Hey - confession 🙏 - I’ve been building my own startup and, over the past year, I’ve worked hard to get good at Clay. I watched the tutorials, built hundreds of tables, set up Instantly with warmed domains & heayreach, ran campaigns at so many angles - and nothing broke past a 1% reply rate. ❓ A few questions have been nagging me, and I’d appreciate the group’s perspective:
How much can great outbound compensate for a weak proposition? I’m not assuming my product is flawed, but I also don’t want to mistake poor response rates for poor fit if outreach performance simply can’t overcome certain fundamentals.
What are the true high-leverage variables? Volume, message, domain health, list quality, timing — the stack is long. I’d be interested in how others rank them in practice.
For people running Claygencies: most public content is noise. Is there anyone here who actually sits down with founders and is willing to get paid only when reply rates cross a specific threshold? I have budget, but I’m still careful with spend. - DM me, don't post here
Grateful for any candid views.
I can’t help you with these questions since I’m also still learning. But any resources you recommend for learning that helped you out massively with Clay?
I thought the clay cohort and unviersity was good to learn
Thank you!
Hey Tim, there is no clear answer to this but the below note could be helpful reply rate = function of (email deliverability, content, problem, audience) Let me address each one of these Content - no matter how bad the content is if the problem & solution are right then you would see good reply rates. we tested personalised vs bulk blast both fetched almost same result (1.5% reply rate and 2% reply rate) Email deliverability - most important and if not maintained properly then this keeps becoming a headache. we used to struggle with this a lot then onboarded an agency which did a fantastic job (life saver tbh) Problem - More the burning problem the better reply rates are. If the problem is not genuine then the best copies too would not fetch replies Audience - Who you are reaching out to also plays an important role. If the audience you have fed into the campaign is not relevant, will have a direct impact on your campaign results
