Interesting Data Gigs # 10: Software Engineer - Growth (Product, Acquisition, Martech) at Ramp

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Hi Data Geeks.

This took me more than the usual time to write this because I wanted to share a major quantity of ideas, so I had to do deeper research for it.

Grab a seat and enjoy.

Welcome to the 2nd Fintech Edition of Interesting Data Gigs. (You can find the first when I wrote about Plaid here).

Today, I will be writing about other of my favorite companies out there, and which I have the pleasure of being a partner: Ramp, and an exciting role in which I strongly believe that if you thrive on it, it could be a defining moment for your career.

The role is Software Engineer - Growth (Product, Acquisition, Martech), and as you can see, it’s focused on one of the company's key areas: Growth.

But, before sharing with you all the ideas I have prepared here to stand out for your application, let’s talk first about what Ramp is exactly.

What is Ramp

I will use the same description of the job position because I think it’s perfect for it:

Ramp is building the next generation of finance tools—from corporate cards and expense management, to bill payments and accounting integrations—designed to save businesses time and money with every click. Over 5000 businesses are spending an average of 3.3% less and closing their books 8 times faster, thanks to Ramp’s finance automation platform that enables billions of dollars of purchases each year.

Founded in 2019, Ramp has seen nearly 10x year-over-year growth which has led to a valuation of $8.1 billion in just over 3 years. Its investors include Founders Fund, Stripe, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Lux Capital, Coatue Management, D1 Capital Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Thrive Capital, as well as over 100 angel investors who were founders or executives of leading companies.

The team is made up of talented leaders from some of the leading financial services and fintech companies—Capital One, Stripe, Affirm, Goldman Sachs, American Express, Visa—as well as high-growth technology companies like Facebook, Spotify, Zendesk, Uber, Dropbox, and Instacart. Recently named Fast Company’s most innovative finance company, Ramp is NYC’s fastest-growing startup and America’s fastest-growing corporate card.

If you want to know more about the amazing rewards (over $350,000 in partner rewards) of using Ramp for your business, just read here. Only this it’s a big sign of why I recommend Ramp to every qualifying business.

But everything starts with THE CARD:

  • Unlimited 1.5% cashback 

  • No fees

  • Runs on VISA (this matters more than you think)

  • A God-level spend control with the virtual and physical cards

If you only take to account all the payments that you make for your business, especially when you're in growth mode; you will understand why the 1.5% cashback on all the purchases is a game changer.

Let’s talk about the business itself

On July 19th (2022), I shared this tweet here where I shared the tweet from Eric Glyman (CEO and co-founder of Ramp):

In that series of tweets, he explained how Ramp’s business exploded when other companies were slowing down.

Let’s highlight some of the most interesting stats behind the boom of Ramp:

  • Ramp helped customers to reduce their spending up to more than $200 Million in July 2022 

  • 7,000+ businesses using Ramp in July 2022, in aggregate, realizing $1 million in cost savings per day.

  • Ramp customers have saved 3,586,868 hours, and counting.

But this part says even more:

Ramp’s ability to help businesses spend an average of 3.5% less is uniquely appealing and valuable to businesses in this macroeconomic climate. It is why Ramp has continued to grow at a rapid pace, bolstering our long-term commitment to customers.

Last month, Ramp closed 38% more new business than we did the month prior. We grew across all customer segments: ~300% in enterprise segment, ~50% in mid-market, and ~22% in SMB. The amount of new business that Ramp closed—from new customer sign-ups—in June is also more than double that figure just six month prior, meaning that Ramp is continuing to grow at an increasingly large scale. Revenue has grown twofold since our last fundraise. We’re grateful for the opportunity to support more businesses and are committed to helping them do more with less and thrive in these times.

This basically says that the business is booming in 2022.

I’m particularly excited about the SMB segment after Brex decided to cut ties with this segment, which from my perspective: was a terrific mistake from the company.

To finalize this section, I will add here my own top reasons why I strongly believe that joining Ramp right now could be a defining move for the future of your career:

  • Ramp was founded in 2019 by Eric Glyman (CEO), Karim Atiyeh (CTO), and Gene Lee (CPO), and this is the second company founded by this team here. The first one was Paribus, which later was acquired by Capital One in October, 20216. This is a key point here because this means that they are not first-time founders, they have experience building products and teams from scratch.

