New here? Hi, I’m Alex Lindahl, Creator in Residence at Clay.
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In today’s post:
Imposter syndrome & growth
5 ways to grow your brand as a GTM Engineer (or Operator)
Upcoming AMA on Reddit with Town
How Lovable uses Lovable to build GTM systems
My next drop with the SpaceXAI team.
Imposter syndrome hit me hard this week. Who am I to be a full-time creator for Clay? Am I actually any good at this?
Jon, one of our media producers, pulled me back to reality: “Alex, you’re two months in.”
Right now, I feel like an SDR staring at an Enterprise AE closing mega-deals, desperate to bridge the gap overnight. So I turned to Brad Haft (who runs Clay’s brand and grew Alex Lieberman’s ultrathink newsletter to 50k subscribers in 6 months) for a reality check.
His feedback was direct:
Put more of yourself on the page. You’re trying to be too perfect. Draft a section by brain-dumping in all lowercase. Share what frustrates you, a hot take you're mulling over, or whatever's getting you hyped about GTM Engineering.
I’m slowly learning how our team approaches content that gets 100k views a week on YouTube. The biggest unlock? Understanding the gap between:
Telling a story: Events → Details → Sequence
Storytelling: Emotion → Meaning → Connection
Here are the key growth principles I’m putting into practice:
Scale from 1 to writing 2-3 newsletters per week - Brendan Short (writes The Signal) told me this increased his new subscriber growth rate. The more posts, the more Substack promotes your work (or so I’m told)
Find content formats that work - My new workflow uses Grok Bot and the Apify plugin to find high performing posts on LinkedIn. Grok Bot adds posts to a Notion database with insights I can use. Each row includes: link to the post, hook, hook rewritten in a generic format (easy to reuse), stats, and hypothesis on why it worked well.
Post everyday on LinkedIn - But include more personal angles. Paul Alec (our LinkedIn brand export who works with our executive team) suggested a new form to try: screen shot a post on X and add
commentaryjust comment. Even if its just “Yes”. crazy how well this post did.
Put the personality on the page - That’s the one from Brad.
Get really good at short form content - I started a new account on X and posting more bite sized content on GTM Engineering. Follow me on X here.
Repurpose more content via X articles - I asked the SpaceXAI marketing team if this has any impact on SEO from duplicate content. It doesn’t, so this is an easy thing to do to improve reach.
That’s a lot of content production.
Posting more on LinkedIn is the obvious answer to “How can you build your brand online?”.
But these are more strategic:
5 ways to build your brand in GTM Engineering
Building a personal brand online accelerates your career. Full stop. It simply helps you attract more opportunities. And it all compounds.
It’s how I landed the gig at Clay. I started posting online. Varun Anand, our co-founder, saw it and invited me to do a work trial.
Jeff Ignacio also talked about how he built his RevOps brand first before leaving his VP RevOps post. Now he’s crushing with his solo GTM AI Agency.
1. Start a GitHub account
Louise de Sadeleer, who does growth at Tella, wrote a post “Why every marketer needs a GitHub.” This is even more applicable for GTM Engineers. It will become a requirement for job interviews to show what you’ve built:
GTM systems (and for who)
Workflows
Apps
Agents
Skills
Experiments
Teardowns
This is why:
Owning a GitHub and being creative or good at networking aren’t mutually exclusive. Quite the opposite.
You should have a GitHub as a marketer because it lets you show product thinking: knowing which problems your customers have and solving them with new features, skills, or apps. It can even be a way to ‘crowdsource’ interest in new features before including them in a product. - Louise de Sadeleer on Substack
2. Share internally on Slack
My previous post on How to break into GTM Engineering highlights this.
Apply this process to build your brand internally.
Find a key metric that matters to leadership
Interview people about how the system works today
Find a bottleneck that impacts the metric
Build a solution and iterate with those it impacts
Deploy it
Learn from the data
Share what happened
Plus help others around you with AI. So many people need help (even with the basics).
3. Help new startups and founders
You can do this with more popular products, too. It’s just an easier starting point because there’s less competition.
New startups and their founders are eager to showcase new users and how they’re using the product.
We started to use Ploy.ai at Clay. I started to build some cool tools - like this speed to lead test and other lead magnets that are in the works. I shared what I was doing with the Ploy team. Met up with Will Gao and told him I wanted to be his most innovative customers.
Of course, they wanted to highlight this and brought me on a webinar. What I built tied in with PloyDB that they were launching. The project then got featured on the Strategy Breakdowns newsletter (something like 180k subscribers ).
The webinar goes up on YouTube (How Clay builds interactive landing pages), gets promoted on LinkedIn, X, and other places.
Suddenly, you become part of the marketing strategy. Distribution follows.
This is the project. Test your team’s follow up: https://gtmengineering.link/speed
4. Write guest posts
Have a cool workflow or GTM play? I’d be happy to get it in front of nearly 9000 subscribers here on The GTM Engineering Newsletter.
This is one that I did on The GTM Strategist - “10 ways Clay’s GTM Engineers use AI to accelerate sales.” This one helped get my brand land in front of 36,000 subscribers.
Bonus: you become friends with some very cool creators. You help each other grow.
5. Speak on panels
I’ve now done 3 events with Lovable at their Boston office and even at JPMorgan Chase HQ in NYC.
Some of these opportunities come about from being at Clay, but others come from networking with the community. Primary Ventures invited me to the Enterprise AI forum at JPMorgan Chase.
You don’t have to be an exec either.
Speaking at Clay Club or local GTM meetup is a great way to start (and a bit more accessible).
Upcoming AMA on r/gtmengineering
Personal AIs exploded in popularity that last several weeks. We use Town internally across multiple departments. Townies learn how you work, keep an updated wiki (the context layers), and then start to take work off your plate.
Using agents to get more done at work is the future of work. I hopefully don’t need to tell you why you don’t want to fall behind here.
Topic: How Town uses Town for growth
When: Thursday (Oct 8) at 12pm EST
Where: new thread on r/gtmengineering
Who: Adam Reisfield, founding Growth Marketer
Company: Town
Would love to get your growth or personal AI questions answered:
Insights from previous AMAs:
How Lovable uses Lovable
I recently interviewed Monica Perez, Head of Customer Success, and Holly Goodliffe, AI Scaled Success Programs, on how the company builds software.
Lovable built its own customer success platform on Lovable. And that's just one part of a go-to-market stack that includes CPQ, pitch decks, onboarding tools, and internal apps their team uses every day.
Monica & Holly show me how it all works. They walk through Catalyst, their internal customer success platform, and show how AI agents turn account data into risk alerts, expansion opportunities, and emails a CSM can review and send.
What stood out to me was the feedback loop. When a CSM edits a draft or dismisses a signal, that feedback helps improve the agent. The team is tracking reply rates and how often drafts get sent without edits as they work toward more automation. Humans are still approving the actions today.
We go over:
Lovable’s internal App Store
Their self-learning customer success platform
How their building the GTM stack on Lovable
How they are scaling customer success
Zero-admin life of reps (and what’s automated)
Monica & Holly go deep on how they build & give lots of cool demos:
How to use Grok Bot with Clay
Stay tuned. I’m working with the SpaceXAI team on a guide. More on that later this week and on my next post.