Clay's Homepage & Messaging Evolution

Screenshots: horizontal to vertical positioning

Jul 01, 2024

👋🏼 Hey, Claymakers!

Last week was exciting - we announced out $62M in funding (Sequoia & Meritech) at a $500M valuation and I hosted our first Clay meetup in Boston. (You can subscribe here for upcoming Clay events in your city.) So, I thought it’d be cool to take a look at some of the homepage iterations to see how Clay went from horizontal to vertical positioning, and then an even more narrow to focus on scaling personalization with better data.

In addition to all the announcement, there also been a lot of talk around how Clay found Product Market Fit. I’ve found the story of grit, perseverance, and patience pretty inspiring. Check out some of the articles from our investors:

First Round Capital: Clay’s Path to Product-Market-Fit — A 7-Year ‘Overnight Success’
Sequoia: Partnering with Clay: On a Mission to Grow
Boldstart.vc: Clay, Inception to Series B: Reinventing Prospecting & Outreach for Sales with AI

I like how Sequoia explained the impact Clay has on growth & sales teams:

At its most basic level, sales and marketing are about finding potential customers, learning about them, and reaching out—and Clay improves and automates that process at every step. The average sales development rep spends two-thirds of their time on manual tasks such as building lists, researching leads, and writing emails; just one-third goes to actually interacting with people. With Clay, growth teams can flip those numbers and then some.

(I would also add Account Executives, who are increasingly under pressure to generate their own pipeline.)

This and the explosion of Clay creators (who have and continue play a huge role in our succes), and then the proliferation of Clay content on LinkedIn, didn’t happen overnight.

First Round Capital explained Clay was instead a “slow bake” over 7 years to find product market fit. Going from horizontal to vertical, trying an ICP, then moving away from it, then coming back to the sales ICP (after re-realizing why they had planned to focus on it in the first place).

Like actual clay, a startup can be malleable. But, it’s a double edge sword and you can get pulled into too many directions without focus.

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.

So how did Clay’s positioning change over the years?

I thought it’d be cool to look at how the positioning changed from horizontal to vertical in their messaging.

How you position — or fail to position — the product shapes all the product features that you build, in addition to shaping people's view of you. - Kareem, Co-Founder & CEO of Clay