  • To be honest with you, I don’t care a lot about fundraising and valuations these days (I care more about revenue and profitability margins), but just a quick note about Ramp: they have raised $1.4 Billion for a valuation of $8.1 Billion. One interesting point here is that the last fundraising event was $550 Million in debt from Goldman Sachs and Citi, and $200 Million from top VC firms:

The raise included $200 million in fresh equity funding led by Founders Fund, with participation from all major existing investors including D1 Capital Partners, Thrive Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Coatue Management, Iconiq, Altimeter, Stripe, Lux Capital, Vista Public Strategies, Spark Capital, and Definition Capital. They were joined by new investors General Catalyst, Avenir Growth Capital, 137 Ventures, and Declaration Partners, in addition to tech industry leaders.

Ramp also secured $550 million in debt financing to support the company’s rapid scaling, including $300 million from Citi and an additional $150 million from Goldman Sachs, which doubled its commitment to $300 million.

So, this proves that the company is well funded, this means too that all these firms can act as “repeater beacons“ for Ramp’s Business Development and Growth teams and present the benefits of the company’s services to the many companies inside the portfolios of these investments firms.

  • And the third and last reason why I think that today it’s the perfect time to join the company is very simple: You will learn a ton about how to manage a company in God-level growth mode. I’m sure that you will learn more inside Ramp’s team in 3 months than in 1 year in a major corporation.

But, what is it like to work as a Software Engineer, inside the Growth team at Ramp? Let’s find out

I reached out to Nick Abouzeid (who is part of the Growth team at Ramp), asking for insights from current members of his team, and he shared the questions I sent him with Hima Tammineedi, who answered with pleasure my questions. Thanks to both of you and the whole team for this level of access to it.

Here’s Hima's response to our questions:

Being a software engineer on the Growth team at Ramp is one of the most unique engineering experiences out there. The team is very horizontal and cross-functional, much more so than in traditional product-engineering-design teams.

Here, you would work on teams with BizOps, SalesOps, Marketing, Sales, and more types of folks. It adds a new type of flavor that pushes you to think of new ones with challenges different from the norm. Here at Ramp on Growth, we're always thinking about how to reimagine what we're doing from first principles, and sometimes, those things require code to build out in their best forms.

So we believe it's our ability to combine engineering, product, sales, and everything else into one that helps give us an advantage and has helped us grow so tremendously fast.

Some of our team members work on new experiments on our website, building out new landing pages that convert better, building new lead gen tools, or working on SEO. We have another sub-team focused on building much better sales processes at scale that helps us acquire more customers extremely efficiently.

And we have another sub-team focused on improving everything in the Ramp product itself to help users onboard faster and use Ramp more efficiently. We're also working on a couple of new initiatives with new teams as well.

Some of our favorite parts of being on this team

- Directly contributing to revenue goals that grow the company

- Working on new things every week

- Shipping extremely fast experiments, being okay with failures, and continuing to ship more

What drives us to work here is the variety of work and the interesting engineering+business challenges in growing an already fast growing company.

We're looking for additional awesome team members to join the team as we continue growing out multiple pods focused on website, sales, martech, and partnerships.

Everyone has high ownership over what they work on and you would be moving in small pods that each have very high impact. We're looking for self-starters who want to do big things, are motivated by hard challenges, and are always willing to try new things. And of course you have to be a great engineer too.

So, if you apply for the role, make sure to use these insights to stand out in your application.

Let’s talk about the job position now

Like I said at the start of this article, the position is focused on Growth.

Let’s dissect the job description and let’s try to understand the things that matter here:

The growth engineering team owns the pre-sale Ramp product experience. We are responsible for developing growth technology to multiply efforts across sales and marketing teams. We experiment and analyze the best ways to grow and creativity is a must. We are a new and growing team so each individual will make an outsized impact.

This means that the work you will be doing here is critical for the company because you will help to bring more faces in front of the sales team at Ramp.

Another critical keyword here is CREATIVITY. In order to work in Growth, you need to be experimenting all the time, tuning channels, testing hypothesis, and more.

So, you must be creative and think outside of the box here. Some of the ideas I shared below will help you on that creative path.

Ability to improvise and develop creative solutions when common approaches fail. Strong value of pragmatism over idealism in times of uncertainty

Perpetual curiosity and passion for honing your craft

Again: Curiosity.

