Meal Prep

Hi, and welcome (again) to the GTM Cookbook! Although I already sent a welcome message to you when you signed up, I figured that a more formal greeting may be necessary since this is the first edition of my newsletter.

A bit about me- I’m Patrick Spychalski. I currently live in New York City, and started a Clay agency called The Kiln a little less than two years ago. I’m an avid runner, a fan of just about anything outdoors, and I grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. I started this newsletter with the goal of helping people understand Clay and GTM as a whole in a deeper, more actionable way.

The way in which I stumbled into the world of Clay is pretty unique. I just happened to be friends with a marketing wizard named Matt Maiale, who was Clay’s first Head of Growth. We moved in together when I first got to New York- at the time, I was running a one-man marketing agency and saving up to open a vintage clothing store, a huge passion of mine. Matt was running the early stage of what came to be Clay’s social media motion and general product marketing direction- he knew I was working with other companies to help with marketing, and he was kind enough to bring me on to the Clay team as a contractor.

For the first 6 months of being at Clay, I helped shape the first integrations page, create the first set of docs for the tool, wrote some blog posts, and did a ton of miscellaneous work to help make the tool usable. As I became more acquainted with it, I realized what many have realized since- this tool is powerful, and I hadn’t ever seen anything like it before. It allowed me to run high volume outbound campaigns, complete with really cool AI personalization, to prospects for my small marketing business. I still remember my first campaign being to the recent YC batch- I got a few positive responses and even a client within the first day of running the campaign, which shocked me. I knew that if me, with no sales experience whatsoever could get a client using this tool, then it certainly would add value to others as well.

Eventually, Varun Anand, Clay’s Co-Founder, asked me if I was interested in running Clay’s YouTube and LinkedIn channels since I was already making looms about how to use the tool for other projects. I agreed, and with absolutely zero LinkedIn or YouTube experience I got started. I feverishly made content with little idea as to what worked, and just iterated my strategy based on what category of content worked. It definitely wasn’t optimized completely, but it got some people to use the tool and helped gather interest for what was a rocket ship waiting to take off.

As the channel got more views, I residually got more followers on LinkedIn, despite not really being active on the platform. I eventually started getting contacted by viewers of the channel to help out with building tables. I remember getting emails and DM's asking to get help with Clay. “Nah”, I would respond, “I’m working on marketing projects right now and not really interested in doing Clay for money”.

That opinion changed after I spoke to Matthew Quan, an early Clay employee who told me that there was a budding micro-economy in the GTM world, where early adopters of Clay were selling their services to those who were just getting onboarded with the tool. Given that the product was still under $1M in ARR at this point, I was pretty shocked this was already starting to take place. Once he told me some people were charging $300-$500 an hour for this, I decided it may be worth looking into.

I sold my first complex Clay table for $500. I knew I could have gotten paid more for it if I wanted to, but my main goal was to get testimonials. So, in exchange for a chunk of cash and some kind words if I did a good job, I was off to the races of building in the tool. I quickly picked up more clients, and along the way started to understand what running an agency was like. Namely, I started to realize how stressful it could be. I was absolutely obsessed on making my clients happy, and I was willing to sacrifice my own short-term happiness to do it.

Many sleep deprived months followed as worked tirelessly to make something out of this. I had maxxed out two credit cards to buy inventory for my vintage store, so this wasn’t just a vain race for me. I had about 5 months left to pay off the cards before interest started incurring, and the clothes weren’t selling fast enough to cover it. I initially brought on more clients out of necessity, because the alternative was potentially wrecking my credit score if the debt started racking up.

I was able to pay them off after a few months of Clay work, but had soon faced a new problem- I had brought on too many clients to reasonably handle. I quite literally was not able to stop working most days, or else something wouldn’t be turned in on time. I either needed to get rid of clients or bring somebody else on, and I was feeling pretty averse to the former. I didn’t know enough people in the GTM space to begin recruiting there, so I turned to my personal network, which primarily consisted of track teammates from Villanova, where I had graduated a year and a half prior. One of them, Mathias Powell, was a unique combination of ridiculously hard working and unnaturally smart at the same time. I had run with him for three of my years as a Wildcat and had seen him exhaust himself to (literally) the brink of death running distance races. I also had heard legends of his test scores and of course, just knew how great he was as a person on top of it all. I felt he was a prime candidate for bringing him on, but there was one issue- he had a real, legit job that paid well and I was at that time seen as an absolute fool amongst my friend group. He was on paper vastly more successful than me and I had to try to convince him to quit his job and join my one person Clay shop, a tool where he has essentially zero experience other than instances where he had helped me build a few tables in the very busy times of the agency.

I spent about a month gaslighting Mathias into joining, and by the end of that month I had for all intents and purposes given up. I honestly thought it was so fair of him not to join, too. I believed in Clay’s growth and my ability to use the tool, but there wasn’t much proof other than some unstable MRR and my YouTube videos to back it up. Then, one day he texted me something along the lines of “I’m going to quit my job”. I literally thought he was joking because we were having a conversation about something completely different and it would be on par for him to make a joke like that. Then, he called me an hour later and it turned out, he had actually done it. From there, we were off.

The time since that fateful day occurred has, in short been a whirlwind. In 2024 we must have averaged 70-80 hours per week of work apiece, we hired ~10 people as the business grew (starting with Ankit Singh immediately after our realization that he was a genius, followed up closely by Charles Ellenburg III via a referral from Nathan Lippi’s bootcamp), and have served dozens of clients.

My goal from the beginning was to cement ourselves as the best Clay-based agency in the space. Not the biggest, not the most followed, but the agency that brings the most value to its clients, has the best team, and uses the tool in the most intelligent, thoughtful way. Happy clients and a happy team, since the beginning, is what brought me the most peace of mind and as such is what I made my north star. I think we’ve made a lot of progress in that direction.

I’ve always been an anxious person and I have been one to know what the future holds. Maybe The Kiln will shut down tomorrow, I don’t know. Just here for the ride. However, I hope to continue adding value to people and keeping or core value of being the “Rolls Royce” of Clay Agencies as the top of mind priority. I feel so thankful and blessed to be able to work with talented and delightful people every day, and it feels like I’m doing my part if I’m able to help people out in the space as much as possible.

That feels like a nice segue into the purpose of this newsletter. I ultimately decided to create this to help people getting to know Clay and the new way to do GTM. In my mind, this is split into 3 categories:
- Technical advice and expertise
- High level tooling and GTM strategy
- General thoughts on the direction of the space

If you keep them in that order, each bullet point is essentially a “zoom out” of the one prior. The one thing I aim to figure out is what aperture adds the most value so I can focus specifically on that. My guess is that this newsletter will be a combination of all three of those things. The edition I have planned next week focuses mainly on the first.

I bring this up because if there’s anything in particular you’d like to see from this, feel free to reach out. Ultimately I’m writing this for the readers, not to spit out random sales facts to the ether, so any direction is appreciated.

With that all being said, let’s get to molding some workflows!

Lastly, a huge shoutout to Alex Lindahl for the advice on launching this. If you haven’t subscribed to his Claymation newsletter yet, I highly recommend you do so.