While we give a couple of folks a little bit more time to trickle in, go ahead and drop in the cra, where you calling from and also what you're most excited to learn, a minute or two to keep trickling in and then we'll get things started. Alright, we've got people from all over the world. It looks like we've got some people from Big Apple, which is actually where I'm based, so good. Good to see you, Laura. I'm sure we're just a few streets away. We've got people from Malaysia, from Portugal, from Canada, a lot of Canada in here, actually some Portugal as well, Texas, France, San Francisco, Rome, wow. It always blows my mind how truly global some of these cohorts can fit. Charlottesville, Virginia, that's actually where I'm the university, Singapore, Philippines, et cetera. And then also, if I mute you, feel free to unmute yourself and speak if you want to, but it might just be because you have background noise that is interfering with everyone else being able to hear and listen. Awesome. All right. Well, I'm sure we might get a few other folks trickling in in the next few minutes, but let's go ahead and get started. Welcome everyone to Clay Cohorts. I'm Yosh, and it's really great to meet all of you. I'm normally joined by my colleague Arpi, who you'll be seeing over Slack as well. And the two of us together run these live experiences for folks like you to better learn clay and get more involved in how to automate your go to market. Now, today's the first day, literally, so we're not gonna get too deep into the weeds of clay itself, any of the like, features, problems, et cetera. We're gonna talk a little bit more about what is cohorts, what's the best way to make the most out of this experience, what are all of the things that you should do, avenues you should reach for when you're looking for help. And then we'll leave time for any questions to talk just spiritually and culturally about this one week experience and then hopefully leave you all to it. So I'll dive in for just a second and say that if we think about cohorts, cohorts to me is very much this like learning doesn't happen in silos. So if, if I think about education all over the internet today, I think 99% of what we consider online education is basically a really fancy textbook, right? It's all like video courses, video tutorials, video exercises, mostly lectures, talking about concepts, maybe some written guides walking along them. If you're lucky, you get some exercises that you can go through. And even if you have content exercises and some like dynamic format of that content, it's still really, imagine if you went to all of high school and all of college, but you didn't actually have the social environment, you didn't have the classes where you got to ask questions. You didn't have TAs who were one step ahead of you that you could actually lean on for support. You were just actually told to sit down, read the textbook, go through the exercises, and then take an exam at the end of class. That would've probably been the worst learning experience for everyone on this call, and it's not how we actually learn. So I think one of the things that messes with people cohorts wise is that there's not a lot that's crazy different from the university experience that you might get. You are gonna go through different exercises and different contexts that you'll see corollaries for on the university experience. But this one week is guided towards, okay, what are the basic building blocks and fundamentals that if we teach you each of them step by step, we have high confidence, you will at least go from zero to one or two on your clay learning journey. And the way that you're gonna do that is every single day you're gonna get a different exercise with a custom lesson that has videos, written guides, context, and you're gonna have an exercise. You're gonna put that actual knowledge and practice to use. You're gonna go through that exercise. No one will be burning credits on those exercises. They're designed in such a way that you won't. And once you submit those exercises, you will actually earn more credits to. So this is like your risk-free safe learning environment to try and build your skills without feeling like you're wasting all of your money learning clay. The other big thing about this experience is that you have access to everyone else in this group who is at the same or similar learning stage to you. And one of the things that I tell people constantly is that the best way to learn is actually to teach. The best way to figure out and really cement your understanding of concepts is to try and explain it to somebody else because the way that it initially makes sense to you is probably not going to be the way that it would actually immediately make sense to somebody else. And that's important for two things. Number one, if you want to be able to communicate the results of your work and what you think is amazing about a tool to your colleagues or to your boss or to anyone else on your team, it's important for you to be able to explain it in a way that they will understand it. And number two, if you are able to explain some of these solid foundational concepts to other people in this course in a way that helps them gain their own understanding, you are that much further along your own learning journey. Because the other thing that I'll say about this week is that it is just scratching the surface of what's possible in clay. There is so much more beyond what we're gonna cover in this week, but this week is the basic building blocks that will help you get sort of the 80 20 effect on your clay learning experience. So in conclusion, the way that this course is structured, we have today's kickoff call and then we're gonna talk about a little bit of q and a. We're gonna talk a little bit about course questions. We're also going to have a graduation call where we'll talk a little bit about closing, what it means for people coming next. We'll leave some space on that call for people who might be in the middle, the middle of exercises or have clay specific questions that they want to ask. And then you are also going to most of all make use of the Slack channel. I highly encourage all of you to post questions that you have in the Slack channel. Try your best to not DM myself or Arp we