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The Claygency Opportunity
An interview with Clay Entrepreneur, Michael Saruggia
Hey, Claymakers!
I recently posted on LinkedIn about the Clay opportunity for entrepreneurs & agencies.
We’re already seeing the growth in the ecosystem - the number of experts, agencies, and creators. It’s part of what’s made Clay so special.
As they say in open source software, “come for the software, stay for the community.” This is so true for Clay.
More frequently, I’ve been asked about the opportunities in the space and started to connect with fellow creators to learn about their business.
This is how I met Michael Saruggia - a Clay entrepreneur (who wanted to escape the 9-5) and is building a business providing educational content, a newsletter, and coaching around starting a Claygency.
Clay Entrepreneur Interview: Michael Saruggia
Tell us a little about yourself and your background.
Well, very few of you know this, but I graduated in Computer Science and Business:
I know how to code.
I took data science classes
I wrote neural networks algorithms and yes...
And all of that provided me with a great foundation to apply AI in business and sales.
Despite all of the opportunities, I just wasn’t interested to take your typical 9-5 full time job long term.
There was always an itch to start something, so I started posting content on for applying AI in business while studying. This led to a newsletter with 2,000 subscribers, a couple events, and paid consulting gigs.
I did work briefly at a B2B SaaS in Italy. And, that’s where how I fell in love with outbound. It turned into my calling, and asked myself - “could I turn this passion into my own business?”
I opened my consultancy and soon after figured out that 90% of outbound success comes from building the right target list. A seemingly easy task, but VERY hard to do well in reality..
Then moved to Spain, and finally to the Americas changing cities every 6 months.
How did you discover and when did you first start working with Clay?
No surprise, I discovered Clay via posts online. This was around 1.5 years ago. It looked super unique, so I took a demo with Varun Anand (Co-Founder & Head of Ops).
I fell in love with Clay
It unlocked creativity for me and gave me all sorts of ways to leverage open data to create successful outbound campaigns.
Clay also saved me hundreds of hours of manual work. Although I struggled at the beginning with credits, costs, and the learning curve - I kept at it and developed the skills to scale.
It’s probably been the best investment of time and money in my life.
What was your journey from finding Clay to starting Clay Wizards?
Well, when you practice a lot and you start sharing your work in public, you soon realize how hot the trend is and that other people want to get in on it.
Continually posting helped my organic reach skyrocket and soon I was able to attract premium clients.
Most of my organic reach success came from posting about Clay workflows and sophisticated outbound automations.
For some reason, people love to see these crazy workflows and the ideas behind them. (It also shows the art of the possible!)
I mean a simple guy like me was able to connect and close some very big companies everybody knows. For sure something was clicking! At that point I realized that many people like me were interested in doing the same thing, pivoting their agency or escaping 9-5 to open their Claygency.
I doubled down on content and started sharing my Clay journey. Then I launched my newsletter, The Clay Scaler Handbook, and The Claygency program to hack your Clay learning journey and open your Claygency (like I did but without the guesswork).
Tell me about a killer Clay workflow you built for a client
For a client of mine (international scale-up), selling a B2B SAAS to improve reviews, I came up with a flow that targets e-commerce companies based on 3 criteria:
They have bad reviews (< 4/5)
They have few reviews (< 100)
They have no review on a particular provider (= 0)
With just a simple copy and paste of the URL, the Clay flow automatically finds reviews data from Google and Trustpilot and, according to the results, sends the lead to the automated campaign:
They have bad reviews (< 4/5)? Push the lead to the ‘Bad review campaign’ and ‘enlight’ how a bad review score actually hurts conversion rates.
They have a low number of reviews (< 100)? Push the lead to the ‘Low number of review campaign’ and ‘enlight’ how few reviews actually hurt trust and conversions.
They have a low number of reviews (< 100)? Push the lead to the ‘No review campaign’ and ‘enlight’ how having no review affects trust.
All of this eCommerce data I was able to find in Storeleads within Clay.
Where do you see opportunities in the Clay ecosystem for entrepreneurs?
Great question! The more I use Clay the more I see opportunities.
These are some of the business model ideas / ways to charge for your Claygency:
1. Outbound-to-Inbound Partner (RB2B!)
2. Retainer + pay-per-meeting
3. List building as-a-service
4. Part-time GTM engineer
5. Full-time GTM engineer
6. Pay-per-meeting
7. Growth Partner
8. Retainer
Many of my students use these models or a combination of them. However, there are all sorts of different use cases. For example, a client of mine in HR connected Clay to his platform to create a match-make between job offers and possible candidates to outreach
Do you have any predictions for the future of Clay / the Clay ecosystem?
Yeah, I love predictions! Nobody can read the future but I see Clay as the next big sales and marketing movement.
Salesforce was the cloud CRM movement, it built amazing ecosystems and huge agencies and lucrative consulting careers were built on top of this CRM.
Still today Salesforce consultants are in very high demand.
Then Hubspot came, it truly led the inbound revolution and lots of agencies positioned themselves into Hubspot Partners to leverage that demand and some of them became huge.
Clay has all the potential to become the next big Outbound AI or even better AI GTM movement.
There’s an amazing opportunity here for entrepreneurs to build a Claygency, educational business, or perhaps something else that can help the ecosystem and business win with outbound.
How Big Could this Be?
As I posted on Linkedin, let’s look at Salesforce & HubSpot as a proxy.
Salesforce changed the game for the CRM; on-premise cloud & the CRM revolution.There are now over 3,000 consulting firms within the ecosystem. This are massive consulting companies, too. The likes of Accenture, Deloitte, etc. Plus thousands of more experts & agencies.A study in 2021 by IDC predicted that the Salesforce Economy will create:9.3M new jobs + $1.6 trillion in new business revenues worldwide by 2026. HubSpot changed the game for marketing. Hello Inbound.There are over 6,500 HubSpot agencies that help generate over $1B in revenue each year for HubSpot.To sum up the prediction...Clay is changing the game for GTM and is the next big opportunity for entrepreneurs. On-premise to cloud.Evolution to inbound.Personalized creativity at scale for outbound.
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