How Clay Scaled from 0 to $30M ARR in 2 years with Product-Led Growth with Co-Founder & CEO Kareem Amin

Kareem Amin:
[0:00] Changing your mind in the middle without the data changing is the biggest risk for an early-stage startup. This is maybe an idea that I just use internally. I think companies own verbs. And for us, the verb is, bro, are we building the biggest thing? Is this aligned with what we care about?

Fabian Tausch:
[0:16] Clay is probably the overnight success of the startup ecosystem in the last years.

Kareem Amin:
[0:21] From zero to 30 million in ARR, from 2022 to 2024.

Fabian Tausch:
[0:25] When it comes to go-to-market and revenue operations, I think no tool has been discussed that often.

Kareem Amin:
[0:31] Clay automates data collection and enrichment, combining web scraping, APIs, and AI to streamline workflows and boost efficiency. And this is why today's guest is Kareem Amin, co-founder and CEO of Clay. Because I've seen this before, the main thing you need to look for is, does anyone like it? You shouldn't focus on the people who don't care about it. You should be aware of why they don't care about it. But you should focus on... And that's what actually matters.

Fabian Tausch:
[0:55] What many don't know is that you're building since 2017. I found an interview in which you stated that in early 2022, revenues were still close to zero. And then end of 2024, I found an article that estimates 30 million in ARR. What happened since 2017 that make you stick? And be honest, like how often did you think about, hey, should we actually continue or should we quit?

Kareem Amin:
[1:16] Sounds like you want to dig into the juicy part.

Fabian Tausch:
[1:19] There are many more founders out there struggling than experiencing hyper growth. We're covering a little bit of the product-led growth motion that Clay is using. We are also talking about the issues coming with hypergrowth, but the most part of the interview, we are discussing the frameworks that Karim and his team used to find this one spot that then brought all the momentum. Therefore, without further ado, you're listening to The Unicorn Bakery. My name is Fabian Tausch, and let's dive deep into the tactics on building Clay. Karim, welcome to The Unicorn Bakery.

Kareem Amin:
[1:52] Yeah, thanks for having me.

Fabian Tausch:
[1:54] In general, many would say Clay is the overnight success throughout the last years. In the last months, when it comes to go-to-market and revenue operations, I think no tool has been named that often and has been discussed that often. But what many don't know is that you're building since 2017. And I found an interview in which you stated that in early 2022, revenues were still close to zero. And then end of 2024, or like the full year of 2024, I found an article that estimates like 30 million in ARR, which would definitely show what happened since 2022. But I would love to also understand what happened since 2017 that made you stick to building rather than saying, we're giving up, we're over it, we don't want anymore. So take us back to the early beginnings of clay and then we'll uncover step by step a few of the stepping stones yeah.

Kareem Amin:
[3:00] Of course sounds like you want to dig into the juicy parts yeah so in 2017 i started the company with my really close friend best friend niklai and we had gone to college together we also like worked on a company before together so we had been really just working together for most of our adult lives and we had been feeling really excited about the idea of giving the power of programming to an order of magnitude more people just making it more accessible so it was really i think actually anticipating some of the stuff that's happening today with llms and just saying like if you can't kind of create malleable software or things that help you get your job done, you can't really capture a lot of the productivity gains that were happening in the 21st century if you can't tell a computer kind of what to do.

Kareem Amin:
[3:54] And we were pretty much kind of exploring that space broadly and playing around with lots of different metaphors that hopefully people could understand for programming. So there was obviously a workflow tool where you're like step one, step two, step three. And then there was other ideas that we had come up with like what if you could connect to apis and have a front end for them so i think that ended up kind of being a product similar to retool but we had been exploring it around the same time and we were also kind of thinking about spreadsheets and realizing that spreadsheets are the world's most popular programming environment but they're not connected to all of the different APIs to pull data in and push data out. So they were kind of isolated. So it's almost like Google Sheets made it collaborative but it didn't bring in data from various places on the web. You couldn't just click on a cell and say bring the stock price of whatever or like here's Google, what does it do? Or like give me a list of the people that work there. so that was kind of the beginnings of the idea for clay so

Fabian Tausch:
[5:14] What of the things that you did early on and tested early on stuck with the vision till today and and were the base layer and what did you have to kick.

Kareem Amin:
[5:23] Out of it well we had a lot of i think i guess part of what you know the audience for your podcast might be earlier in their journey and thinking about kind of like different trade-offs so we were pretty systematic about what decisions we had to make are so one of them was are we building this tool for software engineers who could be 10x better or non-engineers and that's something that we kind of kept going back and forth on in two ways one is what do we want to build and then two is what do we think is the biggest opportunity right and the reason we were thinking about the biggest opportunity is like the bigger the opportunity, the more chances you have to actually build more things and have more of an impact. So we were trying to calibrate those two things.

Kareem Amin:
[6:14] And we decided actually that, you know, soft. So in the beginning, I would say we were not making that choice. Clearly, we were kind of exploring and we built within, within kind of like software developers, which we were looking at, we were like, okay, what are the categories here? Could we target indie developers, like indie hackers who are, you know, building small software products? And that could be a really interesting place to like speed them up there if you have an idea you can turn it into reality quickly generally that concept of you have an idea and turn it into reality quickly has been something that has stuck from the beginning till now and we were just deciding which customer should be able to do that so with indie developers the thought process that we came to was okay even if we help people here they'll eventually want to move off to more customizable platforms and so anybody that actually makes money will eventually leave or else they'll be a small customer and there's not enough of small customers for it to be a big enough business to sustain kind of like the ambition that we had

Kareem Amin:
[7:25] So we ended up deciding against that and then there was what if we targeted front-end developers who want to build internal tools so we realized okay there's the category of all software and And then there's the category of internal software, which is usually something that you want to put together quickly. And maybe you are not the most technical person, but you need like a dashboard or you need to not something that's just analytics, but something that actually takes action. And so we were pretty excited about that because we were like customer success could use this. There's a lot of like internal teams that need to build internal tools with software.