get, you can see in this group, I think there's 180, maybe 200 people now in this cohort. If every single one of you were to try and send a DM to ARP and myself, our support team doesn't handle that volume in a day. We can't handle in a day either, just the two of us. So please, please, please post your answers on a public channel that will make it easier for us to get to them eventually. And then the other reason that we ask that is going back to what I said before, you guys will help each other learn clay throughout this experience. The magic of this experience is actually all of you. It's really not our pit or myself. And so when you see other people asking questions in a Slack channel that you think you might know the answer to, jump in, be helpful, lend a hand, not only is it helpful to somebody else, it's also likely very, very helpful to you and your own understanding. The last last thing that I will say about question answering in Slack is that we have a thing that we are gonna write up a better doc for in the culture called the crystal ball. So if you ask a question in a public channel and you get a crystal ball emoji reaction from Arpi or myself, we are telling you that the question you're asking is a good one, but you should also probably be able to figure out the answer to that question yourself. And that likely just means like if you had Googled it or if you go look through the documentations or you take a deeper look at the lesson itself, it's probably in the lesson itself and you're welcome to resp. The crystal Ball is not us attempting to be assholes to you. The crystal ball is us attempting to help you actually learn instead of giving you the fish. Because when you go through the process of, okay, I got all the way up until this last roadblock, and we can see the light that you're looking for at the end of that tunnel, we don't want to rob you of the learning moment. We want you to take that last step yourself, get the learning, get the insight, build the skill, and then continue to build those skills. Now, if you ever feel offended by a crystal ball, just comment and thread and tag us. We will handle it. We're not trying to roadblock you or be annoying. It's just an attempt to try and see if we can speak the same language. Okay, that was a lot of ranting from myself. I think now would just love to open it up. We definitely don't need the full hour. We're gonna change these to be 30 minutes in the future. But first let's try, since we have so many people drop, any questions you might have in chat and these questions, let's make it open. You can ask questions about clay, you can ask questions about cohorts, you can ask spiritual questions, existential questions. I may not answer them because the last thing that I'll say as we get into the q and a section is that when it comes to questions as people are typing up their questions on live calls, I will make the decision in the moment as to whether or not your question is something that would be broadly useful to everyone else. I may even modify your question to answer a version of it that I think is useful to everyone on the call. If it's a question that is more specific, more niche, more focused, post those in the Slack channel and I may even tell you to follow up in Slack there so that we're able to asynchronously get there and also so that we can document some of those learnings for everyone going through the cohort. All right, we've got a couple of questions coming in. So Jesse has said, if you've gone through quite a few 1 0 1 classes from Clay University, in what ways is cohort for added value? That's a good question. I'm gonna give three answers to that question. Number one, if you've gone through Clay 1 0 1 and you already feel very literate in all of the basics of clay, you should go through this cohort in a breeze. And so the real benefit there is just that you get free credits. You know you if this is your first time going through a cohort, it's like another way to gamify your learning experience. It shouldn't take you more than an hour to two hours if you're truly a pro at doing everything this week, probably less honestly. And so it's a very easy way for you to earn more credits to certify your own clay expertise. That leads me to point number two for what the benefit of doing this cohort is. We are soon going to launch badges and certifications. It's coming probably in a month, maybe month and a half. So if you want to be able to demonstrate your clay expertise, your experience, your skills, we will be giving badges at least to cohort graduates. And then certifications will be something you have to earn on your own by doing the work. But a lot of the work that you do here in the badging program will help you be able to build a certification project and those are gonna be resume worthy credentials that you can show to potential employers. You could display as a mark of being able to start your own clay agency, all sorts of things. So that's number one, earn free credits. Number two, earn that badge in the short to medium term future. And then number three is just I think it's really helpful to be in community no matter what stage of the learning journey you're at. So if you are someone who is further along than other people are, I would encourage you to actually spend more of your time, maybe not on the exercises, but more of your time in Slack asking thoughtful provoking questions, helping other people get along their learning journey, because I think that ultimately is the best flywheel for everything that you do here. Not only is everyone in this cohort, a colleague of yours and likely a potential thought partner or someone that you could lean on for clay advice and support, there's a bunch of other go-to go-to-market geniuses in this group as well, and people who are going to become even greater go-to-market geniuses, and I think these people will hopefully be some of the spokes in your wheel of your network that you can lean on and go to for support. Because the last, last thing that I'll say about the course, and this is worth mentioning, you will notice with every exercise that you have able to complete, you do daily exercises that are the clay table submissions. You have an optional content exercise for every day and to be very clear and