Ramli John

Author of Product-Led Onboarding (+30K copies sold) | First Round Fast Track Mentor | Content Director at Appcues.

⭐️ Follow me for helpful tips to onboard, delight, and keep your customers coming back to your product.
📔 Author of Amazon #1 bestselling book "Product-Led Onboarding." 👉 𝙎𝙀𝘼𝙉 𝙀𝙇𝙇𝙄𝙎, Founder of GrowthHackers.com: "Product-Led Onboarding is 𝐦𝐮𝐬𝐭-𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞 embarking on the critical activity of improving their user onboarding." 


⚡️ I use my multi-disciplinary skills in marketing, design, and software development to help product-led SaaS companies analyze their whole customer's journey and funnel to identify growth opportunities to 2-3X their MRR. 

Often, that means designing and implementing experiments to increase activation rate (trial-to-paid or free-to-paid conversions), decrease churn rate, or increase average revenue per user (ARPU)

If you asked my friends and colleagues how they would describe me, they'd say I'm resourceful, proactive, and entrepreneurial

►► CONTACT INFO
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▷ Write me a note at ramli [at] ramlijohn.com

Founder

A weekly show and newsletter for marketers looking to level up their marketing and career. I interview world-class marketers to uncover the secrets, strategies, and frameworks behind their wins. In each episode, guests reveal three things:  (1) a marketing power-up,  (2) a real-world example of that in action, and (3) a power-up that’s helped them take their career to the next level.

Ramli "RJ" John

I just hired my first full-time employee. Not an assistant. A Chief of Staff. And it's my wife, Joanna Ruth! Here's why:

For 1.5 years, I resisted hiring. I wanted to stay solo as long as possible—full control, no coordination costs, just me and clients.

Then I wrote down the job description for what Delight Path actually needs this year.

Someone who can:
→ Create content and community systems
→ Bring the vision to life (not just execute tasks)
→ Scale the impact for product leaders I had in mind

I realized: this isn't an assistant role. It's 2nd in command.

And Joanna is perfect for it:

1. She's built more than I have!

Joanna's self-published over 47 Montessori education books (I need to catch up)! She's a proven system-builder, not just an idea person.

2. She follows instructions when I wing it (let's talk about building IKEA furniture!) 

Joanna forced me to create SOPs for everything. She's started documenting processes I've been running on instinct. Business became transferable, not just in my head.

3. She connects deeper to people than I do

People call me emotionless sometimes (fair). She cares about people on a level I don't naturally access. It's why she studied early childhood education focused on autism and behavioral science. 

Community needs that energy, not just my frameworks

Transitioning Delight Path from 100% consulting revenue to 50% media + community requires coordination I can't do alone.

Before hiring, I asked:
→ Am I hiring for tasks or for leverage?
→ Can this person make decisions without me?
→ Will this free me to do what only I can do?

If it's not yes to all three, it's an assistant role (nothing wrong with that, but not what I needed).

What's Next:

Joanna starts immediately with partnerships and community for Product Leaders Lab. As we scale, she moves into the Integrator (EOS) role, and I move into the Visionary role.

The onboarding forced me to document everything—SOPs for content, client work, and community management. Business became a system, not just me.
I'm excited to build something meaningful together again (we organized a large youth church conference before we got married).

Please join me in welcoming Joanna to Delight Path.

What's been your experience bringing someone into your solo business?

PS. If you're thinking about staying solo versus hiring, Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell has been super helpful. Changed how I think about the business.

Building a community for product leaders (VP and Director-level). Founder @ Delight Path. 2x best-selling author. New book “Eureka” now available. Author of “Product-Led Onboarding” (+40K copies sold).

Most podcasts are interview-style. That won't cut it in 2026! It's why I'm doing a high-production narrative format for my new show: Product Leaders Lab (coming in Feb).

I turned my living room into a recording studio this Monday. Shot the intro and teaser with my creative producers, Carlo and Justine. 

Here's how it works:

Two veteran product leaders. Same impossible scenario. Completely different approaches.

One episode breaks down their decisions, what worked, what didn't, and the lessons that actually matter.

Episode 1 premieres February 24th: "The AI Adoption Pressure"

Netali (VP of Product) and Greg Leach (Senior Director of New Business) faced the same problem: their teams were drowning in prompt engineering.

Netali's solution? She created a new role, "Prompt Ops," to centralize AI expertise and protect PM capacity.

Greg's approach? He became the chair of the company's AI committee to remove red tape and encourage the adoption of internal AI tools. Over 100 people attended the first demo (out of 230 employees).

Two leaders. Two strategies. Both worked.

