#180: Growth | How Clay is Scaling Top-of-Funnel, Creator-Led Marketing, and SEO with Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing at Clay

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All right, I'm excited to do this one. My guest on this episode is somebody who's responsible for marketing at a company that I have started to see everywhere. I don't know if that's some kind of bias of mine. I've been like liking stuff on LinkedIn but more people are asking about clay in the Exit 5 community. I see it come up over and over. I'm sure you're happy to hear that. Bruno, give me a quick introduction who you are and what is Clay?

Cool. Yeah. Excited to be here today and chat with you. So I'm Bruno. I lead growth marketing here at Clay and Clay is basically a dating Richmond and sales automation product that enables go to market teams to find, enrich and reach out to prospects in a prospect or current customers as well in a much more relevant way. And if you want to do that scale? You can as well. So basically a candidate enrichment and sales automation product.

And how long have you been there? When did you get there?

So I joined Clay end of last year. So it's coming up about like 10 months now. Before that, I ran growth marketing at webflow for five years. For a long time.

Five years. Okay, so you're at webflow for five years and then roughly what like size company stage that you talk about? Where is Clay at?

So now we are in terms of full time employees, we are crossing about like 65, 70 full time employees. When I joined back first week of December last year, we, we were only 20. So we've been growing pretty fast.

That's crazy for you to go in a year. The company must feel like it's reinvented itself every month, right?

Yeah, I went through a very similar process at webflow. I mean I wasn't that early but I was like around like 50, 60. When I joined left five years later we were like 700. So it was kind of insane as well. But yeah, Clay is also growing really fast.

Okay, we should get into some of the webflow lessons at some point. I think there's some good stuff there for sure. And when you joined Clay was 20 people. What was the mission for marketing? Like you got hired. Marketing can be everything. What have you spent the last year or so doing?

So we focused a lot on top of funnel. So how do we acquire new customers through our self serve product? How do we get people to talk about Clay and how do we continue to grow our self serve merchant? Clay was starting to see some movement in terms of top of funnel activity in our self serve product. And how do we actually double down on what's working? And we kind of didn't really know what was working. A lot of my initial role was like, figure out what do we need to do, how we do it and then scale top of funnel. So that was like our main target. How do we grow this self serve business?

Is that the main funnel today? Like you want everybody to go? I guess if I look at the website, it seems to be the main thing. Like you want everybody to go and start doing something in Clay for free. This is very much a product led growth type of notion.

Yeah, it's a very much a product led growth. But the interesting thing is like, and I saw that I Webflow too, as we grow the PLG motion naturally you start to see larger companies wanting to adopt this product. Right. So now we actually have a sales LED motion happening as well, which is primarily driven by the top of funnel motion that drives a self serve product.

But interesting. So, so most of those is like sales led is like maybe they're not necessarily doing outbound, but you're starting to like, you know, see some good fit people that start for free and then sales will reach out.

Exactly, exactly. So we have the, like people are starting to use. The interesting thing is that like at the end of the day everyone uses LinkedIn, right? Like at the end of the day it doesn't matter if you are an IC or at a larger company, if you are a founder of an agency or if you're an exec in a company as well. So as people see the top of funnel content creation happening on LinkedIn, they naturally get interested in seeing this product. So like for example, even like we, I know like people tend to say especially this coming from me as a growth market is like, oh, we shouldn't really look at followers and this as a metric. But for example, we went from like 8,000 followers on our LinkedIn page to 40,000 in the past like 10 months or something. And 30% of our followers are actually people that work in 500 plus companies, you know, full time employee point of view. So like the content creation reaches these people, they see the use cases and they reach out to us.

You know, this comes up a couple times on this podcast and I always like, I don't understand why people, they like to take like the edge case of like yeah, followers are a vanity metric. They're a vanity metric. If you like. If you build a meme page about being a dad and all your content is like parenting memes and then you try to sell them B2B software, then like, yeah, followers don't matter. But if you've been building up those followers with content and information and education that your ideal customers want, essentially what you have is those 40,000 people or whatever have opted in to see updates from Clay.

