Mitch Colleran

OpenAI is one of the defining companies of our time. I can't actually believe we at Clay get to play an (extremely) small part in helping them grow. Here is that story. We met Keith Jones 🚴🏻‍♂️ — who leads OpenAI's GTM systems team — through Maggie Hott in December of 2023. To put it mildly, Keith was skeptical. He even gave us a test in our first demo. He had just joined OpenAI 3 weeks prior, so he was sure we wouldn't be able to accurately find him in Clay, but we successfully did during the demo — in just a few seconds. Now, more than a year later, Keith says: "In my professional opinion they have one of the most practical and exciting applications of AI, in a decades-old practice that has long been stale" What drove this conclusion? ▶️ More than doubling inbound lead enrichment quality from low 40% to high 80% during implementation ▶️ OpenAI used Clay’s AI web researcher to mimic and augment the research process of their best sales reps—at scale—leading to countless hours saved. ▶️ Instead of using a dozen tools, OpenAI's sellers can now get any enrichment they need—from contact info to account research—with one click in Salesforce. But we aren't stopping there. We're working with data science, marketing ops, and recruiting to help them harness the power of Clay for their workflows. And as their team (hi Scotty & Harsha!) continues to come up with new ideas to grow, we'll be there helping them bring those to life. Full case study link is in the comments!

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Your next big DTC hire isn't another marketer. It's a tech leader. The reality in 2025 is that every biz needs to be a tech company. For years, brands have avoided hiring tech people; they scare them, they're expensive and "we're not a tech company". Technology can cut operating costs in half...minimum. Manual processes that don't truly enable creativity. 12 people in customer support? That's an AI agent. This isn't a future talk; you can do it today with DigitalGenius. Ecommerce assistants, translators and copywriters waste time collating information and copying/pasting across stores. Don't need them if you design the process right. The craziest part is the quality actually goes UP with these solutions done right. Whatever your revenue per head is right now, double it to be conservative. The new wave will be 5-10Xing it. The brands that scale fastest will be tech-first. Combining the roles of CTO and COO into one tech-enabled leader allows quicker, more effective decision-making that aligns innovation with everyday operations. A tech-savvy COO can spot and implement automation, allowing the business to scale without a huge cost increase. This creates operational leverage and gives the company the agility to respond to market changes faster than competitors. Our fastest-growing client will cross $100M this year - CTO/COO joined at $25M three years ago. Linchpin. Are you worried about the budget? Start small, hire a Business Systems Manager. Take someone who has worked on the vendor side or has entry-level coding skills. It'll bring a whole new perspective to your business. Target them on saving admin, reducing waste and saving you money. The right person will be all over this brief. #ecommerce #operations #techstacks

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The GTM playbook is being rewritten — and CROs are leading the charge. Last week, Scalestack co-hosted an unforgettable CRO Roundtable in San Francisco with our friends at The CRO Collective. 👥 20 revenue leaders 🌆  An iconic venue at the Transamerica Pyramid 🔥 Real, unfiltered conversation No panels. No pitches. No filler. Just honest conversation around what’s working, what’s not, and where we go next as GTM continues to shift beneath our feet. Some themes that stood out: 🚨  Misaligned incentives are killing revenue strategy 🎯  Marketing ≠ just lead gen — it’s about brand, education, and long-term growth 🧠  Millennial buyers demand a new approach 🤖  AI is non-negotiable — but hard to navigate 🏗️  CROs aren’t just sales leaders — they’re system architects Scalestack is building revenue engines that work with the GTM stack, not around it. That’s why these spaces matter: they cut through the noise and make room for clarity, curiosity, and collaboration. Big thanks to the leaders who showed up ready to challenge assumptions and push the conversation forward — and to our partner Warren Zenna, and the team at The CRO Collective for making it all happen. Looking forward to the next one! #Scalestack #CROCollective #AutonomousRevenueEngine #RevenueEngineMasters #CRORoundtable

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I’ve been talking with founders about how painful enterprise customization still is — even in 2025. David Dworsky and Gordon Ritter just put words to what we’ve been seeing: the age of point-and-click configuration is ending, and the next category winners will make customization conversational. For early-stage founders, this is the wedge: - Own one painful workflow - Capture the data - Build toward becoming a system of record If you’re building in this space, I’d love to hear how you’re approaching it. Link to the full article on this in the comments. 