I've already recorded:

→ Christine Itwaru (VP of Product at Userflow): "The Launch Recovery" - How protecting her team after a launch disaster became her defining leadership moment.
→ Michelle Green (Director of Product at Coley): "The Strategy Misalignment" - When customer success and product saw the same problem completely differently.
→ Nesrine Changuel, PhD (Author of "Product Delight," former PM at Google, Spotify, Skype): "The Competitive Moment" - How she became Google Meet's first PM for Delight during the pandemic and chose benchmark against, "If we were all in a physical room, how would the experience be better?"

I'm scheduled to record with other amazing product leaders:
Betsy Shaak, Joseph King, Chris Downey, Jason Knight, Gabrielle Bufrem, Lauren Schuman, Deepti Pradeep, Angela Sze, Lilach Yaniv, Warren Dombowsky, Nick Cust, Purnima Bihari, and Aakash Gupta.

I'm looking for more VPs, Directors, or Heads of Product who want to share their defining leadership moments.

DM me or tag someone below.

PS. Bookmark this for when you're stuck on an impossible decision and need to see how other leaders navigated it. First episode drops February 24th.

2025: The year I learned focus has a price tag. Turned 40. Ran my first half marathon. Doubled my income while working fewer hours.

But here's what nobody tells you about Year 1 of consulting:

The wins are incredible. The valleys are brutal.

Some months hit $50K. Others dipped to $2K. I got ghosted after proposals. Had deals go sideways. Watched summer dry up completely.

Before I left my job, April Dunford told me: "Don't try to do too many things at once. Focus on one thing and get REALLY good at it."

So I said no to:
→ Newsletter sponsorships (even when I needed the money)
→ Course launches
→ Content creation I actually loved

The result? My biggest deal ever—with a Fortune 100 company.

But it came at a cost: I didn't create anything I'm truly proud of last year. No podcasts. No creative projects. Just focused execution.

That changes in 2026.

I'm launching Product Leaders Lab—a community + media brand for VPs, Directors, and Heads of Product. Already have 22 founding members and $60K in sponsorships locked.

Also launching a documentary-style podcast: One impossible scenario. Three veteran product leaders. Three completely different approaches. 20-25 minutes, not 60+ minute rambling.

First episode launched in Feb 2026: "The AI Ambush" - Your CEO announces an AI pivot without telling you. Product team panics. Board meeting in 48 hours. What do you do?

And I'm also running the Chicago Marathon in October to raise $2,500 for a close friend fighting stage 4 cancer.

2025 was depth. 2026 is reach.

What's one thing you're most proud of from 2025?

PS. Full year-in-review in the newsletter.

2025 has been the most transformative year of my life. Not just professionally, but personally, emotionally, and physically. Just like my review of 20

Open article: 2025 in review: the year everything changed by Ramli John • 9 min read

2025 in review: the year everything changed

In this live workshop, Becki Floyd will share how to turn user feedback into working AI prototypes within a day.  

Engineers can now use AI to ship in hours, not weeks. If UX can't keep pace, product decisions happen without user input.

Becki redesigned her entire UX process to work at AI speed:

✅ Async video research + AI analysis = user insights in hours (not weeks)
✅ Morning feedback → afternoon prototypes using Replit and ChatGPT
✅ High-fidelity prototypes that developers can ship immediately
✅ Process that keeps UX leading when speed matters most

This isn't about adding more tools to your stack. It's about rebuilding how UX works when AI-powered devs are shipping code faster than traditional research cycles allow.

This is her framework:

1. Gather insights in hours (async video + AI synthesis)
2. Build working prototypes the same day (tools that compress design-to-dev)
3. Lead product direction at AI speed (process over perfection)

We kick off the workshop tomorrow (Wednesday, January 21) at 9 AM ET

Bring your PMs, designers, and developers. This is for teams trying to stay user-led when everything moves faster.

Register: https://luma.com/9bwpea6x

What's your biggest challenge in keeping UX involved when dev cycles get compressed?

Founder @ 42 - Paid Media, Creative, SEO & RevOps for B2B

Help B2B companies scale @ 42 Agency
Helping inter-generational families connect with learning @ Little Robin Hood
Build better exclusions for online ads @ exclusion sites 
Publisher and writer  on B2B marketing insights @ 42slash.com 
Various Projects at rext.in

Kamil Rextin

I have been hacking away at Claude Code a lot over the holidays and it's official: I'll be hosting a workshop on Claude Code with Exit Five  Thank you so much to Matthew Carnevale  for making it happen.

If you're curious about how Claude Code can help you as a marketer, doing anything from data analysis to generating content, building custom agents, would love to see you there. Let me know if you have any questions you want me to address or use cases that are most interesting / curious about!

