The Gravity Model for Zero-to-One Products
Ship new products with tiny shielded teams, then let traction—not headcount—pull in resources.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 93%
Ramp built competitors to publicly-traded companies (MX, Expensify, Bill.com) with teams of 3-8 people in three-month windows. The pattern: give a single small team one lofty goal and tight timeline, remove every other responsibility, wall it off from company chaos, and keep it secret until it finds product-market fit. Only then do you add resources—like gravity pulling matter toward mass.
Origin
Geoff Charles, VP of Product at Ramp, describing how Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS business in history (over $100M ARR in two years with ~50 people in R&D).
Core principles
- 01Velocity beats path-selection when the market is wide open—how fast you execute matters more than which path you pick
- 02One goal per team; humans rarely execute more than one thing excellently, especially individual contributors
- 03Secrecy protects early bets from organizational scrutiny before they've earned it
- 04Going from one product to two is harder than zero to one, because the new team has no existing product to defend
How to run it
- 1
Pick a de-risked but ambitious target
Anchor the team on a large market comparable (a Bill.com, Expensify, or Concur) or a market you can help create. The existence of public comparables both motivates and de-risks the business decision.
Pro tip Pair the market target with a Visionary design prototype (Figma/Loom walkthrough) so the team can see the future they're building.
- 2
Staff a single-threaded pod
Pull a handful of people (e.g. 3 engineers, 1 designer, 1 PM) from existing teams. They own no existing product, so nothing competes for their attention.
Pro tip Physically isolate them—'saving a room in the office just for them'—so the single thread is protected in space, not just on paper.
Watch out If the team is ever distracted by something else, you likely won't hit the goal.
- 3
Insulate them with protective tissue
Layer other roles between the core team and the chaos: a production-engineering rotation absorbs bug escalations, product operators absorb documentation, release management, and customer requests.
Watch out Leaders constantly feel the pull to borrow 'just one PM for one day' to fix one customer's issue—each borrow erodes the single thread.
- 4
Keep it invisible until PMF
Don't tell the rest of the company the bet exists until the team finds early traction. Only after product-market fit do you announce it and bring in more resources.
Pro tip Treat the reveal as the trigger to add gravity—resources follow demonstrated pull, not the other way around.
In the wild
Ramp gave one team the goal of building a competitor to Bill.com for accounts payable: three engineers, one designer, one PM, three months. It was kept single-threaded and shielded.
→ The product 'hit it out of the park' and now moves billions of dollars a year.
With roughly eight engineers, Ramp built a competitor to MX in three months, then a competitor to Expensify six months later—both against publicly traded companies.
→ Ramp hit $100M in annual revenue with under 50 people in R&D (fewer than 40 engineers and 3 PMs).
Common mistakes
Announcing the bet company-wide too early
Broadcasting a new bet before PMF invites scrutiny, resource-grabbing, and premature accountability that kills the team's focus and speed. Keep it secret until traction is real.
Multi-threading a small team
Asking a small team to carry a second goal, an existing product, or side research destroys the single-threaded focus that makes fast execution possible—going one-to-two is where teams stumble.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and product leaders launching genuinely new products or entering new markets from a position of strength.
Not ideal for
Scaling or maintaining a mature product where reliability and cross-team coordination outweigh raw speed.
From the transcript
“small teams have single threaded uh Focus um give them the the resources they need”
“don't even tell the rest of the company that you're doing these things until they find product Market Fit until they actually find that early…”
“it was three Engineers one designer one PM three months and and they hit out of that Park”
“I think it gets more challenging when you go from one to two rather than zero to one”
From the episode
Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time
Geoff Charles (VP of Product)