explicit, the content exercise can, if you want, include clay or myself or arpi, but it by no means has to, it's no attempt at us trying to self-promote ourselves on LinkedIn through all of you. We do enough of that plenty more formally on the marketing side, what we are attempting to get you all to do is start to build your own brand, your own voice in the GTM space because this space is rapidly evolving and it's very, very crazy and hard to catch up with. I think for me, what I have found to be the most reliable, consistent way of staying up to date and on top of my skills is being in community with a close group of people that I think also follow these same industry skills and values. So if you start to post yourself on LinkedIn about these topics, broadly speaking, I think you will find yourself getting more of that information just in time, just as easily. All right, longer answer than you may be expected, Jesse, but hopefully it was helpful. All right, we've got Amit next. I won't give you the crystal ball live. Actually maybe I will. I reserve the right to do that. You have mentioned in one of my LinkedIn videos that I used Claude and it got you pretty far in building a table. Ah, what's my recommended resource for Clay for Dummies? Google Clay University, Claude. So I think what you're referencing, Amit, is that I don't think it was Claude actually, I think it was open AI's operator and what I was testing, and this is just fine, right? This is sort of the stuff that I keep on top of because you never know what's going to disrupt this part of the market. Next, when OpenAI launched operator, and for those who don't know, operator is a computer use agent developed by OpenAI, which essentially means it can go perform tasks autonomously. For me, the simplest example would be I tell a operator go book me a table at a restaurant for four this Friday at 6:00 PM in soho. Operator is then able to, if it has all my preferences already as well from chat PT and whatever settings I assign it, go find open restaurants that meet my cuisine preferences. Maybe at that time on Friday in that location search for three or four, it'll probably send me a text or an email saying, here's the availabilities, let me know sooner rather than later and I'll book whichever one you want. I could respond to it and it will go book the actual appointment for me. So that's a very simple example of operator. Now, operator I have also tested if it can just go build a clay table for me. So I went to opening Eyes operator and I said, Hey, go into clay.com, log in, build a list of tech executives at companies with larger than 500 headcount, make sure that they're based in New York, and then add all of their emails and try and add their company headcount and operator actually did 90% of it, correct. The only thing it got wrong was it accidentally included North Carolina in addition to New York in my search parameters. But I think that's interesting because I know tons of humans who would not be able to go figure that out within five seconds if they've never popped into clay before operator was able to do it on its first try. And so I think that's two things interesting because one, we're starting to get into the era where AI can use software for us in a really intelligent way, and if we really take that to its logical extent, let's just even say that in the future you will not need to learn how to use Clay to use clay. I think we're a ways away from that, but let's just assume that for a second. It is still important to go through cohorts like this. It's still important to develop this skill and here's why. You still need to know what to tell operator to do. You can't tell operator, go build me a magical list in clay. It's gonna do crazy things that are not at all what you want. You need to know how to think systematically, how to be able to build targeted lists and how to refine what an operator might do for you so that you can actually get to those concrete outputs and results. So learning how to think in this AI go to market way is really important no matter how good AI gets. Okay, coming down this list of questions, we've got Reib, how do I see clay usage? Is it easy to use so I can train our business development team on it and use it on their own or does it require you to be tech savvy? This is a good question because I think this is actually something we could do a better job of talking about on the website. So I'll answer it for everyone. For context, I spent, I actually was the first GoTo market engineer on our team and I built out our sales team. The number one thing I started saying on all of my sales calls, because everyone misunderstood me all the time. People come to Clay consistently and think it is a tool for SDRs and BDRs. The tricky thing about Clay is that it is really not a tool for SDRs and BDRs in the same way that like an ample market or a rocks might be. Those are tools designed for SDRs and BDRs. Clay is really designed more for this like growth hacker type individual who loves maybe like Zapier or make or Phantom Buster and loves to build systems and processes. 90% of the SDRs and BDRs I know do not meet that persona. It's because what they've been doing their whole life and what they are really good at is building lists, segmenting, writing, creative copy and booking meetings, but they do all of that through manual rote work. And so what clay is actually better at doing, which is where people get caught up because it's a lot of organizational change, is almost always all of our most successful customers. Every single logo that you look at on the clay website, OpenAI, Vanta, Andro, et cetera, clay is primarily owned by the revenue operations team. Sometimes it's called the sales ops team, sometimes it's called the marketing ops team or in like one or two cases that I know of the growth ops team, but it's some sort of an ops team. And then counterintuitively, what that ops team typically does is automate a lot of the lead gen, the outbound work that SDRs were doing manually one by one before. And so then there's two other things worth mentioning from this. Number one, how do you decide who owns Clay an organization if you don't yet have a rev ops team? I'll answer that in a second. Number two is what do STR do in a world where all of the