Kareem Amin:
[8:04] What we ended up coming to, that one was a difficult choice because we thought it would be a really good business and like a really big need. And it aligned with kind of our ambition. But we ended up also thinking that will, at the time we thought there were kind of too many points of friction. In order to build it well, you need access to like your internal data. That's going to be some friction to go get that. So it's going to be sales led most likely. It's harder to build a PLG company if you need access to internal data as the first step. And then the second thing is we were like, we can't probably make it easy enough for non-engineers. So we'll probably just speed up engineers. And that's not, we ended up mostly through this exploration deciding, hey, we want to help non-engineers, give people more access. So that led us away from those two categories of ideas to the spreadsheet as the metaphor that makes sense. And we ended up building a no-code builder app initially. So it was like a spreadsheet, which was kind of a database. We had like a workflow view where you could do workflows and we even had a place where you could write functions to kind of manipulate the data. So for people who are familiar with Clay, this is quite a bit far away from where we are today, even though it actually is the same building blocks, but it might not be recognizable to people who aren't kind of familiar with the whole story.

Fabian Tausch:
[9:32] So, when did you find the first insights to move from developers to salespeople?

Kareem Amin:
[9:40] So, it was actually my co-founder Nikolai who suggested this. And he kind of saw it from the beginning.

Kareem Amin:
[9:49] He was like, oh, we could use this. So, I'll just walk you through our analysis, right? We're like, okay, we're working with spreadsheets. We're pulling in API. I built like a super simple version where you can pull in data from a couple of like different tools and you could even like push data back. So and when we saw it kind of like pop up in the cell, we both felt like, oh, this is this feels like magic, which ended up kind of being like the feeling that came across to others. But we were analyzing it and we're like if it's a spreadsheet this is all super abstract but i'm sharing it because i think it's helpful for other people's whose brains work this way but we're like we could go to use financial data numbers that's what people do in spreadsheets that's one thing that you could do and there's companies like equals that ended up doing that or you could go to list building which is the other thing that people do in spreadsheets and who's building lists. Well, it's salespeople, it's marketers, it's customer success, it's go-to-market teams. And so one of the things that he started doing was reaching out to people to talk about our product. And so he started doing prospecting and was like, hey, we should really kind of like set it up to do prospecting. And quickly we decided, okay, there's outbound and then there's inbound. And there was a huge kind of conversation around like where we should start.

Kareem Amin:
[11:15] But that was kind of how we came to it and we came to this pretty early but we ended up spending a lot of time

Kareem Amin:
[11:24] Like, I would say not deciding that this is our customer or deciding and then kind of walking it back, which I think is a common kind of thing that happens when you're an early stage startup. You kind of like need to figure out how to build conviction in this and why.

Fabian Tausch:
[11:41] So you mean you left doors open widely and didn't narrow the product down enough?

Kareem Amin:
[11:48] Yes. So we both left it widely in the product and in our marketing page. So even just mentally, we kind of were thinking about salespeople, but if someone came to us with another use case, we had a lot of use cases on Clay early on. Maybe it's a different type of data enrichment. Or there was an e-commerce store that was sending a lot of data through Clay, and we would enrich it with a few pieces of information and send it back. So it was also not, both the customer wasn't clear and we were taking on too many use cases and trying to support them. And we had the typical thing where, you know, this customer, for example, would send us these bursts of data. And so our system would struggle to handle it. And it was, the question was, should we figure out how to scale this? Or is this not a core use case? Also, if you looked at our integrations, we had so many different types of integrations, right? They weren't all for data enrichment. So you could pull in product usage data, or you could pull in data from Stripe. And I think that's totally fine as you grow. You just need to kind of order it correctly and decrease the surface area so that you don't have as many bugs. At the time, we struggled with having a lot of bugs. And a big conversation we were having internally is, do we need to up our engineering skill? Or is it because we have a very large surface area that there are bugs? Probably a mixture of both.

Fabian Tausch:
[13:16] So your recommendation will be especially in the early stages you'd start with a very very very focused approach and then you still have everything that you have in your head as a founder how the product could evolve once you gain traction you can still think about implementing things that are that that you would build in a broader product because you're trying to leave or open doors you can then think hey is this a use case that we can now implement once we have the traction once we know what our icp in this case go to market and outbound salespeople need right.

Kareem Amin:
[13:54] I i think that like to make it super concrete i would be, I think that there are many, many different approaches and you just have to know which approach you're on and be consistent and have that be aligned with what you're trying to achieve, right? So like, let's fast forward to 2022, right? So like which elements we kept and which elements we dropped. So first you have to have conviction on what you're building and why. And that could, That doesn't need to be up front. It could be a back and forth process of, you know, you're seeing what customers want. What do you care about? And finding the mixture. So for us, we're a creative tool, right? So what creative means is that it's super flexible. It's open-ended. And so we kept that part. But then we narrowed it down for go-to-market teams to grow their business,

Kareem Amin:
[14:51] Right? So our mission is to help the companies grow by turning any idea that they have into reality. So we kept that part. So Clay is still a, you know, I compare it to like a guitar versus a microwave, right? If you go to a microwave, it has a single use case or a couple of use cases. You're going to heat your food, maybe auto defrust, you press a button, it works. With a guitar, you have six strings and 12 frets and you can play anything. You can spend your whole life figuring this out. And there's a feeling of mastery that comes with that. So we're the same way that Figma is for designers, right? Or an, an IDE, like cursor is for developers. Clay is kind of the tool for expression for go to market teams.

Kareem Amin:
[15:36] And so that was really important. And what that the implications of that are that we create these building blocks in clay, and that's why the company is called clay, that you can mix and match together to implement your idea. So we needed to be super clear about what are the building blocks, right? What are the primitives in the product?

Kareem Amin:
[15:56] And so that stayed open ended, right? Like there's the table, there's integrations, there's ways to connect these integrations together. And then after that, what we did was actually take our positioning and marketing and narrow that. So in fact, the product, we removed the workflow product and the function product. We kept the table as the table enrichment. And we decided our first kind of product is if you are struggling with having really great data enrichment, we aggregate every data provider and we show it to you in a table. So you can build a list of companies and people and you can see all of the, you can mix and match how you do the data enrichment and then you can send it to an outreach tool or a CRM, right? And so that's like a very clear problem and a very clear proposition using the same things that we built, but we just articulated the problem differently. And it still ended up, people felt like they were programming because they were playing around with different data enrichments and how to set it up. But it was a very narrow use case. And then we moved our positioning and our go-to-market to be just about that. So I think actually we narrowed down our go-to-market and kept the product flexible.