The tech stack depends on the team, but there are some common names:

  • Flask (Python)

  • AWS Lambda

  • SQL

  • APEX Salesforce

  • HubSpot

  • Segment

  • Retool

  • Amplitude

  • Webflow

  • Outreach

  • AWS QuickSight

Reading this, you can understand that Ramp is an AWS-based shop.

So my first recommendation is the same: Use AWS Grativon2/3 wherever you could.

It’s time for the real meat here.

Let’s discuss some ideas on how to approach this job application (THE REAL MEAT)

I will break down the growth hacks here divided into four major audience groups.

1. Latino founders in the U.S

The potential audience here?

There are an estimated 4.65 million Hispanic-owned businesses in the U.S., making them the fastest-growing segment of U.S. small businesses, according to the Small Business Administration.

There are nearly 61 million Hispanics in the U.S., according to 2019 U.S. Census data.

The number of Hispanic business owners has grown 34% in the last 10 years.

Hispanics are the nation’s second-fastest-growing racial or ethnic group after Asian Americans.

Twelve states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Texas—had a population of 1 million or more Hispanic residents in 2019.

So, the potential is there, but how Ramp could reach part of this audience? I think that two of the best ways to do this are through local associations and Facebook groups focused on Hispanic-owned businesses and entrepreneurs.

But from my perspective: the piece of the cake here with Latino entrepreneurs is to provide educational content to them in Spanish, helping to understand how they can save time and money with Ramp, and answering their most pressing questions.

I know that creating a separate blog or resource in Spanish is a big task to tackle, but I think it’s worth the effort.

Think about that, my friend.

Let’s talk about some places to find Latino entrepreneurs.

This initiative from Stanford University is amazing because once a year, they make a panel with Latino founders and entrepreneurs and discuss the State of Latino Entrepreneurship in the U.S, developing an annual report for it.

So, this could be an amazing opportunity to find new customers for Ramp’s services and in the process, help this amazing group of entrepreneurs in the U.S

  • Jennifer Garcia (COO at Latino Business Action Network)

  • Arturo Cazares (CEO at Latino Business Action Network)

  • Marlene Orozco (Former Associate Director, Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative, now Global Policy Programs Manager, Research at Meta)

  • Jonathan Furszyfer (Research Analyst, Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative)

This could another terrific opportunity to help more Latino entrepreneurs. This foundation helps entrepreneurs with the start of their businesses.

Even, they have a page for Sponsors.

Key contact here: Carolina Vieira ([email protected]), Relationship Manager of The SCORE Foundation

Facebook Groups

This could be another great place to find entrepreneurs

And a final idea here is very simple:

Have a “cafecito“ with Francis Suarez, the Major of Miami.

Ramp has plans to open an office in the city, so why not chat with Francis to explore some opportunities how Ramp could help more businesses in the city:

2. Indie Hackers and Bootstrappers

I believe that this kind of business (1 Million 1 Person biz) will explode in the upcoming years. And by nature, this kind of entrepreneur loves efficiency and time optimization.

So, the pitch from Ramp here is perfect

Time is money. Save both.

So, where to find them? A good place to start could be the Indie Hackers community, and more specifically this particular page.

Why this page?

Two main reasons:

  • This shows real products with the revenue verified by Stripe.

  • Ramp can use the filters here to find the right type of customers for it

More ideas here?

Potential clients:

3. CreatorsEntrepreneurs

This could be another great audience for Ramp.

Why? Because creators spend a lot of money trying to improve their craft every single day: better equipment, better tools for their job, etc.

Potential clients/partners to work with:

  • Easlo (aka “The Notion Guy”): Easlo has an amazing engagement on Twitter (he has a big audience as well), but the most surprising thing here is that he is only 20 years old, and he is generating a lot of revenue creating Notion templates. If you need some proof:

On his website, he works with AppSumo and Sally Wong. So, he is open to collaborating I think.

More ideas here?

4. More podcasts to sponsor

Enough ideas for today, my friend.

Good luck with your application.

🚨 Join the Interesting Data Gigs Talent Network 🚨

It’s the perfect time to be part of The Interesting Data Gigs Talent Network, where you will find amazing Data Analytics jobs from companies like Netflix, Apple, Stripe, Calendly, and many more.

Let’s change the game together: Instead of people applying to companies, companies will pitch to you, so don’t wait any other moment and join today.

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Marcos out. 

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