Clay’s Path to Product-Market Fit — A 7-Year 'Overnight Success'

Clay’s Path to Product-Market Fit — A 7-Year 'Overnight Success'

Clay co-founder and CEO Kareem Amin shares how he grappled with narrowing Clay’s scope and tactics for landing on the right ICP.

FINDING AN IDEA:

The idea for Clay stemmed from an abstract desire: to make the power of programming accessible to more people. At the time, collaborative software tooling like Figma, InVision and Miro were capturing attention, but Amin and his co-founder, Nicolae Rusan, wanted to leap one step ahead.

“We were thinking about what the next stage might look like. Specifically, we wanted to see how these APIs and SaaS tools on the internet could help people work better. So that’s where we started exploring,” says Amin.

The first idea was to rebuild the terminal — the 1970s emulator of a computer — which would let companies pipe data from one software tool to another. But they quickly realized that a modern terminal would just help developers move faster, not addressing their desire to give the power of programming to more people.

Then the co-founders started thinking about the world’s most popular programming environment: the spreadsheet. “You’re working with data, except it's not connected to any of the data sources on the internet. What would it look like if we built APIs into a spreadsheet?” he says. “The same way you have higher order programming languages like Python that look more like English, what if a database understood more categories than just text or number? Like a LinkedIn profile, or a Linear ticket, or a HubSpot URL? What if the database knew what you were putting into it and then could get you more information?”

In practice, the early product scraped dozens of databases to pull information directly into a spreadsheet. “Even in the earliest version, we felt this sense of magic. It's a spreadsheet where, suddenly, data pops up in a cell from somewhere else on the internet,” says Amin. With an initial version built, his co-founder took point on prospecting. “I was skeptical and resistant at first to narrowing it down to prospecting. We didn’t know much about outbound outreach, but Nicolae decided to try it out. It ended up resonating with early customers — but also showed us just how difficult doing our own outbound was.”

IDENTIFYING THE ICP: DIGGING DEEP INTO THE DEBATE BETWEEN HORIZONTAL VS. VERTICAL

But Clay’s co-founders ran into a bit of a conundrum. The problem wasn’t that they didn’t have a market to target — it was that they had too many potential ICPs to pursue.

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.

This may sound like a PMF goldmine. But the wide footprint of the product ended up working against the business in the early years. While some horizontal products (like Airtable or Notion) are able to carve out a path where they can be picked up by all sorts of different users, Clay waffled between staying horizontal and going vertical by picking a specific customer.

This experience taught Amin that when it comes to finding product-market fit, getting to the right positioning is often more challenging than getting to the product itself. “This is a common path — a founder starts by thinking a product is cool and then they have to narrow down the customer and the use case, start to tell the story in a cohesive, coherent way, and then the market gets it. The flow isn’t always linear; often it’s very iterative and messy and that’s entirely normal,” he says.

The dangers of not picking when you go wide:

One signal that their approach wasn’t working? The initial spark often died off quickly. “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.”

Another issue was the wide range of use cases. “We had a bunch of initial customers, but they were all doing very wildly different things. One company actually sent me their code base because they wanted to send all of their data to NetSuite, but they didn’t have time to do it, so they asked us to reverse engineer it,” says Amin.

Often it’s not that you don’t know who the customer is, it’s that you’re not picking — you haven’t committed to one hypothesis over the other. That’s what creates the confusion about what the product is, what the feature set looks like, and what the language that you use in the product even is.

The costs of malleability:

“When you're an early startup team, one of your strengths is that you're malleable. A prospect can say, 'Oh, could you guys do this?', or 'Are you guys this?' And then you can become that, quite easily. What I’ve learned is that you have to know when to be malleable,” says Amin.

“It’s almost like there are two distinct phases. You can be malleable when you're defining what the product is, but once you’ve taken a pass at that, you need to harden it when you try to go out to market. You can’t be changing the value prop or even the product itself from meeting to meeting. We were being too malleable when we were trying to sell Clay early on, which made it even harder to separate the signal from the noise.”

Malleability is a startup’s greatest weapon — but like all strengths, it’s a double-edged sword.

The claustrophobia of commitment:

It wasn’t that the Clay team set out to have such a wide breadth of users. The problem was the inherent tension between flexibility and focus.

“Maybe three and a half years into building Clay, we were pretty focused on salespeople. But we hadn’t committed to that ICP in a way that showed in the product — like how we prioritized new features, or changed the language on the website,” he says.

This fear of commitment, Amin notes, isn’t uncommon for founders. “When you narrow the scope, it feels claustrophobic. Why are we doing something that’s smaller when we could be doing something bigger? Eventually, we realized that by narrowing down our scope, we were actually increasing our value,” he says.

This was an area for personal introspection, Amin realized in hindsight. "There was something in my psychology that made me feel like, 'Oh, we could do anything.' That was the lure of the horizontal product. And that wasn't an obvious thing until I really dug in. That’s when I realized, 'Oh, I feel constrained.’ And that now we can't do these other things because we're doing this,” he says.

I had to teach myself that just because we're closing other avenues for now doesn't mean that we won't get back to them later. It was also helpful to give myself the reward of recognizing that people were loving the product and using it — even if it was more narrowly. That was worth more than the constraint.

For Amin, this work all starts with self-awareness: “You have to kind of understand how you work in order to navigate the subtleties of all the decisions that you have to make every day,” he says.

There are many ways to cultivate self-awareness, and Amin says founders have to choose the tools that feel right for them. His preferred tools are meditation and a type of therapy called Internal Family Systems (IFS), which involves interacting with yourself from the perspective of your multiple sub-personalities. “So, for instance, if you’re feeling frustrated about something, you may have one part of yourself that wants instant gratification. And another part that wants to wait and be patient. How do you hear each part of yourself clearly and then integrate them? This type of therapy is a way to introspect deeply and understand your motivations,” he says.

