Clay.com becomes the latest 10 year overnight success.
Clay co-founder Kareem Amin spent six years working on a data enrichment product before figuring out who needed it most — and unlocking up-and-to-the-right growth numbers.
The original idea for Clay was incredibly broad and abstract: to make the power of programming accessible to more people. Amin and his co-founder Nicolae Rusan first built an initial product that scraped dozens of databases to pull information directly into a spreadsheet. But when they started selling it, they were overwhelmed by how vast their ICP could be.
Recruiters told Amin how useful their product was for finding candidates. Salespeople wanted to use the platform for their inbound and outbound efforts. Front-end engineers could use the spreadsheet as a low-code backend. They even had a customer who was using Clay to transform and send data to their accounting software.
So for a while, the Clay team avoided committing to just one ICP and sold wide, tailoring it to different customer profiles. “When you narrow the scope, it feels claustrophobic. Why are we doing something that’s smaller when we could be doing something bigger?” says Amin.
But they eventually realized this approach wasn’t netting customers who actually continued to use the product, and revenue growth stayed low. “People would feel excited by the possibilities the product opened. But they weren’t always going back and using it the next day,” says Amin. “So actually we had a lot of, ‘Wow, this is so powerful!’ and then no usage, or inconsistent usage.”
To gain traction, Clay fully committed to the ICP of outbound salespeople and only sold the same product each time — even if Amin didn’t feel complete confidence that was the right call. “It wasn’t so much that I was 100% sure that outbound was the right call, although it was a faster starting point because all companies need it, versus typically only bigger companies needing inbound support, ” says Amin. “It was more that I realized we need to pick one thing at a time, test it out clearly, and then make sure that it aligned with our larger goals — to get a lot of customers that can come in, self-serve and give us feedback that we can react to quickly. That’s when we’d earn the right to execute on the more expansive parts of our mission.”
Reference: NYTimes