Kareem Amin:
[17:08] So we only simplified a few things in the product, like removed integrations that don't make sense anymore, but kept it open-ended. And I think that's one strategy if you want to build a creative tool.

Fabian Tausch:
[17:19] Before we talk about what made the product then so sticky and so that people at some point, from all the differentiation to the years before, thought, hey, that's what I need, let's quickly talk about the conversations you had with your co-founders. Because what we currently walk through are years of, hey, we see some signs that things are working, but it's not picking up that much as we want. What are we doing? Is it enough to build further? Do we have to pivot? So constantly you have to reiterate as a team, you have to have very hard conversations.

Kareem Amin:
[17:58] So what

Fabian Tausch:
[18:00] Is your advice for teams currently building that don't see the uptick yet on truthful and hard co-founder conversations.

Kareem Amin:
[18:12] I mean i think you have to have really high bandwidth between the co-founders to be able to talk about this and my advice is what's tricky in these types of conversations is kind of going in loops or revisiting the same subjects over and over again when nothing has changed so i think what's helpful is to set a time where you're discussing what is it that we're building because i think that when you're in a startup every kind of couple of days you feel differently so sometimes you feel i mean people are quite familiar with Sometimes you feel like things are going well, our idea is going to work.

Kareem Amin:
[18:56] It all makes sense. And then other times it feels like this is a dead end or it's not as big of an idea as you thought. And interestingly, a lot of the things that we thought early on ended up happening in Clay. And it's kind of funny to be like, oh, we thought about this like four years ago and now it's finally like coming to fruition. But it also just really depends on timing and the amount of momentum that you have in the market. So there are many things that we did that I'll give you a simple example, right? Like we had to decide, is the product going to be super easy? You press one button and, you know, it builds a list and you kind of like can get on with it or are we going to give you maximum power, right? And everybody thought it should be super easy, right? If you're selling to salespeople or marketers, it needs to, they have, they're busy. It needs to kind of be a few clicks and get stuff done. We actually ended up going the opposite direction, right? Where it's super flexible and super powerful and we give it to kind of the people who are ready to push the boundaries on how to do these tactics. And that's both a differentiation and it builds, it helps them figure out how to grow and how to do growth. And it ended up being actually what's necessary because a lot of things here, the last 20% are super finicky and if you don't do it right, it doesn't work. So that kind of decision...

Kareem Amin:
[20:23] You, when you're chatting with your, let's say your team about it, you just have to be really clear about which one of these are you going to try first? What you believe about it? And then why do you believe that's different? We ended up seeing that that ended up working. The other version could have also worked, by the way. You know, there are products that are super simple and, or maybe not even the word simple, but they're super targeted on one use case and it works. You just need to know which one you're doing and why you believe that's the biggest one.

Kareem Amin:
[20:56] So once you decide that, my suggestion is you commit to a time frame where you're going to test it out and really give it a chance. And do not change your mind in the middle. I actually think changing your mind in the middle without the data changing is the biggest risk for an early stage startup. And even right now when we, you know, when I work with our engineering teams, they might ship a feature and be really depressed that no one's using it but because i've seen this before i would say the the the main thing you need to look for is does anyone like it right so you might ship something maybe 10 people start using it and so we need to focus on those 10 people so not you shouldn't focus on the people who don't care about it you should be aware of why they don't care about it but you should focus on if does anyone like it if zero people like it you should try something else. If there's a couple of people that like it, you should focus in on them and say, why do you like it? What is actually useful here for you? Is it the same thing that we believed it is, or maybe something else? And then what else do you want? And then build momentum with them.

Kareem Amin:
[22:03] And very soon, so we've had features that we've launched, looks like a flop, right? But then we hone in on the people who thought it was interesting or who used it. We improve it really quickly. We only work with those people and then suddenly it becomes more useful to a broader set of people.

Fabian Tausch:
[22:20] I know you're answering it depends, so therefore I won't ask if like one person can be enough to find the momentum that you're looking for. I'd rather ask, how are you approaching the launch of new features now? Are you giving them out and just like unlocking them and saying, hey, let's just see who clicks on that? Or are you saying, hey, statistically, we need like a subset of like when you say you have north than a hundred thousand users are you only rolling it out to a thousand and see how many of these are are using them how are you approaching that today and how are you deciding that.

Kareem Amin:
[22:58] Yeah i'll answer your first question as well i think that i would say one person is not enough you should be talking to more than a couple of people so that you have some repeatability and i think if there was one person who was interested in it and i've shown it to 20 people i would be curious what's unique about that person. So I would say anybody that's interested gives you something worthwhile. But by interested, I mean, if you've built it, they're using it, not they say they like it, they're actually using it. If it's just someone who says they're curious about it, you need to figure out why they're curious. And are there more people who are curious for the same reasons? I think the trick early on is you might, you should be very honest with yourself if they like it for the same reason, or if it's multiple different reasons and you're trying to make it work. That's the hard part about building things is holding the honesty of like, wow, five people like this, but for completely different reasons, and still holding the optimism of like, we will figure it out. Even though I know that this isn't actually working right now, we'll figure it out. So you still need to be honest with yourself that this isn't quite it, and have the optimism that we'll figure it out.

Kareem Amin:
[24:17] Hopefully that's helpful. I think it is balancing those two kind of ways of looking at the truth, but you definitely need to see the truth. If you're lying to yourself and saying, oh, they are saying the same thing or everybody's interested in this feature and you didn't really hear the customers, then it's not gonna work. So don't lie to yourself to have optimism. You can look at yourself failing and still be like, we're gonna get it. And then for the second question, how do we launch things today?

Kareem Amin:
[24:47] I think there are two types of features. We have this line internally that we call make it work, then make it great. And so it depends on what type of feature it is. So if it's a make it work feature, that means that either some customer, we have a lot of, you know, our Slack channel has 20,000 people. So we have a lot of feedback. We have a lot of customers using it. So we get a lot of information about what people need. And if you are just unlocking something for a customer, then we unlock it and we put it out and unlike you know if you're building spacex you can't have a mistake otherwise the thing blows up right whereas with go-to-market experimentation creative software we can launch things if it doesn't work there's no problem right we can fix it quickly so we tend to launch things that customers ask for directly to customers and then iterate quickly if it's a make it great feature, then either that's already something that we have and we're trying to streamline it or take it to the next level. And in that case, we take our time designing it, building it, and we roll it out to a small, so we have like an experimentation system set up, we roll it out to 10, 50%, 25, 50% into 100. Anything that has a lot of impact on customers, we roll out slowly or progressively

Fabian Tausch:
[26:11] That makes a lot of sense so still not over the the, lower lower end of the journey like the starting point how often and be honest as honest as you can like how often did you think about hey should we actually continue or should we quit and do something completely new or should i go back to a product lead or or vp.