Yeah, exactly. The interesting thing about this is the use cases that people use clay at a larger company are pretty different honestly from what they do at a smaller company. Like the companies that you see on our website, like we have like anthropic in there. We just launched a case study with them as well. They have a massive top of funnel. All the people that are signing up to the product outbound isn't really a motion for them. So they use clay from an inbound point of view to enrich people that are signing up to enrich their contacts, making sure that they're enriching with things that actually matter for them. So depending on the company, the use cases are a little bit different. It's more like an inbound use case versus like an outbound.

I want to go back to the top of the funnel. So this is something that a lot of people want to do, grow top of the funnel. Can we get into some of the tactics like other than. Yeah, you post on LinkedIn, like what's been in the playbook to actually consistently and repeatedly grow top of funnel. This is an area where, especially if you have a free product, a product where you want to get people to use it, how do you drive predictable, repeatable demand?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think like I can kind of talk a little bit about like how we kind of like assess on where we wanted to invest here at Clay. I think like one problem that I see, especially on growth marketers and marketing in general, if you want to grow top of funnels that you go from one business to the other and then you kind of like apply the same things and like, oh, we should do Google search or we should do this, we should like put a webinar program. But the reality is that like businesses are so different and the audiences are so different and the business models are different too. So we actually need to assess these things before we do. So that was kind of like the first step that we took which was like, okay, where do we have really strong product market fit with how is our business model? In our case our model was like a PLG model. So that kind of starts to inform us like we actually need a decent amount of volume to grow a top of funnel. Right. So that kind of starts to inform you like I can do like an executive dinner to grow a PLG motion. Right. And like what are the channels that we can then invest in that will give me this volume that I need and where does our audience live? So really understanding this and I think the one thing that I wanted to call out here too is, and I think I've seen you talk about this is like a lot of this is actually talking to customers and getting self reported attribution and so trying to understand the actual details there. Because if you were to assess how we're growing based on cookie based attribution tracking, this is just like it's not going to take you anywhere, right? Sure. So the way that we start to uncover this is that then we understood that we were starting to grow through like a user generated content motion happening. And the reason behind this user generated content is the product is really flexible. So whenever we get into clay, it kind of feels like an open canvas. There's like this sort of. And it can be overwhelming for some people, too. Like, you get into this kind of like, spreadsheet format, and then you can kind of pull data anywhere. You can do things that actually matter for your business in terms of enrichment. Took what these results actually results in. After you build something, you kind of feel proud of yourself. You're like, oh, shit, I actually built something that I did this thing. So the immediate thing is like, okay, let me actually share with others about this. And the last component is that our audience really early on was filled with service providers. So these are freelancers and agencies that they were using clay to serve their clients. And. And they kind of want to. They need to create content to grow their businesses, right? So they're posting on LinkedIn, they're doing all of that. So us, our tactic was, how can we build programs that enable them to create more content? And how can we invest in them to create more content? And how do we invest in these ecosystems to get them to create more content about clay in general? So technically, what this means, which is very. And Spike, I think the one thing is people are probably listening to this podcast. Everything sounds super fancy, but at the end of the day, it's actually very to like, dirty work. It's like, like, hey, how can you see people signing up? They are an agency. How can you get into a call with you and I help you create content around this, right? Yeah, Just to get the movement going. And then you think of, like, automation and sort of stuff like that.

I actually just had this experience the other day. Obed had DMed me, and we were talking about something, and while we were talking about that, I'm like, oh, he's at Clay now. I'm trying to do. I want to test, like, outbound for us for exit 5. We have a really strong product now. I want to go get a list of, you know, CMOs and B2B. And I was like, I should do this in clay, right? He's like, yeah, absolutely. And I was like, all right. And he's like, why don't you get on a call with someone? I'm like, no, absolutely not. I don't like calls. I don't want to get on a call. He's like, all right, I got you. And then literally, like hours later, I get a message from Scott Towsley, and he's like, hey, Obed told me you're looking to do some stuff. Like, I can help you, like I'll build these things for you. And I'm just one example of that. And I have a, you know, a small brand in this space, but I think it's like sweating who's signing up for your product, who's looking around and like doing some of the things that don't scale. And how do we enable this person? Because you know, if, you know, if I use clay, I'm gonna talk about it in some way and I have an audience in B2B. And so like I love how you're talking about that being a non scalable thing. The other thing, I'm just taking a bunch of notes as we do this. It made me think of like notion in a way. Right. Like how many people do you see who's like, here's my notion template for X, here's my recipe. Like people love sharing that type of stuff.

