Clay

Happy 248th Birthday, America! Whether it's BBQ & fireworks, enjoying time off, or spending time with the fam -- Hope everyone has a great Independence Day! 🫡 🎆 🎇

"Good-bye ABM, hello... clAyBM!?" 😮 😳 Good one, Daniel! Love the half unicorn too :D

🎉 LAUNCHING CLAY COACHING PROGRAM 🎉 Exciting news! As Clay just closed their Series B round, David Emanuel Moreira and I are thrilled to announce the launch of our Clay coaching program. 🧠 Join us for 6 hands-on training sessions tailored to your project, taking you from beginner to pro in just 6 weeks. 🚀 This program is perfect for those: - Wanting to start their own Clay agency - Looking to add Clay-related offers to their existing agency - B2B growth professionals keen on mastering the #1 skill of 2024 Take advantage of these program benefits: ✅ Save 6 months of trial and error ✅ Eliminate unnecessary spending on Clay credits ✅ Secure your first case study ✅ Fast-track your learning curve with practical applications  ✅ Connect with a community of Clay experts  ✅ Receive job opportunity alerts  ✅ 3000 extra credits to kickstart your journey And here’s the best part: SUPER EARLY BIRD 50% OFF LIMITED OFFER FOR THE FIRST 5 APPLICANTS! Don’t miss out on this incredible deal. Interested? ⬇ Comment 'Program' below, and I'll share all the details with you!

Imagine an interested B2B prospect visits your website. Later, they receive a personalized video from your CEO, tailored to their needs. They happen to be scrolling through the prospect's company website. RB2B, Clay, and Sendspark have made this and much more possible for go-to-market and outbound. Join our exclusive webinar to learn how to transform high-intent signals into revenue. Adam Robinson (CEO of RB2B), Bethany Stachenfeld (CEO of Sendspark), and Patrick Spychalski (The Kiln, a Claygency) will discuss the latest thinking around "signals", and guide you through powerful workflows that captures website visitors, enriches data with Clay, and automates personalized videos with Sendspark. Discover how this combination revolutionizes outbound sales: - Understand high-intent signals in outbound sales. - Convert these signals into personalized outreach. - See real-life successful workflows. - Participate in a Q&A session with our expert panel. Don’t miss this opportunity to elevate your outbound strategy and drive more revenue with actionable insights

A brief history of Clay from one of our earliest investors -- thank you for believing in us since the early days, Andre! Excited to continue growing together!

I always appreciate how thoughtful Kareem is around strategy and product. Check out this clip about how we thinking about positioning and targeting the right ICPs -- thank you Unusual Ventures and Sandhya Hegde for having us!!

Imagine you're Obaid Durrani. You just wanted some Crabby Patties, but got a hot dog instead. Now imagine you're locked into a 1 year enterprise contract for stale hot dogs. You really wanted burgers. Single data providers often lack the data you want. When they do have it, it's often stale and inaccurate. What if instead, you searched "Burgers" on DoorDash. Your go-to 1st restaurant is out of burgers. The 2nd one has burgers but forgot the pickles. The 3rd one has exactly what you need, and you pay for just that burger. Imagine all of this was automated, and you only paid for the burger you got. That's how data works with Clay. The old model for data doesn't make sense -- why should you have to subscribe to a year's worth of hotdogs from 3 different restaurants? P.S. - Shoutout to Obaid's gnarly SpongeBob shirt

🚨Episode 49 of the Startup Field Guide is live with Kareem Amin, CEO and co-founder of Clay, which just announced its $50M Series B round - congrats to the team! Kareem’s one of the most thoughtful product thinkers I have interviewed and his 7-year journey with Clay was fascinating to dig into! Listen/watch here 👇 YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gkMahuAs Spotify: https://spoti.fi/45O5Nzo Apple: https://apple.co/4eLuS1J Clay is an AI-powered platform for sales prospecting that gathers data from over 75 sources to build lists and help growth teams at companies like Ramp, Notion and Vanta send personalized outreach messages. 1️⃣ Clay was originally built as an extremely flexible connected database without a specific use case in mind. The team stayed extremely lean for the first 4 years exploring use cases that aligned the best possible market opportunity to their mission. 2️⃣ As they experimented with an outreach oriented workflow, their earliest traction came from a particular type of customer — small agencies providing outbound lead generation and B2B growth marketing services. 3️⃣ Every startup success story comes down to timing. From the beginning, Clay was built to aggregate data sources and tools, making it easy to integrate AI models like GPT-3 as another data source in 2021. They were able to quickly ship data extraction, summarization, and writing personalized messages - tasks that previously required years of NLP investment. 4️⃣ While Clay began monetizing their product in late 2021, it took several months for them to feel the holy grail of startups - “momentum”. The key was extreme product focus (limiting use cases) and alignment. Kareem was very intentional about aligning their GTM motion and pricing model with their product strategy and mission around flexibility. They chose usage-based over seat-based pricing, optimized for the "recurring use case" of sales prospecting, while aiming to provide maximum customer-friendliness to early adopters brought together in a single slack community.

Thank you everyone for helping us celebrate our Series B Announcement last week! Check out this picture of our co-founders. Beautiful 😁. Link to Bloomberg article in comments 🔗

Sometimes getting the right positioning for your startup is more challenging than getting to the product itself. “Often it’s not that you don’t know who the customer is, it’s that you’re not picking — you haven’t committed to one hypothesis over the other. That’s what creates the confusion about what the product is, what the feature set looks like, and what the language that you use in the product even is.” Clay's Kareem Amin is one of the most thoughtful founders I know on this topic. Before Clay was the GTM power tool that it is today, it was struggling to choose between broadly building a horizontal product and narrowly focusing on outbound sales. “We had a bunch of initial customers, but they were all doing very wildly different things,” says Kareem. “One company actually sent me their code base because they wanted to send all of their data to NetSuite, but they didn’t have time to do it, so they asked us to reverse engineer it. It was in the same general sphere of doing some data transformation in a no-code way, but it had nothing to do with sales or recruiting. We just had this running in the background for a long time. They were paying us. But suddenly our servers would go down and we were like, ‘What's going on?’ And it was just this one company sending a bunch of data to us that needed to get transformed and sent to NetSuite. We had a customer, but it was the wrong customer.” In the latest installment of our Paths to PMF series on The Review, I got to sit down with Kareem to unpack the seven-year “overnight success” story of Clay, drilling deep into the debate between building a horizontal vs. vertical product, and how to find focus as a founder. Article in the comments.