outbound is already done for them or iterated at scale? So number one is when you don't have a rev ops team, it's likely that you actually do have SDRs, BDRs or other ops team members who might be good owners of Clay internally, but be really rigorous about who you choose for that clay onboarding because it will make or break your implementation of it or internally. And if you don't have someone to do it, I would even go so far as to recommend don't try and buy clay, either figure out someone who can come to do it internally or work with an expert. That's why we have the experts directory. Number two, what do SDRs and BDRs do in a clay first world? So I can tell you, right, if you think about there, there are two realities here. Number one is that lots of businesses will cut BDR R and SDR teams. I never really think that's the right choice. If you have good BDRs and SDRs, what I often tell people in the most successful companies I've worked with have done this, there's a ton of activity that your salespeople should be doing that they weren't doing before because they were too bogged down with manual email writing and data copy pasting. They could be going to conferences, they could be writing newsletters, they could be commenting on socials in an organic way. Everyone can tell if you're using an AI bot to comment on posts, it is painstakingly obvious. So have your humans engage in what is uniquely human activity is my recommendation there. Let me know if that sort of answers your question. You three, Michelle, if you filled out the form but haven't received a Slack invite, then send me an email actually and if you're in the community slack already, just send me a slack and we'll make sure that you get into the cohort and that for that, that goes for anyone. If you have like ops questions related to the cohort, just email myself and we'll make sure we get to them all today. I don't wanna take up too much time live doing this. Daniel is asking, can you get operator to set up H TT PAPI stuff as well? You might have been joking, but actually you could. What I would say is if you want, there are two things and we'll cover this in the H TT PAPI lesson that are worth it for everyone to know. Number one, you can just input the endpoint of the API call that you're looking to make and we have AI in the background that will go and try and build out what your API call should look like. So it's experimental but it works 90% of the time in clay. And then if that doesn't work, I actually always troubleshoot using Claude. So I take Claude, I'll put my error messages and my like H TT PAPI format into the chat and say this is the error I'm getting. Here's how I formatted my http. API call help me troubleshoot what might be going wrong. I've never been able to not figure it out using Claude. Alright, one more question here from Michael trying to decide if we should ZoomInfo for clay with the manager as our GTM lead finder and funneling those leads to the BDRs demos and deals. Thoughts. This is a can of worms. This does come up a lot so I will answer it for everyone. We get asked all the time, should I replace ZoomInfo with Clay? My official answer on this being biased, 100% is sure yes, but also it shouldn't be like a biased unbiased response. What you should do, there's a three step process whenever you're trying to purchase data vendors. Number one, go to all of your data vendors and ask them to do a data test, right? Give them a sample set of data, give them a sample set of contacts and company points that you want enriched, see what the coverage is and then just go with whatever the best bang for your buck on data coverage and price is. Now, the reason I say yes is because we haven't lost a data test yet for ZoomInfo and there's this philosophy that you know, of course having a hundred plus different providers will increase average accuracy compared to one. And I think that's just like a long-term game. We're gonna keep playing, but that should be how you think about data coverage in general. So don't take my word for it, don't take zoomin info's word for it, just look at the data and decide what is best. There's a second part to this question, which comes back to what I was saying before, which is should we just have like the manager own lead creation and funneling leads to BDRs and AEs to close demos and deals? The answer is if your organization is ready for it, then yes, see previous answer about rev ops, sales ops, BDRs, AEs, et cetera. But note that there's a lot of change management that comes with that. So make sure that you're prepared to engage in that if that's the direction you're going to go. All right, another question we've got from your three here, can you build automations and processes and clay and then have some sort of integration on BDRs or AEs to own the input? Can you say a little bit more yare about what you mean here? For example, he can have AEs, edit search inputs and then have a clay table work on the backend to provide the list with emails, et cetera. Yes. So there are tons of ways you can do this and so this is worth answering for everyone as well. The the core question here I'm gonna reframe a little bit is if you have a team of SDRs, BDRs and AEs that is very used to working in the way that they have for the last 20 years, they prospect the list themselves, they eat what they kill, they hunt on their own. It's going to be really hard to probably rest control of that entire process from AEs, BDRs, Andes. So the question here is, is there a best of both worlds? Is there a world in which I can still keep AERs, BDRs, Andes doing the like top of their process work the way that they're used to doing it but now instead of that whole middle part where they're copy pasting data, manually uploading CSVs, trying to fact check in spreadsheets, I just have clay handle that work for them. The answer here is yes, you can design it in that way. The the tool is not built super well for this. But my two recommendations on how you would do this because we've helped bunches of teams do this are number one set up a really rigorous process by which SDRs, AEs, BDRs put all of their data that they want enriched into the CRM in some sort of list tagable identifiable way because then you can pull all of those lists from Salesforce or HubSpot