Clay is just getting started - here's why

Hello everyone, and welcome back to yet another edition of the GTM cookbook.

Because last week’s edition involved an hour of me talking through the technicalities of using Clay, I figured this week’s could get a bit more theoretical.

As I use Clay more, as well and listen to Varun (Clay’s co-founder)’s energized rants on what the tool could be, I really start to understand why the valuation is so high.

Every company’s hypothetical growth model is very simple to project. The first thing almost every company tries to do is to take over a single vertical or section of an industry. Apple did it with computers, Google did it with web browsing. Clay is trying to do it with GTM software.

In fact, they’re beginning to succeed pretty heavily at it. Clay is quickly becoming at least a consideration in every enterprise B2B company’s board meetings. Sooner or later, it’ll become the default tool that the risk-averse enterprise middle management suggest to their C-suite simply because it’s obviously and consistently good. It’ll be the Zoominfo and 6Sense of tomorrow. That’s when the 9 to 10-figure ARR numbers start to roll in.

I’ve seen a few posts recently reference this exact thing, most specifically when noting Clay’s recent raise at a 1.25b valuation. Almost every person talking about Clay’s raise used Apollo.io, Zoominfo, and other competitors in the GTM space to show that Clay is overvalued.

However, there’s something they’re missing.

See, Apple didn’t stop at computers. Google didn’t stop at web browsers. Clay doesn’t plan to stop at GTM software.

Something that Kareem (Clay’s other active co-founder) often states when asked about Clay is that Clay is for growing your business. He rarely mentions the term GTM, actually, and this is very much on purpose.

Kareem, alongside the entire Clay team, are product visionaries that understand how limiting the category “GTM tool” is for Clay. During this great consolidation of SaaS tools that we’re currently experiencing, Clay wants to take more than just the sales world.

To understand how it’s actually possible for Clay to do this, one has to consider what the tool actually is. In essence, Clay is a marketplace for data that makes it easy to access and action upon. When you go into a Clay table, this is very evident. You rarely use Clay’s data when working in a table- you use an aggregation of providers that they’ve curated for you to draw data from. This is important to note, because it means that Clay isn’t constrained by their ability to find data. They have complete access to every data provider, so you can be positive that data you find in Clay is the best. What single provider could possibly compete with an aggregation of every other provider on earth? It’s impossible.

Additionally, due to the fact that (in many cases) more people are using Clay than the individual provider itself, these tools are competing to have Clay use their data. They’re doing what Amazon did for retail. Book publishers had no motivation to sell on Amazon, until suddenly the books market share belonged to them. Suddenly, Amazon had all of the cards and could dictate which books sold best. Now Clay can do that with data providers.

So why is this concept so important? Well, it allows Clay to expand to any growth-related market they want. You’re seeing this already with more traditional growth marketing, something Clay wasn’t touching in the early days of their product.

The above integrations are influencer based and much more marketing-centric. They’ve also created a source for X posts and users now, which I made a post about two days ago.

So, what’s the point of using other platforms when all of their data is available in Clay? Well, there’s not much of one. The best part is, the data providers love it too. They get more exposure, customers, and ultimately usage. Their native UIs were just a wrapper for their data, anyways. Might as well use Clay’s. HG Insights is a great example of this- they were enterprise only, and now have found a new market in SMB and Mid-market through selling credits via Clay.

This type of win-win-win relationship grows companies. In this case, it can grow Clay far past the likes of ZoomInfo, simply through flexibility. Once you realize this, it’s evident that 1.25B might be selling them a little short.

I don’t claim to be able to predict the future by any means, but if you told me 5 years from now that Clay was the tool every company used for every growth use case I wouldn’t be super surprised. I’m sure their investors wouldn’t be, either.

I hope this was an interesting take to you, and feel free to tell your friends about the newsletter if so! Hoping to grow this community even bigger soon.