The GTM Engineering Newsletter: Reddit AMAs w/ GTM Operators

AMA Recap: How to start a $1M AI GTM Agency

Alex Lindahl | GTM Engineering — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 17:22:11 GMT

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The next $1T company will be a software company masquerading as a services firm. - Julien Bek, Partner at Sequoia Capital

The opportunity to build AI GTM agencies is enormous.

While efficiency gains will reduce demand for some traditional services, BCG’s analysis shows that agentic AI will ultimately expand the total addressable market for technology services—unlocking up to $200 billion in net new value pools in the next five years. - Boston Consulting Group

$6 is spent on services for every $1 spent on software. Deploying AI isn’t the same as SaaS. This is why the Forward Deployed Engineer model is critical for companies selling AI.

That got me wondering, how do you start an agency that focuses on this deployment layer for AI GTM. And, can you do this as a solopreneur?

This led me to Jeff Ignacio who runs RevOps Impact. This is a recap of Jeff’s AMA on the GTM Engineering subreddit (1,500 join every month) and the advice he shares. He covers:

How he got started
The pitch vs. the practice
How he positions his services
Where he finds clients
His 4 call discovery to close process
How agents are used to scale
Advice for others starting

Lets dive in.

How to build a $1M solo AI GTM agency

How Jeff got started

Jeff Ignacio’s first clients came from people who’d already worked with him. When word got around that he’d left his VP of RevOps job, former employers and colleagues called. It took years of groundwork before that could happen.

He didn’t start in RevOps. He was a management consultant working on requirements for large ERP rollouts, then did an MBA and spent a few years in FP&A. He moved into sales ops in his thirties and called the switch “a headspinning venture.” He “powered through it working late nights and taking W’s and L’s along the way,” and worked up to running RevOps.

Along the way he did the thing most operators put off. He built a following on LinkedIn for years, then carried it into a Substack, the , which now reaches more than 6,000 RevOps leaders. So when he went independent, people already knew how he thought about revenue operations. The referrals came from that.

Year one has been “fraught with the rollercoaster ride of trying to get something up and running,” he said. “Having your back against the wall is a mentality I didn’t have as a W2. But it’s ever present in my new role!”

Don’t (only) sell Clay, sell judgement

Jeff described himself as “a combo of solo fractional RevOps that happens to do some GTME work.” Most clients bring him in as an interim Head of RevOps. Clay work is real, and “a huge opportunity over the last eighteen months,” because many teams don’t have the technical skills to use it well. But it isn’t the main thing he sells.

His positioning fits in one sentence: “You get someone who can wax poetic on business strategy AND work with your technology.” He’s clear that this works at Series A to C and less so at public or late-stage companies. He’s fine with that.

He also doesn’t own the stack. He builds inside the tools a client already has, or prototypes an alternative and lets them choose. For a solo operator I think that’s right. Owning the stack means owning uptime, and a person who owns uptime for eight clients can’t take a vacation. But it’s a choice, not a law. A GTM engineer who wants a real agency, with recurring revenue that doesn’t depend on their hours, will eventually have to sell managed systems. Jeff has decided not to be that business.

Where the clients come from now

Past the first wave of referrals, Jeff keeps his pipeline full the slow way. He builds partnerships with software vendors and other consultancies. He works with VC and PE firms to find portfolio companies that need help. He posts honest updates on what is and isn’t working.

His best channel is in-person networking, “by far.” He hasn’t tried cold email or LinkedIn outreach.

That should make GTM engineers pause. The people building outbound systems for a living are getting their own clients through relationships. I don’t read that as hypocrisy. At a senior fractional price, trust matters more than volume, and a warm intro closes faster than any sequence. If your offer is a $3k Clay build, you probably need outbound. If it’s a $15k a month interim executive, you need people who’ll vouch for you.

That’s also why his advice for someone in a GTM job today is to moonlight.

Most of the agency owners I know today started by moonlighting.
Get good at the work in your current seat, then talk about what’s working, without sharing anything proprietary, in the communities you belong to. You’re building the reputation that sends you your first clients.

