Elizabeth Douglas

Here's how Clay used "Reverse Demos" to find product-market fit and build a self-serve motion from scratch: When we first launched Clay on Product Hunt in February 2022, we got hundreds of signups overnight. We demo’d our product to them like we knew best: by running 30-minute presentations like college professors on Zoom. Unfortunately, few retained -- most likely because no one was actually learning during the demo. Potential customers were usually impressed when they saw me use Clay, but as soon as they tried to use it themselves, they got stuck and churned. Enter: the reverse demo. Instead of running canned demo meetings, we started emailing potential customers before meetings, asking them to come prepared with a specific data enrichment problem to solve. If they didn’t come with an idea, we’d use the first 5 minutes to come up with a personalized use case for them. Once they were in the meeting, we’d ask them to share their screen, give them a Clay signup link, and use Zoom annotations to show them exactly where to click to complete their workflow. Our goal on every reverse demo was simple: solve the customer’s stated problem within the 30 minutes -- and try to blow their minds in the process. Initially, we had to walk people through multiple calls before they had their "a-ha" moments. Through reverse demos, we were able to get it in under one call. Our goal was to build product habits: by solving any customer’s unique business problem within 30 minutes, we helped them build confidence with Clay and made it more likely for them to use the product to solve their future problems. The obvious benefit of the reverse demo was better customer conversion and retention. After 100+ reverse demos, we were getting people to “a-ha” moments within just a few minutes and most would convert after that call alone. But—much more importantly—the reverse demo helped us quickly improve Clay’s product. There’s no tighter feedback loop than getting your ideal customers on Zoom and watching them use the product for the first time. There were dozens of times that I noticed something on a reverse demo, whether bad UX, bad copy, or a bug, and asked Eric Engoron on our engineering team to ship a change the same day. Each reverse demo was a UX masterclass. That helped us go from 7 calls to convert a customer to just 1 in less than a year. Eventually this improvement gave us the confidence to remove our waitlist and launch a successful self-serve motion. This feedback loop was foundational for our growth as we navigated product-market fit and evolved our GTM motion.

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🚀 Big milestone for Attio: today announcing a $52M Series B led by GV (Google Ventures), with Michael McBride joining the Board. This follows incredible momentum in customers, revenue, and team growth. But what excites us most remains the same as the very first day I met Nicolas Sharp four years ago, and the reason we have continued to back Attio from Seed through to Series A to now: game-changing product philosophy, world-class technological leadership and delivery, and resulting customer delight. From day one, Nicolas Sharp and Alexander Christie set out to build a new kind of CRM: ✨ Lightning fast and a delight to use ✨ Built on a flexible, modern data model ✨ All designed to give users full control to build a CRM that works for their GTM motion and seamlessly plug into the rest of their stack That foundation has proven to be exactly the right one. A new generation of GTM builders is emerging with Attio as their central pillar - including companies like Lovable, Granola, Modal and more. And the data model is perfect for building native AI functionality and allowing agents to work with the CRM - some of this is live, some is coming soon 👀  Nick and Alex have assembled a stellar team and have impressively scaled the organisation. Congratulations to them all on this funding milestone. Thank you for having us along for the ride over the past few years, and here’s to an epic next chapter ahead.  More from Nick here: https://lnkd.in/easA6jYV

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