Kareem Amin:
[26:38] Product or anything all the time but i i think that i don't think that like in the first couple of years like let's say three years that that ever occurred to me i think that i think the thought that came was was are we the thoughts that had, like, I think this is really specific to the co-founding team, right? Like, what is your loop, you know? And you, I think with different configurations of people, it turns to different things. Like for us, it was very much like, are we building the biggest thing? And then is this aligned with what we care about? Those were kind of our questions that kept coming up. I think we really believed that we were going to build something meaningful and something good because we believed in ourselves and also because we wanted to like we really felt that we had the capability and the desire to do it but it was more like are we building a thing like is this still aligned with our vision of giving the power of programming or not right and does that matter so that kind of came up a lot

Kareem Amin:
[27:47] And then the other one, so, you know, as soon as we started thinking about go-to-market, we're like, well, we're not sales or marketers, so why should we be in this space, right? Like, what do we know about it that other people don't? So it was partially convincing ourselves that what we had here was something valuable to add. And eventually we came to that because we're like, oh, we played around with existing tools. We tried to do prospecting and we're like, this is not how we would have designed it, right? So we do have an insight here. And then we eventually needed to come to care about it by saying, oh, it is about giving this creative ability to a whole group of people that have all of these ideas of how to grow the company, but can't execute it. Right. So once those two things aligned, it became easier to build. And then there's the second part is like, is this the biggest idea that we could do? And I think I've talked about this before, but for me, this was a personal journey of coming to a place where I didn't need to do that.

Kareem Amin:
[28:42] And so I don't think about that a lot. I think it's actually a red herring and potential trap. I think you need to kind of keep an eye out for what is the biggest thing, if that's what you care about. But if you explicitly try to build the biggest thing, I think you will fall into a lot of kind of like traps along the way, because it starts being about you rather than about how you're helping other people. And a business is really about helping other people. so i had to kind of come to a place where i'm like it doesn't really matter if we're building the biggest thing or not like the we're building a creative tool to help go-to-market people turn their ideas into reality and that's what we care about right and i i can because you can always one of the other things is you need to look at yourself as a team and know some people are so focused on the details and they don't have a big picture whereas we actually had like a very big picture. So we knew that we can always grow the pie, but we didn't have kind of like, okay, what are we doing next? So I knew that what we needed to do was to focus some other people need to broaden, right? Again, that's why the advice needs to actually be specific to what is your current

Kareem Amin:
[29:57] Yeah, what do you need in this specific moment? And what we needed is to not pay attention to what is the biggest market or analysis around that. Because I knew that you could always add something that's adjacent. This is a huge space. And this is something, a way to figure out if something is big or not, instead of doing market analysis, which is possible but is not my favorite tool, is to really think about what is something fundamental that doesn't change, right? If you're in capitalism, businesses have to grow and they have to figure out ways to grow. They're trying out all these different ideas of how to grow their company. They need to be able to try out these ideas quickly and see which ones work and which ones don't. And if we are the tool to help them do that, that's obviously going to be a huge lift. And you will be able to capture a lot of value if you did that and provide a lot of value. So we knew it was going to be big. So then you have to kind of drop the need for it to be big immediately or quickly and just focus on building momentum.

Kareem Amin:
[30:58] And I think that's actually the main thing in a company. Everybody talks about it, but the practical reality of building momentum, which means find some customers that are similar and then figure out which groups they're in, how to find more like them, make sure that the messaging is the same. And then once you get these customers, you should be able to get more engineers or you can build your team around this because you have a clear need. And by the way, teams work much more efficiently when they can see that they're serving someone. If you're building a team and you're just pitching them on keep building and then eventually you'll get customers, at some point they run out of steam. But if they can hear the customer and that's what we did in our Slack channel, ask for something, then you'll find your engineers immediately delivering because they can see their impact. And then you can use that to raise money if that's what you want to do. And then keep the loop going. And that's actually what leads you to something big.

Fabian Tausch:
[32:00] Take me back to the moment when you and the team for the first time had the feeling like, whoa, we now have the momentum that we were looking for years.

Kareem Amin:
[32:11] So when we launched the product on Product Hunt in February 2022, it was kind of a fun story because we were at our office and we were preparing for it. And I think you have to launch it as like 12 p.m. PT. Sorry 12 a.m pt and so we're like well should we stay up for it and we're like well we'll probably go home and do it from home but we ended up needing to do so many last minute things that we stayed up to like 3 a.m that day at the office and we started seeing kind of like the votes come in and we ended up being you know we went to sleep from like 3 a.m to 6 and then got back up and kept going and it was it was fun because i i remember emailing everybody that i've ever met in my life and being like please do this help support it and we ended up being number one for the day and the week and the month i think or maybe the day and the week and second for the month but what was great is that we saw kind of like this uptick of people understanding what to do in the product and it's starting to resonate with people it was super early on and we did have some revenue at the time, but it wasn't that much.

Kareem Amin:
[33:26] And within two months from then, we started, there were a couple of people who had left the team at that point. And we started kind of building up the team again. And I think it was probably in June 2022 that we started seeing consistent growth month over month, and it stayed in double digits the whole time until now.

Fabian Tausch:
[33:50] I think I read that you 10x'd two years after another, so from 22 to 23, from 23 to 24, which definitely shows the amount of uptick and the amount of momentum that you got. What would you say were the building blocks for the momentum to consistently stay? Because there are so many companies that I know that have this product hunt moment, or others that are, let's say, creating this bus as a one-time, as a one-off, and then it's flattening, and then growth is flattening or not staying at all. So you must have had some building blocks that are tailored or at least helping to keep the momentum.

