Clay’s Post

Good-bye ABM, hello... clAyBM!? The hottest GTM tool just became a half-unicorn with their $46M series B round. Here's how it's changing GTM 👇 The depth of top-funnel account research and personalization you do for proper 1:1 ABM... is now possible at scale with Clay. In other words: Clay enables you to execute 1:1-depth (highly personalized) ABM plays on a 1:many scale. Why, what's it do? Lemme show you through the example of one of our automated outbound emails: ---- Hey Sue, Noticed someone from ACME signed up for an on-demand GTM Essentials Course with Klear (that's us). I figured it's either because • Jessica and Tom are hiring for sales and marketing roles • you're looking to take ACME's platform to private hospitals   ...so you're probably looking for ways to raise your team's account-based marketing game. Wanted to let you know that you can access other key resources in our library free, that can help you accelerate. You've got some lofty and "fun" goals; making ACME synonymous with chatbots in healthcare is going to be one heck of a ride. You need not just a lot of help, but the right resources. Let me know if you'd like me to send you access to the GTM Essentials Course that your teammates are already learning from ....as well as a Revenue tool, that will help you see if your growth programs are on track. Bye, Dan Renyi, Klear B2B ps.: Is Mo's Restaurant near your HQ still as good as they say? Asking bc with the right help, you're looking at some serious celebration a few months down the line. :) pps.: As you're coming up on 2 years with ACME: congrats on the anniversary. ppps.: Gotta be frank with you: neither I nor any other human wrote this email; it's all AI... Automation like this is part of what we teach and help clients build. ----- now back to our show ----- Can you appreciate the amount of research that goes into creating an email like this for just ONE company? For starters, what we did is: 1. look up marketers and sales peeps above manager level at given company and get their email addresses from one of multiple data sources 2. look up marketing and sales leaders' names 3. scrape company's     - website,    - linkedin page,    - annual reports,      - interviews w/ execs    to extract company-relevant information, hiring info for the personalized parts 4. put all that scraped info in the appropriate format 5. search google for restaurants within 2mi of company's HQ and pick one with a rating above 4* 6. lookup recipient's linkedin profile and extract relevant info We're talking 1 hour-ish per account, possibly more. To create emails like this in 2 seconds for $0.02, you need Clay. (generous free trial w/ lotsa credits) 💥 For the above email, you need our template with all prompts, which I'm happy to share. Just: 1. send me a connection request 2. like this post 3. comment something... like "clAyBM" Big up for Clay and to next-level personalized, buyer-centric GTM.

My 7-year journey via Maple VC with Clay. Thanks Josh Scott at BetaKit for covering the story. I was first introduced to Kareem Amin through a fellow Canadian expat and now Maple founder, Michael Hershfield of Accrue Savings. They first met working at Sailthru in NYC where Kareem sold his first company. In 2016, Kareem started to tinker on new ideas with his cofounder Nicolae Rusan and I was fortunate to meet them at this time. This happened to align with me establishing Maple 1 in November 2016 on the simple thesis of backing Canadians building in America. We noticed that Canadian expats, who graduate from Canadian universities, go on to build some of the biggest companies in tech – Uber, Slack, Instacart, Notion, Faire, Databricks, Cloudflare, Roblox and most recently, OpenAI. Kareem and Nicolae seemed to match this pattern as two graduates from McGill University building in the US. In 2017, they landed on a very clear mission to make programming accessible to all. They painted a picture of replacing the black terminal that developers use, with a spreadsheet that is connected to the internet which could allow non-developers to automate work. What we saw immediately that gave us conviction was a very big ambition (making programming accessible to all) with a unique insight (using a spreadsheet) via a new method of no-code tooling. This reminded us of the early days at Uber: The promise to deliver you anything (big ambition) by starting with a black car that takes you from point A to point B (unique insight) via your phone (new method). We first committed to investing in Clay in Jan 2017 before the company had a lead. In June 2017, we were thrilled to learn that First Round Capital was going to lead their Seed. Sequoia Capital led the Series A in June 2019, which was surprising, since we had no revenue and were still figuring things out. However, the low-code no-code category was starting to take off. Then, they spent the next 3 years figuring out where to focus. During this phase it was fascinating to witness the many disbelievers. We had folks tell us that we should mark this investment to $0. In late 2021, they decided to narrowly focus on automating sales and this turned out to be the big unlock. Varun Anand joined as a cofounder leading their GTM efforts. The timing played out beautifully with new LLMs that we could use to automate growth in a way that hadn’t been done before. Clay relaunched in Feb 2022 with $0 in revenue and has not looked back since. We 10x’d two years in a row, all organically, achieving 100k users, 2500 customers, and 11k people exchanging ideas in our Slack community. Maple has tripled down since the Seed through the Series B which was just led by Meritech Capital. We have a strong feeling that Clay has a real shot at realizing that vision they first shared with us 7 years ago.