SaaStr 841: Going From Blobs to Billions. Clay's Co-Founder Breaks Down Inbound, Outbound, and AI-Powered Sales.

Summary

Podcast Summary: SaaStr 841 – “Going From Blobs to Billions: Clay’s Co-Founder Breaks Down Inbound, Outbound, and AI-Powered Sales”

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode explores the rise of Clay, a company redefining growth and go-to-market (GTM) strategies for SaaS businesses using creative marketing, data enrichment, and AI-powered sales workflows. Clay’s co-founder delivers a behind-the-scenes look at their branding, team-building, breakthrough workflows, and philosophies for leveraging AI in a rapidly changing B2B environment.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Clay’s Origin & Bold Branding (03:21–06:28)

• Clay’s mission: “We are trying to help everyone in this audience grow their business. At the end of the day, everyone here has a TAM. You’re just trying to find the delta.” (03:21, Clay Founder)
• Early investments in brand—like acquiring clay.com before any revenue and hiring a clay artist—were deeply intentional, designed to make Clay stand out from the typical “boring” B2B landscape.
• Creative marketing at Clay isn’t just for attention; it’s authentic and translates into business results. Examples include quirky campaigns (sending clay figures, custom shoes, viral videos with the CFO) that deeply resonate with prospects and industry peers.

  “Generally speaking, I find that B2B marketing is very boring, extremely boring. We do things because it’s core to us and authentic.” (05:14, Clay Founder)

• Clay hires nontraditional marketers and empowers them to experiment, leading to highly differentiated brand presence and mindshare.

2. Does It Work? The Real Impact of Creative Marketing (07:00–07:53)

• Creative initiatives have driven measurable business results: increased mindshare, deal acceleration, and inbound leads.
• “The hardest thing in B2B marketing is actually capturing mindshare because it’s so competitive.” (07:10, Clay Founder)
• Not every campaign succeeds, but the willingness to try new, authentic approaches keeps Clay top-of-mind for prospects.

3. The Invention of “Go-To-Market Engineer” (08:30–11:59)

• The GTM Engineer role was developed internally as a hybrid of ops, growth, and sales—suited to Clay’s complex product and customer feedback loop.
• This role didn’t exist in the wider SaaS world until Clay popularized it. Now, major SaaS companies (Cursor, Framework, Webflow, OpenAI) actively hire GTM Engineers.

• “No other company can do this, actually, because it only makes sense for us...If you’re Figma, you’re not going to have your designers sell Figma.” (09:33, Clay Founder)

• Key GTM Engineer qualities: creativity, product and growth orientation, ability to iterate rapidly, and problem-solving with automation and AI.
• Clay even runs a marketplace to match GTM talent with top companies.

4. Hiring Process & Qualities Clay Looks For (11:57–13:12; 29:32–32:06)

• Creativity is the top attribute for GTM Engineers, evaluated through challenging take-home assignments (uncompensated unless especially extensive).
• Some roles at Clay go through a “work trial” in lieu of traditional interviews if the skillset is harder to assess abstractly.

  “In the early days, we would do work trials for almost every role...Now, not as much, but for some hard-to-evaluate roles, we still do.” (12:58, Clay Founder)

• For hiring in general, Clay seeks people with technical fluency, a systematic/data mindset, low ego, and “negative maintenance.” Standout hires often teach the team something or bring a unique blend of passion and cross-disciplinary skills.
• “We hire a ton of generalists, but none of them do generalist roles. Everyone commits.” (31:58, Clay Founder)

5. Clay’s Demo: AI-Powered Sales & Qualification Workflow (13:18–21:59)

• Live, interactive walkthrough using volunteers’ LinkedIn profiles.
• Key features of the workflow:
  • Aggregates and enriches lead data from 150+ vendors (“waterfalling” for coverage and accuracy).
  • Uses AI to qualify and score prospects (e.g., seniority, company fit).
  • Scrapes websites for unique, non-obvious data points (e.g., SoC2 compliance, benefits offered, past experiences).
  • Auto-generates highly personalized outreach, including LinkedIn messages and custom memes.
  • Produces comprehensive research briefs for sales reps—streamlining pre-call preparation.
  • Updates records in any CRM system for seamless integration.

• “This is a very comprehensive workflow to understand who’s signing up, qualify them, score them, and generate outreach. Companies like Anthrop, Figma, and Cursor run this exact workflow.” (19:58–21:05, Clay Founder)

• Use cases beyond inbound: nurturing existing users, upselling, outbound campaigns, and deep data enrichment.

