How Ramp built a high-velocity growth engine, with help from HyperGrowth Partners

At a glance

• Client: Ramp (FinTech)
• Engagement: Began in 2021
• HGP advisors: Guillaume Cabane: Growth advisor; Kevin Indig: SEO; Rex Gelb: Paid acquisition
• Focus areas: Growth team design, Experimentation framework, Outbound, Paid acquisition, SEO

The numbers

• ~200 growth experiments a quarter from a 10–15 person team (Guillaume Cabane on 20VC, Nov 2023)
• 12–15% response rate on a data-matched outbound play aimed at CFOs (Guillaume Cabane on 20VC, Nov 2023)
• ~10x revenue growth in 2021 (Ramp, via TechCrunch, Mar 2022)
• $100M annualized revenue, crossed in March 2022 (Growth Unhinged)

The situation

Ramp, founded in 2019 and based in New York, sells corporate cards, expense management and bill payments to finance teams. In August 2021 it raised at a $3.9B valuation and said total cardholders had grown five times that year, with transaction volumes tripling since April.

Growth was coming fast, but CEO Eric Glyman says the company had "a lot of blind spots". Its buyer made outbound hard: Guillaume Cabane calls the CFO a "notoriously difficult audience to engage with", because almost nothing you can scrape about a CFO is useful for outreach.

What HyperGrowth Partners did

• Growth leadership and hiring: HGP co-founder Guillaume Cabane (G) advised Ramp on growth; Ramp's own blog bylines him "Growth Advisor, Ramp". Glyman credits HGP with helping Ramp hire its Head of Growth. For Head of Growth and Growth PM roles, G hires former founders: people "good at moving fast and finding signals of tactics that stick".
• A high-velocity experimentation system: G describes Ramp's approach as applying "early-stage, aggressive tactics at a late stage situation": two-week sprints that constrain the size of each experiment, with teams shipping "anywhere between 10-30 experiments per sprint". By late 2023 he said Ramp's 10–15-person growth team shipped about 200 experiments per quarter.
• Outbound that CFOs answer: Ramp's growth team, with G, matched two datasets: the college each CFO attended and that college's upcoming games. The email offered a friendly bet on the next game: $50 to the CFO if their team won, a 20-minute call if it lost. G reported a 12–15% response rate.
• AI-assisted SDR emails: Ramp SDRs used ChatGPT to draft personalized emails by finding common traits and patterns among prospects, such as shared educational backgrounds or industry experience. G reported a 3x increase in response rates compared with fully automated outbound.
• SEO, from zero to a pipeline channel: Kevin Indig was instrumental in kicking off Ramp's SEO. Sri Batchu, then Ramp's Head of Growth, says Kevin defined "a strategy that brought SEO to a multi-million Dollar pipeline channel", ran the initial analysis, coached the team through its first website audits and content experiments, and helped hire and onboard Ramp's full-time SEO leadership. Programmatic SEO was run as a portfolio of bets: "not all of them worked out", and each play got about three months before being iterated or cut.
• Paid acquisition: Rex Gelb, who built HubSpot's paid ads program, advised Ramp on paid, one of the two areas where Glyman says HGP found low-hanging fruit.

Results

Glyman credits HGP with Ramp's Head of Growth hire, the outbound and paid wins and a much faster pace of experimentation. Kevin Indig's work turned organic search into what Sri Batchu, Ramp's Head of Growth at the time, calls a multi-million dollar pipeline channel.

For context, Ramp reported close to 10x revenue growth in 2021 and crossed $100M in annualized revenue in March 2022, two years after launch; by then more than 5,000 businesses used Ramp. These are Ramp's figures, not HGP's: growth on that scale has many authors.

What other teams can take from it

• Measure velocity: Constrain experiments to two-week sprints. At roughly ten experiments per person per quarter, in G's words, "some stuff has to work".
• Hire builders: Former founders make strong growth leads: they are used to pivoting toward the signals that stick.
• Find the shared passion: For buyers who ignore pain-point emails, match a personal signal (here, college sports) with data and make the outreach fun.
• Treat SEO as a portfolio: Place several programmatic bets, give each a fixed incubation window, and cut the ones that do not work.

Frequently asked questions

Who advised Ramp on growth?

HyperGrowth Partners co-founder Guillaume Cabane (G) advised Ramp on growth from 2021; Ramp's blog bylines him "Growth Advisor, Ramp". HGP partners Kevin Indig (SEO) and Rex Gelb (paid acquisition) also worked with Ramp.

What did HyperGrowth Partners do for Ramp?

According to Ramp CEO Eric Glyman, HGP helped Ramp hire its Head of Growth, find low-hanging fruit in outbound and paid, and dramatically increase its pace of experimentation. HGP's Kevin Indig was also instrumental in kicking off Ramp's SEO.

How many experiments does Ramp's growth team run?

Guillaume Cabane said in November 2023 that Ramp's 10–15-person growth team ships about 200 experiments per quarter. In an April 2023 Ramp blog post he described two-week sprints in which teams ship 10–30 experiments.

Who helped start Ramp's SEO program?

Kevin Indig. Sri Batchu, Ramp's former Head of Growth, says Kevin was instrumental in kicking off Ramp's SEO and defined the strategy that made SEO a multi-million dollar pipeline channel.

Sources

• How to set up your org to support emerging low-CAC strategies (Ramp blog, Apr 2023)
• Guillaume Cabane on 20VC (Nov 2023)
• Kevin Indig: client testimonials
• The HyperGrowth Partners Guide to AI-powered Programmatic SEO
• 9 Use Cases HyperGrowth Partners Use AI, pt. II
• Ramp closes on $750M, confirms $8.1B valuation (TechCrunch, Mar 2022)
• Ramp more than doubles valuation in five months to $3.9 billion (CNBC, Aug 2021)
• Growth lessons beyond classic PLG (Growth Unhinged)
• HGP client record: Ramp (advisors, start year)
• HGP partner profile: Rex Gelb