The Ledger
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Ramp does not actually have a product-led growth motion, argues Cabane
“Even the people I love and care about, you think of, like, something like a ramp, I love them to death. Amazing company. Do you think there's PRG? Do you think CFOs randomly invite other CFOs to use Ramp? Hell no. It doesn't happen like that. It doesn't work l…”
Automated onboarding welcome emails usually add zero value to user activation
“Have you tried not sending a welcome email? Not sending, you know, the first three, four, five emails to get people to use the products. And of course they haven't. And I tell them, try it. Take 2030, whatever it takes to be statistically significant and don't…”
Series A and B startups cannot hire top-tier growth leaders full-time
“They're, like, of the one 20, a third is, like, semi-retired in VC and other things. A third is in, like, great walls, like Luke, and you're not gonna poach Luke from, like, Shopify, right? And there's a third, like me, who's, like, doing, like consultancy and…”
Enterprise-first software startups cannot successfully pivot to self-serve PLG
“It's companies that are enterprise first with the entire, like, cost structure and product structure of an enterprise software, and then want to open a PLG and go, hey, let's let people, like, sign up on their own. And like nothing works. Like the acquisition …”
Guillaume Cabane: CAC rises faster than brand benefits compensate in growing startups
“In most successful startups that grow fairly well, The CAC will rise faster than the brand can compensate for that rise.”
Cabane: Sending email verification requests boosts user retention in SaaS
“That is an example of something that is very replicable in almost any SaaS business. It's very easy to implement and will drive your user retention up.”
Cabane: People will increasingly ignore real human messages as AI writing surpasses humans
“So it's very likely that we'll start ignoring messages from real humans at a much higher rate, because the quality of AI will be better than the quality of humans.”
No SaaS firm Cabane advised reached $50M ARR on a single channel
“And I have never seen a companies I've worked with, neither at Segment or at Drift, Gorgias, or Ram, and not in one of the companies I engage with, where we were able to get to fifty million on one channel. Not one.”
Cabane: Growth teams incentivized on non-revenue KPIs won't deliver revenue
“If the incentive of the team is to drive signups and engagement, the problem is they will optimize for that, not for the long-term viability of the business. That's a huge risk. I'm French. I know how to cheat 10 times out of 10, right? You give me anything as…”
Only 120 elite growth practitioners exist in the US, estimates Cabane
“All, almost all people that like my level of experience in the US, right? There's like, there's less than 200, there's a 120 people, okay?”
Cold calling is back big time thanks to LLMs and Orum
“ColdCard was dead from like, 20, 12, 2013 to 20, 22, and with LLMs now, and tools like Orum, ColdCard is back big time.”
Product bundling shrinks target market size and fails as a strategy
“Building bundles. Like bundles are a terrible idea. When you start bundling different features, different products together into one, the size of the audience that cares about the entire bundle is smaller and smaller as the bundle increases.”
Senior executives never succeed when returning to early-stage startups, says Cabane
“Hiring to senior. They tell me, yes, I'm excited going back early stage and getting my hands dirty. That has never came out to be true.”
Segment tracked engineer job changes using LinkedIn URLs for reverse attribution
“That's what we found at Segment. Really crazy attribution logic, where we found engineers across jobs by, and that's the unique lesson, keying not on the link, not on the email, because the email changes, domain changes, not on the name, that's not relevant, o…”
Zapier refused Segment's enterprise feature requests to maintain strict SMB focus
“I have one example. Zapier did that for very, very long. I talked to the Zapier founders. I talked to Mike when I was at Segment, and I wanted enterprise features, and he said, gee, we love you, but I'm sorry. We're not going to build those features. I'm like,…”
Ramp's hyper-personalized CFO email campaign hit 12-15% response rates
“The response rate here is 12 to 15%.”
Cabane: Startups should double ad spend weekly to test channel limits
“I recommend companies to two X the budget every week until it's that lines. Just do it for like Four weeks, six weeks, it's not gonna, like, burn your budget, your entire, like, capital, right? But just, two x on week two, two x on week three, two x on week fo…”
Cabane: Startups with unsamplable target markets should focus on ABM
“Take a sample. Take a sample of, take a randomized sample of the audience. If you can't do that, it means your target market is too small and you should be doing ABM. You're not doing like high skill stuff.”
Cabane: Growth teams should care only about weight-adjusted pipeline dollars
“Reject any KPI that is vanity. You don't care about traffic. You don't care about any of those KPIs. The only thing you care about is weight adjusted pipeline dollars.”
Cabane: Never hire a marketing candidate who doesn't own pipeline numbers
“If a marketing candidate that you're looking to hire does not own a pipeline figure, that is the wrong candidate, my friend.”
Cabane: Startups without a lead score must halt operations to define ICP
“If you haven't think of, like, the lead score, it means you haven't thought of your ICP. If you haven't thought of who's a good customer for you just stop everything. Stop everything and just go define who are the good customers and what are their attributes.”