6. Live Growth Hacking Session (23:07–25:57)

• Volunteers bring real-world growth problems onstage.
• Example: Marketing ops lead from Personify Health wants to automate manual SDR outreach and phase in AI agents.
• Practical advice:
  • Use Clay + outside data (Google Maps, web scraping) to unearth “offline” leads (like health insurance brokers).
  • Scrape company “About Us” pages for team data, then use Clay to find emails and automate outreach.
  • Hire agencies if internal bandwidth is lacking.

  “If you don’t have the bandwidth internally...you could hire an agency and we can recommend some that could help you do this.” (25:44, Clay Founder)

7. Insights on AI Usage and Guardrails (27:32–29:28)

• Clay’s approach is “bottoms up” and flexible, not enforcing AI use for its own sake.
• Cautions against mindless AI adoption, particularly for marketing, where standing out is critical (“LLMs revert to the mean; marketing is about defying it.”).
• Recommends AI for scalable, repetitive tasks (e.g., sales research, outbound), but not for creativity-driven roles like brand and content.

• “In marketing, for example, marketing is all about standing out. You know what large language models are all about? Not standing out.” (28:23, Clay Founder)

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Clay’s Ethos:
  “We don’t do [creative stunts] for the sake of it. We do it because it’s very core to us and authentic.” (05:51)
• On B2B Mindshare:
  “The hardest thing to do in B2B marketing is actually capture mindshare because it’s so competitive.” (07:10)
• On Invention of GTM Engineer:
  “Now the best companies in the world, from Cursor to Framework to Webflow to OpenAI, are hiring for go to market engineers.” (10:33)
• On AI Limitations in Marketing:
  “Marketing is all about standing out. You know what large language models are all about? Not standing out.” (28:23)
• On Data Enrichment:
  “Waste management uses Clay to get satellite images, then uses AI to analyze the images to see what color the trash cans are outside people’s houses to figure out who’s a customer.” (26:36)
• On Evaluating Talent:
  “There are things when I meet someone that stand out...Maybe it’s creativity, maybe they’ve taught me something.” (30:49)
• On Generalists:
  “We hire a ton of generalists, but none of them do generalist roles. Everyone commits.” (31:58)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Brand Strategy & Marketing Philosophy – 03:21–07:00
• Effectiveness of Creative Marketing – 07:00–07:53
• Origin of GTM Engineer Role – 08:30–11:59
• Hiring Process & Qualities – 11:57–13:12; 29:32–32:06
• Clay Product Workflow Demo – 13:18–21:59
• Live Growth Hacking (Audience Q&A) – 23:07–25:57
• Common Use Cases for Clay – 26:21–27:28
• Internal Use of AI and Guardrails – 27:32–29:28

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Takeaways

• Clay is a company obsessed with differentiation—from creative branding to pioneering new roles like GTM Engineer, all underpinned by authentic culture and willingness to break SaaS norms.
• Their signature: automated but human-centered growth workflows that combine rich data aggregation, unique automation, and strikingly personal outreach.
• Clay’s view on AI is pragmatic: use it to amplify operations and experimentation, but never let it dull creativity, personality, or brand.
• Hiring for creativity and nontraditional backgrounds is their secret sauce—and they’re exporting this model, turning it into a movement across SaaS.

This episode is a how-to guide for SaaS founders/operators on blending creative marketing, modern data practices, and thoughtful automation to fuel authentic, scalable growth.

Transcript

[Clay Founder]

Welcome to the official Saster podcast where you can hear some of the best Saster speakers. This is where the cloud meets up today on the Saster podcast. This is trying to understand who's signing up to your product, figure out if they are a good prospect, qualifying them, and then trying to score them to determine how good of a prospect where they land. And this is by the way, workflows that anthropic figma cursor are all using theta power. And then like if they, you know who they are, they are a good prospect, you've qualified them accordingly. How do you then create some language for them over LinkedIn or email or whatever to reach out to them and get them going, you know, and then do that very quickly. And so that's what you're trying to accomplish here in like one comprehensive order.

[Podcast Host]

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[Clay Founder]

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[Podcast Host]

Everyone. Welcome back.

[Clay Founder]

Let's go.

[Podcast Host]

I'm excited here. He came all the way from the states for you guys, so give him a round of applause. Just by show of hands, who's seen like a clay billboard? Any clay, anything? Okay, you got some fans already.

[Clay Founder]

Let's go.