Exactly.

And if you can identify those. So yeah, like I get it how you, you have a product that gets a lot of user generated content. Yeah, but you mentioned before, like you need a certain amount of volume. How can one person create enough ugc? It's got to be so many people. How do you make the volume play work there?

Yeah. So, and then like after a while we sort of like started to realize, okay, what's, how can we enable, how can we make it super easy for them to create content? So the way that we did it was we actually created like a creator's program for clay, which is kind of common for social platforms. Instagram has one, TikTok has one. It's a program that like enables people to create content. They are associated with the brand, they want to be associated with the product and get some resources. So that's initially what we did, which is a program of like, they have to apply, they have to have some sort of content creation motion on LinkedIn already. They have to show that they mentioned Clay on LinkedIn already as well. And they use our product. So we don't really accept like it's not really an affiliate program, it's more like a community based program. And then as they join, we give them resources of like for example, we actually just launched one which is really cool, driven by Tommy on our team, which is like, hey, give us your profile, record this piece of text here with your voice and we auto generate a screen recording thing of this new feature that we launch on your brand with your face, with your voice, so you can actually look really good on social. Like how can we enable this?

You have to pay that. It's not an affiliate program. Do you have to pay them do or are they willing to just do it because they want to be seen as like, expert content creators?

We give them a. So like, a lot of the benefits. Like, we give them an affiliate link. We give them these sort of like, pieces of content that they can promote. We promote their profiles on paid ads as well. We give them access to features in our product.

Yeah, that's such a killer play now with thought leader ads on LinkedIn. Like the fact that, like, you can get so much more out of that. It used to be very, like, ephemeral. Somebody writes a LinkedIn post and it's awesome. But the shelf life of a LinkedIn post is like, you know, six hours.

Yeah.

Now you can request to sponsor that post. And it's like you've created this amazing organic ad unit that now you can go put dollars behind. That's a really good idea.

Yeah, exactly. So we have this sort of ladder of programs that we built. One, we have this creators program, which is like, people are getting started in clay. They want to talk about our product, and we enable them to talk about it. And then we have a selective group of clay experts. And these are like freelancers and agencies that build their businesses on top of clay. And we have internally here, we have to make sure that these people are millionaires. We want to build a bunch of millionaire agency founders that provide clay services. And then we have the top rev ops agencies that are now adopting clay as well. This is more like an enterprise motion that they work with really large clients. So that's sort of like how we've been building this motion. We have this sort of creators, which is the people that we really enable to talk about clay. Then we have the service level, and then we have like, kind of like the enterprise motion as well.

Okay, so that's one play.

I love that.

I've always believed that, like, the best or not always. But since I've been in this game and from what I've seen, I think the best marketing is always in B2B. It is education. It's information like, how do you make people smarter at their jobs because of what you're doing? And how do you enable them to do that? It's not always about, you know, ads to get a demo and try our product. And when you have a product like clay that people can actually use, that's the perfect playbook to go and do that. Like, let's show our product. Let's show how people use it. Let's incentivize them to do that. Let's make them smarter, let's make them stars and like they can teach other people. And then also it allows you to have this like content army of people who don't even work at your company. You can build a really big moat there.

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Yeah, I see this come up a lot in the Exit 5 community. And I don't know if you've done this, but I often see like, hey, we want to work with influencers. This is somewhat related. We want to work with influencers in our space, but I don't know where to find them. How would you help someone answer that? I have a strong opinion on this, but I want to go second.

Yeah, it's tricky, like, especially if we're thinking about B2B. Like the one thing that I learned on like B2B influencer marketing is that a lot of these people, they actually have jobs, you know, so it's not like it's a influencer on an E commerce store that you can pay on Instagram that you're going to promote this thing and put it out there.

