How Clay Built Its Creator Program Around the People Who Use It
Max NimmoFounder, CreatorWorks Published 3 min read
Clay’s creator program is built around the people who already use the product: 600+ partners, agencies, employees and creators post about Clay, while Clay pays only a handful of creators directly. It’s how Clay went from six years to reach $1M ARR to $100M ARR in December 2025, two years later.
Clay’s marketing team sums the whole engine up as one loop. Someone builds something in Clay they couldn’t build before, they post it on LinkedIn, and the people who see it get FOMO and sign up too. We mapped the founders, partners, employees and creators posting about Clay, and here’s how that loop was built.
How Did Clay’s Founders Start the Loop?
Varun Anand explains what changed: “Cold email agencies were our first customers. They posted about Clay organically to position themselves as experts and win clients. We pounced on it and enabled them.”
His co-founder Kareem Amin says it worked because “we were not selling them”. Clay sat in WhatsApp groups and text threads with those early agencies, and the posts followed. Varun and Kareem now reach about 93,000 people on LinkedIn between them.
How Did Other People Start Telling Clay’s Story?
Varun calls it a self-perpetuating cycle: people discover Clay through an agency’s post, join, create their own content and earn recognition for it too.
By January 2026 that was 150 agencies, including Alex Vacca, Eric Nowoslawski, Dan Rosenthal, Felix Frank and Patrick Spychalski. Around 90 Clay Clubs now meet around the world as well, run by hosts like Ricky Pearl in Sydney, Thibault Garcia in Bangkok and Constance Gatbois in Paris.
This is the part most companies can’t buy. Every one of those agencies has a commercial reason to post about Clay, because being good at Clay is what they sell.
How Did Clay’s Team Become a Channel?
Bruno Estrella built the next layer on one rule: a head of growth should hear from Clay’s head of growth, and a CRO should hear from the co-founder. He says it takes “someone who’s borderline annoying” to keep it moving, and in one quarter executive content drove about 6M LinkedIn impressions.
Todd Busler posts on enterprise sales, Davide Grieco on growth and Alex Lindahl as Clay’s Creator in Residence. Yash Tekriwal emceed Clay’s first conference, Chris Viglietta teaches the AI and GTM workshops, and Rob Cook rebuilt SDRs around GTM engineers.
How Does Clay Choose Which Creators to Pay?
Carefully. Clay’s own marketing blog says it “has worked with a handful of B2B influencers, but our bar is high. They have to be real operators who use the product.”
In practice a creator needs to already post on LinkedIn, already mention Clay and actually use it, and Obaid Durrani, who ran the program, onboarded every creator into the product himself. On LinkedIn that’s creators like Brian LaManna, Sam Kuehnle, Aidan Brannigan, Sara McNamara, Mason Cosby and Kaylee Edmondson, with sponsored newsletters from Kyle Poyar, Maja Voje and Brendan Short.
How Does Clay Use Creators in Paid and Launches?
Bruno runs creators’ own profiles as paid ads. Sara McNamara’s sponsored post, for example, fronted the Clay World Records campaign.
For one funding round, Clay had employees, investors, partners and 600+ creators post on the same day, with custom visuals for the creators. The head of social who ran it said afterwards: “In our little bubble, we owned the feed that day.”
What Can B2B Companies Learn From Clay?
Very few companies have turned the people who use their product into their distribution the way Clay has. Three things I’d take from it:
- Find the users with a reason to post. Clay’s agencies posted because it won them clients, so look for the customers whose own business gets better when they’re seen using your product.
- Hold paid creators to an operator bar. Clay pays few creators and picks ones who use the product, which is why their posts read as recommendations.
- Stack every voice on your big days. Employees, investors, partners and creators posting together is how Clay owned the feed for a funding round.
The second point is how we pick creators at CreatorWorks: practitioners your buyers already follow, vetted on who actually engages, and run as an always-on program. Our Productive case study shows it on a product launch, and there’s more on our case studies page.
For a company that made every employee part of the distribution, read our Lovable teardown.
Questions
- Does Clay pay creators?
- Only a few. Clay says it has worked with "a handful of B2B influencers" because they have to be real operators who use the product, alongside sponsored newsletters. Most of the content about Clay comes from agencies, users and employees posting unpaid.
- What is a Clay Club?
- Clay Clubs are local meetups for Clay users, run by community hosts. There are around 90 of them worldwide, including hosts in Sydney, Bangkok and Paris.
- How did Clay get to $100M ARR?
- Clay took about six years to reach $1M ARR, then reached $100M in December 2025. Its co-founders credit cold email agencies, who posted about Clay to win clients, as the first customers and the start of the loop that grew it.
- Who runs executive content at Clay?
- Bruno Estrella built Clay's executive content program, matching Clay's leaders to their peers' audiences, and it drove about 6M LinkedIn impressions in one quarter.