YouSaid · the spoken record

George Bonaci

lines on the record: 74
first: 2025-02-28
most recent: 2025-02-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Became like one of our most successful biggest channels after a few iterations. So I'm happy to chat about where you find these things, but you've got.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was stealing alpha from an investing terminology. Like, what's your unfair advantage? Is maybe a better way to put it. That is the key to being a good growth team. You got to figure out something that is not saturated and that other people ideally are not doing. I think the way that you find alpha is either by doing things that no one else knows about, most likely because it's so new. Like think about when TikTok first came out. I don't think any B2B brands were thinking about advertising on TikTok. I don't think there even was advertising on TikTok when it first came out. But the folks that were really ahead of the game, they're like, eventually they'll be advertising on TikTok and it's going to be totally saturated with consumer brands to begin with. But eventually there will be a B2B opportunity. And when they were the first ones to run those experiments, they probably had huge returns. So anyway, doing things that I think folks don't know about is like one aspect. I think another aspect is probably doing things that everyone is convinced will not work. I remember first suggesting we try direct mail like years and years ago. And it was like, why would direct mail work? Like junk mail to people's homes. Like that absolutely won't work.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. I think my personal opinion is I think growth should be independent. I think the growth team's mandate should be to figure out how to grow the business. And that should be more than just marketing, it should be more than just product. It should mean that you have the mandate to do whatever is the highest leverage. To me, that means you probably should report to, honestly, that's one of the reasons why I love RAMP is the growth team reports to one of the co-founders. I think some companies have chief growth officers. I think other folks have growth organizations that are more like SWAT teams and kind of roam between different parts of the business. Ultimately, it does depend on the business, but I think they should be as independent as possible.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, a really tactical example was we were doing some very basic A-B testing on our homepage and we saw that a red button by far outperformed anything else. Now red is like as a button is generally like a bad idea. It has a negative connotation. It's like something is wrong. Don't hit the red button, but we couldn't ever find anything that outperformed on a pure A-B testing basis like that red button. Now it turned out when you actually went and looked at the data by segment, although it outperformed in general, it severely underperformed like the enterprise segment. It's like a great example like Simpsons paradox. When we took that information and removed that from the web team and applied it to the content team and applied it to everyone else that was using the red button as a best practice, that was like incredibly valuable because most of the content we were generating was for enterprise. Most of the webinars we were generating were for enterprise. Like most of the direct mailers we were sending were for enterprise. So what we were actually doing by saying, hey, red is the best button, or sorry, the best practice was actually like decreasing the performance of”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm a Google Doc person. I think the DRI should write it up. They should send it out in advance at least like 24 hours in advance. People have time to think about it. But ideally, I'm more in favor of a live conversation rather than add some comments, have a conversation in the comments in the doc and then like have a maybe more boring live conversation. So I'm big on live.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So I think the person that was ultimately like the DRI for an experiment, the person that also hopefully scoped the experiment, they should write the postmortem. They really need to be clear on, number one, did we run the experiment well, or did it fail for some reason that we could have avoided? I think like outside of did we scope the experiment well, it's did we learn something that could be generalized to other aspects of the business? I think that's an important aspect to have. And then I think like the third most important component is just making sure that the right cross-functional stakeholders are there so the folks that can learn from it, the folks that can prevent the failure in the future, I think that's maybe like the third most important aspect of a post-mortem. But beyond that, like the structure, I don't think actually matters that much is going to be very company dependent.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. I would say for the high probability, high confidence bets, the things that you're doing to hit a number this quarter or even this year, I think pretty high. It's probably like 90% plus. For the big swings, there's always like some black swan. There's always something that like you cannot anticipate. You had no idea. And that's where the post-mortem actually, I think, is valuable and trying to figure out what you learned and how it might apply to either other big swings or maybe even like higher confidence bets. That I think is actually the much more interesting and more valuable conversation.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One way to do it. I would actually get more specific than that when you're planning the experiments. Like, why would this fail? It's like, oh, we're not going to have a large enough sample size as we predicted. Or like there's a million things. You should probably write out those million things. And then I think what's more interesting is when you do a postmortem, if the experiment failed for something that you didn't actually anticipate, something that you didn't like factor into your experimental design, that I think is an interesting conversation. But if it's something that you would kind of anticipated and maybe the probability was wrong or whatever it might be, that is less interesting. And I probably wouldn't even do a postmortem for that.