Yeah, just like post a picture, like in a bikini on the boat, drinking the seltzer and selling.

Exactly, exactly. It's very different. It's like, it's much more of like a deeper partnership. Most of the time you need to get people to understand the product. You need to show value to them. Like, hey, this is something that you can use. And the way that we've approached some of these is we reach out to them normally through LinkedIn and be like, hey, I feel like there's an overlap between our audience and yours. And the way that we've done this before is like, let's actually build something for you that will drive your results for your business using our product. Because then it's much easier for you to talk about it versus, like people can sense whenever it's like a 100% paid post. So that's how we've been approaching it and it's been pretty successful because then so we work very closely with them. We literally have like a call which like, what's something in your business that you need help with in terms of growth and how can we help you? And then we build clay tables, you work together with them, we launch it, get results, and then whenever they go talk about it, they're like, okay, this thing is for real. This thing is legit. So it's very different. And it takes some time to disenablement session takes some time, but I think that's how we made it work. Curious to hear your thoughts too, Dave.

Well, I feel like people ask this and they expect there to be some magical database. And you go in this database and you search for your industry and they surface you this list of influencers, right? And I feel like the only way to really work with influencers is even if there was that database, like, you have to know who they are, you have to know what they talk about, you have to know what their audience is like. And then you have to meet them in the middle and then match the content to that audience. And then the other thing is, like, even if that did exist in B2B, I think people just have it wrong. You don't need people with massive. I bet if I looked at some of the people in the Clay creators program, you've probably driven, like, tons of pipeline from someone that has, like, you know, 6,000 LinkedIn followers, right?

You.

You don't need to be Mr. Beast. You don't need to have millions of followers for this to be meaningful. I had Natalie Taylor on the podcast a while ago, and she runs marketing at Capsule. And, like, they did something smart, which is, like, they found like, 10 or 20 creators on LinkedIn that were making videos for their company. And I'm making up a number, but it was some small dollar amount where, like, Instead of paying one person a huge amount of money, they found 20 people and they pay. They say, hey, can we pay you 500 bucks? And we want to do this micro influencer campaign. And she didn't find that from some database. She found it because she's on LinkedIn. She knows her customers, she knows who they follow. Like, you're not going to get this, like, list. And then, by the way, even if you did get that list, what would happen is everybody would reach out to those same people. And so I think you have to be curious about the platforms, you have to be curious about the channels. The people on your team should be, you know, deep on social understanding, who's talking about related topics to your brand, and then you can find them. There's no really shortcut to, like, you know, getting a list of influencers to go and work with.

Yeah, 100%. And that's why I think the one thing that you mentioned is, like, something that we do pretty well, which is like, what's the content that you're creating? Who's your audience? What is something that will be relevant for them? And how can you build something that uses Play that. It's also relevant for you because then whenever you have all of these touch points and you have all of these areas correct, you can kind of build something that makes sense. And I think the other thing too that no one really talks about is there's the part of actually finding and launching the content. The other piece is actually like measuring results. And I think people often forget how they buy things. I think that's something that I've kind of noticed. Whenever you indeced that you're measuring results, you forget how do you make decisions. And most of the time you don't click on ads, you don't think about these things, you see people talking about it, then whenever you have the need, you go ahead and purchase it. So it's really tricky if you want to do this type of influencer marketing, if you want to treat it as a less touch paid search channel, because at the end of the day it's top of Funnel and people forget how they make decisions and whenever they are actually looking at roi, they don't actually think about this way. Yeah, just something that I've kind of noticed over time too.

What else has been a contributor to Top of Funnel? Are you spending a good amount of money on paid channels? What else can you do to drive volume?

We're not spending that much on paid channels. On paid search, we spend like a pretty low amount considered to how much we could. We've been mostly focused on these programs that I mentioned and also SEO. We're starting to invest quite a lot in SEO, mostly because of like we have so much data and we can actually build some really cool things using our product. And so we've been investing on some SEO motion that can drive like a top of funnel to our site as well. But at the end of the day, our audience lives on LinkedIn. SEO is like another channel that we have control over the levers and we can do this. So. But yeah, these are the core two channels that have been sort of focusing quite a lot.

