Marketing goes first
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- Ramp Router is an LLM router infrastructure software that routes AI requests to the lowest-cost approved model meeting quality standards, reducing model costs by ~30%
- Ramp successfully embedded the Router within its existing company narrative (saving money) established since 2019 with its original corporate card product
- Argues that the optimal business order is marketing first (story/strategy), building second (products), and sales third, rather than the traditional reverse sequence
- The story becomes the strategy document that guides product decisions across all stakeholders (customers, investors, candidates, engineers) and now also informs AI agent behavior
- Amazon’s ‘Working Backwards’ process exemplifies this: write the press release and FAQ as if the product already shipped, before any engineering work begins
- With AI lowering the cost of building v1 products, features converge quickly; what differentiates is the enduring company story that compounds with each new product
- Proposes two tests: ask five people to complete ‘This company exists to __ for __’ and count distinct answers (one answer = clear story); run press-release test on roadmap items before building