The four-call discovery → SOW process

This was the most practical answer in the thread. Jeff’s sales process:

Intro call
1 hour discovery
High level solutions & prioritization
SOW & proposal review

Step 4 sometimes takes a couple iterations. This was his exact response on Reddit:

Where agents fit, and where they don’t

When I asked how he uses agents to scale delivery, Jeff listed Claude plus agents he builds himself:

List building for sales and marketing targeting
Data hygiene for territories, lead assignment and segmentation
Executive memos and weekly business reviews
Forecasting scenarios: the downside, the upside, and what has to happen for each
Pipeline management, spotting trends early

Most of it is the prep work behind an executive’s job: the memo, the forecast, the clean territory data. Agents compress the hours that used to go into preparing for the meeting. They don’t attend the meeting. That’s why the model scales by making Jeff more valuable per hour, not by adding clients.

What about bottlenecks?

The interim-executive model caps how many clients he can take: “My time can only scale so far.” He loses deals when a prospect wants a firm with several people, when he’s too expensive for a solo practitioner, when the client isn’t sure what they want and backs out, or when they try it themselves. That last group usually comes back about six months later.

He isn’t trying to solve the first two. He hasn’t decided he wants to grow past one person, and he likes the economics of a single-member LLC and the control over his time. “I just need my slice and that’s it. Don’t need to be greedy.”

So the honest version of the $1M solo agency, as Jeff runs it today, is a few senior clients at senior rates, with agents handling the grind. The version where agents do the delivery and one person runs twenty accounts might come.

Reddit AMA is TODAY

Today at 2:30PM EST on r/gtmengineering

We’ll be joined with Nicolas Schell, co-founder of Scalantec, a boutique agency in Berlin who’s sent millions of outbound messages in Germany.

He’ll be answering submitted questions such as:

What are the boundaries between cold prospecting and warm prospecting in Germany, and what are some tactics that companies can deploy to shift prospects from cold to warm? And how does that change the legal dynamics for outreach?
Are there real risks to ignoring the strict consent rules? I’m sure someone at some point has gotten a fine, but it really seems like most startups just ignore it. Never heard of anyone getting caught, but that could just be my ignorance.

Clay launched an App Store (but for skills)

I’ve been looking forward to this for a while and previously wrote:

I loved this infographic from Yukta Kandhari that highlights some of the featured skills by creators (from Clay & the community):

Skill of week: org chart generator

I wish I had this as a rep.

Input a company. Clay researches the executive team. Claude builds an interactive org chat where you can:

Drag and drop to adjust reporting structure
Mark the buying committee (Champion, Executive Buyer, etc.)
One-click source work email + mobile number
Visually see how is new in role (3, 6, or 12 months)
Recent news with executive mentions

Copy & use in minutes: https://gtmengineering.link/org-skill

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13 days ago · 1 like · Alex Lindahl | GTM Engineering

GTM Engineering AMA Recap #1: How Clay builds GTM systems at Clay

Alex Lindahl | GTM Engineering — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 12:01:47 GMT

New here? Hi, I’m Alex Lindahl, Creator in Residence at Clay.

Join 8,300+ GTM operators from OpenAI, Reddit, a16z, Figma and some of the fastest growing companies who are a part of the community.

Hey GTM Engineers & Operators,

A customer recently asked me, “how does Clay figure out what GTM systems and workflows to build next?”

It hit me. I couldn’t answer the question as well as before. Clay grew from less than 30 to over 500 colleagues in ~2.5 years. A LOT has changed since the OG days where everyone knows everything that’s happening. Every quarter we are forced to rethink how we build to support the next few months of rapid growth.

This question paired with “how does Clay do GTM engineering” left me wanting a better resource to provide customers & ya’ll. So, I hosted the a Reddit GTM Operator’s AMA and invited Spencer Chemtob, who’s one of our internal GTM Engineers, to answer these questions and others from the community.

Below is a recap of the first one, How Spencer Chemtob builds GTM systems at Clay to scale from $25M to $250M?

What is Reddit GTM Operator’s AMA?

Every week, one operator, founder, or builder opens the floor to real questions from the community. No fluff. No vendor pitch. Just the actual thinking.

AMA insights

How does Clay decide what its GTM engineers should build?

Spencer’s team tries not to operate like a reactive service desk. Instead of waiting for sales, marketing, or post-sales to file one-off requests, his engineers sit with those teams and watch for problems that keep showing up.

When the same need appears across two or three groups, that repetition is the signal to build something reusable rather than another point solution. His example: pre-meeting notes for post-sales teams. Instead of a separate workflow per function, Clay builds one shared foundation and personalizes the output per user. This is how we reduce redundant builds. Read the full answer →

Where should someone new to GTM engineering start?

It’s counter intuitive, but don’t start with a tool. Spencer’s advice is to pick a functional specialty (marketing, sales, data, RevOps, growth) and learn which metrics actually matter, how they move, and what levers control them.

