Ramp

grew to $8B selling "free" software

Author

Stan Rymkiewicz
July 13, 2023

Welcome to the Category Surfers where we break down go-to-market strategies so you can build the best growth engine for your SaaS.

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How Ramp grew to $8B with a free product

Ramp is a corporate card startup that lets you quickly spin up cards, categorize transactions and save money on the company’s money ops.

Here is Ramp’s GTM strategy:

What is it?

Ramp gives companies cards to use, and then provides lots of useful information about how they're spending money. They help companies find ways to save money. It looks at what companies are buying and suggests ways they could save money.

Why are they growing?

One of the main reasons Ramp grew is their GTM strategy. Since they are selling a free product (customers don’t pay for their spend tracking software), they were able to sign contracts left and right.

Ramp makes money like a credit card company does: on card fees. Last year they powered $5B in payments — a 2% fee rate means $100M in fee revenue!

TLDR: It’s very easy to sell a free product that saves customers 3.5% on average. All thanks to one of the best tactics when coming up with a GTM play.

How big is the market?

The market is worth about $20B just for spend management (issue cards, manage transactions) and has been growing on average 35% annually.

Spend management category

Ramp is competing with:

  • Brex: $1.5B raised with 1,400 employees

  • Airbase: $264M raised with 400 employees

  • Divvy: $667M raised with 460 employees

  • Navan: $1.3B raised with 2,300 employees

I’m working on a searchable library of the best GTM strategies (like this one). Let me know what you’d like to see there. I have some ideas but I’d love to hear yours.

That’s it!