[Podcast Host]

All right, so we're excited we have room here today. We're going to take some questions so if you want to send me your questions on the live stream, we'll do some spicy questions at the end.

[Clay Founder]

Yeah, okay, great. And keep it. We want to make this very engaging. We want to make this very, you know, conversational and interactive. So, you know, bring out your hardest hitting questions. Like.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, okay. So this will be fun. So for those who maybe don't know Clay yet or haven't seen the billboards, you know, bit of a reputation for like going viral, doing all these like crazy marketing things. Like, I know you guys have sent people like clay figures of themselves. Like, you've done a bunch of crazy things. Like, is this just you telling the team, like, where does it. And your shoes are even like, his shoes.

[Clay Founder]

The shoes are braid.

[Podcast Host]

His shoes are br.

[Clay Founder]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Like, everything is brand. So, like, where does all that come from?

[Clay Founder]

Well, maybe I'll just explain Clay for just a minute. Well, I have some baseline and understanding if you, if you aren't familiar. Basically, we are trying to help everyone in this audience grow their business. At the end of the day, everyone here has a tam. You're just trying to find the delta. And the only ways you can do that are by converting your inbound, by going getting outbound or taking your existing customers and expanding that. And we help you do that by giving you all the data providers in the world, giving you LLMs to improve that data and by data points that no one would ever have. Like, is a company SoC2 compliant or is it B2B or something? Or something way more interesting. And then we let you use those as primitives to run growth campaigns and the most creative growth campaigns. And we can talk about some of those. And those could be like personalized ads or outbound campaigns or direct mail. And play becomes the vehicle by which you run your most creative growth ideas. So coming back to marketing, yeah, we, I will say brand is very core to our company. We bought clay.com before any revenue. We have a full set in house. Actually, we contracted with him originally and this is again, we almost had no revenue.

[Podcast Host]

You have a clay artist in house?

[Clay Founder]

Yes, but originally he was a contractor and we had almost no revenue. And he had a very innovative business model. So he would like make these blobs and their bead of the blobs more blobs. But he would have like, he would say, okay, you can get the blob, but it's like $3,000 and you can rent it for a year and then you'll have to renew it again next year. So it was like SaaS business model for like claymation blobs. But I was obsessed with the blobs and we were all worse. So we like, paid for the blobs. We had a head of brand of like 15 people. And yes, like, like, there are a lot of inventive things we do on marketing and so. But all of these things we don't do just because for the sake of it. We do it because it's like very core to us and it's very authentic to who we are. You wouldn't hire the head of brand or have the payment artist or pay this much money from blobs every year if. When you don't even have revenue, if it wasn't like quarter. We do it because it's like, what matters to us and it's beautiful. And like, that's really representative. And over time, as the business has worked, it's turned into like a real differentiator on the very creative marketing campaigns that we do now. Generally speaking, I find that B2B marketing is very boring, Extremely boring. And generally people look at like, I just saw Philip back there. He's a CRO of personio and we had dinner recently and, and you know, people would look at Philip and I mean this with all the love of my heart, people will look at him and be like, hey, you know, you probably get your news from Gartner and, and, and like Forrester and that's not true. You know, like, he do scrolls LinkedIn just like the rest of us. And so how do you communicate with Philip or Amelia or any of these people in a way that feels authentic and refresh and interesting and keep that, you know, and do that with like. And do that with some pace. And so we're trying a lot of different things. More recently, we're doing more like, like my CFO and I are doing these videos where we analyze the ROI of marketing scene.

[Podcast Host]

I was like, oh, they're talking numbers on the linked.

[Clay Founder]

Yeah, yeah. Or like, hey, hey, Karin. Like, I want to go to the super bowl with five prospects and they'll cost an. And he said no. And like. And those are really resonating and getting a lot of traction. And so we're doing a lot of these things that feel authentic to us and help us connect with the audiences, but in new and innovative ways. And I think the reason we're able to do this is we actually hire very nontraditional people to do marketing.

[Podcast Host]

Let me ask you this on all that. Is it working? Like, does it show up in the numbers and the revenue like do you guys get a lot of inbound from it? Like, how much of that translates back into the business?