into clay, automatically enrich all the information that's missing from the field that's missing and put it back into the CRM. That's your best case scenario because you're not introducing any other needless tools that need to get managed, it's just everything goes into the CRM. If it's just bare bones on the CRM, that's fine. It gets added to a list. Clay enriches that list, puts it back in the CRM. That's your dream case scenario. Your like second less ideal scenarios you can give people on your team BDRs and AEs in particular access to only search in clay like we just introduced user access permissioning. So you can give them the access to only build lists and then from those tables someone will have to come in and actually add all those tables to an enrichment table and still takes a little bit of work to do but far faster than having individuals do it all themselves. So I would say if you have more questions on that follow up in Slack, but the high level of what I explained should be applicable for everyone here. All right, we've got more questions coming. We've got Kira on. Is there a way to restrict access to specific folders within Clay? This is a good question. I believe we're working on it. We're working on a lot of user permissioning in general as we work with more and more large companies to be quite honest. And so we just introduced basic user permissioning where you should be able to like limit who can run enrichments, build tables, et cetera. We may not have it at the folder level just yet Kieth, but it's coming soon would be my recommendation there. And then another question here. Okay, bunch more questions. This is good. Maybe we should keep these in an hour but we'll see. Is Clay ever going to get an open API where you can query the table from inside of Make or Zapier Right now I'm just pushing all clay data to Google Sheets and then querying that as needed but it feels like a waste of time in an extra point of possible failure. This is a good question Ken. The immediate answer here is we're probably not going to build an open API in the way that you're imagining with make Zapier et cetera because then it opens up this whole can of worms into us just being like A an API that other people call, right? The reason that we won't is because the way Clay is really intended to be used is as like a let me build the workflows, scales, issues, et cetera of what I want to figure out and then be able to do the rest myself. If you're asking for API access to Clay, you probably should be able to still, you can directly send data from Clay to Zapier make if you want via a web hook and you can also import it directly like we do have clay connected to those apps if you want to build it as part of a separate workflow. So I would say also feel free to like post that with further questions because I'm guessing you have some existing setups that you want to optimize in Slack and we'll hopefully get to it and help you answer them 'cause you shouldn't need the Google sheets in between Allison, if you're brand new to Clay, you're in the right place. The cohort is the best place to start actually. And then if you're looking for Async resources, I would start with the Clay 1 0 1 course on university. Giannis is asking about how deep a clay agency should go with their niche, any resources directly for Clay for GTM agencies. Yana, I'm gonna answer this one quickly 'cause I don't think it's relevant to everyone, but the answer is you could do whatever you want on your clay agency niche. We have tons of examples of people doing all sorts of things. We don't yet have any resources directly available for people building their own agencies, but that's something we're planning on doing either next quarter or the quarter after. Okay, Liam has a question or maybe just a statement agreeing that optimizing is the last mile. Nice. Appreciate it Liam. And then last question here from Jesse is will Perplex perplexity ever be available with an API key instead of clay credits? I believe we're working on it. I think we just need to figure out how it works in the perplexity end. I don't think they have allowed for it very easily quite yet, but I've heard this question a few other times so appreciate the question. We'll see and figure it out when we can. Alright, I'll give a couple of seconds for any last other questions that people might have. All right, Alejandro also has a question about clay agencies. This one I think is broadly applicable so I'll, I'll sort of reframe the question there. There's two things here, right? Number one, commoditization of clay agencies. Two, whether or not clay will ever bring these services in-house. So number one, let's actually just talk about what clay agencies are for everyone because I think it's helpful to learn about the ecosystem. Clay agencies are groups of people, sometimes individuals who are very good at using the tool in a particular way and then lots of folks will contract with them in order to help augment buttress or even just do the clay services piece for them. Now first question here is it's growing really rapidly. Do we feel like there's any like commoditization of clay agencies? Does it feel like it's becoming valueless? I would say it's still very, very early for the clay agency ecosystem. As an example, look at HubSpot partners. HubSpot Partners I believe has a few thousand on the lower side of a thousand partners who are formal partners that provide HubSpot services across five different tiers. And those companies work with businesses of like multi-billion dollar sizes all the way down to your everyday mom and pop shop. Clay experts as a comparison has 98 experts and we have paused it manually for the time being simply because we've had way too much demand to be quite honest. We have this ties to the second question, will Clay ever just like do their own internal clay agency and put all the clay agencies outta business? Fun fact, we experimented with this when I started as a go-to-market engineer trying to build the sales team. We wondered if our enterprise offering should include a lot of clay services. The answer is a resounding no. And here's my reason why we could try and take that revenue from agencies for ourselves. There's a lot of it. There's millions and millions and millions of dollars