Mar 22, 2024 · 42m · sourcery
Nick Abouzeid, Rivet: Growth "Hacking" Myths, What Worked at Ramp, & Better Tax Services · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
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In this episode of the Sourcery podcast, host Molly O'Shea interviews Nick Abouzeid, co-founder of Rivet, about debunking growth hacking myths, structured experimentation frameworks from Ramp, and building a venture-backed modern tax prep firm. Nick shares key career learnings across venture capital and hyper-growth fintech startups while offering practical advice for founders and growth marketers.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Molly holds 19.8% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Molly as informed peer 2.6 Guest teaching 2.9 Guest disagreement 1.1 Molly pushing back 0.4
speaking balance: gold is Molly, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 6:25 Debunking the secret sauce myth in growth
Nick forcefully rejects the idea that growth requires secret tools or expensive contractors, calling it a complete farce made up to bill consulting fees.
Hardest push from Molly ▶ 22:32 Questioning venture-scale economics of a tax firmMolly directly challenges Nick on whether a traditional tax prep firm can truly deliver venture-scale returns and manage high investor expectations.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 6:25 Reframing growth as direct metric accountabilityNick corrects the common misconception of growth hacks by explaining that true growth mastery is simply owning a concrete business number without excuses.
Molly holds their own ▶ 36:24 Molly highlights venture market chill across fintechMolly brings her proprietary deal-tracking expertise from Sourcery to establish the macro context of the fintech funding downturn.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Molly as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Molly pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Congratulating Rivet's Launch Announcement | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 | Molly opens with a warm welcome and highlights Rivet's launch metrics on Twitter. Nick graciously downplays the social media reception, noting celebrations are only warranted after tax season wraps up, before detailing his career background. | |
| Debunking Growth "Hacking" Myths | 2 | 5 | 4 | 0 | When Molly asks about best practices and secret sauces in growth, Nick forcefully rejects the premise. He calls secret growth hacks a farce invented by high-priced consultants and emphasizes raw metric accountability. | |
| Measuring Growth Goals & Experimentation Methodology | 3 | 5 | 2 | 0 | Molly asks how to measure and hire growth talent. Nick delivers a masterclass on Ramp's single-metric ownership and probability-weighted experiment scoring framework, dismissing common excuses like seasonality. | |
| The Power of Simple ("Level Zero") Growth Optimization | 2 | 4 | 1 | 0 | Molly inquires about high-impact breakthrough strategies. Nick shares a story about a simple homepage button change that outperformed sophisticated campaigns, introducing his concept of Level Zero experiments. | |
| Practical Advice on Experiment Prioritization | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Molly shifts the discussion to how Nick's Ramp learnings led to founding Rivet. Nick explains Ramp's promotion culture and how his co-founder Kyle's IRS auditing background spurred the idea for modern tax services. | |
| Building a Venture-Scalable Tax Prep Business | 4 | 3 | 1 | 3 | Molly probes Nick on the venture viability of a service-heavy tax business and the pressure associated with VC funding. Nick defends the model by explaining software automation for tedious tax workflows like K-1 transcription. | |
| How Rivet Got Its Name | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Molly asks about the company name Rivet. Nick shares that ChatGPT suggested the name, mentions passing on Roman, and describes aiming to build a multi-billion firm comparable to Ernst and Young. | |
| Winning Client Trust Through Responsiveness | 2 | 3 | 2 | 0 | Molly asks how Rivet earns client trust and identifies target customers. Nick explains that just answering emails quickly sets them apart from incumbents who ghost prospective clients for months. | |
| Strategic Partnerships & Serving Complex Tax Needs | 2 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Molly asks about channel partnerships like OnDeck. Nick describes how OnDeck founders present complex international tax scenarios that traditional accounting firms refuse to service. | |
| Recruiting Tax Talent & Demystifying Tax Extensions | 5 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Molly cites her newsletter deal-tracking data to highlight the fintech venture cold spell and prompts Nick for his insider view. After Nick notes markets now demand real revenue over subsidized growth, Molly adds perspective on fintech regulatory lag. | |
| Career Advice for Aspiring Founders | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Molly asks for transition advice for operators considering founding a company. Nick advises waiting until the pull is irresistible, and Molly reinforces the importance of offboarding responsibly. |
Statements from this episode (22)
Abouzeid: Rivet's Launch Means Nothing Until Successfully Completing Tax Season
“At the same time you know, nothing's happened yet. I'll take the congratulations on April 16th when tax season is over. Then I will feel like, you know, we've done what we need to do, but for the for the time being it feels good to sort of be able to talk abou…”
Abouzeid remains Superhuman's top referrer of new users
“I'm still their number one refer knock on wood. Nobody's overtaken me in the last year or so.”