[Clay Founder]

Yeah. So I mean, it obviously depends. Summer hits and some are flops, but when you're being this creative, that that's going to happen. I. What I will say unequivocally is we are capturing mindshare a lot like you. Like, just for the last month I've been in Europe. Pretty much everyone I've interacted with has actually seen these videos with me and our cfo and they bring it up, you know. And the hardest thing to do in B2B marketing is actually capture mindshare because it's so competitive. There's so many companies out there forget even our own space. But it's generally so many things are happening and obviously people are on TikTok and reading the news and there's all these things going on. So the number one thing is, can you capture mindshare? Can you do it obviously in a way that's consistent with your brand and then like, how do you translate that to people? And so, yeah, we do see that in it's accelerating deals, it's bringing in new inbound, it's staying top of mind. And when we have a moment when people need Clay, like they're ready to do something.

[Podcast Host]

I want to touch on recruiting real quick and then I'll let you do a demo for folks just so that they can understand Clay conceptually before we do the rest. The thing I see all over LinkedIn, like the last six months is we're hiring a go to market engineer. We're hiring a go to market engineer. And I was like, didn't. Didn't Clay, like invent, like literally, like just manifest the go to market engineer into being? So first question. Well, one, congrats, because I. This is like all I see on LinkedIn. Second one, how. Okay, well, let's just do one at a time. How'd you come up with GTM Engineer?

[Clay Founder]

The origin was actually I was coming up with a name for our own sales team, founder led sales for a while, and was like, okay, let's build out a sales team. To be honest, at the time, no one really understood Clay. In fact, Amelia backstage was like. I was like, why aren't you guys using Clay yet? It's a mess of products. Obviously it's gonna help. And he's like. She's like, it's too complicated. Which is a narrative that we're working on. But at the. But certainly it was too complicated 2, 3 years ago when we were selling the sales team despite it being a go to market product. It was like, okay, why don't I find people like me who are like growth and ops people, people who are like our customers when it's very like product oriented and we really need that product kind of life cycle and feedback loop. And so we need. That's like the mold we were looking for. And so we tried that as, as the approach, tried that as the approach. And that that profile really worked for ourselves. And our sales team is 35 people. We're still hiring those people to do our sales. And of course we have some traditional AES. But when I was looking for a name for that to capture that, Kareem and I were discussing it and GTM Engineer felt appropriate.

[Podcast Host]

You don't want to do fe?

[Clay Founder]

Well, it's not really a forward deployed engineer because a forward deployed engineer is almost like professional services where they're actually going on site and setting it all up and whatever. This is a sales role, to be clear. But it's coming from a very different background and a very different thing. Now the thing is, is no other company can do this actually because it only makes sense for us because our product is clay. And like if you're a figma, you're not going to have your designers sell Figma Designer two, three years ago. That's what we started as at Miss it. What we realized in the market is that people were hiring people who looked like our salespeople to use clay internally as the ops team. And so what it became is, okay, who are the people using clay and other tools like it to build revenue systems, using automation and AI to run growth experiments to grow. And maybe they're building their own software internally, maybe they're using clay, maybe they're. All of them are operating with a product and growth mindset. They're iterating quickly, they're experimenting quickly. That became the thing. And then we obviously like enable that and fuel that. And now we actually even have a go to market engineering marketplace that we've launched to match talent to the top companies. Because now the best companies in the world, from Cursor to Framework to webflow to OpenAI are all hiring for go to market engineers. And so we are matching people in our community to get those jobs for.

[Podcast Host]

Folks that either hiring, whatever they call it, go to market Engineer or FD may, if they want to hire an fd, what should they look for? Because like, I think the thing for me and for probably a lot of folks in this room is like people don't have this skill. Like it just doesn't exist.

[Clay Founder]

So the way I think about it, and maybe even for answering the explicit question, I think what we've just generally seen is the way the org chart in sales used to look like and still looks like most companies you have SDRs or prospecting they use or closing deals, run ups or maintaining systems. The issue with this is it operates a lot like an assembly and assembly lines aren't really good for sharing learnings and scaling ideas. And so the new org chart that we see in all these cutting edge teams is you have like go to market engineers like a few of them who are building product basically using clay or building their own or coding themselves sometimes with a data scientist even to take some of the best ideas that these sales team people are doing and scaling them and, and running experiments to see what works and what doesn't work.

[Podcast Host]

And then just before you do the demo, like when you're personally evaluating con like candidates for go to market engineers in house at clay, what's the number one thing you look for?

[Clay Founder]

I'm looking for creativity is the number one thing.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Clay Founder]

And, and, and that can usually be demonstrated like in the take home.

[Podcast Host]

What is this take home? Like what's it like? You give them homework.

