Seattle · Engineer turned growth marketer
Technically superior products lose to inferior ones. Constantly.
The difference is distribution and positioning. I’m Raymond Fong, an engineer who has spent 18 years building the growth systems that close that gap.
$1M ARR
Deviate Labs, built from zero
TIME
Best Innovations of 2022: Up Paint
$100K
E-commerce revenue on $0 ad spend: Immersive Audio Album
10,000+
Copies of Growth Hacking sold
How I think about growth
I trained as an engineer at Harvey Mudd College, and Mudd never taught me a thing about marketing. But it did teach me how to reason through a problem I had never seen before.
Break it down. Identify the components. Figure out how they interact.
That mental model works the same way on a sales funnel as it does on a circuit. The entrepreneurs I’ve learned the most from built repeatable systems instead of grinding harder.
Scale requires architecture.
I wrote that architecture down as the ASP™ Sales Flywheel in Growth Hacking: Silicon Valley’s Best Kept Secret, and it has anchored my work ever since.
What I’ve built
I’ve built three companies in three unrelated categories on the same playbook: find the system, build it right, let it compound.
Deviate Labs
Deviate Labs is the growth marketing firm I co-founded in 2014, and we’ve worked with companies from bootstrapped startups to billion-dollar enterprises, including Dollar Shave Club. We cross-pollinate tactics across industries: what works for a scrappy DTC brand often works inside a Fortune 500, and the reverse.
Up Paint
Up Paint upcycles waste paint into premium interior paint. TIME named it one of the Best Innovations of 2022, and it landed on shelves at Michaels and Ace Hardware.
Immersive Audio Album
Immersive Audio Album is a media platform and download store for the immersive audio community, built entirely through community.
The book
Growth Hacking: Silicon Valley’s Best Kept Secret
Chad Riddersen and I wrote it (Lioncrest, 2017) to bring the ASP™ Sales Flywheel to businesses outside Silicon Valley, and it has since been translated for the Chinese market.
Featured in
Mudd Magazine, Spring/Summer 2026
Cover story: “Harvey Mudd Alumni Build What’s Next”
Webby Awards, 2021
Nominated for Best Growth Strategy (Radix .TECH “Break The Code” campaign)
Interviewed for the documentary about Yelp’s advertising practices
Get in touch
If you’re building something and want to compare notes on growth, I’m happy to talk.