Tell me about SEO and what's working now. It seems like the search landscape has changed a lot. What's the overall approach to how you're putting this channel into play? It's much different than it was 10 years ago where you just would try to like rank for a bunch of keywords. Or maybe it's not, I don't know, I don't have a lot of experience here. What's the SEO playbook?

Yeah, the few things that we have been doing is the one thing is because we have Clay in the background. We actually use clay to build specific tools for SEO. So if people need to find specific company headcount numbers. So basically the tech stack is good for me because like it's clay on the back end and webflow on the front end. So we actually build the tools within clay and then we export it to webflow. So we, we've had some, like, we built some email finding tools, we built calculators the way that we're seeing now. And also we're actually building some articles as well that are more bottom of the funnel articles and whenever people are looking for reviews, looking for pricing data on some companies. But we're mostly focused on these two. Bottom of the funnel from a editorial point of view and tools and programmatic SEO using clay and other.

Got it. But bottom of the funnel is not necessarily. Is it an SEO play? Are you looking at like keyword volume and then deciding this is a low search volume but high intent, or is it more just like this is product marketing content that we want to exist?

No, we're actually looking like both because like we didn't really have anything, you know. So like a lot of the times it's like, okay, we actually need to rank from a product marketing point of view on these. But a lot of the times it's like, okay, we actually, there's a really strong intent on this keyword here, on this cluster of keywords. We should be the one. We should be popping up here from an editorial and product marketing point of view. So yeah, that's like one area that we've been investing.

And then just from an overall SEO standpoint, are you doing this in house? Are you doing it with an agency? And then I'm just curious as to know, like, where do you start and what are you looking at? Is there like a list of keywords that you care about and you're constantly looking at like, how do you build a strategy here today?

So we have some content that is in house and we also work with an agency. And the thing to think about for us is like one, what are our core use cases of our product? I think it always starts there. What is the core use case? Is there an opportunity to leverage this channel for a use case? Let's say for example, in our case, outbound. What's the decision making process for someone whenever they want to buy an outbound tool? What are the types of keywords that signal that they are on decision mode? Then you start from there Most of the time I like that.

It's like, start with the first principles of like, how do people buy this type of thing? And then you're working backwards from there.

Exactly, exactly. And then it's the same for outbound. In our case, it's the same for inbound. Like what are the things that they are looking for from like an inbound? The same for data enrichment. So like you have your product, your core use case of your product. Right. What's the decision making process? And you start from the bottom of the funnel up just so we can start to get some traction, you can kind of get some conversions going and then you can start from there. But that's usually the process that we take when it comes to like SEO strategy.

And does somebody do this in house?

Yeah, I was doing it at first, you know, like 20 person startup. Like you do you. Pretty much.

That's how it should be. You get hired to run marketing, you got to do all the things in the first year and then you can hire.

Exactly. So but then we hired an agency, some of the guys that I worked in the past and I trust and then we're assigned to scale this.

Now we've talked a good bit about the funnel. This is great. People are going to love this. Specifically about the creator program, the approach to SEO, something that's top of mind for me that I want to ask you about is differentiation. It's top of mind because there's just so many companies out there today and everyone sounds the same. And even if you don't, don't. Your buyer is going to want to know, well, how are you different? And I think for a while in B2B, everybody obsessed over trying to create a category or try to be the platform for X. You're in a crowded market. Right. I think people would perceive the competitors to clay, you know, things like maybe Zoom Info, maybe Apollo. I'm not in this world deeply, so there's probably other tools that are missing. That's gotta be a key ingredient to this, right? It's not enough to be like, hey, we have a good product, it's free, go sign up for it. I'm sure people at some point are asking, how are you different? What's been the storytelling exercise that you've gone through to get that out of clay. I think, I think I struck a nerve. I got a smile.