[Clay Founder]

What we have, we actually have take ups for every role at play.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Clay Founder]

But, but the take ups could be like very different. They could be a lot of different things. It could be like hey, like I hear three companies come up with three creative outbound campaigns for them and build it play and let's.

[Podcast Host]

And do you do comp candidates to do that or expect them to do that if they want to get the role?

[Clay Founder]

It depends. Generally speaking, take homes at clay are not compensated. It's just a part of the formula process. If it's for some reason particularly long, we will compensate.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Clay Founder]

And a lot of roles like by the way, the woman Sarah you were working with, she. Her first day was actually only yesterday because before that when you were actually working with her, she was on a work trial at Clay for two or three weeks. She wasn't even full time. She's on a work trial where we were trying her out.

[Podcast Host]

I see. Okay. And is that standard for like any role at Clay you guys do a trial?

[Clay Founder]

In the early days we would do work trials for almost every role. Okay. Now we don't because now we know how to interview people and we have a better understanding. But there are certain roles like Sarah's where it's hard to interview for. It's Hard to evaluate for in a traditional process, so we opt to do a work trial instead.

[Podcast Host]

All right, let's give people a little context. Varune's gonna come to the desk. We're gonna swap.

[Clay Founder]

Wow. I'm getting upgraded, guys. So we're gonna just do a quick demo to kind of get people an understanding of Clay and get a sense, but it's gonna be interactive. So what I want is a couple volunteers to basically give me their LinkedIn URL. One person. Do you know your LinkedIn URL? This guy. Okay. This guy right here. That's you. Okay, perfect. Wow. 15,000 followers. Popular man. Okay, we're gonna take. Okay, we're gonna do that. Okay, amazing. Anyone else want to volunteer? This is Francis. Francis Osifo. Okay. Okay, so let's get into it. All right, so basically what I'm going to show you is like an inbound workflow. Now, remember, we talked earlier? There's only a few ways you can grow a business, right? Inbound, outbound, and expanding your existing customers. Inbound and outbound are actually the same thing. It's just, where's your lead originating from? Right. And so I did that form with you guys to get, like, something as an inbound point, and we're going to walk through a workflow that covers 70% of Clay's functionality, and we'll give everyone, like, a really good overview. Okay, so let's say you signed up for this thing, and we've gotten a few people here. We got Milo, we got Michael, and we got Francis. Amazing. And. And look, we got a bunch of information about these people. So we know. We got Francis right here. He's signing up at Rada Co. We got. He's an angel investor. He's CEO of Rada. We got a bunch of info about him. We have Milo over here. He says he's a family dad. Very sweet founder. We got a lot of information on Milo. He's in Denmark. Okay, look, this right person. 15,611 followers. So still. Still just as popular on Clay. Okay, great. So we got a bunch of information, and let's see what more we can find. So we got a LinkedIn profile. We got the companies that they work at. We got the domain, and. And we're getting some more information. Okay, so we know that Francis is a founder. We know that Milo is doing growth, which we know. We know that Michael is a cmo, and we actually have all their past experiences here, too. So we can search through this however we want. We know every single title and job they've ever had. Basically this is like a, obviously like a wealth of information that we can do things with. And then we check to make sure that we know their domain is correct. And then we're actually going to find out like what, seeing how senior is the role. Right, so imagine someone signing up for your product. You want to know, are they like a, like a C level person or are they like something else? So we have like an AI column here that's analyzing the job titles to determine how senior they are and then categorizing it into like cxo, vp, Director, Head of, something like that. So that's pretty useful qualification. And you can see the AI prompt over here on the right and how it's like qualifying it into all the different, into all the different kind of levels of a role. And then we see, okay, how big are these companies to help qualify it? Sales headcount, like how many people are on the sales team. That's pretty useful. We can even scrape their website and like get a bunch of information to the website. Then you can search off that and be like, do they have information on the website that could indicate if they're a good fit? As an example, if I was last night I was talking to someone running a benefits company and you can imagine they would want to scrape a company's website to determine, hey, are you, what benefits are you offering your employees? Then you want to get your work email. So we got Francis email, Michael's email, and Milo's email. And we were able to do this because we have a waterfall. And so at Clay we're able to use like we have 150 data vendors in Clay and we do this thing called waterfalling where we try lots of different vendors to get you the data. And if it doesn't come in the first one, we try the next one. And then we'll also validate the emails as well. And so you can see that through all of this.

[Podcast Host]

Just expanded the waterfall right now, basically.

