☄️ Ramp’s $700M ROI Engine

Ramp sells savings.

There is no better startup value proposition than helping other businesses save money (except, potentially, making them more money — but that’s less reliable).

Ramp has analyzed spending patterns from 40,000+ businesses. They know exactly where companies waste money, and they guarantee you can eliminate it by using their products.

When Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh founded Ramp in 2019, they noticed something broken: companies spent millions on financial software that created more work, not less. So they flipped the model. Instead of charging for software, they'd make money by saving their customers money.

Six years later, they're at $700M ARR with a $22.5B valuation.

Ramp’s playbook reveals how systematically eliminating waste creates compound growth.

Every product they launch makes the previous ones smarter, every feature prevents problems before they cost money, and every customer becomes a growth engine.

Here’s how they deliver on ROI for their customers:

ROI At The Core

Every win is captured as a financial event, not a feel-good metric.

For example, Ramp tracks Time-to-First-Dollar-Saved (TTFDS) religiously. New customers must see savings within 7 days.

To find out Ramp’s ROI to the companies, Ramp commissioned Forrester to validate their ROI. The findings? They generate a 503% return over three years.

Ramp took the findings from the study and built them into their sales process.

Every prospect can go to Ramp’s personalized savings calculator before the first call.

They input their employee count, monthly total spend, and net working capital in order to get exactly the amount of money Ramp can save them, plus their expected yield from using Ramp’s treasury product.

Additionally, Ramp publicly posts the results some of their customers are getting (with their permission, of course).

For example, The Second City saved $40,000 annually just by switching its AP tool. Barry's fitness chain saves 400 hours monthly.

This strategy is so effective yet also so simple. You may be able to incorporate into your sales efforts too.

If a customer saves 10 hours weekly with your product, at $75/hour, that's $39,000 annually.

Stack Valuable Products

Ramp started with free corporate cards offering 1.5% cashback. The cashback cost them money. But cards generate transaction data daily.

Three months later they launched Bill Pay. The card data made Bill Pay smarter, predicting duplicates from charge patterns. Bill Pay now grows faster than cards.

This data advantage compounds with each new product. When Ramp launched Procurement, they had visibility into the payments of 40,000+ companies.

Their Price Intelligence benchmarks contract and allows customers to renegotiate with Ramp's data, saving 15-20%.

I love their playbook:

Start with high-frequency data generation. Add products leveraging that data. Build intelligence on combined data. Monetize intelligence, not features.

Use Intelligence to Prevent Problems Before Customers Notice

Traditional expense software shows what you spent. If there’s unwanted spending, you’ll only see it at the end of the quarter or by doing your own analysis.

We all have had a facepalm reaction to an unwanted SaaS invoice email. Ramp's Seat Intelligence tracks SaaS usage and prevents those bills.

Haven't logged into Figma for 30 days? Ramp alerts you before the next billing cycle.

If you calculate the costs in the US incurred by companies for unused seats over a four-year period, it amounts to almost $30 billion.

At Ramp, AI agents ingest written policies and historical approvals to make decisions with perfect recall.

These agents also transform a 14-minute expense review into an instant approval. Consider this example: approving a $5 coffee receipt typically requires 4 minutes from the employee, 3 minutes from their manager, and 7 minutes from finance.

Agents approve 99% of expenses automatically, detect fake receipts, answer policy questions in Slack, and provide full audit-ready logs with a rationale for every decision.

As Ramp describes it, "a trusted teammate that never sleeps."

Bottom Line

Ramp grew from $100M to $700M ARR, maintaining 18% month-over-month growth through systematic urgency.

Their VP of Product, Geoff Charles, emphasizes:

• Doing over planning: "Any second you spend planning is a second you don't spend doing"

• Teams should be organized around business outcomes with clear accountability

• Hiring for "high slope, high agency, high humility" over pedigree

• Major product launches every 6 months through rapid iteration

While competitors debate in committees, Ramp ships and learns.

Notable Ramp investor Keith Rabois noted: "Ramp's product velocity is absolutely unprecedented in my 21 years working with technology businesses."

And for me, the Ramp playbook distills to five principles that any team can implement:

• Calculate the exact value created: Build a model from your best customer. Track their time and money saved. Make it customer-facing.

• Prevent, don't report: Map the highest-frequency problems. Build detection before they cost money.

• Design compound products: Each product should make the previous ones more valuable. Share data between products. Monetize the intelligence layer.

• Customer success equals growth: When customers save money, they expand usage and refer others. Build viral mechanics into workflows.

• Ship with urgency: Set impossible deadlines, hit 80%. Ship embarrassing V1s, improve weekly. Momentum compounds.

When you guarantee ROI and deliver it consistently, growth becomes inevitable.

Until next week,

David Lobo

Head of Growth, Workmate

P.S. What's the one metric that would make your product's value undeniable? Reply and let me know - I read every response.

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