🧪 Why Clay gave its brand away

Hey, I’m Isaac 👋 I founded Pistachio, a growth agency working with B2B brands like Atono and Clay to build trust, relationships and loyalty with their current and future customers.

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Open Kareem Amin's LinkedIn and you'll find a founder who shows up. Posts that have gone viral, a point of view people quote. His co-founder Varun Anand is just as visible. By any normal measure, Clay has a founder brand worth millions in earned attention.

Now look at who's actually selling the product. It's rarely the founders. It's a hundred-plus creators posting workflow breakdowns, agencies that rebuilt their entire service around the tool, and a job title that didn't exist three years ago. For a company whose founders are this well known, it's striking how little of the growth runs through them.

That gap is the strategy. Clay's founders got visible enough to matter, then spent that visibility building a brand that no longer needs them. Most companies treat the founder as the destination. Clay treated the founder as the seed.

The company grew by giving away the four things most brands hold onto for dear life.

The traditional model of turning founders into celebrities and broadcasting to the widest possible audience breaks down when your category doesn't have a name yet. You can't amplify a message people don't understand. First you have to name the problem so clearly that people recognise themselves in it.

Clay's founders went a step further. They did the naming, then they got out of the way.

In 2024, Clay started pushing a phrase that's now everywhere in B2B. GTM Engineer.

The work itself was old. People had been cleaning data, chaining enrichment tools, and automating pipeline inside revenue teams for years, scattered across a dozen different job titles. Clay gave all of it a single name and a sense of status. Today there are thousands of GTM Engineer roles on LinkedIn, salary benchmarks around US$135k, bootcamps, and dedicated job boards. A title Clay popularised now has its own job market.

Look at what that does for the brand. The pitch to a customer becomes personal. Clay offers you a more valuable version of yourself. Pick up the identity and the product comes with it.

I've written before about the Identity Mirror, the idea that the strongest brands reflect who the customer wants to be. Clay built the mirror into a job description. The most durable asset the company owns is that identity, a label thousands of people now use to describe themselves, with Clay's fingerprints on every part of it. It will outlast any single post a founder ever writes.

An identity doesn't do anything on its own. It needs people willing to carry it into the world.

This is where most brands get nervous, because carrying the message means losing control of it.

Clay went the other way. The company built one of the best known creator programs in B2B, over a hundred creators producing workflow videos, teardowns, and tutorials. Creators get badges, early access, and a 20% cut of the revenue their audience brings in for the first year. Clay's brand lead hand-packs onboarding kits that look like something Apple shipped, and the unboxing videos write themselves.

It would be easy to dismiss this as an affiliate scheme with nicer packaging. But look at the order it happened in. Users were posting Clay workflows on LinkedIn long before there was money in it. Clay didn't add a financial incentive until after five million in revenue, by which point people were already posting for free. The carry just rewarded what was already happening.

The payoff is a brand that speaks in hundreds of voices at once, each one more credible than a company account could ever be. When a release ships, dozens of practitioners show their own audiences what they built with it, all at once.

None of this shows up cleanly in a dashboard, which is the part most companies can't stomach.

Clay made a call that would get most marketing teams overruled. It stopped trying to attribute its growth.

The community has somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand members, after the company shut down its private support tool and pushed every question into the open. Creators post on their own schedules about their own use cases. Word of mouth compounds across channels no analytics tool can trace back to a source. Clay accepted that it would never know exactly which post, video, or Slack thread produced which customer, and kept investing anyway.

This is the reason the playbook is so hard to copy. Giving away the spotlight is a mindset. Giving away the identity is a strategy. Giving away the mic costs money. Giving away the dashboard costs certainty, and certainty is what most marketing leaders are hired to provide. The moment a founder asks what the ROI on the creator program is, the honest answer starves the program of air.

Last year, my studio worked with Clay to build a content repurposing system, and the brief alone tells you how they think. You drop one webinar recording into a folder and hit a button. The system cuts it into dozens of vertical clips, writes a LinkedIn post to match each one, and drops the lot into a queue ready to publish. One input, a wall of output. A team optimising for trackable ROI would never pay for a machine that turns a single webinar into dozens of posts it could never individually attribute. But that’s exactly what Clay asked us to build.

So why keep paying for something you can't see?

Because a brand you keep has a ceiling, and a brand you give away compounds.

Tie the brand to one person and you've capped it at one person's energy, and how long they stick around. The day they burn out, get bored, or move on, the brand goes with them. Clay built something sturdier. The category keeps spreading whether or not the founders post. The creators keep teaching whether or not Clay runs a campaign. The identity keeps recruiting people who have never heard Kareem's name.

Clay gave its founder brand away, and built a customer identity in its place. That's the trade most companies won't make, because it means accepting the brand will grow bigger than the people who started it. The ones willing to make it end up with something that grows on its own.

Most founders ask how famous they can become. The better question is how much of the brand you're willing to give away.

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