[Clay Founder]

Yeah, I just expanded the waterfall. And you can see that that's what enables us to get like the highest coverage because we try so many vendors to make sure that we are like getting the right email. Okay, so that's great. And then we want to like, okay, find something about the company that we can use in email to reach out. And so we got like the mission here for Rada and why Step and Rift, we got like a one liner about each of them. I can show you even the AI prompt that we wrote here. So you're writing a sentence about a company who want to understand what they do and you're giving a lot of constraints so that you can have a one liner that you can include in an email. You're also seeing, okay, who their customers are. And then I am, what I'm doing here is I'm actually going to create a meme. And so for all these people, for Francis, Michael and Milo, they're going to get a LinkedIn message soon and I could show you what the meme is for the meme to make it, you know, even more engaging. I'll show you guys what the meme is too.

[Podcast Host]

Can you fix something that's not a meme? If like, if they don't want to.

[Clay Founder]

Do a meme, a nice message for them too. Okay, yes. We have like a meme for the, for the, for the vibes and, and a thoughtful line for the sale. And so, okay, so we're creating a meme here and you can see we're just actually doing a random meme selection and then taking the data from their LinkedIn profile to personalize the meme for them. OK, so we do that. Should we look at the memes? Okay, so okay, so this is Francis meme. Y' all got any more of that Seamless Global IT onboarding? RADA's got you pretty good. Look at Michael's. Wow. Michael 2X exits, new categories, keynote vibes, mental riffs. Pretty good. And let's look at Milo's. Let Milo build momentum. Let's go. So that's pretty good. And then we're actually using clay to do a lot more very creative research on websites to get new unique data points. Right. So we are doing like GTM research. We can see what this one is trying to do to like get a lot of unique information about their go to market strategies that you can then use in your email outreach. Right? Because hey, you know you're that your outreach, this is the way you do go to market. Here's how you can use Play to accelerate that. Right. So it's very tailored. You also probably want to know, hey, here are some unique data points that these businesses care about. And then you can in your email be like hey, like a clay can help you and find these unique data points in these ways. Right? Other qualification details or like your funding information, we get that from a lot of different sources. So again you can see how we have a waterfall from harmonic and crunchbase and things like that.

[Podcast Host]

We'll sort through all this. Right. So let's say this is like your campaign. People are Signing up, like what do they do with all this next?

[Clay Founder]

Right, so this is basically a very comprehensive workflow to do a number of things, right? This is trying to understand who's signing up to your product, figure out if they are a good prospect, qualifying them and then trying to score them to determine how good of a prospect where they land. And this is by the way, workflows that anthropic figma cursor are all using theta power. And then like if they, you know who they are, they are a good prospect, you've qualified them accordingly. How do you then create some language for them over LinkedIn or email or whatever to reach out to them and get them going, you know, and then do that very quickly. And so that's what you're trying to accomplish here in like one comprehensive workflow and then you even score it. So you have here like, here are the scores for like whether this is like a good fit and you can like set up a very custom score. And then lastly, we're coming up with a couple of things here, right, so what you've also done is we've created a research brief for the sales rep who's going to take the call. So if I go here, I'm going to see Michael's like research brief. And this is like a full document that's been created for the, that's for the sales rep about Michael and his company that they can read prior to their like meeting.

[Podcast Host]

This any of their data or is this all just what you found on like the Internet?

[Clay Founder]

This is all what's online? Yeah, this is all what's online and what they submitted in the form. And so you have so much here, right? You have non traditional data points that you can suggest. You have like obviously a bio on them. You have like all this research that's been done. You have financials on the company. So we can look at another one. Maybe we look at Milo's. So again like a very comprehensive brief here that you can, you can bring up. And then that's like call prep for the rep. You can send a slack message and then you can see here, here's the like, here is the message and so you can send the message over LinkedIn. Boom. And then lastly you'll want to update this in your CRM and so you can check, hey, have they already engage with us in any way? If not, here you go. And then updating the record in the CRM.

[Podcast Host]

CRM agnostic.

[Clay Founder]

Yeah, we can use any CRM. Yeah. So this is basically a very comprehensive Workflow for inbound that covers a lot of different bases from qualification to scoring, to CRM upload, to sending them a message. And you can pretty much implement immediately to kind of like get your inbound kind of working. And so many companies, like for example, Cursor, they had so many free users using their product, didn't know who they were and saw an immediate revenue uplift because now they knew who they were, they could convert them into revenue.