of it. I think the world is far better off with us enabling a bunch of people to build their own businesses on the backbone of clay. And we are going to, we have our hands full just continuing to develop the product in the way that we need to and just continuing to sell enterprise software subscriptions. Don't even think about the services branch. The most that we do with enterprise customers is we have a dedicated growth strategist who helps them onboard and will maybe provide the upfront three trainings or four trainings and that's really helpful to building that competency internally. But those growth strategists will actually work with some of our best clay agencies to make sure that enterprise customers are successful and it enables us to kind of scale these offerings in a way that it would just be really hard for us to do internally. You know, it makes no sense for us to try and build a hundred clay agencies that can do all the things that we need to. Alright, some more questions coming. Also, feel free if you feel like you've gotten your everything you need to out, as I've seen a few people peel off, my feelings will not be hurt. We'll keep it just for the question askers here. All right, yet three. What's a suitable plan for discovery that has enough features and still reasonable pricing to get approved from finance? That's a very specific question. You have three, but I will have you ask that one in Slack since it's unique to only you and then we'll get back to it in some other way. John, cost optimization in one of the exercises. Prompt engineering, you can do one AI column or three cost optimization is a big deal. When do you know if there's too much of an ask and can time out the request versus breaking them out in various columns? Is there a way to weigh the ask IE look at all open jobs and summarize every open job and summarize what the company's solving for versus how many office, how many doctors and someday crowns, what's too much? John, this is a really good question. So John's a little bit ahead of the curve on just asking about the AI prompting modules and lessons and what he's essentially asking is all of you will get to a point when you're looking at the AI prompting lesson where you will see that you can format outputs, which means that whenever I use clat, which is our AI web scraper, I have the ability to ask clat to retrieve multiple points of information. So for example, let's say I have a database of a hundred startups and I use clat to go find out who the lead investor for all of those startups is. I could actually from the same clat call likely ask Clat to not only include the lead investors but also include other primary investors, include the amount of their latest fundraising round, what the round was and total funding till date. And the reason why I would think about grouping all of those into one call is because they're very related points of data, they're all fundraising related, so it's a little bit easier for equations to not have to context switch to get multiple points of data. That's the general rule of thumb that I would use for when I should be combining data points into one AI call. If you're doing three very different types of data points, you can still try it, it just may not work as well. So for example, if I wanted to use plast to find the head of customer experience the latest funding round and related investors, maybe that's going to be more difficult. It's possible but more difficult. And so ultimately there isn't a like tried and true golden rule for what John is asking, which is when should I be consolidating for cost optimization? When should I be keeping it separate? The easiest path is when in doubt try to consolidate because you're going to save money on that test on 10 rows at a time. Don't bring it across the table of hundreds of rows. If you have tried to consolidate and it's not working first, try different models to see if the models get you better results because they can think for longer. Just recognize that your cost trade off in models is if you go up a credit that's basically eliminating one of your outputs. So it's still worth it to go up in model costs if you're getting four or five data points. If you're getting two data points and you go up one model cost, you might as well parse separate costs if they're discrete tasks and then really just experiment and repeat. Unfortunately that's the best way to kind of answer that question. But when in doubt, consolidate test iterate would be the answer there. Thanks Alejandro, appreciate it. Michael, is there a lean setup you would recommend when starting with Clay? There are so many experts that recommend five to 10 additional tools to use with Clay. Starting out with that seems like a big unre investment end goal is to get BDRs AEs. So this I think is re applicable to everyone. There are lots of people that recommend a whole stack of a dozen tools. When you're thinking about your go-to-market tech stack, here's the simplest way to put it. You need someplace to destroy your data. Everyone should have a CRM. Your CRM should be Salesforce, HubSpot at t or something else. It can even be notion, it can be Airtable, but you need to have A-C-R-M-C-R-M is number one. Number two, you need some way of reaching your leads. That's either email, some sort of omnichannel tool or something else in between. Typically best tools for that are outreach. I don't like outreach but it's the biggest player. My favorites are instantly smart lead and then you have a whole bunch of like you know SalesLoft LEM list, et cetera. If you want to go omnichannel LEM list has more of the LinkedIn messaging features. Now the growth machine is another one. You could explore just purchasing a sequencing tool of your own. Let's say you have a CRM and a sequencing tool. You do not need anything besides clay to start sending leads to BDRs and AEs because all you can then do in clay is clay consolidates all the other tools for you Right now in clay I can build my lists, I can then go enrich my lists, I can get the research done on those lists, send the data from those lists to my CRM and my sequencing tool of choice, start generating campaigns when those campaigns get booked. It should update my information in my CRM and it should be feeding my B-D-R-A-E