In his view, this is what separates automation from engineering: automation finishes a task, GTM engineering ties a task to a business outcome. The best practitioners can explain why a system should exist before they touch how to build it. Full answer →

Should you start with CRM cleanup?

Spencer’s answer was close to no. A broad cleanup can burn months with no clear line back to revenue.

His suggestion: figure out first where the company is winning and losing. Once you know which segments, signals, or behaviors correlate with success, clean the CRM data that supports those specific findings. You don’t need to do the whole database. And the data you need might not even live in the CRM; it could be sitting in product usage, seller notes, call transcripts, or enrichment sources. Pull that, show sellers what you found, form a thesis, and let the system catch up as evidence builds.

If you want the unedited back-and-forth, the whole thread is worth the scroll: r/gtmengineering AMA with Spencer Chemtob.

What does Clay’s GTM data architecture actually look like?

Clay joins CRM and product-usage data into shared audiences, segmented by deal stage across objects. Those audiences feed an orchestration layer: land in a stage-two opportunity and you might enter a targeted ad audience; hit stage three and a Slack notification pings a sales leader to help the rep multithread the account.

Spencer’s framing: this is the shift from static lists to active audiences that respond as an account’s context changes, not just when someone remembers to update a field. Full answer →

How does Clay keep AI-assisted outreach from sounding like AI?

Agents can automate the research. They pull ICP signals, reverse-engineer prospecting triggers, find lookalike accounts, and can match each one to a use case or customer story. Spencer’s point is that none of that should show up in the message itself. Prospects clock generic AI output instantly, so what reaches the inbox should be a short, specific line, not a paragraph of synthetic personalization.

Clay also caps daily send volume per inbox and pays for verification when sending from its own domains. Better data doesn’t buy you out of deliverability discipline. Full answer →

How do these systems get maintained once they’re live?

Every six months or so, Spencer’s team runs a formal review: each system gets rebuilt, reimagined, or explicitly signed off as still fit for purpose. Growth changes what a system has to handle (more data, more headcount, more product complexity) and last year’s fix tends to break again in a new shape.

The number that stuck with me: only 15 to 20 minutes of his typical day goes to maintenance. Not because nothing breaks, but because maintenance gets designed into the system up front instead of becoming a permanent fire drill. Full answer →

What actually kills a GTM play?

Three patterns, by Spencer’s account:

The audience is too small to produce a real sample
It’s sliced into so many microsegments that the results stop meaning anything
Everyone else in the market starts running the same play, and the edge disappears

His fix: start with enough volume to actually learn something, segment once patterns show up, and retire a play the moment it stops converting instead of letting it quietly burn through the addressable market. He also pointed out that the best plays run always-on in the background — success stops depending on convincing every rep to adopt a workflow, because the system is doing the work for them. Full answer →

Excerpt from our sister publication, The GTM Engineer by Clay.

How should GTM engineering performance get measured?

Clay’s GTM engineering org sits across multiple revenue functions on purpose, so the line between GTM engineering, marketing ops, and sales ops stays blurry. Spencer measures stakeholder satisfaction and how much low-value work gets eliminated; for growth-facing teams, pipeline generation still matters most. He also flagged a subtler signal: whether the team finds creative, responsible ways to say yes to real business needs instead of defaulting to gatekeeper mode.

An insight that might surprise you: Clay keeps CRM writes deliberately thin. Routing might touch one or two fields. An inbound conversion can justify 30 to 40 enrichment fields. Records get re-enriched at real touch points, with a full refresh roughly every 90 days.

What’s actually worked?

Chemtob’s favorite build is natural-language audience building, which lets sales leaders pull their own audiences and reports without filing a ticket. This collapses the loop between a leadership question and an answer. Close behind it: social listening tied to ad retargeting, so someone who shows up on a platform gets advertised back to in that same environment. Further down funnel, product-usage analysis feeds expansion plays. Taken together, it’s a reminder that GTM engineering isn’t just a prospecting discipline. GTM engineering touches acquisition, pipeline, expansion, and almost any leadership initiative related to growing the business.

👇 Cont’d reading on my learnings from inside Clay:

Next AMA: how to build a $1M solo AI GTM agency

Event details:

Where: r/gtmengineering
Date: Wednesday, Sept 2
Time: 12pm EST
Who: , a former VP RevOps and founder of RevOps Impact, an AI GTM agency. Jeff is also the author of (one of my most recommended newsletters).

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