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say, like, you should be doing pre-mortems and postmortems. I think that's part of good experimental design, like understanding what are the different failure modes for this and acknowledging what the probability of those failure modes are. If when you do”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No one should be that attached to the experiment that they're running. Like, I think that is a cultural problem. I think that they should acknowledge that the vast majority of what they work on is going to fail. And that if they're not failing, like honestly, they're probably not doing their job well. You need to be running a bunch of stuff. It needs to be unique. It needs to be creative. And that means that most is not going to work. If you're that attached to something that's working, you should be very, very high on the confidence aspect of how we prioritized it. And in that case, like maybe we were wrong with having that conversation, but you definitely, no one should be that attached to any experiment.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a reasonable framework. I think you have to have some threshold that you agree on as a business, like this is what we're willing to spend. And this is what we think a customer is worth. But the reality is it's like false precision. Like you're not going to know where your LTV is if you've been in business for a year or six months or whatever it might be. So I wouldn't over index on that false precision. I would instead just acknowledge that there's some threshold we're going to be okay with in terms of spending to acquire a customer and what that customer is worth. And that should change over time as you learn things and run experiments.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only right answer is that, like, yes, CACs become more expensive. Like, as you get more and more market share, it makes sense that it's every incremental acquisition is going to cost more than previous. Having said that, I think the reality is that's usually not true. Usually you figure out new products to sell that actually make the LTVs improve. You figure out new geographies to break into. You figure out new channels that work. You figure out maybe that, hey, actually combining different channels has a halo effect and you're not fully capturing that and what the customer acquisition cost is. So the reality is that no, it takes a really long time to get to the point where like the macro effect of saturation is hitting your cack, but that's how I think about it.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yes, but it depends. So, if you're able to graph that response curve going from 10K to 200K, obviously you're probably not going to be able to go to 10K to 200K overnight. If you were, that actually would probably be a good problem to have. But yes, if you're able to graph that response curve and see when something goes from linear to start to decay in terms of response, that tells you it's like, okay, we're no longer getting an expected output given the input. And then we have a conversation if the returns are worth it. So figuring out the asymptote where things start to actually plateau is the most important thing. And I think most companies or most startups at least, they get to that asymptote asymptote too slowly and they should really be scaling much, much faster if they find something that works. Having said that, I think like most things saturate probably more slowly than people expect. And so going from 10K to 200k might not be as insane as it sounds, but it depends. You've got to watch it.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. You should triple down on that. I think that another mistake most startups make is they see something that works and they're like, okay, great, let's increase our spend. Let's double it. Let's triple it. Ideally, if it's working, you take that channel to saturation as quickly as possible. Like if you graph out what the results are over a long period of time, you're probably going to see it approach an asymptote. You're going to see the incrementality of those results start to like decay.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's where I think the experimental design and the rigor of experiments comes in. You'll have a hypothesis. And I think most marketers tend to jump to let's go do something, let's go launch something. But the experimental design, like understanding what you're actually able to measure, what you will measure, how long it'll take to get that result, if it's statistically significant or not, all of that, honestly, like you either need to be able to do that math yourself or go find someone on a data team and go work with them or acknowledge the fact that, hey, we don't actually have a good way to think about this or measure this. And that's okay. We're going to go collect some qualitative data and it means we might be wrong. Folks need to be honest about that upfront and define that upfront is probably how I would think about it.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goes back to the portfolio. Like if you're going to allocate 20, 30% of your time to longer term bets, that's fine. Be okay with the fact that you're not going to get results anytime soon. Having said that, it would be great if you could figure out what some leading indicators are or scope down the experiment so you could get some signal that like, hey, we have confidence this wheeler won't work. In general, I've always tried to prioritize experiments based on impact and effort. I think those are the obvious ones, but also confidence and time to results. Like if you're really confident something's going to work, you should just do it. If you're really unconfident that something's going to work, but the time to results is really fast, you should do that as well. And I think usually those two dimensions are lost when people are prioritizing. They tend to just go for impact and effort and not think about confidence or times or results.