{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "description": "Enriching users to find ideal customers",
  "path": "/clay",
  "publishedAt": "2025-08-12T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:a2rdzfdxkjwerrfrpbwcipb2/site.standard.publication/3jd443afc2222",
  "textContent": "This post is for our fellow engineers & founders doing GTM / sales.\n\nI used to think doing enrichment was for big companies with massive outbound\nsales functions.\n\nBefore launching Val Town for Teams (coming this week!), we set a goal: find 10\npre‑sales customers. All of a sudden, I was spending all my time looking for\nteams who could be the right fit.\n\nOur best channel was obviously new users signing up for Val Town. However,\nscrolling through emails and hoping we recognize someone quickly became\nunsustainable. (And really it only works for\ncelebrities anyways.)\n\nClearbit vs Clay vs Val Town\n\nClearbit used to be the obvious answer, but post‑HubSpot acquisition, it's no\nlonger an option for small new customers.\n\nClay is great, but we wanted to use it like an API so anyone on our team could\nuse it programatically, without Clay knowledge or set-up.\n\nWe asked on X, the CEO explained how we could do it.\n\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">You can pass in data via a webhook and pass it to any system after that</p>&mdash; Kareem Amin (@kareemamin) <a href=\"https://twitter.com/kareemamin/status/1917972224746942731?refsrc=twsrc%5Etfw\">May 1, 2025</a></blockquote> <script async src=\"https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"></script>\n\nIntroducing: Clay API Proxy\n\nWe turned Clay into an API / SDK on Val Town via our\nClay API Proxy.\n\nThe hard part was that Clay enrichments are triggered by one webhook, but you\nget the results from another webhook. We wanted the developer experience to be a\nsingle request that gets back the enriched data as the response.\n\nHere's how we built it:\n\n1. Your val imports and calls our  \"sdk\" function with an email or\n   GitHub username\n2. Our proxy authenticates you as a Val Town user\n3. We generate a request id, and forward the payload to Clay with that id\n4. Clay enriches, and POSTs the result back using the id. We save the result to\n   SQLite.\n5. While your original request is still open, we poll sqlite for it.\n6. When it returns, we give you the JSON back in the normal request/response\n   pattern.\n\nEnriching emails with Clay is now as simple as:\n\n\n\nWhich returns:\n\n\n\nHow this helps\n\nUser enrichment is a big part of how we successfully found our first 10\npre-sales customers.\n\nOur users are no longer a long list of anonymous emails. We are able to more\nefficiently spend our time interacting with our\nICP (Ideal Customer Profile)\nas soon as they sign up, instead of combing through endless dashboards in search\nof a unicorn.\n\n- We see new users joining in real-time, with their enriched profiles\n- Anyone can start a thread, tag the right person, or notify everyone else that\n  they've already reached out. For example:\n  \n- Warm intros were easy to track\n- The team then starts building intuition about: how many new users joined, are\n  we attracting ICP, who owns follow‑ups etc.\n\nThen what?\n\nOnce you have this data on Val Town, there's lots you can do.\n\nHere are some templates:\n\n- Send new user enrichments to Slack\n- Enrich yours' or your competitors' GitHub repo stargazers\n- For fellow devtool companies, we reach out with an auto‑generated Val that\n  runs their SDK so the first touch includes a working demo. This got some great\n  responses!\n  \n- Get Townie to build custom outbound demos etc. based on their profile.\n  (Patrick Spychalski\n  has a great example post with a similar workflow.)\n\nWe've been loving these experiments, and would love to help more engineers scale\nthe traditional GTM function.\n\nPricing\n\nClay credits aren't free, so we can't let just anyone use our proxy. We've\nallowlisted a couple of friends\nwho we know are good for it, and can bill them later. If you wanted to get\nstarted, shoot me an email at charmaine@val.town and I'll personally help you\nget set up.\n\nWe also have\na self-hosted alternative, if\nyou'd like to create an API for your own Clay account.",
  "title": "How we built an API for Clay"
}