You may not agree with this … but I believe it is a FACT.
Clay is worth $3.1b because they built a culture of Customer Discovery and Product Iteration. Here’s what NOBODY knows about Clay:
Varun Anand joined Clay in late 2021 as a GTM co-founder.
At the time, Clay had less than 20 customers paying $100-$200.
I have spoken to 100's of early-stage Founders over the past two years, and messaged with at least 1,000 more.
If they were in Varun’s position, 99% of them would have ran this playbook:
1. Made a list of people they thought was ICP
2. Created hundreds of throw-away domains
3. Run an instantly or smartlead cold email campaign
4. Run some LinkedIn ads, and
5. PROFIT (somehow)
Varun did the exact opposite.
Here's what he did:
1. For 12 months he sat on calls from 10am-5pm.
2. He did a “reverse demo”… Instructed a customer how to solve a problem with Clay.
3. He got incredible product feedback and brought it back to Eric Engoron, where they constantly improved the product
4. He lived in communities like Jesse Ouellette's SaaS Yacht Club where their ICP (LeadGen Agencies) hung out all day looking for people with problems Clay could solve (which was the source of the calls).
No cold email. No paid ads.
Just manual, brutal sourcing of prospects and one-to-one conversations.
For 12 whole months!!!
I asked Varun why he thinks their valuation more than quadrupled from $500m to $3.1b.
What did he say?
“It’s because we have a culture that is still doing EXACTLY what I did for that entire first year. We are all constantly talking to customers and using that feedback to improve our product, every single day.”
TAKEAWAY:
Clay is the hottest company in B2B right now.
They have INCREDIBLY strong product-market fit.
Not only do I think it’s because they actually DID an insane amount of customer discovery to get there…
But they built that process into their culture and are STILL doing it today.
Want to raise at $3.1b someday?
You MUST start where Varun started.
Because unicorns are born slowly…
One discovery call at a time.
Adam