Yeah, you did. Yeah. It's like it's a super crowded space. Right. Like we have like Zoom in for is a public company. You know, Apollo is really big too. And then we have like all the actually AI focus tools that are coming up as well. So this is like actually something that we talk all the time and a lot of the work is on positioning and product marketing. Right. But I think for us is there's like a few things that we can do and I think one that's very clear for us is how is our brand like? Every B2B product looks the same. They run the same ads, they sort of like use the same type of website template kinda. But like if you look at Clay, we're pretty different in terms of our brand. We're kind of like always borderline kind of weird when it comes to brand. And we do this very intentionally. Like we don't want to be looking and feeling the same from a visual standpoint, that's like one piece. The other one is like sharing the use cases of showing how Clay is actually different. Because you're right, every time we talk about and it's something that we have actually. I've actually seen a webflow too. Whenever you're trying to theoretically explain what Clay does to people, they immediately think of what you just said, like, oh, it's just like Apollo. Oh, it's just like zoom info. But it's not because one example that I was just chatting with the customer and they sell software to dentist offices. So how would you do outbound to dentist office managers? There's no way without Clay. And the way that we do it with Clay, because we integrate with Google Maps. You can pull Google Maps data, Google my business, you see the website and then you ask our AI to say like, do these people have, do they have Invisalign? Do they do teeth whitening? Do they do root canals? So you can actually enrich these things with things that matter for your business. Because I think one thing that we say quite a lot is every business is different. Data enrichment is the same for the past 30 years. This is how Clay is different. It's actually the creativity that you can bring to a non creative, historically non creative area of go to market. So that's why we've been trying to show more and more of these use cases. But it's tough. This is something that it's actually really hard. But yeah, we've been trying.

How involved are the founders in that vision and how much does the product play into this for you and the marketing team?

Pretty involved. They're very involved. And like this thing that I mentioned, which is like this is more of a creative tool. It's something that we talk about very frequently as a product and as a marketing team too. And these decisions come with things like we could theoretically dumb down the product a little bit, you know, like to make it easier to use, but enclose and sort of like keep it within a box. But the problem is that you heard creativity and you heard flexibility. So the things that I mentioned to you, for example, this example that I just mentioned on Google Maps, will end up being hurt because it's not a core use case. But, like, everything that we build as a product needs to enable flexibility and creativity. And every time we launch a new feature, let's say, for example, we just launched signals and triggers. How do you ship this thing in a way that will be easy for people to use? Some different types of use cases and how can we make it more flexible? And from a marketing perspective, how can we showcase these different types of use cases? So it's very ingrained on our marketing and the founders play a big role in this. The tricky things that I'm sure you probably ran into is that the vision is all the way out there. But, like, if I put this in our website, people don't give a shit. I'm like, oh, it's a creative tool for growth, you know, like, yeah, what does this actually do? Right, right.

I think the vision, yeah, I don't think the vision. I don't think it could be like the main story, but I think if you have a strong vision, it can become part of it and it does matter. And so it's like, yes, people might come to you because you solve a specific use case, but in how you might compete, I think go back to the differentiator thing, right? Like in how you might compete versus ZoomInfo or Apollo or whoever else. I do think there is some element of, like, somebody who's going to buy your product might want to know how you see the world and how you see things differently. And it's like, oh, yeah, Clay is solving this for me today, but I can see where this is going. I always talk about when I was at Drift, we had an awesome company vision and we were focused on building, like the conversational marketing platform. And right today we only did chat, but in the future, and we didn't even have these products yet, we could stand up on stage and tell them in the future, you could imagine what that means. So imagine we did sms, imagine we did video, imagine we did this. And it's like, okay, cool, I see. So I'm going to buy for this use case today, but I'm going to buy into the company and I think that helps in creating more of a movement and getting people to engage with the company when they see where you're going, Right?

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's what we're trying to communicate is like, so first we were very focused on outbound, right? Like, you can do clay with outbound. Then we start to launch some features that enable people to do inbound really well. How can you do inbound in clay? And then we're going to branch into, like, how can we improve retention with clay? How can we improve expansion with clay? And within this sort of, like, outbound and prospecting world, how can we integrate with other channels like LinkedIn ads or with Facebook ads? Because we already have the data, we already had the personalization, we should be able to enable people to actually go deeper into other areas. So. But we're starting. We kind of need to start somewhere.

