Clay
Imagine if go-to-market tools were as malleable as clay.
Clay is a GTM development environment that helps growth marketers and revenue teams enrich their data, automate personalized outreach, and implement any go-to-market idea. Today, it’s a $1.25B platform used by 5,000+ companies like OpenAI, Canva, and Anthropic.
But back in 2017 when First Round led their seed round, they were exploring a much broader vision: making programming more accessible to everyone. After years of quietly plugging away, Clay experienced an explosion of customer and revenue growth, 10x'ing revenue in both 2022 and 2023, followed by 6x in 2024. Here's what stands out from their "7-year overnight success" story:
- Founders
- Kareem Amin, Nicolae Rusan, Varun Anand
- Initial Partnership
- Seed
- Category
- Enterprise
- Partner
- Brett Berson
- Location
- New York
- Founders
- Kareem Amin, Nicolae Rusan, Varun Anand
- Initial Partnership
- Seed
- Category
- Enterprise
- Partner
- Brett Berson
- Location
- New York
Kareem Amin on Clay's path to product-market fit
As a second-time founder (his previous company, Frame, was acquired by Sailthru in 2012), Kareem brings unique insights on how founder psychology affects company building. As he unpacks Clay’s journey, he explores the tension between flexibility and focus, and the self-awareness required to make difficult decisions. "Your personality plays a major role in your success because building a company exaggerates all of your traits," he says.
Don't fear committment
Getting to the right positioning is often more challenging than getting to the product itself. For four years, Clay had been a horizontal tool that could do everything from helping recruiters find candidates to enabling front-end engineers to use the spreadsheet as a low-code backend. But this wide footprint worked against them. It took commitment to an incredibly narrow wedge — data enrichment for cold email agencies — to finally break through.
Malleability is a startup’s greatest weapon — but like all strengths, it’s a double-edged sword. You have to know when to be malleable and when to harden your positioning. We eventually realized that by narrowing our scope, we were actually increasing our value.
Throw the demo in reverse
Varun Anand joined in 2021 and quickly earned the co-founder title by helping to architect the go-to-market moves that bent Clay’s growth curve. Instead of presenting polished demos, he took an unconventional approach. "We'd have prospects share their screen and solve a real problem in real-time, using Zoom's annotation features to guide them through which buttons to click," he says. "If you're learning to drive, you don't sit in the passenger seat while the instructor lectures you. You take the wheel while they safely guide you."