From idea to half the Fortune 500
🌎 Inside Clay's path to managing 100,000,000+ relationships
👋 Hi, it’s Kyle Poyar and welcome to Growth Unhinged, my weekly newsletter exploring the hidden playbooks behind the fastest-growing startups.
Clay — a tool to help you be more thoughtful with your relationships — went from a potential “waste of the most productive years of your life” to an under-the-radar hit, attracting users across half of the Fortune 500. Founder & Co-CEO Matthew Achariam unpacks their exact growth journey from 2020 to today. This story has plenty of highs (like the coveted Golden Kitty) along with Matt’s share of lows (like navigating prosumer churn).
This is part nine of my Zero to One series showcasing the growth journeys of startups like Tango, Copy.ai and Rewind. The post may be too long for email; read the full story here.
Starting a company was the last thing we wanted to do.
Especially in a space described to us by some of the most successful founders you’ve heard of as a massive graveyard, tar pit, or worse—a waste of the most productive years of your life.
That’s where we found ourselves in 2020, an almost universal chorus telling us that working on relationship management tool for prosumers was the wrong thing to do. Even worse, everyone had a different idea as to why it was the wrong idea to work on.
Behind those words of advice, we honed in on an underlying, common feeling—frustration. Being thoughtful and helpful with people is still too difficult. It’s something we all know intuitively. To achieve more, to be more successful, to be happier, we need to start thinking about others first.
Today as we celebrate crossing 100 million relationships under management for Clay members at half the Fortune 500, we feel like we’ve barely cracked 1% of the solution we want to build and are still as obsessively driven to find the perfect answer to the question—how can you scale global conscientiousness?
Read on if you’d like to learn how we got to this point by ignoring almost all of advice given to us and instead “played the game on the field”.
2020: Prototyping
Before writing a single line of code, we went on a listening tour that included speaking with almost every failed company in the space and hundreds of potential users, investors, and self-proclaimed productivity or networking enthusiasts.
We found most of our audience on Twitter and LinkedIn, plus we emailed everyone we knew in our personal networks. (This process subsequently became much easier when we had a working version of Clay.)
After speaking with almost 800 people and categorizing their feedback in a big Notion doc, a few things became abundantly clear:
There was still a huge unmet need in the market.
This will be an evergreen problem — if we fast forward 100 years, we couldn’t imagine a world that people wouldn’t want deeper more meaningful relationships.
Beyond functionality, trust and privacy were the most sought-after qualities that people wanted in their software.
To drill down further, we segmented the data to better understand the demographics of our early customers:
Armed with this user research, we set out to build a story, brand and prototype with the following brief:
💡 People have a deep need to connect with others. Every call we have becomes an hour-long therapy session where modern professionals express their goals for their network and failures in following up on potential opportunities, friends’ birthdays, and new relationships. They've been let down by tools that have repeatedly violated their trust and privacy. It's akin to the significant consumer shift from processed foods to more sustainable Whole Foods.
To put it simply, our task is to help our customers be the best at understanding three questions:
"Who do I know?”
“How do I know them again?”
“How can I deepen and remember this relationship?”
2021: Building a v1
By this time we had enough validation and a prototype that was working. We made the choice to narrow our scope and focus solely on building a mobile iOS app.
As we started building, we realized that to build a truly delightful experience, there were a 1,000 little paper cuts that we had to solve in an end-to-end workflow for our customers. To adequately solve the problem, we needed to build quite a large “MRP” — minimum remarkable product.
We did this by pushing code almost hourly to a handful of paying customers that were just as obsessed with the problem as we are, and were willing to tolerate a huge number of bugs and missing functionality. Every one of these people were onboarded manually over a video call or in person.
At that point we also had a growing waitlist of several thousand people from a really simple landing page with a video of the prototype we had built. The goal of the landing page was to test the broader appeal of the idea, while simultaneously finding us qualified customers.
We developed a prototype in Xcode (Apple’s development environment), which we recorded to create a "show don't tell" demo. We used a simple two-column layout to communicate the entire concept in three paragraphs. Achieving the right balance of product and copy required several iterations. To target our audience more effectively, we offered a chance to jump to the front of the waitlist by providing a credit card. This strategy was designed to attract those who felt the pain point most acutely.
💡 Tip: In the early days, we took a page out of LinkedIn’s playbook and onboarded every VC we met—since VCs are notoriously picky with software, it helped us refine our pitch and product. We now have customers and enterprise contracts at every top decile firm.
2022: Launching and iterating
We decided to launch and iterate in public in 2022. All our growth was happening organically from people who were excited about the problem we were solving. Almost every new customer came in after hearing about us from another customer. This was all the internal proof we needed to proceed.
We were also looking closely at quantitative data, most notably when our retention curves started flattening. Instead of a generic app-open metric, we defined our active event as any unique user that took one of three core actions: taking a note, creating a reminder, or interacting with a home feed item.
We decided to do a targeted launch on Product Hunt. We studied other successful launches and came up with a strategy to find the optimal launch window. They document it pretty well themselves if folks are looking for specifics. Some helpful tips to keep in mind:
Get ready as early as possible before launch day. PH has tooling to schedule everything far in advance of your launch.
Try and get a respected 3rd party or someone credible in the PH community to hunt you.
Launch early in the month to maximize your chance at winning product of the month.