Startups should wait until $2M+ revenue to hire growth teams, says Cabane
“After a couple of million revenue. Like once you, once you've handled the early adopters, you've scaled at least one channel that works well, and you're starting to think of optimization Testing, aggressively building a growth team, then you should have enough…”
Cabane: Hire former management consultants for growth if founders are unavailable
“If you don't have a former founder, go for somebody from, like, a consulting background, one of the, you know, big five, somebody who's really focused on, like, on data, on precision, On the running hypothesis and on running a process.”
Cabane: Growth candidate take-homes should include data with hidden anomalies
“You want to ensure that they can look at your data, which means you need to give them a take home that has some of your data. I would recommend hiding a few Easter eggs in there, some outliers, to see how they look at the data.”
Ramp's growth team ships roughly 200 experiments every quarter
“And if you look at a team like Reamp, these days, with like, 10, 15 people on the growth team, they ship about 200 experiments per quarter.”
Cabane: Marketing lacks respect for individual contributors with deep channel expertise
“Everybody in marketing is forced to become a manager pretty fast. Right. Because there is no, there's no respect for deep knowledge of one channel.”
Cabane: Sharing unknown business mistakes guarantees audience engagement
“If you can drive value about mistakes, problems of the business you have discovered that your audience does not know, you will get engagement. Guaranteed.”
Cabane: Having engineers build quasi-products effectively drives demand for technical audiences
“Leveraging engineers to build quasi-products, to build let's say, demand gen, drive people to the product that is different, so have people build something which is a quasi-product, That works really well, especially for technical audiences, right?”
Cabane: Free sidecar products still drive demand if exceptional
“If there is interest for a product, people have built a better version of it and have monetized it. So, like, a lot of those niche have disappeared, right? And the second is that the quality has gone down, and people have become desensitized when they say, oh,…”
Free plans incentivize engineers to adopt products and bring them to new jobs
“If you're lucky enough to have a really good product, let's put aside those that have like a bad product. We have a truly good product that is useful. You have an incentive to have a free plan, a startup plan, whatever you want to call it, because engineers We…”
Top-quartile post-$5M SaaS startups spend $1 CAC per $1 revenue
“Well, I'd say low CAC, if you look at the you know, the KeyBank Capital deck that they release every year, look at the top quartile of startups in terms of performance post five million revenue, you're gonna see that the, roughly, it's about a dollar of revenu…”
Cabane: Mid-market users stick with fintech platforms like Ramp for up to eight years
“When people onboard a financial, you know, platform, global platform like Ramp, they tend to stay for very, very long, multiple years, and so you can afford It's a something much higher in terms of payback time because the LTV is huge. People stick for three, …”
Gorgias contacts its entire TAM of 200,000 merchants at least quarterly
“If you look at their total adjustable market, we're talking of a couple 100,000 merchants in the US and Europe. Right? That's the market. By now, they touch each of those merchants at least once a quarter. At least every single merchant at least once a quarter…”
Guillaume Cabane: Growth marketing requires a venture capital portfolio mindset
“Like an angel investor, like a VC, growth is a risk-adjusted way of creating value, ok? What that means is that I have limited information. When I'm an angel investor, I have limited due diligence. When I do growth, I have limited knowledge on that experiment,…”
Cabane: Most growth teams run experiments without checking for statistical significance
“The biggest mistake that I see happen in growth teams is they undertake an experiment without assessing the cost, the effort or the audience size. And often I ask, can we reach statistical significance here? Is the audience big enough for us to be able to lear…”
Gorgias' automated outbound campaign achieved a 10-12% response rate
“No, it's more like 10, 12%. 10, 12%, which is about five X the standard response rate of a good cold email.”
Cabane: Growth teams rarely exist as standalone units, usually reporting to product or marketing
“I'd love for that to be true. I have learned that I'm wrong. And that is rarely the case. The local effects of the world are the exception, truly, right? It generally rolls into, like, either product or marketing, more rarely to revenue but I would love for th…”
Cabane: Early growth teams should comprise a growth head, engineer, and marketer
“The head of growth is the analyst in the early days. So you have like head of growth, engineer, and one marketer slash copywriter. That's your team.”
A growth team's true budget constraint is headcount and experiment velocity
“My budget? It's my head count, and it's the time allocation of my head count. My constraint, generally, is how many experiments can my small team ship, right?”
Cabane: Startups should always prioritize full-time growth hires over advisors
“You should always hire full-time when you can. Like, I always tell people, like, if you can hire the person you want, that's the right fit for you. Go for it.”
Cabane: Growth leaders should outsource testing costs through peer networks
“The key to success and growth is testing and learning, and so if you can outsource the cost of learning to other teams, either through advisory like I did in the early days, or through, like, good relationships, you are saving a ton of effort and capital, and …”