Everyone thinks Clay is the “next big thing”...

Maybe they are. But it’s easy to get caught up in fundraising announcements with the word “Billion” in them...

...and forget the reality of the situation.

It’s still early for Clay.

They need a lot of things to go right to live up to the valuation.

ZoomInfo alone (one of their main competitors) is doing $1+ billion in REVENUE.

My best guess, Clay is doing ~$40 million.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  What Clay has done so far is impressive — the traction, the word of mouth.

But now that they have the attention of their biggest competitors, it will be interesting to see how this market plays out.

I found it especially interesting that 2 days after Clay’s fundraising announcement, Zoominfo updated the messaging on its homepage to mimic Clay’s positioning.

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I don’t have a dog in this fight — but I will be watching.

These are the 3 things I’ll be paying attention to:

1 - Incumbent distribution vs. Clay’s buzz

A tale as old as time.

Can Clay’s competitors simply outspend and out reach Clay to saturate the market with similar products?

Clay may have a product advantage now, but as we’ve seen before — the best product doesn’t always win.

2 - Market adoption beyond early adopters

Clay has done a masterful job getting early adopters (primarily growth agencies) to buy into their vision.

But will this translate into mass market adoption?

In other words, are non-agency businesses going to activate across multiple use cases like these agencies have?

3 - Bargaining power of data suppliers

Clay has built its whole product on the idea of bringing together 100s of data sources.

They “rent” this data from these providers.

If these providers feel like Clay is intruding on their territory, they may decide to raise prices or prevent Clay from using their data altogether.

This puts Clay in an interesting spot — where they need their competitors to play nice.

This revenue stream (to the providers) vs. competitive advantage (to Clay) is likely to be an ongoing balancing act.