Offer a special offer to hunters or bring clear value to the community.
The PH team is great, send them a message about your launch. They’re super receptive to speaking with companies.
Things organically took off from there with us being top product of the month, winning a Golden Kitty, two Webby awards, and being featured by quite a few publications.
While this was amazing from a growth standpoint, internally we were struggling to keep up with all the growth. We had already built a small, passionate, paying customer base, but we found out the hard way that activation looks very different once you open the floodgates and allow anybody to signup.
To add to the complexity, the existing app experience was degrading as more and more people signed up. We quickly pivoted our focus into two things — improving our onboarding and making sure our infrastructure could scale accordingly.
Our original onboarding flow was a scheduling link on desktop and non-existent on iOS (we weren’t even in the App Store so we had to direct folks to TestFlight).
After weeks of late-night work and a huge effort from the whole team, we improved our activation to over 70% by making a delightful and comprehensive onboarding process.
The winning onboarding process for us consisted us of re-hauling two major sections:
Set Up: This was very brittle as it consisted of us importing, scoring, and enriching everyone you’ve ever met or interacted with across various major platforms. A lot of the onboarding magic here was clearly displaying the platforms we supported and overcoming the privacy barrier by clearly indicating exactly how each integration worked in a human user friendly format.
Education: We were getting a lot of folks who were really eager to manage their networks but had no mental product framework to rely on besides contacts apps and CRMs. We had to reframe this narrative into a productivity workflow that consisted of educating customers why managing their network was important, and how to do it well. We did this effectively with a beautifully crafted onboarding booklet that was personalized to you.
💡 A quick side note on delight: I don’t think anyone would categorize onboarding to an app as particularly fun, but we made it our jobs to do just that—with delightful animations, beautiful iconography, and graphics. I think these are the moments that subconsciously communicate to a customer that we truly do care about every single step of the experience.
There was a lot of unglamorous product work to refine and iterate on this workflow. Instead of focusing on new features, we really wanted to have a bulletproof first mile experience for our customers. One of the biggest improvements to conversion was adding additional sign-in methods. We started exclusively with Sign in with Apple, but now support a variety of login methods.
2023: Growth, AI, teams
Growth was still happening pretty rapidly, but at this point we felt battle-tested enough as a team to be able to handle the demands of scaling and deliver on an ambitious roadmap. We had a few bets that paid off in 2023, which included building the first AI navigator for your network, Nexus.
However, the foundation for our next business focus came from an unexpected quirk that we almost ignored. Right around June we were looking through some our dashboards when we discovered that we had over 500 teams hacking Clay as a team CRM. We thought this was a bug in our analytics, and even wrote some SQL to confirm that this was indeed happening.
As a self-serve prosumer product, we had no intentions of serving this market, but we decided to pull on the thread. We ended up interviewing a lot of these customers and what we heard was unbelievable. Many of these teams had tried all the existing solutions out there and all of them required a ton of resources to get going — huge annual contracts and months of consulting and instrumentation to get data imported. And many of the teams told us that after months of onboarding and setup, nobody at their company was actively using the CRM! Meanwhile, people were organically using Clay with their corporate emails and asking IT to enable it for their org. All the work we had done to make Clay fast, intuitive and beautiful was resonating with teams of people.
We were so excited by what we heard, we threw out our entire roadmap for the year to focus exclusively on getting a teams product online. The process was quite simple — we looked at the makeshift team accounts and identified pain points. Much of the product work involved expanding our onboarding to include a team's workflow and admin management.
The growth motion for our teams product was already organic, as our customers self identified and invited their teams to Clay all on their own. We made that process a little easier by natively supporting those workflows within the app and during our onboarding.
We are currently exploring ways to enhance this growth motion, and so far improving our lifecycle emails is paying dividends. The moment someone creates a team account and invites a teammate, they receive a personalized e-mail from someone on our team asking if they need any assistance getting setup. This allows us to learn firsthand where folks are getting stuck and get direct feedback.
Additionally, we’re doing the same segmenting we did earlier to better understand the target demographic of this type of customer.
As our personal and work lives continue to blend together, we'll keep leaning into this natural growth motion. Similar to great bottoms-up tools like Airtable, Notion and Figma, individuals who use Clay want to bring the tools they love to work with them. We have so many exciting things planned and we’ve just scratched the surface.
Hopefully, you’ve found our story helpful in your journey to building something wonderful!
Big shoutout to Matt for sharing Clay’s journey from zero to 100 million relationships! You can catch up on all the Zero to One stories here.
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love it. 1) it reminds me of Linear and makes me wanna try Clay for its focus on UI 2) what a pivot from self-serve pro-sumer to teams and 3) nice to see their journey and month-1 retention curves.
Lovely overview, simple language and fun to read :)
I would be happy to here similar stories, but I’m curious to get more ‘juicy’ details - pricing for initial users for example, and some more metrics like the retention one (for example, did the switch to focus on teams affect the standalone users?).
This part is for Matthew - I went to check the pricing, and saw a free version, and $10 per month version. The free sounded good for starters, with 1000 contacts. I downloaded an app, and when I started the onboarding there were neither of the plans - only a 14 day trial for a $20 per month plan.
This made me a bit angry - I understand the concept of trials, but not letting me use the free version was a deal breaker 🤷♂️
I understand how such tweaks improve activation rate, but I find them a bit distasteful.