team, maybe my marketing team, some highly qualified leads. So those are like the three bare bones tools that you need in order to get started with clay. And ideally you already have number one and numbers one and two if you don't have numbers one and two, I question how you're reaching out to people today. So it really should just be clay alone if you have those other tools. Alright, KIRO, is there a credit calculator of sorts where you can learn the most optimum way of using credits? There is not, but we sort of covered this throughout this week. So I'll let you go through the lessons and sort of learn how to build optimally the general rule of thumb build and run one row to 10 rows at a time. Try and spend on the least expensive integrations which are just gonna be waterfalls and then AI agents. And you're already set on your path. Jesse says he saw that the previous card or midweek checkup, that's not in our schedule. We will not be doing midweek checkups because we're trying to take them a little bit out and put it more in the slack. So good call out Jesse, but we're just gonna have the graduation, which will be our catchall for all questions. We'll still be very active throughout the week in Slack. I will share the recording. No worries. For Clat AI columns, I'm always required to filter for errors and then run again and then repeat for all AI columns. That's interesting. Ansul, you should post that message in Slack and tag myself and our that shouldn't be happening is the answer there. That's just a product flaw. All right, Liam, will Clay or does Clay support multiple credit pools in the same account? Da da da da. That's a sales question as well, Liam. We can do something like that. It's going to be custom, it's going to be probably like a larger plan in some way ideally, but I think doable Kareem appreciate that this was helpful. In clay demos we use credits pretty freely, but in many cases using external data sources connected will get results cheaper. Is there a clay recommended guide for this? I'm not quite sure what you mean Daniel. I think there, there's sort of two answers here, right? Like one, if you have other external data sources that you have accounts for, you can always replace the API keys of those tools in clay with your own API key. So you'll automatically draw down from those instead of using credits. We're not trying to force you guys to spend credits where you need to like it's just really an optimization of spend across your stack. If you have other data sources that you think are just cheaper for different tasks than what you have in Clay, I'm not gonna stop you. You should post those in Slack, share them with everyone else. There's probably a role in which we should be connected to those as well. So I don't know of a guide yet, but if you find those things, we welcome them with open arms as you find them. Last couple of questions we've got and for the time being here. So ashay, any industry specific features or best practices that one should know when using clay? Very interesting question. Very broad. I'm not gonna give any industry specific features or answers just because that would then not be applicable to everyone on the call. But what I will say is like a general rule of thumb, and you guys are gonna see this in your lessons for day one are I think about the frameworks as FE and Jigsaw FE is Find and rich transform, export or execute everything you build in clay no matter what the use case will have at least some if not all of those steps as part of the workflow. Number two is the jigsaw framework. I think a lot of people struggle with like what's the right order to sequence things. This relates to the what's the most credit optimal way for me to get data. Almost always. And again this is 95% of the time, not a hundred. Your best path to finding data about a company is going to be you need to find the company website or company, LinkedIn, URL. And then once you have the website or the LinkedIn URL, you can enrich company which only costs one credit in clay and then you have all the data you might need to be able to start a foundation about that company, right? For whether it's scraping additional searches, et cetera. For people, the exact same thing is true. If you are able to find either their email or their LinkedIn profile from email or LinkedIn profile, you can then enrich person and access this wealth of other data about people as well. That's the jigsaw metaphor I think of it as finding your corner pieces, then your edge pieces and then filling in the rest of the puzzle. Your corner pieces are gonna be for company's website, LinkedIn, URL, profile for people, email, LinkedIn, URL profile. And then once you have those corner pieces, your enriched person and enriched company actions fill in the edges, it give you all of this basic data so that you can see the frame of your data picture a little bit more clearly and then you can fill in the middle with whatever else you want. You can use CLAYT to scrape custom signals, you can find headcount, change industry, job change, new jobs, you name it. Okay, AM has a question about come across a lot of clay courses and learning that people use clay in their domain a lot, but it's not actually a clay affiliated course. What's our take on folks using that like top level domain in some way? Are there restrictions around it? Asking for a friend? That's so funny. Amit, if you want to launch something that is Clay branded on a website, and this goes for everyone on here, I highly encourage it. The on we, we will be very, very clear that nothing that is not clay.com is not officially affiliated with Clay. But we want you guys to go explore, create resources, be a part of the community. I love Clay Bootcamp, I love the masters of scale with Clay. I love Clay It and nail it. Like I know all these substack and publications and I think it's clear that they're not Core Clay team members, but it's also clear that they're excited about clay. So that would be my 2 cents on that. And then Yuri Clay and analytics, we are about to, if we haven't just released credit analytics for how your credits are getting spent in your workspace across tables or folders. If you don't see it yet, it will be in your workspace very soon. So that's the first thing that we've ever done