Ramp's best marketer is an economist

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Last year everyones favourite accountant, Dunder Mifflin’s own Kevin Malone, sat in a glass box in the middle of Flatiron Plaza NYC filing expense reports for seven hours straight. I’ve binge-watched The Office end-to-end at least 3 times, so I was pretty excited.

Brian Baumgartner, the original actor who played Kevin, worked through a pile of receipts while a live counter on the glass tracked his total against the 600,000 processed every day by accounting software, Ramp. Thousands of people stopped to watch in person, and the online livestream had 112 million views across platforms.

After five months of planning and a production crew including MrBeast’s former head of vertical platforms, the end result was funny and very well made. It turned the dullest problem in corporate finance into something the whole internet was talking about.

In a much less news-worthy move nine months earlier, Ramp hired Ara Kharazian as its first lead economist, straight from running economic research at Square.

The box stunt bought attention at a scale no amount of content publishing would ever reach. But the economist bought something that compounds instead of spiking, and 18 months later it's still paying off.

Kharazian's job is to turn Ramp's own transaction data into public research.

That data covers more than $100 billion in annual spend across 50,000 US businesses. From all that information, he builds a monthly AI Index, an advertising index, a ranking of the fastest-growing software vendors, and a weekly newsletter.

Every accounting software brand can have an opinion about how businesses are spending on AI. Only one of them measures it across 50,000 companies and publishes the figures every month.

Frankly, every brand full-stop can have an opinion about it. You or I could write a decent take on enterprise AI adoption right now. Neither of us could use real spending figures to back up those takes, because nobody outside Ramp can see the data from their platform.

This is where the traditional advice on content has inverted in the past few years. Publishing a credible opinion used to take real judgment and a bit of nerve. Now it takes a prompt. Opinions are free to produce and free to copy, so content built only on public inputs provides almost zero unique value.

Kharazian runs three tests to decide what to publish. Does Ramp have the data, are they well-suited to write about it, and does publishing it serve their audience. Everything that clears the bar goes out free and public, including the findings that conflict Ramp’s own strategies. One of their most recent updates was titled "Cracks in the AI thesis" and found US companies increasing spend on open source AI models, including those from China, and plateauing spend on dedicated AI platforms.

Anyone can reproduce your take, but only you can back it up with your numbers.

All of these updates are published on a Substack called Econ Lab, which has roughly 4,000 subscribers. Compared to the box stunt’s 112 million views, 4,000 subscribers is a rounding error.

But then you look at who's on the list. Readers are spread across 43 states and 50 countries, including executives from the top AI companies and most of the Silicon Valley VC ecosystem. Sitting alongside them are the industry reporters who cite Ramp's data in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Reuters, Financial Times and NPR.

Press coverage doesn’t inherently equal better business outcomes, but it does for Ramp. They sell to finance teams, and CFO’s are already reading the Financial Times every morning. The coverage lands in front of the buyer without Ramp buying the access, and it lands with the masthead's credibility and inherent endorsement attached. A CFO sees Ramp there as an authority on the economy they're operating in. Being a source your buyer already trusts and relies on is a very different position to being the name on a cold outbound email.

It gets even more valuable now that those citations are what AI models read. When a finance leader asks Claude or ChatGPT how businesses are spending on AI right now, Ramp is the cited source providing them with the answer.

Despite those widespread brand benefits for Ramp, I’ve found the whole strategy relies on tying everything back to an individual. Econ Lab publishes under Kharazian's name rather than Ramp's, and the author pages on Ramp’s website belong to staff like VP Controller Melissa Montgomery and senior data scientist Adam Bienvenu, rather than “The Ramp Team”. Reporters quote people, and audiences trust people.

I’ll assume you don't have $100 billion of proprietary transaction data. Fair enough. The point here is exclusivity rather than scale.

Every business is sitting on a goldmine of insights its competitors can never get a look at. Support tickets tell you what's confusing about the whole category rather than just your own product. Churn reasons tell you what people thought they were buying and where the gaps are. Quote-to-close times tell you how a market's confidence is moving. Booking patterns tell you when demand actually shifts.

None of those insights ever get packaged up and published, largely because publishing it has never been anybody's job.

That's the bit Ramp solved by hiring Kharazian as their economist, someone whose actual role is to look at what the company can see and put it somewhere other people can get value from it.

The glass box stunt is an awesome thing to do when you can afford it. Ramp pulled it off brilliantly and it did exactly the job it was meant to do by spiking attention and getting everyone talking. They did it again last week, surfacing as the partner behind The Kumar Method, an Instagram character who had pulled over a million followers playing a mysterious retired accountant. But remember those spikes don't last forever. Their other bet is eighteen months in and paying off more every day, all from one question. What can you see that nobody else can?

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