Varun Anand, co-founder of Clay, discusses the company's early go-to-market motion and access gating strategy.
Insight
Anand: Prospective users should drive sales demos to build self-serve confidence
“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…”
Insight
Anand: Platform fees are flawed pricing mechanisms that procurement teams challenge
“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. …”
Disclosure
Clay combines AE, SDR, and sales engineer into one GTM engineering role
“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…”
Insight
Anand: Investing in brand creates alpha for B2B software startups
“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…”
Insight
Anand: Managers lose if an employee has to ask for a raise
“If someone on your team comes to you, you've already lost the game because they have been thinking about this. I promise you for weeks, if not months, because it takes a lot of courage and bravery to like go up to your manager or the founder and ask for more m…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Anand: Clay manually invoiced customers via Stripe until hitting $1M ARR
“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 …”