasts. This is where I think they’ve entered my brain more often than I’m comfortable admitting.
They also turn up in odd places. I’ve heard of “test new ad channels before other companies get there” but I’ve never seen an ad in a church bulletin before.
Last Christmas, they put Claude Code in RollerCoaster Tycoon.
They built their own coding agent, Inspect. Which they used internally for a while before opening it up for others to use.
And a model router.
And Glass, a knowledge platform for teams.
There are so many areas where I may become a Ramp customer that is not their core offering. But it feels like Amazon starting with books, seeing what other people want to buy and adding that too.
They build with AI tools, they track spend, they ship tools to help their team move faster, more efficiently and spend less. All of their customers want that too, so why not productise it. And land some new customers in the process.
How do they do it all? Eric, the CEO, talks about empathy and then taste as two values for Ramp. Another mentions velocity as a key component of their culture.
They switched up how they do marketing, what products they build for customers and also how the organisation works.
And the stunts come from a team of seven.
If we layer everything onto the super-accurate chart we started with, it’s interesting to see how velocity, taste and experimentation really helped accelerate growth for Ramp.
But more interestingly it’s all after a down-round in valuation where usually all the weird things are cut away in favour of doing what ‘normal’ companies should do.
And that may be why Ramp is doing so well...
Ramp don’t sponsor me (maybe they should?!) but I’ve just been floored by how much fun they seem to be having. Their whole strategy for the last few years is so smart. To me it’s truly tasteful in how they’re doing what they’re doing, how they understand the game of attention, and how to reach the customers they want - in and out of their peripheral ‘TAM’.
Quick bites
Fable 5.2 is out - very powerful, often slow, and you need to encourage it a lot (is this a dog?!). I think stick to medium/low reasoning for nearly everything.
An open-source Slack that you can run with one click.
A look into how Claude dreams for a better memory.
Emil’s UI skills now have before-and-after examples and prompts. I use Emil’s skills for all my design work.
How does a card company become a product factory?
Executor v2 is out - This is my go to tool for integrations (i love it so much i hounded rhys to invest!)
Love the new animations, reminded me of waitbutwhy. Keep'em coming