The ICP move that turned Clay into a category.
A few years ago a CEO I was working with asked me to take a new tool for a spin. A friend of his was a co-founder and he wanted a marketer's take.
I opened it, poked around, and honestly wasn't sure what to make of it. It felt more like something a developer would use than a marketer. But it was interesting.
That tool was Clay.
Fast forward to 2023 and I started hearing the name everywhere. Not from CMOs. Not in demand gen conversations. From RevOps people. Growth engineers. The technical SDR lead rebuilding their outbound infrastructure from scratch.
A completely different buyer. And that was entirely the point.
What Clay actually built
On the surface Clay is a data enrichment and workflow automation platform. It pulls from 150+ data sources, lets you build hyper-personalized outbound at scale, and connects to your existing stack.
But that's not the story.
The story is who they sold to, and how they got there.
