love this so much!!! you're going to crush it! talking about this on linkedin would also be a great way to show what you're doing in public if you can do without reveal any private info etc!
thank you! so fun, love this community 🙂
Love this ❤️ One thing that's made a big difference at Clay is simply having our leader, Kareem, really obsessed with craft, art, and good storytelling. A lot of culture flows from the top so the fact that he was open to creating a grant program for creative projects, creating a book benefit, funding some of our more ambitious internal video projects, and investing in really good design and brand early on — all of those things made a difference. Regardless of who your leader is, I think another great thing to do is simply talk about what you're loving, reading, and watching more amongst each other, to share your best ideas and even just go try them out and see what works. I love when people bring their personal selves to work too 🙂
I think Daayem is spot on. I'd actually just recommend diving into projects instead of even focusing on skills too much in isolation early on! This answer might be relevant here too:
This is a really great question! I do have a really particular way I use AI to edit and I find it insanely useful. Here are some of my top tips:
An essay should have clear stakes and a thesis up front.
Paragraphs in an essay need to be ordered in a way that makes sense.
Every single paragraph needs a topic sentence that previews what the rest of the paragraph is going to be about.
Every single paragraph needs a transition out of the last paragraph and into the next paragraph.
(A lot of the above are about guiding the reader so their mind can follow where you're going)!
On a micro level cut fluff, cut jargon, cut wordiness, don't use unnecessary adverbs and adjectives, avoid passive voice, be as succinct as possible
The number one thing I do when I'm using AI to edit is ask it to give me 5 versions of an intro hook, or a transition sentence out of one paragraph and into another, or a topic sentence for a paragraph. Then I'll pick what I like the best. I also very frequently paste a paragraph into AI and say, "This feels clunky. Make it flow better" or "There's too much jargon in this. Make it more plainspoken and succinct." It's actually really good at helping I think!
I like Air, Ramp, and Stripe! Duolingo for socials. Gamma could be interesting. Anthropic definitely has a certain warm cinematic aesthetic though I wouldn't say they're doing anything groundbreaking. I think what makes brand storytelling good is what makes any kind of story good: having stakes, a good hook, plot, talking about actual people, actual trends in the world, and issues, not just about your product. We're all super attuned to what feels like obvious marketing. But some of the companies above have made things a normal person would actually want to read in their free time. For example, Ramp's Economist puts out a lot of interesting data — he recently did a report on the most expensed New York City restaurants. Stripe Press has published amazing books. Air does awesome events with filmmakers and authors in New York. At Clay, we are trying to make YouTube videos and shows about topics that an everyday person would find interesting. There's always a way to hook it into your product somehow, but I feel like less is more if that makes any sense?
Sandra! So nice to hear from you here ❤️ ❤️ Great questions! I think the best way is to actually proactively try to help a company you're really interested in with something that you think they need, based on what you can learn about them online. The way I created my first job at another startup was just texting the founder a bunch of product improvements that I thought he should make. He ended up hiring me in a product role even though I'd never done it before and I'd never actually even worked at a startup before. For example, someone could find a company you knew sold to a certain niche and and find some leads for them with suggested messaging for a GTM role. Or look at a company's website and send them feedback about how to improve it for a PMM or design role. These are the kinds of things that catch people's attention right away because you're already solving a problem and thinking critically about their business. That's really all people care about, I think, especially smart people in the startup world, where it's often the case that most people don't really have a background in what their current job is before. Hope that helps but lmk if you have more thoughts on this! (For what it's worth I know this depends on the industry but I think startups in America, at least, are very open to this kind of approach, though older-school industries like finance, law, etc. or even startups abroad where norms are more formal might be different)
Thanks for the question! We definitely didn't think GTM engineering would necessarily take off. We were just responding to an internal need when we started hiring for the role, before we even wrote about it. Then we noticed that a lot of the companies we were selling to were super intrigued by the work our early GTMEs were doing — and they wanted to hire GTMEs too! Little organic signals like that that made us feel like we should talk publicly about the role more. (Even then, there was no guarantee that it would really catch on beyond a certain tiny niche of us and our peers.) I think the key thing here is we never started with "oh, we need to stand out in the market — what roles or brand campaigns will do that"? GTM engineering at Clay happened very organically based on a true internal need + the changes in the market (AI changing how growth was done and what was possible). I don't think we're going to be coining more titles, but who knows 🙂 The key thing is that coining a title or a brand campaign in isolation really rarely works. It really has to be the perfect combination of how something your company helps with hooks into a current need, change in the market, or topic of discussion I think!
I know some of our employee bootcamp projects really range from sourcing pizzerias in New York to crawling lists of journalists that are good to pitch for various topics. It's often not even related to a specific customer problem or something but people learn these tools by just thinking about some research and outreach tasks they're curious about and then trying it out
Totally hear you! It's hard to figure out how to learn things described as abstractly as "systems thinking in practice." One great start, I think, would be to reach out to a business, learn what they're struggling with in their go-to-market motion (it could even be someone super local, like a coffee shop or a laundromat), and build them out a workflow that would help them. I think Clay and a lot of GTM engineering tools are best learned by having specific projects in mind versus in the abstract. There are definitely a lot of boot camps that do a good job at teaching fundamental skills! But the reason I suggest something like this is that it'll immediately get you into the belly of a business: understanding what they're struggling with, coming up with a solution, and then implementing it, which is the core skill I think.