on an analytics front with Clay. What I will say in the meantime is that if you're trying to have analytics or reports that kind of demonstrate the ROI of Clay to your own organization internally, there are some pretty good custom guides on how people set up HubSpot or Salesforce reporting to do this. The TLDR is every time you send a record from Clay to a CRM or every time Clay touches a record in your CRM, always update a like created by Clay, updated by Clay Field. And then you can use those records to distill down how many total records are we enriching, which of these leads are we actually reaching? What's the conversion rate on these campaigns, et cetera, et cetera. Cool. What else? Let's see if there's a couple more questions that trickle in for EU based companies. I wanna have you put that in Slack because I think it's a little bit more specific. Again, I actually don't know any off the top of my head either, but I'm sure we could find some and I'm sure there's some other EU folks even in this cohort that might be able to jump in. All right, one more question that I think is worth covering. Victoria is asking how accurate is fine people from a company Clay table? The answer is, it varies is the honest answer, right? Because so we don't scrape LinkedIn data. We will find data sets that are like very one-to-one with LinkedIn and we utilize those. But scraping LinkedIn data is a violation of their terms of service, which can result in you getting banned from LinkedIn. So that's why we don't do that. Now there's tons of people and company data sets that are very similar to LinkedIn data sets or mirror or have similar coverage. There's two things that might be causing inaccuracies in your refined people searches. Number one, it might just be that we don't have the same data that LinkedIn does, in which case flag it to support. We're always looking for ways to improve our people data set and so we're building it ourselves when we can. Number two though, and this is what I would say has been the majority of instances 'cause we have a whole team working on people data right now, we are intentionally filtering out profiles that we are reasonably sure are fake. So like the last five times that someone showed me a search that wasn't one-to-one with LinkedIn, it's because LinkedIn doesn't filter out fake profiles for you. If you look at anyone that has less than 50 connections on LinkedIn or doesn't have a profile picture or doesn't have something else, then they're likely not a result you actually want to try reaching out to. But like I said, throw us the support questions and we'll let you know which one it is, whether it's an AC inaccuracy with us, an inaccuracy on LinkedIn, honestly, or something else in between. I'm seeing other people having bugs with this post about this in channel. I would love to see what issues people are having with find people find company search because we'd love to relay it back to the product team. So let's take this into a Slack thread. Anshe is asking about the LinkedIn crackdown. So for those of you who don't know about what Anhill is talking about in the last week, maybe two weeks, I'm forgetting now, seamless AI and Apollo were banned from LinkedIn because here's what my understanding of the true official reason. Both of those companies have Chrome extensions that allow you to directly scrape data from a LinkedIn page which violates the TOS. So it actually doesn't affect their core business model or anything else according to them. At least that's what we know legally. We have naturally gotten tons of questions as well about whether or not we are going to have anything similar happen with LinkedIn. And the answer is very similar to what I said earlier. We do zero scraping of any data on LinkedIn. People will compare data that they have on LinkedIn to the data that you can get in Clay, but those are obtained different ways. And then the other thing that I can say clearly is that our LinkedIn, or sorry, our Chrome extension specifically only copy pastes profiles from LinkedIn into a URL bar and does not take any other data from someone's LinkedIn profile URL and for, that's the reason for that are these recent bans from LinkedIn on these companies because at some point you used to be able to also extract like the name, the title, et cetera, and we discovered that that's a violation of the LinkedIn TOS, so we immediately rectified it. There are no issues with Clay's violation or like there are no violations of Clay and LinkedIn's TOS. Hopefully that clarifies things. Cool. I'll give a couple more seconds for anyone else feeling like a last minute burning question to throw it in the chat. Sweet. Seeing none, if you've got more questions, remember Slack is your best friend. I told a couple of you to actually put some of these in Slack already anyway, so please go ahead and follow up in Slack if you haven't and then we'll go from there. And then Alejandro, I think the, the answer to your question directly is we don't get LinkedIn data. We get data very related to and adjacent to LinkedIn, but we do not scrape LinkedIn data or if there's any data that looks like it's LinkedIn data, it comes from a different provider that's not core from Clay. And then we do actually have an official integration with LinkedIn for community listening. So that's through the LinkedIn official API for any of the signals mentioned on your socials, brand mentions, et cetera. And so that's done and white hat with LinkedIn. Next steps just to like leave everyone off is go ahead and Slack and post any other questions that you have, jump in and try and also answer other people's questions. But most importantly, log into your portal on clay cohorts.com. At least get done with day one. Feel free to work ahead if you want to and then start submitting your exercises, start submitting your content and working through the week. Those are the main things. Awesome. Thank you everyone. I'll post this recording in Slack as well and then follow up over there if you've got further follow ups Y when are you doing a clay conference? Keep this on the dl, but we are planning one for hopefully later this year, so stay tuned.
Nice. Awesome.
All right, thanks Hamed. Thanks everyone. Thank You.
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