Clay

“So I'd say maybe three and a half years into it. We were pretty focused on salespeople, but we hadn't committed in a way that showed in the product we had committed to ourselves and like when we were prioritizing new features, but the real kind of point came r…”

“It's not that you don't know who the customer is. It's just that you're not picking yet, or you have hypotheses and you're not committed to one over the other. And that's what creates a little bit of the confusion about what the product feature set looks like …”

“Eventually the way that we got a ton of customers was actually by cutting off all of the different ways that we supported customers. So we basically pushed all of our customers into the same channel. So anyone that would sign up to Clay, we would say, join our…”

“I think you should think about outbound as like outbound operations. It's not, As easy as just download a list of people and send them messages. You have to kind of find out who your ICP is and figure out how to like nurture that and make it more specific.”

“General tools are really good when you have an engineering mindset and you can put the puzzle pieces together. In fact, that's why we're called play, but we needed to give more guardrails for people to actually be creative. It was too open-ended.”

“We quickly realized that everybody needs outbound and not everybody needs inbound. So actually outbound is a better and faster starting point.”

“And actually a couple of them have made more than a million dollars just implementing clay for other customers, which is kind of wild.”

“There are kind of like some certain natural numbers of retention. At different stages of the company, depending on who you're targeting and for different types of companies. And so don't try to kind of improve something, let's say by 50%, that's already okay. …”

“What I decided to do is to say, we should only sell the same thing each time. We should find customers who want the same thing each time. If they don't want what we have, they're just not a good customer for us right now. And if we can't find people who want t…”

“We have maybe 4600 people today in the Slack channel, and that's pretty active.”

“I really think that when the need is large enough, people We'll buy your product and wait for you to build the rest of the features. And that, that is actually the main indicator that you have something worthwhile.”

“I realized that by narrowing down and verticalizing, we Will be able to move faster. I believe in terms of just decision making because we have kind of those guardrails and you know, the marketing page could be clear. We can target like a specific customer.”

“So actually we had this, a lot of, wow, this is so powerful and then no usage or inconsistent usage.”

“Most tools choose to build their own data set. And they're like, this is the best data set, the one that we built. And they try to be as easy to use as possible because they think that the best way to go is to be the, you know, shorten the time to value.”

“That you should try to use as many data sources as possible, because what you really want is the information, right? And about a company, for example, and every data provider has, they don't have infinite resources and they have to make trade-offs about where …”

“It's that whole thing of really understanding the total cost of ownership of something. So we could build it quickly, but then who's going to sell it? Who's going to educate customers about it? Who's going to iterate on that feature multiple times until it get…”

“We started playing with the metaphor of a spreadsheet because it was the world's most popular programming environment.”

“I think it's, it isn't plays a major role because essentially the company is you at least initially. And what I mean by you is that it's exaggerating all of your traits in some ways because you're hiring the people. You're also influencing how things get done …”

“For me, focus is you don't even think about anything else. That's how focused you have to be. In fact, if you even think oh, it's okay to kind of imagine this other world, you're not focused.”

“Yeah, I mean, we've grown from maybe a 120 customers at the beginning of the year to we should end the year at around a thousand.”

“And you have to know when to be malleable. And I think you can be malleable when you're defining what the product is and then when to harden that, which is once you've done the definition, you need to actually go out and try to get it out to market in a way th…”

“Not put so much pressure on the product and strategy that I think leads you to something that's less interesting, actually. Because, you know, you don't have enough information. You're kind of a priori trying to make it as big as possible.”

“Once we agree to something and it's on our sprint planning, nothing will shift it. If you're walking to work and you happen to have a new idea, throw it away. We're not like the, there's only one moment to think of things and that's during our planning. And th…”

“The flexible one was trickier because it's not that we don't want to be the easiest to use. We want to be the easiest to use, but we prioritize flexibility if that conflicts with ease of use, and so in some ways it's a priority order, and when once Once we mak…”

“And by focusing it on this one task, I actually feel like we have more of an ability to innovate than if we stayed more broad. Just because, you know, like having the boundaries allows you To actually push against them in ways that I think are productive.”

