Nearly every revenue product team I speak with talks about competing with Clay - and every time I think "you have a snowball's chance in hell of doing that"

Nearly every revenue product team I speak with talks about competing with Clay - and every time I think "you have a snowball's chance in hell of doing that"

Hopefully Varun Anand doesn't get too mad at me for sharing this but Clay is UNBELIEVABLY far ahead of every competitor because of their ecosystem.

To the point where I think for the next few years they're essentially unbeatable.

And none of the people who want to copy them even understand why.

Let me explain.

In software 1.0, rev tech product teams had an idea and pulled together different data to act on it in a specific way to create more revenue.

Here's the problem - testing one of those specific workflows requires LOTS of development time, or a mad scientist like Kyle Williams to pull it off.

The iteration time for most teams is LONG - weeks or months.

Clay gives you access to almost every data provider instantly without code.

So the first thing Clay does it reduces the bar of data access MASSIVELY.

And with AI you can do AI work that would have taken a dev team in the past in an afternoon.

But that's not the real power.

Everyone who wants to compete with Clay is trying to build the use cases themselves.

Clay said "no thanks" and just gave that ability to their users instead.

THEN they started to build an expert ecosystem, really starting with guys like 🦾Eric Nowoslawski and Jordan Crawford, and now people like 🤖 Jacob Tuwiner and Michael Saruggia.

These guys are operators and are actively testing clay with clients - what this means is they test a workflow dozens of times in the time it takes for a normal product team to ship 1 use case.

THEN Clay started making UGC easier and opening up table templates.

And with a certified expert program they develop the ecosystem even further.

The result - Clay has effectively created 100's of product managers + demand gen marketers for their product.

Other product teams start looking at this and thinking they can replicate Clay's success without understanding why it happened in the first place.

The real moat is Clay's humility to say "my users actually know what to do better than me, I want to empower them"

I doubt anyone will really make that choice again.

That's not to say there won't be other great RevTech companies

BUT

I suspect no one will do this because it's a hard pill to swallow that your users may be better at building a workflow than you.

My advice to product teams - replicate a small piece of what Clay is doing that makes sense for your use case, then for all the other functionality just try to be Clay's best friend.

You won't want to see this but it's actually too late to beat the feedback loops Clay has created.

You're better off joining them than trying to fight them.

Happy sunday everyone.

This post was originally shared by Scott Martinis on Linkedin.