Kareem Amin:
[34:40] Totally, yeah. I mean, so just to give you a sense of how, like Clayworks, there's a PLG motion, which has been primarily how we've been growing. So PLG, you find the product, you sign up and you start using it and you pay us. And we just layered on what we call a sales assist motion, which is some of the PLG customers, we upgrade them to annual if they're using the product in particular ways that make sense for that. And then we have a sales led motion, which we've introduced recently. So, you know, on the longer term, we were adding these different motions together and we just have a partner motion now where we have a lot of the collegiancies and other kind of partners that help that we co-sell with. So, you know, I think for long-term growth, you need to layer on multiple go-to-market motions.

Kareem Amin:
[35:28] Initially, though, so at the time that we did the product hunt launch, we had my co-founder Varun was just joining us. And at the time, he was kind of joining in a head of ops role. And he played a very big part in setting up our go-to-market motion. Well, he was responsible for the go-to-market motion, but he played a really big part in kicking that into gear. And what he did was pretty amazing. So he would sit, almost like a PM, he would sit with our customers to do an onboarding call. And we had one dedicated engineer working with him, who was a customer engineer. And basically, Varun would sit in these back-to-back calls all day, every day, for 30 minutes, onboarding customers, so they would come with a problem. And initially, it took us three calls to get them set up on Clay.

Kareem Amin:
[36:25] And our metric was like let's drive this down to one call so let's make product improvement so he would get on these calls send me all the feedback me and the engineer would work on prioritizing these and getting them right or figuring out like what is the actual solution and we would do them immediately sometimes while the person was on the call we would fix the issue and then we got it down to one call when we got it down to one call we decided to do something called the reverse demo so when you come we don't demo the product you come to us with a problem and then we walk you through how to set it up in clay and what that did was we both got feedback from you because we could watch what you're doing and at the same time we were teaching you how to use the product so you could use it yourself and then we eventually said okay let's drive it down to zero calls so in order to do that we had to build documentation fix all the issues with the product that we know about and then make sure that we only take calls if it's something new or unique that we haven't seen before. So that was the initial path. At the same time, we found out that, and this was kind of interesting because a lot of agencies, B2B agencies help with growth and they're very sophisticated actually. So they're more sophisticated often than some of the bigger companies, because they're experimenting with the latest techniques for growth.

Kareem Amin:
[37:54] And we had a bunch of them using clay or experimenting with clay. But initially, we weren't focused on them because we thought, is this the right market for us? Are they the right customer? You know, we, they're not in companies that are super well known. So people won't know, kind of like that we have this traction. But as we started talking to them, we realized they actually have the most need. They're working with multiple companies that we would love to work with. So they're a great channel partner for us. And at the same time, their feedback was extremely effective and helpful. And so we found out that they often have these WhatsApp groups where they're sharing ideas. And we talked to a few of them, became really friendly. Varun kind of got to know a couple of them personally that became personal friends. And we basically just joined their WhatsApp groups and would help them figure out what they need to do and also fix any of the issues as quickly as possible. And that became our initial distribution channel and the initial kind of like feedback loop. So once that happened, we realized that they need customers. And so they would post on LinkedIn saying, hey, here's this cool play that we have for go to market and we're using clay to do it. Right. And that became an engine of telling other people about play when i sum this up you have

Fabian Tausch:
[39:19] By now you have 20 000 people in the slack channel you early on used for example the so-called agencies that you build up and and and or helped and work together with building the product and and so when i when i when i summarize this or put this together it's definitely a community play because you were working close with people that then also share it on, for example, LinkedIn, that they are working with Clay and use that as a word of mouth motion. And so what would you say, because I know a lot of B2B founders who would say it's not possible to build a B2B community at the moment, not for my product. So how and why did it work to build a community motion and what was making it successful?

Kareem Amin:
[40:09] Yeah, I think that's, again, why you need to align your go-to-market motion with the type of product that you're building and what you're trying to achieve. So in our case, it's a creative tool, right? So creative means you have a bunch of primitives, high flexibility, and you're trying to turn any idea that you have for growing your company into reality. And so the community here makes sense because when we set up our Slack group, we initially set it up as a customer support public forum. And that was a risky idea because everybody could see people's complaints, right? But it ended up being super helpful because people would post about something, someone else might respond to it or we would respond to it and people could see the speed at which we were responding, which built Momentum.

Kareem Amin:
[40:54] But we were already tapping into the fact that people were building communities about this. The communities were these WhatsApp groups where they were sharing these tips and tricks. And so we just kind of went into these communities and aggregated them into the same place. So we realized, okay, you're already doing this stuff in WhatsApp groups and we were doing it publicly in our Slack channel so you could see all the different tactics. And because our product was super open-ended, it actually made sense to and it ended up always there's like a latest tactic or there's like a way to do something that's a little bit more complex you could get help from others and then the others would get credit and cachet for helping you whether it's personal or like broadly people start to get known to be like oh this is the person you ask about things and then they would get hired right so you know one of the early people that we worked with was eric noslosky and part of what he was doing was he was sharing his tactics and techniques because then he one he wanted to help people but two he would get well known as the person who knows the most about this and then people would hire his agency i

Fabian Tausch:
[42:05] Think that's super interesting because when i think and spin this further like everyone coming to me saying hey it's not possible for me i would say think about the icp that you have and it doesn't always have to be a slack community but building community can be hosting a dinner for the cfos or the.

Kareem Amin:
[42:24] Head

Fabian Tausch:
[42:25] Of fpna or the different kind of icps you have and bring them together at some certain points spark conversations probably create content around that of course it feels more obvious in quotation marks to do that for go-to-market but there are so many.

Kareem Amin:
[42:43] Different needs out there that if you know very specifically and that's what we discussed in

Fabian Tausch:
[42:49] The first half of this podcast is like saying no to a lot of things to find the thing that you want to commit to if you know what you commit to it's easier to also think hey these are the people that we want and need to bring together to then spark the conversation and become more of a household brand in that space is that something that starts from one day to another definitely not.