[Podcast Host]

So it's not. So it's not just, you know, like trying to get new leads into the funnel. It's also. They can use it to like nurture basically.

[Clay Founder]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Qualifications.

[Clay Founder]

Yeah. And so really, I mean, it's very flexible. Yes. Totally inbound or taking your existing customers and dramatically upselling them, figuring out where they work. How can you, how can you upsell them there and then putting them into this funnel and then reaching out to them?

[Podcast Host]

All right, do you want, do you still want like two more volunteers?

[Clay Founder]

Oh, to do some growth act? Let's do it. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

If there's two new volunteers there, we're actually bring you up on stage.

[Clay Founder]

Well, let's just give them a heads up of what's going to happen. So, so they, so they know what they're signing up for.

[Podcast Host]

So before you raise your hand, what.

[Clay Founder]

We'Re basically going to do some live growth hacking. And what that more or less entails is you should ideally have some growth problem in your business. And, and you should. And we will help you with it basically. And, and so you would come up, tell us a little bit about your business, tell us like, you know who your customer is and what growth problem you have and we will try live to brainstorm a solution.

[Podcast Host]

With that being said, we need two people. So if you start so one and then drew another, we have already done yours.

[Clay Founder]

Well, there's one in the back.

[Podcast Host]

Oh yeah, in the hat.

[Clay Founder]

Hey guys. One is Martin, senior marketing operations manager. I'm from a company called Personify Health. Okay, great. We work, I work in marketing, but working really closely with SDRs, trying to roll out agents. Okay, and what is like the main problem like you're trying to solve? Is it like the SDR outreach or what is the. I mean, for us, the main problem that I'm dealing with at the moment is a how we implement those kind of AI agents. We're still kind of primarily human based. We have a SDRs. The problems about kind of phasing out SDRs and phasing in agent. How to do that. Yeah. And the time to roll this Out. Right. It would be me doing this. So I think it would be helpful to kind of understand what is the most manual work they're doing right now. And then we can decompose that to how you can build that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think the most, the most manual reach is a lot of discovery for bringing in top of funnel through marketing. Got it. And like the complicated bit why it's manual is because there's like complicated account hierarchies or things like different, like marketing segments. Yeah. Okay. So I think for this, this by the way, I think is a relatively straightforward workflow you could build in clay. This would obviously be like different workflows for different audiences. But basically like I actually used to work in health insurance, so I like deeply understand that market. You know, this is a market that's actually very offline to some degree because a lot of health insurance brokers in the US are working in brokerages that are mom and pop brokerages. Right. So for that what I would recommend is actually you can use Google Maps or OpenMart to get a lot of of the small health insurance brokerages and then you can use that to reach out to them and then you can use clay to find the people who work there. Now, again, because they're offline, a lot of them are not going to have LinkedIn profiles is my guess. But a lot of these health brokerages will actually have like an About Us page on their website with their team. You can use clay to scrape the website and use AI to analyze it to tell you who all the people are and then use a clay to find the work emails. So that would be like the workflow that you would set up here. And if you don't have the bandwidth internally, which it sounds like you don't, you could hire like an agency and we can recommend some that could help you do this. Thank you.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, a little bit of time. So a couple things I want to dive in on just because we've seen now like an actual, we've given people context what clay can actually do. Where do you see most people? Like, what's your most typical use case of a product? Is it like an aisdr? Is it something else? Like, I feel like people only think of it maybe as like enrichment.

[Clay Founder]

Yeah, I mean enrichment is definitely a starter use case. Like, and we will like help you dramatically improve your data enrichment quality. And we will do like a data test with you and you can use the waterfalls and you could get very custom data points. Like Waste management uses clay, actually, and they use Play because they, they, this is a very custom, unique data point. They want to know who their customers are. So they use Google Maps to get satellite images, AI to analyze the images to determine like what color the trash cans are outside people's houses to look and see if it's a very unique data point that a vendor is never going to have.

[Podcast Host]

But what are they doing with that? They're like.

[Clay Founder]

And then they're like, okay, they're using a competitor or they're using us. And because they sell to a lot of subsidiaries and they don't actually always know who their customers are. And then if they're not using them, they can then market to them in different ways.

[Podcast Host]

Got it. Okay.

[Clay Founder]

So that's a very unique data point. That's starting off point. And then you could also use Clay on top of that to do very creative growth campaigns. So that could be, hey, I'm using, I'm using direct mail campaigns to send customized cookie jars or whatever to people. Or I'm doing like very personalized targeted outbound campaign. Or I'm converting inbound like the workflow we just showed.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Clay Founder]

And those are like more standard use cases in play.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, so you've talked a little bit about like inbound and outbound as like a total go to market.

