George Bonaci on Finding Alpha in Growth & Why Most Bets Should Fail

Growth Is Just Science, and Most Marketers Are Bad at It

Most marketers bring their favorite playbook to a new company and expect it to work. It rarely does.

George Bonaci has a different philosophy. He treats growth like a chemistry experiment—form a hypothesis, test relentlessly, accept that most things will fail. This approach helped him scale revenue from $100M to $650M ARR at Samsara and now drives one of the fastest-growing fintech teams at Ramp.

The goal of growth is to figure out how to grow the business. And the honest answer is like, no one really knows. Every business is different. So even if you understand from past experience something that's worked, usually just taking like that one playbook or that one tactic and copy and pasting it to a new company, like generally doesn't work.

— George Bonaci

The problem isn't just bad tactics. It's that most marketers don't think in terms of experiments. They think in terms of what they know and how to apply it. That's the profile of a writer or PR person—valuable, but fundamentally different from someone trained to scope experiments, measure results, and iterate.

Run More Experiments Faster, Then Triple Down When Something Works

Velocity beats perfection. If you're doing growth right, the majority of your bets should fail. That means you need to run enough experiments to find the outliers.

George prioritizes experiments across four dimensions: impact, effort, confidence, and time to results. Most teams only consider the first two. But if you're highly confident something will work, just do it. If you're uncertain but can get fast signal, run it anyway.

The real mistake happens after you find a winner. Most startups see a channel working and double their spend. George says that's not aggressive enough.

If you just burn a shitload of cash though on a channel super quickly, say you're spending $10K and you're like, shit, it works, let's put $200K on it. The $200K will not be nearly as efficient as that $10K.

— George Bonaci

The trick is watching the response curve. Graph your spend against output and find the asymptote—the point where returns start to decay. Most companies reach saturation too slowly. They should be scaling much faster when they discover a channel that works, then throttle back only when the data tells them to.

When Velocity Gets Sloppy

George once faced a web page with declining conversion rates on their number one channel. The team had two options: run controlled experiments to isolate variables, or throw everything at the wall at once. They chose velocity over rigor and 3x'd the conversion rate in weeks.

The problem? They never learned what actually worked. Months later, they had to reverse-engineer their own changes through proper A/B testing. But in the moment, with a quarter to save, velocity was the right call. That's the portfolio approach—allocate some bets to short-term wins, others to long-term learning.

Finding Alpha: Do What No One Else Knows or What Everyone Thinks Won't Work

The best growth teams find unfair advantages. George calls this "seeking alpha"—doing things competitors haven't discovered or haven't tried because they're convinced it won't work.

Direct mail is his favorite example. Years ago, the suggestion was met with skepticism. Junk mail to people's homes? For a B2B SaaS company? It sounded absurd. But nobody else was doing it, and it was massively scalable. After a few iterations, it became one of their biggest channels.

I think the way that you find alpha is either by doing things that no one else knows about. I think another aspect is probably doing things that everyone is convinced will not work.

— George Bonaci

Where do you find these opportunities? George recommends three sources: academic learning (adapting old playbooks like marketing mix modeling from the 1950s), peer conversations (what's working at other companies), and learning from other verticals or geographies. WhatsApp marketing dominates internationally but remains underutilized in the U.S. for most B2B brands. That's alpha.

Today, George believes influencer marketing and user-generated content remain underexplored in B2B, especially for enterprise. It's labor-intensive, but the unfair advantage is real.

Pre-Mortems Matter More Than Post-Mortems

Before launching an experiment, George's team writes a pre-mortem. What are the failure modes? Is the sample size large enough? Are we measuring the right thing? For high-confidence bets, they get it right about 90% of the time.

The big swings are different. There's always a black swan you didn't anticipate. That's when post-mortems become valuable—not to rehash predicted failures, but to extract learnings that generalize across the business.

One example: A/B testing showed a red call-to-action button outperformed everything else on their homepage. But when segmented by audience, it severely underperformed for enterprise customers. That insight cascaded to content, webinars, and direct mail—all enterprise-focused channels that had been using red buttons as a "best practice." Fixing it improved performance across the board.

The structure is simple: the person who owned the experiment writes the post-mortem, sends it 24 hours in advance, and hosts a live conversation with cross-functional stakeholders. Google Docs, not Notion. Live discussion, not comment threads.

Hire Junior, Optimize for Potential, and Report to a Founder

George's advice to Series A founders: hire junior growth talent, not senior. At early stage, potential matters far more than pedigree. A smart generalist who thinks like a scientist will outperform a veteran bringing stale playbooks.

Growth should also sit independently—not buried in marketing or product. The mandate is to grow the business, period. That means having the freedom to work across functions and tackle whatever's highest leverage. At Ramp, growth reports directly to a co-founder. That's not an accident.

The cultural piece is critical too. No one should be attached to their experiments. If you're not failing most of the time, you're not taking enough risk. That mindset has to be baked into the team from day one.