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or we could just run everything at once, kind of use our gut, kind of use our past experience, and hope that it worked. And we ended up going that ladder route, which was definitely the sloppier route, the less rigorous experiment. It did ended up working. It did end up working. So we did end up like 3xing the web page conversion rate over the course of a couple weeks and helped us hit our number that quarter. I say that that was like a mistake because we never actually knew what did or didn't work and we had to go back and undo a lot of the changes that we made once we did end up A-B testing them. But I think that goes back to like the portfolio of bets. Like we were operating on a very short time horizon. So we had to like optimize for velocity versus like rigor. And then once we were no longer under the gun, we went back and optimized for rigor to understand what worked and what actually didn't.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a good question. So I'm reminded of this one time. I won't say which company, but we had a web page and the webpage's conversion rate was trending down. It was trending down for a long time. It was our number one channel. And it was like, hey, what are we?”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think if you had to choose, velocity is more important, but there's another side of that coin, which is if you're just doing a bunch of sloppy things, it doesn't matter how many things you run, you're not going to actually learn anything.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes. So it's absolutely a portfolio, but I think like an investment portfolio, it depends what you're optimizing for. And it depends on the stage of the company. So your risk tolerance is going to depend on the stage of the company. It's going to depend on if you're optimizing for growth or profitability or whatever it might be. So it is a portfolio. I think that you should assume if you're doing things right, you should assume the majority of your bets are going to fail, which is why I always believe that velocity is probably more important than getting things perfect. But it is a spectrum. You could do some really well-controlled, rigorous experiments and it's going to be incredibly academic and you're going to learn something, but it might take you like a year to like say something conclusive. Or you can just run a bunch of experiments at an incredibly high velocity and it's kind of sloppy. And similarly, you might actually learn anything because you made a bunch of mistakes or didn't fully think through how you'd measure something. So you kind of have to balance it. But in general, I would probably biased to run things, run more things faster than run something.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a good question. The short answer is it has to be both. If you're doing a good job, and it depends on the stage of the company, but in general, if you're doing a good job, you're thinking in terms of different time horizons. So you have to have some like bucket of bets or experiments that are going to be those like big swing, huge step changes and impact. But those are generally high risk, high rewards. You can't just do that. Otherwise, you're going to fail and miss your number this quarter. At the same time, like you need to have some bets where you have high confidence, but probably not going to move the needle a ton, but it'll help you get the two, three, four, five percent improvement like this quarter. And then you have everything in between. So like ideally, you're being intentional with how you're allocating your resources across everything from the very long term to the very short term and how you make those bets and how you allocate those resources is actually a conversation you should probably have with finance, with leadership, and align it to the goals of the company. But that's my way of thinking about it.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's probably partly the profile, but it's also partly just like how you think. Like, I think the type of person that would go and become a chemist like me or an engineer is probably very different than someone that's like, hey, I want to become a writer or I want to get into comms or PR. Like very valuable skills, but very, very different from the way in thinking or way of thinking that would make someone successful, like scoping an experiment and thinking about like what my hypothesis is and how I'm going to measure results. It's just like a different part of your brain. Like I would be a terrible writer, for example.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The goal of growth is to figure out how to grow the business. And usually, like early on, that's very top of funnel focused. How do you figure out how to get more leads? How do you figure out a channel that works and is repeatable and has predictable outputs given some inputs? And the honest answer is like no one really knows. Every business is different. So even if you understand from past experience something that's worked, usually just taking like that one playbook or that one tactic and copy and pasting it to a new company generally doesn't work. And I think that's the tendency of a lot of marketers. So when I say that like growth is mostly just science, I mean that you kind of have to come in with a blank slate, form a hypothesis, and then run a bunch of experiments. And you'll be surprised about what works. You'll be surprised at what doesn't work. But ultimately, if you run enough of those experiments, you'll find something that's usually lost on a lot of marketers because they don't think in terms of experiments. They think in terms of like, what do I know and how can I apply it here?”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the way that you find alpha is either by doing things that no one else knows about. I think another aspect is probably doing things that everyone is convinced will not work. I think a good leader needs to know how to do everyone on their team's job, but poorly. And I think the poorly part's important. I would always skew Moore Junior. I think hiring for potential, especially early on in the business, is far, far more important.”
2025-02-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source