[Clay Founder]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

So for you guys, like because you are an AI company, where do you as maybe guardrails or just rules on your internal team on how they can use AI. Are you like do whatever you are with AI or like what is the, what's the.

[Clay Founder]

I would say we're like pretty agnostic. Like we try to let people, we're very bottoms up. And so if people want to use cursor or this or that, like we're very open minded. I will say like I think we are less. We're an AI company. We're obviously it's very like a forward thinking company, very progressive. I will say we're less. I think basically there's a lot of talk on the Internet of like AI is the default for everything. And like you see the new like open door CEO and they send the memo or the new Shopify CEO, they send these memos, they're like use AI or you're not going to be here at all. You know, and I don't think that's necessarily the right approach. You know, in marketing, for example, marketing is all about standing out. You know what large language models are all about not standing out. They're all about reverting to the mean actually. And that's literally what they're doing, they're synthesizing a lot of information and giving you kind of a synthesis of it. And so if you use it for writing or marketing, you are kind of defeating the whole points of marketing in coding. You know, it's a great, all these AI coding products and Claude and Cursor, whatever, are great products, but the issue and trade offs with them is our engineers like understand less of the code that they're actually writing, you know, or making more mistakes issues, can't debug it faster. So there are all these very like tricky trade offs with all this that I feel like people don't talk about. And so for example, we don't really want our team to use clay for writing internally and for marketing. Like, we want that to come from the soul and.

[Podcast Host]

But do you use it for sales?

[Clay Founder]

I mean, we use clay to do like pre meeting notes, right? We use clay to automate a highly targeted outbound campaign. But we are kind of humans are coming up with the creative ideas to iterate and experiment with.

[Podcast Host]

And then when it, when it comes to recruiting those humans, how many are you guys now?

[Clay Founder]

We're like 250 people.

[Podcast Host]

So of those 250 people, how many did you have to like, did you train everybody on clay? Like how many kind of got it or like how did you hire for something that that's like, it's not really out there in the market, right? You're like, okay, I'm gonna go in kind of dark.

[Clay Founder]

Yeah, well, I mean you only kind of need the clay expertise for the customer facing roles. And for everyone else we have like a clay bootcamp. Then you go through at the beginning of those, at the beginning of the company when you onboard and you learn the product and you learn everything. But look, I think what we're looking for is like underlying skills. Like are you technical or do you like playing in tools? We have a take home that's about clay usage, right? Do you have a systematic mindset? Are you data all these kind of like core attributes and then we evaluate for that and we hire for that. And then we have like a rigorous kind of take home and interview process that test for that.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, a couple last questions then. When you hire people, has there been anything that stood out to you? The mo like is there an attribute, something where you're like, okay, I know this person, take home tests or not is probably going to meet the bar and this person does not.

[Clay Founder]

I actually try not to think about a bar per se, like a gut feeling.

[Podcast Host]

Now you're just like.

[Clay Founder]

There are things when I meet someone that stand out.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Clay Founder]

And that are like, okay, this is interesting and we should spend more time here, you know, and what, what are some of those signals? Right. Like, maybe it's creativity and creative ideas. Maybe it's. They've taught me something in the conversation. Maybe it's like the sheer passion for the product. And they've demonstrated that by going deep on the product and explaining all this feedback. We're deeply understanding our vision in a way that very few people do. Even our own employees do sometimes, you know. And so there are these like things that can stand out when you originally need someone. But ultimately what we're trying to do is just evaluate things. Right. And so, for example, like, and like, other unique things that you don't expect. Like, we hired a head of recruiting, but the head of recruiting is like a quasi engineer who taught herself how to code because she was an engineering recruiter. I was trying to build empathy and like builds like salesforce integrations on the side and stuff. And you don't see that that often in a recruiting lead, you know. And so there are unique attributes that you try to pay attention to, but it's a little less about like, do they have this quality or that it's more like. And we have values that we care about, like low ego and negative maintenance. But. But really what? It's like we're just trying to understand who the human is and try to get as much information about them as possible and try to map that to what we need and like, see this fit. So actually we hire a ton of generalists, but none of them do generalist roles in the company. Everyone commits and thank you so much for having me.

[Podcast Host]

Thanks for coming to Saster.

[Clay Founder]

All right, thanks guys.

[Podcast Host]

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