Kareem Amin:
[43:10] Yeah and and you want to know like for us we are kind of like this is maybe an idea that i just use internally i think companies own verbs right so maybe google owns search or organize right uber owns to move and if you use that kind of concept you could say okay uber you know there's a person moves another person to another place but then you can instead of move a person move a package, right? Instead of a person moving it, it could be autonomous. So you can come up with all these different ideas around the verb. And for us, the verb is grow, right? And we think about it as not just grow, like help grow companies, but help grow people. So sometimes the thing that's blocking the company's growth is personal growth. And so that's what we focus on in our community. We're trying to help people grow authentically, right? So both grow in their job or just grow as human beings and so if you're setting up kind of an event and it's about personal growth and people then care about your company and your product because they know a lot of people that use clay are getting promoted because of the impact that they're having and that's what actually matters and that's what matters to us and that's what matters to that there

Fabian Tausch:
[44:25] Are so many ways to to continue but the one question that i have in mind for for a while already is what is the major shift that we are currently experiencing in the whole world of go-to-market, that Clay is definitely on the one hand driving and on the other hand riding the wave at the same time.

Kareem Amin:
[44:47] Yeah, I'll just steal your comment right now. There's many ways to answer this. I think we are riding a wave of, you can think of it as like malleable software or just-in-time software with LLMs, right? You can build software faster now and custom-made software, and that's something that we believed in early on, but now is made even more realizable. And so I think what Clay does is it allows you to express an idea really quickly into software.

Kareem Amin:
[45:20] And it is much, much, much more customizable, and it's much easier to customize this. And I think in the go-to-market space, it's all about being unique and getting people's attention.

Kareem Amin:
[45:31] And the way to do that is to target the right people at the right time and say the right thing. That's always been the case, but the techniques to do that are becoming increasingly more complex because you have a lot of data that's available, and Play allows you to work with that quickly and easily. Right so another way to to say this and to look at the market is there's co-pilots and things that help let's say sellers or marketers or frontline people do their job more efficiently so there's tools doing that then there's the opposite end of that there's like all these tools that call themselves digital workers and are trying to replace the person fully and just say okay well ai will do the whole thing and then i think we're riding a wave we're saying there's a third way which is you move the jobs to be done to a more technical person like a gtm engineer or a rev ops person and they can enable the frontline people by trying out all of these creative ideas really quickly using ai and i think we're riding the wave of this emergence of this more or it's almost like a reformulation of this more technical person being very central because they can use tools like clay and ai to enable a whole team and both decrease the number of people that are needed to do something and do more things and upskill so now if you're an sdr you can either spend all of your time talking to customers or you can upskill yourself and become one of these gtm engineers how

Fabian Tausch:
[46:58] Will this change the setup of gtm teams.

Kareem Amin:
[47:02] I think that you will find that the the that you will consolidate more of the tasks into one person so instead of having maybe an sdr an ae and the sales engineer we've kind of combined all of those roles into gtme right so i think you upskill people and then they're able to do a couple of different tasks which i think is both more interesting and more powerful right and i think the way that the teams are structured would be that there's always going to be, you can look across all of go-to-market. So it's less siloed sales, marketing, customer success. You should be looking at all of your efforts across these as GTM. And then I think there's a GTM ops team, almost like a systems team that's looking at, hey, do we have all the data from all the different places, third-party data and first-party data to make the best go-to-market kind of campaigns. And then that team is enabling the go-to-market team to implement their ideas, and the go-to-market team is passing ideas back to the ops team, who then implements them and tells them if it worked or not. So I think you really need this GTM ops and systems team.

Fabian Tausch:
[48:14] How are you building your own go-to-market team then?

Kareem Amin:
[48:17] It's very much exactly how I describe this. So we have go-to-market engineers who are playing the role of salesperson and sales engineer. And then we have a go-to-market ops team that is basically taking the best tactics and implementing them really quickly in Clay. And what's that the cool thing that that's allowed us to do is to we almost don't have anybody entering any information into crms manually everything is automated but also the team is able to be way more creative because they're being supported by all by all of the ops kind of roles in automating a lot of like how do you prepare for a meeting who have we reached out to getting the information from our own internal systems about who this customer is really really quickly as well as our outreach we're sending a lot more outreach through our through clay and having it be very very accurate to the person's needs so

Fabian Tausch:
[49:21] Knowing that clay is definitely a substantial part of your own go-to-market but probably not the only one because clay is not delivering every solution to every problem what are the tools that.

Kareem Amin:
[49:33] You

Fabian Tausch:
[49:33] Are the most excited about when we look at the go-to-market stack and we don't have to talk about like all all all tools i think there is no time no time for that but like at least like one two more that you think could deliver a lot of value to to founders listening.

Kareem Amin:
[49:47] Yeah so i think you know just to add to your first comment we we do use clay internally for most things and then there are a bunch of features that we haven't released that we build internally first so we build you know some of the things to power ourselves and once they work we ship them so we tend to kind of build versus buy obviously for go-to-market tools the things that i'm excited about are well one of our customers intercom their tool finn has been very very helpful on the customer success side helping us basically answer a lot of questions that our support team would know how to answer quickly, but would be very repetitive. And so that they can focus on the kind of like more complex questions that are interesting. And then the second thing is that it's a really good place for the product team to hear what are the problems, right? Like what are the constant questions and things that keep coming up? And for me as a CEO, to be able to kind of quickly dig into categories and then see the actual things people are saying has been super helpful. super

Fabian Tausch:
[50:55] Interesting i'll link to to finn in the in the show notes as well as to clay obviously but still just adding adding that to to it when we.

Kareem Amin:
[51:04] We

Fabian Tausch:
[51:05] Quickly have to talk about hyper growth like to be honest it's definitely one of the things that everyone would describe clay as a company and organization with what would you say even when some founders that are in the more kind of in the situation that you were for five years and could describe it as a more of a luxury problem to have like the the hyper growth and all the problems that come with it what would you say is the hardest hardest part about hyper growth and scaling.

Kareem Amin:
[51:33] I think the the hardest thing is the organizational design and kind of figuring out how to like revisit that what is the optimum kind of times where you change the structure of the org

Kareem Amin:
[51:49] Versus keep it as is even if some things are not quite aligned right because as the team grows its internal comms becomes super important right so how do you communicate the vision and the strategy and why the team is organized in this particular way for the moment and because things are changing so quickly you have to the way to do that i think is to make sure that you have people who are super flexible and emotionally mature right so you know we went from 25 to 100 people in one year and then you know we went from like 100 to probably 135 from the beginning of the year so the trick to doing that is to make sure that your people talk about culture a lot but how do you make that more concrete right so we've built an operating principles document like many other companies but just being super clear about what your operating principles are so that you the the company needs to have a sense of how it's operating and not be whiplashed so if you're a super flexible company don't suddenly turn into a, you know,

Kareem Amin:
[53:08] Super disciplined company or a very rule abiding company. If you do that kind of thing, that's the kind of thing that confuses people as you're growing. You need to have some consistency because there's already so much change. You need to decide what are the things that stay the same and which things are flexible and change.

