Clay reposted this
Sometimes getting the right positioning for your startup is more challenging than getting to the product itself. “Often it’s not that you don’t know who the customer is, it’s that you’re not picking — you haven’t committed to one hypothesis over the other. That’s what creates the confusion about what the product is, what the feature set looks like, and what the language that you use in the product even is.” Clay's Kareem Amin is one of the most thoughtful founders I know on this topic. Before Clay was the GTM power tool that it is today, it was struggling to choose between broadly building a horizontal product and narrowly focusing on outbound sales. “We had a bunch of initial customers, but they were all doing very wildly different things,” says Kareem. “One company actually sent me their code base because they wanted to send all of their data to NetSuite, but they didn’t have time to do it, so they asked us to reverse engineer it. It was in the same general sphere of doing some data transformation in a no-code way, but it had nothing to do with sales or recruiting. We just had this running in the background for a long time. They were paying us. But suddenly our servers would go down and we were like, ‘What's going on?’ And it was just this one company sending a bunch of data to us that needed to get transformed and sent to NetSuite. We had a customer, but it was the wrong customer.” In the latest installment of our Paths to PMF series on The Review, I got to sit down with Kareem to unpack the seven-year “overnight success” story of Clay, drilling deep into the debate between building a horizontal vs. vertical product, and how to find focus as a founder. Article in the comments.
Love this story, Todd. It's cool to see a 'slow bake' success when everyone's chasing quick wins. Clay's journey shows that patience and focus beat obsession with silver bullets. Interesting how they went from 0 to 2,5k+ customers in just 18 months after years of work. Their community is impressive too. I actually know a few folks who've built impressive businesses on top of Clay. Hey Nathan Lippi! Makes me wonder how many potential unicorns give up too soon, thinking they've failed before they find the PMF.
I think they will soon update this vertical as the 'personalisation' channels are burnt! Google and Microsoft are tightening the screws on cold email, same with LinkedIn. The majority of my clients use Clay to enhance the CRM for use in cold calling or use a 'personalised' staying in touch fodder, aka your already a client and I care about you.
Super cool to see the old page
Very well written and insightful. Thank you.
Cody Carnes
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Partner at First Round Capital
2wRead the article here: https://review.firstround.com/clays-path-to-product-market-fit/