Everything in life is a spiral, really. You come back to the same place, but with a new perspective that enables you to see it differently.

BUILDING OUT THE PRODUCT:

So the Clay team decided to focus on outbound salespeople as their ICP. To ensure this wasn’t just another false start, they found ways to hold themselves accountable to this narrower purview. According to Amin, this meant:

It took time, but the team eventually saw the payoff of narrowing their focus. “We just needed to internalize what momentum felt like. For instance, we would get a customer who wanted a feature. Then the next customer would want the exact same feature. Then we would build that feature, and the customers would be happy,” he says.

And then we would hire another engineer because we would get more customers. It was about thinking in these loops instead of thinking in terms of what the product should look like or what features we should build.”

We had to figure out how to feed the process rather than feed the product.

Lean into counterintuitive product principles

Many founders say that they start their companies with a thesis in mind, but for Amin, it’s more of an intuition. “Thesis implies more information than I think most people have when they start,” he says.

To ensure you can operationalize your intuition, Amin recommends trying to codify it into a set of product principles in the early days. Establishing these principles, Amin says, gave them a clear direction for their strategy, product features, and other important company-related decisions. He shares the two that power Clay:

The move to integrate with every single data source instead of creating their own exclusive data source wasn’t exactly intuitive. “It's almost an a priori way to think about the world. We thought it made sense to use as many data sources as possible to get the information you want,” he says. “For example, maybe there's a data point of if a company has an office in South Asia. Maybe that's not relevant to every company so it's not worth creating it for some data providers, but it's relevant to this person who's doing prospecting, so including more streams is helpful.”

Flexibility may seem like a simplistic product principle, but it was also a counterintuitive approach. “It’s at odds with the way the world works right now,” says Amin. “Most tools choose to build by trying to be as easy to use as possible — you aim to shorten the time to value. You come in, you press one button, you’ve got all your leads and you can start sending outbound messages.”

But for the Clay team, flexibility came first — even if that meant the product wasn’t quite so approachable for folks outside of the power user. “When flexibility conflicts with ease of use, we prioritize flexibility first. Once we make something flexible, we then start to think, okay, what is the easiest way to use this?”

Don’t mask PMF with new features

“Once you can clearly articulate your strategy in terms of a couple of principles, the next task is to apply this methodically. Take an idea that you have to market and really push it to the maximum to see if you've actually built something worthwhile,” says Amin.

“That means pick the actual customer that you're talking to, make sure that they have the same title or at least the same jobs to be done, and then really try to sell it to them — without manufacturing new features.”

There’s a tendency when you’re early to be like, “We’re just missing this one thing…” That actually masks the signs of PMF. When the need is large enough, people will buy your product and wait for you to build the rest of the features. That’s actually the main indicator that you have a product that’s worthwhile.

Amin found it helpful to instill serious discipline here. “I told the team that once we agree to something and it's in our sprint planning, nothing will shift it. If you're walking to work and you happen to have a new idea, throw it away. We think of ideas during our planning, and then we commit to it unless the data changes. And often the data doesn't change actually,” says Amin.

BUILDING COMMUNITY:

This decision to commit is ultimately what led to Clay’s success. “It was actually by cutting off all of the different ways that we supported customers that we saw huge growth,” says Amin.

This focus also allowed the Clay team to build a robust community. Since they were focusing on one narrower ICP, rather than a huge swath of different folks with vastly different needs, Amin had a hunch that their customers might benefit from being put in the same place to share ideas, best practices, and questions with each other.

So they started a Slack group and put all their customers in one channel. It was a bit of an unconventional call — Slack would be the only place where customers could get support from the Clay team. “Before that, you would email us or chat like most startups. But we pushed all of our customers into the same channel.” His hunch turned out to be correct. The community, which started with around 200 people, has grown to 11K+ people today.

The momentum created in this channel shouldn’t be underestimated. “It’s like arriving early to a concert. No one else is there. But then five or 10 people trickle in, and then it escalates,” says Amin. “We quickly built some momentum by bringing the same type of people into the venue and letting them see that, when they come in, they're seen. They're like, ‘Oh yeah, I recognize myself in the group that's here.’”

GAINING TRACTION:

When Clay eventually found product-market fit, Amin says that there were three signals that told him the company had struck gold:

LOOKING FORWARD (AND INWARD)

As for Amin’s longer term vision? “We are a creative tool for growth. So with Clay, you should be able to translate any idea that you have for growing your company to reality instantly. I want to be able to turn outbound into a data-driven experimentation platform where you can ask questions like: Who exactly is my ICP? How do I know that they're my ICP? Who are the people that we should message and what should we say and when? With Clay, I want people to be able to run these GTM experiments almost like a scientist.”

It’s not just Clay that Amin has big plans for though. He doesn’t intend to stop growing as a founder, and a human. Which brings us to Amin’s final founder psychology tip — decouple the wells of personal and professional fulfillment:
“In the beginning, I put a lot of pressure on myself with Clay because I wanted it to be both successful and personally fulfilling. As a founder, your company can become your art project, the thing that you want to be actualized through,” he says. “But this actually decreased the quality of my decision-making because I would get caught in that same spiral of trying to figure out the biggest, most high-impact thing we could possibly do long-term, instead of what is actually useful right now,” he says.

“Now I’ve shifted my mindset. I’ve removed the psychological pressure — it doesn’t have to be the biggest thing, it just has to be what other people think is useful. That enables me to find meaning in the micro-moments — like when a customer is excited and tells me they were able to do something that they couldn't have done before Clay — and that has actually helped me make better decisions as a founder.”

Read more details on Clay's next chapter of growth here _.