Kareem Amin:
[53:26] Maybe that's too vague for people to understand, but, you know, I'll give a quick example, right? Like we are okay, for example, having a reporting structure that doesn't reflect kind of the priorities right now, as long as everybody on the team understands what they're doing, right? That doesn't bother us. just because moving the reporting structure you know moving one team from reporting to one manager to another one creates even if in the most kind of flexible people a little bit of slowdown you have to get you know to know this new manager what do they need how often are they meeting so if things are working keep them working right only change things once you get to a stage where there's either like a pause or there's a big reason to change the team so sometimes we've had people,

Kareem Amin:
[54:18] You know, common advice is you should only have, you know, five to eight people reporting to you, right? Whereas until now, the whole engineering team still reports to me. We have a few engineering managers. So we have four engineering managers and there's 40 people in the engineering org and we don't have a head of edge. I'm the head of edge, right? The product team, we have four people. They all report to me. We have, you know, the finance team is reporting to me the people in brand team are reporting to me so that's a huge number of people reporting to me and in actual reality i'm obviously not doing and i don't do any one-on-ones right it's just if you have an issue message me and we'll deal with it immediately right and if you need some time just book it on my calendar

Kareem Amin:
[55:03] Now, obviously, that will change as we continue to grow, but we haven't needed to change that, and we haven't needed to add a layer of management that you need to work through, because that does make things more complicated. So I would say keep things going with as direct an impact as you direct connections to the individual contributors as you can for as long as you can, because then you have a pulse on what's happening and then you add the layer of management when you need to and even then you don't need to make it super formal unless that's kind of how you want to run the company but that's one way in which we've been able to scale without losing touch with kind of like what's happening or dealing with problems immediately

Fabian Tausch:
[55:47] Super interesting and i'd love to double click on your calendar and time management because when you say hey i'm i have so many direct reports i don't do one-on-ones of course sometimes there are things like like podcast recordings like this one but besides that it when you say hey message me and we'll deal with it immediately immediately meaning as soon as you see the message this sounds like you have a very flexible calendar and try to minimize meetings and try to be like when we when we look at paul graham's makers versus manager schedule i'd suggest you have a maker schedule trying to block as much time as freely as possible so that you can focus on the things that you want to as in my opinion most founders quickly in scaling companies tend towards the manager schedule yeah.

Kareem Amin:
[56:42] Well i think that so it like you know one of the The harder parts for me was kind of letting go of like, I wrote a lot of the initial code and built a bunch of the product. So like letting go of doing that on a daily basis. And I think the, so just to be clear, I think you should figure out the management style that works for you very specifically. And I think the thing that's underlying that is that you need to stay in touch with the company's pulse. And the best way I think to do that is to stay in touch with the ICs and what is actually happening. And so I have like a couple of tactics to do that instead of one-on-ones, right? I keep my calendar reasonably open. And so you could either Slack me if there's an issue, right? Or just book 15 minutes and we can deal with it then. And sometimes you might be like sending me, so we call it FYI culture. So you're just like, FYI, this is happening. I'll read it. Keep everything kind of like in the open and Slack channels.

Kareem Amin:
[57:50] And that way, even if I don't do it during the day, I might read it at another point, right? If it's not urgent, I'll still kind of get to knowing what's happening. So I think I'd say that this is a more reactive structure, right? But it works really well if you have people who are, if your setup is like distributed decision making, which is what we have, try to empower the people who are working on things to make the decision. And then they can FYI me if they're blocked on something or if something's not clear. So if I see something is not clear across many people, then I might set up a meeting to bring everybody together and figure out, okay, is the vision not clear? Is the strategy not clear? So that's the internal comms part. Often it's just a people thing, right? So like this person doesn't want to do this thing, or this person disagrees with this path, or this person is,

Kareem Amin:
[58:46] You know, it could be an interpersonal conflict, right? Like, I don't like the way this person's talking to me about X thing. And so you're constantly kind of smoothing out these issues or coaching the managers to do it for next time. But I think it's really important to have your space as a founder free to make sure that you're aware of all of these issues and actually intervening and coaching where we're needed and bringing or realizing, hey, we need more principles or some things are not clear. We need to clear them up. the other thing is that we have a weekly all hands where we kind of like bring up one kind of like department that talks about what they're working on as well as i usually give actually it's almost like this is a fancy way of calling but like a dharma talk like at the beginning of every all hands it's like how do we operate at clay and why and how does this really matter I think probably 50% of people like it, and 50% of people don't care. But I think it's a helpful way of helping them at least know what's on my mind. And then every week we have an open Q&A session. So anyone in the company can come and ask a question, and it's well attended, because we discuss various things that are happening in the company very transparently.

Fabian Tausch:
[1:00:09] I think that's very interesting. one thing that i want to cover before we need to end up this podcast is the people and i want to understand what were you looking for in the earliest team members that you hired versus what are you looking for and approaching hiring today what are commonalities what changed due to the growth that you're having just to for other founders to get an understanding what you value you and the people that work for clay.

Kareem Amin:
[1:00:40] Yeah i think that the top things that we value is did we learn something from you during our interaction and it can be anything right did i learn if you're an engineer did i learn something from you about how you would approach like a particular problem if you're a product person did you give me a new way of looking at this if you're a go-to-market person did you come up you know our interview for clay for go-to-market engineers is do something interesting with play right so it's almost set up to learn something from you so i think that's our top thing did we learn something from you and then number two we call it a quiet ego right so are you able to navigate a conversation in a way where we feel like you're both teaching us something and maybe receiving some feedback or changing your mind about something or you know The high bandwidth communication, I think, requires a low ego, and we really value that. So if we're having to watch every word that we're saying to make sure that things are okay, then we're just slowing down our communication throughput. And then I think for early...