“We don't have that many examples of self-serve customers turning into enterprise customers. A lot of these enterprise customers are coming in cold. And so you don't have that many complementary effects from it. You're almost doing a sale from scratch, and you …”

“Like Anthropic used us to automate all their inbound at scale and triple their enrichment rates on that and finding way more leads through that.”

“We actually launched a product in February, 20, 20 to remove the waitlist. Two months later, put the waitlist back on. And then we didn't remove the waitlist until multiple millions of ARR in, you know, July of 20, 23.”

“We have, you know, 50 different clay clubs hosting community events all around the world from Bangalore to Sydney to Toronto.”

“And that brings us to the fall of 24, where we basically bundled all of this. I took a lot of inspiration From Snowflake's pricing model, and we basically bundled all of this into the credits, and bundled the platform fee, and the support, and all these things…”

“Maybe 10, 20, 25 paying customers, any of whom were paying somewhere between 30 a month to 200 a month. The true answer is really zero, because all of those people were not ICP, and all of them, or maybe all of them, with the exception of two or three, churned…”

“First, platform fees are inherently challenged. They are not great pricing mechanisms, and the reason for this is, first, it doesn't scale. After the first year, you want to keep raising the price because you want to, you know, you want to create more margin. …”

“At minimum, it has to be a five K, 10 K annual contract to make a sales of motion work.”

“Our support team is super technical and this leads, we don't have like an outsourced support team in India or the Philippines. And this leads to the fact that sure we're paying a premium for these people, but they're delivering extremely high quality support t…”

“When you look at other B to B software, no one invests in it. And so when you have something that no one invests in, And everything kind of looks the same. A lot of early stage software is just about standing out. Because you're trying to make news about somet…”

“We do sales through this, you know, we call it go-to-market engineering. And so this is collapsing three different roles into one. An AE, an SDR, and a sales engineer all into one role. And this is a person who's a bit more technical and background, who is goo…”

“I think that companies like Notion and Figma have a clearer path to going from self-serve to enterprise because it's seat-based. You're expanding from team to team. You can go to IT and you can make an easy, compelling case, and it's, and there's a lot of prec…”

“In January of 23, I mean, it'll be interesting to share that, like, we didn't have billing in the product. You couldn't pay for Clayton in the product until past a million in ARR. Until a million in ARR, I was just sending Stripe invoices to people, which was …”

“We would have these, like, reverse demo conversations where I wouldn't traditionally demo the software. Basically, they would demo, like, they would demo it themselves. Like, they would sign up Share the screen, do the flow. I would help them do the individual…”

“It's heavily weighted to work trials and take homes. We like give them a chance to focus on that. It's much harder, obviously, to do a behavioral interview where you go in a methodical way through their background and kind of identify what they've accomplished…”

“That one integration basically helped us win the business of those, like, 50 or 60 companies that we would methodically go through.”

“When you're not doing seat-based, you're doing a value-based sale, and you are pricing in this usage way, you can price more aggressively. And that probably enables you to go way higher over time as you generate more value. In a way that most seat-based pricin…”

“And they went from a self-serve customer paying a few hundred a month To paying several thousand dollars a month in like an eight week times period.”

“We were a usage-based pricing model in twenty-twenty-two. At the time, it was fairly controversial because everything in sales tech was per seat. Now it's obviously changed with AI, so it's changed. But I think we were at the vanguard of that.”

“Our first answer to that was incorrect. And it was, what if we do it for you? Because our customers were telling us, Hey, I would pay you this much money, but you should just build all this for me. And so basically they were asking for professional services. A…”

“And you can imagine that compounded over seven months is kind of how we went from these initial sales calls. We're taking like seven demos to get someone to pay two, 300 a month. To January, February of, where it was taking one call or even none.”

“For our business, events and social media are really important. This is how we grow. So for us, I don't look to events and social media as a benchmark. I look to growth marketing.”

“Tactically it means we hired a claymation artist who we worked with part-time for many, many years and is now full-time at Clay. And we have a full-time claymation artist who's building imagery and art with Clay.”

“Clay, I mean, right before we were talking, like they didn't start off with the product they have now. And unlike for many other startups, they went through constant iteration, a lot of discovery before they finally like just overnight found like the fit and i…”