How Ramp hit $700M with outbound: 5 overlooked principles

Why outbound is their #1 growth engine

Aug 20, 2025

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In 2025, Ramp crossed $700M ARR.

Their #1 growth engine: Outbound.

Here's what most teams get wrong: They look at these numbers and think "that's not relevant to us." They assume Ramp's playbook only works with Ramp's budget.

But there's a bigger problem.

Even the founders who do study Ramp chase the wrong things. They copy the tactics, the exact email templates, the specific tools, the team structure. Then wonder why it doesn't work.

But that's exactly backwards.

The best companies don't succeed because of their resources, they get resources because they've nailed the basics. The same principles that work at $700M ARR worked when they were at $7M.

I pulled out 5 outbound lessons from Ramp's playbook that any GTM team can use. Not their tactics that require 140 SDRs. Their principles that work whether you have 2 SDRs or 200.

Here are the 5 lessons:

1. Run on speed

Short feedback loops lower the cost of being wrong and compound learning at any size. Ramp operationalizes speed with:

a 48-hour MVP rule
weekly experiment cadence
a live “days since founding” timer that keeps urgency visible.

Small teams can copy the habits; large orgs can standardize the cadence.

3 reps → one shippable test/week + Friday retro.
1,000 reps → org-wide two-week sprints with a single speed KPI.

2. They run 2 separate outbound funnels

First funnel for the sales team:

Tier 1 manual Gmail for top accounts
Tier 2 AI-assisted Gmail
Tier 3 sequencer for long tail

Plus a separate funnel on distinct domains/IPs as a benchmark and deliverability hedge.

3. Treat outbound like a product

They put growth people and engineers on outbound.

These teams run a backlog of hypotheses, run 200 experiments/quarter, ship MVPs, and track one main metric (qualified pipeline/payback).

You can do this with a single “full-stack” generalist or many pods; the unit scales cleanly.

3 reps → a micro-pod (founder/manager + 1 eng/ops) owning pipeline/rep.
1,000 reps → dedicated growth eng org with promotion/kill reviews.

4. Build a flexible tech stack

Composability avoids vendor lock-in and lets you swap parts as you scale, IP ID across vendors, contact-data waterfalls, ML “next best action,” and multi-channel outputs. Start simple; evolve into a fabric that supports hundreds of reps.

3 reps → basic vendor waterfall + simple scoring.
1,000 reps → multi-vendor redundancy, explainable scoring, and channel orchestration.

5. Use AI as force multiplier (don’t replace reps)

Ramp applies AI to repetitive GTM work:

Write messaging
CRM autofill
Reply triage,
Risk alerts, handoffs, copilot Q&A

So humans spend more time selling. Start light; scale into deeper use cases and build-vs-buy with ROI gates as teams grow.

Why these five work whether you have 3 or 1,000 reps

They are systems, not tactics.

Each principle defines a repeatable way of working (cadence, pods, data activation, outcome KPIs) that you can run with one squad or many parallel squads.

This is exactly how modern outbound orgs scale.

If you want the full story of how Ramp hit $700M ARR with outbound, I broke down their entire playbook here:

Check it out here:

How Ramp Scaled to $700M ARR With Outbound

Elric Legloire - Outbound Chef

Apr 24

Read full story

If you’re a founder or GTM leader building from scratch:

Don’t copy Ramp’s size.

Copy their system.

What's your biggest takeaway from this list?

Let's get cooking!

See you in the next newsletter.

👨‍🍳 Elric

Chef, Outbound Kitchen

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