Kareem Amin:
[1:01:50] So, you know, these two things imply a number of things, right? They imply you're smart. They imply that you have, like, humility. They imply that you're flexible, right? A lot of things that we care about at Clay. But I think those two things kind of stand out and are maybe unique. And then the other thing is in early, like, team building, I think that you do want T-shaped people. I find that, like, everybody talks about everybody has an A-team and the best people in the world, etc. But if you want actually helpful advice, right, like why are the best people in the world joining you? They probably aren't, right? Unless you're a second time founder or you've done something before or you already have some kind of network where you're connected to the best people in your field. Why would someone join you initially? They probably aren't. So I think you're kidding yourself if you think you have the best person in X or Y. You want to actually hire people who are unique. I find that our early team is the best at one or two things.

Kareem Amin:
[1:02:57] Occasionally, you meet someone who is actually truly the best in the world for a number of things and is well-rounded, and they'll probably join you because of the mission and the culture. But in most other cases, you're finding someone who spikes in one area and maybe doesn't spike in another area. And that's why they don't fit into traditional, like, larger companies. Those are the unique people that you want on your team, right? Like someone who, you know, one of our early engineers was really, really fast, incredibly fast. So he would sometimes have more bugs than we would like today, but he was incredibly fast at shipping features, and that speed was a huge competitive advantage. Probably the fastest engineer I've ever worked with, right? but definitely not the most comprehensive engineer. And then we had another engineer who doesn't ship any bugs, like very, very careful, but requires a lot more detail. So there's kind of like, everything has like two-sided edge to it. And so it's almost like a sports team. You're kind of balancing the team out. You don't want everybody to have the same role. So we kind of have someone who's super fast and then someone who doesn't ship bugs. And if you manage that correctly, you end up having the best of both worlds.

Fabian Tausch:
[1:04:21] And then one thing that I can't let you go without, back to a topic that we discussed briefly only, sadly, but too many things to talk about. What would you say is the hardest part about building a product-led growth slash PLG motion? So that quick explanation again for everyone who probably hears this the first time, this means I can go to the Clay website, start an account myself and do everything and then buy the product if i want to use it further and not like talking to the team and then having a sales process before i can use it i.

Kareem Amin:
[1:05:01] Think the hardest thing about that is that it takes a long time to find the right kind of flywheel to drive that motion right so in our case it's agencies who are, or like where we started it was agencies who wanted to find business for themselves and found clay to be super helpful for them. And they were talking about it and posting about it and telling their friends. And then more people hearing about that and trying clay, right? So you needed to be, you needed to experiment quite a bit and to have a thesis that makes sense around that. And then you need to be very, very fast at fixing all of the little paper uppercuts because it can be,

Kareem Amin:
[1:05:47] You know, there, there were so many, it was kind of interesting because in the beginning, every time we removed a little roadblock from, you know, the path of like getting started on clay or paying, we would see huge jumps in the number of people that were using it. So even seemingly small things that we'd be like, well, if someone really wants it, they'll get over this. They don't, they just drop off. And so you have to be very careful that you make the path of success like clear and at the same time you have to balance that out with not lying to yourself that you actually have like true product market fit and a plg movement and that you you don't keep doing things to smooth out the path when there really is no pull so really being it is an art to know oh this is the pull right people are coming to the product and they really want to use it despite the hurdles. And then you start to remove the hurdles and then you see as you remove a hurdle, you see a big jump, right? So having the patience for that and then having the ability to hold on to the belief that it will work, even though it's taking time. And then at the same time, being super honest with yourself about what isn't working and why you need to fix it. So holding all of these things that are conflicting together is very challenging, right? Yeah.

Kareem Amin:
[1:07:10] And I think what's helpful there is if you have clarity around why you believe it's going to work and then managing your emotions so that you don't freak out when it doesn't work and that you also don't change your mind too often while you're running an experiment, right? You need to have the patience to wait to see does it pan out or not. And if it doesn't pan out, make the change, wait again. So I do think it's actually a big part of it as a form of patience and being able to handle failing, especially failing like publicly and not having like shame about that. I would love

Fabian Tausch:
[1:07:53] To ask follow-up questions, but I need to hold myself short. For everyone who hasn't tested Clay yet, a quick opportunity for you. What would be the easiest use case that can give me a wow moment when I now click on a link in the show notes and say I'll test Clay for the first time?

Kareem Amin:
[1:08:10] You should go to clay.com. You can enter, for example, a bunch of companies that you're interested in, and then you can use our Use.ai integration to ask any question about the company. So you can say something like, does it have SOC 2 compliance, which is a type of security compliance? You can ask what technologies does it use and how much do they spend on some of these technologies? And we'll go out and figure out how to get you that info. Cool.

Fabian Tausch:
[1:08:40] Kareem, lots of things that we covered today. Thank you so much for sharing all these thoughts, experiences, learnings. It's been such a pleasure. I can imagine I'll write you at some point with a different idea on a different topic to double click on. But for now, for today, we will call it.

Kareem Amin:
[1:08:57] A day and I'll

Fabian Tausch:
[1:08:58] Link to your LinkedIn, but also to Clay in the show notes. Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure.

Kareem Amin:
[1:09:04] Yeah, I really appreciate the time and hopefully this was helpful.

Fabian Tausch:
[1:09:07] It definitely was. Thank you.

Kareem Amin:
[1:09:09] Thank you.

Fabian Tausch:
[1:09:10] I hope you enjoyed this episode with Karim from Clay and giving insights into the journey of the struggling part and the struggling phase of five years before there is the uptick, before there is the momentum. So as I can imagine, that it's way more people listening right now that are struggling too than having like everything working perfectly fine. I hear you. We hear you. All the founders hear you. So therefore, thanks for listening and staying till the end. But also if you found this episode helpful please share it with a friend i can imagine that somebody needs to hear the clay story to say hey i'm sticking to this project and i want to continue so please share it with a friend or share it on socials if you really enjoy it we can also share you and send you some video snippets in high edit quality you can just email us at fabian at unicornbakery.de and if you haven't already feel free to subscribe to the podcast on youtube spotify or apple podcast so that you don't miss any upcoming episodes with like the former cro of cloudflare who built cloudflare into a one billion dollar arr engine stelly fd from close.com another episode with mark from strava and many many more so you would miss a lot if you don't follow to the to the unicorn bakery now thanks for listening it's been such a pleasure and see you next week.