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Lessons from a newly minted unicorn

10x, 10x, 6x — The exact GTM moves behind Clay’s explosive revenue growth

Today on The Review, we’re excited to bring you an ultra-tactical look inside one of tech’s newest unicorns.

The GTM Inflection Points That Powered Clay to a $1B+ Valuation

After years of wandering through the pre-product-market fit desert, Clay had finally bent its growth curve in the right direction in 2022 — with 10x revenue growth to show for it.

But this was no one-off growth spurt. Clay followed it up by increasing revenue tenfold once again the following year and hitting 6x in 2024.

It’s the kind of eye-popping growth that begs for a peek under the hood at exactly the gears and mechanical tune-ups that made it all possible.

So, fresh off of the splashy Forbes write-up on Clay’s new $1.25B valuation, we sat down with co-founder Varun Anand for a crash course on how to turn a struggling horizontal SaaS tool into an AI juggernaut that counts category leaders like Anthropic, OpenAI, Canva, Ramp and Rippling as customers.

What follows is an extremely granular look, with Anand as our guide, at the exact go-to-market moves that transformed Clay’s revenue trajectory. Here’s a preview of some of the aha moments that proved to be foundational:

  • Starting from scratch with customers. Horizontal wasn’t working, so Clay went narrow — extremely narrow, making their new ICP cold email agency owners. “Everything is about getting to the next step and earning the right to keep going. In the beginning, it wasn’t about thinking 10x. It was about helping the right people as quickly as possible.”
  • Reversing Clay’s demo. Stop sharing your screen and let the customer take over, Anand says. “If you’re learning how to drive a car, you don’t sit in the passenger seat while the instructor lectures you. You take the wheel while the instructor safely guides you.”
  • Cracking the 4 elements of PLG. Clay always intended to move upmarket, but the enterprise play would have to wait awhile. “At minimum, you need a $5K-10K annual contract to make a sales-led motion work. Clay was only getting $200-$300 a month. At our price point, self-serve had to work and then we eventually could turn that into a sales-led motion.”
  • 3 tries to get pricing right. “If we want to be a generational company, we need the best companies in the world to use our product. But how do we get enterprises to pay enough money to justify the high-touch, white-glove experience? And we needed to differentiate it enough from the self-serve because they could just sign up for Clay at any time.”
  • Embrace atypical hiring. Rather than your typical sales hire, Clay originated what they call go-to-market engineers. "I’ve been on too many sales calls where an account executive can’t answer a basic product question and says, ‘I’ll need to bring a technical resource to our next call.’”

If you’d prefer to listen, you can check out our interview with Varun Anand on the In Depth podcast, which also dropped today.

Thanks, as always, for reading (and listening) and sharing!

-The Review Editors


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