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I was recently asked whether AI will kill SaaS. My opinion is more nuanced than a simple "yes" or "no." I think the death of SaaS will happen slowly and then very suddenly and very dramatically. I'm talking particularly about mid-size SaaS companies (say between $100 million and $1B). If you're not AI-native right now, you're going to struggle. 9 out 10 of middle-market companies are seeing some churn, but the churn isn't dramatic yet. There's employee attrition. These companies are fighting a war, feature by feature, adding a little "AI pixie dust" here and there. But net: they're struggling. There will be a tipping point in the future where credibility tips to the new fast-growing startups and away from the incumbents. We can already see that people are buying for outcomes instead of buying for seats. The billion-dollar companies will have enough cash to spend their way out of this problem, and these mid-sized incumbents will get squeezed. The question isn’t if the tipping point comes. It’s who shows up with a product that actually does the job and evolves faster than the models. Right now, we should all be paying attention to the tiny AI-native startups that are growing like crazy - especially if you’re sitting in that middle-market range.

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AI has already meaningfully changed the B2B GTM motion. Anecdotally, we're seeing the top performing startups have meaningful different org structures than those that are more mid. Our Beyond Benchmarks report puts some numbers around the shift:   1. SDR/BDR teams are shrinking   36% of companies reduced SDR/BDR headcount while only 19% increased—the steepest decline across all sales roles—while sales teams overall declined just 24%. This is very likely because companies are using tools like Unify to make their teams more efficient at generating a qualified pipeline.   2. Professional services teams are growing   34% increased PS headcount versus 17% who decreased. Why? AI solutions require deep customization. Non-deterministic, agentic software must be tuned to each customer's specific workflows. Getting this right demands hands-on expertise.   The implication? We're shifting from "sell the software, let them figure it out" to "sell the outcome, help them achieve it." It explains why Forward Deployed Engineer has become tech's hottest role—bridging AI's potential and customer reality.   Winning companies recognize that customer expansion generates higher ROI than new acquisition. They're trading top-of-funnel quantity for post-sale quality.   The companies still hiring SDRs like it's 2019, while their competitors build implementation armies, are about to learn an expensive lesson.   You can read more details in the full report—I'll add the link in the comments.

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There’s a lot of chatter about how measuring ARR is meaningfully different today than before. Folks are citing: AI and usage / success based pricing as a new game as the big one. Yesterday’s article on 11x has stirred up some chatter on opt outs. Are those ARR? I don’t think these are new problems to SaaS. As far as I’ve known, ARR has always been a subjective measure. It IS true that a greater % of companies are now subject to more subjectivity in how they define ARR. But this question around usage based / resolution based pricing metrics… we already have decent precedents here. We can look to companies like Twilio, Snowflake, Intercom etc who’ve had usage based models for a decade plus and have all reported on ARR. And I’m positive that opt outs are not a new thing for any business. My take on this is that everyone does have to report on ARR differently. It is subjective. It’s always been. As such, my guiding principle: ARR should always represent your best guess for what revenue is recurring. So if it’s a usage model, recurring should mean you have reliable evidence to state that they’re going to continue to pay at least that amount moving forward. And then you should always be really clear about what’s in and what’s out of ARR. Perhaps I'll share more specific examples of what's recurring and what's not in a follow up. Just a few quick thoughts.

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Stop paying agencies to rebuild what already exists. Too many businesses get quoted $50k+ to build features that cost $500/month off-the-shelf - Authentication systems. Payment processing. Email marketing. Infrastructure These are solved problems with enterprise-grade solutions: Auth0, Stripe, Klaviyo, AWS. Yet some agencies will quote you custom builds for everything. Why? Because billable hours matter more to them than your success. The problem with this approach: You are paying for inferior versions of solutions that already exist. Your "custom" authentication won't be as secure as Auth0. Your payment system won't be as reliable as Stripe. Your infrastructure won't be as robust as AWS. Plus, you are taking on massive technical debt maintaining these systems yourself. Here's what proper development looks like: - Partner with proven enterprise platforms and integrate them into your app. Your users get battle-tested security and reliability. You get 80% cost savings on development and ongoing maintenance. - Custom code should solve your unique business problems, not reinvent login systems that billions of users already trust. When an agency suggests building basic infrastructure from scratch, ask yourself: 𝘈𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘮𝘺 𝘴𝘶𝘤𝘤𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘰𝘪𝘤𝘦𝘴? We build partnerships with clients, not transactions. That means recommending the $500/month solution when it's better than the $50,000 custom build. If someone quotes you to rebuild everything that already exists in the market, you know they don't have your best interests at heart. The goal isn't to write more code. It is to build a successful business as efficiently as possible.

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