Before we wrap up. Tell me about the team. So you. The company's grown from 20 to 60. You joined, you're building out a marketing team. What do the functions look like? How many people on the marketing team? What do people do right now?

Yeah, so we have on the marketing team, we have someone on product marketing. Her name is Mishti. And we have someone on content. It's Scott. Who reached out to you, Dave. And then we have someone on brand who leads our brand team. And under that, we have different types of people driving each segment. Like on growth marketing, for example, we have someone focused on our programs, which is like a core piece of how we grow. We have on life cycle, we have people on web, we have people on SEO and some of these products as well that I mentioned to you. But yeah, the core pillars are product marketing, content growth marketing, and brand.

Cool. Okay, that's good. That's helpful. And brand, is that creative?

Yeah, it's both creative and web as well.

And what functions? Like, what agencies? You don't have to say who they.

Are if you don't want to.

But what agency roles have you brought? Like, what are agencies doing for you?

We actually just have an SEO agency. We do a lot of things in house, especially on the brand and creative point of view, because it's such a core piece of differentiation for us that it's kind of difficult for us to outsource. And on our website, we have some people that came from webflow, which is, like, really strong. Like, we've been investing a lot of in our web presence. We actually don't have a ton of, like, agencies. We do a lot of things in house.

Is that on purpose? Have you been burned in the past or did it just kind of shake out that way?

I think one thing to mention too. We do work with some contractors, people that we trust and we worked in the past and can deliver. Yeah, I think it wasn't necessarily on purpose. It's really hard. I think it's kind of hard to scale sometimes. I think you really have to know which agency to work with and for which. Like, a very specific problem that you need. And I think whenever you're so early as a company, the problems are so ambiguous. Things are so, like, you don't have enough data. It's like things are kind of hard. So I think, and I'm a big proponent of like, we do it first, we know how this thing works, we know the inputs to grow. And then if we think it's like, it's an agency. Oh, we actually use an agency for paid search as well. But as soon as we really understand the input really well, then we can decide if you want to keep it in house or hire an agency with people that we trust. But it's just mostly because I need to understand exactly the mechanics here.

Yeah, I forget who we talked about. This came up recently where the idea of, like, whether you're hiring in house or an agency to do it first and then spend there. Like, before we go right to hiring an SEO agency, can we do a little bit of this in house to, like, prove that there's something there? We're doing this big event at exit 5, and I initially was like, oh, we. We have some budget, we have some profit, whatever. Like, why don't we just do this the easy way and go, you know, spend 50 grand on an event agency. And Dan was like, no, no, no. And he's the cheap one, right? And he's like, no, that's such a terrible decision. He's like, we should do this as a team. And so we have this event coming up. All five of us have contributed in some way. And then now we're going to have done this event. We'll have learned. We know if we want to go bigger or scale next year, we can then make a more informed decision. And I think me as a marketing leader, I made a bunch of mistakes in hiring either people or agencies when my first instinct to solve a problem was to hire for it versus I think the real way is to do a little bit of it to get better knowledge of like, yeah, man, I've never. I've never managed a paid agency before. And let's just go right to this. And now we're spending a hundred grand a month from zero. Like that's a rest the of recipe for failure. Now we've done it a little bit and now we can scale that up. I think that's a much better option. So it makes sense where you're at.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay.

Hey, this was great, Bruno. Thanks for hanging out with me. Yeah, I gotta go get my Clay action on a little bit. I've been given some orders of some emails that I need to send. So I'm gonna go get in there. Everybody can go and check you out. We'll link to you on LinkedIn. Go and connect with Bruno on LinkedIn. Follow along what they're doing with Clay and I think you're, you're at the tip of something interesting that's happening in B2B which is this creator led marketing. Right. Where like let's let the people who use our product be the stars of our marketing. And it's been interesting to follow and I'm excited to continue to watch what you do. Thanks for hanging out with me on the Exit 5 podcast.

Yeah, thank you, Dave. It was awesome. Exit.

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