Abouzeid: Growth 'secret sauces' and ad tricks are a consulting farce
“None of this exists. This is all a farce. This is all made up to allow people to bill exorbitant consulting rates to tell you that maybe Google ads is not for you.”
Abouzeid: Top growth hires can clearly explain why their metric moved
“The thing that we screened for was, have you owned a number before, and can you verbalize what you did in order to make the number go up? And the best growth people we worked with all could verbalize exactly why the number went up. And they can walk you throug…”
Abouzeid: Do not hire growth talent without defining target metrics first
“It is not a good idea to hire a growth person if you don't know what number they're going to move.”
Abouzeid: Growth team members should each own exactly one isolated metric
“If you make one person responsible for one number and that one number is in a vacuum by itself, not touching anything else, It's very clear if they're doing their job or not. It's very clear if the things that you're doing are working or not.”
Abouzeid: Ramp growth team targeted 2x their quarterly goal in expected value
“When you sum up all those expected weights, you end up with the value of all the experiments you're going to ship for the quarter. And it's very difficult to ship all of those and then miss your number, right? If you ship all of them and the sum of those weigh…”
Abouzeid: Single homepage button test drove over half of Ramp's quarterly goal
“Monday rolls around opening up our testing suite. Huh? There's a winning variant on the homepage by like a pretty big percentage. That's really interesting. It was big enough that it, you know, helped us hit our goals by like over half in like that one little …”
Abouzeid: There are no bonus points for complex growth tests over hitting numbers
“There's no bonus points for sexy. There's only bonus points for hitting your number. If you get your number by changing the button text, great. That's awesome. We should be really proud of that. We should celebrate that. We shouldn't just shy away from it beca…”
Abouzeid: Test Website Buttons Before Buying Expensive Personalization Tools
“It's certainly effective, but unless you're, it's such a big scale. Test your buttons first, right? Like that's a very expensive engagement. Take some time to implement it's, you know, focus on the buttons are already there and don't cost anything to test.”
Abouzeid: Rivet raised venture believing it can IPO in 10-15 years
“No, I mean, look, we wouldn't have raised money if we did not think we could go public in 10, 12, 15, right? People have to return their funds. This is not for fun. This is not a hobby, right? We know that we wouldn't have raised money if we didn't think that …”
Abouzeid: Rivet uses Drake Software for backend tax preparation
“We use Drake for our sort of backend sort of tax prep actually builds the returns.”
Abouzeid: ChatGPT generated the name for his startup Rivet
“Weirdly enough rivet was a name that Chad CPT told me.”
Abouzeid: Rivet is building an EY competitor, not a startup-only firm
“Ernst & Young is who I look up to. It's not, you know, there are a bunch of startup focused tax prep firms. We are not building one. We are building a better tax prep firm. Just so happens that a lot of our sort of early customers happen to be startups.”
Abouzeid: Tax prep is highly fragmented and targeted by PE roll-ups
“This is a massively fragmented industry. It's largely owned by, you know, accountants themselves who started their own firms and grew it slowly over, you know, two decades and are ready to retire. Private equity firms are getting involved now to roll them up.”
Abouzeid: Rivet services individual W-2 filers through Series C companies
“We work with, you know, everything from Vanilla w two tiny nines. I'm just an employee at a company. I want somebody to be able to call in the off season for questions all the way through call it like series B and series C companies with, you know, deeply soph…”
Abouzeid: Personal tax prep firms avoid complex, multi-jurisdiction clients
“There are no personal tax prep firms that are eager to engage with this type of client. Why? They're more sophisticated and time consuming than sort of your easy, you know, here's a thousand dollars. I'll get you my tax returns and just sort of not have to thi…”
Abouzeid: Tax extensions are prep firms' biggest productivity lever
“It's oftentimes the biggest lever a tax prep firm has and sort of making their people more productive is by themselves six more months to do the work.”
Abouzeid: Unprofitable VC-fueled fintechs face painful couple of years
“If you grew really fast off the back of cheap venture debt and cheap venture equity and, It's unclear where the business goes from there. It's going to be a very painful couple of years ahead.”
Abouzeid: Ramp is a generational company, Rivet unlikely to match its success
“I hope I hope we are as successful as ramp one day. I don't think we will be, I think it's a generational company.”
Abouzeid: Aspiring founders should only leave jobs when an idea pulls them out
“Don't, if you just cut and run when you're sort of Marginally excited about an idea. Most people end up regretting it, at least that I've seen. So wait until the company, the idea, you know, the opportunity literally like rips you out of your seat, because in …”