Attribution said paid social drove 257 leads for a B2B SaaS client.

The real number was closer to 2,137.

That's an 8.3x blind spot.

Here's how we found it. We matched companies that had any LinkedIn ad exposure against their CRM data—not just clicked. Not just converted. Any exposure.

Companies with LinkedIn exposure had a 6.72% opportunity rate. Companies without? 0.83%.

That's an 8.1x lift. Statistically significant.

Your crm model is lying to you. Not because it's broken. Because it was never designed to measure what paidsocial actually does.

paidsocial doesn't convert people in-session. It makes your brand familiar. It warms up accounts. It does the work that later appears as "direct" or "organic" or the sales team taking credit.

If you're measuring paidsocial the same way you measure search, you're measuring it wrong.

The question isn't whether LinkedIn is working. It's how much credit you're giving to channels that are just harvesting what LinkedIn planted.

I don't want to explain my content system every time I use it.

So I saved it as a Claude Code agent.

It knows the 5 themes. It knows the tease-publish-promo rhythm. It knows each essay spawns 6-9 LinkedIn posts and 1-2 carousels. It knows to hit the ClickUp API with the right tags, due dates, and assignments.

Next time I need content? I invoke the agent. It doesn't ask clarifying questions about structure. It just builds.

This is the shift most people miss about AI. Everyone's focused on "prompting better." That's a trap. You're doing the same work over and over.

Build systems, not prompts.

We spent the time once to encode our entire content engine - 10 months, 20 essays, 200+ derivatives - into something reusable. Now it's a tool, not a task.

The first time takes effort. The second time takes seconds.

What if your best processes were preserved and reusable instead of stuck in someone's head?

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I built a paid media co-pilot this weekend with Claude Code. Here's what actually matters.
Most of what it does is table stakes - unified dashboard across LinkedIn/Meta/Google, performance tracking, ad variation generation, approval workflows.

But there's one piece that fundamentally changes how I think about audience building:
Natural language audience targeting for LinkedIn.
Here's the problem we've all experienced:
You know exactly who you want to target. "Marketing leaders at mid-market B2B SaaS companies focused on demand generation."
But translating that mental model into LinkedIn's targeting interface means:

Clicking through job function taxonomies
Searching job titles one by one
Guessing which seniorities to include
Hoping you didn't miss relevant segments
No way to validate you captured your actual ICP

The new workflow:

Describe your audience in plain language
The tool analyzes your website + description
Queries a database of LinkedIn's complete targeting taxonomy (job functions, titles, seniorities, skills)
Matches and ranks relevance (highly relevant, partial matches, not relevant)
Shows you the API targeting script it will generate
Saves the audience for reuse
Pushes it directly to LinkedIn as a draft campaign

Why this matters:
When you stop treating ad platforms as the primary interface and start treating APIs as the interface, your workflow changes from searching to describing.

You're no longer constrained by platform UX. You're expressing intent and letting systems translate that into platform-specific parameters.
This is the same shift that happened with SQL → natural language for databases.
The platform interface becomes a validation layer, not the creation layer.
What I learned building this:
LinkedIn's API doesn't return audience penetration (annoying).
Demographics require a separate API that returns URNs but not company names (very annoying).
But the targeting taxonomy is comprehensive if you structure it properly.
And Claude Code made building this dramatically faster than traditional development would have been.

Shout out to the 42 Agency team, especially Ma Cherrie Dee Gonzales and Alejandra Céspedes, for creating the custom box and designing the it

Vanessa Griffiths & team  awesome partners to work with on this .

If you want an awesome giftbox, send me a DM (if you need RevOps or Demand Gen support) & I will ship you one personally.

Fractional CMO for Seed to Series B startups | Founding marketing leader at Float & CrowdRiff 📈 | Builder of standout startup brands

I already thanked them privately but nice touch from 42 Agency on their client gifting program. You don't have to be a big company to do things well. (And of course the bigger thanks is for their help untangling some thorny MOPS problems for me!). Well done Kamil Rextin Alejandra Céspedes.

NEW ESSAY: Paid Media Isn't Your Problem (Coming January 20th)

Last quarter, a B2B SaaS company came to us: "Our paid media isn't working."

We pulled their CRM. 47% of leads were sitting in "open" status. Never worked.

Their paid wasn't broken. Their system was.

This essay breaks down the 3 problems disguised as paid media problems—and introduces Compound GT

We just published a new essay on our Substack: 

Why most paid media problems are not actually paid media problems but they're more measurement or GTM stack problems. 


Check out the link below. Let me know if it interesting or if you have any feedback

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